...But on to the ones I actually got for Christmas. For these I really only have first impressions.

I've been spending too much time playing the big game of the year, Bungie's Destiny. I'm only a little way into it (my Hunter is level 7, and the cap for the pre-expansion game is 20), and haven't completely wrapped my head around the many options ( Read more... )

I've been playing video games a lot lately, partly because of Christmas.

The one I've experienced enough of to write something like a knowledgeable review is Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, the latest in a series of twin-stick shooters with gameplay that is essentially a refinement of the old Robotron: 2084 formula (move with one stick, shoot in all ( Read more... )

Having talked about Disney Infinity before, I guess I should mention that Jorie got v2.0 as a belated birthday present ( Read more... )

We just took a long weekend and spent a couple of nights up around North Conway, NH.

On Friday, we went back to Story Land, a little kid-oriented amusement park that I visited with my daughter a couple of years ago. She's a little older, and some of the things that used to thrill her are less thrilling; having ridden Big Thunder Mountain Railroad ( Read more... )

We went back to Lake Compounce yesterday on the way home from a little family reunion in Pennsylvania. The visit was shorter than we'd expected, thanks to the two-hour backup caused by a car accident at a terrible choke point on I-84 near Waterbury ( Read more... )

I first got into playing Farsight's The Pinball Arcade on the XBox 360, which, according to Farsight, has also been their main development platform.

These days, I play it almost exclusively on Android, which isn't quite the same quality of experience, but at least you can get the updates on Android ( Read more... )

I missed this when it happened, but Andrew Trevorrow and Tom Rokicki's fine program Golly, the most powerful software I know of for running Conway's Game of Life and similar cellular automata, is now available for free on Google Play for Android and on Apple's store for the iPad. I can now mess around with my tweaked variants of Life anywhere I go ( Read more... )

Somehow this blog has become all about Disney products. Oh, right, I have a 7-year-old daughter.

My kid got Disney Infinity for Christmas, a game that is both charming and brilliantly evil in its business model: like Activision's Skylanders, it's a game with huge wads of on-disc unlockable content that you access by buying collectible tchotchkes, ( Read more... )

While I'm too averse to physical punishment to be one of these people who can ride roller coasters all day long, I am interested in them. This summer I didn't get to ride any new-to-me coasters; the last amusement park I went to for the first time was Lake Compounce last year ( Read more... )

Apparently Facebook's imitation of the LiveJournal friends page was the most revolutionary innovation on the web.