I am currently playing the crap out of Grand Theft Auto IV. To get this out of the way immediately — it is not a 10/10 game, it isn’t perfect. It isn’t even close. That said, the middle third of the game is pretty excellent, and the game every now and then does something quite …
Category Archives: Games
InstallShield Wastes My Valuable Time (Which I Could Be Using To Play a Game)
I’ve had to use InstallShield to create installers a couple of times. These were fairly unpleasant experiences — while InstallShield is indeed a pretty flexible tool, it also takes a lot of work to get anything accomplished. Their habit of releasing new versions of the package every year (and completely abandoning the previous versions) makes …
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Fun By Proxy
A former coworker of mine passed along a link to a pretty good read — a "Let’s Play" thread going through Knights of the Old Republic II (a game produced by my former employer, Obsidian Entertainment). If you’re not familiar with the "Let’s Play" concept, it is essentially a running commentary (with screenshots or video) …
Finally Beat Culdcept Saga
Last night, I finally plowed through to the end of Culdcept Saga. I discovered, via GameFaqs, the concept of the “symbol deck” — one that has absolutely no items or creatures in it, and instead focuses on spending as much money as possible through the symbol system, and controlling the board and pace of the …
Neverwinter Nights 2 Still Going Strong
Amongst the pirates, that is, with 1,893 people leeching it at the time of the survey. Not sure how to take that…
Still Playing Culdcept Saga
It’s a really great game, in my opinion, held back a little bit by some technical and usability issues. To get those out of the way first: There’s some slowdown on certain maps when a lot of creatures are deployed, which doesn’t seem justified given the perceived GPU load. There’s also some visible tearing at …
When No Idea Was Crazy
While I was cleaning out and throwing away some old junk, I came across some old promotional stuff for iSmell scent technology which I guess I picked up at the 2000 GDC. I saved it for humor value. The company (Digiscents) met its demise in June 2001, to no one’s surprise. I thought I picked …
Roll the Dice, Move Your Mice
We recently bought Culdcept Saga for the Xbox 360, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It’s essentially a cross between Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering — you roll a die and move your piece around the board, claiming (or contesting) territory with monsters that you cast out of your hand of …
Apollo Justice
I saw on Rock Paper Shotgun that Capcom has released a free Flash demo of the upcoming Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney game. As someone who recently played Phoenix Wright: Justice for All (my introduction to the series — I haven’t yet played the other two installments), I find this demo interesting for a few reasons: …
In Defense of the Escort Mission
Through a rather convoluted (but interesting) path, I came upon an Escapist article from earlier this year which trashes one of the whipping boys of game design, the escort mission. While I certainly wouldn’t disagree that there are tons of terrible escort missions in games, I think that escort missions don’t have to be terrible. …