Erik Novales

A few months ago, Microsoft announced that it would be shutting down the Xbox Live service for the original Xbox on April 15, 2010. I haven’t played an Xbox 1 Live game in years, but this news still makes me a little wistful, because for the first time something that I’ve worked on will essentially [...]

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I’ve been meaning to write this up for awhile, since I beat the game a month or two ago, but only just now got around to it. I quite enjoyed the first 10 or 15 hours, tolerated the next 35 or so, and then slogged through the last 20. I would say that once the [...]

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I played the demo for Tom Clancy’s HAWX recently, and was pretty disappointed in it. I found the plane to be quite difficult to control (for no good reason), and the “action camera” mode is extremely disorienting. You are forced to use the “action camera” for part of the tutorial, and it’s quite maddening — [...]

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My first brush with Rez in person was at some “games = art” presentation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a few years back. (Of course, I had already seen “that article” about it, too, but I wasn’t going to dismiss the game as a gimmick since it had received such widespread acclaim.) [...]

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My wife completed The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess the other day, after starting it several months ago, and playing in sporadic but lengthy bursts (the kind that you tend to indulge in only on the weekends, and which usually leave you feeling guilty about “wasting time”). I was a spectator for a small, but [...]

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I did some air travel a few weeks ago, and had a chance to play and finish Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. It’s a fairly easy action RPG with some interesting features, and a very good localization, which makes the charming humor in the game seem, well, charming, as opposed to bizarre. Gameplay is split [...]

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Braid is a very good game that overcomes some ham-fisted writing and overly ambitious themes. I won’t really dwell on talking about the game in this post other than to say that I recommend it, and that there are some mild spoilers in the remainder of this post. I saw a post by the author [...]

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Last night we went to see Supergrass in concert, which was a decent show. Standing near us was a guy wearing a promo T-shirt for a game — I had the same shirt, from an E3 several years ago. The game was "Seed," and was apparently shut down a few months after its release. As [...]

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Oasis frontman links videogames to knife violence: "If kids are sitting up all night smoking super skunk [cannabis] and they come so desensitised to crime because they’re playing these videogames, it’s really, really scary." * "sudden expertism" being a bit of Ticket lingo describing people who insist that they are an authority on any subject [...]

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We bought Ticket to Ride on XBLA the other day, and Sandy has pretty much owned me in our (decidedly non-combative) matches. I was 0-9 before I eked out a victory last night. I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on appropriate strategy for the game (card and route selection), but it never [...]

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