If you haven’t already heard about it, you can download it here. I’ve started a game and I’m having a nostalgia overload right about now.

Damn, what a good series.

Warning: Here be spoilers Read the rest of this entry »

Taking a break from my two Odyssey games, I have a confession to make. I haven’t been terribly excited with the stuff that’s been released so far this year. There have been titles that have made me contemplate dropping $50 just for something new, there have been sequels to established series that I felt were a safe investment, but so far I can’t really think of anything that has made me really sit up and take notice.

So let me just be blunt: If you own an XBox and have even a passing fondness for platformers or puzzle games, 1200 MS point (USD$15) is a bargain to pick up Braid from the XBox Live download service. For sheer awe-inspiring enjoyment of a game, I feel that Braid is probably the best deal for your dollar available yet this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Rock Band 2 will be out in a couple of months, and it looks like the track listing has been finalized. There’s a lot of stuff there, a lot of good stuff, (although the B-52’s song “Good Stuff” is not in there), and also a lot of crappy samey “if only the WB were still on the air and we could get our song played on Smallville” stuff.

One thing I realized about Rock Band is, if you’re playing with four people, one person has to know the song, and also be comfortable singing. So while there are a lot of fun songs on this track listing, there’s also a lot of stuff you’ll have to set your mic part to “easy” and just mutter through. Read the rest of this entry »

The makers of Indigo Prophecy will be releasing a new game for the PS3 sometime in 2009. I haven’t been aware of it until now.

This game looks amazing, and you won’t see me complaining about a female protagonist who isn’t sexxed up to 11. It’s by the people who did Fahrenheit and Indigo Prophecy. This looks like a realistic (no supernatural element) film noir game. I went looking and found this trailer on YouTube, which is pretty disturbing but definitely raises my interest.

Via CNN (h/t Joystiq)

My husband had repeatedly warned our 3 boys about their behavior while playing the XBOX. Tuesday, after I arrived home from work, our oldest son told me to look in the backyard at “Dad’s artwork”. Well, I wasn’t surprised to see the XBOX proudly displayed on the nearest tree… way to go Honey!!!!!

I’ve got mixed feelings on this. There’s a lack of details… were they not sharing? Were they swearing at the television? Were they being abusive on XBL? Either way, good on dad for enforcing civil behavior.

But part of me is a little freaked out as well, and again, there’s a lack of details. Nailing a toy to a tree is a very violent act, even if it was not done in anger (which we don’t know). You can take away the XBox and make it clear that they aren’t getting it back without using violent imagery… by selling it or giving it to a community center or something like that. I think if the kids were teenagers, they might see some of the humor in it, but I’d be a little afraid of what nailing the XBox to a tree would do to a smaller child.

What are your thoughts on this? Funny? Praiseworthy? Disturbing? Abusive?

OK, I looked around and wasn’t really impressed with the trailers available this week, so I thought I’d break from the trailers and just show some funny gamer videos I’ve found over the last week.

A guy singing about his Geometry Wars frustrations:

Megaman vs. Donkey Kong:

Terrible Video Game Endings:

So a dirty little secret of mine (that’s not really that dirty at all when you think about all of the feminist foodie sites out there) is that I love to cook.

This is a good recipe for scrambled eggs — I like mine a little more “done” before I add the milk/creme fraiche because I can’t abide undercooked scrambled eggs, but the chives really do make a very tasty and elegant addition to a meal most people don’t really think of as an opportunity to live a little. Can you believe this is the same Gordon Ramsay who’s made a name for himself in the states by screaming his head off at people and hurling abuse at would-be chefs?

Anyhow, back to my love of cooking: In my spare time over the past few years I’ve developed a Recipe Sharing Database. I’ve been beta-testing with friends and family and it’s pretty much ready for primetime (ok, maybe there are a few tweaks here and there, but it’s reliable and easy-to-use). This thing is totally free–no ads, spyware, whatever. You put your recipes into it, and you can share them peer-to-peer with friends and family via a data file you email around. There’s no central server, your recipes are still “safe on your computer” and you can even mark recipes as “family secret” to keep them from being shared around. Apart from being able to print your recipes in book form or singly, you can also check off a bunch of recipes before you go shopping for the week, and (after omitting the stuff you already have), it will print the grocery list with everything grouped by aisle. There’s a version for both Windows and Mac OS X, so if you’re interested, have at it.

What are your favorite recipes?

Gametrailers has released their “Top 10 Most Difficult Games”.

There are times when I look back at the Nintendo games like Battletoads and Castlevania and all of those other amazing 2D platformers, and I think “wow, games these days are easy.” I was practically asleep through most of Twilight Princess, but even the Cave of Trials was nothing compared to even the third dungeon in Zelda II.

Usually, whenever I pop off with something like that, I tend to think to myself, “well, hold on. You’ve been gaming now for a few decades, you’re probably better at it than you were,” and I also think “you’re getting soft in your old age and you just PREFER the easy games.” So I’ll pick up a game that wants more tactical thought put into it than simple twitchy precision button matching. Games like Virtua Fighter and Civilization are still pretty friggin’ hard, it’s just hard in a way that’s different from the way that Ninja Gaiden was hard.

But seeing this list, I wonder if maybe I’m being to overly-careful in thinking I’m just being an old geezer who shakes her cane at the whippersnappers and declares “The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600! Now there was a difficult game! You punks with your War Gears and your Auto Theft games have no idea!”

So, what do you think, are games getting easier? Is the need to advance the player through the story superceding the need to offer a challenge?

I’ve been keeping an eye half-lidded at the gaming news sites, and so I was surprised to see an item popping up hither and thither about Spore pissing off atheists. Not just atheists, but militant atheists. Y’see, in an interview with Eurogamer, Will Wright discusses how surprised he was at the backlash against the game’s religion module by “militant atheists:”

Eurogamer: You describe yourself as an atheist; take the so-called militant atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who see faith uniformly as a bad, negative and dangerous thing. Do you see it more benignly, even if you don’t necessarily believe?

Will Wright: Oh, I definitely see it more benignly. I see a lot of benefit and danger in religion like anything[...] I think our bigger fear was that we didn’t want to offend any religious people; but looking at the discussion that unfolded from this thing, what we had was a good sizeable group of players that we might call militant atheists, and the rest of the players seemed very tolerant, including all of the religious players.

And most of the atheists were very tolerant as well. I didn’t expect to hit hot buttons on the atheist side as much; I expected it on the religious side. But so far I’ve had no critical feedback at all from anybody who is religious feeling that we were misrepresenting religion or it was bad to represent religion in the game. It was really the atheists!

We have a number of team members that are pretty religious. And so in design, on the team, in our small, little microcosm of players out there, we tried our best to make sure we weren’t overtly offending any religious people, but yet we wanted to include the idea, the concept of religion in the game.

Now, I’ve seen these sorts of arguments before. If someone expresses disappointment over a particular feature or gameplay option in a game, suddenly they’re “militant.” So I decided to Google “Spore Atheists” to see if I could find any examples of these so called “militant atheist” rants against Spore. Read the rest of this entry »