Mattel Expands Games Portfolio with Award-Winning Apples to Apples®, Snorta® and Blink® Games EL SEGUNDO, Calif., August 28, 2007 – Mattel, Inc. (NYSE: MAT) today announced it has acquired the rights from Out of the Box Publishing, Inc., to manufacture, distribute and market several games properties, including the award-winning Apples to Apples®, Snorta® and Blink®. [...]
Filed under: board games, business, card games, family games on August 29th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
So I played the demo of Bioshock a few days ago and I was all like, “huh,” enough to put my money down on a pre-order but not, you know, entirely convinced. Game play, atmosphere, setting and backstory, fantastic, but there was one thing that really jarred. And then I read an internest discussion that [...]
Filed under: character, fps, narrative, oh for fuck's sake, storytelling, survival horror on August 24th, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Just to assure you I’m still alive… Apparently there are only three countries in the world that haven’t officially adopted the metric system: Liberia; Myanmar; and the United States of America. How richly ironic is it that the USA’s way of measuring things is what they call the English system, and the rest of the world calls the Imperial system? (And they can’t even get that right: there are 20 fluid ounces in a pint, not 16. Please, these things are called ‘standards’ for a reason.) In other news: Space Giraffe is a huge disappointment, and I will deliver some thoughts [...]
Filed under: humour, information use, oh for fuck's sake on August 23rd, 2007 | No Comments »
Gen Con Indianapolis starts today, being Thursday, which means I can finally talk about three things. For those who don’t know Gen Con it’s the largest public games event in the English-speaking world, attracting more than 25,000 people to the four days of its show. I am not there this year, partly because my wife [...]
Filed under: awards, convention, event, hobby games, munchausen, rpg on August 16th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
The London Gamer Geeks meeting for August will be on Wednesday 29th inst*. Once again we’re downstairs at the College Arms on Store Street, from 6.30 onwards, talking about all aspects of games from obscure video-game stuff to equally obscure tabletop stuff, and drinking. If Dan Hon and I get a chance we’ll be running [...]
Filed under: London, geek culture, playtest, pub, travel on August 15th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
This post at Mentisworks, listing 27 of the top ‘artistic’ video games, has been much linked in the past day or so. It’s pretty cool; there are some excellent games on there–I might quibble with the inclusion of Orisinal, whose games are mostly orthodox though beautiful in style and execution, and September 12th which isn’t [...]
Filed under: arcade games, art on August 4th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
I finally played Puerto Rico, Andreas Seyfarth’s award-winning boardgame from 2002, over the weekend. I’ve had it sitting on my games shelf for well over a year, but for some reason I’d forgotten I’d never got around to giving it a try. On Saturday evening I was forcibly reminded of that reason. It wasn’t the [...]
Filed under: ARG, arcade games, game design, geek culture, munchausen, online games, tabletop on August 3rd, 2007 | 10 Comments »