Dear GameStop employees, You can blame me. It’s my fault. No, really, it is. kthxbye! Oh, wait. You’re wanting me to explain that, aren’t you? You bounder, you cheat! Well, okay then. I was at the mall this afternoon. I was looking for the new issue of MOJO at Borders. Mostly I wanted the secondContinue reading “On Games and Nostalgia”
Category Archives: Video Games
On Ensemble Studios
On Ensemble Studios I remember it well. It was the fall of 1997. I heard about this game demo from Microsoft for download. “Age of Empires.” I liked the title. I was curious, and download the demo I did. I’ll be honest. I didn’t like the demo a whole lot. I’d never played a real-timeContinue reading “On Ensemble Studios”
On E-Mail Inaccessibility
For the record, I love my e-mail client. I use The Bat. I discovered it, what seems like ten years ago, and didn’t begin to use it regularly (yes, finally abandoning Outlook Express) until about 2001. What I love about The Bat is that it works hard to be secure. And that means that it’sContinue reading “On E-Mail Inaccessibility”
On Tortured Similes
I frequently read Penny Arcade. The creators bring a snarky eye to pop culture and video games, and the web comic rarely fails to amuse me. Today’s strip concerns, of all things, literary criticism. Specifically, the tendency in science fiction to invent really complicated similes for really simple comparisons. Throwing in random, made-up words —Continue reading “On Tortured Similes”
On a Battle in the Saguenay
Colonizing the Saguenay seemed a good idea. The land was lush. Resources were plentiful. There was abundant wildlife and water. Naturally, I wasn’t the only person interested in staking a claim to the Saguenay. So, too, did Henry the Navigator and Suleiman the Magnificent. They mocked my explorer, Sir Henry Sinclair, as he moved acrossContinue reading “On a Battle in the Saguenay”
On a Burning PlayStation
Once upon a time my PlayStation 2 melted and caught on fire. The story begins on October 26, 2000. At long last, the Sony PlayStation 2 was coming out. It was a dreary day that day. It was foggy. It was so foggy. And I lost my way in the fog, and I ran myContinue reading “On a Burning PlayStation”
On Retailing Comic Books and Video Games
I like to stay up on what’s going on in the comic book industry. Chalk it up to curiosity — in my college days I routinely spent forty to sixty dollars a week on comics, and my first job after high school was working in a comic book store. So once or twice a weekContinue reading “On Retailing Comic Books and Video Games”
On Building Walls
Far to the north, in the snowy wastes of the Yukon, I met the Russians and the Sioux in battle. Sod it, that’s about all of the “After Action” report I’m going to write in the faux military memoirs style I like to affect for such posts. There’s a reason for that. There really wasn’tContinue reading “On Building Walls”
On a Lankhmar Roguelike
When I was in high school, I discovered a game for MS-DOS entitled “Hack.” The concept of Hack was quite simple — you were an adventurer, you had a dog, you went down into a dungeon in search of pillage and plunder, and you fought all sorts of monsters along the way. It was aContinue reading “On a Lankhmar Roguelike”
On Wars of Attrition
Every inch of ground I gained on that island was stained with the blood of my armies. Much like my recent battles in the Caribbean, I met Marie Louise and Catherine the Great amidst islands, but these were snow-covered islands far to the north. The islands were small, they were low on resources, but theContinue reading “On Wars of Attrition”