Pokemon Go

In an effort to improve my over all quality of life, I have resumed this blog. Hopefully someone still reads it, although it has been… five entire years since I last posted? Seriously?

Uhm. Right. Well tonight I will talk about a game that statistically speaking you have either played, or heard someone else talk about, Pokémon GO! Specifically I want to take a look at why such a simple game blew up beyond what anyone expected. Most people are just shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘Eh, because Pokémon’ but I don’t think that’s the case. Pokémon is huge, sure, but no Pokémon game has ever been this big.

So why is it so huge? Why did millions of people suddenly start playing a Pokémon themed Marco Polo game? I have my personal opinions on the subject, and that’s all this will be, my intuition as someone who studied game design, and who has played more games than I would ever like to count. Please follow me down the rabbit hole of Pokémon GO!

Terraria Journal

DAY 1

I have decided to keep a journal of my journeys, perhaps it will help me stay sane. I have no idea how I got here, or if I will ever leave, but if I don’t this journal will help people understand who I am.

I awoke to find myself on a cliff, overlooking a small pool of water. A man was hovering over me, he smiled when I awoke. “Oh good, I was worried you weren’t going to make it. Welcome to Terraria!”

The man said he was my “Guide”. He wasn’t able to do too much guiding though, as he told me nightfall would come soon, and when it did, we would be in a bad way if we didn’t have shelter. I decided not to ask, and instead went to go find some wood. Searching my bag I discovered I had an axe. Where this came from, I have no idea, but it helped me collect enough wood to slap together a house. While gathering I was assaulted by strange, jelly monsters. My new axe made short work of them, as did a pickaxe I found. Returning to the cliff where I awoke, I got to work on our simple shelter. I got the roof over our heads just as night fell. My Guide told me to seal us in, it would be safer that way.

I was about to find out what he meant.

Scratching that MMO itch.

Yes. I missed my deadline for twice a week. Argh. I will, from now on, be posting once a week on Mondays, and then extra posts when I feel they are necessary. Cool? Cool.

So for those of you who know me, you will know I played World Of Warcraft pretty religiously a long time ago. It was what kept me going through the last few years of highschool and the first year of college. I had my lovely level 70 Draenei mage named “Kadganris”, who was everything I could possibly want from a character: He spent most of his time fishing instead of doing anything useful, and was generally just not very exciting for anyone but me. I loved him.

I stopped playing just before Wrath of the Lich King dropped, as I was rapidly running out of time to play, and to be honest the game felt stale. I haven’t gone back yet, and to do so now would cost a distressing amount of money. Unfortunately, the urge to play still rises every once in a while, which means i have resorted to other MMO’s to try to help. Here are some of those.

Rest in peace you magnificent bastard, we will meet again.

So. Been quiet around here.

Don’t worry! I didn’t suddenly explode or anything! For those of you who noticed that my “post-a-day” challenge stopped suddenly, well, your right, it did, good job. I couldn’t keep up that level of updates, I simply couldn’t think of enough things to talk about! However I don’t like only updating once a week, that feels weak to me. I am going to try to update twice a week, and see how I like that: Tuesdays and Thursdays sounds good, there isn’t much going on internet-wise on those days.

So what have I been up to? L.A.Noire!

Yeah. That one.

Dragons and robots and aliens oh my!

So for day four I am going to talk about an older RTS that has always tickled my fancy. It stands forever as the only RTS that I like all three playable races in, to a point that on the army select screen I am left staring at the three choices forever, just trying to make up my mind. This game didn’t sell very well, which really surprises me because everyone I have shown it to, thought it was absolutely amazing.

I am talking about Rise Of Legends.

Also some of you may be noticing that this  actually is going up on friday (its 2:30 am), but fuck that this counts.

Skyrim, More like SkyAWESOME.

Day three of my daily blogging. Moral is low, but caffeine supplies are high. I think I finally realized the problem with blogging every day: I actually don’t game enough to talk about stuff daily. Even if I did, I rarely game on the PC and that’s the only system I can get reliable screen-shots from.

So instead, I am going to talk more about Skyrim, because I want to, a lot. Here’s more game-play, it’s about 14 minutes long with a bit of overlap. Totally worth watching, even if you have to ignore the annoying presenters.

E3 thoughts

E3! WOO! For those of you who don’t know, E3 is the place where all the biggest game companies like to make excitable gamers like me cream their pants… metaphorically, not literally, although in some cases I am sure it is literal.

Anyway, lots of new revelations for games, a lot of which look awesome! Lets go over my personal favorites!
Right off the bat. SKYRIM! WOOOO SKYRIM! We have game-play!

((via Gametrailers))

Why the hell not.

So as an experiment, this week I am going to try to have a new post every day. Why? Because I can goddamnit. I consider it an experiment, I will be seeing if I can post about a thousand words a day (likely a little less, depending on how lazy I get. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

So what shall we talk about today? Well, the only real game I have been playing recently is…Super Smash Brothers. Uh. Woo!

Destroying my Iphones battery life: Game Dev Story

So last week or so I was desperately in need of a way to procrastinate, and the internet was being surprisingly unhelpful. As a result of this, and a long series of very random thoughts and decisions that made sense at the time, I bought the first iPhone game I have bought in a long time.  Its called Game Dev story, but if like most people you looked at the picture before reading this you already figured that out.

Poor-Man’s Gaming: Minecraft

Just a warning for you guys, this is going to be the first time this is really “poor-man’s gaming” and not “totally-free gaming”.  I will start by saying this game is €14.95, which google tells me is a little over $20.00 Canadian. I will also say that this game has, in my case, paid for itself a million times over.

What game could this possibly be that I want to talk about it this much? I bet I have you on the edge of your seat just wo-…oh. I put it in the title. Damn.

Yeah its Minecraft.

This game involves crafting, and possibly some mining.