Title: His Dark Materials – Book One: The Golden Compass, Book Two: The Subtle Knife, Book Three: The Amber Spyglass Author: Philip Pullman Year of Publication: 1995 Genre: Fantasy Length: Each paperback book has between 335 and 465 pages. Rating: 4.5/5 – Worth paying full price. Review: His Dark Materials is a trilogy that should […]
Departures / Some Playtesting Principles
I just got my Wii flown in, and boy are my arms tired! No seriously, I’m sore. It’s probably due to going a bit nuts with Wii Sports Baseball, and having done a lot of lifting yesterday, but my right arm really does hurt. Still, so far, a lot of fun with the games. Apparently […]
Unused Nintendo Ad Campaign
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 […]
Around the Survivors a Perimeter Create!
While preparing for last week’s comic, I went to an obvious source for cartoon-yoda images, which was of course the fantastic Clone Wars cartoons. Pictured to the right is a quick drawing I did from one of the images, just to get a feel for the style and see what I could learn from it. […]
Review: Oryx and Crake
Title: Oryx and Crake Author: Margaret Atwood Year of Publication: 2003 Genre: Science Fiction/Fiction Length: The paperback version has 443 pages. Rating: 4/5 – Worth paying full price. Review: Oryx and Crake is one of two novels that I have read by Margaret Atwood that are about a utopian future turned to dystopia, the other […]
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” […]
Lost Tales from the Dagobah System
I’ll begin this with an apology, I’ve had Star Wars stuck on the mind the last few days. The worst part is that it stems from an incomprehensible desire to watch Revenge of the Sith again. I really only ever saw it all the way through once, the first time in theaters, when a ooze […]
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 […]
Quite the Predicament
Obviously when you are playing a game like World of Warcraft, it is all consuming to the level that it begins to invade the other aspects of your life. It was a joy, as I talk about back in that old post, to be playing with my (now wife) then girlfriend and hear her make […]
Recent Comments