Rock Band has moved into my #1 “must have” slot this past week. A co-worker started bringing it into the office at lunch, and we played it in one of the conference rooms on a 12 foot wide 1080p screen. Holy Jebus. This game seriously captures the feel of being in a band. I mean, [...]

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User Interface. It’s the bastard child of the gaming industry. Often cast aside and forgotten about ’till the last minute, typically an afterthought, it is hardly ever given its due when it comes to game design discussion. I’ve been giving UI (user interface, specifically the “menu” design) a lot of thought lately, as I’m being [...]

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I’ve been a fan of Sirlin ever since I stumbled upon his Playing to Win website years ago. His experience and insight into tournament play Street Fighter went a long way to making me a better player of games in general, and especially at Street Fighter (which I felt I was already pretty good at). [...]

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I’ve been playing CoD4 for the past couple of weeks, and I have to say I think it’s the best game I’ve played all year. It gets a lot of things right, from play/weapons balance, to the rich single player experience, to the “level up” mechanic of multiplayer, and especially the perks system. It fires [...]

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Hi there and welcome to game-ism.com. I’ve started this site so I have a safe place to rant about my thoughts on game design, and more importantly, other games. There’s been a lot I’ve wanted to say about games over the past few years, but couldn’t because of my job in the games industry, and [...]

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