Sixteen thoughts on Greenlight

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Sep 012012
 

1) The sorting options for games are terrible. Worse, the default random order gets changed every time you click on a page number. As I browsed through, Layernet’s goddamn skyscraper game followed me through four pages until I finally downvoted it. It would be nice to sort games by overall rating, and it would be especially nice to sort games by my rating, so I can see how games I upvoted are doing without wading through all that Layernet crap I downvoted. 2) The tide seems to have subsided a bit, but damn there were a lot of idiots posting [Read more…]

Choosing what to complain about

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Feb 052010
 

My review of The Saboteur has gone live at GameCritics.com (spoiler alert: I really liked it!) after a modestly torturous rewrite. It’s a vastly larger game than any I’ve reviewed before at that site, which led to an enormous imbalance between my notes and the size of the review. I spent almost 48 hours in the world of The Saboteur, which means I have many pages of notes that had to be boiled down significantly before I could get anywhere near a readable size. Games like this are so large that reviews could easily become a ponderous, ten-page affair, and [Read more…]

A good way to spend a day and a half

 Critical Thinking Compilation, Other  1 Response »
Oct 142009
 

My compilation of critical writing about Grand Theft Auto IV has gone up at Critical Distance. If you have a couple of hours to devote to reading some interesting writing about the game that was supposed to change everything then hop on over and get clicking. There’s a lot to read, and I ended up including a pretty diverse set of posts, from straight essays to cross-blog dialogues, to one post from Corvus’ site that ended up in there because of a really interesting comment. Also, because the game appeals to such a broad swath of gamers, I made an [Read more…]

What’s the word, Slim?

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Aug 202009
 

Tuesday saw the widely-expected unveiling of Sony’s new hardware model: a slimmer, lighter, and less energy-hungry Playstation 3. They also debuted a new, $299 price, meant to make the PS3 more competitive with the XBox 360 and Wii. At the same time, my PS2 has started to sputter; it had a tough time chewing through Persona 4, and since then has only gotten more feeble. This would be a great time for Sony to sell me a brand-new PS3 with a reduced form factor and lower energy consumption, but Sony has chosen not to include backwards compatibility with PS2 games [Read more…]

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