Tag Archives: game design

The Facts and the Truth are Not the Same – Paradise Killer Almost Gets There

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There’s a certain kind of game that I’ve become very into in the last few years. These are games that are investigative or explorations of knowledge and that bring one or two important things to the table:

  1. They’re definitely going to examine the broken-ass structures of the society they’re set in, and
  2. They might offer up a way to break, reshape, or recreate the society to be not-terrible.

The first gets me to play a game with gusto. The second makes the game perfect.

Paradise Killer is an outstanding game by Kaizen Game Works in which you play Lady Loves Dies, a disgraced immortal investigator let out of prison to determine who murdered the head of an immortal broken-ass oligarchy running a broken-ass pocket universe society in which humans are abducted from the real world and used as fodder to attempt to resurrect their old gods.

It’s one of my favorite games, period.

Much like the islands in the game, however, it is not perfect.

Beware, all ye who enter. Spoilers lie ahead, and this is a game with some real good revelations in it as you play. This doesn’t include anything from the 2022 expansion, which I haven’t played yet.

Continue reading The Facts and the Truth are Not the Same – Paradise Killer Almost Gets There →

Winkage!

Winks, links, they’re all the same.

  • xkcd: Epsilon and Zeta – I don't link to XKCD much, in part because I don't read it much, and in part because everyone else in the world does. That said, this one uses real-deal National Hurricane Center advisories in it, and is really good.
  • Ann Aguirre’s Blog – Authors Against Bullying: Blog Hop – "Things were bad. People made fun of me daily. They picked on my appearance, my weight, my geeky interests. Sometimes I hid in the bathroom rather than face a cafeteria full of people who didn’t like me."
  • Utah Game Developer Jailed for Not Paying Wages – ABC News – "Hunter lasted two years before calling it quits, hanging onto promises of paychecks that appeared only erratically, with Rushton sometimes handing out checks selectively and demanding confidentiality while blaming companies that licensed games for being slow to pay for their development or royalties."
  • Beyond Minecraft: Notch On Fame, Pressure, Sequels | Rock, Paper, Shotgun – A bizarre thing for there to have been contention over: "Sometimes the fans are right, too. Like ladders. I did not want ladders in Minecraft at all. Ladders are never fun. They’re not fun in Minecraft either. But they’re a very good utility. It’s an easy way to get straight up without having stairs going back and forth."
  • On Labeling Women “Crazy” | Paging Dr. NerdLove – "I started realizing that when my friends and I would talk about our crazy exes or what-have-you, more often than not, we weren’t talking about ex girlfriends or random dates who exhibited signs of  genuine mental health issues. […] For the most part, crazy meant 'acting in a way I didn’t like.'"

Weekly Linkage

This week’s internet cruising:

  • Seriously? – bitquabit –

    [H]e identified the Three “P”s of entrepreneurship:

    'Profits, people and…you can figure it out.'

    [Muttering amongst the audience.]

    'Women. People, profits, and women. Or men. Whatever. People, profits, and women.'

    No, no. He really means "Profits, people, and pussy." That shit's not funny.

  • BBC World Service – Outlook, Neda Soltani: mistaken for a dead icon – Heard this story on NPR on an early, early morning drive to work. This was fucked up; it ruined her life in Iran and sent her fleeing to Germany to avoid (further) persecution by the Iranian government. Continue reading Weekly Linkage →