(Warning, this post contains spoilers.  If you haven’t played Batman: Arkham Asylum, stop reading now). A year late to the party, I grabbed Arkham Asylum GOTY edition a month or two ago on the recommendation of pretty much everyone, and started a playthrough of it for what I anticipated was going to be combat design [...]

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So HP recently developed a smart web cam that will track your face as you move around a room (I don’t know, don’t ask me, maybe some people do web conferencing/skype/nudie cam while standing up).  It works really really great! If you’re not black. I guess the HP techs designed it to look for contrasts [...]

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Now more than ever, I find myself with even less time to actually play games, and so I’m looking for experiences that involve smaller bites of gameplay that don’t ask me to spend hours and hours at a time on the stick. I normally shy away from XBLA type titles because previously, for me, the [...]

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For awhile I’ve been struggling to find a way to describe what I feel has changed about game design in recent years.  My own appreciation of games has been changing, and for awhile I thought it was just me.  I’ve been finding games like F.E.A.R. or HAZE or the idea behind Fracture as tired cliches. [...]

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    Achievements.  While they continue to set the rest of the 360 gamer community afire, I’ve never really been a fan.  To me, they’re nothing more than a very shallow meta game to turn the 360 into one giant MMO grind.  People who buy into achievements and the achievement score wind up playing games [...]

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Wow, I’m kinda floored by how awesome Google’s new browser, chrome, is. I’ve wondered how long it was going to take for Google to enter the browser market, what with their spiders, and their data tracking that they already do, not to mention their robust analytics, etc.  While I have my beefs with Google Ads [...]

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Don’t let it be this game. Seriously, friends don’t let friends build Fantastic Contraptions. I don’t know what’s cooler:  making a machine that works, or seeing how mind-blowingly awesome everyone else’s machines are.  For the level depicted, you could build a machine that looks more like a plow (that’s how I solved “Awash,” the level [...]

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Okay, it’s finally here, so what do folks think about it?  I for one am somewhat non-plussed about it, but then I don’t play the Heavy anyway (so feel free to dismiss).  But more to the point, reviewing their decisions from their own design requirements, I don’t really feel that they flexed any superior Valve [...]

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I was right!  Tell your sister, I was riiiiiiight. Valve released the first of the Heavy weapons update in their week-long burlesque strip-tease for the Heavy Update today, and it turns out it’s a set of boxing gloves that gives crits when you kill someone with them. Huh, where did I see that design before……..oh [...]

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More general design nonsense tonight (it comes back to gaming eventually, stick with me here), but I was smiling walking out of seeing Wall-E thinking about the character designs for Wall-E and Eva. On the surface, they’re simple enough. One’s a boy. The other a girl. One’s old. One’s new. But the comparisons just don’t [...]

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