Scop’s Blog

To be honest, going into this game, I thought BioShock 2 was a cash-in. After all, how can you recreate the success of a game that stood out for doing things differently? How do you follow up a story that pulls from social theory and the likes of Ayn Rand? While I never completely shook that feeling playing BioShock 2, the game worked awfully hard to convince me that it was fun and worthy in its own right.

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Knightengale (who has contributed to this site in the past) is quite skilled at, and I say this in the nicest possible way, annoying the crap out of me. One of his latest offenses was claiming to be disinterested in the sandbox genre. I was shocked.

In one sentence, he managed to dismiss many games I adored. Assassin’s Creed? Fallout 3? Gasp, Saint’s Row? Come to find out, he had an extremely narrow definition of sandbox games. He essentially restricted it to the GTA series and “clones” thereof, such as Saint’s Row. This cooled me down some, but as I prepared to revise his definition, I realized… mine was not very good, either.

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I was standing next to a Gears of War poster the other day (one of many), and it had Emergence Day written on it:  11.12.2006.  I found it hard to believe that the game was nearly three years old already.  It has even been eight months since Gears 2 came out, now.

Oddly for me, it got me thinking about how graphics have evolved in the past few years, or, rather, how they have not. (continue reading…)

“Sin to Win” is a new promotional contest being run by EA to promote Dante’s Inferno.  In this contest you enter by submitting as many pictures as you can of yourself being photographed with a booth babe at Comic-con.  The grand prize?  You get yourself a night of paparazzi, access to an exclusive event, a limo ride, a “SINful dinner”, and the supposed hook: you get to do all this with two booth babes.

Despite encouraging acts of lust, I’d like to put the morality of the issue aside.  I say this because when I first saw this contest I thought with my head, “Aww yeah!”  Then I thought with my other head, “Wait, this is a load of bullshit.” (continue reading…)

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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