I have been playing games over the year-and-a-half since I last posted. Mostly these have been solo play or extremely casual. What is interesting is the shift in platform that has occurred for me in this time. I now have an iPhone which has made my casual gaming an almost daily (if not hourly) occurrence. As an intimate and fast way to play a game, as a platform for solo or social play, and as a tactical-gestural interface, I can only describe the iPhone as quite cool.
The other major development in platform has been the delivery mechanism to the desktop. Now that I have both Steam and Impulse services running I have more games than I thought possible including many of the missing classics--Deus Ex, CivIV, Portal, World of Goo, Tropico 3, Trine, And Yet It Moves.
The mix of indie and blockbuster, new and classic offerings that are made easily accessible and inexpensive through iTunes, Steam or Impulse is a breakthrough. Michael Eisner's "reasonable alternative to free" has happened and my credit card statement is a small-scale catastrophe proving that I, at least, was more than ready to pay.
I'm still a bit brain-dead but I hope that over the coming weeks and months my critiques will come back a bit. I've got at least a dozen games I want to write about so there's no shortage of content, but I'll need to think about what it is about them that I want to say.
Good to be back.
