I began my week still having Nier, Blur, and Red Dead Redemption. Nier got moved up the Gamefly list, and Blur is on it waiting for Tam’s approval/desire for it. I’ll play it when she gets it, but I’m not feeling pressed to play it; it’s not like I’ll do any of the online [...]
Given my schedule, I only have a few nights a week to focus on gaming, but tend to get a lot of gaming in on the weekends, particularly on Sunday, which is ‘my day’. I don’t focus on games for hours at a time — usually — so typically drift from game to game over [...]
To continue the experiential analysis, I wanted to recap the three modes of interacting as laid out by Norman in Emotional Design. Most people are familiar with his work in The Design of Everyday Things (or Psychology of, depending on where it was published). In Everyday Things, Norman complained about things that were overdesigned, or [...]
I’m reading Schell’s Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, which took me a while to pick up after his DICE talk which destroyed some of his credibility to me. The book, though, is a good one, and while I’m not far into it, the idea that Game Designers’ job is to create an [...]
I’m not a big fan of appointment gaming, nor of competitive play of video games. I play card and board games, but those are over pretty quickly, and tend to feel like they’re at a certain skill level that we all have. So I don’t play online FPS because there’s a lot of player knowledge [...]
I suspect that if White Knight Chronicles hadn’t been a huge JRPG, it would have been a half hour, or one-evening game at most. But it isn’t, and that more or less gave it a buffer for me. It’s a comfortable genre, and it seemed that it was going to do some interesting things.
Of course, [...]
Well, I did spend two hours of my weekend working on the Klik-n-Play Pirate Kart, but when I finally sat down to do it, I discovered that I’d saved none of my refactored map code. On one hand, that code was confusing and not very good, on the other hand, it was nearly done. Well, [...]
February 23, 2010 – 10:43 am
It was a fairly interesting moment in a game without too many interesting moments:
I’d just managed to get Cole and Trish back together by being particularly good. She respected me, we were getting back together “after this is all over.” Then the villain decides to ramp things up, and make them much more [...]
February 19, 2010 – 12:39 pm
The ongoing diary of Chelon, Mage and Grey Warden. Start at the beginning.
Duncan proved to be a good, and understanding, travelling companion. The trip from the Circle Tower to Ostagar was not a quick one, and I quickly had to learn many things that I’d never had to bother with inside the tower. [...]
February 18, 2010 – 9:10 am
The PS3 game inFAMOUS was one of three angry-man open-world games that came out about the same time. The other two, Prototype, and Red Faction: Guerrilla were also available on the Xbox 360, so I played them months ago. Prototype was a 30 minute game, although I gave it a few hours of play. Red [...]