Yolanda and I have relaxed into more of a casual TV-watching environment since the lockdown began. I’m not generally big on TV shows as I prefer to either play games or read, but there have been plenty of games and shows that have paired up well for paying half-attention to each of them. (“Podcast games,” I’m told people call them.) If I’m running around with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla muted wh...
I didn’t read as many new books in 2019 as I did in 2018 (caught up on some older stuff, mostly), but I did like these: Peter Clines: Dead Moon Clines never really aspires to much more than delivering some fun page-turnery stories, but that’s fine: he does it well. “Zombies...on the moon!” is a great tagline for a book. Clines’ writing is usually pretty easy-going and fun; if you haven’t checke...
Hey, I was bored Saturday so I wrote something on Facebook about MTGA and it got pretty long. Here it is! --------------------------------------------------------------------- I hope you're enjoying your Saturday! I wanted to say hello and say that I am really enjoying Magic: The Gathering: Arena. It is by no means a perfect game but it is a really fun rendition of Magic for the digital age and...
Hey GB, I made a couple of purchases lately that I've been enjoying so I figured I'd tell you about them! You may have heard some of my grousing about Logitech mice on the last UPFs. I don't hate them or anything; I've just always felt them to be a bit slight in build and I've never liked the placement of the side buttons. I was always an Intellimouse Explorer person, then shifted to Razer Deat...
If you want this thing just leave a comment here! Premium members only! If you're overseas this might cost you some money to get past tariffs!
It's that time again! If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and th...
Hey, I been reading a bunch of stuff lately and I figured I’d write some stuff down about it in case anyone was interested. Most of what I’ve been throwing on the Kindle lately has been in the vein of escapist sci-fi, which, you know, maybe it’s easy to forgive a little escapism right about now. I was a little surprised, actually, to find out that I had already read five of the six Hugo novel n...
It's that time again! you know what they say about a guy with a big head If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in...
It's that time again! the cgi in this looks like it cost a lot of money If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in i...
It's that time again! i a cat If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable...
that is a lot of open seats If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable,...
It's that time again! shamelessly re-used image If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is r...
Actual email chain. Keep in mind that this guy's email address does not match to an account on the site and does not return any results for previous orders on our store. He's also never emailed support before. Defective t shirts Please let me know if u can help regarding the defective t shirts? Thanks Jack Me: Hey Jack, Sorry, what was this in relation to? I don't see an older email from this e...
Hey, I wrote this a long time ago on my Tumblr blog when I was unemployed! Since the movie based on the Dark Tower is about to come out (and it looks like it's going to be terrible!) I figured I'd port it over here. I’ve been reading through Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books again recently. I remember picking them up for the first time shortly after Wolves of the Calla was released in 2003; I...
It’s a familiar story for me: buy a game after it first dips into sale territory, play for an hour or two, get frustrated by something minor, then set it aside until I come back to it half a year later and plow through the rest of it. Not having any pressing editorial commitments to finish games in a timely manner, I generally kind of don’t: I’m happy to let them sit in my Steam folder until th...
It's that time again! If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and th...
I’ve been torturing myself over the last couple of years by playing free-to-play stuff on my phone. The habit kind of picked up around the time that I got my Nexus 6, which was the first phone I owned that had a screen that felt like it lent itself well to gaming; my Nexus 5 and everything before it just felt a bit too small to do much on. But I’ve invested a bunch of time into stuff like Star...
It’s been a heck of a busy month around these parts, and I haven’t been around much on the forums, so I figured I’d throw out a little #personalblog and give you all the #details you’ve no doubt been #craving. #Winning! #hashtag September started off with one of our semi-annual sales, and anytime we have one of those, my support email inbox starts getting pretty crazy. To give you an idea of wh...
It's that time again! If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and th...
I intended to join in the Community Endurance Run shenanigans a couple weeks ago but unfortunately wasn't feeling great. So, I'm going to try again this weekend! Join me for a WoW Raid-trospective tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific Time, going until whenever I feel like stopping. The Community Endurance Run had a goal of $4,000 to raise for Pencils of Promise, and we're a few hundred bucks short , so we...
Here are some thoughts on stuff I’ve been playing and reading and watching! Most of it's genre stuff that's easy to read because that's what I've been in the mood for recently! Anyway here's some words! The Spider’s War I chewed through most of the Dagger and Coin book in the last couple of years, so I was pretty happy when the final book finally came out. I guess I was actually just happy to k...
It's that time again! If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and th...
I sat down and started writing a big long blog post after happening across this Kickstarter for “The New Walden.” As originally planned, these guys were going to take Walden and edit it to make the language more palatable to modern readers, in part by removing allusions to mythology, changing gendered terms to gender-neutral words, and replacing dated or large words with ones simpler to underst...
It's that time again! If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and th...
It’s probably been a solid decade since I built a computer. It hasn’t been an everyday occurrence, at any rate: I built one during college and a a micro-ATX for my mom a few years later, and that’s basically been it. I was going to do it again for my last computer, but I wound up founding an aggressively-priced prebuilt system on Newegg and decided to just spring for that rather than take the t...
Hey, I've mentioned it on the last couple of UPFs, but CBSi is currently looking for both a Front End Developer as well as a UX/UI Designer. What do those words mean? I don't know because I'm not a nerd. But if you are, then maybe you'd be interested in applying for a job here! The listing for the front end developer can be found here. Unfortunately the job listing for the UI/UX designer isn't...
Hey there. I read and enjoyed the fifth entry in the Expanse series, entitled Nemesis Games , by James S.A. Corey, who is actually two writers writing together, and I never really understood why two people wouldn't just put their own damn names on a book rather than inventing a nom de guerre for the both of them as a collective. That's a little weird. Anyway, I suspect that Daniel Abraham does...
After watching a bit of the first Avengers movie tonight, it kind of struck me: this is the most ambitious and fairly insane venture in the history of the cinematic medium. The first 10 or so movies in the MCU have been successful, especially considering the first Avengers movie, but to expect 25 or more films, most of which will have a budget of 150 million dollars or so, to all make a return...
It's that time again! If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and th...
It's that time again! If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and th...
grima wormtongue holds the ear of the king I wrote a while ago about The Expanse , a series of sci-fi books that I really enjoyed. (I recently re-read the first one, and still found it to be pretty great.) I figured I would proceed onward with the works of James S.A. Corey, but, alas, that's not actually a dude; it's two dudes, and as far as I can tell, Daniel Abraham is the one that handles th...
It's that time again! m'asgard If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictabl...
Hah, no, I'm joking: Warlords of Draenor is pretty rad. I've been playing it a bunch. Here are some thoughts! (Keep in mind I wrote most of this a month or so ago, so some of it might be a bit dated.) gotta get home to play warlords Garrisons: Mostly great! I would've changed a few things here and there, of course. I think buildings are a bit expensive compared to what I would like; considering...
Hey, I got sent a Collector's Edition of Warlords of Draenor. All I really wanted from it was the game code (I didn't pre-order), so I popped open the DVD and redeemed that. All the rest of this stuff is not really the kind of thing that I'd usually keep, so I figured if anyone wanted it, I...could give it away to a Premium member. (You can still enter as a non-premium member and I'll hook you...
The sole bright spots of the last couple of weeks for me have been musical in nature. The almost transcendently loud Pujol/Screaming Females concert on Saturday was one of them. Live music is, generally, a fantastic way to put your troubles out of your mind, and this year has been a fantastic one for it. Robyn/Royksopp , New Order, Xenia Rubinos , Minipop , Lake Street Dive (twice), Mø , Black...
Some thoughts on games and stuff I've been playing lately. take a trip to sleepy town Destiny: I got to max level in this without ever grouping, which is a nice feature for a pseudo-MMO. Not sure I have much more to do here, but maybe I’ll dig it out from time to time. Generally speaking, I really enjoy the action here, but it is pretty baffling to encounter the story and variety issues that Bu...
Hey, I'll be on vacation starting tonight and probably won't be very quick about getting back to PMs and the like for the next week or so, until after PAX. If you have moderation concerns, use the PM All Mods button on the right side of any forum page, or send an email to [email protected]. If you have a site issue, post in the bug reporting forum or email [email protected] and someon...
Hey, since we've been talking about WoW lately, and @danryckert seemed curious about WoW addons, here's a screenshot of my current addon setup: That is, of course, a relatively placid screenshot. And note that this is not a particularly pretty or well-organized screen; it's very utilitarian and focused only on what I absolutely need, without much care for aesthetics. Here's one where I'm actual...
So I powered through the first four books of the Expanse series as quickly as I can recall book-reading in the past. I got through the first four books of the Harry Potter series in about two weeks back when I first started plowing through them; I think I might've gotten through all of the Expanse books even more quickly than that. My Kindle records show that I bought the first book on July 20t...
I like reading, and I like reading books for free, although I rarely get to the library anymore. That's why the Kindle Owner's Lending Library is so poopy. In theory, it's a grand idea; as part of your Amazon Prime yearly membership, you get to check out a book a month for free, read it as much as you like, then return it and get another one after a few weeks. Great! But even though there's lik...
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA I did a quick scan through my Steam and game collection just now, trying to find games that I thought were above average but which featured superbly annoying lead characters, and didn’t come up with much. I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed III more than most people, but even I found Connor Kenway to be channeling a bit too much of angry teen Anakin Skywalker for comf...
This Saturday and Sunday Giant Bomb and GameSpot will be taking part in an (almost) 24-hour marathon to benefit Operation Supply Drop. You can find more information on the charity here and our team page is here if you want to donate early. Big thanks to Kurt Meyers, Matt Pascual, and Nathan Hawkins for giving so far, and a big big thanks for the $200 coming from an anonymous donor! lazy saturda...
It's that time again! an epic romance If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly pre...
HARUMPH CONTESTS ARE FOR THE POORS Hey, I finally had a chance to figure out the winners of the last couple of blogs. By random choice, @counterclockwork87 gets a free copy of Ni No Kuni! And with the BOWL, @meaninoflife42 gets a free year of Premium Access thanks to a guess of $93.7 million when the actual opening weekend was $95,023,721. And the premium winner of that contest is @dukest3 , wh...
Wow, it's been a long time since we did one of these! "Oh..you know...just hanging out in a dark room and stuff." If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest g...
Neato! I would’ve loved to be a fly on the wall when it came time to translate the title of Ni No Kuni for the American market, or, rather, not do so at all. I don’t disagree with the choice to leave the title untranslated; I’m just really curious about it. It’d be one thing if it was a character’s name, but it seems like the phrase has a number of serviceable options for an English translation...
the most chompable pup Hey, we recently put a bunch of Nighthawks posters on the store. We originally printed 1,000 of them thinking that they'd take a while to sell out, but you guys are crazy, and we actually sold out of them within a matter of maybe eight hours of them being on sale? They sold so fast that we actually had a bit of a snafu on the store and we sold around 1,120 of them, which...
Dead Space 3 was nominated on our "most disappointing games of the year" list, so I thought I might take a moment to think back on a game that I actually found shockingly solid, despite my initial trepidation about it. I personally would venture that DS3 was one of my favorite surprises of the year, especially coming after my largely negative experience with Dead Space 2 (which threw game-break...
I haven't written much here lately! Mostly I've been busy being sick over the last six weeks or so. I've never been sick for this long before! Probably the wasting disease or consumption or maybe just a general sense of malaise. Getting better now, but still coughing more than I should be. We'll see how things go. i like games Anyway, I've been meaning to write more in this blog, but I generall...
I haven't played GTA Online. this pup is happy and relaxed and not worried I guess more generally I was thinking yesterday about the hoopla surrounding the server troubles that accompanied the launch of GTAO and how uninterested I was in their ramifications. I've been through numerous poor launches of online titles, including but not limited to World of Warcraft (all but unplayable for the firs...
Alas, my PS3 is officially no more. My attempt at a repair on my Playstation 3 YLOD, courtesy of the iFixit repair kit, was an ignominious failure. I didn’t have too many problems with the actual process of working through the instructions, even though it took almost one and a half episodes of Foyle’s War to get through all the steps. I’m pretty familiar working with the interiors of PCs, but I...
Not a PS3 I don’t get misty-eyed over technology very often, but it’s hard not to lament the passing of my Playstation 3. I’ve had this bad boy for quite a while now, having bought it on the first vacation that I took back home to Virginia after joining GameSpot back in 2004. So, that would place the purchase in the summer of 2007 or so. As I recall, Best Buy was running some kind of crazy $50...
Hey, I've seen a lot of people in various threads lately mentioning wiki/forum bugs/features that disappeared with the redesign, often without being as specific as I'd need to have them to file an actual bug for them. Since we have a couple of engineers back on the site working on various stuff, feel to just reply to this thread with stuff that's been bugging you as a forum user or wiki editor...
People often ask me what I do around here, and it's a valid question, since so much of what I do is not publicly visible. Needless to say, there's a lot of weird stuff that Giant Bomb has going on in the background that other sites in the CBSi family don't have to deal with, largely because many of them don't feature subscription services, nor do they have storefronts through which they sell me...
So, been playing a bit of FFXIV on Lamia server the past few nights. (Frail Gesture, if you want to friend me.) I haven't gotten too far (level 11 as a Gladiator), but I figured I'd throw out a few initial thoughts/quibbles. Overall, I’m enjoying the game, but it’s not hard to see some areas for improvement in the early game. A Slow Start: The first few levels that you gain are...kinda boring,...
Hey guys, I'll be heading up to PAX Prime this weekend and roaming the hallways and gaming rooms. If you're traveling along, be sure to look for me and flag me down, as I'll be bringing along plenty of stuff to give away. I asked our warehouse guys to dig up some of the last remaining copies of some shirts that have been discontinued or not restocked in a while, and they managed to find a few c...
I got dis So I finally got one o dem new fangled Nexus 7's after fooling around with it for a bit in an Office Max. Pretty slick little device, and it's super responsive to input, which was my big problem with the original-generation Kindle Fire, which had pretty laggy performance. So far I'm mostly just intending to use it for some bedtime browsing and Netflix, but I figure that since I can ac...
Hope you're doing alright. It's been a trying week for everyone, I suspect. I wish I had been around on the site a bit more than I have been. It doesn't help that I've been a bit sick. Anyway, I wanted to say thanks for the outpouring of kind words and thoughts this week. I've been doing my best to get back to as many PMs and tweets as I could, although the amount of tweets that were coming my...
It's time for a little spring cleaning in anticipation of the upcoming consoles. As such, I'm going to be running some contests to start giving away some of games from my library that I don't really want or play anymore. I can't guarantee that all of these are going to be great games, necessarily, of course. Heck, some of them might be downright bad. But they'll be free, at least. I've seen shi...
look at this pup My last couple of jobs were not exactly stable: Screened was part of a startup, and I could tell that GameSpy was on thin ice as soon as I was hired and learned that IGN was trying to sell itself off from Fox. Between those, and a year's worth of unemployment, I haven't exactly been making a lot of major purchases in the last few years aside from a $600 bike that was more of a...
Hey, look at this pup Glad to see a mostly positive reaction to the launch of our currently-untitled movie podcast. If you're confused about why this exists, Alex and I both used to work for Screened.com back in the Whiskey Media days, where we had a weekly podcast that focused on movies and television. When BermanBraun bought Screened, neither of us wound up working for it, so we stopped doing...
look at this pup Hey all, I'm heading to Virginia tomorrow for my sister's graduation. She's going to be a doctor of criminology or something like that, I guess. I don't really pay much attention to that kind of stuff because she's an icky girl. Anyway, I'll be only intermittently online from Saturday until Wednesday, and queries to [email protected] may go unanswered until I get back. I'm...
I was unemployed from April 1, 2012 to April 22, 2013. That was a pretty long time to be out of work, as you can probably appreciate. (Note that I'm graciously leaving out a five-week period in which I was Executive Editor of GameSpy.com , mostly because the bulk of those five weeks were spent getting used to the CMS for the site rather than actually creating content for it. It was an honor to...
Hey! It's been a fun first week here on the Bomb and Comic Vine. Mostly what I've been doing is getting used to all of the many, many tools that are used behind the scenes as part of the support system here. Giant Bomb is not a completely self-contained site, as we rely heavily on a third-party support site to help us run all of our support stuff. So anything you send to [email protected] a...
Hey there. I’m now the Product Manager for Giant Bomb and ComicVine. That’s a fun sentence to write, as you might imagine. It’s been a bit of a long year for me since I left Whiskey Media, but in the end, coming back to CBS Interactive to work with a bunch of people that have been colleagues of mine for almost the entirety of my professional life is pretty much the best possible conclusion to t...
Hey, I forgot that I still have a shrinkwrapped SimCity copy if anyone wants it. If you do, just leave a comment below and I'll send the code to someone at random in a few hours. If you register it by tomorrow you should be able to get one of the free games that EA offered due to the crappy launch, as well. So, really, this is like getting Dead Space 3 for free with a bonus SimCity in there as...
(I posted this on my blog , but I figured I might as well put it here, too!) I’ve been playing a bunch of WoW lately, but my experiences are replaying the usual cycle I go through with every expansion. I start out, level a couple of characters to the max, have a good time running dungeons, then get bored at the endgame. To its credit, Pandaria has kept me interested in my max-level characters f...
I take a lot of screens nowadays, mostly because Steam makes it too damn easy to do so. Here's a compilation of the dumbest screenshots I found in my folders this year. Post your own! Uh... I think Kingdoms of Amalur forgot something when rendering out my character. *points to schlong* Yeah, I'll get right on that...wait, what did you say? I think I speak for every BL2 gambler when I say "MOVE...
A quick note: I wrote a Beginner's Guide to Guild Wars 2 for GamesRadar last week/weekend, which is why I wasn't posting much. (On top of being generally under the weather.) Me being me, I wound up writing way too much about it, so it's being split into three different sections and posting over the end of the week. Hopefully you'll enjoy it, and feel free to check it out if you like! It was the...
I never got the chance to play Alan Wake on Xbox, but, now that I've picked it up on Steam, I'm fairly glad that I missed it. That...sounds strange, I think: I actually liked the game quite a bit, but I'm glad I waited for the PC port, since it was one of the better PC ports to come along in recent memory. It's superlative, really; it runs beautifully on high settings and looks pretty spectacul...
I got into the beta (not through any special access or anything; I opted in on my Battle.net account and got into it via that method with the last round of invites.) I've played every character up to level 10 now. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me and I'll try to answer. A titanic battle
Kind of interesting.
So the guys from Namco Bandai dropped by to show off a bit of Dark Souls yesterday, and I'm not sure if the GB crew had any plans to do a Man, I Saw That with it (we couldn't get any direct feed, and the trailer they released wasn't super long). I sat in on the session, and got a good look at around half an hour of the game. This is...basically Demon's Souls II, for all intents and purposes. It...
Message me on Screened. I answer all of the messages I get over there, but I'm not on GB enough to keep up with messages on both sites. Sorry! My twitter stuff gets mirrored here, but I don't upload them manually or anything.
I don't post these very often, but I figured some of you might want to tune in today at 4 PM for The Screening Room: Commando ! Should be a lot of fun, and I believe one Ryan Davis may be joining us for a bit.
I try not to post too many blog posts advertising Screened stuff (which I'm sure you all appreciate), but I figured some of you would be interested to know that Wednesday's Screening Room is going to be none other than Aliens , a film that has a long history of influencing video games. It's not going to be a TANG feature, I doubt, but it's still a hell of a blast to watch. We'll be live tomorro...
Just a note that we have a new Screening Room going on today at 4 PM PST for Pee-Wee's Big Adventure! It's on Netflix Streaming in the U.S., and we'll be joined by one Ryan Davis , so feel free to queue that sucker up and join us! You can find us in the chat room starting around 3:50 PM today. Also don't forget that you can still comment on our Free Friday post if you haven't already for your c...
Little feature we did for screened.
Hey dudes, this week on the Screening Room we'll be watching The Thing. We got a great turnout last week, so I hope some of you can check back in this Wednesday at 4. Also, we have another edition of Free Friday for you guys to enter. Feel free to throw a post in there if you haven't already and we'll pick some winners on Tuesday. One post only, though!
Figured I would drop by to let those of you who entered Screened.com's Free Friday that we picked a couple of winners. I think that was about as many comments as we've had on a story in the last long while, so thanks for swinging by (assuming you did). Also, in case you don't go over to Screened all that often, feel free to come by for tomorrow's Screening Room , where we'll be watching Iron Ma...
Hey duders. In case you didn't know, we've been doing Free Fridays on Screened.com...not as often as the other sites have, but I want to get back in the groove of doing them every week. If you guys want to sign up (since you have fancy multi-passes now), feel free to head to this link and post a comment. It's that easy! And to curtail the questions, we'll probably do another Rorcraft sometime s...