Odds and Ends

- I've written the sixth chapter of Encounter. It needs some editing, but should be ready to post next week.

For those who are late coming into the story, Encounter is a cyberpunk short story I am writing and posting irregularly on the Gone Gaming blog. Check the indexes on the blog for the previous five chapters, if you are interested.

After I finish the whole thing, I will take it and re-edit it all again. Then I will decide what to do with it. Publish it on Lulu? Send to a publisher?

- I also thought of a way of turning my Menorah Game into a pure card game. I may go back to reworking the theme and design. Or I may just keep talking about it for another ten years and not do anything about it.

- 2Old2Play writes about how the existence of strategy guides is affecting the way games are developed. On the one hand, I don't think very much about strategy guides, when they exist to take the thinking part out of the game so you can get to the whacking part. On the other hand, I don't mind a guide around when I give up on a puzzle (this is hypothetical, since I don't play much in the way of computer games).

And if the solution is not one that requires thinking but just requires random actions to solve, I probably don't think much of the game at all.

- GamesBlog mentions that Phillips is moving forward with its "Entertaible". They still haven't published any games for it, yet. I don't know why, but I honestly have really really low expectations for this. And this is despite thinking that the idea is a great one.

I'm just waiting for the buggy software, proprietary DRM'd games, privacy issues when connected to the internet, exorbitant pricing, incompatibilities, and so on and so forth.

- The Escapist runs another article that tries to convince us that games are good for us. The problem with these types of articles is that the agenda forces them to dismiss anything negative. And the problem with articles that claim gaming is bad, is that they dismiss anything positive. I need to see a few balanced, well-thought out articles that deal with the subject seriously from both perspectives.

Yehuda