Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

My wife and kids were away this weekend so I was left to fend for myself. I indulged in a lot of solo gaming and general slobbing around but there were still jobs to be done like getting our weekly groceries. Of course I forgot to do this until the very last minute thus it was that I found myself pushing a shopping trolley around a 24 hour Tesco's (big supermarket chain)  late on Sunday night. It was quite a bizarre experience. The supermarket was full of young people. Evidently late night Sunday shopping has become a thing for twenty some-things who perhaps have better things to do for the rest of the weekend.There were couples there as well as singletons but they were fresh new couples still getting excited over discoveries like which brand of butter the other prefers. I found myself overcome with a huge wave of nostalgia for that brief period in life when you have acquired the nominal trappings of adulthood but have yet to take on its full responsibilities. It is a strange ...

Games bought in online sales during December 2013 Steam: Number of games 6, Total Expenditure €31.84 Amazon: Number of games 4, Total Expenditure €11.64 Others: Number of games 30, Total Expenditure €24.87  Grand Totals: 40 games, €68.35 spent (Others include Green Man, Gamers Gate, Get Games, Uplay, Humble and Bundle Stars. None of these got more than €10 from me but there are three bundles included which explains the large number of games. ) Notable purchases include "Brothers a tale of two sons", "Crysis 3", "Far Cry Blood Dragon", "Sleeping Dogs", "Metro Last Light", "Fallout New Vegas" and "Xcom Enemy Within" all of which have been on my wish list for some time. A lot of the rest were impulse purchases which I may or may not get around to playing. Surprisingly the game of Christmas for me was definitely: "Dragon Age Origins Ultimate Edition" picked up for $5 from Amazon. This is despite the f...

Was clearing out some old files on my computer and I found these Dark Souls snippets that I never uploaded for some reason. They capture the impact the game had on me so I think they are worth preserving and I am posting them now more than a year late. From December 2012 *Dark Souls has engulfed me like very few games have ever and yet I find it difficult to write about. It is not that there aren't stories it is just that they are all intensely personal stories about how I tried and failed and failed and failed again until eventually learned something and overcame some in game hurdle. In the absence  therefore of any coherent narrative let me share some random thoughts about the game. *Last night  the game went into a loop when trying to access my save file. The message flashing repeatedly on the screen said something like "Verifying save game. Do not quit the game or turn off your computer". I waited at least twenty minutes before hitting CTL ALT DEL and rebooting. As...

If you use a feed reader like Netvibes or Feedly you are probably familiar with the problem of noisy feeds that clog up your reader with dozens of posts every day most of which are dross (like Buzzfeed). You can leave these out of your feed entirely but then you miss the occasional funny or interesting item that they do post. I have found that a good way of dealing with them is to create a new category (feedly) or tab (Netvibes) called "Noisy Feeds" and stick all your noisy feeds in there. That way your less prolific sources do not get buried and you can still occasionally dip into the noisy category occasionally to keep up with the zeitgeist.

The title says it all. I spent two months levelling a character from the mid 40's to the cap of 85 just in time for Lotro's Helm's Deep expansion. Once the expansion launched I lasted 2 days. I loggeed off after two days and haven't logged in since. I cannot even blame the expansion. From the little I have seen it looks like an excellent expansion. In my opinion actually Lotro is getting better and better with each expansion. The devs are clearly lavishing care and attention in to the world they are re-imagining and the continue to tweak and improve the game play. Yes I do have some minor niggles which I will talk about in a minute but ther are not the reason I stopped playing. I stopped playing because the eight weeks I spend preparing for Helm's Deep burned me out on the game. I simply wanted to take a long break. So much for my grand plan to finally catch up with the herd and enjoy the thrill of discovering new content along with everyone else. As for the ni...

Being lazy here. Tobold asked "How Long Are Games Relevant?" and I was inspired to write a fairly long comment. This poor blog is a bit short on attention recently so I though it would fit here as well. It isn't just games. In every area of culture we humans have an insatiable demand for novelty. Extremely worthy contributions from a few years back are ignored in favour of the "next big thing". The issue is muddied somewhat in the field of games because the rapid pace of technology means that older titles are often uglier than modern games. However I do not believe that this is the main reason people do not play older games. Minecraft became a major mass market success in recent times even though it looks like a 1990's game. How many folks are still queuing up at movie theatres to watch Finding Nemo? How long has it been since The Da Vinci Code was in the best seller lists? Technology has not moved on substantially in the fields of movies or bo...

A couple of years back  I logged off my level 65 Champion and I really thought I was done with Lotro. This September however I was tempted back to the game while pursuing an excellent Coursera course exploring Lord of the rings in game, book and movies. ( https://www.coursera.org/course/onlinegames , highly recommended if they run it again). I figured I would only play for the few weeks of the course so I picked up a mid level Loremaster alt  and pottered around with him in original Shadow's of Angmar content. By the end of the course I had hit the original level cap of 50 but I was still enjoying the game so I decided to hang around for a bit longer. Lotro has changed over the years and for the most part the game is a lot easier to solo. Oddly enough this suited me and I was happy to play the game on my own for a few weeks. The Loremaster is a very fun character combining crowd control, Pets, debuffs, modest heals and moderate damage. It probably isn't the fastest charac...