So, I am a huge fan of Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Rez is the game that made me realize that games could be more than shooting dudes, jumping on goombas' heads, or scoring goals. Naturally, as an aspiring indie game designer, I freaked out at the opportunity to enter a game in a contest being judged by him over at Kongregate. 
 
I've spent the past month working on this game and it'll be available on the iOS App Store basically as fast as Apple will approve it. Check it out free on Kongregate; it's called 'foggy fields' and is best enjoyed with headphones. I hope you like it!
 
Click here to play!
 
Please rate it highly and tell everybody you know about it! :D

Hey gigantic bombers,

Hello! It's been a while since I blogged, but today I had two ideas on my mind that seemed like they could be expressed well in a blog!  Here goes!
 

Fake Poker is Dumb

In Defense of Sports Games

Hey, 
 
I'm a really disappointed guy. 
 
Without going into specifics in this blog (because I don't feel like making a bad situation worse), I'd like to pose a situation to all the Giant Bombs in the audience tonight, and ask what they think the outcome should be. 
 
I entered a contest being held by a software company, of whose software I already enthusiastically use.  Their software is free, but they have paid enhancements.  The paid licenses aren't very cheap; I spent $400 on such a license last year.  They were giving away a license valued at $1,500 in this giveaway. 
 
I got excited yesterday when I saw that I'd won the contest!  And then I noticed that there had to be a mistake of some sort.  To enter the contest, you had to say what you planned to do with their software in 2011.  The plans they said I had weren't my plans at all, but they were attributed to my name.  The company contacted me to congratulate me and ask for my e-mail response so they could set me up with the license. 
 
I, being a dope, played the game of honesty.  I told them that I didn't know whether the contest was a random drawing or based on the merits of people's plans, but the winning idea was not matched to the winning name. 
  

I wrote this as a note on facebook and i want more than the hundred or so people i'm friends with to read it, so i'm posting it on a website about video games.  if you actually read this, you'll realize that it's not about politics (which i'm internet-savvy enough to know is a sore subject).  i just think that the sentiment is too important not to express to as many people as possible and i reckon i have the biggest audience here.  maybe that's my fault, but here's my blog: 
 
This Whole "Congresslady Got Shot" Thing is Really Fucking Important 

I cared a lot about politics in high school.  I haven't cared nearly as much since, but if you haven't been thinking a lot about the shooting in Arizona and checking the news regularly, you're missing out on a pivotal point of American history.

I think this could be more important than 9/11.  You know, that t-shirt-inspiring day when a bunch of people died in New York City (isn't that near where they film Jersey Shore?).  Never forget or something.

Sarah Palin is responsible for this image which, if you don't already know, is targeting 20 pinkos to be removed from office, including the recently-shot Gabrielle Giffords.  Now, a Palin representative has come out and said, "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights."  Fair enough.  That's not the most unbelievable thing in the world and it's a little wishful to think that Sarah Palin is crazy enough to actually endorse violence towards elected officials. 

That's not the point.

In the same statement, Sarah Palin's representative said of the suspect, "It seems that he people that knew him said that he was left-wing and very liberal -- but that is not to say that I am blaming the left."

Great.  Obviously Palin and her people have learned nothing from this tragedy.  It doesn't matter why the suspect fired his weapon at a congresswoman's public appearance (though I'm as curious as anybody).  The point is that Sarah Palin's combative, hateful imagery and rhetoric has come a little too close to reality, especially if Representative Giffords loses her seat due to her wound (as she's still in critical condition).

The entire country has a chance to wake up and realize that "opponent" isn't the same as "enemy".  The American right has been promoting hate, fear, and enmity for longer than I've been alive and it's only gotten worse since Obama was elected.  It's vanishingly unlikely that Obama is either a communist or a Muslim, but hundreds of thousands of Americans sincerely believe one or both of those propositions and hate him for it.  Policies and positions aside, there's no reason to hate the president.  If you'll entertain my "hippy-dippy" Buddhist philosophy for a moment, there's no reason to hate anybody.  Hate only begets more hate and that much has become obvious in the escalation of the language, division, and vitriole used in popular American political discourse.

When I came back to America after spending a semester in Europe, the very first thing I noticed was how much more bitter everyone was on this side of the Atlantic.  In America, if you are of a certain opinion that carries any perceived importance at all (religion, politics, etc), anybody who opposes your view is somehow a reprehensible subhuman who should be tarred, feathered, anally penetrated, and kicked out of his or her bridge club.

People in America are so eager to validate themselves by judging others and putting them not across a table of civil discussion, but in a stockade while arming their allies to humiliate this person who would dare oppose them and what they know is right.  The propaganda against these peoples' enemies becomes more and more exaggerated until a Christian centrist is labeled as a Muslim (read: terrorist) communist by a vocal and sizable group of people.

I hope this tragedy takes the wind out of the sails of everyone who trades in hate on a daily basis.  I'm not just talking about Sarah Palin.  People do this every day.  Americans (not that people from other countries never do this) will find any excuse to hate someone else.  As someone who grew up being a very hateful teenager, I hope you'll trust me when I say these things.  Just because someone acted kind of dopey and slowed you down in public, that's no reason to be upset.  Everyone is a dope from time to time.  It's not criminal to make a mistake.  Allow yourself to forgive other people and realize that not everyone who seems not to be in allegiance with you is conspiring against you.

Stop validating your own existence by shitting on others'.  One thing I've learned since broadening my media diet beyond Bill Hicks and death metal is that there are worse things than other people being happy.  We need to encourage happiness, not criticize people for their life decisions.  This is the most baffling thing about homophobia.  Why discourage love?  That's absurd!  This is an extreme case, but you know you do this regularly.  I'm not perfect; I still do it, too.  I like to think I have the capacity to recognize it and, if nothing else, be embarrassed by it at this point, though.  Hate isn't cool.  Being antagonistic and cynical is just exhausting, depressing, and immature.  To appeal once more to Buddhist views that I find very universally acceptable: you're only as happy as you think.  To elaborate, I mean that if your mind is always occupied with negative thoughts, you'll find your own image of yourself colliding against all this negativity.

If I go much further, I'm sure I'll venture into pro-vegetarian and more explicitly pro-Buddhist territory and I'm hoping I've made everyone who's read this reflective enough already.  This tragedy is something we can all learn something very important from, not just the talking heads on TV/radio and not just the politicians-cum-WWE-superstars.  Stop sensationalizing conflicts, no matter how small.

I'm almost done with my penultimate semester of undergrad at the University at Buffalo and, as such, I've been finishing up some projects this week.
 
Here is my final project for my Virtual Worlds class, made with Unity.   It's called On and On... and the title refers to the Tenori-On, a piece of hardware for making music designed by the dude behind Electroplankton, Toshio Iwai.
 
If you like making music, you'll probably dig it.  If you like games, you could very well dig it as well.  It controls like a first-person shooter; tastes like music!  Er, sounds like music. 
 
Something. 
 
Anyways, after this semester I'm going to work on getting it on the iTunes App Store.  If you want to know when that's done, throw me a PM with your e-mail address or something and I'll keep you up to date. 
 
Edit: It's totally on the App Store now!  Right here.

Hey! 
 
I'm makin' games and such at school and my professor wants me to do some honest-to-goodness testin'.  If any of you delightful bomber giants would be kind enough to take a few minutes and play my (unfinished) game and give me feedback (via the survey I've set up), it'd be greatly appreciated.  All you have to do is play a game and then click some buttons and/or type.  You were going to do that already!  Now you can do it for science!
 
Click here for all the info you need.  The game's Muzak Attack. 
 
Thanks a ton! 
 
EDIT: Updated the game based on some feedback.  Now has a basic scoring mechanic and more user-friendly restarting.  Game still found at link above.

I wrote a review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  Spoiler: I found it pretty and pretty offensive.
 
I feel bad simply linking to another page in a blog, but the movie (or, at least, it's appeal) is so deeply entrenched in video game culture and history that I feel like sharing it with the GB as well as the Screened is a must. 
 
Edit: if you are about to comment without reading the whole thread, know that I hadn't read a single panel of the comics before watching the film.  Since then, I've started the books and I think they're much better.

This is a wonderful way for Capcom to build to the release of the full game. You might chafe a bit at having to pay for it -- I'd much rather have seen this as part of some sort of pre-order deal -- but you can't argue that Case Zero is not only an effective way to set the stage and build anticipation, it's also a meaty, satisfying slice of the zombie apocalypse.    

In a recent thread about the review process, someone brought up that they think review scores are bad and should be done away with.  I'm not familiar enough with the debate to know why anybody would think that, though. 
 
Review scores are obviously distorted by publishers and sites like Metacritic (which I don't think is a bad site in itself; you can't just take the numbers ascribed to products at face value), but so is the text of the review itself.  I've noticed this more with Rotten Tomatoes than Metacritic, but it seems like it's often the case that a film will recieve a Rotten rating from a critic while, at the same time, the blurb extracted for the website sounds totally positive.  The point is that reviews will always be grossly distorted by marketing teams.  Seeing "4/4 stars - Roger Ebert" on the back of a DVD case says much more to me than seeing a vaguely complimentary blurb that has a suspiciously placed ellipsis and could very well be followed by the phrase "but other than that, it's pretty much garbage" in the full text review. 
 
Because of review scores, I don't need to read about or play Starcraft II to know that it lived up to expectations (of sane people).  Similarly, a review score will let me know quickly if something is just as average (or just as awful) as I assumed it was.  I don't want to have to read three full-length articles (annoyingly spread out over multiple pages on most sites) to know I'm still not interested in a game.  If I see it has a 76 on Metacritic and I wasn't interested in the first place, I don't have to waste any time figuring out if it was surprisingly excellent.  The review text is for people who are on the fence about a game and need a detailed criticism to inform their purchasing decision.   I don't think there's anything wrong with going to Metacritic to find out if critics generally liked, were lukewarm about, or hated a game.  That's the point of a review score: to get a quick idea of a reviewer's reaction to a game.  If you're too curious or unsure about a game for that to be enough, you can read further and get the information you need.  However, not everybody needs or wants that information.
 
If you want to argue that people shouldn't buy games just because they have a score in the green on Metacritic, I totally agree, but this is the fault of lazy consumers, not irresponsible critics.  If someone doesn't know enough about their own tastes or care enough to read a few text reviews, they deserve to get burned on buying a game they didn't know they weren't interested in.
 
I really feel like review scores are necessary and I haven't heard an argument against scores that made any sense.  I'd really like to hear one, so if you hate review scores...fire away.