Two (too?) easy games

The most difficult part of reviewing a game is reviewing the difficulty. A few games — Super Meat Boy, I Wanna be the Guy — can uncontroversially be called hard, but the essential question is actually whether they are too hard. Since that level of difficulty depends not only on the individual player's skills and experience, but also on his values, it can be difficult to state what goes over the line. It is even harder to accurately say whether a game is too easy, primarily because most reviewers are skilled and experienced gamers, many of them drawn to the hobby during its early days when challenge was practically all a game could offer in terms of fun. "Too easy" often equates to boring, perhaps to the detriment of games like Soul Bubbles. I have seen the "too easy" charge leveled at two games I played recently, Kirby's Epic Yarn and de Blob 2. In both cases, the statement is wrong, but for very different reasons.

Read the rest...

PAX East 2011 Roundup

I spent the weekend at PAX East, checking out upcoming games and meeting great people. That last one was a bit more difficult thanks to the enormous size of the BCEC, but that size made panels much easier to get into and allowed for an expanded and much nicer exposition floor. In case you weren't there, here are some impressions...

Read the rest...

Arcology

When I was a boy my family used to joke that crows didn't fly in Vestavia. Our suburb, like so many others, had a knotty system of streets that made direct travel impossible, and zoning that made driving a necessity. My high school was less than 2/3 of a mile direct distance from my house, but it was a two-mile drive down a road that became pretty backed up around 7:45 AM. Of course nobody rode the bus. Suburban living allowed my brother and I to go to a good school, live in a big house, and play in the woods frequently as we grew up. It also used a lot of gas.

Read the rest...

Demo-lition

I think I should start with the reason I placed the pre-order in the first place, which is that I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins a great deal. I didn't particularly care for the combat, which suffered from having continuous time and lousy AI. I also thought that much of what BioWare did to make the game seem gritty, especially the blood spattering, was unintentionally comical. However, I thought the game had some interesting ideas hiding behind its surface pageantry of turgid Tolkienism, and the writing for some of the characters (Shale!) was really great. So, when I heard Dragon Age 2 was coming out I placed an order, and when I heard there was a demo, I downloaded it. Having thoroughly gone through the demo, however, I decided to cancel the pre-order.

Read the rest...