When a game has a story and involves sentient creatures, it is inevitable that dialog will arise in some form. But there are different forms of dialog and different ways to handle the dialog in more or less respectful ways to the dialog itself. But if there is effort...
Child of Light: Artistic Success, Gamers’ Duress
It was only a bit more than a month ago that I expressed why I was looking forward to Child of Light. Now I played through the game with my wonderful but not very video-game-experienced wife and can share our thoughts. In somewhat of a different perspective, I played...
Bravely Default – The JRPG that Could (but could be better)
Bravely Default was a surprising game for a number of reasons. Innovation was not one of them, but creating a truly solid JRPG experience definitely was. The game’s success shows that gamers do actually care about good JRPGs even in this day. So what was so good? Where were...
Nit: Difficulty – Labels and the Spectrum
The challenge a player faces in a game is extremely important to consider. After all, video games are an interactive medium and the challenge really frames how that interaction will go. So how can a game find the ideal challenge? Maybe first, what is the ideal challenge? And truly,...
Free-to-Play Titanfall: or the Utopia Ship Everyone Didn’t Know They Wanted
I have no problem admitting that I enjoy Titanfall. But especially after playing it for, currently, 50 hours, I feel the game could have been (and still could morph into) an amazing free to play opportunity for everyone (though I also argue that some of the benefits have already...
Nit: Value – Everything has a price
Nit is my series of posts that will nitpick minor or very specific details relating to one very scoped aspect of video games. Our purpose is to always come up with a series of rules or suggestions to guide developers to make even better games in the future. Today we start...
Titanfall is Fun or: How I Learned to Stop Complaining and Love the Game
I like to nit pick things. I feel criticism is a good way to improve overall. In the end, though, there is frequently something more than a checklist or a simply distilled combination of factors that make something good or bad. Titanfall is like that for me. I can...
Why you should care about Child of Light
Child of Light is an upcoming RPG game from Ubisoft about a princess who becomes a warrior and saves the land… or some such. Now as a very strong enthusiast for the narrative and such a thin grasp of the story, something else must make CoL interesting. I wish...
Really Getting Things Done
Libraries, exceptions, and debugging
In some work I was doing with a ruby extension, state_machine. I ended up running into a very frustrating but simple problem with an exception I was receiving. I think this is a good opportunity to talk about exceptions especially with regard to libraries. If you just want the...