If someday I am standing at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter looks down at the sum total of my life and asks, “You played Civilization 2 once for an entire weekend? Like, 32 out of 48 hours? Seriously?” I will answer him, head held high, “Yes, yes I did.  And it was totally awesome.”

It is true that in my younger days, I put in many a marathon session of gaming.  Entire nights or weekends could blow by as I sat immersed in whatever game was occupying my attention at the time.  An entire Christmas vacation could be lost to Final Fantasy VI, or nights that should have been spent writing history papers were spent tracking down Sectoids in X-Com. Even up to my years in college, I still might put off more pressing concerns to stay up until the wee hours of the morning waiting to see what was coming next in Silent Hill or the like.

Continue Reading…

Michael Abbot over at The Brainy Gamer has an interesting write up on his thoughts about Afrika, the open-world safari game coming out for the PS3 later this summer.

When I write about games, I usually look for a hook; something about a game that makes it distinctive or meaningful to me. Afrika throws me a curve. I don’t know what the hook is. I love this game – I mean, I truly adore it – but I’m struggling to account for precisely why. I can describe the things I like about it, but none of them quite captures the essence of the experience this game delivers.

Maybe that’s because Afrika relies so much on my imaginative engagement. What I bring to the experience is at least as important as what the game brings me. When I play Afrika, I feel like an explorer with a purpose. My camera is a personal extension of me, and it encourages me to define my own objectives, capture my adventures, and share them with others.

From his description, Afrika seems to be a dynamic mix of Pokemon Snap with a pure open-world environment.  As someone who secretly adores Pokemon Snap, as well as not-so-secretly loving exploration in games, this is suddenly a title worth a little more of my attention.

Though it was not a term I had heard until much later in my life, once “rage quit” entered my vocabulary, it felt like it had always belonged there.  It encapsulated a feeling I had experienced many times before in a nice, concise, two-word phrase.

Even if you don’t know the term, which is unlikely if you’re a gamer of any type, you have undoubtedly experienced it before.

In my mind, the rage quit breaks down into three distinct types…

Continue Reading…

I’m sure you’ve all been there before at some point in your life:  playing a friendly game of Monopoly, enjoying the zesty give-and-take of shifting the same pile of money back and forth between players, when suddenly you notice that the banker took $300 when he paid himself for passing Go instead of the mandated $200.  Perhaps it was an accident, you think to yourself – it would be easy to be distracted by the pure fun of Monopoly and make such a mistake.  And yet, on the next go-round the board, you see him do it again.  That’s when you realize: you’re dealing with a cheater.  You respond the only way you know how; driving the Thimble playing piece into his eyeball while screaming about the “integrity of the game.”

Continue Reading…

When Harmonix announced that they were developing a Rock Band title for the PSP, I was intrigued;  How could they replicate the experience of playing Rock Band, an inherently social game, for a portable system, which, while not out of intention necessarily, is designed for solo play?  For that matter, how could they design an instrument-based game for a system for which you can’t actually use any instrument peripherals?

Short answer:  They didn’t.  Long answer:  They didn’t, but this is still a great game.

Continue Reading…

“While Insult Sword Fighting is one of the first things people think of when they hear Monkey Island, I thought it seemed little tedious (but fun) as I played though it again.  There is a point where you say ‘I get it’, but you’re still forced to go though the motions again and again.  If I was going to do Insult Sword Fighting in a future game, I’d make it more free form allowing the player to be clever and construct their own sentences.”

To commemorate the upcoming re-release of Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert offers his commentary on Secret of Monkey Island, 19 years after he designed it. It’s a really amazing glimpse of what went through one designer’s mind as he worked on one of the seminal games of the graphic adventure genre.

My grandparents gave me the game, King’s Quest 5, as a present during a visit the summer when I was 13 years old. They are a funny pair. At the time they were almost bigger gamers than I was. They loved games like King’s Quest and would play together, the whole time arguing about what to do next and how to solve the game’s puzzles. These are the same people who to this day refuse to buy a microwave or a DVD player.

It was my grandparents’ gift that introduced me to the type of games I came to enjoy the most. My first adventure games were the Commodore 64’s X-Men: Madness in Murderworld and Maniac Mansion on the NES (which I played obsessively), but it wasn’t until I played King’s Quest 5 on our PC that I truly saw my video game future.

Continue Reading…

I will readily admit that several years ago when Nintendo first unveiled the Wii, I was one of many who sat back, impressed, and boldly stated “this is going to revolutionize gaming.”  Looking back on things now, it seems clear that the Wii has changed gaming, but not really in the ways we expected.

The promise of motion-controlled gaming has always been an elusive one; touted as the next evolution of interactivity, we are all often inclined to think that its mere existence will make a game better.  The Wii, I think we can agree, can easily demonstrate that this isn’t always true.  Motion controls, when implemented poorly, can seem far more of a burden than a benefit.

Continue Reading…