Mssv

(As I mentioned in my last post, I have this big backlog of posts I want to make. One of my notes says ‘zelda’. I’m not sure what this means any more. Could it be about the Phantom Hourglass trailer I saw at GDC? Or maybe it’s about the Zelda music they played at Video [...]

Well, my whole ‘bumper crop of Christmas posts’ thing didn’t work out so well, what with going to a wedding in Cambridge with no internet access. Still, the posts are waiting…
As most people know, Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 worldwide in November last year. There was a lot of fanfare, and lots of people gushing [...]

LCD boardgames that can detect the position of your counters - well, so much for my grand idea. Having said that, I’m pretty sure that a lot of other people have had the idea of LCD boardgames before.

My induction to boardgaming began early in 2004, when I started playing The Settlers of Catan. I’d played plenty of other traditional ‘boardgames’ before that point, such as Monopoly or Risk or the Game of Life, but after Settlers, I quickly realised that these weren’t real boardgames - they were ‘boardgames lite’. They were ‘roll [...]

Like pirates, zombies are reaching the peak of their popularity. They’re cool. They’re in movies, books, videogames, boardgames and MMOGs. I’ve only played two MMOGs seriously; the first was about seven years ago, when I beta-tested Ultima Online (yeah, I’m that cool). The second is Urban Dead, a browser-based text MMOG that sees zombies and [...]

Games for couples (other than the obvious) - another Ask Metafilter classic about good, non-confrontational two-player boardgames and card games. Most modern boardgames are for about four players…

After hearing so much about Train Your Brain, the Nintendo DS game that’s been developed to boost your IQ, I was pretty excited on obtaining a copy. The game has probably sold more than a million copies now, and that’s mostly to non-gamers, so it’s certainly an unusual hit ‘game’. Players are supposed to play [...]

NB: I’ll be putting up my presentation notes in the next few days.
As a game developer at the conference told me, “When people hear that I’m from Montreal, they think of two things. One, that we speak French, and two, that we almost separated.” They certainly don’t think that Montreal is a place where computer [...]

The popular games weblog Joystiq regularly posts about promotional ARG campaigns, generally to do with new games or consoles like the XBox. Until today, that is. Today, they proclaimed that they were sick of viral marketing and sick of ARGs. Their list of complaints include the fact that ARGs are predictable, not entertaining (this is [...]

Regular readers may have noticed some subtle change in the appearance of my weblog - yes, I have in fact posted a new article in the ‘massive’ section. It’s not very long, but people into alternate reality games might be interested. Basically, it’s an edited version of the extended abstract I sent into the GDC [...]