January 25, 2012 – 10:02 am
My daughter (aka Goddessdaughter) is lacking in certain important life skills. She doesn’t know that you jump on Koopa Troopers so they won’t be able to attack you in Paper Mario. (And never mind that that lowers their defense so that your other attacks work better.) She skips past dialog faster than any regular [...]
December 29, 2011 – 2:04 pm
Well, it’s time to do some online gaming. I knew G+ would be good for this when I first saw Hangouts, but they made them better, and I played in one of Corvus’ Bhaloidam demos (which funded, yay!). I was busy doing two of the free Stanford classes, as well as running a bi-weekly [...]
October 24, 2011 – 9:28 am
I don’t completely remember my first gaming experience. I know it was one of the few at my friend Blair’s house, before his father — a Southern Baptist minister — decided what we were doing was demonic (So we switched to Traveller when we were at Blair’s). I do remember that my red-box human cleric [...]
September 16, 2011 – 8:58 am
If there had never been another Elder Scrolls game, Arena would have been forgotten, or fondly remembered by a few gamers but largely ignored today. Perhaps there would have been a bad third-person console game made from the license a few years ago, and then nothing else. Instead the parts of Arena that are interesting [...]
A few months ago, I started a campaign with my Shattered Earth setting. It was the product of some soul-searching about what makes a game fun for me as a GM, and what makes a game fun for the particular players that I have. As such, the setting is quite different than anything I’ve done [...]
Avencast is an action RPG by ClockStone Software, an Austrian game development company. I’d never heard of it, until I saw it on Steam, and there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of it either. I’ve found that a lot of Action RPGs, like this one, don’t make a big splash within my user community. [...]
I blame Steam. Or maybe GoG.com Either way, it’s useful to have someone to blame. I went a long time with a substandard PC, and played a lot of PS2 and Xbox games. I joined GameFly and got games that way and other ways. I had been a sort-of PC gamer, and I became a [...]
February 24, 2011 – 11:00 am
As I said yesterday, I abandoned doing the big rift events, and focused on leveling my character. I killed 10 of those and 5 of that, and used this thing on that thing and fought the monster that popped out. I died a couple of times, and leveled three or four times. If you’ve ever [...]
February 23, 2011 – 11:00 am
This is a bit of a spoiler for the newbie areas of Rift. It’s also the strongest argument I can give for playing the game, so I feel justified. Throughout the Defiant tutorial/newbie zone, you’re trying to fix the time machine that will send you back to before everything became unsalvageable. It’s the best they [...]
February 22, 2011 – 2:43 pm
So, there’s been some debate about what is a skill-based system, partially around Rift and it’s supposed skill-based system. There’s no doubt that Ultima Online uses skills, everything you can do is based around a skill you have, and those go up and down based on use. Contrast this with say, World of Warcraft which [...]