My Top 10 Favorite Video Games OF ALL TIME :D

A favorite game is like a warm snuggie that you can cuddle yourself into, reach for a bag of chips, and dive into a world of  indulgence. The experience might not be the best for your brain and body, but oh boy is it satisfying.

The following is a list of games I consider to be my favorites, not because they're the best games I've ever played, rather because they've managed to rattle around in my head like earworms over the years, and because Steam tells me I've devoted precious months of my life to playing some of them.

Coming of Age in Virtual Worlds: Remembering Splinter Cell as a Gateway Drug to Habitual Trespassing

Everyone has a piece of media that they grew up on. I’m not referring to the games, comics, or books that one fondly remembers from childhood. I’m specifically referring to that one piece of media that helped forge the bridge between adolescence and early adulthood. The media bildungsroman. For me, that piece of media was a virtual world, a video game, called Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005). I’d like to utilize a bit of self-ethnography, and talk about the formative experience of growing up on Splinter Cell, and how the sensual details of its virtual environments extended (and often blurred) the line between reality and fantasy, to the degree that younger me ended up scaling rooftops at night, clad as an NSA superspy working for Third Echelon.

Retiring Night of Swords

There are some projects that serve more as growing pains than actually good work. I think all artists (I use artist as a pejorative term when referencing myself) experience this phenomenon. It can be frustrating, especially with more recent work, to commit so much time to a project, go in with the best intentions, and then look back at the result three years later with contempt. I think that's why Stephen King recommends locking your finished manuscript in a desk for six months immediately after writing it before you start editing. Some things are too close, too fast.

Spectacle Vs The Rules: Some reflections on gaming with miniatures

There's just something about miniatures. My grandmother loved them (though I doubt she'd ever play 40k), and I've always loved them. My grandma would tell me that when she was hospitalized she had a set of army hospital figures (presumably marx or airfix back then) that she would play with and make up stories with. Nobody died in her war.

This link from miniature to imagination ignited a passion for scale figures in me long before I ever discovered games workshop and the various excesses of the local hobby store. I made my first boardgame when I was five using a plastic army man and a piece of copy paper. Fast forward 10 years later and there I am standing in the middle of a hobby shop having arrived fresh from the orthodontist. I had just gotten braces wired to my teeth, and the only thing I could think of that would make the self consciousness and horror of that experience go away was buying the 5th edition rulebook for warhammer 40,000. Mini games have always been there to inspire and comfort me.

Miniatures possess a certain quality of imaginative possiblity, coupled with a sensation of tactility that mirrors the satisfaction one might get from running your hands through warm sand. It's entrancing. And yet, I've found that those qualities of spectacle and sensation can rarely be matched by the rules systems that govern play with them.

Alice in Wonderland LARP

Pocket Reviews: Godzilla vs Destroyah

What if the Godzilla movies were courtroom dramas? Godzilla vs. the people of Japan, Godzilla vs. Connecticut public schools. With the oddly titled "Godzilla vs. ___" films of the 90s, you knew exactly what you were getting when you rented the flick. The king of the monsters is going to duke it out with a mysterious big baddie. These films perfectly captured that VHS box aesthetic, with glossy city skylines, huge early-CG color font, and plenty of lasers, explosions, and smoke to go around.

You've Been Disavowed is now available: a story-game with bad spies and awesome drinks

"You get so nervous when you're making anything espionage related," said my girlfriend. And it's true. I've had a life long passion for the absurdity, bright colors, and dangerous liaisons of the James Bond, Graham Greene, Pink Panther, etc universes. There's something very musical about the spy genre that I've always wanted to capture.

You've Been Disavowed represents a final attempt to simulate the narrative of a super-spy movie, letting players tear out the guts of the genre tropes and archetypes and assemble something unique.