I went to a screening of Incredibles 2 tonight. I walked into the theater about five minutes before the scheduled start. The screen was blank. That's a bit unusual these days, but it was an IMAX screen; I figured that perhaps they didn't have any commercial fluff that was in IMAX format. The starting time of the…
When you step into the middle of a franchise, whether it's written, on screen, or in a video game, you run the risk of not understanding references to past events. Within a couple of minutes of playing God of War, I watched the main character, Kratos, fiddle with his arm wrappings. There was a strong sense of…
I'm a fan of Mystic Vale. It's a deck-crafting game. Unlike a deck-building game, in which you add cards to a starting deck as you play the game, in a deck-crafting game you modify the cards themselves. In Mystic Vale this is done by inserting mostly-transparent cards into the plastic sleeves of the cards of your deck.…
A couple of days ago my friends saw a series of posts on Facebook. As a couple of people guessed, this had to do a fictional race called The Silence from the TV series Doctor Who. In the show, the chief property of The Silence is that you forgot about them the instant you looked away. The…
I like Telltale-style games: Video-game stories that evolve as you make decisions throughout the game. Most of the games I've played in this genre are based on major commercial properties: Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Back to the Future. Life is Strange, published by Square Enix, is based on an original concept. You play Max Caulfield, a…
I like Telltale-style games: Video-game stories that evolve as you make decisions throughout the game. Most of the games I've played in this genre are based on major commercial properties: Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Back to the Future. Life is Strange, published by Square Enix, is based on an original concept. You play Max Caulfield, a…
I enjoyed the first game in this series, Batman: The Telltale Series. It had a different take on the standard tale of Bruce Wayne as he transitions into his role of the Batman. It also set the stakes for a different origin of the classic Batman villains, especially the Joker. Batman: The Enemy Within continues the story…
The seder on Friday night was grand. It had all the usual elements: Good food, good people, and everyone wincing at the sound of my singing voice. (I can't sing, but I never let that stop me.) One major topic of conversation at this seder focused on the Wicked Son: why do people make a forced distinction…
TL;DR: Too difficult for me. Back in 1993, Cyan published the game Myst. It was one of the first games published on CD-ROM. I remember playing it on my PowerMac 7500. Myst is a puzzle game: You moved through different, beautifully-designed environments, looking for clues, interacting with objects, accomplishing various goals, and at the end of the…
Edit: A first came, was first served, and the game has been given away. Worldbuilders is a charity run by geeks (most notably Patrick Rothfuss). Every year they hold a fundraiser/raffle to raise money to fight poverty and starvation. I usually send in the lowest level of participation in the raffle, because I give to other charities…