The Book of the Shadows

  E7’s February/March Side-Story, A Game of Princes So, we’re a few days away from the final part of the Vivian side-story, Game of Thr… er, I mean, Game of Princes. This has been a really good story, which kind of sets up a pattern for SG at this point; expect that the story they release in February each year to be the best one they’ll release all year. Last year’s Valentine's Day side story, despite some people complaining early on due to the mechanics of it, was a very popular one, probably the most popular all year. The Valentine’s Day story the year before that was also very well liked, again probably the favorite of the year. In any case, this story is unique in that it has a very deliberate mystery element to it. I’ve got stuff to say on the way the main story is going too, but I’ll save that for another time. Spoiler Alert for anyone who hasn’t caught up on the side story yet but given the title of this post you should probably already expect spoilers. So, the story...

 So the big Rise update has been out for a couple days now, and you can mostly disregard my last blog post. They really did simplify things to the T.

In November of 2019 I made a post about the basics of gold farming in Epic 7. Here's an update in anticipation of some major changes coming next week.

With E3 behind us, I've been thinking about what a new Ace Combat might benefit from. For your consideration, another set of suggestions and ideas of Ace Combat 7.

Drum roll please... the unveiling of the top project for this anniversary weekend...

I hope everyone enjoyed the 4th of July weekend, and did/are enjoy/enjoying Tanabata. There is a big week ahead, but I thought I'd get started with a follow up to one of the last full posts I've done, which was my initial take on Ace Combat Infinity.

So I got to playing Ace Combat Infinity, and the first thing I wanted to figure out was if the teasers early on were really about making a real-world version of 4, arguably the most famous entry in the franchise, or was it something else.

Yesterday was the big kickoff for this year's Electronics Entertainment Expo, the video-game-palooza netter known as E3. And by "big kickoff" I really mean started... just started.

This is the day we've been waiting for...

I am a big believer in the power of individuals. We, as in people in general, tend to whine about a lot of things. Go to virtually any forum or comment section on any subject on any website, you'll find a bunch of people complaining about something. I'm sure some people reading this will take it as me complaining about people complaining. I think people in general are predisposed to taking on an identity of a victim. We tend to look at anything that goes wrong or that we don't like as some sort of affront to us personally, rather than a confluence of circumstance that it usually is. We see conspiracies against us rather than simple matters of our own will falling against someone else's. Sometimes your bottle of soda missing from the fridge at work is just somebody's mistake, not a conspiracy by your co-workers torment you. But this isn't always a bad thing. It is often annoying, but it isn't always bad. With so much complaining, You're bound to get a...

The Ouya, for those who don't know, was an idea that went up on Kickstarter , a website where you can look at various projects and decide to pledge money to help that project reach the light of day. This is a process called Crowd Funding. It's similar to regular investment funding, except instead of going through a bank or some rich people with some cash, you can get bits and pieces of funding from the general population. Ouya's popularity started really when they received a huge amount of funding through Kickstarter - more than they were asking for and at the time a record for any project on the site. What helped it get this far was a fairly rudimentary idea; let's make a very affordable gaming console with really affordable games. That, for me, is about where the idea fell apart. It's not that their goal is at all a bad one. It is a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work. We all want to be able to get a lot without paying a lot. It's all about getti...

Year in and year out there are a few dates that you tend to mark on the calendar. The obvious ones are holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. Then there's tax day, just because you can't escape it. If you've got kids, or are a student yourself, you also mark off the start/end dates of school, and school holidays. Working down the list you then get to sports - start/end of regular season, playoffs, games you might attend, etc. For gamers and those interested in the gaming industry, June means one thing - E3. It is THE big event of the gaming industry each year. Every few years things get a little more interesting, because the big 3 of the gaming (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft) industry introduce new hardware. Well, not always at one E3. Last year Nintendo started off the new generation of consoles by revealing the Wii U.... and it has barely gone anywhere. It's not all that much better than the Wii in terms of performance, but it is an improvement. They also gave ...

It's been a few weeks since I launched this blog, and I was intending to have website up and ready to go already. But alas there have been a few setbacks so I'll have to hold off on that for now. I can't at this point make any promises about when I'll actually get things going, but at the moment it doesn't seem I'll be able to do it for at least a couple more weeks. Oh well, that's the way things go sometimes. So for now I'll tease a little more about the actual story that this is all working around. I should have mentioned in one of my early posts that there are several themes that are at the heart of the series of stories I have molded. The starting point, however, is the concepts invoked by the characters within the story. I approach characters for my story in a very direct manner. I utilize the concepts of String Theory for my story in many aspects. In other words, I hold that all possible outcomes exist as a component of an alternate real...

About a year ago I had a little bit of spending money and wanted to buy a game to kill some time on. I'd just gotten mostly through Bayonetta, which was a terrific game, and so I wanted a new game for my 360. I trolled about the web reading reviews of some games I'd heard about. Along the way I came across a game - BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. I didn't know what to make of the game right away. Just on presentation it looked amazing. The graphics were solid, they had some really well done, polished, cut-scenes with anime quality. The gameplay was good too. Make no mistake, it is a tough game. The combat system relies on a series of complex button combos, and the opponents are not the easiest you will find in a fighting game. There is a bit of novelty to this style of game. For those reading this who don't know the game's history, it started out as an arcade game. No, it's not an ancient relic from the 90s that got a gussied up re-make, it is a modern arcade ga...