Gaming with purpose
This was a victory 30 years in the making. I finally finished Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight. The Bard's Tale was, of course, a series that is dear to my heart and one I never shut up about. Back when I was kid on our trusty Apple IIe we had Bard's Tale 1 (or …
Continue reading Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight and the joys of mapping
Being comparatively new to the realm of blogging, I am somewhat surprised at the number of awards that are available. I am even more surprised at the number of "awards", which are only "awards" in the same sense that there are "single girls in your area". Whatever, they're stil fun. I was nominated for this …
Continue reading “Sunshine Blogger Award” (Disclaimer: not a real award)
"Just one chip". "A quiet beer". "One more turn of Civilization" Some things are just impossible. A while back, I had about an hour to kill. For some unknown reason I had Civ III in Steam,* and I thought "I played a lot of Civ 1 and 2, I'll try this for just an hour". That …
Continue reading Civilization III and (failed) attempts to fix the end-game
I'm not having a stroke, the title of this blog post will make sense soon enough. In October I'm doing a guest piece for Normal Happenings as part of their "Games that Define us" collaborative piece in November. It's a fantastic idea where myself and many other bloggers each write a piece about the game …
I spent 120 hours on Battletech. It felt like 40. That should tell you everything you need to know about this game. Oh all right I suppose you want to know WHAT kind of game it is, and WHY it was so good. I will assume that "WHERE" and "HOW" are self-explanatory.* Battletech is a …
Continue reading Battletech and “irreduceable complexity” (Completed)
The Tex Murphy series is one I've long wanted to try, which is why I have all 6 of them in my backlog. I've now played the first two, 1989's Mean Streets and 1991's Martian Memorandum. And so far they're interesting games filled with odd contradictions. It's an adventure game, with a driving sim in it. It's a …
Continue reading Tex Murphy double bill – Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum
I'm really blogging the backlog now - I don't typically blog about free games, but let's get into it. I played Steamworld Dig about 12 months ago, which means this will be a short post. It was free on PS Plus - I played and finished it because I was up late at night looking …
I just wrote a post for The Well Red Mage on "What Makes a Good Sequel" - check it out here!
Mighty No 9 is quite fun. It says something about Mighty No 9, and the internet in general, that this feels as comfortable as saying "I eat puppies". But my firm view is that if Mighty No 9 had been released minus all the hatred it would have been warmly received and probably have a little …
I think I discovered another "dead" genre. The 4x genre (Xpand, Xplore, Xploit, Xterminate) is a genre of turn-based strategy game. Once upon a time it was very popular - with a large number of high profile releases, the most famous of which (and only survivor) is Civilization. Think of it as turn-based RTS on …
