Best Games - Star Wars: Squadrons If a VR experience can make you ill, maybe more of that experience can set you right again. At least that was the hypothesis I was testing when I kept playing Star Wars: Squadrons well past the point where I was alternating hot and cold sweats, dry mouth, and motion induced dizziness. Piloting an X-Wing or Tie Fighter, even in smooth and languid dogfights turned my stomach. At first.

About a week ago I rearranged my whole desk. It’s sort of funny how set you can get, working in a certain way, with things in a certain place. It’s sometimes difficult to imagine that there might be a better way until you move a few things around.

After writing a few new stories, I have to edit them. This is easily the hardest part of writing. Coming up with ideas is easy. There are nearly infinite ideas that other people haven’t worked on, nearly infinite ways to remix the ones that they have, and nearly infinite ways to tell a story based on these ideas. So, yeah, ideas are easy.

It’s no secret that I am into a lot of old games. I’m also into a lot of new games, so it’s not like I think old games a somehow inherently better. Some of my favorite experiences playing games were relatively recent. Nostalgia is a trap that can make you believe the things you once loved are better than anything new. Taken to an extreme, it can make you think that the best times are in the past and we would all be better off rolling back the clock. But that’s more of a political conversation than one about games.

What would you do if you were suddenly attacked by several unknown guys? Since I played Kung-Fu Master, I know what Thomas, the kung-fu master would do. He would punch and kick his way through a lot of unknown guys. Way more than several. It’s a full regiment of unknown guys. Way more guys than would ever fit in the Devil’s Temple.

It’s a holiday for us here today. That just means I’m going to work on some writing and maybe a bit of game dev, but I won’t do a bunch of writing here.

Going through the process of constructively critiquing a lot of work, I think I have boiled my approach down to one simple rule. Now, there are as many ways to critique as there are people, but if you actually want to be helpful to someone’s creative process I think the ways to do that are shockingly few. Pointing out mistakes or flaws isn’t it. Being whatever you think of as brutally honest isn’t it. Stroking their ego isn’t it.

Yep. Still writing stories this week. In fact, I was in the middle of writing one when I left to write this post and I really should be getting back to it.

For the next few weeks I will be working on a small handful of stories. And punching up some others to get them ready to submit. And I will be submitting the ones that are already punched up and waiting. And I will be resubmitting the ones that have already been rejected at least once. And I will be looking for new places to submit stories. And I will be working on game art and code for my own game projects. And I will be creating graphics for other game projects.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing some more short stories for a contest. I will likely have some things to jot down here about writing. So right now I am going to do something a little different. I’m going to tell you about the best joke I have ever seen.

I have an absolutely enormous collection of old games. Literally thousands of them. While I do play a lot of newer games, I also dip into this collection on a near daily basis. It would be easy to write this off as nostalgia, but I don’t think that old games are better than newer ones, or that game development peaked sometime back when I was younger. It’s more that I think a good game is a good game, no matter when it was made. And sometimes a game that isn’t very good might have some aspect to it that is worth investigating. I play with old games, because I play games. All of them.

I solved some development problems today. That isn’t really noteworthy. Making any part of a game is solving an unending torrent of problems. Nothing more, nothing less. Making games, like any sort of creative work, never really has any procedural aspect. A point where you are going through the motions. You solve one problem, then another, then another. Maybe you make a new problem when you solved that third one, so you add that to the list and solve it as well.

It ain’t perfect. It’s not even that much fun. But it works.

Best Games - Wave Race 64 Some games just feel right. There isn’t really much to Wave Race 64, when you get right down to it. The big, beautiful, 3D sequel to a simple Gameboy jet ski racing title. There aren’t really that many tracks. There are only a few riders and they aren’t very different from one another. There are stunt and time trial modes. You can play split screen multiplayer. On paper, a pretty uninspiring package for a racing game.

There is a few pieces of text in Street Fighter III : Third Strike that I find fascinating. They aren’t important to the game. They are mostly semi-nonsensical pump up quotes. One bit of text might have a typo in it. None of that is why I find it fascinating. It’s the technique that I love.