Author Archives: Ryan

The Dark vs. Ghost Question: A Rope of Sand

This was a post on Google+, but it ended up being so long that I’ve convinced myself it belongs here too. It is an analysis of Pokémon types.

I was wondering what the philosophical distinction between Ghost and Dark Pokémon was, and my friend Zach said that Dark is evil, while Ghosts are dead. This sounded good at first, but as we thought about it it seemed overly simplistic. For one thing, it’s not totally clear that Ghost Pokémon are straight-up dead Pokémon. Maybe the better word for Ghost Pokémon is “spooky”?

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The Ascent of the Gothic Tower!

Cover

When Simon Carless commissioned The Ascent of the Gothic Tower for the video games-themed StoryBundle from earlier this year, we agreed the game should be released on a non-commercial basis at some future time, and further we agreed that future time should be September. Friends, it is September right now!

You can now play Gothic Tower online or download the story file to play in a different interpreter if you insist. In either case I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it!

An Interesting Choice in EarthBound

NOTE: I played a little further in EarthBound and I realized that this post only makes like 45% sense. Maybe I should revise it? Hmm.

I’ve been replaying EarthBound on the Wii U Virtual Console and thinking a lot about the decisions involved in constructing its narrative. A particular choice caught my attention, and I am going to analyze it here, but since it involves spoilers from the tail end of the game, and because I have a feeling you might not care about EarthBound at all, I will place my analysis on the other side of a break thingy.

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Clash of the Type-Ins! Episodes!

Recently I have been able to edit and upload three(!) episodes of the text adventure podcast that I do with Jenni Polodna. Our last recording session was with Jeremy Freese; we played his game Violet and my game The Statue Got Me High and it was all very pleasant. You will enjoy listening to all of it!

Did you know that you can subscribe to said podcast on iTunes? Just search the iTunes store for “Clash of the Type-Ins” and it’ll pop up there, probably.

Adze

INTERIOR – ALASKA NATIVE HERITAGE CENTER

A replica Unangax longhouse: a single, semi-subterranean, dimly lit room. A GUIDE of about sixteen is showing RYAN around, explaining various artifacts of her traditional culture.

GUIDE
The flap over the hole in the ceiling is made from seal intestine. It lets in the light but keeps out the cold air.

RYAN
All right.

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