Homer in Silicon and other Casual Stuff

On Delicious Emily’s Holiday Season, a time-management game with a romantic subplot in which you can actually make choices for the character. I can see this may have set them up for some problems about sequels down the road, but I was pleased with it, and it made a good occasion to talk some more [...]

Passport to Perfume

Now and then I get review copies of things that turn out to have too little narrative content for a Homer in Silicon column, but are decent enough that I play them for a while anyway. Passport to Perfume is one such: a new casual game from Playfirst.
Passport does the thing a lot of casual [...]

Spring Thing: Vague

I am looking at another Spring Thing game, this time Richard Otter’s Vague.
Here is where we fill in the RSS feed with meaningless chatter of some kind. I’m going to use this space to mention that apparently PlayFirst is having an April sale, so if you’re thinking of trying Emerald City Confidential or one [...]

Chocolatier 3 on Homer in Silicon

My take on the latest Chocolatier game (“Decadence by Design”) is now up over at GameSetWatch.

Assorted things

Aaron Reed has a short story of sorts distributed over the face of the internet. Here is the beginning.
Chocolatier 3: Decadence by Design is out — much like the first two Chocolatiers, but this time with the ability to mix and name your own chocolate blends. Full review later when I have time for such [...]

Casual games and marketing

Gamasutra has an article on Big Fish Games’ CSO explaining that the “hardcore” and “casual” aren’t sufficient categories to divide the market up, and arguing that we need more categories with more kinds of game. Which is true, but I can’t help finding it a little ironic considering the source.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing some [...]

Time Management, meet Tower Defense

At least six months ago, lured in by the Chocolatier and Tradewinds games, I joined Big Fish Games’ Game Club, and now I get a game credit every month. The last few months, I’ve been at a loss for how to spend it. That’s partly thanks to the relative dearth of material for the Mac, [...]

Ideas for Interactive Fiction

Recently there has been a bit of an argument raging on several blogs about how much a game idea stands alone, how much it’s worth without any implementation, apropos of Squidi’s 300 game mechanics page.
I’m not going to dive into this debate, mostly because the point I’d want to make has already been made eloquently [...]

Puzzles of Aesthetics

A few weeks ago, I complained about the casual game Home Sweet Home that it wasn’t a very entertaining game, being asked to decorate a house to client specifications. (I ragged even more on the “construction” part of the game, which manages to be easy and annoying at the same time, and to bear little [...]

It’s Not All Chocolate

After my recent good times with Chocolatier 2 (and, I have to confess, a string of stressful working days that left me too brain-dead to want to work on IF in the evening), I decided to try some demos for other games being sold by Big Fish and PlayFirst. Sadly, none of them were nearly [...]