It finally starts…

Though it’s been sitting here for several months waiting to be installed, I finally started in on RHEM 4.

This is just the first of what I imagine will be many pages of notes, diagrams, hastily-scrawn and dejectedly-erased maps and painstakingly researched clues. RHEM ain’t no walk in the park.

A friend of mine […]

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A map of our Minecraft server.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

A few days ago I said this about Pirates 4: “This movie sure had pirates!” I feel like I could just leave it at that, and have said everything about the movie that needs to be said. It’s not really a question of whether or not I enjoyed the movie. Do you like pirates? This […]

FF12’s Awesome Cast: The Pirates

If the kids are the foundation of Final Fantasy XII, and the nobles are the driving force behind its plot, I think it’s certainly fair to say that the sky pirates are its heart and soul. Balthier and Fran are, unquestioningly, the most memorable PCs in the game.

Fantasy writing — and JRPGs in particular […]

E74 Wins

It is with a heavy heart that I report that my Xbox 360 has finally lost its long battle against the dreaded E74. Upon firing it up to play L.A. Noire earlier this week it once again retreated behind its horrible red ring. So, as a prerequisite to cracking cases and sleuthing evidence, I had […]

L.A. Noire

There are, like, two or three games in history I can positively recommend based solely on storytelling alone. L.A. Noire is one of them. Playing this game is very much like watching the most stylishly entertaining 1940s crime drama you’ve ever seen. This game bends over backwards to make you forget you’re holding a controller, […]

The last two parts of my NaNoWriMo thing are on my PC at work…

…so instead you get one-line impressions of the media I’ve been rotting my brain with this week.

L.A. Noire – This game is even more remarkable than I was expecting. I think the guy whose job it was to program the interrogation scenes got the words “doubt” and “accuse” mixed up, though.

Pirates 4 – […]

FF12’s Awesome Cast: The Nobles

The first thing a fantasy story does is belch out a bunch of nonsense words at you. These nonsense words are supposedly the names of places, important characters, groups of people, concepts or ideas… but you won’t remember any of them because a stream of nonsense words doesn’t mean anything without context. So when the […]

The Fourth Season Problem

HBO’s Game of Thrones probably has no chance of making it four seasons. Let’s face it: this is a big-budget series on a station which is known for canning its big-budget series after two or three award-winning years. Most likely we’ll get two good years out of it before it pulls up a chair alongside […]

How to get the Zodiac Spear (in fifteen easy steps!)

Look up on GameFAQs which arbitrarily-placed treasures to avoid. Play Final Fantasy XII for about 30 hours. Figure out enough of the medicine-hunting sidequest in the Estersand to get across the river and into Mosphoran Highwaste. Kill King Bomb. (This is the easy part!) Run through like nine maps’ worth of unkillable monsters who […]