Howdy y'all. I've been quiet on LJ, even though I've been melting my keyboard under the fury of my frantic typing into Twitter, so feel free to read my recent stuff there. I've been far too deep into the end-of-year gravity well action playset to organize my thoughts into more than 140 characters at a time. (Or, sometimes, more than 280.) I have no ( Read more... )

I just got to play in a really-real nationwide game show and blew it within - literally - the first few seconds of my appearance. Details here.

Despite my best all-smiles efforts I can't help but feel upset about this, being driven from "heh I'm doing good at this tonight" to "HOLY SHIT I'M PLAYING FOR REALS" to complete choking flameout defeat, ( Read more... )

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Add Carney Vale to the list of "totally worth five bucks" Xbox 360 games. This is a Community Games title developed by the Gambit game lab, whose Kendall Square offices I've had the pleasure to visit by way of the various local events they host. It's a fine morsel, gleamingly polished, where you use minimal controls and simple 2D physics to fling ( Read more... )

Microsoft's having a sale on these two downloadable games for Xbox 360. Assault Heroes, a top-down shoot-em-up with Robotron-style controls, is ~$3.13 (i.e. 250 Microsoft Points); and Catan, a very nice port of Settlers, is $6.25. I already own the latter, and just picked up the former, because hey ( Read more... )

The launch of the "New Xbox Experience" last week still feels a little bizarre, in how it took a service that I had already subscribed to for a while and made it measurably better, in several ways, with no increase in price, loss of other features, or need to do anything on my part. This is so the opposite of the way things usually go, right? classicaljunkie and ( Read more... )

I am looking to build a contact-list of folks who may be interested in being the first betatesters for a major new Volity Games project ( Read more... )

I was amused to find that 50 percent of all the people I have played with in Xbox Live have awarded me an "Avoid" flag, meaning that they've asked Live's matchmaker to make it less likely to encounter me in the future. I assume that they are all past teammates from my TF2 sessions, which I played without a headset on - thus ignoring anything that ( Read more... )

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How do you find other players for games that aren't the top five FPSs? I don't know! I'm asking!It seems that for any game other than Halo / Gears / TF2 / wev, the only way to get a decent XBox Live game going is to contact remote friends offline and set up a game. The Quick Match button is almost always futile, and plenty of games that seem like ( Read more... )