Tea Leaves

In case you’re wondering where tonight’s post is, my Mario Kart Wii code is 1032-1807-7532. See you on the track.

Here’s how it works:

1. Previews of GTA IV appear in every magazine and weblog on the internet. Afraid of being attacked by mobs bearing torches and pitchforks, they universally give it 10/10, 5 stars, whatever the rating is that means “Jesus has returned to earth in the form of a videogame.”
2. Everyone buys GTA IV, including all of your 12 year old cousins.
3. Eventually, you give in to the hype and buy it too.
4. At this point, you realize that the “innovative” gameplay all of the reviewers in Step 1 talked about is, in fact, nothing more than the exact same gameplay from the past 5 games, only now with more pixels.
5. After about a week, you put the game down and never play it again.

Lather, rinse, and repeat with whatever other hit titles our corporate masters want to sell you in a given month.

I suppose people are probably expecting me to tear into the ethics behind GTA IV. I’ve certainly done the same with respect to other games. This time, I won’t bother for a few reasons. First, I haven’t played the game, and have no intention of playing the game. Second, and more importantly other people are making the argument for me, which I take to be a very healthy sign.

The more interesting question, to me, is: should I pick up Mario Kart for the Wii?

I keep trying to write collections of short snippets about games, but they keep running long. So tonight, self-discipline will take over and I’ll keep it short. Really.
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My cat just gnawed through the wire to my Wii sensor bar.

Good thing you can find replacement sensor bars everywhere! Oh wait. YOU CAN’T.

Edit: It looks like I can order a replacement sensor bar from Nintendo for $10, or pay $20 at a local Gamestop for a battery-powered one with no wire. Guess which one I’ll be doing.

I remember a couple of months ago I got a little notice from Amazon.com when I visited the web site saying that the credit card information I had given them was about to expire, and that I should go to my account page and fix it. So I went to my account page and fixed it.

Apparently the same thing happened at Xbox Live. Because Microsoft is going to crush all comers in the online service sweepstakes, you would think that they’d have a similarly streamlined scheme for dealing with this issue. Of course, if you think this, you will find yourself at home at 9pm on the phone with some Indian guy who really doesn’t give a shit. This is because Microsoft customer service is retarded.
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I fired up Shadow of the Colossus last night only to find that I had somehow managed to overwrite my “You beat the game” save file. The last save I have is right before the final battle with the last Colossus. I’d rather pull out my own teeth than jump straight into that battle just to unlock Time Attack mode — again — but I see there are all sorts of save files for the game on GameFaqs. Do any of our Alert Readers know the easiest way for me to transfer one of these saves from my PC to a PS2 memory card? Inquiring minds want to know.

Today I got home from dinner and sat down to do some coughing while I surfed up some of my regular web sites on the couch. Today was a good surfing day because I came across two links worth sharing with you, our beloved readers. One is a smart article, one is a stupid article.
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Today I read an interesting interview with Tim Sweeney of Epic whose tag line is “PCs are good for anything, just not games”.

Summarizing the interview perhaps a bit unfairly, here’s what he says:

(1) People aren’t buying expensive enough PCs.
(2) Even the expensive PCs aren’t good enough to run his games.
(3) People who buy cheaper machines with Intel integrated graphics are giving their money to Blizzard instead of Epic.
(4) This aggression cannot stand. The solution is that everyone except us should change what they’re doing and buy machines with more expensive graphics hardware. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent my third day with this year’s flu today. In my fever induced haze, I did manage to read some books I’ve already read, and I made a tiny bit of progress in the video games that I’ve been playing. I have to say, Lost Odyessey is great fun and all, but the costumes on the female “leads” are a few levels past chainmail bras. These chicks go into fights in Full Victoria’s Secret +4 Battle Underwear. This made it hard to concentrate, so I tried some Call of Duty, but even on Easy this game is too hard. Defeated, I laid down in bed and watched YouTube clips at random.
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The good thing about PlayFirst’s Chocolatier is that it reminds me of Taipan!. The bad thing is I’ve gained five pounds this week from playing it, because it makes me crave chocolate. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t had anything long form to write about games recently because I have not been sufficiently in tune with my own sense of self-absorption to come up with much of an extended thought. But this does not mean I haven’t spent some time with the old electronic crack.
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I don’t have a lot of time tonight, because I am playing Dwarf Fortress. On my Mac. Under OS X. Without emulation. That’s right, after years of trial and travail, Dwarf Fortress, one of the most interesting games of the past few years, is finally available on my computing platform of choice. This was the single game that had me keeping a Boot Camp partition on my machine. Now I can get rid of it. I don’t kid myself that my call for porters had anything to do with it. But I can lie to other people and tell them that it did! Read the rest of this entry »

We spent the weekend visiting some good friends in New Jersey. Since the route home sends us right past Philly, I figured I would take advantage of the opportunity to enrich myself with the erudite discussion of the day’s issues at that landmark NPR station WHYY.

Instead, I was assaulted with this show about Second Life run by some psychologist named Dan Gottlieb, PhD. You always know something is going to go badly when the guy makes sure to put “PhD” on the end of his name. None of the smart ones are that proud.
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I’ve written before, disparagingly, of the use of the Magician’s Choice in games. The magician’s choice, reduced to its simplest form is: “Pick a card, any card.” And then, whatever card you pick, you’ve picked the one the magician intended you to pick. Read the rest of this entry »

Pity the PC (or Mac) gamer. We spend thousands of dollars buying or worse, upgrading our computers so that we can play the latest high end games. Then we spend our time with those computers seeking out remakes of the classic games that we actually liked, but which don’t work on modern hardware or operating systems anymore.

The poster child game for this effect, for me, is Panzer General (and its fantastic sequel Panzer General 2). I suspect this game occupies that role for most of us who have been wargame fans (wargames are a fairly esoteric niche in the already marginalized world of PC games. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, I wrote an explanation of the genre last year). There is virtually no turn-based strategy game that comes out that I don’t buy, because I am — perhaps out of some desire to reclaim my youth — trying to return to 1997. I am typically disappointed. When I heard people talking about Commander - Europe at War, I experienced a familiar sense of dread. I was sure I was going to see another Panzer General clone, and I was going to be let down again.

Here’s the good news about Commander - Europe at War, a strategy game available for both PC and Mac. It’s not really anything like Panzer General. Here’s more good news: it’s really quite good. Read the rest of this entry »

Long time readers of our humble writings will recall that we have no love for the Metal Gear Solid games. Pete says, and he is not wrong, that the games implement gameplay systems that are actively hostile towards the player and he doesn’t have time to play games designed by people who hate him. A couple of years ago, I had tried and given up on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence for that exact reason. Then, while scanning my pile of old games looking for something to play after the holiday rush, I found I wanted to give the game another chance to see if what I liked about the game might triumph over what I hated this time. As it turned out, this is exactly what happened.
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There’s a certain question that makes straight men freeze with fear: “Does this outfit make me look fat?” Men hear this, and they are paralyzed in a moment of fight-or-flight panic, because they know, first, that they have to respond and, second, that there is no correct response. Women, so I’m told, often have the same reaction to being asked “Hey, honey, am I starting to go bald?”

The reason these questions are problematic is that they are sometimes not asked in earnest. Rather, they are the slippery tentacles of a chthonic and atavistic beast, feeling around for a tender meal. That meal is called validation. When that meal is replaced with something bitter and truthful, those tentacles can squeeze the life out of whatever they find, instead.

Those of us who play and comment on games are constantly surrounded by such tentacles. They come in the form of people typing the name of their favorite game in Google, and instead of finding a joyous community of like-minded believers, they find you. Or rather, they find your article. The one where you called their favorite game “a buggy mishmash of old clichés, retarded ideas, and adolescent wank-fest fantasies of gullible women in chainmail bras.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve contributed a chapter to an upcoming book, ‘’Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games Without Frontiers - War Without Tears'’, edited by Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann. The book can be ordered directly from the publisher, or you can pre-order it from Amazon.

My chapter is titled “There and Back Again: Reuse, Signifiers, and Consistency in Created Game Spaces”, and builds on some ideas you’ve seen on this very weblog. As for the fancy title, well…just call me Umberto.

My co-writer may complain bitterly that I infected him with the shopping virus, but from my perspective, turnabout is fair play. I have spent the past month mostly ignoring any game that doesn’t have “Disgaea” in its title, and it’s all his fault. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s awesome, except for how it sucks.

At my request, my co-writer and game pusher peterb used his Gamefly powers to obtain Assassin’s Creed for the Xbox 360 the other week. I’ve spent a couple of weeks playing it in between my long sessions of getting repeatedly shot in the head playing Call of Duty 4. To say that Assassin’s Creed is a mixed bag does not really do the game justice. After all, the game has far loftier goals than usual. So, I can’t say that my impressions of the game are merely mixed. No, Assassin’s Creed is more like an exquisitely crafted ceramic dish that someone has covered with dog shit. It is by far the most finely crafted crappy game I’ve played.
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I’ve made no secret of my love for Bay 12 Games’ Dwarf Fortress. I’ve returned to it this holiday season only to find there’s been a significant change: the game is now 3D.

It’s still a roguelike, mind you. But the environments now encompass a huge number of z-levels, which you can step through with the < and > keys.

I’m of two minds about this development. On the positive side, it brings a lot of freshness and variety to the game, and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, particularly with respect to moving water and magma about. On the other hand, the user interface of Dwarf Fortress was already fairly punishingly bad, and this isn’t helping. Read the rest of this entry »

Karl Hendricks, a Pittsburgh indie-rock local legend, released an EP in the early 90’s called I Hate This Party which perfectly encapsulated teen angst, the feeling of simply not understanding the things that other people like to do, and the shame that can sometime go along with it.

I hate this party.
I hate all your friends.
I hate feeling stupid.
I always do in the end.

This, not to put too fine a point on it, is how I feel when people talk about what a superlatively awesome time they are having playing Popcap’s pachinko-on-crack game Peggle. Read the rest of this entry »

…and now I’ve picked up Disgaea 2 via eBay.

STOP ME BEFORE I BUY AGAIN.

I visited The Exchange last night, and ended up walking out with two other Nippon Ichi games, La Pucelle Tactics and Rhapsody, A Musical Adventure.

I am so very doomed.

My co-writer and I have somewhat different approaches towards games of questionable value. He approaches gaming a bit like a “catch and release” fisherman, constantly buying the newest games on a whim, playing them for a couple of days, and then selling them on eBay in a week if they don’t work out. I, on the other hand, agonize over each and every purchase, determined to hold on to my hard-earned cash to the last second.

This has its downsides. One of them is that I hardly ever sell games. If the game is good that’s fine, but I even put the bad games on the shelf, lovingly enclosed in their pristine cases, so that I can enjoy not ever playing them again. It’s a bit of a sickness.

However, my buying pattern has its upsides, too. My co-blogger doesn’t just buy too many games, he actually buys them twice. So every so often I get a free game. It’s charity, like that given to a beggar scratching at the back door of Marie Antoinette’s pastry chef.

Last week, he bought Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for the PSP, so I got his copy of the PS2 version of the game, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. It has taken over my life, and invaded my dreams. Perhaps by writing about it a bit I can get it out of my head. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a peculiar, but probably not particularly unique, habit. I like to read reviews of things after I have otherwise consumed them. I do this a lot with movies, music, books and other such “artistic” media. I think part of this activity stems from the engineer/dork need to search out validation for one’s opinions. For example, I was once thrilled to find out that the Trader Joe’s red wine that I had bought was also enjoyed by the wine critic on The Splendid Table. We are creatures of ego, we can’t help it.

This is not the only reason I engage in this behavior though. The main reason is to read interesting writing about something that I enjoyed, or didn’t, as the case may be. Of all of the media that I consume, what saddens me the most is how little interesting writing there is about video games.
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I have always liked first person shooters. For a long time they were all I played. Every couple of years I’d pick up a new one and play it for a while and then go dormant again. Being slow and uncoordinated, I have never been particularly good at shooters. In online games I am particularly useless, and my main goal is usually to not be shut out.

After the last flood of major releases in 2004, the last few years have been off years for shooters. Most of the releases have been second string franchises or remakes of second string franchises, or ports of other second and third string franchises from the PC world. This year, however, has been different.
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I’m not going to link to any of the handwringing articles over this because I don’t want to bore my readers to death. For those of you who are already following the situation, here is my take:

(1) No one who is talking actually knows why Gerstmann is no longer working at Gamespot.
(2) Everyone who is talking is speculating.
(3) All of the various posts people are citing that ‘confirm’ the rumors, don’t.
(4) In 2 or 3 weeks, everyone claiming that they are boycotting Gamespot because CNET eats babies and rapes puppies will be happily reading it again, and bitching that their new favorite Zelda game didn’t get a high enough numeric score. Every so often someone will ask “Hey, remember Jeff Gerstmann?” and someone else will reply “No?” Read the rest of this entry »

I originally planned to pick up The Orange Box on the strength of the Team Fortress 2 trailer videos. Here was a multiplayer game with some character, I thought. I was excited about it. The people who play games for me played a lot of the beta and seemed to love it, but then they all ended up playing the multiplayer on Steam instead of the Xbox, and then my Xbox melted. No Team Fortress for me.

Then a surprise happened. They all told me to play Portal. So when my Xbox came back I picked up the whole Orange Box to see what the fuss was about.

Note: Spoilers ahead. There are spoilers ahead, so if you have not played the game, go do that first then come back. It won’t take long.

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I don’t have a lot of time for games.

This may seem strange, given how much I write about them, but the fact is that I work a day job, and have a social life, and games basically fit a slim slice of time between the time I’m done with everything else – usually around 10:30 or 11 pm – and the time I go to bed.

That has some interesting consequences. First, it means I tend to dream about whatever game I was last playing (perhaps this is why I was so hard on Persona 3). Second, it means that to a fairly good approximation, I can estimate how good a game is by how late I stay up.

An average game will keep me up until around midnight. A game that is particularly well executed, such as Bioshock, can stretch that until 12:30 or 12:45. If a game is well executed and it’s a type of game I’m obsessed with, such as Fire Emblem, I might push that until 1 am or so.

On Friday night, I played Portal until 4:30 in the morning, and dreamed of blue and orange holes in space until morning. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently played the first eleven missions of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Nintendo Wii.

This breaks something of a tradition for me. I recently played the first ten missions of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Gamecube. Last year I played ten missions (each) of Fire Emblem and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones on the Gameboy Advance. I abandoned all of those games after ten missions.

Why only ten missions?

Because – with the exception of the new Radiant Dawn game – the Fire Emblem games are a great example of games written by small-minded people who hate humanity, because they have completely punishing and broken save point systems. After 10 missions, the games got hard enough that I had to interact with the broken save system. So I stopped playing. Read the rest of this entry »

TellTale has released the demo for the first game in Season 2 of their Sam and Max adventure games: Ice Station Santa. A full review will be forthcoming, but let me just say this: if you own a PC that you play games on you must buy Sam and Max. It is more than just a good idea. It is a moral imperative.

Tonight we begin with a couple of different links. First, I have to give a shout out to Yahtzee, that writer of flash-based animated video game reviews who brings a heretofore almost unheard of level of bitterness to the game. The target of his ire this week is close to my heart since he takes Zelda and literally skewers the game headfirst on a pike.
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You will recall that last week my wife and I called Microsoft to get a shipping box for my dead Xbox. That converstation lasted 45 minutes and included no less than six corrections to the shipping address as read back by the woman on the other side of the phone who apparently did not really speak english at all.

Well, the box arrived that the beginning of this week. The only problem: it arrived at the wrong address.
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As we hinted at yesterday my Xbox 360 melted over the weekend. I had happily worked through the single player of Halo 3 and was playing the occasional multiplayer match when the box started crashing randomly. Then it booted to the red lights. Then it recovered for a day. Then it booted to the red lights again.

After that, the worst part of the experience came: I called Microsoft. Don’t let this happen to you.
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Early on Saturday psu let me know that his Xbox 360 had given up the ghost. He had been hoping to get the Red Rings of Death at least since mine died a few months ago, and they sent me back a cooler, quieter model. Still, he was a bit nonplussed, and at a loss as to what to do without his beloved Halo 3. “Maybe I’ll play Banjo-Kazooie,” he joked. “Of course, I’ll need to buy an old Nintendo 64 first.”

Little did he realize that I never pass up a chance to get another piece of obsolete computer equipment out of my basement. I packed up the N64 (along with Banjo-Kazooie and a few other games), and brought it over. And while I was packing it up, a funny thing happened. Read the rest of this entry »

I finished the single player campaign in Halo 3 this weekend. There is almost no point in writing anything about the experience because the game has taken on a life separate from normal critical evaluation. There is really only one thing you need to know about Halo 3 and it is this: Halo 3 is Halo, only bigger.
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It is a disturbing and compelling image. The young man is wearing his school uniform and a slim pair of headphones. He reaches into a pocket with his right hand and pulls out a gun. He flourishes, twirls the gun, and points it at his own temple. There’s a sharp report as he fires, and a fountain of glittering shards spray out of the other side of his head.

It is a compelling and disturbing image. In the course of a game of Persona 3, it is an image that will assault you thousands upon thousands of times. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t recall when I watched The Fifth Element for the first time. However, I distinctly recall that I didn’t think it was that great. Over the years, however, my wife and I happened to catch the movie from time to time on HBO or whatever, and a funny thing happened. After watching the film the equivalent of five or six times, suddenly it became the one of the best films ever made. Repetition made it better.
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“Baker Street is a game of logic and deduction,” says the web site, modestly. It is more than that, though. Baker Street is a life-destroying timesink of addiction and pure puzzle-solving pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »

I picked up Madden a couple of weeks ago, and actually had time to play about half of a franchise season before Bioshock hit and the quest for achievements consumed me. This year’s iteration improved many aspects of the gameplay, but was also annoying in many of the same ways as last year. The user interface problems persist: the play calling screens are a crime against usability studies. The game insists on using time consuming in game displays to indicate simple things like if the field goal was good or not. Replays dance and jitter while the players on the field sometimes teleport around. The radio announcer guy is still mildly retarded.
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I was skeptical about Bioshock. I remember watching some demo reel that Irrational had put out on the game. While the demo footage panned over a claustrophobic and chronically damp interior setting, the voice of Ken Levine spoke over the film, declaring that in this game they wanted to redefine the shooter, and provide the player with a combination of visceral action and and a deep web of possible tactics. This kind of talk always makes me skeptical.

The critical reaction to Bioshock would also make you skeptical. For the most part the game has been hailed as an instant classic, a brilliant tour de force, a fantastic combination of killer gameplay and compelling narrative. Of course, there are the inevitable nay-sayers who think the game is a crippled version of System Shock 2, dumbed down for the masses. I don’t think either of these extremes is true. But I do think Bioshock is excellent. While the game is not without flaws, none of them diminish my admiration of game’s polish and craftsmanship.
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Despite the common misconception that both Petes on Tea Leaves are the same person with multiple personality disorder, we actually lead separate, fulfilling lives. This is especially apparent when it comes to games. Here is the typical Pete To Pete Pattern when it comes to “What we’re playing lately.” Read the rest of this entry »

Like at least half of the rest of the gaming universe, I picked up Bioshock this week. Most of the industry appears ready to pronouce it to be the orgasmic second coming of gaming nirvana. This may or may not be the case, I don’t know. What I can say for sure is that the game knows how to begin with a bang.
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After being killed by a cactus with a flower on its head, I restarted the game and used a cheap technique to quickly level up to level 15 before progressing with anything.

I’m much happier now.

In my time on this Earth I have often been accused of taking things too seriously. As I’ve grown older and seen more of the world, I have tried to keep a tighter hold on my tendency to do this because if there is anything I have learned it’s that no matter how seriously you take something, there is always some guy living in a basement somewhere who is working much harder that you are.
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Just when you thought it was safe to browse your internets, the intellectually challenged have come out to play again. This seems to happen once or twice every year. Or maybe it only annoys me this much once or twice a year. This year, I come to the partial defense of the current punching bag of the defensive gamers everywhere: Roger Ebert. You may recall that he said some stupid things about games versus art last year and like a kid in an Internet Forum, he is back to troll again.
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I’ve been happily playing through the opening chapters of Resistance. The game is as good a straight up shooter as I’ve played in a while. The presentation is strong, the level of polish is high. Even if the game doesn’t quite reach a Halo-like sense of place and atmosphere, the game does present enemies that are enjoyable to shoot in a world that is mostly enjoyable to look at. Here is the one problem though.

I started on Medium, and I should have started on Easy.
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I got the PS3 last night. My overall impression is that Sony should stick to hardware, and Microsoft should stick to software. It’s really too bad that the companies did not end up as partners.
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For those following along at home, my Xbox 360 Died The Death about a month ago and I shipped it off to Microsoft for repair service. When I sent it they had not yet announced the repair program, so they billed me $70.

A package with an Xbox 360 arrived yesterday. I don’t know how they plan to refund my money, but hopefully it will just magically happen. Anyway, there are a few things worth discussing in terms of the machine that came back. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a prevailing line of thought in the circles of economic theory that consumers will act in a manner that is in their best interest. This is the idea of a rational consumer. The notion is that consumers will evaluate the choices given to them in a manner consistent with logic and reason and the pick the choice that maximizes whatever it is that consumers want to maximize. Not being an economist, I’m sure I’m doing violence to their elegant theoretical thinking. The trick to making this idea work must be in defining the function to be maximized in a clever way. After all you don’t need to look too hard at how people buy games and gaming hardware to throw out the idea that they are acting rationally.
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I don’t read game manuals.

I should qualify: I don’t read manuals for games first. After I’ve been using a program for a while, sure, I might look up a specific task in the manual. Or if I’m truly obsessed with the game, I might read it later, for recreation (really, everyone should keep a copy of the manual for Dominions 3 in their bathroom). But I never read a game manual before actually trying the game out.

I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this behavior. That leads me to a very simple conclusion: if I can’t figure out how to play your game without the manual, it is a bad game. Read the rest of this entry »

Almost everything about the “new generation” of gaming has revolved around High Definition. High Defintion allows console games to look as “good” as PC games. These same consoles, at least the two that aren’t selling that well, are being used as a wedge to try and own the High Definition movie market. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been watching Planet Earth in HD. I have also been re-playing Resident Evil 4, which is decidedly not in HD. While you can’t really compare these two experiences directly, my conclusion after having had both experiences is that the H in HD is more about hype than about reality.
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Snippets from a real conversation I had this weekend with my friend Nat:
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It seems like just the other week that I ranted about the Xbox 360 design being unacceptably fragile. And what’s the news this week? Microsoft is extending Xbox 360 warranties for the “red ring of death” to 3 years (even retroactively!), refunding service fees for that repair already paid by customers, and taking a one billion dollar (plus) charge to cover the costs

Without any schadenfreude or sarcasm whatsoever, I’ll just say “good job, guys.” This is the right way to address a serious customer-facing problem. I will confess to wanting to be a fly on the wall in the postmortem where they figure out how this ended up happening, though.

As psu mentioned yesterday, Pokémon on the Nintendo DS is the new obsession.

Being a consummate joiner, I am not afraid to admit that my descent into the Pokéworld was due to Penny Arcade’s ungrudging respect for the game, coupled with a purely base financial motivation: I’m reviewing Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for PTD Magazine. After just two days playing the DS game, I found myself scrounging the local used game stores for the older GBA games so I could understand exactly what I had been missing all these years: the best Japanese RPG since Earthbound. Read the rest of this entry »

Today a discussion of two games that have been around for a long time, and are still more interesting to play than most of the new games. I suppose it’s possible that my current state of mind makes me more inclined to stick with the familiar. I think it’s more likely that these games are just better.
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…and I sort of suspect it’s a bad sign that the planned highlight of my week is likely to be the release of Pokémon Battle Revolution for the Wii.

More on that soon.

In what has become something of a yearly ritual, the time between early Spring and the next release of Madden brings with it almost nothing of interest to play. Last year, I was saved when Oblivion hit and kept me busy for a couple of months in this normally empty time. This year there is no such white knight to save the gaming industry from my disinterest. Worse, some new equipment and a nice overseas vacation have awakened other obsessions that have for the most part been dormant while the gaming obsession has taken its course.
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I had what started off as an extremely productive weekend. I got a lot of work done at my job, did some house stuff, changed the oil on the car, and was otherwise efficient and in a good mood. As a reward, I decided to play some more Forza 2, a game I’m reviewing for PTD Magazine. I’ve been enjoying Forza, and approached my Xbox 360 with some enthusiasm. This should have been a warning sign. Because, inevitably, as soon as I turned the machine on, 3 blinky red lights appeared, and the machine was officially as dead as a doornail. Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago you may recall that I posted an enigmatic call for writers to assist in some-project or other, without saying exactly what.

Now I can tell you what that project was: PTD Magazine’s latest issue is devoted to retrogaming, edited by your humble narrator. You can download the digest version here, or subscribe to PTD for a mere 99 cents per issue to read the rest.

If I do say so myself: it’s awesome. In addition to making lots of complaints about how game writing is hidebound and formulaic, I also hear other people making those complaints too. Here’s an attempt to break out of the mold.

While I remain hidebound here in Pittsburgh, co-author psu is taking a few weeks in Paris. But I’m not jealous: I have Travelogue 360 Paris, just released for Windows and Mac. And my Paris has a rhinoceros wandering around the base of the Eiffel Tower. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m basing this minireview on three game sessions.

Step 1: Insert Crackdown disc.
Step 2: Choose “Play Halo 3 Beta”
Step 3: Watch pretty opening screen. Enter multiplayer lobby.
Step 4: Start matchmaking process.
Step 5: Wait 15 minutes while the game tries, and fails, to find a match.
Step 6: Give up and go do something interesting.

Color me unimpressed.

And so with the release of Episode 6: Bright Side of the Moon,