******pssssst. The Tropico 5 DLC is on sale today on Steam!****** The last couple weeks have been rough, spending most of my time dealing with a personal tragedy. I haven’t been gaming or posting much or following the gaming news, but I have played a few DLCs for Tropico 5 […]
Yearly Archives: 2014
249 posts
With Christmas vacation looming just around the corner I look on in envy as friends and family tweet, post, and talk about staying up late and sleeping in till noon. I smile and nod because I know that Christmas break is going to mean getting up and making breakfast for […]
The end of the year is drawing upon us and in the first of two posts reviewing this year of gaming, I thought I’d analyze the cover or box art of some of this year’s new console releases. For the sake of simplicity I will be focusing only on some […]
Winter (break) is coming! And that means that there is going to be a whole lot of catch up up going on among gamers everywhere. I think that I am starting off my run to diminish my pile of shame a bit. With the release of the next gen systems […]
Episode 91: The Happy Meal Argument: No Such Thing as a Boy/Girl Toy (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about gendered marketing of new toys (and the toys themselves) and wax nostalgic on toys in our own past. Join us as we […]
This week, with all of the terrible news, I wanted to play something light, so I picked up Tales from Deep Space. An Amazon Game Studios Kindle adventure, Tales from Deep Space is a cute adventure game for the Kindle Fire HDX and 2014 Kindle Fires, so the game is […]
Over the past few years, I have found myself mostly uninterested in Black Friday (or, is it now Black Thursday?). My mom and I used to go every year, although we never did any hardcore shopping. Instead, we just got up early and shopped around a bit for fun. My […]
This week I’m following up on a discussion of game mechanics started last week. To read part I, check here. So a quick recap: Mechanics are a special subset of game rules. Rules are the foundations of games, and they do all sorts of things. In poker, for example, hand […]
In this series we’ll be looking at some principles of game design, particularly as they relate to analysis and criticism. Check out the first part, about genre in gaming, here. While calls for objectivity in games reviewing have been with the media for quite some time, Gamergate seems to have […]
I know that it’s a bit early for sweeping comments 2014 seems to be the year of a lack of female character creation options. Or, more specifically, the removal of female character creation options for the sake of the game’s “quality.” This not so pleasant instance in this year’s list […]
The latest viral letter from LEGO made me a bit sad. The message is great, but reading it makes me sad because it was written in 1974, before I was born. Forty years ago LEGO wrote To Parents. The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and […]
Bear with me. This is raw. But raw is the best that I can muster right now. This post is not about games…but it is. I am a writer, a gamer, and an activist in no particular order and in no particular manner. I process things through my writing so today […]
Of course the last couple weeks I’ve been completely distracted by #GamerGate. It has consumed most of my free time, which was spent looking at articles and reading about new horrible things happening to women in the gaming community. Doing the research for my dissertation damn near killed me, not […]
It’s no secret that I have a real interest in games for educational purposes. And this interest extends to games that might be both fun and educational to my own 6 year old. So when I got the chance to review The Counting Kingdom by Little Worlds Interactive for iOS […]
Episode 90: Girls and Their Toys: On Toys Done Right (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) As we get closer to Christmas we hope to turn to happier things…like toys. In this episode we wanted to talk about toys and the ones that we think get it […]
The Alaska carefully crafted in Upper One Games’ first creation Never Alone is as beautiful as it is haunting; as enchanting as it is perilous. In some of the most treacherous lands in the continent a young girl named Nuna, accompanied only by an arctic fox known simply as Fox, […]