The Controversial Saga Of The Zombie Massage Makers 21 Oct 2010, 12:37 am

This was a really fascinating read about a developer's attempt to get an admitted cash grab game into the Xbox Indie Game Marketplace The Controversial Saga Of The Zombie Massage Makers. Jeremy Eden believed this past summer that he had concocted the recipe for a hit. It would be, he and the rest of JForce […]

Why you shouldn’t play the lottery 28 Sep 2010, 6:06 pm

A gent by the name of Rob Cockerham has created a lottery simulator that pretty much encapsulates why you shouldn't play the lottery.  Here's a quote from my results: You played 1040 games of Mega Millions. It cost $1040. You won $108. Incidentally, the highest single win was $10.  The first time I ran the […]

The Brainy Gamer: Unplayable 22 Sep 2010, 5:11 pm

The Brainy Gamer's got a great blog up right now about his experience asking younger gamers to play an old classic.  Both funny and a little bit depressing, ultimately more enlightening than anything else. It mostly came down to issues of user-interface, navigation, combat, and a general lack of clarity about what to do and […]

Discovery at PAX: Retro City Rampage 9 Sep 2010, 6:26 pm

So that hypothetical question I asked last week?  Turns out to not matter so much, because while I was at PAX, I saw that there's a game in development that is very similar (but superior!) to what I was thinking about doing.  It's called Retro City Rampage.  It looked like a blast! A parody of […]

Hypothetical Question: Perspective 2 Sep 2010, 8:22 pm

Imagine for a second that I'm working on a kind of old school game.  Imagine further that as I'm working on said game, I'm open to suggestions and other sorts of help from the Internet at large, rather than going it alone. Now, if I were going to do that, it's possible that the game […]

The Adventures of a Noob – Star Ruler 31 Aug 2010, 6:28 pm

The Adventures of a Noob is a recurring column in which I dive into a (potentially) complex game without reading the manual, FAQ, any help files, or playing a tutorial. I then catalog my first impressions and thought process as I attempt to figure out the game. This may end up being amusing, or it […]

Unamommer is my new Favorite Site Ever 30 Aug 2010, 6:08 pm

In a thread over on NeoGaf, I got linked to a blog called the Unamommer (awesome name, btw).  The thread in question was discussing the recently released Elemental: War of Magic, from Stardock entertainment.  The nerdier parts of the gaming Internet have been abuzz about some controversy about the game's release, but I don't really […]

Captcha Your Imagination: Comatile Mom 26 Aug 2010, 9:43 am

I've started making quick prototypes of games out of captchas, because really, "why not?"  A general post mortem follows. First, for a general idea of what this series of blog posts is about, see the general Captcha Your Imagination page.  Also, my plan is to go through and comment my code sometime within the next […]

Penny Arcade! – Words And Their Meanings 25 Aug 2010, 9:02 pm

Today's Penny Arcade has started a bit of an online dialogue, focusing on the topic of buying games used vs. new. Penny Arcade! - Words And Their Meanings. A quote from the accompanying newspost: The idea that THQ is somehow "disrespecting customers" with this kind of rhetoric misunderstands the situation as completely as it is […]

My Oblivion Mod List 23 Aug 2010, 8:39 pm

Off and on lately, I've been replaying Oblivion.  I tend to do this with any Bethesda RPG... play it extensively when it first comes out, and then revisit it years later after modding it into a mostly unrecognized state.  This makes the game feel almost like a sequel at this point, because of how little […]