Fortress: Ameritrash Blog

I used to spend some time over Thanksgiving weekend editing my game wish list. The list used be long, filled with games about which I knew only a little bit, but which sounded interesting.  I was looking for something. I wanted something like a game I already owned and loved, but different or better. Maybe my best loved game had been over played, or maybe I needed something that had a shorter play time, or could be played by a different number of players, or maybe we were just tired of a certain theme. Throughout the year,...

Games give me new and interesting ways to interact with other people. This is the difference between e-games and board games. While the increased sophistication of e-games seduces and immerses players into their increasingly elaborate worlds, they are all worlds inhabited by one. Even multiplayer games provide only a hint of the human interaction that occurs when people can meet each other's eye over a table and read each others facial expressions, tone of voice and body language.  Games strip away the existing social structures and constraints and create new power structures and encourage people to play...

We had a couple of  hours to kill while the Spawn was at a school function, so we went to a nearby Barnes and Nobel to hang and drink over-priced coffee. I was sitting near the games, listening to people as they shopped, because I'm nosey like that, and discovered something interesting about why people buy games and how they make their choices.   First, every single person that purchased a game bought it as a birthday gift for a kid. Saturday is a big birthday party day, so Friday night is the last minute,...

So yeah, obviously I have a 360 now. I've done a couple of video game reviews here and there but now that I'm actually part of this console generation (Wii doesnt' count, apparently) I figured I may as well blog off on some of the games that are oldies to everybody else but me. Think of it as an archaeological diary. I broke in my 360 with BIOSHOCK, a game I've been hearing about forever. When it came out back in '07, I thought it looked pretty great and then I had to suffer hearing about how awesome it...

The Spawn related the following story to me today.   This morning she noticed a boy on the school bus reading a comic book.  "Whatcha' reading," she asked?  "Manga," he replied.  "I like X-men and Wonder Woman," she told him.  "Those are comics. This is a graphic novel."  The boy then explained to her how superior Manga and graphic novels were to American [sneer] comic books. Also that his life's ambition was to attend PAX, the biggest video game convention in the world. "I've been...