You find yourself standing outside a cabin. It is 1894 and you are deep in the heart of the Swedish countryside. The cold sting of the winter wind hits your face as you make your way through a strange and mysterious forest. In the distance, an old windmill croaks and creaks. Snowflakes drift downward, illuminated by fleeting bits of light. Strange objects litter the landscape – a wooden box, se...
You find yourself standing outside a cabin. It is 1894 and you are deep in the heart of the Swedish countryside. The cold sting of the winter wind hits your face as you make your way through a strange and mysterious forest. In the distance, an old windmill croaks and creaks. Snowflakes drift downward, illuminated by fleeting bits of light. Strange objects litter the landscape – a wooden box, se...
I published this on my personal blog earlier , but wanted to put it here as well. The Entertainment Software Association reports that the average “frequent game purchaser” in the United States is 35. They also claim that just under half of gamers are women. Video games are a multibillion dollar entertainment industry and a medium that’s about as mainstream as anything else in our popular cultur...
Last week's tragic shooting in Connecticut has, not surprisingly, reopened the debate on gun control, mental health care, and violence in modern popular culture. There are, of course, those who will scapegoat videogames and use them as a conveniently simple excuse for an all too complicated issue. And the extremely vocal gaming community will respond with the fact that there's no measurable lin...
The reason I play video games isn't to master the mechanics or chase a high score. For me, the most important thing a game can do is give me a chance to experience something I'd never be able to in real life and to immerse me in a world that's at once completely believable and unbelievable. And so, with that, I want to share with the Giantbomb community my experience last night which managed to...
Dear reader, I find that the hardest part of any writing is figuring out that perfect first sentence. And so, I'll dispense with any pretense and just say that this is my attempt to tell a story. I've had an idea for both a world and a story kicking around for some months now and have made countless aborted attempts to get it off the ground. I recently found myself doing a good bit of reading...
So last time I wrote one of these, I was around 14,000 words into my book. Now, I've been travelling/working at my actual job like crazy for the past few weeks. That translates to not having a ton of time to write. So at this moment, I'm hovering at just south of 15,000 words... now granted, I went back and revised and removed some sections I wasn't thrilled with. But even still, my progress ha...
As I blogged last week, I'm trying to tackled the project of writing my first novel. I've decided that blogging about this here might be a helpful way to keep me motivated. I'm not really writing this with the goal of having it be a commercial success, so I'm happy to let the community watch my progress, add comments, or just read it as I continue to write and revise. When I wrote last week, I'...
One of my greatest regrets about myself is my inability to tackle long-term projects. Just about the only extracurricular I've ever committed to was learning to play guitar, and even that I'm only so-so at. Well, over the past year, I've had this idea kicking around in my head for a story. It started with a question- why are fantasy worlds technologically stagnant? Magic - why develop medicine...
So, I'll start this with a (probably mangled) quote from Louis CK, "Everything is awesome and nobody is happy." When I look at people on Reddit getting up in arms over DLC, DRM, and certain Bioware writers, it seems like every week there's a different cause to get behind and grab our pitchforks to be mad about. Do I think that sometimes companies take advantage of consumers? Sure, they do and t...
It's easier to represent this graphically, so I've made this handy image:
Oh, how I long for the days of college when I could spend time engrossing myself in a game for hours on end. Now, I have a real dilemma when it comes to playing games - there are so many good ones out there, so many that I wish I could devote large swaths of time to, but just can't. With a job, a fiance, and other responsibilities, I just can't shut myself off for 6 hours and play a game. Add t...
Is Robert Downey Jr's second turn in the Iron Man armor as fun and entertaining as the first film? Probably not. Is it worth seeing if you enjoyed the first film? Probably, yes. Iron Man 2 suffers from a fair amount of sequel fatigue - too many characters, too many sub plots, and a little too much time spent setting up the upcoming Avengers film. While the first film let Downey's Tony Stark ste...
Part documentary history of the street art movement, part commentary on the art world as a whole, and part post-modern comedy, Exit Through the Gift Shop is a difficult film to label. Directed by the elusive street artist Banksy, the film follows Thierry Guetta, an eccentric, obsessive French shop-owner turned amateur documentary filmmaker as he chronicles the burgeoning street art movement. Be...
Today I admit it - I sometimes play games on easy/casual/beginner whatever it may be. I'm easily frustrated and get no joy from replaying a segment of a game over and over. I have a job and responsibilities, I want to experience a game and get as much out of it as I can. I don't want to fall into the trap I did in the last generation of having a ton of games that I got through 60% of before get...
We tend to make a lot of beef about games being "cinematic" and it's pretty easy to spot the influence of film on more than a few games. Playing through Mass Effect 2, I realized that a large part of why I really enjoyed the story was that it didn't try to structure itself like a film. Instead, I think the more apt comparison was that it felt like a season of a good sci-fi tv show. The game ope...
I'm currently in between finishing my Mass Effect 2 play through and waiting for my copy of Dragon Age: Origins to get here, so this weekend I decided to go to my backlog of games and make some progress in ones that I'd shelved. Now Assassins Creed was a game I didn't enjoy, for the reasons that many have mentioned - the repetition, pacing, and a combat system that I just never mastered. That s...