Gaming
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I Hate PVP
by I’ve been playing video games for as long as I’ve had access to devices that would let me play videogames, from begging my parents for quarters to our first home computer in 1983 to my computer, phone, and console today. Next to reading, it’s probably the biggest way I relax. I try new games regularly. Sometimes they hold my interest for a while and sometimes they’re gone quick. There’s a lot to be said for a shooter or an action game or a puzzle game or a platformer or… well, I enjoy a lot of different kinds of games, but I particularly like games that have a lot going…
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Rediscovering Halo
by When I bought the Xbox One a couple of years ago, I specifically got the Halo edition because it came with Halo 5 and I’ve been a fan of the series since I discovered it in 2003, a couple of years after the first one came out. The new console also came with the Master Chief Collection, which puts the first six games into an integrated collection. When STO (my primary gaming entertainment for the last year or two) was having its recent update snafu and I couldn’t play for a couple of days, I happened to notice the Collection was still installed, though I’d never actually booted it…
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Star Trek Sunday: STO
by I’ve been playing STO (Star Trek Online) for about two and a half years now and I still log in most days for at least a few minutes. I actually tried the game about five years before that on PC (I’m an Xbox player these days) but my laptop at the time couldn’t keep up with the processing power needed. It doesn’t take long to figure out the basic mechanics of the game and at this point there’s a lot of storyline you can follow, plus cooperative and competitive scenarios, regular events of various durations with various rewards, an in game economy with multiple currencies, projects, regular new content,…
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Rediscovering Halo
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Game Review – X-Men: Destiny
by Quiet around here lately. Sorry. Real world has been busy. Trying to address that, but going through some upheaval over the short term. I think things will settle out fine in the new year, but it’s going to be a bit crazy until then for a lot of reasons. I do have several book reviews ready to go and I might be ready to announce a couple of small writing things soon, but neither of those is why I’m blogging today. Today, I took a step forward in my long range quest to play through all of the video games I’ve bought and never finished. Not that I have…
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Unfinished Stories
by Recently, in a fit of cleaning up after the children in this family, I decided to put away and organize all of the video games for the various consoles we have to. To be clear, that currently includes a Nintendo 64, a Nintendo GameCube, a Wii, a Wii-U, an Xbox 360, and a PlayStation 3. Over the dozen or so years since we bought the GameCube, the N64 being a more recent addition, we’ve picked up quite a few games, some of them new, some of them used, and some of them gifts. We like games, and we play quite a bit. Well the kids play a lot more…
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The Joys of Geocaching
by If you’ve never heard of Geocaching, you’re not alone. And that’s okay. It’s a fairly recently development, coming about not too long after the advent of reasonably affordable handheld GPS devices. And reasonably affordable gets more so every year, depending on the bells and whistles you want. Of course, these days you can go out with a smart phone. As long as you have data access, you have a working GPS device, and there are apps for every platform. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. I haven’t actually told you what Geocaching is it. And while it would probably be easier just to steal some copy from…
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Video Game Companies Need to Get Smarter If They Want My Money
by Backing that up a bit, I appear to be raising several gamer kids, although of distinctly different types. At some point, we’ve all been Halo fans, and fans of first person shooters in general. Those days are mostly over, I think. We’ve decided we’re not going to bother with the XBox One at this point for a variety of reasons, but the 360 still has a solid place in our entertainment unit. So does the PS3. The Wii (although that’s mostly for Gamecube games, and the Gamecube itself has migrated to my son’s room with an older 360). And the recently acquired Nintendo 64. There are a variety of…
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The Perils of Minecraft
by Dig, farm, make, build, create. Minecraft is hard to describe in only a few words. It takes place in a randomly generated, blocky, heavily pixilated world where just about everything is made out of cubes. Okay, that’s oversimplified, but it starts to find the flavour of the game. It’s a mostly creative endeavor, and can be either cooperative or competitive (with a heavy emphasis on the first one, which is why I like it). It’s also rather addictive if you have the right mindset for the game. Harvest resources (mining, digging, farming, chopping, fishing, etc, etc, etc) and use them to create your own home, castle, shop, world, whatever.…
