Seriously, books. Anybody that knows me knows that I am not a big reader. Reaching back I can really only recall a couple of books that I enjoyed reading. Choose your own adventure books interested me in my early years. When you think about it they served as a kind of interactive media akin to gaming. Now for actual novels, I remember starting with the Island of the Blue Dolphins and its sequel Zia. Then I remember enjoying books like Brave New World, 1984, and The Giver, which I base most of my future reasoning on. In high school I was fascinated with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and find it to be a series I reread every couple of years. In recent memory I read the first couple of Halo novels and the first Mass Effect book. Now for some reason in 2009 I was compelled to read a lot and I don’t really know why. Perhaps the lack of decent video game narratives pushed me into this old pastime. Either way I will admit that reading a book does seem to go against my personality. However, when you consider that a game’s story greatly determines how much I enjoy it, it starts to sort of makes sense. So without further ado I present my summaries of the books I read in 2009. Yes, after all these years I am willingly doing a book report. Continue reading ‘Besides Gaming 2009: Books’
Written by: Sythlia
In all fairness, you should’ve called it Middle Effect. It’s not going to be able to have that fresh & new feel of the first or the (hopefully) epic conclusion that ties everything up in the third. It’s not a lesser game for what it decided to focus on: the character development. It’s more of a game to explore the characters than focus on a heavier story plot like ME1 did. For me, I really liked doing each and every one of the loyalty quests and I can’t wait to go back and do it all renegade. Continue reading ‘Middle Effect 2, Another POV’
Mass Effect 2 is a good game, that in my opinion, does everything it can to prevent itself from being a great game. I attribute most of the things I don’t like about it to the fact that the game is very consolidated. Everything seems to be rounded down to its most basic elements. Interestingly I found that most of the action gameplay reminded me greatly of other third person shooters, most recently Army of Two 2. Mass Effect 2 plays like that with some very basic RPG elements thrown in. I think I was just expecting more from the game. It was disappointing to me but not very. Maybe I just had high expectations for the game considering how good the first Mass Effect game and Dragon Age was. If you really want to know my reasoning please feel free to continue reading, but I do warn, there are EXTREME SPOILERS AHEAD. Continue reading ‘Lesser Effect 2 Review (Spoiler warning for those click happy)’
After reading a lot of other gamers picks for 2009 I decided to play some of them. Now I had heard of most of them before but passed on them because they seemed mediocre. Most of them are small games from independent developers and studios. I was pleasantly surprised by most of them though. It just goes to show that you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a good game. Even more so when that game turns out to be greater than some of their mainstream counterparts. Continue reading ‘Other’s 2009 Favorites’
I listen to music like any normal human being. I currently have around 4,200 songs on my hard drive. Everything from anime, video game, j-pop, rap, light, heavy, classic rock, alternative, and even some county music can be found there. Most of the time I just use winamp on my music folder and play it all. That way it’s totally random and I just shuffle though the deluge letting whatever music fits my mood play out. I would now like to take a moment and list some of the tracks that I added to that collection in 2009. Continue reading ‘Besides Gaming 2009: Music’
Lunch Table