Casual Games
Runescape: Kind of a Big Deal
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008I knew that Runescape was popular with the kids, but not so popular that it would come in at #5 in Yahoo’s top ten searches of 2008. That’s two spaces higher than last year. It’s going places. For reference, here are the searches it managed to beat out:
6. Jessica Alba
7. Naruto
8. Lindsay Lohan
9. Angelina Jolie
10. [...]
Passage
Sunday, November 30th, 2008I read about Jason Rohrer’s game Passage in the latest issue of Esquire and headed over to his site to check it out. The premise is like lots of other arcade games: move around the map and collect as much treasure as you can in five minutes. However, Passage is actually a metaphor for life [...]
When in Doubt, Look Around for Some Inspiration
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008I find myself rather unexcited about Wrath of the Lich King. I’ll buy it eventually. I’ll play it. Whenever my WoW addiction fires back up I’m sure I’ll be writing about all the cool stuff that everyone will have written about already. I can’t get into the hype right now, though — even with a [...]
World of Warcraft: The Bejeweled Crusade
Saturday, September 20th, 2008I have an on-again off-again love affair with casual games. They can be a lot of fun, as anyone with access to the Microsoft Live Arcade knows. If you’re interested, I know a whole slew of obscure indie RPG and fantasy strategy games that I could recommend. But I also like the simpler games like [...]
Game Piracy: An Open Discussion
Sunday, August 17th, 2008Courtesy of Jay Barnson’s excellent indie RPG blog, I found this really interesting news item: Game designer and one-man indie outfit Cliff Harris of Positech Games (Kudos, Democracy, Rock Legend) opened a frank and honest discussion of why people pirate his games, and then blasted it all over the internet. Surprisingly, a ton of people [...]
XBLA: Rocking Me Casually
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008I’ve very recently become a huge fan of Xbox Live Arcade. Prior to moving to Seattle, I used my Xbox so infrequently that I was going to sell it to a friend. I had a few games that I’d consider entertaining, but I spent most of my gaming time on the PC. I ended up [...]
Business Plan: Sue the Competition, Deliver an Inferior Product
Thursday, July 31st, 2008I never used Scrabulous, so I can’t speak as to whether it worked well. However, I am a big Scrabble fan. I heard the news that Scrabulous got shut down and decided to try the new “official” version of Scrabble, currently in beta. The game itself is fine, but they apparently didn’t anticipate how many [...]