Not everybody enjoys watching others play videogames, just like not everybody enjoys others play sports. There’s something about games that demands that hands-on experience. Of course, a big part of it depends on the style and personality of the person you’re watching. If you’re a stealth gamer, you probably wouldn’t enjoy watching a brawler barrel through levels, […]
Category Archives: game writer
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
E.T. Has Been Exhumed
Did you guys hear that E.T. the Extraterrestrial, specifically the one made for the Atari 2600 console, has been dug up from its subterranean grave? For those of you unaware of the legend, in 1983, Atari released this gawdawful game and had literally millions of unsold cartridges. They buried something in New Mexico, and some speculated that […]
The Hitchhiker’s Guide Game is Back
The BBC have kindly revived the classic Infocom text adventure game version of Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” for its 30th anniversary. The Hitchhiker’s Guide webgame can be played in your browser for free… and the spiffy web version comes with wireframe graphics, sound effects, and some preset buttons for navigation and […]
Free Football Videogame for Texas Gamers
Free football videogame? No joke! It’s Superbowl time, and that means Texas’ Game Over Videogames, a game store that specializes in vintage and retro games (but also sells current games), is having their annual football game giveaway. This Saturday and Sunday, gamers can visit one of their locations for a free football videogame as long […]
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 […]
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 […]