New Blog

I started a new blog with a friend for book reviews. You can find it here. And I just posted a new book review today.

Chains and Words Excite Me

Sometimes dumb chain messages can be awesome:

Game analysis, as a part of social psychiatry, is only interested in describing the game when it does occur regardless of how often that may be.

It's international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don't mention the title. Copy the rules as part of your status.

A Game of Poems: Who is Playing?

How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

Things I'm Excited About

This... a million times this:


This is the very first video available for the game Wasteland 2. Wasteland 2 is being developed by Brian Fargo, using a talented cast of writers, musicians, artists and programmers.

With many of the collaborators on this project having experience directly with the writing and design of Fallout 1 and 2 and Planescape: Torment(though let it be known that Fallout only exists because at the time Fargo didn't have the license to produce a sequel to his own game, which came first, Wasteland), Wasteland 2 has the pedigree and experience and vision behind it to perhaps be one of the best RPGs ever made. Ever. Even if it isn't, and that's nothing to be ashamed of because Planescape: Torment is an incredibly high bar, this game is still set to be GOOD.

This:

Shadowrun Returns is only a month or so into development and the team at Harebrained-Schemes already has a beautifully styled world evolving in their concept art that is readily apparent in everything they're doing, as well as already releasing stories for flavor to give a feel for the world they are developing for. Their work is incredibly awesome and I am loving everything I see and I hope they continue to be as public about their development in the future as they have been up till now.

The Two Guys from Andromeda's current project, SpaceVenture:



Space Quest was one of the primary games of my formative years. The humor and story telling, characters, and puzzles are still with me to this day. The fact that the original creators are back to make a spiritual successor to a great intellectual property is simply amazing.

Well, folks, that's the short list. THere's more, but I'll save that for another day.

Raise Your Jolly Roger in the Name of Inevitability

So, Cambodia, which does not have an extradition treaty with Sweden, and certainly has no problem letting your average fugitive run free, generally for more horrendous crimes than making it slightly easier to find and download copyrighted music and videos, has detained the co-founder of The Pirate Bay. They don't even have a law that on its face allows them to detain and extradite a fugitive from Sweden, but they are working very hard to find one under which they can do it anyway.

This smells. This really stinks of a deal poisoned with money.



I'm not worried though. This isn't even an issue of right and wrong. This is an issue of inevitability and reality. These industries in their death are trying to hold back a flood with their hands rather than learning to swim. Some people will go to jail, but it's a losing battle.

You cannot fight piracy by trying to lock down your data. It is impossible, the very act of making your data available to anyone breaks this. People are generally willing to pay for service. I recommend that they start fighting piracy by making a product that competes with it instead of one that is inferior to it.

I buy my games from steam because even though they can track what I've done they provide the amazing service of maintaining my library and making my games available to me whenever and wherever I go along with more and more cloud saves. In contrast, 10 years ago, every single game I purchased I had to find a cd crack for in order to keep from having to root around through my CDs or dvds to get to whatever games I felt like playing that day.

The future is here. Sink or swim.