EVE-Online - Still Pretty, Dangerous, Complicated

I've dabbled with CCP's hasn't-quite-been-underground-anymore-for-awhile-now EVE-Online from time to time over the past few years. At its best, it's a gorgeous looking piece of software with what amounts to the perfect soundtrack for what the game is going for, even when it's not.

Ahh. Space porn.

Isn't that nice to look at? Now imagine some Swedish guy falling asleep on a keyboard and you've got the perfect recipe for a low-stress ride through one of those peaceful lazy river things at those fake fancy hotels only in space. So it's like a space hotel lazy river you navigate with a mouse. So you're buzzing along, happily riding the mood-high of a...

...

God dammit. Someone turn that god damned music off. DO YOU SEE WHAT IT GOT ME? Last time I ever listen to your new age John Tesh knock-off bullshit while I'm trying to find a god damned wormhole to investigate and NO that wasn't a euphemism, alright?


*Sigh*


No big deal. Let's all just relax. I'll just...I'll just get a new ship. I'll just stroll back to a starbase and take a look in the market and see what we've got going on. Let me just open up my definitely-easy-to-navigate menu system and...

Oh FFS.

You know what? On second thought I'll just set some random skills to train and come back tomorrow.

Tecmo Super Bowl is the Greatest Thing Since Ever

I don't really need a ton of excuses to talk about Philly-centric sports, even at The InGame Asylum. Thanks to people with too much time on their hands and Tecmo Super Bowl, I have all the excuse I'll ever need. Or rather I would but here's a handy dandy video of the closing moment's of yesterday's game instead:



Awesome.

Digital Distribution is (not) Taking Over

The NPD group recently released their 2010 Games Purchase Drivers report and revealed that 29% of video game purchases over the last three months are delivered to the consumer via digital distribution. What this means, of course, is that 71% of video game purchases are still done incorrectly boxed copies from brick and mortar establishments.

Pictured: the right way to get games.

Let's stop delaying progress, people. Sure, there was a time back in cave man days where going to a special building to acquire <item> was like...what you did. Now machines are connected to other machines by lightning wizard magic the internet and we have things like sunglasses and toasters and stuff and you don't really need to bang a couple rocks together anymore for fire.

There's also this nauseating nugget of unjoy from the report:

"...nearly 10 percent of buyers report using a trade-in to fund their purchase."


Tear down the brick and mortar after the jump.

Be Decent AND a Nerdy Indie Hipster

For those of you who missed it the first go-round, the Humble Indie Bundle is back! If you have no idea what that is, or why you should care, it goes like this:


The bundle is made up of five pretty rad indie games: Braid, Cortex Command, Osmos, Machinarium, and Revenge of the Titans. Sold separately, you're looking at $85 worth of stuff here. With the Humble Indie Bundle, you get to name your price for the whole shebang. Yup, you can be a disgusting cheap skate and get all 5 games for just a penny if you really wanted to and could live with yourself afterward. Extra cool points for the fact that you can split up your payment so that it ends up in the hands of up to 4 different entities: the developers of the games themselves, the Humble Bundle folks, the excellent digital rights group EFF, or my personal favorite, Child's Play.


If that's too philanthropic for you, then just get the Bundle on the cheap because the games are good, you bastard.

Especially Braid.

OGINTWA (Oh God It's Not The Weekend Anymore)

Normally, you see those back from the weekend catching up posts thrown up places early Monday morning because I guess that's supposed to be a good time to do that. I know better. First, I know for a fact that I can't string a coherent thought together until roughly 11 AM and I definitely can't translate that into text until sometime significantly beyond noon. Also, I would expect a vast majority of my readers to be of the gamer persuasion and I know gaming is being embraced more and more by the mainstream but, come on, <insert no-longer wholly appropriate stereotype about gamers not waking up before the afternoon>.

Amirite?


More, post-jump.

A Faithful Re-Creation of Events that Happened

(I apologize ahead of time, I've been replaying the Mass Effect series)

Like any real dork, I'm pretty pumped about the fact that, just yesterday, SpaceX launched and landed their Dragon capsule after a couple orbits of the Earth, making them the first private company to ever accomplish such a feat. I'm pretty sure privatization is the way to go in the field of space exploration, and it's only a matter of time before we're beyond the Termination Shock (honestly, this is probably one of the few times in my life I'll get to type Termination Shock with any sort of relevance to anything, extra pleased about that), fighting demons materializing out of unearthed (unmarsed?) teleporters, and fighting queen aliens in sweet power loaders.

Hopefully next Wednesday

In celebration, I'm reenacting what I can only imagine as being some sort of last minute briefing with the pilot of the SpaceX Dragon, a pilot I will for confidentiality purposes call Commander Shepard (neverminding that the flight was in fact unmanned).

Accuracy, post-jump.

The Pre-review

Meat mEat meAt meaT

I haven't played Super Meat Boy enough yet to offer a proper review. Instead of that, a pre-review, edited for dirty words, conducted over Google Chat:


  me: it's ... hard

but it's amazing

it's like...

if you were able to make joy a physical object then turn it into a concentrated fluid like red bull or something

then injected it into your eyelids

Vindictus

More and more, it seems it's becoming both increasingly common and easier than ever for the MMO-playing populace to split its affections over multiple titles. No, the economy hasn't recovered yet, contrary to reports that the recession currently harshing the world's collective buzz is over. With so many titles converting to or launching with a free-to-play model of some kind, the entry point for the MMO genre is arguably more accessible than any other in gaming.


I've mentioned previously that LOTRO is my current pay-to-play MMO of choice. As a lot of my readers would probably already know, Lord of the Rings Online was another title to embark down the "free-to-play" route this year. Trust me, I didn't goof. I maintain my subscription because it's damn convenient and I really like what Turbine has going on over there. At any rate, I decided today I would write a bit about what I'm playing on the F2P side of things and when I started hashing it out in my head, I had a half-blown review on my hands.

Many, many creatures get harmed during the course of this game.

More, post-jump.

They nerfed it, now it sucks

Special thanks to tvtropes.org for the passive inspiration for the title of this post and to my buddy Rob for the topic suggestion.

Something funny happened on the way to our adult years, and really all along the way to the modern day as a whole. We've all become very, very bad at gaming (relatively) since we were but wee lads and lasses. I can remember playing games like Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and (Mike Tyson's) Punch-Out!! at the tender age of 5 and playing them WELL. Now...I don't know about you, but I've seen kids these days (oh my god I just said kids these days non-ironically) playing games and, comparatively, they're absolutely horrible at it. You know what I'm talking about, right? Tell me you haven't watched a child playing a video game recently and witnessed them repeatedly screwing something up so simple in your mind that you get so irrationally angry you have to REMOVE YOURSELF FROM THE ROOM BEFORE THEY RUIN YOUR SUPER MARIO GALAXY SAVE FILE AND YOU'RE FORCED TO THROW THEM THROUGH A WALL.

That's not pressure, kid, that's drywall.

Then you sit there and think about how you used to blow through Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man or how you got so good you didn't even need the Konami Code for ANYTHING anymore. It was like you were some kind of 8-year old who had gained the ability to manipulate assembly with their minds, karate chop arrows out of the air, catch bullets with your teeth, and emit a strange golden glow from your skin. It's not every day I get to set up an image from Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon so you gotta go with me on this one.

I up-up-down-down Leroy.

More, post-jump.

I Want My XBLA

If you can imagine "Money For Nothing" playing in the background while you read this, that would be pretty cool. Better yet, if you could just play it on some sort of device so you can remove the imagination equation, that would work even better.


Okay, just go here in another window and we'll be golden.


I'd purchased an Xbox 360 in early 2006. It was part of the first waves of the machines that came out. You know, the ones that didn't work. With that in mind, you can probably imagine both my surprise and delight at the fact that it took a whole 4 years for the machine to finally bow out (ungracefully) with a red ring of death. This isn't to say my 360 was without its share of problems. It habitually destroyed games and, about 15 DAYS into its lifespan, took an extended vacation (that lasted roughly 15 days shorter than 4 years) from determining whether or not the disc in its tray was a game or a DVD. Spoiler: Apparently every disc I own is a DVD. I don't know if I even own a DVD but the 360 was pretty much sure I did.

God. Whatever, it's just hundreds of dollars.

More after the jump.

RTS! OR, Premises and how quickly I abandon them

I was all set tonight to write about how exciting the field of ARG or Alternate Reality Gaming is becoming but then I finished off Thanksgiving leftovers which reduced my brainpower to such a reptile-like state that I had to reach into my emergency topic pile and pull out something safe instead. Sorry, ARG fans, your day will come, I promise. Also, I now have an excuse if this post reads about as well as a steaming turd.

When you (I) Google Image Search Alternate Reality Gaming, this is what you (you still) get.

Instead, we're going to be talking about the incredibly popular genre of (primarily) computer gaming known as RTS. For those of you reading this who SOMEHOW also don't know what RTS stands for (which is actually probably going to be a substantial number of people since I'm mostly hawking this blog on Facebook right now), I grant you Real Time Strategy. What this means is that while you're sitting there and strategizing, planning your moves, the computer or other human players are also doing their own thing. You know, in real time. As an extension of that concept, this also means that, unless you're Korean (and no, not that one, I'm talking about the one with individual freedoms) you're probably going to lose almost every game you play. I sure do, anyway. This in no way means I'm just bad at RTS. I mean...it DOES mean that, but it also means you're all bad at it, too. I'm sure you'll dig up some "concrete evidence" or something to the contrary but this probably just means you hate me.


Micro after the jump.

Amnesia. A trope, yes, but also the key...

...to self-inflicted heart attacks.


Big ups to M0RG0TH13, bane of elves, dwarves, and men across the entire breadth of Middle Earth (not to mention my first commenter). To be honest I was terrified that this early in the lifespan of my blog, I wouldn't get a single suggestion for today's article. One is a pretty sweet step in the right direction.


Anyway, the suggested topic for this post is a little game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent by Swedish developer Frictional Games, creators of the Penumbra series. If you look around the internet digging for reviews and details about Amnesia, you're going to see a lot written about the efficacy this game enjoys as a constipation aid. THIS IS MY ONLY REFERENCE TO POOP IN THIS ARTICLE. It's been overdone and I don't want to be that guy.


Fight or flight after the jump.

Fishin' for topics and usin' apostrophes because finishin' verbs is UNNECESSARY

It's Holiday Hangover time. In tribute, or rather using that as an unrelated excuse, I'm going to take suggestions on what to write my next blog post about. The deadline for topic suggestions is Noon EST Saturday, November 27th. Hopefully it'll be video game related, but it's not necessary. After I decide on the winning entry, I'll have the post up later tomorrow. Suggestions may be made in the comments section here or as a comment on my Facebook page.


Don't sit on your hands! Let me give you a shout out! Suggest anything, as long as anything doesn't include me not writing. Don't be a dick.

Genesis of the Emoticon

Well, OK, not the FIRST emoticon. The one (my LOTRO guild and) I created and have tried to foster and nurture to prominence. The task is not an easy one.


Perhaps I should do some establishing first. We humans live a pitifully short time. The whole concept of legacy...creating something that lasts long after we're gone...be it a child, a novel, a legend, whatever...is, in essence, a feeble grasp at immortality.


Founding Wendy's after the jump.

Avast!

A vast what? It doesn't really matter. Hey, my name is Roger. This morning at work, I was in an infuriatingly mind-numbing meeting where I resolved to do absolutely anything else later in the day as a step toward reaching the unlikely goal of doing something more along the lines of what I WANT to do with my life.* I want to write about video games. I want to write about the video game industry. I want to make people laugh. I want to make people angry. At some point, I would like several sandwiches.


Toward that end, I started a blog. Not just any blog, mind you...but this blog in particular. You know, the one you're reading (somehow). You see, at some point during my life I got it lodged in my head that I could write at a level dangerously bordering on coherence. I have a knack, sometimes, for making people laugh. My parents decided that one of the best babysitters available to them when I was but a precocious tot was an Atari 2600 modded to play pretty much every game ever released up to 1984. They were right about that last bit.


It's the perfect storm. I am the perfect voice. I have the perfect sideburns.


Some days, I'll probably talk about a specific game tickling my neurons. Other days, I might take a look at (and then type a bunch about) trends. Just as likely as either of those topics, I'll rant about something completely unrelated. Want to know what's hot in the latest pet cactus names? Gotcha covered.** Interested (for some reason) on where I stand in the F2P vs. Premium MMO debate? I can help you out. Looking to inflate the ego of a hack video game nerd with either ebullient praise or the vilest of infernal flames? Boy, have I got a comments section for YOU.


I hope you enjoy your time here at this one (of infinite) corner(s) of the internet. It is an honor that you wasted your time with me. Check back for more!


-R


*What a terrifying sentence. There will be more of these, I promise/warn you.
**The answer, as with most things, is Guy Carbonneau.