The journey through Azeroth and self-indulgence continues. Please follow these steps for maximum enjoyment:
Note that when I said “maximum enjoyment”, I was talking about my enjoyment, not yours.
In this CNet interview, EA president Frank Gibeau talks about the new direction he has planned for the company:
I’ve noticed this already. A “service” model. They have been moving towards this for some time now. Why sell me a game, when you can lease it to me and hold the experience ransom for a monthly fee? What better way to get closer to your customers than to enter into this economic suicide pact with them? If we die, we’re taking your games with us.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “That Explains a Lot”
Some people were asking about my particular console / gaming setup. Ok, two people asked. But I want to put this up so I can link back to it later.
I haven’t had this setup running since the HD crash a few weeks ago, but when things are working right my gaming environment is thus:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Console Gaming on the PC”
…is a lot of years to be old, or not, depending on who you ask. In any case, it’s how old I turn today.
Thirty seven? How did I get to be thirty seven? I have this vivid memory of standing outside my first-grade classroom, looking at all the other doors I’d never gone through. To my right was a door with a brass “6” affixed to the front. Grade six! I couldn’t imagine. Would I ever get there? It was eons into the future.
The distance between those two points – between grade one and grade six – seems much larger than the distance between right now and the point where I graduated from high school in 1990. It’s not just that things are speeding up, but the rate at which things are accelerating is also increasing. At this rate I’ll be fifty by Wednesday.
Pay this no mind. I have these little Almost Mid Life freakouts every year around my birthday. I’ll straighten out in a few days.
…Assuming I’m spared. You can’t plan too far ahead at my age.
Some more MC Frontalot for your Saturday morning:
T w e n t y S i d e d
Notice: If you emailed me today, please re-send.
Let me just say that while I love Firefox, its email counterpart, Thunderbird, is a constant irritant. I’d change email clients, but…
You see, I have every email sent to me since 1997. (Uh, except for today’s. And a few other one-day gaps from things like HD crashes, computer migrations, and whatnot.) My archives are now just over 6GB. Now, 99.999% of that is stuff I’ll never need, but once a year I have some reason to reach back into the archives that sort of justifies keeping them around. Moving to another email client at this point would be only slightly less difficult than (say) getting divorced and re-married. To a complete stranger.
Anyway, I know there were 5 unread, non-spam emails in there before the thing went kablooey. So if you sent me something today, please re-send. Sorry.
I want to say some nice things about The Escapist. I hope this doesn’t sound too hollow coming from me, since I’m a contributor now. The following is in earnest, although I certainly can’t claim to be disinterested and unbiased. Adjust your perceptions accordingly.
Here goes: The Escapist is a fantastic site.
Over the past decade or so I’ve come to think of gaming magazines (and their website counterparts) as deafening hype machines infected with juvenile thinking and rampant fanboyism. Their process of reviewing a game is:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Escapist”
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Would you have survived in the middle ages?
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
A horrible, railroading, stupid, contrived, and painfully ill-conceived roleplaying campaign. All in good fun.
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.