How Do You Meet Game Writers and Designers?

I got an interesting question recently on Quora and thought it might be useful to repost the Q&A here: How do I meet game developers? (I titled this post targeting game writers and game designers because that’s a little more relevant to this blog.) Here’s my answer: That’s not hard. 1) Find a local meetup […]

Share

Videogame Indictment: Dragon Age Inquisition

A Dragon Age Review with Bugs Attached Been playing this popular game on PS4 recently and man, am I disappointed. I really want to love it, but instead I just think about how Bioware shipped this thing about six months before it was finished, with some bad design decisions baked in. I’m also a bit irate […]

Share

How Bad Is the Astros’… Chron Blog?

It’s October baseball, folks, and the Astros are in the postseason for the first time in 1,000 years. Hope and delight reign in the hearts of Houston sports fans, but torpor rules on the pages of the Astros’ primary blog, blog.chron.com, where Astros fans often turn for news. Why? If you’re like me, you’ve noticed that […]

Share

Star Wars Battlefront Beta: A Review

The new Star Wars Battlefront beta is out and we’ve got some unsolicited impressions. First the bad news. The Star Wars beta is overflowing with snipey reload-free blaster gameplay. In this Star Wars implementation, a standard blaster has a high fire rate, high magnification in zoom mode, and nearly infinite range, allowing ridiculous snipefests on […]

Share

ACL Festival video + Shia Arrested, Of Course

If you missed the Austin City Limits Music Festival (like I did) or are just looking to relive some of the moments in video, check out the Red Bull TV video highlights. It’s not the most generous assortment of headliners, but you can find songs from Gary Clark Jr., Nate Ruess (of Fun), San Fermin, […]

Share

WTF, WWF?

Zynga’s Words With Friends. I’m a word guy, obviously, and I can’t help playing this game against friends and strangers. It’s crowdsourced word puzzles, really. But why, Zynga? Why does your QC have to be so utterly lousy? Why are you so hellbent on proving you couldn’t care less about this marquee property? Here’s example […]

Share

Chrome Doesn’t Trust Google

A few days ago I tried an innocent Google search in Chrome — “master lock 141q” — and Chrome told me that www.google.com presented a certificate issued by an mysterious entity (the Elder Gods, I assume) that is not trusted by my operating system, aka Android. Essentially, Chrome doesn’t trust Google.com. Chrome, please help me […]

Share

Hilton Hhonors Royally Botches Password Security

How Not to Handle Password Security Recently Hilton’s Hhonors loyalty program asked me to reset my password in their attempt to increase security. Makes sense, after high-profile security breaches at several online websites like Target.com. They dangled a 1000-point reward for early action so of course I hopped over and reset my password. Today I […]

Share

Videogame Writers Are Important #4

Far Cry 4: Egg on Face You know, videogame writers aren’t perfect. We make mistakes and typos, and sometimes our producers and teammates create mistakes and typos in their well-intentioned efforts to fix mistakes and typos. Such is life. However, sometimes a videogame writer gaffe is just so glaring and ill-placed that it has to […]

Share

Food for Thought: We Make More with Less

Thought I’d share this interesting macroeconomic article today. The summary, sans cool graphics, is: Since the turn of the century, we mine and drain a lot less resources per dollar of GDP. We spend a lot less of our total energy to make manufacturing basics like steel (the percentage has dropped, but we actually spent […]

Share