Author: secondtruth

  • What I’m Up To

    Hi internet – I moved to a new apartment this week and we just now got internet access again. I’m using this week to catch back up with all my various virtual environments and projects. Lately playing: Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time, which I am probably going to totally finish this week. I broke…

  • Currently Playing

    Just an update to currently playing from my gamer blog – I’m still working on FF4, but off and on I’m playing Mystery Dungeon Shiren, a roguelike game that seems to be more popular in Japan. I’m actually not all that good at rougelikes, but I like them anyway because they’re so challenging. Else-blog I…

  • The Endgame

    Currently playing: Final Fantasy 4 remake, Metroid Prime, and City of Heroes (a lot). The renewed interest in City is due to the Mission Architect, a system that allows players to make their own missions in the game. An observation I’ve had from watching how people interact with the Architect: City of Heroes has no…

  • Games I’m Playing

    I finished Retro Gaming Challenge! Lots of interesting stuff. Fun game all around with just a few moments of frustration. The play control is much tighter than the old games it’s trying to represent, but, to compensate, there isn’t as much lag in them either. This is particularly notable in Haggleman 3 when there’s 20…

  • Art Works

    I reformatted the art gallery hosted in this space with some recent examples of 3D work. Only a few pieces right now as a lot of my 3D art time is being taken up with my current MSU project or teaching! Art Gallery Index The “art” gallery actually is still mostly my design documents and…

  • Saving Tomb Raider

    Crossposted from my LJ. Apparently, Tomb Raider Underworld, a mediocre game released during a saturated new-gaming season, didn’t do so well. This to me is not a surprise. I’ve never been interested in playing Tomb Raider games. When I was younger, this was not really because I found Lara Croft all that offensive (though it…

  • I live – and I do math

    Having a day from work this week I realized I hadn’t updated this blog in a long time. Guess I have a hard time keeping up with being serious, but I’m going to keep trying! I wanted to use this space to write an analysis of something I found elsewhere on Blogger, rather than using…

  • Nobody Cares about Sandy

    I suppose I should learn that, even if I have another article idea in my head, it’s not actually likely that I’ll write the next thing that I predicted I would write. But I do want to talk a little about NPC design today, as an aspect of narrative, and how providing context is the…

  • Television, Games, and Narrative – Not With a Bang

    I relate my experiences with narrative primarily to my personal experience, so in discussing that kind of matter I’ll usually talk about games I’ve played or that I am playing, in as much as I might talk about movies I’ve watched, etc. I’ve at least commented on the blogs of some pretty good academics, so…

  • Best Foot Forward

    I believe I will finish my Masters Thesis this week. Writing a Masters Thesis was hard and took a long time. It is not just that the paper and writing the paper is hard, but also that the paperwork and overhead involved is very hard. A lot of signatures need to be signed and papers…