I’ve been using the WordPress self hosted backend for ages, and… It’s been good to me.
Really, it has. But, lately, I’ve not really had the time to make sure that I’m as updated as possible, that the site has all the current patches and whatever needed to keep it safe and secure. I don’t really care enough to sift through the hundreds of plugins to find just the right one to keep the blog tied into Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever.

In short, I just want to be able to write something and have it pop up on the interwebs. And, lately, the blog itself has gotten in the way of that.

So, I’m trying something new. I’m – slowly – trying out the tumblr service. My tumblr blog is found at dunny0.tumblr.com; don’t worry, I’ll be adding a link to the sidebar and mucking about with the domain later. My tumblr blog can be found at dunny0.net as of right now. This blog, which you are currently reading, can be accessed via blog.dunny0,net.

But I’m not making any permanent changes, not yet. If I do decide to move to tumblr, I’ll keep this blog in it’s entirety as an archive. There’s just too much good stuff here, stuff I don’t want to get rid of. Memories and such.

So, yeah – not the end of the world, just the start of a new experiment.

Maybe one that means I’ll actually write more often.

Which is not the point of this post. At least, not directly. Nor are the “bugs” in the game – bugs which the reviewers are quick to point out, but the internet has been strangely quiet about.

No, the point I’ve been rapidly running away from, only to circle back upon when it was least expected is: I’m willing to say that this is the Game Of The Year.

At least, that’s what I was thinking a about an hour ago. Then I began to wonder which games were actually released this year, and how it compares against them.

As I always do when wondering something, I checked Wikipedia – the bastion of all human knowledge. I quickly managed to dig up their list of games released in the year 2010, and was staggered by just how damn many games were actually released in past year.

At a rough counting, I would say a metric shitload of them. Over 200 have been – or will be – pushed out of the developers doors and into the sweaty hands of GameStop workers world wide. Or the local equivalent should one live in a land where GameStops are not a thing.

Regardless, that’s a lot of games. A lot of games I am not, in anyway, qualified to remark upon.

I can, however, compare Fallout: New Vegas to the games that I did play, so I quickly pulled them out of the list, and have compiled them below.

As you can see, there are eight of them.
Eight.

Nine if you count the one that is based on a movie, but hasn’t been released yet. While I know enough that the vast majority of movie based games suck, I’m willing to risk it seeing as it’s related to TRON.

But, again, I digress.

At an average of one game every two months, I’ve picked up one Windows game (even though I only own a Mac), two full XBox games, two full PS3 games, and an XBL Arcade game (not sure why that’s on the list, TBH.) Even though I tend to prefer the PS3, my purchasing has been pretty evenly distributed over the two major consoles.

No Wii love at all this year. Which, honestly, was not a surprise.

With this (short) list in mind, it’s time to double back and again ask: Do I still think Fallout: New Vegas is the best game I’ve played all year?

Star Trek Online (STO) is pretty darn amazing – it has managed to hold my attention, off and on, since February. Cryptic are constantly adding new content, and tweaking/revising existing content. But it does have its own problems. The content that is there, now, is still sparse. The various stories it tries to tell are good, but not great – and are either too fragmented, or not detailed enough. And, surprisingly, there aren’t any immediately memorable characters in the game.

So, while I love the game – and plan on playing it for at least another year – it’s not better than New Vegas.

Next, there’s Just Cause 2, another fun game. A great sandbox game, one that I still play occasionally, when I feel the need to drive around a small island country acting like a horrible person.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that. The gameplay is way fun, but there isn’t any memorable story. It’s basically a Micheal Bay action flick, which is great fun to watch/play, but not something that would be nominated for any real awards.

No where near a contender, really.

3D Dot Game Heroes was a lovely, wonderful, fun throwback to the 8bit days of yore. Lots of fun to play, lots of silly side-quests, and self aware story telling. A great, fun game. One of the most fun, and most original, games I’ve played in years.

Also, one of the more frustrating. And not “frustrating until you memorize the dudes movements” kind of things, but “frustrating because the world map is a bit hard to remember, and the damn camera never quite works the way it should, dammit, now how the fuck do I get back to the damn Fire Temple anyway?” kind of thing. I still say it’s the Legend of Zelda sequel I’ve been waiting years for, but it’s not something I think I’ll ever go back and play again, let alone finish.

I’m happy I bought it, and I’ll still heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys Action RPGs, but that’s about as far as I’m willing to go with this one.

Finally, we come to Halo: Reach. What do I need to say, other than it’s the Haloz? Only, in many ways, it’s not. Yes, you still shoot guys in the face, but there are enough changes to the game that it feels like it belongs to a separate franchise from Halo 3. The single player campaign has been fun, and the characters are well fleshed out. The story is much deeper, and somewhat easier to understand, than the previous Halo games. (Yes, the previous games had stories. Or so I’m told. I only ever got “Aliens bad, shoot them” out of the previous entries, but some gamers swear there’s more too it than that.) And the mulitplayer is frantic, and kinetic, and way more fun than it should be.

It’s also repetitive. It is not at all addictive – I don’t ever find myself thinking “Just one more level, oh, lemme check this out, what the fuck do you mean it’s three in the morning?” when I’m playing Reach. I, quite naturally, get a level in, have my fun, and then am ready to do something else. Something that isn’t Halo.

So, no, Halo: Reach isn’t it either.

Fallout: New Vegas has a compelling main storyline, one that Nadia has said several times is like watching a movie. At times a very creepy movie, but a movie. It also has many, many, many compelling side stories. Many unique, quirky and fun characters to find. It near perfectly balances SRS GAMING with light-hearted humor, and damn creepy moments of WTF’itude.

It’s addicting. With so many places to explore so damn close to one another (it’s really, really hard to go more than four minutes without finding SOMETHING, contrary to some reviews) and with almost everything being actually interesting, it’s very hard to walk away. Even for spectators: Nadia has said, a couple of times, that just watching the game is very addicting – she’ll stay up far later than she intends, just to see what’ll happen next.

And it’s fun. Shooting dudes? Fun. Exploring buildings? Fun. Looting Vaults? Fun. Wandering the Mojave Wasteland, in search of more caps, or more dudes to shoot, or more funny notes, or more weird occurrences? Fun.

So, yeah – upon further, mature, reflection, I’m confidant in saying that Fallout: New Vegas is my Game of the Year. The best damn game I’ve played all year long, and one that will continue to eat my free time for the next six months.

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New Borderlands DLC is 1.3Gb. Looks like I won't be playing it tonight. #

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It was an experience, to say the least.

First, I had to relearn the most basic of things, such as answering the damn phone. When someone calls, by default, one does not just press a button and start speaking. Oh, no, that’d be too simple: One must drag the button one way to answer, and another to ignore.

I also had to learn how to display running apps: Holding down the home button. Yes, it’s not all that different from iOS, but it’s enough of a difference that it took me two days to figure it out. I’m still not sure it’s totally doing what I expect it to, either. I get a list of things that were recently opened/accessed… But not all of the things still running show up. For that, I get to delve into the phones labyrinth of menus and settings to find what I’m looking for.

That said, I rather enjoy being an Android user. It’s probably because I’m still in the first week of ownership, but I’m having quite a bit of fun. I really enjoy just how damn customizable the thing is, right out of the box. I don’t like the complete lack of documentation – which compounded by things not quite working as expected. I’m not saying that anything is wrong, per se, just different. Different enough from what I’m used to that it is going to take a bit of time to get into the swing of things.

Of the (few) tweaks I’ve done so far, replacing the launcher is the one I would most recommend to any potential Captivate users. The default (TWLauncher) is nice, but the bottom bar is completely locked down in terms of which icons you can have there. Not a fan, as it’s got stuff I don’t really care about. I was able to swap it out easily enough (once I read that it could actually be done) by simply downloading ADW Launcher from the Android Market.

It was pretty neat, but I settled on LauncherPro, because it felt a bit more solid and offered a couple of nice Widgets.

The camera has a bit of lag between shots, but that might be user error. I didn’t really play with it all that much, as the camera on a phone is one of my least used features. Still, after it’s done thinking, the pictures it takes are really nice, both crisp and clear.

Really a big fan of the Live Wallpaper. I’m currently using one that constantly scrolls the system event log, using the same font and color scheme of the Commodore 64. Geeky? Hell yes, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

All said, it’s a nice little device. Not quite as polished as the iPhone – in most ways, the iPhone is still the king of consumer devices. But what it lacks in polish, it makes up for in number of additional features, and end user customization. I don’t think Android OS is quite ready for the mass market, just yet, but for the few power users looking into getting a new handset, I highly recommend it.

I’ve even got a couple of ideas that I think would work, too. Nothing too concrete, but something that would at least get the creativity flowing and allow me to stretch those muscles, so to speak.

I used to write. I used to write quite a bit, any time I had free time to kill and a black sheet of paper. Most of the time it was really, horribly bad fantasy crap. Occasionally I’d try my hand at other genres, like horror (crap), satire (crap) and sci-fi (crap in space), but I almost always came back to fantasy.

Which is weird, really. I’ve not read a lot of fantasy. Most of the time I read science fiction, from the pulpy 30′s to the atomic 50′s, from the hard-science 80′s to the cyberpunk 90′s. Rarely any fantasy, though.

Maybe that’s why I wrote in that genre – because, to me, it was more open. I didn’t know what had already been done – and been done better than I could hope to achieve. I hadn’t already limited myself with expectations of what other writers would do, so I was a bit more free to try my hand at things. That would explain why ever horror story I tried came out like a really shitty carbon copy of a really shitty Steven King short story. It could be worse, I suppose. At least I’m still better than Peter David.

What I’m trying to say, is: I want to write again, and Peter David is a talentless hack.

We’ve got ourselves a wedding date and location now. With food and entertainment and stuff.

Crazy, but awesome. The place is great, we both really like it, and the dude what runs it is very cool. As in laid back, totally committed to making sure we are calm and totally taken care of.

Awesome sauce. More details as events warrant.

Noel Coward - Camp Master

For two days, and two nights, we will be sleeping in a tent, in sleeping bags, doing such exciting camping things as walking about, sitting in comfy chairs, and playing in water. Also on the list of things to do is cooking over a fire, making chili in a tiny tin pot, and… Well, that’s actually it I suppose.

We’ll be at Lake Mead, and I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures that I’ll never actually get around to posting.

Huzzah!