I’ve been playing some Magic Online recently and spent even more time watching videos of pro players playing on Magic Online. While I gave up paper Magic ages ago, the game still has a dear place in my heart for various reasons. One is the sheer amount of possible combinations of cards you can have […]

So I’ve played a bit of Magic the Gathering : Tactics by now, and I’m quite disappointed. I used to be quite the enthusiastic Magic player and I still get my dose of its online version (awful as it is) from time to time. Richard Garfield’s game system has evolved quite a bit since its […]

There are, broadly speaking, two categories of games in existence – those who make use of randomness and those who don’t. This goes for both traditional board games as well as for computer games. In a game like chess or connect 4 there is virtually no random element to be found (except for maybe who […]

I used to play in a lot of Magic: The Gathering tournaments back in the day and still enjoy the game even though I never get to play with real cards anymore and only rarely get to get my fix on in Magic Online. It seems utterly irrational to love a competitive game with so […]

Elemental damage and its counterpart elemental resistance have been part of computer role-playing games for ages now and they keep on showing up even though they are actually quite bad design, in my opinion. Today I’ll step through a few different implementations of such systems, point out the issues and see if I can find […]

Blizzard poster Eyonix wrote about the stat changes in World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion Cataclysm the other day. The blogging response has mostly been positive so far, Hatch highlights some good changes and Tobold tells us how the removal of defense is a good thing. Alas, Tobold uses an absolutely horrid analogy to make his […]

In the light of the recent Allods Online cash shop fiasco, let’s have a look at micro-transactions and their impact on gaming. There is a generic dislike for cash shops out there, and many bad examples make that dislike very well justified. But I’m going to go ahead and say that there are cash shops that are […]

Spinks posted an article yesterday dealing with player rewards vs character rewards. While interesting in itself, it caused me to think about something only remotely connected – the ability to tell stories about our game experience. Back when I was running the Magic – The Gathering tournament circuit, (Not very successfully, mind you. I only won cash once.) the […]