Welcome

A thousand times the mysteries unfold like galaxies in my head.

Follow me

[gallery type="slideshow" size="medium" link="none" ids="1383,1382,1381,1380,1379" orderby="rand"] Taking a trip down memory lane is never pretty. Who knows what skeletons you might accidentally take out of the closet? And there's a risk that those skeletons are not what you remember them to be. Our mind is used to adding a LOT of makeup. It's dramatically called coping with the unbearable reality. But this is never useful if you're dealing with the fast evolving technology. Or, by extension, with video games. Which brings us to Gabriel Knight...

[gallery type="slideshow" size="medium" ids="905,904,903,902,901,906" orderby="rand"] Well folks, it's done. I've munched through the last latest title in the Blackwell Series - The Blackwell Deception. And expected or not, the deception part in the title kinda sums up how I felt about this episode. Blackwell Deception has the feeling of a game from a s eries that is finally settling down. That is both good and bad I guess.

Every time I'm busy with a challenging exam I feel like I disappear into an existential bubble. It was the same with Indie Game: The Movie, whose interestingness had to compete with my Algorithms exam. It was the same with my blog actually, the result being that, although I got to see Indie Game: The Movie last weekend, it is only now that I manage to write my impressions on it. (I DID miss you, ol' blog).

[gallery type="slideshow" link="none" size="medium" ids="878,877,876,875,874,873,872" orderby="rand"] I can't believe I have already finished the third title in the Blackwell series: Blackwell Convergence. On the one hand, I feel like talking about Blackwell Convergence for hours. On the other, I feel that I've said so much already in the review of the other first two titles that anything from this point on would be a spoiler.

With the exams taking place these days, I don't really feel like playing anything too complicated lately. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, sobbing on my Steam shelf for several months now bears witness to my brain's inability to munch on too complex reflex skills. Ow well, the good thing is that there's always adventure games. Point and click is really comfortable and reasonable stories are always soothing. That's how I stumbled upon this little jewel.

In the same trend of grown-ups and growing up and growing down and childhood galore and what not, I remembered a game I have almost forgotten... There is a very fine line between light and darkness. A line that gets even feebler if you add the reality-fiction duality. And sometimes, this tense line shatters and dreams flow richly into reality, dissolving the shadows in the creamy, sunny contrast. That's when you have to face the world with lucidity, to let yourself dragged in the torrent of ideas, like the foamy shadows upon the surface of a black coffee. Dreams and reality are but facets of the same essential thing that matters in this life, the SELF.

Ever since I moved to Denmark, as a Computer Science student and a game designer slash programmer, I have commenced an innocent, yet not too ostentatious flirt with the local gaming industry. This end of the week though, I had the opportunity to expand my knowledge-greedy paws over the stretch of water which is Øresund and get a taste of what the whole Scandinavian region has to offer when it comes to game design, in Malmö, at the Nordic Game Conference. 

This article first appeared on Eurogamer.ro, site which is no longer available. Machinarium is a very dear game to me, so I didn't want to lose my thoughts on it. You've surely all seen Wall-E, the Disney movie about the shy adorable robot who ceaselessly cleaned up planet Earth in wait of the return of the human beings. Until the end of it all, any sensible soul would have realised that Wall-E was a lot more human than those buckets of lard that he cleaned up after. And this is the same impression that Machinarium leaves you with. This tiny Flash game, which can be safely finished in a couple of hours by any outside-the-box thinker, is much more humane and full of flavour than all super-hero (read:hooters) games of 2009.

Botanicula could have easily been a five star game if only it had been advertised a bit differently. As I prize myself to be quite the hardcore adventure gamer and having come to love Amanita Design through its wonderful, rusty and melancholic Machinarium, I was expecting Botanicula to be a game in the same trend of witty puzzles and shaking emotion.