About Games Blog

Walking into the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (after a disastrous time trying to navigate the Melbourne public transport system), I noticed a banner that stretched across the ceiling; it read ‘Welcome Home’.

Even as somebody who hadn’t been to Australia’s Penny Arcade Expo before, I knew that PAX was a home-away-from-home for many of its attendees and I was looking forward to sharing that sentiment by the end of the weekend.

I have a beautiful clay pot filled with thirteen succulents. Every week I am given a new seedling and I plant it, spray it with water occasionally, pull weeds from the surrounding dirt, and help it grow by singing it soothing melodies.

Viridi is a free-to-play simulation game by Ice Water Games. It allows you to care for a pot of succulents (or more than one pot, for a price) as delicate instrumental music plays in the background. The game is designed to give you a time out from your work when you need five minutes to pause and relax.

The night before EB Expo 2015 really kicked off, we were invited to a media evening. As we moved between the Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation booths I noticed a very obvious theme: almost all of the games that I heard about and played on the night was a shooter.

When I was in high school, I was told I had to be either a Halo person or a Call of Duty person (which is quite strange, considering they play very differently), but I was never really a shooter person at all. While there are a couple of franchises I really enjoy—like Borderlands and Gears of War—I’m definitely not the best equipped to judge the upcoming and recent releases that I played at EB Expo.

But perhaps my lack of experience is actually an interesting lens through which to look at big titles like Halo 5: Guardians, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and Star Wars Battlefront, or smaller titles that aren’t necessarily ‘shooters’ but still involve guns, like Splatoon, Ratchet & Clank, and Cuphead.

Guitar Hero is a franchise that could have been made specifically for me. As a long-time lover of rhythm games and a guitarist for years, I jumped on the bandwagon instantly in 2005. Suddenly I didn’t need to go to the arcade to satisfy my rhythm cravings with Dance Dance Revolution; I had a rhythm game in my own home.

Full and transparent disclosure: This piece is about my game(s).

I recently developed and released two videogames:
Fairy Tale is an incremental (clicker) game that includes a simple journey through a forest and a little resource management.
The Icecream Parlour uses icecream as a means to explore issues of sexuality, and was released early in celebration of The Supreme Court of the United States’ ruling in favour of marriage equality.