I was raiding the other night, and something snapped. Some switch in my brain clicked, in a sudden, surprising manner. For the last four years I have played one game, often to the total exclusion of other games. I have spent so many hours on it, collecting items, fighting, and honestly making real and lasting friendships. But as Wednesday night rolled on in the desolate Firelands, as the members of were downing bosses and murdering trash, I realized something. I was done with this game, done with it in a way that I have never felt before. I didn't want to be in Azeroth anymore, I don't see myself going back. Read more

WoW...and that is it. Everything else took a major fucking backseat to my pursuit of a home and a chance to kill Firelands bosses. Well this past week I finally found my new home on Eldre'Thalas, and I found a guild that I like being with, and that raids. has become my new home, and it seems filled with people who are generally nice. I also got in at just the right time it seems as well. After one night in Firelands with them, they asked me to be part of their regular raiding group, which is really more than I hoped for. Read more

The damn itch where I feel the need to raid. It usually happens when my gear catches up to what would be considered to be raid ready. I somehow manage to do this despite never getting the chance to actually raid. However, I put myself in a bit of a spot when it comes to actually getting to raid now. The server I find myself now on, Wyrmrest Accord has two major problems with it. First of all, it's an RP realm that actually RP's. This is definitely weird for me, coming from Earthen Ring, which is full of fucking morons and little else, but at least they raid. Wyrmrest Accord as a server is more concerned about Black Temple than Firelands, which does not net me valor points. Read More

So I am back from my trip to the Dogfish Head brewery in Delaware, and I have come home with a few interesting beers from what has become over the years my favorite brewery. In the spirit of my weekend traveling, I decided to rip of a great blog I read, and do a game and booze pairing. Read More

So I settled on Chrono Trigger on the Nintendo DS for my game to play during the weekend. I got to play a surprising amount of the game, though most of it came during the horrific car ride to Delware, and back. As such I did not get to drink really while playing it. I am also very tired tonight, and decided not to indulge in the pairing I thought up for the game. Chateau Jiahu by Dogfish Head is what I plan on trying tomorrow and seeing if my ideas will gel nicely with the game. I think they will.

In the meantime; I was just talking to my friend Joe about how the Wii U will have DLC. I like the idea, but they need to fix this memory issue if they're going to do this. I refuse to catalog what DLC I put on what SD memory cards.

So Nintendo is apologizing to early adopters. Rewarding them...whatever. It seems even the re-release of what many consider to be the greatest game of all time was not able to push the big N over 850K sales of it's new portable funtime machine. With absolutely nothing I can think of coming out in August, and Star Fox 64 (a remake...) coming out in mid-Sept, it seems Nintendo has finally realized they counted the chickens before they hatched...and those eggs without chickens leaked egg shit everywhere. Read More

I plan on having something up tomorrow. Also I am going to steal a page from another blog I read. The Art of Pairing Video Games with Booze is a great time, and I love what he does. Since I am going to Delaware this weekend to go to the Dogfish Head brewery, I figured I will try and think of a game pairing or two, and test it out. Anyway, yes, tomorrow will bring new stuff.

I feel like I could say it's a pretty Diablo with a dog and knock off for the night. I still may do that halfway through this thing, who knows. Maybe I'll just start talking about chocolate. The possibilities are endless.  Read more

I was never one to play all the games I own as soon as I get them. I always had a modest backlog of games going on, usually RPG's, which as we know, tend to take a lot more time to play than the more standard cover-based shooty bullshit. WoW doesn't help matters either. Game is really more of a fucking lifestyle choice, and it's starting to bug me again. Read more

It is weird. I find myself wanting to do something that I have no wanted to do in a while. I touched on it in the last post when I spoke about...well really nothing. It was just babbling. But what I was hinting at the other day was that I was going to be trying raiding again. This is something that became part of my normal week, and while it was fun doing it with people who were fun to be around, we suffered from a heavy burnout when Deathbringer Saurfang was brought down. Eventually the guild stopped raiding and most people left the game. I stuck around for the most part, and while I have had fun with my casual leveling game, I have found myself wanting to do more of the endgame content. Read on

I have a few draft blogs sitting around on Blogger that I have written in varying states of weariness and/or sobriety. They're all crap, not that what I tend to write is normally gold, but seriously, bad. Tonight really seems as good a night to write as anything. I really was not going to, but I was playing like such absolute crap in heroic ZG that I decided that WoW and myself were not meeting in the middle tonight. I apologized to my group for my poor DPS and tendency to fucking croak and excused myself in the hope that they would get a random DPS who had their head in the game, as mine was obviously not. It was odd too, as I really wanted to play tonight, as it has for the past few nights, WoW has reinstalled itself as my succor from an annoying day of work. I have even found myself for a week now being sick of smacking my face into the heroic wall while using the LFD system. So much so that tonight, I spent a good deal of time skimming possibilities for raid spots. More to read bitches

I have been in a weird place lately while playing games. I find myself with such a daunting backlog of games to play that I can never get anything remotely close to done due to the almost paralyzing size of the pile of discs I want to go through. Despite that, I find myself dicking around in games that I am not having such a great time with, if anything they just serve to waste time while I tell myself I am looking for something better to do. I am somewhat sure that last sentence is the very essence of, if not close to, insanity. I will talk more after I put the cut here. Click on the article to read more.

I make no secret of the fact that I am a big fan of The Escapist Magazine. I think it is easily one of the best, most complete geek resources out there. However, for a while, when I first started going to the site, I was only availing myself of one of the articles, and that was Zero Punctuation by Yahtzee Croshaw. I don't even remember how I came to finding this dude, as I don't remember anyone recommending it to me. That is neither here nor there though, my point is, sometime in the last two weeks, he wrote an article about this website that I have never heard of before. Now normally if this guy goes out of his way to point something out, it usually means he is going to tear it apart with his superior accent.

However this time the focus of his writing were a series of screenshots and videos of people essentially giving the Mystery Science Theater treatment to playthroughs of video games, called Let's Play. So far today, I have been spending a good part of my day watching a dude named Garin play trough Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, with a rotating cast of guest speakers. Now I know I am extremely late to the party when it comes to this website, but if you're as slow as me and have never heard of it, check it out, well worth the time. Hell it has made writing more enjoyable than music or TV tonight.

Anyhoo, here is the link: http://lparchive.org/

I have been in something of a writing funk as of late. I think I finally figured out why too. When I first started writing this thing, it was supposed to be about my thoughts on video games. Quickly though, things devolved into me simply reviewing games, which while fun, did become far to formulaic and hence, boring. What I need to do is get back into what I wanted to do with this deal, and write whatever comes to mind about video games. So here, I shall commence writing about whatever I damn well please.

Quick list of the top 10 games I missed the boat on that I need to finish...or start to play (no order in terms of importance)


1. Half- Life
2. God of War
3. Dragon Age: Origins
4. Shadow of the Colossus
5. Earthbound
6. Devil May Cry
7. Fallout
8. Persona
9. Panzer Dragoon
10. Shadow Hearts

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I promised I was going to play Fable 3 upon my completion of Halo: Reach. So really me talking about this damn game has been a long time coming. I finished it something like a month ago, I don't know. I mean I could go check, but that would require me turning on the Xbox, which shall not be done as House is on right now, and nothing interrupts my viewing of that show...nothing. So anyhow, let's talk about Fable 3 and what a piece of crap it was. Well...gave away my opinion right there didn't I? I should really talk more about this I guess, so here it goes. Click on to see the rest of the article.

So I decided to give the Fable series another chance after Halo: Reach decided to show me that a series as bland as wall Spackle can eventually churn out something worth being played. I played the first Fable game way back when before the 360 came out, and it was impossible to hate anymore. It was boring beyond reproach, bland and did not feature one original idea. While the moral choice system of gaming was still in its infancy, you had games like Knights of the Old Republic doing it infinitely better. Fable just had you kicking puppies, where as Revan could tear shit up if you decided to. It had a leveling system that left nothing to the imagination, and the world itself was so cookie-cutter, I'm still surprised everything wasn't shaped like a Christmas tree, a five pointed star, and a gingerbread man.

So fast-forward to the tail end of 2010, and we're up to the third Fable game. I skipped Fable 2, because really, after disliking the first one so much and seeing that about fuck-all changed while watching my friends play it, why would I bother with the second one? So back to the original point. I took the plunge and bought the third game, trying to push aside any prejudice I had about the series in order to give the game a blank slate, make sure it was judged by its own merits. In the end though, this was a complete waste of time and effort, as I could have honestly taken any thoughts I had about Fable 1, apply them to this supposedly new game and almost nothing would have been off the mark.

Albion is still a world full of things you do not need to do, and if you do happen to do them, there is really no tangible reward. Any reward you would also get, even if it were an actual help, would not be needed anyway, as all you need to beat the game is two thumbs and half of a working eye. Playing on the normal setting was such an absolute joke that I only died in the game once, and that was only because I was not paying the slightest bit of attention to the game at that moment. Regardless of this though, there is no such thing as an armor stat, so your frilly pirate prince shirt apparently affords all the same protection of that suit of armor you bought.

The story to this game, while keeping a sense of flow, is completely stupid. By the by, I am going to spoil the whole plot here, because it's fucking March, the game came out in November and a Paddington Bear book reads better. You're the prince...your brother, the king sucks. He's a dick, and he hadda break a few eggs in front of you to make his royal omelet. So you get mad, run away like a sissy, and get people to follow you by hugging them, or playing patty-cake, or fighting some easy undead a paraplegic 4 year old can fend off. Then you go yell at him, he gives you the kingdom, then you have to fight off the BP oil spill with the help of a man with a hookah, and a bald woman Lion Head had the common sense to leave out a romance subplot for, because bald women are gross. I am guessing there is a message there somewhere. Oh and you also have the help of a gruff, old British man who suffers a series of personal trials that makes you care infinitely more about him than any of the faceless whores you can marry and knock up in the game.

Speaking of those...things, like in any Fable game you can marry almost any NPC you meet in the course of the game. However, each city only has about a grand total of oh...I dunno, 4 face models, maybe. Or maybe it's only 4 face models stretched out over the course of the game with differing clothing, who knows. Point is, like I said, you can marry any of these people, and have children, assuming it is a heterosexual relationship (I guess, I wouldn't know if Albion has Butt-babies). However, the problem is with this game, and the games before this is that if you are a remotely normal person, you will not give a crap about any of the semi-faceless, one word-track set of people you can become betrothed to. If you can somehow find yourself giving half a crap about the NPCs you can do anything with in this game, then that simply means you are the type of person that goes into a department store and names all the mannequins, and remembers those names on each subsequent visit.

Lastly combat is the same as it has been in Fable previous; if you use melee, you're an idiot. Dump everything into AoE magic and go nuts. You can target spells, but why would you? You have near infinite health and eventually you can cover the screen in pretty much everything you want. I happened to choose lake of fire+ raining ice shards. However, I am sure that like the rest of this pointless game, the magic combos you use are totally up to you.

I normally find myself responding to the release of a new Halo game in the same fashion, with a resounding "Ughhhhhhh...", then remembering that I should not be surprised at the fact that people who like their games as bland and unoriginal as a cinder block exist, and exist in force. Since 2001, we have all been drowned in the mediocrity of Halo and it's crowd of middle schoolers corpse-humping people between shots of Ritalin pills administered by parents too lazy to notice that their son, whose balls have not dropped yet is thoroughly telling a grown man off who just wanted to unwind after a day of work, and instead has to listen to some little pissant go on about fucking his mom in all the octaves that Justin Beiber will no longer be able to reach once the hormones for his gender reassignment surgery take over and he will finally be a real boy. Ten fucking years and that boy still has somehow not grown up, or he has cloned himself ad nauseum into some sort of barely pubescent army that has infected the world of online gameplay. Honestly this type has been around since before Halo. But somehow the union of console online gameplay and the console first person shooter have made some sort of scary singularity that pulls in all the dickheads with a headset and brings them directly into the realm where a normal sane person just wants some time to face other players in a competitive game. Fuck, nowadays it is a risk playing Uno on XBL. Uno...really?

So I got a PS3 for Christmas. And since I got a PS3, this opened me to a whole world of exclusive games that I have always wanted to play, but haven't had the chance to. My current plan is to still use the Xbox for games that go on all platforms, for a very petty reason. I am invested in achievements as opposed to trophies. Switching now would be like switching my main in WoW. All that work down the toilet, no thank you. So yes, my PS3 will be seeing a lot of play, just not exactly as much as my Xbox. But anyway, I have started a few games on the new system, most notably God of War. The first one, yes I have dabbled in the game, but never really plowed through it, so I am hoping to change that, and when I do, I will review the trilogy as a whole. For right now however, I am going to talk about one of the games I was most excited for, one of the reasons I really wanted this system. Hit the jump to see me babble about Katamari Forever.

My friend Steve made a short Facebook (It's a little weird that word is still considered misspelled.) post the other day about the games he has played, rating them and then saying what his favorite game of the year is. I meant to copy him, doing the same thing with the games I have played this year, but then I realized why don't I just take this chance and return to my blog with some game of the year talk. So I am gonna do something I am not always fond of doing. I am going to apply number grades to the games I talk about. Everything will also get a brief review, colored through the lenses of hindsight, as I am not gonna sit down and play these games again simply for this article. Alright, let's get started, well we'll get started after the break.