I’ve been playing a fair share of role-playing video games lately. RPGs. And actually, I’ve primarily been swapping between two right now — Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on my desktop and Fallout 3 on my PlayStation — but have dabbled in a bunch of others in recent months and years, too. RPGs are the types of games where you take on the “role” of the central protagonist of a vast and interactive story. This is different from a first person shooter (FPS) game because — even though they look very similar on the surface, the third-person over-the-shoulder view of a character running around and fighting critters or baddies — in an RPG the character is not a mere static set of statistics to improve your [...]

It’s been a while since I attended one of our Monday Night Games Nights. Let’s use… uh… summer as an excuse. But last night Chris gathered a few of us together for an altogether-satisfying, nearly three-hour round of Magicka bleeding well into the hours somewhere between past-my-bedtime and not-quite-midnight. It’s been six months since I played that particular game and for the first hour, give-or-take, my chops were still a little rusty. Unlike the typical WASD control-scheme employed by most every other PC game these days, Magicka makes use of those same keys plus QERF to control spell combos that are then launched through various mouse-clicks. The mouse itself is your movement control. The short-of-the-long is that I spent the first hour or so attempting [...]

I haven’t written much about gaming lately. This is probably because I haven’t been doing much gaming lately. Not much, with the exception of some mobile stuff — because I can play mobile while I am mobile, and I seem to be mobile a lot. That, and it’s summer, so gaming is kind of a winter sport around here. So… mobile-wise, I’ve been playing a stupidly addictive little iOS game called Tiny Tower, a time-sucking, resource-farming-style game (yes, in the spirit of Farmville, et al, but with fewer virtual chickens) that takes place in some random rental-property utopia. The eight-bit-fashioned graphics form the essense of a virtual two-dimensional office, commercial, and apartment tower-in-one. You, the (apparently omniscient) landlord are tasked with four innane tasks that [...]

A few months back, when I first started at my new job, my new coworkers– by way of subtle hints and overheard conversations — got me into this game called Minecraft. Right now? It’s late in the evening as I write this, and rather than stress myself and my fingers trying to explain the game and its addictive properties in my own words, I include the following excerpt from the latest iteration of Wikipedia’s entry on Minecraft: The core gameplay revolves around construction. The game world is essentially made up of cubical blocks arranged in a fixed grid pattern, that represent different materials, such as, dirt, stone, various ores, water, tree trunks, etc. While the players can move freely across the world, objects and items [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately. Surprised? One of the themes for a bunch of my recent stuff has been to get away from the hard science fiction and fantasy writing and build stories around slightly more plausible fictions, in particular stories about the culture and ideas of the net. From a couple of perspectives, namely that of (a) a hack of a social anthropologist and (b) a card-carrying member of the geek tribe, net culture is fascinating to me. So, rather than make up fantastic realities, I’ve spent a lot of time making up fantastic scenarios inside the reality of people interacting online. A story that I’ve been working on has piqued my interest, and if all goes according to plan I’ll [...]

Sony unveiled their latest iteration of the PSP, and in the subsequent few days it has been universally slammed as an epic failure. The PSP Go, unlike my older model, is unilaterally tied to a Sony-controlled online-only media store, hampered by a boggling array of proprietary cabling, and proudly displays a smaller screen than it’s older brother — and all for about eighty bucks more, too. I’ll be sticking with my 3000, thanks. But unless you are foolish enough to dip your toe into Sony’s portable console collective with the Go, the handheld’s update is not all doom and gloom. In fact, the first point — the link to the online store — while a bottleneck for Go owners, is a welcome gift for those [...]