I've noticed that being confronted with the dialogue options in a CRPG, especially the Bioware ones, makes it easy to analyse options to work out what effect they're going to have on your karma/standings/whatever. You might be tempted to big up the glory, but the game helpfully draws your attention to the opportunity to instead worry about how the other characters are.
An ordered list of unordered thoughts about Dragon Age: Origins, now that I've played through all the backgrounds (and haven't started the game proper).
I've set a calendar event to pester me to post something each Tuesday and Thursday (although I'll probably let myself off if I've been posting properly in the meantime). I have more to say nowadays and somehow I still don't generally get around to it.
I'm also going to concentrate on it as a gaming 'blog (and other things vaguely related) and it's unlikely to see many more purely personal updates.
I'm probably not going to worry too much about a whole new theme, but I will at some point look into making the text closer to full width. There just aren't that many 800px displays any more. Unfortunately the theme is so Byzantine that it's not as simple as taking some width declarations out of the CSS, as I hoped; it'll take a while to get my head around it.
I'm also going to concentrate on it as a gaming 'blog (and other things vaguely related) and it's unlikely to see many more purely personal updates.
I'm probably not going to worry too much about a whole new theme, but I will at some point look into making the text closer to full width. There just aren't that many 800px displays any more. Unfortunately the theme is so Byzantine that it's not as simple as taking some width declarations out of the CSS, as I hoped; it'll take a while to get my head around it.
This was going to be a piece for the news/features site I've been considering trying to write for, but in the meantime it probably works better here. This place needs more posts anyway.
Depending on how deep you want to read, this post is either food for thought on the difficulty of games and the dangers of listening to the vocal minority, or it's a rambling tale about why I'm not playing Metaplace Inc's Facebook game, Island Life.
Depending on how deep you want to read, this post is either food for thought on the difficulty of games and the dangers of listening to the vocal minority, or it's a rambling tale about why I'm not playing Metaplace Inc's Facebook game, Island Life.
Wolfshead has a nice piece on how WoW used to care about immersion and no longer does. That's a Terrible Idea has a different view, and I disagree with it so strongly (or more to the point, so subtly) that it's going to take a little while to collect my thoughts on it.
Edit: Tobold has waded in now with what seems at first glance to be an even stronger position against there being any value in what he calls immersion. Again, I disagree with him on quite what immersion is and why it's important; that response post is looking more urgent now.
Edit: Tobold has waded in now with what seems at first glance to be an even stronger position against there being any value in what he calls immersion. Again, I disagree with him on quite what immersion is and why it's important; that response post is looking more urgent now.
The current Wii television commercial amuses me. It amuses me because the Wii has a BBC iPlayer app, and the XBox 360 doesn't.
Contrary to whatever I may have said while excited and hopeful before, it's now looking unlikely that I'll pay any more money to Cryptic for STO, and I'm even starting to resent the cost of the preorder I put down.
SOE's Gamers in Real Life game design scholarship is now in its third year. MMORPG.com reports on it.
There's a new review of the thing I work on. In talking about an incredibly large product it specifically praises a small part that I designed and implemented (I claim a certain amount of the credit for us including it at all). I'm thrilled.
Still can't tell you what it is...
Still can't tell you what it is...
I'm in the Open* Beta for STO. Here are some thoughts.
