"Go West Young Man"

Hello everyone, been a while right.

Like I said in my last post, I should be able to post something on here every week or so, depending on how crazy things go at university. With preparations for my master coming very soon, it looks like I will be one busy writer.

That being said, I was able to cook something up for the first week of January. I decided to stay away from the myriad of "Top [X]" lists that have been spawning all over the internet for the last few weeks in favour of a themed retrospective. I looked at four games from 2010 (Civilization 5, Red Dead Redemption, Fallout: New Vegas and Minecraft) and how they touch upon the concept of the frontier. Just go take a look at it.

In other news, it looks like I will be writing about games for school weekly once more the semester. I'm taking a psy class about emotions and motivations, and the work for the semester is to write one to two pages per week about anything in relation to what we are seeing in class that week. It's basically like the myspace business from last semester but without myspace, meaning it's a hundred times less annoying. Let's just hope writing about games weekly in french won't stop me from writing weekly in english.

Also, I went at the Mount Royal Game Society yesterday evening. It was pretty great. I met cool people, saw a live demo of Fract, got my ass kicked by a retro game (damn those monkeys!) and saw a girl wearing a sombrero in the middle of winter on my way back home. Pretty great evening indeed!

Not Dark Yet.

I know I didn't write anything on here for over a month, but I was extremely busy with school. It's not like I didn't write about games though; I just wrote in french. The semester work for one of my class was to write weekly on a myspace blog (urgh) about any subject and make links to what we saw in class. So I basically wrote about games (and once or twice about the internet in general) on a weekly basis. The bad thing is, I didn't have time to really write anything here on back on Bitmob, but the good thing is, it helped me develop a rhythm  and a schedule to write. From January onward, it should be way easier for me to get out some weekly content -- unless I get some crazy work again for some classes.

Anyway, here is a blog post I made on Bitmob about games and politics.

See ya later.

The Aug... September Madness... sorry guys.

Alright, haven't posted anything on here for a whole month. That sucks. I was busy with the first few weeks of university and with a good whole week of being sick like a dog. But now I got rid of a few things (mainly my sickness) and I can write again! Well, to be fair, I have to write a weekly post (on Myspace of all places) about one of my class. It's pretty interesting, even if Myspace is clunky, and I get to talk on about games and internet culture in french for notes. Could be worse.

In the meantime, I wrote a bitmob article about Minecraft (because everyone did) and I am probably going to write another iPhone game review soonish.

See ya later peeps!

New Year

Happy New Year everyone! I hope your holidays were filled with gaming goodness, because mine certainly weren’t, and the situation won’t go any better.

First, my brother is leaving home to go live with his girlfriend (who he has been with for only 2 months) and he is leaving with some of stuff, one of it being the HD TV that was his. I am now stuck with the non HD TV.

It really makes a difference in some games. For example, Battlefield 1943’s texts are way more difficult to read. Not that it really matter, the game is about shooting dudes, but the issue is that the enemies dudes and my team’s dudes are pretty hard to tell from one another at a certain distance; bad when you are an avid sniper.

I guess I’ll need to learn to live with it as if it were 2006 again, because there is no way I’m able to afford an HD TV in the next few months, university being a costly mistress. For a guy who says, “I don’t care about the quality of the graphics in a game, more about the style”, I guess I will have to live by my word.

Oh and he also left with the Wii. That will have to wait too, but I can live with it better.

On a related note, I haven’t played a lot of new games during the vacations. I took a break from new stuff after my little run through Modern Warfare 2 and mostly played old favorites like Oblivion and Chrono Trigger (talk about retro). I’m going to wait for the release of Mass Effect 2 to get into new games. And boy will I have to play it tight.

My console gaming time was reduced to about a day and a half, more or less. The worse is, so many great games are coming soon. Mass Effect 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Bioshsock 2, and Heavy Rain. And there are probably that I am forgetting. I guess I’ll need to play some mad marathon sessions to get through these.

Such is the life of an academic. I guess the good thing is, I will spend more time writing and reading about games, and watch movies. Sure, it sucks that I will have less time to play games, which is kind of the point of it, but I will live with it and maybe even enjoy it more as it will become those rare quality times spent with my favorite medium.

And then there’s TV… Oh shit.

I need to write more

I've just (and by just I go back to last weekend maybe) finished: a 12 pages work on narration in video games, a 12 pages work on the of the Dead horror movies, a 13 pages work on the evolution of westerns, a 10 pages work on some stuff about society (the teacher killed what could have been an interesting subject), watched 5 movies of which 2 were fun and studied for 3 exams that I all did between last Wednesday and today.

I am drained. But strangely, doing all this, being proud of my works (I may just translate the narration one and post it here) and performing like I never did, I have a strange envy to write even more. Write about games, write about the gaming culture, anything and from the point of view of both an academic and a fan. Henry Jenkins would be proud.... if he knew about this blog. So my (early) new year resolution is to at least write something once a week. About anything that may grab my attention during the week. Just to keep me writing and keep me motivated. But not this week. Like I said, I am empty, my brain is dead, I'm out of sodas and the week sucked anyway. VGA's were misogynist (from what I've heard) and more people are loosing their jobs in the industry. I will start my weekly routine after I get drunk (this Friday) and hopefully keep it going.