There’s an invisible line on the floor of the dungeon. It is a point of no return. Getting there will so exhaust the life and mana of your party that there is no chance of turning back and walking out alive. (more…)
A couple of weeks ago, my son Halford Ash was born. If you believe the warnings, rumors and wives’ tales, such an event is seismic. Your life, they say, will never be the same. In the months prior to the boy’s arrival, I have done everything I could to get my mind right. I imagined a life without videogames and metal shows. I tried to imagine how I’d fit into that kind of life, not because I thought that all of those things would be gone from my life with the arrival of my new offspring, but because I had, and still do, have a hard time imagining the degree to which my life would change. (more…)
Gus is a little busy with something this week – we are sure there will be a column about it soon enough. In the meantime, we present this vintage Pretension +1, originally published at Joystick Division, as an unsubtle hint as to the nature of Gus’ absence.
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I’m not the kind of guy that needs music recommendations. I’ve got a storage closet full of CDs, a hard drive full of music (iTunes says around 215gb) and an RSS feed brimming with music blogs desperate to turn me on to new sounds. (more…)
When I played Sabbat, it felt like the game had been made just for me. It is a good feeling. Unless you love sports or shooting terrorists, it is not often that videogames feel so specific and personal. In Sabbat, you’re a miserable Satan worshiper who performs a blood ritual, transforms into a horrific demon and wreaks havoc on the world, but not before smoking out and watching anime with a witch. In the parlance of the day: this is relevant to my interests. (more…)
It was the simplest of words to get stuck on, but when the rail-thin Eastern European immigrant first said the word I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Was he even speaking English? We were both around twelve or thirteen years old. Me a suburban Floridian. Him the son of a Russian mother and Czech father, new to this country by mere months. He wore thick glasses, a chunky digital watch that beeped every hour on the hour and the kind of short shorts you expect a young Eastern European in the ’80s to wear. “VEE-PON,” he repeated. I could have slapped my face. With context, all the TSR boxed RPGs scattered around the room, it made perfect sense. The concerns of game-loving nerds crossed all Cold War boundaries. (more…)
There’s a pervading notion that people who spend a good part of their day peering into the tiny screen of their mobile phone are somehow missing the glorious moments of life as it whirls on around them. Those who hold that opinion must live in a really nice place because when I’m standing around in the Target Starbucks waiting for my soy latte or dining at Red Robin, one of the finer establishments in Apple Valley, California, I can honestly say that there is nothing miraculous, beautiful, enlightening or even remotely lovely happening around me. In fact, that magical little device I keep in my pocket is a window to a world where despair and banality is slightly less all-consuming. It is an escape hatch out of the bland purgatory of suburbia to someplace, anyplace else. If I didn’t have my wife (and forthcoming son) in my life I’d figure out a way to cram my head into that screen and climb out the other side. (more…)
The streets of Stormwind ring with my sister’s laughter. To tell the truth, whenever a human female World of Warcraft avatar breaks into that jolly chuckle I think it is my little sister, Rachel. That’s because I spent years playing along side my sibling’s avatar, the Paladin Breccia. We rolled new characters and leveled up together from Goldshire to Northrend. Since we didn’t use voice chat I became accustomed to that avatar and the sounds it made. They were an extension of my sister. Of course, playing World of Warcraft with a far-flung relation once a week isn’t quite the same thing as living down the street from them, but when you can’t have dinner, go to the movies or just hang out, killing virtual orcs with family is an acceptable stand in. (more…)
