Category: 2016

Posted on in 2016, Current Writing, Essays, Gaming

28 Games You Should Play on PC (and a Dozen You Might Want to Give a Look)

[Authors Note: All information provided is, to my knowledge, factual as of time of writing]

So I play most of my games on the PC these days. I used to predominantly play consoles before this current generation of hardware. I do have some current Nintendo consoles but just because they complement my PC, which gets most major releases. Anyway, my time on the PC has been spent finding whatever I can and grabbing it at a cheap price point.

Now my Steam library has a collection of 441 games (accurate at the time of writing). Recently, I’ve helped some people build their first beefy PC. Some I’ve given advice on parts to build your PC from (the best ever advice I got on building a PC came from PC Gamer’s budget build guide and their mid-range PC build guide).

There’s a lot of fearmongering about PC gaming. Some PC gamers have given us all the reputation of snootiness. The idea that building a $1000 box for gaming makes us superior to people who play on console. If you set up your PC up it can emulate rather well the Pick Up and Play nature of consoles past.

My list has been split into two sections, with an honourable mentions section at the end. The two sections are Can Be Played on Most Any PC and You’ll Need At Least a Decent Graphics Card. They’re pretty self-explanatory but just for clarity, Most Any PC means there’s no need for the game to render high-end graphics. These games are more likely Indie games with a pixel graphic or visually drawn style that don’t require anything but basic graphics and a rig that was built in the last 10 years. Can even be played on an older laptop.

At Least a Decent Graphics Card games are games that require at least some graphical power to run. None of them are too intensive and can be run on low settings with the lower end of graphics cards. I run a Nvidia GTX 750 Ti and that serves me well for pretty much everything on this list.

One last thing, you can always put these games on your wishlist and wait for them to go on sale if you’re strapped for cash. If the game is older than six months, it’s likely to go on sale in the next Steam sale. Steam sales periodically appear around the holidays. Maybe get someone to get you a Steam gift card for Christmas.

Now, on with the list!

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Posted on in 2016, Current Writing, Essays, TV

Alright, Time to Talk About Game of Thrones

[Author’s Note: Beware of SPOILERS! Post discusses all currently released books of A Song of Ice and Fire up to A Dance with Dragons, and Game of Thrones up to Season 6, Episode 9: Battle of the Bastards]

(Edit Note: 6/11/2016 14:55 – This post previously stated that a particularly egregious line was uttered mid-season to Ramsay Bolton. It has now been edited to note that the line appeared in an Emmy award for Writing winning episode and uttered to Bronn in the clusterfuck Dorne plotline. This has been amended.)

Sigh. I don’t like Game of Thrones. I used to. This fact rears its ugly head whenever the show appears for ten horrible weeks of the year or when someone spots one of the countless pieces of merch that I have of the series. Whenever someone brings up Game of Thrones I tend to get irrationally angry. Nothing makes me sigh louder, except maybe Doctor Who but that’s a similar issue for another day. So finally, I will sort out my beef with the series right here and now in this post.

 

Before the show I never read the books, I’ll begin with that. I watched the first two seasons enraptured and completely on their own merit. Between seasons two and three I had a lot of transit time. I was commuting to Melbourne for uni back then. During that time, I read all the books in the series released at that point. Going into season three I was armed with knowledge from the books. I must confess that I was rather haughty about having read the books.

I’ve never read a book series faster. I watched seasons three and four having my bugbears with the adaptation but overall content that they were getting where they needed to be in those two seasons. There is one scene in season four that strikes me as one of the worst written scenes in the history of quality television but I’ll get to that. As I watch season five the series began to offend me with not only it’s terrible writing, but also its completely nonsensical storylines (I have some very specific words about how they messed with the Dorne plotline, mostly fuck and you). After finishing season five, episode five I resigned myself to quitting the show following the end of season five. The rest of the season just hardened my resolve. I loved this show for two great seasons and two mostly good seasons but the show took a sharp nosedive in season five.

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Posted on in 2016, Earlier Writing, Essays, Gaming

You Can’t Go Back

[Author’s Note: This was originally written as a personal essay for one of my uni classes. Originally written May 2016, minor edits]

 

Preamble

“[Nostalgia] is a compound word, consisting of nostos (return) and algos (pain).”

– Sedikides et al., Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future

Pokémon was everywhere when I was a kid. It was on early morning TV, kids squabbled over trading cards in the playground. I don’t remember ever seeing a kid playing the games on a Gameboy, the handheld system that Pokémon helped sell with its first releases. Pokémon is one of the highest selling video game franchises to this day. Before Angry Birds and Minecraft, Pokémon was the killer app of the late 90s. Every kid was playing Pokémon in 1999.

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