Opinionated: theHunter

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It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these.  What have I been playing when I’m not playing Kerbal Space Program or Skyrim? Quite a few things, actually.  Some I have lots of playtime with but not very much to say about, and others I’ve got very little playtime but could talk your ear off about.

Well, here’s one of the latter: The Hunter.  Or, theHunter rather, which is easier to search for on Google as the former leads you primarily to a Willem Dafoe movie.

What’s theHunter?  It’s a hunting game.  As in you have a gun, there is a landscape with wildlife in it, and you’re to shoot the wildlife.  It’s controlled through a first-person point of view, there’s lots of stuff in it and things to shoot, and none of that is anything I really want to talk about.  You’ve seen one FPS, you’ve seen them all.

Guess what?  It’s also ” ‘free’ to play.”  Yes, those are nested commas.  I’ll get to that in a minute. Read more ›

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Adventures… in outer space!

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This is the story of a bunch of little green people with big dreams.  For millennia, the population of the planet Kerbin have been staring at the sky, wondering what mysteries lie up there.  Their scientists and philosophers, such as the greats Nicholas Kerman, Galileo Kerman and Stephen Kerman, through observing the motion of the planets and working out the complicated maths involved, worked out the laws of physics governing the skies.  But still they dreamed of the day that they could explore the cosmos for themselves.

Then disaster struck the people of Kerbin – for unrelated reasons a massive world war enveloped the previously peaceful Kerbals.  When the smoke cleared, one Wernher Von Kerman – an engineer – made a tremendous leap of logic.  He was brought in to make weapons of mass destruction, and in order to get them to their target he invented (or rather perfected) a machine called a rocket.

Kerbal Missile

Kerbal Intercontinental Ballistic Missile

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Skyrim My Way: The Prince(ess)

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Anthony Burch (of Hey Ash, Watcha Playing and Borderlands 2 fame) has a blog, called No Wrong Way To Play in which he chronicles the many different types of alternate ways to play though our favourite video games that people have come up with once they’ve become bored of the regular gameplay.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is with its role-playing background is ripe for this treatment, so I present to you the Prince/Princess – a set of character limitations that both make the game more challenging and give you incentive to roleplay a stuck-up royal banished from his/her court and forced to do things for themselves for once. Read more ›

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five(5) – Chapter One

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This is Five(5), a short story in progress.  It’s… sci-fi? Slice-of-life? Neither? Anyways, I’m always looking for inspiration to write more!  Content after the break. Read more ›

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What if Skyrim were ‘Free-to-Play’?

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Skyrim During Night by BlackJoe23 – CC-BY Find the original here: http://fav.me/d6rsa4a

Skyrim During Night by BlackJoe23 – CC-BY Find the original here: http://fav.me/d6rsa4a

I’ve been playing video games for a very long time.  During that time, two things have not changed.

Firstly, gamers are cheap.  Games are expensive!  Even the best of us will pirate.  Yes, the more moral among us will go out and, full of guilt, slap down some money from time to time, or at the very least make a prayer to the gaming gods that we’ll give them cash when we’ve got some.  Sure, we’ll do that.  But it doesn’t change the fact that there are many great games out there, but we have only limited funds to distribute amongst them.

Secondly, because of the cheapness of gamers, developers have tried many different tricks to alleviate this.  Shareware is something that older gamers like myself would remember.  To those of you young-ins, Shareware is kind of like being able to download a large piece of DLC for free, but you’d have to pay up if you wanted to play the rest of the main campaign.  This acted like a demo – you’re free to play the first eight levels of Doom all you wanted, but the remaining sixteen (and two new weapons! Five new enemies! Buy Now!) were for paid players only.

Today’s shareware is called ‘Free-to-Play’. Read more ›

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