There’s a very brief interview with me in the fall issue of my alma mater’s alumni magazine, the Carleton Voice.
Puzzle Pirates: Sailing the not-so-open seas.
Puzzle Pirates is basically a casual game portal with avatars and a point system, which actually puts Three Rings pretty far ahead of the curve in terms of casual and virtual world trends.
Bejeweled vs. Diamenty: Not so much with the “vs.”
I love it when people realize that business isn’t a zero-sum game.
Is that a dinner bell I hear?
Kongregate isn’t the YouTube of web-based indie casual games; it’s the Xbox Live Arcade of web-based indie casual games.
Waiting games: Travian and Desktop Tower Defense.
Thoughts on two games that are more about waiting than action.
AGC, Day 1: Compare and Contrast.
Very brief notes from the first day of the 2006 Austin Game Conference.
Idle Thumbs on Orsinal.
You can hardly blame them for being lulled into a liminal state by Halim’s deceptively simple, airily seductive games.
Casual games: playing one thing at a time.
While the latest big-budget, big-scale Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil games garner lots of attention and sales, I find myself drawn more and more these days towards casual games.
Non-multiplayer online games on Xbox Live.
I always think online gaming is a good idea, until I actually go out and try it.
Bejeweled 2. (PopMatters)
Continuing with the theme of pleasurable addictiveness that I brought up last week, my review of Bejeweled 2 is now up at PopMatters.
And because I’m too lazy to go look in a thesaurus at the moment: is there a word for “addictive” that doesn’t carry so many negative connotations? I don’t really think that seeking little morsels of happy fun from a video game (or a TV show, or a book, or whatever) is necessarily a bad thing, but words like “addictive” or “compulsive” really make it seem like I’m describing pathology rather than pleasure. I wonder if I could get away with using the word “crackalicious” in a review.