While changing over the layout of the blog a few weeks ago and updating the bits of it that inevitably broke while doing so, it occurred to me I never said anything about Petz Fashion: Dogz and Catz coming out for the Nintendo DS earlier this summer. Let’s fix that now, shall we?


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I love the simplicity of the controls in Trials HD. One button makes the bike go, one button makes it stop, and slight taps to the left stick makes the little guy lean forward or back on his bike. It’s everything you need to get through the game’s many stunt tracks, from the earliest “this is what a ramp looks like” tutorial stages to the crueler ( Read more... )

So a few months ago I wrote a post weighing in on the whole “are games art?” thing. It wasn’t exactly a new topic at the time, and several (often smarter) people and articles appearing in industry magazines and sites have gone on to beat the point even further in to the ground, but it was nice to get out of my head and written down, and it ( Read more... )

The question of when videogames will have their own Citizen Kane - that is, one that provides the great leap forward from embarrassing hobby to legitimate art form so desperately craved by so many - seems to crop up more and more with each passing month. It’s the bad penny of games journalism, the go-to question whenever a developer talks up their ( Read more... )

Alexandra Pusateri, games reviewer and columnist (and apparently a force to be reckoned with as the Sniper in Team Fortress) does a regular column at pop culture catch-all 411Mania called Reality Check, in which she explores the lesser known corners and real world ramifications of videogames. For her latest column, for reasons that may never be ( Read more... )

And back to blogging.  Again.  Something more like a proper post should be up in the next day or so, and hopefully more should follow that in an ever-so-slightly more timely fashion.  The last five months have been very, very busy and then very, very lazy, and I feel the need to shake off some cobwebs.  And it’s also good to make sure I still ( Read more... )

Travel in Fallout 3 is a bit different than in other games. Like most open worlds, a lot of your time in the ruins of the Washington, D.C. area is spent getting from one place to another. You know how it goes: somebody at Point A wants you to do something for them at Point B, after which they’ll tell you all they know about what’s going down at ( Read more... )

The trouble with wanting to talk about videogames on the internet is you have actually stop playing them long enough to do so. Take for instance Fable 2, a truly great game that I managed to happily play for fourteen hours straight one weekend (not something I normally do) and could not shut up about in person for a good long while, and yet I ( Read more... )

UK-based games journalist Tom Francis is easily one of my favorite people who make their living talking up electronic entertainment simulations. His dairy of an epic playthrough of GalCiv 2 spread out over twenty days was one of the most well-written and entertaining pieces on games I read last year. A lovely balance of personal experience and ( Read more... )

In which the councilor’s cabin is struck with a mysterious case of the mumps, threatening to cancel the camp’s big End of Season musical, until I rally the other campers for an all-singing, all-dancing lesson about how lying really hurts that we’d never forget. Or maybe I just talk about games some more.

Sid Meir’s Civilization Revolution (DS)
I ( Read more... )