Here’s a rather unceremonious way of announcing a side project I’m working on: I’m trying to put together a let’s play series! Everyone and his mother is doing it these days, and being the trendy fellow I am, I had to jump on that particular wagon. Gotta pay those bills. Really, though — I’ve wanted for a while now to expand my videogame-talky-guy stuff into another format. I’ll always have the blog, but it would be nice to have something else on top of it. Something verbal and more off-the-cuff — something conversational, even. Let’s plays, then! Except, to have
Author: scwiba
Skithiryx, Why Are You So OP?
The mailbox has been seeing a lot of extra use this last week. The real one. You know, for those like… physical, paper e-mails things they send sometimes. I think they call them letters. It’s also where the magic stork drops off the stuff you buy on eBay. I’ve been getting two or three of those a day — all with my name on them. And they’re full of — you guessed it — Magic cards! It’s only been… eight months?… since I rediscovered Magic, and now I’ve actually got around to fulfilling the promise I made to myself back
Homecoming
In less than a week, I’m going to be back here. In this place, right up there. Or somewhere nearby. I’m not sure I have any classes in Coburn this semester… but you get the idea. I’ve written about this place once or twice. Made reference to it when I took some photos near the campus. But I’ve never come out straight-up and said it, so here it is for posterity: This is UMass Lowell, where I go to school, and this is one of my favorite places on Earth. For a year now, I’ve made my home-away-from-home here —
In Which I Betray My Ideals (And Kind of Like It)
To my shame, I’ve slowly been converted into a Steam user over the summer. I used to avoid that thing like the plague. I originally passed on the F.E.A.R. sequels because they required Steam. I’m still waiting and hoping for a GoG release of Far Cry 3. I actually bought a physical copy of Fallout: New Vegas only to then play a cracked version so I could avoid dealing with Steam. I am a card-carrying, haterpants-wearing guy-who-doesn’t-like-Steam. But everything changed when Borderlands 2 was announced and could only be found on Steam. They’d got me. I had to take the
Let’s Level Up Our Farming Skill!
So we’ve started a garden. Yeah, I know this is a blog about the Digital Age, but occasionally it’s nice to get back to basics, even for us nerds. To get down to earth. To get our hands dirty. And actually, maintaining a garden is a little videogame-y, if you think about it. I just recently got back into Lord of the Rings Online, and it’s interesting how similar they feel. (I’m not crazy, I swear.) There’s that same slow crawl, the work-at-it-a-little-every-day mentality. Except in an MMO you’re fighting monsters and crafting items (I have a character who farms,
Deus Vult
Slaughter maps aren’t really my cup of tea. I like more of a slow burn — a steady build to an epic climax. I like an even distribution of enemy types and a WAD that gives you reason to use the whole array of weapons at your disposal. Slaughter maps, by their nature, tend to be the opposite of that. They consistently throw dozens, if not hundreds, of enemies at you — battles that necessitate the use of Doom’s high-end weapons almost exclusively. Anything weaker than the super shotgun collects dust. It’s also hard to ramp up the tension and
What If… (Videogames, Star Wars, and the Power of Fanon)
I remember being read a story when I was a kid. Nothing about the plot or the characters — what I remember is the ending, and it’s stuck with me for something like two decades. The story ended… by not ending. Not just by leaving questions unanswered or threads untied, but literally telling the reader, “Now you come up with your own ending!” You might laugh if I say that to me it was a moment of profound frustration, disappointment — even betrayal. But it was. I can still remember how disturbing it was to me and how lost I
RAGE-worthy (Part II)
Where was I? Right — Rage. I started off my… what I think is now long and self-indulgent enough to call an “essay”… about Rage by pointing out how confused it is as a whole. Of course, like a dope, I racked up a thousand and a half words talking pretty exclusively about the story, and that’s not where Rage is really confused. Dumb, maybe, but I think it embraces its dumbness. And who cares — I mean, really cares — about the story in an id game? You could say the only mistake that was made there was in having
RAGE-worthy (Part I)
What are you, Rage? What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do with your life? Really, that’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you. Truth is — I’m not sure anyone at id agreed on what Rage was supposed to be either. If there’s anyone who’s more confused about what it’s getting into than the people who played this game in its first few months — it’s Rage itself. I suspect a lot gamers were looking forward to a typical id shooter. Those who weren’t familiar with id were probably
RAGE-worthy (Screenshots)
I just finished Rage a couple hours ago. For the second time. Since I’m still in the process of digesting the experience and figuring out what I want to say about it (there’s a lot to say), I figured I’d tide you over with some screenshots. If there’s one thing you can’t deny, it’s that Rage is a really pretty game, so while I sort the mess of notes I took into something comprehensible and hopefully worth reading, enjoy some (really pretty) virtual carnage. (Don’t look at me like that! …it’s not like I’m just trying to offload some of