That was my absolute favorite puzzle in the first Myst! I'll never understand the hate for it; figuring out the direction/sound combinations was surprisingly easier than other chunks of the game and a great joy to map out.

I've always been really fascinated with the construction and management of theme parks, for how much effort goes into maintaining their operation, world, and mystique. The Mouse Tales series has some great anecdotes about the behind-the-scenes chaos and abuse at Disney's parks, and I love the stories about things like…

The computer did the auto-layoff thing on everybody.

I'm sad I missed out on that "failing forward" discussion, but luckily, I can go back now and read it! I have to agree unfortunately that people (myself included sometimes) will just reload if they get an undesired option. For as much as we want sprawling narrative driven by choice and consequence, it's too easy to…

Argh I had no idea it was International Tabletop Day! Naturally my board game-playing roommate is out of town this weekend.

It is a huge deal that these are publicly available now. So much interesting stuff in gaming happens on the edge of what's legal (let's be honest, "classic gaming" is almost completely dependent on piracy), so it can't be openly talked about or shared sometimes. And usually that means that only people in the know can…

I said "couch."
*audience boos*
*drunk Richard Dawson sighs*

The Vectrex is a strong contender because it's basically a full 9.5" CRT television that weighs 15 pounds.

That "nightmare scenario" is already happening.

Fruit Ninja Kinect, no joke. Playing Fruit Ninja with your body is so much more visceral and exciting than playing it on a phone, and showing your silhouette on-screen is a great shorthand for putting you in the game. With no controller, the connection between your motions and your game feels immediately intuitive;…

I tried Crypt Worlds for the first time last night, and I suspect I'll be deep in that for a while. It clicked for me immediately. The world appears to be a bottomless pit of strange people, rendered like a terrible PlayStation 1 game. Very quickly after starting, I found a cave where anthropologist druids were…

How have I never been aware that this is what Crash 'n' the Boys is?! It sounds like high school Base Wars. Have I found a new go-to multiplayer game?

I was going to post a comment about how almost all the criticisms in this review (unnecessary additional modes that don't improve on the original gameplay) could apply to Star Fox: Assault. But on second thought, Assault really tried something different. I don't think it succeeded, but it was at least a conscious…

For as many things as Star Fox: Assault got wrong, I was impressed by the risks it took in shaking up the stable of characters; Peppy retired, Pepper was effectively dead. Krystal stepped up as a central player, Andross never appeared, and so on. The skeleton of the game was still very similar, but it seemed like the…

But Carol loved that one!

I saw Tron: Legacy twice in theaters, including once in IMAX, and I loved it. I tried to watch it in 2D two times since then and couldn't make it through. That movie is extremely dependent on the 3D to be entertaining.

My roommate is a baseball fanatic, so we picked up RBI Baseball 15 last year. I don't have the years of instincts from having loved baseball (and the Triple Play games) to play the game at any appreciable level. But I'll occasionally come home to my roommate playing it, and after a day of work, watching a game or two…

Loved reading the discussion about FFVIII this week. So to celebrate, soundtrack time! If VII's soundtrack is more operatic, VIII is… eerier? I'm not sure what adjective I'm looking for.

Good point about life counters and such. It takes a while to work out of those tendencies, but I wonder if back then it had the sort of almost-religious resistance we're seeing now. "It's not a game if you can continue for free!"

Nothing is more saddening than a game trying something new that feels the need to include "traditional" game design elements. There has to be something to activate, there has to be a puzzle to solve, there has to be some nominal challenge. There's no need to weld a game to a 20-year-old expectation of what a game…