MMO Monday - Everquest

MMO Monday - Part Two

Everquest

While this game also released in 1999, months before Asheron's Call, I didn't experience it until it's first expansion was released in 2000. My closet gamer was salivating over what this game offered, though, when I finally got around to investigating it. Unlike Asheron's Call, Everquest offered a full world to explore, not just a single continent. While that world was broken into multiple zones, complete with loading screens and everything, the promise of adventure from landmass to landmass was too much for me to ignore. Not only that, but it also gave me the opportunity to explore other races besides Human, and races that I had, up until this point, only read about in J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. Wood Elves, High Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, and more were all available to play, and I couldn't wait.

But what drew me in was the cover art for the first expansion, The Ruins of Kunark. Whoever designed that must have known what captured my attention, because this did immediately as I spied the game box on the shelf at Target so long ago...

MMO Monday - Asheron's Call

MMO Monday - Part One

Asheron's Call

With the newest expansion of the world's most successful massively multiplayer online RPG releasing inside a month, it has inspired me to take a retrospective look at how this genre of video games has influenced how I look at gaming, role playing, and the online community as a whole. I've played my share of online games, and tried subscriptions to various MMOs, World of Warcraft being only one of them.

This post is the first in a four post series that will go through the most influential MMOs in my gaming history, and how they have shaped who I am today. So, for starters, we're going back to the year 1999.

Vlog Post - 10.09.2014

New Vlog post for October 9th, 2014.

Silent Hill finally gets its due

This post contains mild spoilers for PT. To find out more about information on PT, please look here.

Anybody who knows me understands that I have an indescribably infinite love for well-made horror stories. It is my how to one day write serialized horror/science-fiction, and I'm certain that those stories will be incredibly influenced by the Silent Hill franchise, among my other favorite horror stories.

This year's Gamescom saw the announcement of P.T. on the PS4, a playable trailer that raised a lot of questions and sparked a lot f discussion. Upon experiencing it, we find it to be a disturbingly ongoing walk down an infinite hallway, which gets increasingly unnerving with each new loop.

The pacing is rough, or can be, since what little progression exists is based solely on the nerve of the player as well as their ability to spot and activate the nuances of the environment. Three of the play-throughs that I watched all went between twenty minutes and three hours of play, and none of them reached the end, either because they were too scared, or because they were too frustrated with not finding the clues needed to progress to the next version of the hallway.

After finally finding a short video of the final moments of PT, I'm greeted with a very reassuring sight. Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro are collaborating on the next installment of the Silent Hill franchise, entitled Silent Hills. It is also starring the likeness and voice of Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead.

This is an amazing bit of news that has me incredibly excited for a franchise that has done nothing but disappoint me since Silent Hill 3 (although Shattered Memories was an interesting revision). Del Toro's artistic flair and haunting imagery combined with Kojima's knack for breaking the fourth wall (which is displayed in PT), will combine for, what I expect to be, one of the greatest Silent Hill experiences in the franchise long and storied history. And these are high words coming from someone who is normally much more conservative with his excitement.