Seriously… this game. Seriously. Where have you been all my life? I’ll admit I’m biased toward liking Dangerous Dave. I have a kind of pseudo-nostalgia for this early era of PC games, in all its 16-color, PC speaker glory. I say pseudo-nostalgia because I wasn’t even around for it when it was going down. It really wasn’t until Doom that I came onto the PC gaming scene, but there’s still this warm, fuzzy feeling that creeps up on me when I load up these older games.
Author: scwiba
Poof, You’re a Sandwich!
You can hardly get further from the topic of technology than talking about sandwiches, but hey — even technophiles have to eat. And we tend to like it as simple as we can get it. What is it about sandwiches, anyway? Is it that they’re so easy to make, that even the most inept preparer-of-food can cobble a passable one together? Or the comfort food angle, that a sandwich is the ultimate lounge-around-and-watch-TV food, or something nostalgic from childhood? Is it that you’re in total control, that you choose what goes in there and what doesn’t, and that there’s no
Ascendancy II Is Coming
(This post is from 2012. I’ve written more recently about Ascendancy II, which you can read here.) Never (I won’t say in a million years, but maybe a hundred) would I have anticipated writing this post before the one about the original Ascendancy. Ascendancy is one of my all-time favorite games, one of the most influential experiences in my life, and a defining moment of my childhood. To say that Ascendancy, and by extension, The Logic Factory, is dear to me is an understatement of near-criminal magnitude. So, of course, I was planning a long love-fest of a post on
Interloper
This is what it sounds like to be inside my head — for the past few weeks, or maybe a month or more. Not that anyone was scrambling to know what it sounded like in there, but I felt like sharing just the same. Interloper is, at least for the moment, the soundtrack to my life. The Carbon Based Lifeforms guys are masters of ambient music, but this album in particular grabbed me and refused to let go. It’s almost like the halfway point between Enigma and more formless and ethereal ambient works. Interloper is still quite corporeal. The beats
Subtitles in Videogames
Last Thursday’s episode of Game Grumps featured a brief rant from Arin Hanson on the topic of subtitles in videogames. “What’s there to say about subtitles?” you might ask, but I actually think there’s some worthwhile discussion to be had. My aversion to subtitles in games has been subtle, but growing lately, though I never put together any coherent stance against them. It took Arin’s comment before my neurons started firing. Sometimes you don’t even realize you have an opinion until someone else shares their own — because you didn’t think it was worth having an opinion on that particular,
DOOM
Is your nostalgia center tingling yet? How about now? Doom is one of those games that almost anyone, gamer or no, has heard of. And if you played it back in its prime, you probably have a lot of fond memories. I don’t think anyone would argue if I called it one of the most beloved games of all time. There’s a staggering amount of stuff to talk about when it comes to Doom: its frenetic, balls-to-the-wall gameplay; its technical achievements that revolutionized PC gaming; the parade of sequels (of varying quality) that followed; its identity in the late ’90s
Adventures in the Dark
This isn’t my house. I must have missed the end of the world; here we are taking shelter in some abandoned house. The lights are out. The water hasn’t run in ages. We scope the place out, sweeping flashlights over a silent, dusty landscape. We scavenge cans of beans from the cellar staircase. The TV sits there dead no matter how long we stare at it and wish it would work. Outside, another arm of the storm rolls in. The branches groan and strike the sides of the house. Rain beats on the roof over our heads. And that’s all
The Beauty of the Glitch
My video card has always been finicky. Mostly just the occasional, barely-noticeable pink lines dancing in the title bars of windows. (I had to look up what that very top bit of a window is called.) A little unnerving, but nothing serious. It served me admirably for years, despite being a touch eccentric. We were a good fit. I can appreciate eccentric. Last weekend, though, it took things to a whole new level. Where we’d had minor glitches before, we were now in full-blown catastrophic failure territory. The problem began with Borderlands 2, which froze up with garbled graphics and
An Unexpected Party
I wrote my first post all about how nobody would ever see it, and it wasn’t supposed to be a joke. I honestly expected this blog to fly 100% under the radar for the first weeks, months, maybe even the first year or so. I expected it to fly under the radar until I started actively seeking readers, really. So here I was fumbling around, trying to make sense of this whole blogging affair — nail down a theme, adjust my personal settings, figure out how the heck to even navigate the dashboard — all the while, fully expecting to
MCMXC a.D.: A Coming of Age Story
In 1990, Enigma came out of nowhere bearing gifts unlike anything eager listeners had heard before. MCMXC a.D. was the first album from this mysterious newcomer, and it made some impressively sized waves. It took over a decade for those waves to reach my quiet corner of the world, but when they did, I was in for quite a ride. In my early teens, with no allowance and no job, my options for expanding my musical horizons were awfully limited. This was before Pandora, before you could find just about every album under the sun on Youtube, so the only