It’s been a long time since I last had time to do proper game reviews, and my backlog hasn’t grown any shorter during the interim. So I’m doing a double-header: Styrateg and Age of Fear: The Undead King. This isn’t just to save time; these two games have a lot of similar qualities, and I […]

There has been some discussion lately about whether there is really such a huge difference between jRPGs and wRPGs after all. Quite aside from whether we can prove that “East is West” based on a sample size of two, I’d like to discuss an issue hinted at near the end of Rowan Kaiser’s piece: specifically, […]

Eric Scwarz has posted an opinion piece on Gamasutra arguing that RPGs are not about story or decision-making so much as they are about rulesets: As narrative elements began to creep into RPGs, as players began to get attached to the characters they played as and the universes they inhabited, RPGs began to become associated […]

I posted an article on SinisterDesign.net on Wednesday evening analyzing the RPG genre, looking for a common thread that ties all RPGs together. Here’s a choice quote: RPGs are fundamentally creative games: even the ones about killing and destroying everything. Because even those RPGs aren’t really about destroying. They’re about building and shaping your character, […]