Oh, right! It’s October. Usually that means having some kind of “spooky” game to write about. Under normal circumstances I would find some fairly obscure Halloween-themed action game and write about that. But it’s been quite a busy month for me, combined with there not being many spooky games that aren't just horror clones ripping off Amnesia: The Dark Descent or SOMA. This makes actively seeking out something like that a challenge for me.
So instead I’ll pro...
2022-10-24 23:00:02 +0000 UTC
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My family is a packrat kind of family. For the longest time, we’d just hoard things that we might need someday. But as time goes on, we’re slowly culling away those things we held onto, often times just books and old toys. During this process we have found a bunch of old things I honestly thought we tossed away, like the Sega Dreamcast keyboard. (Now if only I had The Typing of the Dead…) But there was one thing that we found that suddenly caused a wave of nostalgic feelings: A...
2022-09-13 18:19:04 +0000 UTC
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(As always, feedback is appreciated!)
It’s no secret that I play a lot of competitive first-person shooter games. While I vary in skill from an absolute noob to top of the leaderboards depending on the match, I do play a fair share of competitive games. Often times these become my podcast games, where I just mindlessly shoot things while hearing about video games or forgotten TV shows. And yet, I seem to do okay most of the time.
However, there’s one particular quirk ...
2022-07-13 06:35:29 +0000 UTC
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(As always, feedback and comments are appreciated either in this article or on my socials.)
The Build Engine is a fascinating piece of tech. Made by a young Ken Silverman, the engine was made as one of those engines that could rival Doom in features, and was used to great effect with its design, features and most importantly, interactivity. Build brought us some of the coolest mid-90s FPS games: Shadow Warrior, Blood, and of course, the granddaddy him...
2022-06-14 17:48:11 +0000 UTC
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As I’m writing this, I’m listening to Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, his fourth solo album, and what spawned his first #1 solo hit on the Billboard Hot 100: “Higher Love.” The #1 hit isn’t that amazing – mid-80s pop with a bit of synth cheese for flavor – but the rest of the album also spawned a myriad of hits that charted in the top 40 here in the States, including “Freedom Overspill” and “Back in the High Life Again.” Honestly the album tracks are a ...
2022-06-06 02:03:44 +0000 UTC
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(as always, any feedback is appreciated!)
It really cannot be overstated how much Portal made an impact to gaming when released in 2007. Valve snatched up a few Digipen students, gave it that high quality Valve polish and released it as part of The Orange Box. The game was considered tertiary to the rest of The Orange Box – the more hyped games being the long-awaited Team Fortress 2 and the continuation of the Half-Life 2 saga – but P...
2022-05-12 20:24:43 +0000 UTC
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(Any feedback or comments about this before it goes live for the public are welcome.)
It’s time to head back to the unofficial expansion mines once again. I’ve been down this road countless times at this point, but this one is one I had to come back to, since I mentioned it briefly before late last year. Since I covered one of the unofficial expansions -- Zaero for Quake II --
2022-03-19 21:01:29 +0000 UTC
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(What you are seeing is not the final text, but is what I consider “good enough.” I’m open to any suggestions or feedback on this post before it goes live on my website.)
Something I’ve constantly talked about on this blog is how eternally behind I am in games. Procuring a massive backlog, buying games thanks to Humble Bundles, cheap Steam sales, and gifts of spare keys from friends has been the primary causes of my never ending back catalog.
I try to keep myself ...
2022-02-15 17:27:44 +0000 UTC
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Over the 10 plus years I’ve been writing about video game stuff, one thing that’s stayed constant is me writing about the most jankiest, clunky games out there, often in January. So much so that I almost considered making an event called “Jank-uary,” where people would play these particularly busted games as a celebration of the underdogs and trash of video game culture. Maybe I’ll still consider that in the future if there’s any interest.
Since it’s the start of a new yea...
2022-01-19 18:12:50 +0000 UTC
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It’s the holidays again – at least as of this writing – and naturally I thought about writing about a holiday themed game. Realizing that’s not a particularly big pool of games to choose from, I opted for games based on media franchises that took place during the holidays. Like Die Hard.
(I... sorta miss these? Companies publishing video game adaptations is something solel...
2021-12-12 23:51:19 +0000 UTC
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When I wrote about the previous Mods and Maps article about Soldier of Fortune, Inc., I honestly wasn’t expecting it to go beyond Quake. When I found it that there were new tie-in levels made for Quake II, it made me replay through Quake II and its expansions, something I hadn’t done in years. I was originally not so fond of it, and I t...
2021-11-19 18:04:26 +0000 UTC
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A few months back, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bethesda re-released the id Software classic Quake on modern systems. Ported to the versatile KEX Engine by Nightdive Studios, it added the base game, the two official Mission Packs, the MachineGames developed Dimension of the Past made for the 20thanniversary in 2016, and a newly made expansion, Dimension of the Machine, also by MachineGames.
Going back through Quake was a nice nostalgia trip, and while I had alrea...
2021-10-13 17:51:47 +0000 UTC
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I’ve had a Steam account for about 18 years. I got mine the day it was available to the public: September 12, 2003. More than half of my life has been giving money to Gabe Newell and the folks in Bellevue so I can play PC games. It’s kinda surreal when you think about it.
It took Valve several years to make Steam a reliable service. Those first few years of Steam were not very great: The always-online factor, an unreliable community service where alternatives like 2021-09-17 17:19:44 +0000 UTC
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Late last year, I had written about Interplay and Platinumware’s attempt at trying to make a fake game show, Lexi-Cross. It was surprisingly interesting if a bit flawed. At the end of that article, I was reminded of a similar crossword-puzzle driven fake game show. This one came out during the big casual games boom of the mid-2000s, and actually featured someone that until recently, was rathe...
2021-08-11 16:07:30 +0000 UTC
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If there’s anything I kinda miss about the modern age of video games is that there's not enough video games based on media properties. They were so ubiquitous throughout the '80s and '90s where we had classics like Disney's DuckTales and Goldeneye. They started dying off by the early 2010s, during the start of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 eras. When I think of promotions with licensed properties these days, it’s usually as crossovers with other games, like 2021-07-20 23:35:49 +0000 UTC
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As of this writing, the famous Electronic Entertainment Expo – E3 for short – has come and gone. Lots of companies announcing hot new games slated to come out later this year or the next, people pushing polygons to the limit, and your favorite franchises coming back for a new installment.
Electronic Arts, being the rebellious type, decided to skip E3 this year for a catch-all “EA Play” event sometime in July. I fully expect them to show more of their notable franchises such as <...
2021-06-23 19:30:59 +0000 UTC
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It’s been about several months since I last wrote a Weekend Writing post. Admittedly me playing games has slowed down considerably in 2021, due to a multitude of factors. Fed up with playing Bingo Story and Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War all the time, I decided to tackle a game in my backlog. One that has sort of an infamy among gaming circles. A game t...
2021-05-15 17:43:01 +0000 UTC
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(content warning: Depictions of violence and war within.)
In 2021, it was announced that the previously canceled game Six Days in Fallujah was being brought back. With some of the original development team handling development, it naturally got a lot of backlash now just as it did back in 2009: by glorifying a specific military conflict as a good thing, and feeding into middle eastern stereotypes of them being nothing but terrorists. So much so that th...
2021-04-10 00:18:31 +0000 UTC
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As someone who loves the world of game shows, I’m honestly amazed that there haven’t been many game shows based on video games. We have game shows based on board games – Monopoly, Scrabble, Scattergories, stuff like that. We had game shows that used a bunch of video games as its base like Starcade and Nick Arcade (ugh). But rarely one based on a single video game.
There’s only been one other attempt to make a video ga...
2021-03-11 19:37:42 +0000 UTC
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I’ve been struggling to find motivation to play new games lately. I’ve gotten a bunch of games thanks to them being on deep discount, but then I don’t play them and just default to playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War instead. However, I did finish Battleborn before its shutdown for a recent blog post, and I did finish Wolfenstein: Youngblood with friend of the si...
2021-02-21 18:12:45 +0000 UTC
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I never thought I’d be starting 2021 with an article about a game that's shutting down. While I’m often behind the curve and don’t play games until years after the fact – some of last year’s posts being about games that are 5-10 years old – when I’m reminded that a game that I paid money for is shutting down, I thought I might as well give it one last hurrah.
It’s a shame the game in question is a bizarre genre mashup, made by one of the more infamous game studios of the...
2021-01-18 19:21:33 +0000 UTC
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It’s that time of the year again. The Game Awards, a show that’s ostensibly about giving awards to the biggest games of the year, peppered with occasional celebrity guest talent and reveals for hot new games. A continuation of the Spike Video Game Awards from years past, it’s been more as a spectacle than a genuine award show.
I really don’t enjoy these shows, especially during the Spike era, where at one point they literally gave an award to the person actually hosting the even...
2020-12-09 01:54:39 +0000 UTC
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(NOTE TO PATRONS: Patreon's blogging feature isn't as robust as Wordpress' blog setup, where I can upload audio files and put them into the article itself. To get around this, the audio clips are under the article as attachments instead. This version of the article will reference the file attached so you can listen along in the media player of your choice. This won't be a problem when the post goes live for everyone.)
Several years ago, I had came up with one of the silliest music-rel...
2020-11-13 00:02:10 +0000 UTC
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I’ve been writing about game show video games here on and off. It’s a fascinating genre, especially ones that aren’t based on standard TV game shows. I’ve written about ones using licensed properties like Outburst or MTV’s TRL, to even straightforward adaptations of 2020-10-13 15:29:59 +0000 UTC
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Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego is one of those rather ubiquitous edutainment titles of the late 80s and early 90s. A geography-driven game, the goal is to find clues around the world to stop Carmen’s henchmen from stealing some of the most notable world artifacts, eventually leading to stop Carmen herself.
A fair share of computers around the world had Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego installed, probably next to Odell Lake or Number Munchers<...
2020-09-07 16:14:29 +0000 UTC
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There was a brief time around the 2000s where there were a bunch of shooters based on historic events. Medal of Honor in 1999 kick started the craze of World War II-themed shooters, which lasted well into the late-2000s. During this time period, there were a lot of games based on conflicts new and old, most of them shoved off into the annals of obscurity.
During this period, there was an unusual spike in Vietnam War games. Despite the Vietnam War being one of those pointless wa...
2020-08-12 17:35:14 +0000 UTC
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Hey. I rarely get to talk about the behind-the-scenes nature of how I prepare blog posts in a public space, but I figure I should write about this. It's about how I was going to publish something, but realized how bad of an idea that was.
So, yesterday, I was going to post an article on the game Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, a first-person shooter published by Codemasters and developed by the infamous Spark Unlimited (Call of Duty: Finest Hour, Legendary,
2020-08-06 18:02:18 +0000 UTC
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I rarely abandon games. Mainly because of the infamous “sunk cost fallacy”: I spent money on this, thus I must play it in its entirety to get my money’s worth. Even for a person like me who doesn’t buy a lot of games these days, there’s that fear of wanting to not let even a game I bought on deep discount go to waste. So with that thought process in mind, I drag myself through a game that I’m not thoroughly invested in, just to see the ending and sit through a 30 minute credits se...
2020-07-20 04:51:14 +0000 UTC
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There was a time around the 2000s where you just could not avoid poker on television. Thanks to Chris Moneymaker making a decent bank in an online poker tournament, suddenly Texas Hold’em Poker got big and started being the next big TV filler. Every channel had a poker show, from Bravo’s fluff-driven Celebrity Poker Showdown to NBC having a late night poker show to fill in the gaps between Last Call with Carson Daly and Early Today. Even Game Show N...
2020-06-19 14:12:14 +0000 UTC
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I never thought I would ever come back to this. After a steady stream of music packs released throughout 2014-2016, I assumed Valve was done with the whole “CS:GO music kit” concept. After the Radicals Box hit in 2016, there had been nary a peep when it comes to that kind of content.
Then something changed. Throughout 2019 to 2020, Valve started slowly doling out individual kits, which was a better strategy to me as I could basically write about them when I had enough music kits to ...
2020-05-01 19:12:38 +0000 UTC
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