Cheerful Ghost: An Awesome Community For Gamers

Skyrim: Dragonborn Feb 5 for PC, PS3 DLC coming!

http://cdnstatic.bethsoft.com/bethblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/dragonbornsony-2.jpg

On February 5, the Dragonborn DLC is coming to PC finally.

In bigger news, all three DLCs for Skyrim are coming to PS3 in February, each for 50% off in their first week!

Full story here: http://www.bethblog.com/2013/01/18/the-dragonborn-comes-in-february-and-hearthfire-dawnguard-too/

Dungeon Siege: In The Name of the King

Recently I watched Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King on Netflix. I know many would immediately dismiss this film as a terrible Uwe Boll film but in a fit of interest I decided to watch it. First off the film is not great but I reject the notion that its as bad as people make it out to be.

As I was watching the film I was wondering if it was intentionally funny because this film is very campy. Truth be told, I love camp as I consider films like Time Cop and Soldier to be really fun movies. How could the film not be knowingly campy casting Burt Reynolds as the King? When I first saw him on the screen I laughed, it just seemed such an odd choice.

That said, this movie... Read All Recently I watched Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King on Netflix. I know many would immediately dismiss this film as a terrible Uwe Boll film but in a fit of interest I decided to watch it. First off the film is not great but I reject the notion that its as bad as people make it out to be.

As I was watching the film I was wondering if it was intentionally funny because this film is very campy. Truth be told, I love camp as I consider films like Time Cop and Soldier to be really fun movies. How could the film not be knowingly campy casting Burt Reynolds as the King? When I first saw him on the screen I laughed, it just seemed such an odd choice.

That said, this movie did do a few things right. At times some of the shots in this film look quite good. Seriously, some of the shots are really pretty. The final battle between the protagonist and Ray Liotta was fun. At one point the protagonist and his compatriots are in the forest and meet up with some women that travel entirely by swinging on vines. Its really comical as the vine travel is so entirely unrealistic they might have well just not removed the stunt cranes they were hanging on from the shot.

Jason Statham takes the lead role in this film and provides one of the better performances. I only had a few problems with his character and it really just involved some poor dialog choices and that his name was "Farmer." The reason for that is that you start as a farmer in the original Dungeon Siege game. The film attempts to explain this by stating that Jason Statham calls himself Farmer because that's who he wanted to be.

So how does this film stack up to the Dungeon Siege game? Since I loved the original game so much, it was interesting to watch the movie and stack it up to the game. The movie is loosely related to the video game in a few ways. First Jason Statham starts out as a farmer, like in the game. Second off his village is ransacked by The Krug right away which again, fits with the game. But as the movie gains some steam it starts going off in a different direction. The Krug really only serve to provide the protagonists things to kill but you know, that's really what they were in the game too. In the end I would say for what little story the original Dungeon Siege game did have, the movie keeps tabs on it reasonably well.

If you wore out your VHS Tapes of Street Fighter starring Jean-Claude Van Damme then you should give this movie a shot. It isn't perfect but it has its moments and some of them are actually pretty fun. Oh right, its available to watch entirely on YouTube and is linked above, for the Kingdom of Ebb!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Name_of_the_King:_A_Dungeon_Siege_Tale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_%281998_American_film%29

The Game Chasers Sin City Shenanigans Part 1.

Found an interesting YouTube series called Game Chasers. It is a reality TV style show of a couple of dudes that hunt down awesome Retro Styled games and systems.

Let me know what you think of it, I find these kinds of video game shows really interesting.

Rage Contest

Rage was a fantastic game. From the very first videos the developers published long before the release, I was hooked. And, contrary to many other people, I also enjoyed the actual game when it came out.
Never had technical issues, so I can't comment on that, but at least the gameplay was immense fun and I don't understand why so many people disliked that. The gunplay is really, really smooth and in combination with all your gadgets you had lots of different possibilites to take out your enemies. The occasional racing parts provided some more variety and then there are also all the other minigames, the hidden collectibles and rooms (Doom, Quake, Wolfensteid, id) or even... Read All

Rage: The Scorchers Giveaway!

Greetings Friends of the Ghost,

You may remember our Borderlands 2 Haiku Contest & Torchlight 2 contest from last year. The new year is upon us and its time to bring you the next best thing. I love Rage. Recently jdodson completed the new Rage expansion: The Scorchers and we want to share the love with all you awesome people. The game is beautiful and a really exciting addition to an already great game. A bit about what to expect with The Scorchers:

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/899

We are giving away a copy on Steam Gifts as per usual to drop in one lucky person's Steam account on January 30th. No strings attached. Head over to SteamGifts to enter that... Read All

Dat Firehose: Free Bundle & Doom Gangnam Style

If you had a problem with The Humble Bundle costing money now there is a solution in The Free Bundle. Right now The Free Bundle is collecting a few interesting Indie games such as Nitronic Rush, Ascension, Celestial Mechanica, Imscared & Abobo Big's Adventure.

http://www.thefreebundle.com/

This week in GoG, a weekly YouTube short showcases what was released and other GoG awesomery. This episode features Cultures 1+2 release, Kings Bounty Crosswords GoTY & more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXfP9VJl0BQ

To showcase what is possible with the new HTML5 Cavas technology some enterprising souls wired up Doom 3 and Gangnam Style. The Demons dancing does seem quite... Read All

Interview with CarbotAnimations Jon Burton

For quite some time I have enjoyed the Starcrafts series of animation shorts. I was able to reach out to CarbotAnimations, the creators of Starcrafts and they agreed to do an interview. Right now CarbotAnimations consists of Jon Burton with contributions from his brother. Its pretty amazing to consider how awesome it is to go from zero to a few million views in such a short amount of time. I imagine the fact that the videos are awesome has much to do with it.

This was a really fun interview to do and I want to thank Jon Burton for taking the time to talk to me.

jdodson: The characters of Starcrafts have very distinct personalities. The Zerglings, Zealots & Colossus... Read All

We Now Support Embedded Podcasts!

Download this podcast.

Since we have a few Podcasters on Cheerful Ghost I decided to spend a bit working on support embedding Podcasts into posts. Basically for any browser that supports HTML5 you can put the URL to your podcast mp3 and it will embed right in the post now. Most browsers support it and for the ones that don't we have the "Download podcast" fallback link.

Should work on Safari, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, Android & IE9. Let me know if you run into any quirks.

The linked podcast is Watch out For Fireballs Episode 25: EarthBound (Part 1).

http://duckfeed.tv/woff/25

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang

Recently I watched a neat documentary called "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang." Essentially its a documentary that follows the rise of Minecraft and chronicles the journey. Notch, the owner/original developer of Minecraft is featured heavily as are other employees as they join Mojang. The documentary features other notable gaming luminaries musings about Minecraft such as Peter Molyneux and Tim Schafer.

The documentary is tonally similar to Indie Game: The Movie in how its shot. I was completely engrossed in the film start to finish and to me the movie didn't suffer from any pacing problems.

The creators of the film are employing a pretty interesting distribution model.... Read All

Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt Drops Today

DLC drops today and it looks like more awesome Borderlands 2. You planning on picking this up or do you have this as part of the Season Pass?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/213250