You begun with primal viciousness.
You ended with a frosty cold night's embrace.
Your unbelievable range of musical focus is legendary!
Your fingers burn your fretboard with unmatched intensity.
You fought your cancer with epic metal might!
And fell prey to your own ironic namesake.
You will be remembered, oh dear metal brethren.
This month, your contributions are recalled,
on the anniversary of your death.
Live on, oh metal brother!
In Death, your name is immortalized!
Arcanum : Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura Posted December 3, 2010
With a name that means "Deep Secret Wisdom", Arcanum
is arguably Troika's crowning achievement. Considered by many to be even better than his extremely highly-regarded Fallout
series and the Baldur's Gate series, garnering a rabid underground following and claiming an extremely difficult to achieve
90% and Editor's Choice Award out of PC Gamer in 2001, an 80 in Mobygames,
and a Gamespot rating of 8.5 (out of 1767 votes!). Arcanum
is a nonlinear masterpiece of isometric RPG gaming.
Set in a nontypical Steampunk fantasy setting, the world, previously
dominated by magic, has undergone a fantasy-equivalent of an industrial revolution, adding primative technology to the world.
There's an inherent tension to the mix, weaving through the entire story-arc. People prioritizing the old ways (The tight-assed Republicans of the world)
don't like the new Obama-esque technological new ways and vice-versa. You know they really secretly want to do each other
one day and then go to war complete with broken bottles and chains the next.
The game plays almost exactly like Fallout and
Diablo, allowing the player to move around by selecting with the mouse. There's a ton of skills, spells, and character classes to upgrade
the characters with, allowing for a massive amount of replay value. This is one of those games you can play 5 times and have
each pass play out differently. There's some malignment regarding bugs, polish, and balance factors that are mostly fixed by patches
on the linked sites below. Let's be honest though, no game is perfect, and there's always going to be naysayers and gripey
bitchy people crying with their god-damned bleeding hearts about various inane crap. That said, the good far outweighs the bad here
providing for an Ultima 7-like gameplay experience that ends up being a more than worthwhile experience. It will not be time wasted
for you, that much I can say with certainty.
Musical Prelude to a Post-Mortem Posted November 30, 2010
Coroner is one of those underrated gems, that when you find you just want to show off to everyone, knowing
that if you didn't, they may never find this band of their own accord. Seriously, this would likely even be
the case with me if it wasn't for Headbanger's Ball in 1989 playing the video for "Masked Jackel", exposing me to the
world of European metal. Ex-roadies of Celtic Frost, these wicked-talented guys struck out on their own, doing more
with 3 members than most bands can with 5 (let alone Slipknot with 9). These guys have enough talent in one finger to
push planets out of alignment with their metalness. Amazing neoclassical stuff with no compromises in brutality
or the thrash quality of their work. Take a quick tour here. You'll hear it. Great stuff to wheel fresh corpses
around to.
X-Com.
That really should be enough said. X-Com's a game that melds macrocosmic and microcosmic strategy into a whole
that people are trying to outdo even to this day. In X-Com : UFO Defense you play a corporation that's attempting to
dominate the alien forces that are secretly spying on Earth (and probably abducting rednecks and conspiracy theorists).
You start out with a view of the planet Earth and start by locating where the UFOs are landing. You start with 3 ships
that you have to send in to capture the UFO. Once you get one, you switch to a 45-degree offset view with individual
troops. In turn-based fashion, you proceed to send your guys in to kick alien butt and chew bubblegum. Though, more
typically, you get your ass whipped by a bunch of aliens with mind-control devices and ray-guns. Eventually,
once you get your tactics proper, you capture and kill all the aliens in the UFO, grab one of their bodies for a autopsy,
and grab some loot in the form of hyper-complex alien technology to research and equip in further missions.
Just good
tactical stuff. So good, in fact, that it still comes in #1 of the best games of all time.
Check it out and break off some cold hard alien justice! You know you want to be a hero. That's why your mom still has the picture
of you as a kid in your Superman underoos on the fridge. All your friends know. Don't kid yourself. It's
ok. We like you anyways...
A note with these versions : X-Com : UFO Defense is setup to run straight in Windows. X-Com 2 will need to be run in Dosbox.
Do that and you'll be fine.
There is a guy in metal who single-handedly represents the spirit of Halloween in a way unmatched by any contemporaries.
And that guy is King Diamond. His songs have all the good stuff you'd expect from a good horror novel. To list all
the aspects would require a frickin' encyclopedia, so instead, I just threw together a playlist of 6 videos that will sum it up better
than words could possibly attempt to. So, here you go. Cozy up to them. Best served with tea with just a little bit of blood.
Lists of the top 10 scariest games
(List 2,
List 3,
List 4) routinely mention one game in particular :
System Shock 2. The reason is easy.
It is, quite simply, a badass game. High-Octane Nightmare Fuel.
Most games are content to throw an unexpected enemy or two at you and call it a day. On a scale of candy-ass to I-eat-live-frag-grenades-for-kicks,
this game definitely ranks at the later end of the spectrum. The game draws from some of the scariest movies ever like
Event Horizon and
The Thing, setting a stage for grand horror that
other games have been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to capture in the same way. Dead Space
and Bioshock both rip this game directly,
but not to the same level of effect. The game's purpose is this : System Shock is a series formulated with the single goal of scaring
the shit out of anyone who plays it. That's it. That's all. The best thing about this game? The sound. This game easily has the
best implemented sound of any game ever made. Doom III really tried to borrow from this game's unbelievable use of sound to create
terror and failed miserably. It really is that good.
You start out on the Von Braun, a direct nod to the German scientist who
helped design the rocket that put Neil Armstrong on the Moon, the first faster-than-light starship. As you'd expect with any great
new-fangled technology, things go horribly horribly wrong. And then some. And then some more. As if technology that peeks holes in
space ala-HP Lovecraft wasn't toying with the fringes of space and time enough, you
have an evil AI named Shodan (Ripped from the Harlan Ellison (Creator of the Terminator mythos via Outer Limits (Original Series) episodes "The Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand") story "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream")
hellbent on smashing you like the meddlesome bug you are. Of course, you're just trying to stop it, not because you are a
Schwarzenegger-esque one man army, but because that's the only chance of you surviving. Yeah, your situation is that bleak.
If you really want the full effect (read as : you are a man), I recommend playing this game at night in the dark at full
volume (or headphones). Wear diapers. I will not be held accountable. You have been warned.
