Recent content by David Miscavidge

Galapagos. A weird artificial-intelligence based 3D platformer from the mid 90s, both for Mac and PC from some studio in Colorado that later went on to do web-functionality browser plug-in stuff. No one seems to remember it.

I live in San Francisco. Many years ago I was playing through Quake 1 singleplayer for the 2nd or 3rd time, at about 4:00 AM. At that moment, there was a pretty intense little earth tremor, a real 'quake.' I live in an old apartment building which sways and moves even when commuter trains pass...

I only just played a Zelda game for the first time this year. And that was in emulation. I very much liked Deus Ex 2. (which seems to put me in good company in this thread.) I never finished Final Fantasy 7. I think Gears of War is basically boring. (Which also puts me at home here.)...

Word. And lets not forget to "Believe"

In my neighborhood there is an older-middle-aged guy who wanders around, tearing down flyers for music acts, comminity events and lost dogs & cats which people have stapled to telephone poles. He argues that it's illegal and unsightly to attach these flyers to the telephone poles. No one pays...

Instructor support/tech/tutorial helper at large art/trade school.

It probably is. I played singleplayer GOW the week it came out for a couple of hours and despised it. Couldn't understand the hype, found the duck&cover mechanics awkward, hated the monochromatic visual design and the dumb dialogue. Now glad I'm giving it a 2nd chance. It's really grown on...

I'm trying to like Gears of War for the second time. Out of peer pressure, because everyone else seems to.

I play games because even after 25-30 years, unlike cinema, literature, or other art forms, it is still emergent, still being defined. The language of games and goal-oriented narratives are coming into being right now. Even at it's utter stupidest (and there is some stupid shit out there,) I get...

The challenge of the whole game diminishes. I resorted to saving, rather than using the chambers, because it just felt weird and wrong to me. Saw an interview somewhere with some members of the Bioshock team who said that the Vita-Chambers were created to give something of the feeling of...

I agree with the review, for the most part. All of the parts that make up the whole are things we've seen before, BioShock just happens to be a splendid combination of these ingredients. At times I got lots of Deus Ex deja vu. Which is very good--This is really my favorite type of first...

The moral choice systems in these games, though presently vestigal, allow us to live out unexplored aspects in ourselves, I think. Oblivion for example: Ron and I work at the same shitty job for a corporate entity. I am the older counterculture-damaged punk-rock malcontent to his young...

Interesting. There hasn't been enough of that stuff lately---lots of quote/unquote "hard space opera" and stuff of that ilk, but no good hard science extrapolation stuff. Ever read Greg Egan? I loved Permutation City, though it smacks you in the face with a really intense biochem lesson in...

The Ghormenghast books by Mervyn Peake. (Very enchantingly subtle--not the proto-Book of the New Sun experience I was expecting them to be.) Ajar, Deepness in the Sky is excellent. And I think you'll dig Charles Stross---You can get Accellerando online for free, and it's a great book. In some...

Ocarina of Time. In emulation. On a Mac, no less. Excellent experience. It looked wonderful in all of it's low-polygon at a higher-than-native resolution glory. Controlled (mostly,) great with my lousy $14 gamepad. Last night I beat the final boss with one heart to spare, thinking, "this is...