Blog Archives
sElectronic Arts (video game publishing superpower) is a pretty scummy company—voted “Worst Company in America” 2 years running!—but in the quest to milk every single dollar out of an increasingly alienated and cynical fanbase, they occasionally do something not completely horrible. (Or at least something marginally useful for the purposes of researching one of my […]
I had a terrible weekend. How about you? For my part, I spent almost four hours watching E3 press conferences, first EA’s, then the Xbox’s, then Bethesda’s. And after seeing presentation after presentation, and trailer after trailer, my response is this: Utter and complete stupefied boredom. Nothing excited me at all.
I was considering writing about my recent readings of the Broken Sword or Neutron Star, but I’ve just been having too much fun with Rimworld. So much fun that I had to share. For those who may be unfamiliar with this one, Rimworld is a scifi colony sim/survival game inspired by the likes of Firefly, Dune, Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space […]
Fallout Shelter: A Terrible Game by Terrible People
Monday , 5, June 2017 Computer Games 22 CommentsFallout Shelter is a terrible game by terrible people. It’s completely awful, top to bottom, with nearly no redeeming features. “But it makes a lot of money!” So do crack kingpins. What’s your point?
If I were to draw a Venn diagram of the artistic inspirations of the new video game Prey, there’d be a big blue circle marked “Bioshock” and a big red circle marked “Dead Space 2” and where they overlapped, all that purple space would be marked Prey. Now, I’m not saying Prey is ripped off from […]
900 WORDS OF EPIC RANT THE LIKES OF WHICH THE WORLD HAS SELDOM SEEN!
Monday , 10, April 2017 Book Review, Computer Games, Pulp Revolution 12 CommentsYES! It’s blog post time, time for me to crank out 900 words of scintillating prose in the form of a scathing review, a brutal editorial, or a brilliant and inspiring speech calling for the brave Pulp Revolutionaries to storm the citadel of Tradpub and cast down their Golden Idols. Hey, I’m Daddy Warpig—it’s what […]
When the question of “what are your hopes and dreams” came up for a school assignment, my son’s response was, “I want to a make a million dollars designing video games and then I want to retire and play the video games I designed.” I was not pleased. “Son,” I demanded. “You do know what […]
SUPERVERSIVE: Unlikely Bastions of Superversion
Tuesday , 20, September 2016 Computer Games, Games, Superversive, Uncategorized 14 CommentsThe first and only video game I ever got in trouble for playing was Squaresoft’s Chrono Trigger. You see, early on in the game, there’s a chapel in the woods that has been taken over by monsters, and in order to keep the charade up and hide their dastardly deeds, several snake-women disguise themselves as […]
DevGame has announced that the classic TSR fantasy wargame, Divine Right, is now being developed as a computer game. That may or may not be of interest to readers of this blog, but what will almost certainly be of interest is the last paragraph of the post. Castalia House also acquired the right to produce […]
Guest Post by Dave Hoffman: From the Tabletop to the Internet – MMORPG’s Past, Present and Future
Monday , 30, May 2016 Computer Games 6 CommentsWe play board games, especially D&D and its variants, for the feel of adventure with our friends. Whether the events within the campaign are scripted or organic, we appreciate the experience itself and the social setting for what it is. They are not just the means for the entertainment, but the ends as well. Those […]
Vox invited me into his class on video game development and I wanted to try to convey a little bit of what it’s all about. Up front, the most striking thing about it to me was just how much Vox is into every little nuance of the history of the medium. You know, the guy […]