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Kasumi from Shira Oka, looking ornery: a pale girl with glasses and unruly blue hair, in a schoolgirl uniform.

Sweeping Exits and Offstage Lines

July 1, 2012 / 1 comment

I spent a long time trying to figure out Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. It had an unusually deep simulation with a lot of random variables, so I dug through a lot of FAQs to figure out what the hell was going on. This being the work of Harvest Moon fans, the FAQs tended to editorialize about…

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A screenshot from Fallout 3. Tenpenny Tower in the distance, with the sun setting in the background.

Four Types of Videogame Tragedy

January 9, 2012 / 13 comments

In my last post on tragedy, The Wrong Ending, I presented what I saw as an essential problem of tragedy in videogames: an ending where things go badly is often seen by players as wrong, and therefore in need of fixing. This makes it hard for a tragic ending to seem like a valid choice…

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Fenris and Isabella from Dragon Age 2, in fighting poses.

Readings: Outside the Lines

November 29, 2011 / 3 comments

Holy crap, I’m back! And I’ve even had time to read things! Here are some of those things. First off, Kirk Battle brings his uniquely legal perspective to explain the difference between playing Magic on a tabletop versus a computer in a Kill Screen post called In Brief: Who Rules the Rules? He makes a convincing argument…

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Readings: Lost in Transition

October 13, 2011 / 5 comments

I’ve been neglecting the old blog for a while, due to a combination of work piling up and not being able to get back into my old routine. But I’m back, hello! Here’s some of what I’ve been reading while I was gone. A Fate That We Deserve: Choice, Triumph, and All That Remains. This is…

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Dragon Age 2: The Champion of Kirkwall

August 20, 2011 / 0 comments

It took me a long time, but I finally finished my first playthrough of Dragon Age 2. This is the first of a couple posts I’ll be writing on it. To get the overall opinion stuff out of the way first, I was pretty crazy about the game. I wasn’t too offended by the reused…

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