A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
Team Cap or Team Iron Man? More importantly, what basis would you use for making that decision?
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2014.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
Lists of 'best games ever' are dumb and annoying. But like a self-loathing hipster I made one anyway.
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
A look at the main Borderlands games. What works, what doesn't, and where the series can go from here.
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Sometimes software is engineered. Sometimes it grows organically. And sometimes it's thrown together seemingly at random over two decades.
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
It's not a good movie, but it was made with good intentions and if you look closely you can find a few interesting ideas.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
A video Let's Play series I collaborated on from 2009 to 2017.
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.