So, there’s a reason I haven’t updated this blog in a good long while.  That reason, simply put, is that I haven’t been playing much in the way of relevant games to comment on in quite some time. True, that’s not to say I haven’t been playing any games at all, but most of them […]

It’s been a while since I last wrote a round-up of indie and other curiosities I’ve come across during the year, and it is truly incredible how much the landscape has changed since I last wrote.  Since then, Kickstarter has truly come into its own, and a huge variety of games have used it to […]

While I haven’t talked about it much here, one of my favorite types of computer game is the pinball simulation.  Pinball is the sort of game that can be competitive without being discouraging, ruthless yet fun to master, and the sort of thing you can play as a quick break between working on other things.  […]

Interestingly enough, postmortems are not something you often see in the gaming press.  Unless you count nostalgic flashbacks written years or decades after a game’s release, the coverage that games mostly receive are previews based on demo code, or reviews based on a quick and (maybe) complete playthrough of a game.  That, for the most […]

Found this in the Guardian, via RPS: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2013/feb/14/frustration-in-game-design It’s a fairly in-depth and comprehensive discussion about the role of frustration in gaming, including quotes from a number of prominent game designers. I agree with many of its premises, including frustration as an inescapable and perhaps essential component of certain genres of games (a topic which […]

I’m not quite sure how to properly express how I feel about Borderlands 2.  I had a considerable amount of praise for the first game in the series, and so Borderlands 2, when it was announced, automatically became one of the very few games I considered buying at full price this year.  This is something […]

If you’re looking to find out information on the newly released F2PMMOFPS that is Tribes:Ascend, about the worst place to go is their official site, which provides the sum total of a download link and a 46-second gameplay video.  However, the video is telling in a certain respect – an awful lot of projectiles are […]

A while back, I wrote about A Valley Without Wind, the latest title from Arcen Games available as a preorder, in one of my alpha-funding roundups.  In that earlier entry, I was unsure about the game, which at the time felt pretty rudimentary (although, while re-reading that entry, I also appeared to be against the […]

As you may be aware, this blog often touches on the topic of gaming difficulty and frustration, and the issue with difficulty being a roadblock that prevents the player from experiencing the whole of what a game has to offer.   However, I should probably clarify that sentiment.   When I talk about being able to explore […]

So, it’s been a while since I last checked in on the various alpha-funding projects I’ve mentioned before, and I wanted to do a quick roundup on how they’re doing, as well as some of the other new projects I’ve been looking into. -Minecraft, of course, has had its official release, with some fairly decent […]