I now have learned, after a long ordeal, that the holiday shopping season now begins the weekend before Thanksgiving. I had hoped to use a Best Buy coupon that was valid only last weekend to purchase my Wii, but that failed for a few reasons. And Toys R Us was the busiest I’ve ever seen […]
Today's Experiment… Failed
If I had realized that Philcon was going to suck so much, I probably wouldn’t have gone. And if I had realized when I first agreed to go this year that the Wii launch was on the same weekend, I probably wouldn’t have gone. But as it stood, I ended up in Philadelphia, in unfamiliar […]
Finally, some IMPORTANT terminology!
I’ve been reading and digging (as in enjoying, not the web-verb) Jonathan Degann’s Journal of Boardgame Design. It’s a while between articles, but I find them consistently thorough and enjoyable. For someone else looking at boardgames from an academic stance, it’s a place to go. This week, though, as a break from the design stuff […]
YouTube of the Week: Long Time Ago, Middle Earth Edition
Another somewhat long one, 8:30. Shot like the series of “making of” interviews previewing… George Lucas directiong Lord of the Rings.
Geekery Collision / Brainstorming from constraints
Not much of a column this week. Between a fast-approaching finals season and various events at home, I’ve been pretty busy. One piece of news: two of my favorite things are colliding. Alan Moore is going to appear on The Simpsons. The episode is going to feature competition between Android’s Dungeon and a new, “cool” […]
YouTube of the Week: Reasonable Zombie Edition
More for the awesome song than the WoW Machinima. If you enjoyed the song, I highly recommend checking out Jonathon Coulton’s site for this song and many other hilarious tunes.
Inq. of the Week: Horror of Horrors!
These days, more and more emphasis is being placed on the story within games. Back in the olden days, Link just wandered around the land and just happen to be given a sword by an old man. Nowadays he’s drawn into adventure, and it looks like its going to take 70 hours to finish this […]
Warhammer 40k Little Men (Ctrl+Alt+Del)
Ctrl+Alt+Del is a webcomic usually about video games, including the competitive aspect of it. It also features an Xbox robot! Their recent run, however, is about one of the characters trying to introduce his hardcore video gamer roommate to Warhammer 40k. One of my favorite exchanges from this: “These guys have chainsaw swords.” “This is […]
Dripping with Theme or Drowning in Theme?
Last week I talked about The Triangle of how to approach a game design. One of those points of the Triangle is “Theme.” But there are different ways of looking at what theme is, and if a game is well-themed or not. When people talk about theme, they’re generally talking about what is otherwise called […]
From the "WTF" department…
As reported on Ogrecave, Games Workshop has decided to shut down its official forums. They recommend typing the name of your favorite army into a search engine to find new ones. Of course, you won’t be able to find official answers to rules questions, or talk directly with game designers, or give feedback to anyone […]
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