This weekend, I’m playing some of the following games!
1) Streets of Rage Remake!
2) Civilization IV!
3) Mirror’s Edge!
4) Darkest Hour!
What are you guys playing this weekend?
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Delicious brains!
Something else you’ll come to learn about me is that I love zombies. Not like that, I mean, I guess if she was fresh and tied up and all, but I’m on a tangent. As a concept, as a threat, as a source of drama, I love zombies.
I have traced this to a gift I got as a kid. A friend of my grandma’s apparently thought that a book which detailed in exquisite, grotesque detail pretty much every flesh eating zombie movie to date would be an excellent gift for a seven year old child. I spent fifteen years terrified of zombies to the point where a movie would give me nightmares for a week.
I’m not as bad now, but I still have an amazing fascination with them. Something about them just appeals to me; how they are relentless, numberless, and tireless. The thing is, zombies have been done well in movies, they’ve been done well in books, but despite being a very common foe these days, they have very rarely been done well in games.
Partly this is because what we expect, or are presumed to expect, as gamers. Despite the “survival horror” moniker, survival is not all it is cracked up to be. Carry health items, conserve ammo, dodge zombies/ghosts/demons/whatever. Nothing about food, clean water, secure shelter, and so forth. Now some games go completely to the other end of the scale and make zombies fodder for hilarious slaughter, like Dead Rising. That’s quite fine with me, I love that sort of thing. I would prefer that ones at the survival, rather than action, end of the spectrum made a lot more effort to simulate survival proper.
More broadly the ‘survival’ genre is not exactly overflowing. There’s the Disaster Report series and… nothing else really comes to mind. Fort Zombie could have been something special but ended up being close to unplayable. Dead Island has the benefit of a lack of guns, but from what early reporting I hear, it is still conclusively action-oriented. I have no trouble with action, even as part of the survival end of the genre, but it should be short, dangerous, and shocking, I feel. Two of the current games I feel best do zombies are Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, and Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without A Pulse. The former of these because although many of the survival aspects are absent, and although the undead are fast (which is a huge faux pas in my elitist eyes), this game is one of the few to truly make the zombie apocalypse feel horrifying and dangerous. I don’t stand around fighting zombies in UD: I get done what I have to get done and then get the heck outta Dodge. When I see a dozen of the things come tearing over the crest of a hill at me, even though I’m on horseback with plentiful ammo and full Deadeye, I feel a shot of terror. It’s huge effective.
Stubbs the Zombie is a different kettle of fish altogether. You are a zombie, the eponymous Stubbs, and though your own abilities go rather beyond those of the typical undead (Using your head as a bowling ball and lobbing your liver as an explosive to name but two), the zombies you create are actually very faithful to what one thinks of as a zombie and, more than this, they act with uninfected AI characters very well. It is deeply fun and satisfying to infect a few people and watch them reanimate and spread amongst the populace.
Hopefully Dead State, though a tactical RPG, will be able to capture some many of the necessary elements. (To any who doubt how tense and downright terrifying turn-based games can be, go and dig up a copy of X-Com, fight a terror mission against Chrysalids, and you’ll reconsider your position.) From what they say they are giving due consideration to things like the need for supplies, the difficulty in trusting other survivors, and so forth. Even so I’m still holding out for a true zombie game in a GTA San Andreas style setting, which a heavy emphasis on survival, hiding, and cowering like a baby.
Intro post: Mister Adequate
So I sit here mulling over where constitutes a good introductory post. Many of you already know Pike and enjoy her writings on many things, but this “friend” she speaks of is a rather more nebulous proposition. But maybe I’m overthinking it. After all, how many people will be hooked by this compared to how many will come across actual blog posts that they find interesting (Or, alternatively, so completely deranged that they can’t help but read more)? Nevertheless it’s better to make a good impression here than not. So. Yes. An introductory post. I suppose it would be germane to talk about my gaming past and preferences? This seems like a sensible line of discussion.
I don’t remember what the first game I played was. I don’t recall ever not playing games, and I can’t tell you the first one any more than I can tell you what my first solid food was. I’ve been gaming my whole life, now a quarter of a century, and I’m yet to grow bored or disaffected with them. It is by far my preferred use of time, and if I’m not playing games I’m usually reading about or talking about them – although I’ll probably still have something turn-based running somewhere or a flash game or the like. I don’t like not having a game of some sort going on.
I’ve owned a fairly wide array of systems, beginning with the Amstrad CPC and continuing until the modern day. I have an especial fondness for the PlayStation, which I played many many games on. In fact, I played more PlayStation games than I didn’t! I also have a very soft spot for the Dreamcast. Currently I am mostly a PC gamer, not out of any serious choice but because that is where the games I currently like tend to be found.
I have a great fondness for strategy and management genres. I don’t avoid any particular genres, but I do have my preferences, so you can probably expect to see a bulk of my posts oriented towards them. What I have a real interest in is the systems that games create. How the AI interacts with other AIs and with the player, how it reacts when you put a cat among the pigeons, and so on and so forth. You’ll see quite a bit about that subject as time goes on I would wager.
As for the blogging side of things, I’ve never really done it before outside of a dusty old LJ, so I am essentially a neophyte. However, my good friend Pike does know what she is doing and I am following her lead. I can only hope to do her justice in sharing this platform with her. As a final note, I ask that you forgive my profligate overuse of semi-colons; they are such beautiful, overlooked, and misunderstood pieces of grammar and I cannot help but insert them at every available opportunity.
Intro Post: Pike
So here I am. Blogging again. I’ve called myself a serial blogger before and it looks like this is still a fitting title. I am, it would appear, not quite myself if I’m not pounding furiously away on a keyboard somewhere, making sure the world can read my thoughts if they feel so inclined.
This blog came about mostly in a flash of inspiration that really should have come to my mind several years ago, but hey, no one ever said I was a logical person. Anyways, let me explain where I’m coming from here. My “blogging” career probably really started back when I was a wee tyke and filling up empty notebooks with my chickenscratch. I had diaries and journals at a young age, and going back and reading through them is always hilarious because they tend to focus on exactly how far I got in Super Mario World that day while foregoing any other details about, I dunno, school or whatnot.
This trend continued as I got older and eventually this culminated in Aspect of the Hare, my World of Warcraft blog that most of you readers probably initially got to know me through. Aspect of the Hare was originally a place for me to dump my thoughts where no one would have to read them. Of course, that plan backfired on me spectacularly and it wound up becoming a pretty big deal– much bigger than I ever would have expected. People were linking to me, WoW Insider was interviewing me, I had some thousand-odd subscribers at my peak, and it was a beautiful feeling knowing that I’d successfully managed to combine two of the things I love the most– video games and writing– into one exciting and neatly wrapped package. It was really a grand old time and I absolutely loved every minute of it. Unfortunately all good things must come to an end, and as my WoW playing began to wane, so, too, did my blogging.
Now I’m not me when I’m not writing, so obviously this was followed by Clockwork Hare, a “personal blog” of sorts where I could talk about whatever struck my fancy. Which is all fine and good, and I fully intend on maintaining that blog, but I’ve missed having a niche and a genre to talk about, which is what I had with Aspect of the Hare.
So then I was playing the vidya with a longtime friend and partner-in-crime, and I was thinking about it and I thought, you know what, Pike, why the HECK have you not started a video games blog yet? And why the HECK aren’t you writing it with your friend?
Enter The Android’s Closet, where a couple of dorks who wish they were mechanical talk about games. We hope you’ll enjoy the ride.
And about me, personally? Well, I imagine a good deal of you already know of me from my previous blogs, but if not, here’s the rundown: I’m Pike. I like goggles and pocket watches and history and ice cream and playing copious amounts of video games, and I have been doing the latter since I could hold a joystick and figured out that I could make Pac-Man and Dig-Dug move on the screen of our Commodore 64. Strategy and tactics based genres are my favorites, but in the end I’ll play anything. And then write about it. And then write about it some more.
So let’s begin, shall we?