About Games Blog
Welcome Home: My first PAX Aus experience
Walking into the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (after a disastrous time trying to navigate the Melbourne public transport system), I noticed a banner that stretched across the ceiling; it read ‘Welcome Home’.
Even as somebody who hadn’t been to Australia’s Penny Arcade Expo before, I knew that PAX was a home-away-from-home for many of its attendees and I was looking forward to sharing that sentiment by the end of the weekend.
Read more »Viridi (Review)
I have a beautiful clay pot filled with thirteen succulents. Every week I am given a new seedling and I plant it, spray it with water occasionally, pull weeds from the surrounding dirt, and help it grow by singing it soothing melodies.
Viridi is a free-to-play simulation game by Ice Water Games. It allows you to care for a pot of succulents (or more than one pot, for a price) as delicate instrumental music plays in the background. The game is designed to give you a time out from your work when you need five minutes to pause and relax.
Read more »Shooters (Hands On at EB Expo 2015)
The night before EB Expo 2015 really kicked off, we were invited to a media evening. As we moved between the Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation booths I noticed a very obvious theme: almost all of the games that I heard about and played on the night was a shooter.
When I was in high school, I was told I had to be either a Halo person or a Call of Duty person (which is quite strange, considering they play very differently), but I was never really a shooter person at all. While there are a couple of franchises I really enjoy—like Borderlands and Gears of War—I’m definitely not the best equipped to judge the upcoming and recent releases that I played at EB Expo.
But perhaps my lack of experience is actually an interesting lens through which to look at big titles like Halo 5: Guardians, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Star Wars Battlefront, or smaller titles that aren’t necessarily ‘shooters’ but still involve guns, like Splatoon, Ratchet & Clank, and Cuphead.
Read more »Guitar Hero Live (Hands On at EB Expo 2015)
Guitar Hero is a franchise that could have been made specifically for me. As a long-time lover of rhythm games and a guitarist for years, I jumped on the bandwagon instantly in 2005. Suddenly I didn’t need to go to the arcade to satisfy my rhythm cravings with Dance Dance Revolution; I had a rhythm game in my own home.
Read more »Dabbling in Developing Videogames
Full and transparent disclosure: This piece is about my game(s).
I recently developed and released two videogames:
Fairy Tale is an incremental (clicker) game that includes a simple journey through a forest and a little resource management.
The Icecream Parlour uses icecream as a means to explore issues of sexuality, and was released early in celebration of The Supreme Court of the United States’ ruling in favour of marriage equality.