Scops Blog

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Unrelated announcement (maybe I do need to get Twitter or something):  New Fiction up in my Works section.  It’s the first part of a series I’ve been thinking about for a while.  Yes, it’s a vampire story, but I am going all Neal Stephenson on you and making you learn the lingo via context.  It’s rough, so let me know what you think.

Normally (i.e. the two other Rebounds) these articles are about games I played a while back and wanted to review to bring out a point.  This one is simply about an old game that I finally picked up recently… which brings out a point.

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A few points of order before I write a real post (promise!)

Note:  Posts are ordered by relevance, from greatest to least.  Feel free to stop reading when you get bored.  You will not miss anything.

A coffin for a friend

-As you can see, part of the reason I have not posted to my gaming blog is because I have not had an Xbox 360 on which to game.  By the by, if you happen to have a bricked 360 with a RRoD, e74 error, or a bad DVD-ROM drive and want to get rid of it, lemme know.

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When I first heard of OnLive last night, I did not think much of it.  As I started going through the news stories and getting the impressions from industry heads (I could aim a low-blow to Denis Dyack here, but I will not), I admit the Kool-Aid started looking a bit tastier.  Steve Perlman has done a damn good job selling his product.

After some time to mull over this new tech, my thoughts are this:  if everything went right for OnLive, it would mean a true paradigm shift in this industry.  The reality, however, is that this sweet tune is probably going to go a bit off-key when it reaches consumers.

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I am working on a rebound for Vampire:  The Masquerade – Bloodlines right now, but I do not think I will publish it.  I wanted to point it out as a great role-playing experience, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it failed in most of the same places that every other RPG does.  Namely, these games do not make you play a role. Read more »

Fine, WordPress don’t update.  Dreamhost can just cut me off anytime they please for the sake of “security issues.”  I have got plenty of ideas for full articles right now, but tonight I just have a few short comments on a wide variety of subjects, and that is what you will get for now.

-Folk wisdom states (to paraphrase), “A man will pay twice as much for something, because he needs it.  A woman will buy something she does not need, because it is on sale for half price.”  Folk wisdom has never been on slickdeals.net. Read more »

Or, how much I suck at acronyms.

My copy of F.E.A.R. 2 is in the mail, and I have been spending some quality time with the Resident Evil 5 demo, so it seems a good time to reflect on the nature of fear in video games.  A good way to start seems to identify four ways that our favorite survival horrors get the blood pumping. Read more »

Things have been a bit quite here lately, but hopefully you have noticed the tweaks I have made to the website.  For vague, esoteric reasons, I can’t discuss some of them, but do check out the new story in my Works/Links page.  It is a story I wrote for a writing group I had going with my friends a few months back.  Thanks to GoogleDocs to taking away all the trouble of hosting it.

Thanks, too to Jere, for ensuring that the first ad that appears on my website is for a vacuum.

Hopefully you will not have to wait long for my next post, and I plan on adding some of my favorite links to the Works/Links page as well, so you can see just how I go about wasting my time.

Finally, if you don’t like checking this website every day, I do have the RSS feed set up by WordPress.  Click on the orange icon in the top right of the website to check it out.  Just do not forget to stop by and check out the real thing every once in a while!

I finished Gears of War:  Aspho Fields by Karen Traviss like I do most books, with a 100-200 page sprint that keeps me up until 3:00 AM.  Traviss appears to have mastered (what I believe to be) the first rule of working in an established universe, and that is preserving the feel of the franchise.

Obviously, there are no brutal cutscenes to watch or bosses to fight.  Instead, Traviss works on the familiar characters of Delta Squad and Colonel Hoffman, along with newcomer Tai Kaliso.  In this, she appears to have mastered the second rule as well:  Adding characters and backstory that fit into what we already know.

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During my aforementioned period of shifting tastes in high school, a few of my closest friends were getting into a little IP called Asheron’s Call.  They regaled me with tales of late-night questing, and often asked me to partake in their adventures.  I declined.

Back then, I claimed it was an issue of money.  I did not have a credit card, and it was always a big thing to ask my parents to use theirs, so monthly transactions were out of the question.  My first real job was cleaning the floors of a grocery store over a summer, and even then, $15 a month is a lot of money to somebody making $7.35/hour on five hour shifts.

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