Despite being neck-deep in the Golden Weekend event over on The Secret World, and also trying to get together entries for a truly epic forum contest they have going on (blog incoming on that Soon ™), I’ve made just enough free time to start poking around in Final Fantasy XIV again. Continue Reading
Archives
All posts for the month March, 2015
Over in my neck of the woods, we’ve been enjoying weather in the 50’s and 60’s (10 to 16 C) for the last couple weeks; right about at my favorite temperatures. Sadly, the temps dropped and last night, we were supposed to receive 1-3 inches (3-4 cm) of snow. Yeah…by the time it was over, we wound up with about 7 inches (18 cm).
Why would weather affect my blog? As I type this, I’m about halfway done shoveling lots of heavy snow and I’m already feeling my wrists ask me if I have a death wish for them. I’m just going to put it out there now that there won’t be a real post tonight. Hopefully I’ll be back tomorrow, or at least by Wednesday.
Take care, all – and stay warm?
When I was a kid, my brother and I walked everywhere. I mean, we had bikes that I’m sure we used sometimes; but my most lasting memories are always of the two of us walking. And the memories of walking lead to memories of gaming.
My brother and I had an active imaginary life, you see. Where some kids will pretend to be Batman or a Power Ranger, we pretended to be ourselves, but cooler and in a much cooler world than the one we were slogging through to get to school or the video rental store. We were rulers and generals, mages and warriors, in a never ending battle with…Mario. My seconds-in-command were Bowser, Yoshi, and later Setzer. Our slushies were potions. You get the idea. Continue Reading
On Friday, folks browsing The Secret World forums got a surprise. A thread had been started by one of the ingame NPCs. The post asked for help, and provided a short number sequence and a garbled audio file. Today, there was another post from that NPC – this time with a longer number string and a longer, still garbled audio file. Part of this second post’s puzzle has been solved, leading to a free trial key meant for new players interested in the game, but the rest of it is still being puzzled over by the community. Continue Reading
You’re welcome for the earworm. 😉
This week, there were a lot of changes going on in my favorite MMO, The Secret World. Our Game Director, Joel Bylos, announced that he will be moving on to a different Funcom project and the massive Enhanced Player Experience update went live. (detailed patch notes are also up)
This is still going to be a short post, for a couple reasons. Continue Reading
Over the last few days, I’ve seen an article on gender in gaming get passed around quite a bit. You can read it here; and it makes some interesting points. I’d love to see the study done over a wider group of people and see which results continue to be consistent. I’d also be very interested to read the “more comprehensive analysis.” The section that jumped out at me wasn’t about who likes playing which protagonists or who plays what type of games (those are also interesting, for the record). It was specifically this small section:
Burch and Wiseman took their study a step further by asking students if they identified as a “gamer.” While 65 percent of girls said no, and 65 percent of boys said yes, both genders displayed anecdotal evidence of being just as invested, and just as knowledgeable about games.
So, despite both the boys and girls displaying equal investment and knowledge in gaming, the girls were noticeably less likely to call themselves “gamers.”
This is something I’ve long had opinions about, but since they’re all anecdotal I’ve been careful about injecting them into conversations. The short version here is that some of us have got to rethink how we define a “gamer” if we’re using it to deny people their voice or push them out of the community. Continue Reading
I don’t watch a lot of reality tv shows. To be more accurate, I don’t watch a lot of tv. I don’t say that as a judgment on anyone else. I just had to unplug my cable for house renovations years ago and realized I didn’t miss it when it was gone. Since I didn’t miss it, I never plugged it back in.
Having said that, sometimes I get on a Netflix kick and watch a show that everyone else has been keeping up with for years. This time around it’s been Kitchen Nightmares (US), and I was surprised when I started seeing a connection to gaming. Confused? I’ll explain. Continue Reading
I ordered USB versions of the SNES and N64 controllers (NES was on backorder) during a recent online sale. I didn’t pick them up to use with emulators, though. I ordered them because I own a number of games on Steam that seem like they might play nicely with the controllers I grew up using. There’s some nostalgia involved in wanting to play with those specific controllers, of course, but that’s not the entire story. Continue Reading