When two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon on Monday—killing 3 people and severely injuring more than 100 others—my first thought was a fairly obvious one: “Wow… that could have been us.” We’ve been down to watch the Marathon many times, and it was simply a matter of chance that instead of navigating the crowds…
BioShock Infinite does what the BioShock series does best, weaving a thrilling narrative into a rich and captivating world. Like any medium for artistic expression, video games can allow us to experience fantastic new worlds that entertain and inspire us. Unlike most other mediums, though, games also allow us to interact with those worlds. This…
Though a little on the lean side in terms of content, Gears of War: Judgment is pretty good… provided you like third-person Halo games. Shooters are the video-game equivalent of jazz music. To some people they seem like so much chaos and noise, and many have trouble discerning the subtleties that distinguish one work from…
8:09 AM – Day three. Last year the third day fell on Easter, while this year we have the Game Developers Conference (GDC) starting tomorrow. We’ll see which one is better at thinning the crowd; I’m guessing the latter. Either way, I hope it doesn’t have a negative impact on getting to see the games…
8:23 AM – Thanks to help from my wife and my mom, I’m less encumbered by child care responsibilities this morning. However, I am encumbered by getting only four hours of sleep, so I still get a later start than I intended. Still, it looks like I’m going to make it to the 10:00 panel…
8:42 AM – This time last PAX, I was standing in the bowels of the Boston Convention Center waiting in a gigantic line full of bizarre people for no discernible reason. This time around, parental duties required that I drop my two beautiful, screaming children off at day care before I could embark on the…
I can’t believe that nearly a year has passed since I abandoned my family for the Easter holiday to attend my first gaming expo, PAX East 2012. This time the good folks at Penny Arcade have taken the less blasphemous approach of not attempting to be “bigger than Jesus”, which means that although I’ll have…
Ninja Theory’s inspired reboot doesn’t just revive Capcom’s aging hack-and-slash franchise, it transforms it. In 1893, after writing twenty-four short stories and two books chronicling the life and times of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned the final chapter on the world’s greatest fictional detective. However, after enduring ten years of hate mail from…
I used to believe that the path from thought to language traveled only in one direction. It seemed to me that spoken and written words were a poor approximation of the mind’s inner workings, a crude limitation of this dreadfully physical plane of existence. Of course, now that I’m older and wiser (or at least…
Though it’s a clever and enjoyable enough way to spend a few hours, The Cave is unlikely to impress anyone who knows how great Ron Gilbert’s games can really be. In 1987, the debut works of two great artists were released: Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction and Ron Gilbert’s Maniac Mansion. Each was a…