In 1956, when this photo was taken, I weighed next to nothing, whereas this behemoth (the first ever 5MB HDD!) weighed a ton. Fast forward a half century, and now I weigh a ton and 5MB weighs nothing at all…(additional life lessons such as this can be found in my new inspirational self-help book, “Why Everything Sucks”)
I’ve spent a couple of pretty intense weeks now with Vanguard:Saga of Heroes, and before the self-loathing sets in, let me say the game is pretty great. The sense of scale is awesome–the world feels huge and real. The art direction and design are top-notch. The community is polite and helpful. There is always something new or interesting to do, whether it be PvE combat, quests, diplomacy, or crafting. It’s sort of like a grown-up version of Everquest (some of the same design team as the original EQ). (Read on …)
Is this the WoW-killer we’ve been waiting for? It might be. Find out for yourself at the WARRIOR HEROES: SAGA OF EPICS website.
Here’s what happened:
My wife recently had to have surgery. It went fine, but unfortunately included an excruciatingly long pre-operative wait of over seven hours. Hey, it happens. The surgery before my wife’s was a particularly difficult one. It involved pulling a patient’s–it might have been Jack Thompson–head out of their own ass.
Anyway…my mother-in-law–who is nearly 87 and lives several states away–was absolutely livid that her daughter had to wait so long. She emailed something along lines of…”I was so frustrated I went to the computer and played a particularly aggressive game of Bejewelled and got my highest score ever.”
A few months ago when I was visiting her, I had to escort her to the local EB, so she could pick up some games to play on her new, scratch-built, dual core PC (no, Grandma isn’t quite that much of gearhead; it was built for her by a friend of her grandson…still…my octoganerian mother-in-law has a better rig than I do!) This led to one of the most surreal scenes I could imagine: there was Grandma, in the middle of EB, trying to decide between Bejeweled and Call of Duty 2.
You know, in retrospect, I might have steered her in the wrong direction.
Recently, a good friend of mine–we’ll call him “Slybone”–had a harrowing experience. He flirted with Insanity. He waltzed with Madness. He took bugfuck Crazy home to meet her folks. But he survived, came out the other side, and I asked him to share his story. At first, he was understandably reluctant. But I explained that EMB was a place of unflinching truth (who can forget Daedalus’s description of his two weeks as a fluffer on the set of Hanna Montana?), and he agreed. Be warned, readers: this story makes The Descent look like a sleepover romp in a tent cave made of fluffy blankets.
Slybone’s story
“It was a beautiful, crisp winter afternoon. I stopped at the local Big Box retailer to see if they had a day-of-release copy of Lost Planet. Now, I need to explain that I truly loathe this place, but the nearest alternatives are 60 miles in one direction or 30 miles in the other, and while the chances of them actually having the game were slim, there was a chance. After all, this was the store that sold MS Flight Sim X a week early by mistake. I hustled past the front-of-store child slapping area and made my way to the electronics section.
“Of course, they didn’t have Lost Planet. But there, in the case, was something unexpected. Like a chimera, a unicorn, or a watchable Uwe Boll film, it was a mythical beast that I had often wondered if I would actually ever see in the flesh: a Playstation 3.” (Read on …)
