Game Writer Guy, Author at game writer central

Man Walks Miles in the Snow to Honor Qbert

See this fellow? He walks miles in deep snow, for hours, for a noble cause. To honor the arcade game Qbert. Here’s what that snow art looks like: I can hear Qbert jumping from cube to cube right now! Spoing spoing! Okay, maybe it isn’t actually Qbert-themed. Simon Beck is our snow artist and apparently […]

Did My Sister Design the 3DO Logo… At Age 4?

As some of you know, the late great 3DO was one of the game developers where I’ve hung my hat. Good stories, great people, late nights, inevitable collapse, the usual game industry situation. Anyhow, appropos of nothing, my sister brought a little item to Christmas a few weeks ago — a bookmark made in the […]

Remembering Rocket Jockey

Rocket Jockey, the Myth, the Legend Rocket Jockey was the first and arguably the best published game I worked on. Published in 1996 to very little notice, RJ was well-received by videogame critics who happened to notice it. And it was worthy of notice, although I should note that the bulk of the credit goes […]

npesp32.dll: A Virus False Alarm

Beloved geeks, Just a quick note about npesp32.dll, a little-known and horribly undocumented Windows DLL. For some reason, my antivirus program, the unremarkable but free AVG, took a disliking to npesp32.dll, tagging it as the host for the “Generic22.BYCR” virus. I quarantined it and fortunately did not delete it, because shortly thereafter, both iTunes and […]

Hulu Plus Review-ette

Hulu Plus Sounds Useful You know, it’s not hard to like Hulu Plus. One of the big wins for me is that Hulu Plus has a huge catalog of Criterion collection movies. These are classic arthouse movies and canonical cinema landmarks from a wide range of eras. And they have some essential TV shows that […]

Draw Something iOS Circles the Drain

Zynga Breaks Draw Something Again I admit, I play Draw Something on my iPhone. And I often regret it. On my old 3GS, I would only play when I knew I was going to get refreshments or warm up the bathwater because that’s how long it took to load. But my friends play, and some […]

Bing Wants You To Eat a Motsu Pod

As some of you know, I do a fair amount of work in the world of Local SEO or “LSO”. That is, I help clients optimize their data so that they appear in map search engines for phrases like “Detroit florist.” Today I was greatly amused by some of the categories Bing provided for businesses […]

Back Up Wordpress to Google Drive? Careful!

Just a quick little rant about backing up your Wordpress blog to Google Drive. I love this idea, but at the moment it’s an example of why you can’t always trust what you read in a quick Google search. Dig deeper, my geeks. There are two Wordpress plugins that you’ll see scattered around in the top […]

Why I Hate Stealth Games, and More

Stealth Games and Why They Suck Just got through playing a fair number of hours of Hitman: Absolution. It’s well-executed (ha ha) and smooth. I love how you can perform the right actions in context that you expect your hero to be capable of. But I hate stealth games. I think we’ve all played our […]

PS3 Controller Problems

Game Industry Denizens – Not Immune to PS3 Controller Problems My PS3 controller’s started to cause me problems lately. It’s the “random dpad button presses” problem. I’m putting along, just trying to destroy digital things in my little fantasy worlds, and suddenly my avatar is changing weapons like a dervish and insulting all of my […]