This week was once again, uneventful.
I played more Slay the Spire, and pretty much spent the whole week trying to beat the game with the Defect. Yesterday I did it with great effort and luck. And now I’m going to try to beat it as the Watcher.
I did also play a few rounds of R.E.P.O. since the monster update came out. I’ve only seen a few of the new monsters, but they have definitely spiced things up.
How’s everyone else doing this week?
The origin and evolution of horror movie franchises is rife with commentary, observations, and analysis. Some of it is even good. The sub-genre of “slasher” movie might be the most visible category, although personally I don’t view slasher movies as distinct, per se. The things that horrify us, or startle us, or discomfit us provide horror categories as far as the fundamental nature of a film goes. (Although, I will admit that genres and sub-genres as we think of them can be very useful when trying to find something to watch on a streaming service. Sometimes you want gory kills; sometimes you want creeping dread, sometimes you want commentary and comedy.) The fundamentals of horror, I think, are more closely associated with concepts like “conflict types.” You know, “man vs. nature,” “man vs. man,” and “man vs. himself.” While it would be easy to just say, “Well, sure; that’s ‘survival horror,’ ‘slasher,’ and ‘psychological'” you have to acknowledge the incredible number of caveats you would have to employ to subsequently categorize every horror movie. All of which is to point out viewing slasher movies, especially the big franchises, through the lens of genre isn’t useful for ALL analysis.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Slasher Movie Franchise Origin and Evolution”
Some years ago, Phasmophobia blew up on Twitch. It was everywhere. It seemed like everyone wanted to run into a haunted house, wander around not really knowing what to do, then inevitably get murdered by a restless soul. Eventually, people figured out the mechanics and patterns to correctly identify the ghost with relative accuracy. With this familiarity the initial thrill wore off. The trend passed. Like so many fad games that came before it, Phasmophobia died.
Or did it?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Phasmophobia Deserves a Second Chance”
I played Slay the Spire. That’s pretty much it, I did nothing else.
The only thing worth mentioning in Slay the Spire is that I got the achievement for killing the Transient before it disappeared.
This isn’t to say it was a bad week or anything, just uneventful.
How was everyone’s week? Hopefully eventful. But not bad eventful.
Because of my quest to play “collector” in World of Warcraft (and I know this has been a month of World of Warcraft; my apologies…I get tunnel vision sometimes) I have been on a bit of an adventure. Playing on my laptop with its older graphics processor, a unified architecture Ryzen 7/Vega 3 (and its currently limited RAM) causes some issues. I was never able to get WoW retail running. Under a Wine install I would experience random shutdowns during the install. About one out of forty times the Battle.net install would complete, but then Battle.net would not operate fully. I couldn’t install any Battle.net game, because it kept telling me I was “offline.” Don’t go checking for solutions to that problem explicitly, by the way; you will find a lot of people telling you “well, *of course* you can’t install…*you’re offline*. Go online and then it will work.” You can just picture your favorite “head smacking/are you stupid” reaction gif now. I did read a few references that sometime in Summer 2025 Blizzard changed “something” that has disabled or at least greatly hampered Linux installs. To be sure the only success stories I found predated this past summer. But given my available hardware, I would not be surprised if it was possible.
There are, at this point, *many* recommendations to install World of Warcraft through Steam. This isn’t 100% straightforward; by the traditional instructions you have to run the Battle.net installer, cancel it out when it asks to log-in (something that is part of the Wine instructions as well), then change the configuration to point to the just-installed Battle.net rather than the installer, which will now run under Steam’s Wine overlay Proton, and successfully install World of Warcraft. Here’s the first thing, though: after the Battle.net install completed, I couldn’t ever find where it installed. *Every other game* I ever installed through Steam *and ran,* which may be the important part, is in my Steam archive folder. What *did* work is doing the Wine install (which can fail often, remember) then adding *that* installed Battle.net to Steam. This is when I hit the second issue: World of Warcraft would only install to the internal hard drive, the one that’s only 256 gigabytes and about 2/3 full. I *should* be able to change to any of my external drives, but it couldn’t see them. I’m sure this has something to do with pretending to install through Windows, and there is probably a legitimate explanation…but I don’t currently know what it is. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “When Did World of Warcraft Jump the Shark? or, A Tale Too Big For Azeroth”
Hello everybody. My name is Ethan. I’m not new to the family but I’m new to the site so I figured I should start myself off here with an introduction. So here’s some things about myself:
I’m a millennial who grew up playing the previous generation of console to whatever was current. When I finally did catch up to what was new, I got the 360 and it red-ringed on me after a year. I started young and kept going pretty steady until adulthood. I spent plenty of time on the PC as well but mostly casual stuff and MMOs.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Introduction”
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
T w e n t y S i d e d
