One of my favorite games growing up was the original Zork on the Atari 8-bit. I sucked at it, for sure, but I remember spending countless hours mapping out the the huge cavern and the dam lobby, not exactly knowing the point of the game but sensing something great from that Grue-begotten adventure. For years after that, I couldn’t get enough of adventure games, something that…
Even though we technically have a cable box hooked up in a remote corner of our house next to the dresser that leads to Narnia, our family has long ago cut the cable cord. Amy and I were streaming shows when Netflix only offered Red Dwarf and whatever Stephen King movie featured the young Drew Barrymore, and we haven’t looked back since. This last week, though,…
I finally got through major edit number two for my current work, Red Cliff. Or at least that’s the developer name. Some pretty major changes since the last time I posted a snippet, so I thought it’d stick the first chapter up here as a sample. I know there’s still some editing work to do, and I can’t get the text formatting right on the web browser,…
Turns out I hate myself. Or at least I’m a wanton for emotional punishment. Maybe the two are one in the same. Earlier this year, I found The Little Prince next to our computer and decided to read it to my kids. I knew it was a classic in the Mark Twain sense of being a book much praised but never read (well, at least by…
First, a heresy: Finding Nemo is not my favorite Pixar movie. Not even close. When I first discovered that everyone else in the world not only loved it, they considered it one of the best animated movies of all time, it was like someone had told me the ocean wasn’t wet. I mean, yeah, it was okay, but I didn’t love it. It wasn’t until…
I loved adventure games as a kid. Probably because I hated my life and wanted to grow more frustrated with every click of the mouse. Most of those 90’s adventure games had terrible play filled with puzzles that made sense only to a sadistic programmer hunched in his cubical so long that any exposure to sun would melt him the moment he stepped out of…
I’m a terrible dad. That’s what rolled through my head as Valiant Hearts’ tragic final ending faded into credits. Over the past couple months, Kella has been on a huge video game kick, and I’ve tried my best to steer her towards the few and far between E rated games on the Xbox. She found Valiant Hearts on her own, a World War I themed game that…
As the throwback book closed on the movie just like in the original cartoon, I couldn’t help but think that Rudyard Kipling would have liked Disney’s latest version of The Jungle Book. I remember reading a while ago (and confirmed today on Wikipedia, so it must be true) that Walt Disney wasn’t happy with the first draft of The Jungle Book. The screenwriters had stuck too closely…
In my constant search for Xbox games that don’t encourage my children to take chainsaws to aliens’ faces, I have occasionally bought the random E rated game just because it’s on sale. Beyond Eyes is one of those games. Beyond Eyes is brought to you by the publisher of Worms, the adorably cute game where cartoon worms try to murder each other with bazookas, hand…
Long ago, while Finley and Oliver were still cooking, I had dreams of zoning out on the couch with my children and destroying an entire new generation in Bomberman. Things haven’t worked out so far with Finley, who has shown minimal interest, zero aptitude, and even less patience when it comes to traditional controller-in-hand video games. Since I had no desire to test how many…