Breaking with a long tradition of building my own desktops, I recently took the plunge and decided to switch to a mobile setup: an Alienware 13 R3 and Graphics Amplifier. Today is all about the 13 R3, and I'll go over the plusses and minuses of the Graphics Amplifier in follow-up post. Up until fairly recently, buying a "gaming laptop" meant making a compromise -- you could have something that was portable and underpowered or heavy…

Before we dive in, let me set the stage! I have my parents and Nintendo to thank for introducing me to video games, starting with a Christmas gift of an original Game Boy (and a copy of Tetris) in 1991. About a year later, a family friend gave us his Nintendo Entertainment System with copies of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, and Danny Sullivan's Indy Heat...and I was hooked. Since those…

Spoilers abound for Fallen London's "Seeking the Name of Mr. Eaten" - feel free to skip this one if you're working on it! Thirty years ago, London was stolen. Now it rests on the shore of the Unterzee, that old dark ocean under the world. Hell is close, immortality is cheap, and the screaming has largely stopped… I'm a huge fan of Failbetter Games' Fallen London universe, currently comprised of the titular Fallen London, Sunless Sea,…

I recently had the opportunity to attend a small LAN party that one of my co-workers puts on twice a year. If I'm dating myself: back before the days of ubiquitous internet and always-on broadband connections, the easiest way to play multiplayer PC games with your friends was by lugging all of your stuff to someone's house. Everyone would plug in to a switch and form a little private network to play games together. Games like…

One of my favorite things about playing games is that they give us a wonderful way to create our own stories. While you can get good anecdotes out of just about any game, some titles lend themselves to the story-telling process better than others. At the top of this list are the sandboxes -- games that provide players with a framework to manufacture their own worlds, then get out of the way. These games hold a…