http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kiePaAHK3jE

Interesting compilation of video game footage set to an instrumental piece. I find it strangely emotion provoking, with tones of loss, hope, and sweet struggle... Or maybe I'm just in a mood...


Oh Guild Wars 2, it has been a long beta weekend. Such a laggy weekend indeed! With the pre-purchase (notice I didn't say pre-order) of GW2 it gave us access to a beta weekend starting on Friday and ending Sunday. I made preparations with some old gaming friends and jumped in this weekend. I hope you enjoy my thoughts.

First off, the game is beautiful. NCSoft has a stellar art department and their stylized art direction is consistent throughout the game thus far. Most quests have an audible cutscene to depict the situation at hand. Definitely blows reading a wall of text out of the water.

Each race has its own starting area and they feel very different. Even though I... Read All


http://i.imgur.com/cQM2l.jpg
Last night I went to the Magic: The Gathering Avacyn Restored pre-release party at Red Castle Games in Portland.

Red Castle Games is a pretty cool games store. It has a very large selection of awesome board games ranging from Settlers of Catan, Arkham Horror, Castle Ravenloft, Pandemic and others as well has a hefty supply of Magic, Pokemon and other collectable cards. It also has a farily large set of games you can pull of the shelf and play if you want. One such game, Hero Quest caught my eye as it has been out of print for quite some time. I asked at the front if it was for sale as its hard to find and alas, it was not.

My friends arrived and we started with a card... Read All


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Any of you MMOers out there... do you think your game would let this happen?

http://www.destructoid.com/eve-players-band-together-to-destroy-the-economy-226632.phtml

Ever since I first heard about it, EVE has tempted me. I don't really have the time, and I doubt I could really pull off explaining the monthly subscription to my wife, but a game where this happens sounds... entertaining. All of the other games try to make you "believe you are part of a larger world." Well, guess what: this game actually let's you interact with everyone and change the world, even if it's for destructive purposes Just like the real world.



Guys. Holy crap. It's not like this is my first foray into Steam. I've been using it for simpler games for ages now, but I'm more into it since I'm playing more "serious" games on it.

But I *just* finally decided to see what pressing shift+tab to access the Steam community did. That thing is badass. You can get a full tabbed browser in your game as you're playing it.

Why had I never checked that out before?


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Looks like the Diablo 3 free beta weekend blew the doors off battle.net a bit:

"Diablo 3's weekend beta went about as smoothly as a hamster in a ball rolling down an erupting volcano – which is to say it was completely normal for a high-profile beta test. Saturday saw a peak of 300,000 concurrent players, Blizzard community manager Micah Whipple (Bashiok) tweeted, reporting the full number of testers for the weekend was "a lot.""

Friday night was quite laggy, Saturday was better but battle.net was out of commission until 9.50am. Some of my friends on Mac had the game crash a few times. My Windows client was stable but lagged out a bit. On Sunday battle.net was pretty... Read All


Valve will finally release the Portal 2 simplified level editor and rating system May 8th! Looks like it will be free DLC for all PC players and there is no word on it coming to consoles. Awesome.

I don't generally do much in the area of level editing but I plan on giving this editor a spin as it looks pretty straight forward to use. I picked up the PS3 version and that came with a free steam copy. Its cool they are releasing this so far after launch!

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http://www.giantbomb.com/news/portal-2s-perpetual-testing-initiative-launching-may-8/4107/


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Phoronix has confirmed that Steam is going to be released on Linux:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_linux_dampfnudeln&num=1

Direct from the article:
"For those that have doubted the exclusive Phoronix claims for quite a while now that the Steam client and Source Engine are in fact being ported to Linux, the doubts can be nearly laid to rest. Even I began to wonder how long it would take before the clients for their popular games would be publicly released under Linux. However, after confirming the information perhaps a bit too soon, their level of Linux interest is much more clear after spending a day at their offices. A meeting topped off... Read All


This is a fun version of trivia and getting to know your fellow members. Sometimes it helps to look at the date of the source, as some answers are outdated. Again this is fun and not to difficult.