So the talk of the day is that Pillars of Eternity, the Kickstarter darling of 2012, has come out - to considerable amounts of fanfare and a fair bit of muffled grumbling on the side ( Read more... )

Well, the last month has actually been quite busy with all the requisite writing of articles and grant applications that comes with my new territory of PhD studentness, but thankfully not quite busy enough to entirely keep me from my recent streak of actually *gasp* playing games. And so, lately, I've been plumbing the lowest depths of grognardom ( Read more... )

I'm just going to ramble for a bit about games.

So I've been playing a whole lot of Japanese RPG Maker horror games recently; largely because they're the kind of short games I could conveniently play on my laptop during commutes to work. They're also free, and if there's scenester drama involved in their creation, I don't know about it, so that's ( Read more... )

So it's just about May Day, and I have the day off! In that spirit, nary a word about work. Instead, the occasion is that I'm almost done with Dark Souls II - which is not as good as the first game, but still good - and, more importantly, finished my new playthrough of Vagrant Story, the first in years. This momentous occasion calls for a ( Read more... )

Somehow, through a malicious twist of fate, I've spent a great deal of time last month testing database software at work. While it's an interesting experience in a way, and some of the (numerous) bugs are entertainingly bizarre, what's really fascinating about it is this strange and possibly inevitable cultural conflict that manifests between a ( Read more... )

So I was in the Dark Souls II beta this month, which is probably the most interesting thing to happen this month, except maybe finding an 18th-century baby skeleton with a bead necklace, but... there's not much to talk about that, really, so Dark Souls II beta it is ( Read more... )

When I have not been doing other things (*cough*thesis*cough*) I've been playing quite a bit of Dark Souls. It's a great game that I like a lot, and its reputation for difficulty is not entirely undeserved, but part of what's interesting about the game is that it - intentionally, I presume - is that for a game that has "Prepare to Die" on the cover ( Read more... )

Still not M.Phil. Oh well ( Read more... )

So, what is this warm and fuzzy feeling? Am I happy? Boo! Hiss! Bad feelings! Bad!

It's kind of weird, because I can't really decide what I should be this happy about. Ostensibly, not much is different from last year, but it just seems all of the same things feel a a great more fun right now - even walking around in libraries with huge stacks of ( Read more... )

I have spent most of the last week in the grips of a persistent and spectacularily distracting flu. I've also played a lot of Zerg in Starcraft II. I would like to think that there is no deeper connection between the two than that I really like the Zerg and that once you're sick in a sufficiently unpleasant way it's increasingly difficult to do ( Read more... )