jdodson1

Joined 01/23/2012
  Admin

I'm an Engineer and built the video game community Cheerful Ghost and text based mini-MMO Tale of the White Wyvern.

2759 Posts

The Humble Bundle Gets Netflix Like Subscription In "Humble Monthly Bundle"
"A highly curated bundle of our favorite games at one fixed price. Includes everything from recent hits to hidden gems to timeless classics - every month. Receive a bundle every month. Simply sign up, and let the games roll in. Discover games that haven't been featured in other bundles. Help worthwhile causes — 5% of each month's proceeds support charity."

If one of the problems in your life is not having enough games to play, The Humble folks are on the scene with The Humble Monthly Bundle. You pay a monthly subscription of $12 a month and you get a bundle delivered to you each month. New subscribers get Legend of Grimrock 2 and you can cancel anytime. What I like about this is that the games you pay for that month are yours to keep. What I don't understand about this is what games are going in the first bundle? I am also not sure how many games will come with it each month?

That said, I bet this hits the sweet spot for many games and I am curious if this is something you are going to look into?

https://www.humblebundle.com/monthly

Click And Tap Your Way To Virtual Riches In AdVenture Capitalist
I thought it would be fun to talk about AdVenture Capitalist on the day we drop traditional web advertising from Cheerful Ghost. AdVenture Capitalist is a free to play game by Hippo Games that takes the cookie clicker formula, simplifies it and is styled after a 1920's era Capitalist Utopia. You start the game by selling lemonade and can upgrade to a newspaper route, car wash, pizza delivery all the way to running your own oil company. Since clicking each time you want to sell something is tedious and not very Capitalist the game allows you to hire managers to do the clicking for you. If you get Managers running all your companies you can step away and come back to billions in profit(wish it were that simple). You can reset the game to gain Angel investors that grant you bonuses next game and each reset gains you leaderboard ranking.

AdVenture Capitalist is a free to play game funded by ads and in app purchases and available on Steam on PC, Mac and Linux alongside iOS and Android.

Why We Dropped Traditional Web Advertising From Cheerful Ghost
http://cdn.na16.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/scrooge-mcduck.jpg
When I launched Cheerful Ghost more than three years ago I wanted to build an amazing video game community that was funded by its users. Initially I had three ideas for ways to make enough money to keep things going and one was using traditional web banner advertising. I didn't plan on this making us much money, but felt it was a good compromise to make a few bucks to offset some of our traffic costs. In a perfect world, I don't actually mind this model as it mirrors much of how traditional forms of radio and television use to fund the programs we love. With that, there have been some very interesting conversations recently about web advertising, privacy and respect for your readers. These factors coupled with the simple fact that our 3 year net on ads is less than the price of Fallout 4 has led us to drop our use of traditional web advertising. We don't find it effective, respectful of your privacy or very awesome to look at. We have replaced our advertising banner space with a rotating mention system. Right now it rotates between two things that mention that we recently published our first game Starship Rubicon and mentions how our site is funded.

Cheerful Ghost is a site aimed at creating a safe, open and independent place for people to talk about what interests them in video games. If you have any ideas on how we can do this better or ways we can improve our current Membership system, let us know.

Fallout Anthology - One More Collectable Before The End Of The World
https://bethesda.net/data/images/event/0/Fallout-Anthology_Compilation-EN_730x490.jpg
"For the first time in the history of the award-winning franchise, all the Fallout games you know and love – or need to catch up on – are available in one explosive PC collection. Fallout Anthology features five critically acclaimed games and official add-ons in a premium collectible set – neatly packaged inside a Fat Man mini-nuke!"

I was just going to pickup Fallout 4 but now.... this is really great and I have a place on my new shelf for it. I also don't own Fallout 3 on PC yet as I played it on PS3 originally and want to come back and replay it.

Are you going to pick this up? It's not a bad deal for all 5 games and comes with a neat nuke collectable too.

https://bethesda.net/#en/events/games/fallout-anthology-announced-at-quakeCon-2015/2015/07/13/0

New Legacy of The Void Video "Reclamation" - Everyone Dies For Auir
Blizzard has released a new video called "Reclamation" that goes into history of the Protoss as they get ready for the new Legacy of the Void game.... errrr as they get ready to invade the Zerg infested Auir. As with many things there is a completely coherent idea that war can be avoided and that the Protoss should find a new homeworld to avoid the massive loss of life that would result in an all out war with the Zerg. Good thing Artanis completely rational ideas are immediately discarded as if they went with it after you started the game you'd see Artanis hanging out on the current Protoss homeworld knocking back a cold one saying "good thing we didn't do that war thing" as the credits rolled. Personally i'd find playing that game fun for a few minutes but then wish he'd chosen the more violent path. Good thing he doesn't disappoint.

I know i'll be watching endless Protoss march to their deaths on November 10th, will you?

Hideo Kojima Reviews Hideo Kojima a Hideo Kojima Game
Jack and Rich review Metal Gear V and like all of their reviews I found it amusing and fun. Like Rich, the last Metal Gear game I played was on the NES and I wasn't really drawn to the rest. Many people loved the later Playstation games and there is an incredibly loyal fanbase for them. So much so that this review seems to have caused some Metal Gear fans to take shots at Jack in the comments. Video Game controversy isn't new but I often find it strange as people are essentially getting upset someone has an opinion about a game they don't share. Sure Jack and Rich are snarky as is the Red Letter Media way, but I didn't find it grossly offensive or insulting.

Jack and Rich take point with the story as well as some of the characters such as Quiet that acts and is presented in a very odd manner. They seemed to enjoy the gameplay very much which got a mixed no and yes recommendation from them.

Have you played any of the modern Metal Gear games? What do you think of this assessment of the game?

Come Hear Our Starship Rubicon Talk And See Our Booth At This Years IndieGame Con
Greetings human. Wick and I will be giving a co-talk at this years Eugene IndieGame Con about Starship Rubicon from it's early stages to eventual Steam launch. We talk about the games humble beginnings, Kickstarter and also discuss the age old question "why make another indie game?" Spoiler alert, we ain't rich but we can hopefully convince you we had fun and learned... something. Oh and come by and check out our all new Cheerful Ghost / Starship Rubicon booth. We will have some surprises for people so come check it out.

IndieGame Con is happening October 2nd-3rd and we will be boothing and give our talk October 3rd. For more information about IndieGame con, ticket pricing and location check the site below.

http://indiegamecon.com/

See you all next weekend!

Alien Isolation Coming To Mac & Linux on Steam September 29th
I've heard it said that in space no one can hear you scream with glee that so many sweet games are being ported to Mac and Linux. Or is that line shorter? 2014's chest-bursting hit Alien: Isolation is coming to Mac and Linux on Steam next week and I am very excited. It seems that some publishers are releasing a game initially then when the game has been out for sometime, drop it on Mac and Linux. I think this is a good strategy to pump some life in a games release cycle. This news also comes about a couple months away from Steam Machines launching so it might be related to that too.

Now watch the original 1979 trailer for a piece of cinematic history and the movie that spawned all of this amazingness, Alien.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEVY_lonKf4

Cheerful Ghost Roundtable: S3 E5 - That Episode Where They Talk About Terraria
Travis, WhiteboySlim and jdodson are back at it talking about what we've been playing, the upcoming games we are all planning on getting and then one of our favorite games Terraria. Terraria is a special game for Cheerful Ghost as we have been playing it for about 3 years and 5 group servers. We talk about our love for the game, the parts about it we love the most and our most recent server experiences. This may bring our total mentions for the game to damn near close to infinity.

Cygnus Destroyer Reviews Gameboy Classic Super Mario Land
No one really talks about Super Mario Land anymore but I really enjoyed playing this classic on my Gameboy. When my brother got a Gameboy the first two games we had were Tetris and Super Mario Land so I spent much time playing them both. I did find the graphics of Super Mario Land a bit less than what I enjoyed in Super Mario Brothers but really liked the levels and gameplay. This game was pretty hard for me as a kid and I never actually completed it like I did the other Mario games.

That said Super Mario Land and the other Gameboy titles are really impressive considering the Gameboy had a 4 mhz CPU, 8k of system RAM and an 8k graphics chip.