A mood was to bound to hit me at some point in time that would require me to follow the flow of top ten lists at the end of the year, and although I had been lucky enough to avoid this trend for years, it has finally caught up with me. So, for the next twenty days, I will be writing about one game per day that will fall into the follow lists: Top Ten Games of 2005 and the Ten Most Appetizing Games of 2006 -- the title of the latter very much being a work-in-progress . The games will came at y...

I got my hands on F.E.A.R. yesterday, and had beaten it by midnight. Overall, I'd say the game has about ten hours of gameplay, which gets pretty action-packed after about forty-five minutes and doesn't let-up until you finish the ending sequence. I will say that if you're any "good" at FPSs at all, then you should probably play through the game on Hard or, maybe, even Extreme difficulty. The slow-mo in the game makes the enemies pretty damn easy, and after playing through it on hard, I reall...

In what is quite possibly the worst "piece" I've ever written, here are my thoughts on Serenity. Hopefully I'll get the gusto to spice it up a bit (yes, I did just say that and no, I don't ever plan to again) sometime when I'm a bit more conscious tomorrow. This was primarily written as a reply to this crap review from this thing I call a school. I'll admit it from the get-go: I'm a big fan of Firefly, and have been since the day my friend thrust a DVD in my hands and said "Watch it, or d...

Serenity . Just go ruttin' see it. Seriously.

The lack of a comprehensive update in a few days may make a few of you disoriented in your travels, speech, and general being , but I promise, I had good cause. Kind of. Well, not really. But I bring pictures to compensate. Them pixels arrayed in an organized fashion represent the little room that I call home in a very slightly off-campus house with ten other people (all but two of whom I know on a friendly or friendly-ish basis). It's a pretty nice place, actually, and words cannot descr...

Searching through the reaches of the abyssal drawers of some of my nightstands and dressers in my room of ten years I came upon a number of buried remains of scratched-up CD-R discs which had previously served as reusable "diskettes" of a larger capacity for use in transferring data during the non-Internet days of my computing life. Amongst these compact treasure chests, I found a number of old pictures, as well as some old conversation logs and e-mails exchanged at key dramatic intervals over t...

I've spent the last two weeks of my time with Torque doing nothing except tweaking the GUI that I plan to use for my upcoming projects, and tonight I can finally say that I'm done with the damn thing. I created every image completely from scratch, which I'm still proud of, then tweaked and re-drew every texture about three or four times, then tweaked and re-wrote some of the GUI scripts and the inner GUI core code. And it's done. I would've had this done far sooner, but this weekend has been ...

If I were a bit more like the rest of the universe and a bit less like myself, two things would be true: One: I'd begin this article with a definition of the scientific meaning of "half-life," or Two: This article would simply never be written. Unfortunately I can neither start this article with a definition of "half-life" which would lead into the witty observation that, by all means, Half-Life 2 by definition is only half as good as the original Half-Life, nor can I ignore my burning necessity...

2005 is a great year for gamers as a whole, with the release of the highly-touted Xbox 360 headlining the news (and, consequently, the temporally inferior PS3) for the brutes of the gaming crowd and new graphics card technology and big-name game titles for the intellectually elite [Ha.] PC gamers. Far and wide the most important event of 2005 is the release of Gas Powered Games' Dungeon Siege 2 , the sequel to the relatively under-appreciated original game of the same name, one of my top titl...

The video games we play have advanced seemingly exponentially in terms of their technological complexity, and therefore the complexity necessary to create such advanced pieces of software. Why then hasn’t the immersion of these games, on average, advanced alongside of everything else? When I pick up a new game to play, I feel just as much outside of the game I’m playing as I did to games I played years ago; this fact disturbs me greatly. Why should I feel as little involvement and immersion with...

In the last decade, video games have become more and more like movies than their old-age makers could ever have even thought of. We have games like Halo 2 which are so big,expensive, and popular that it can generate more money in a single day than any blockbuster movie could ever hope to bring in on its opening day. One thing that is becoming really hard to do with modern games, though, is making a really “good” game; and, by good, I mean fun to play and experience . The actual source of this...

The review will come eventually, but for now I'm just going to rant about a few things regarding the recently released Battlefield 2. Published by everyone's favorite draconian institution Electronic Arts (Remember kids, Challenge Everything , except the publishers) and developed by Dice . Let me start off by saying one thing: Battlefield 2 is an absolutely incredible game. I might even dare to say that it is the best thing to ever happen to multiplayer gaming, and no, don't even ask me "...

I've had a series of interesting revelations and plans throughout the course of the day, which, for the record, didn't even begin until 4:30pm. The first of which, though not necessarily chronological in occurrence, is about change and style, in a few different combinations. And, as you read this, don't mind whatever internal gaydar you may be running at the moment; if it starts flashing, beeping, or playing some ridiculous pop song at any point in your reading this post, just pay it no mind. ...

Thought I'd post of one of my personal favorite blog entries for the JoeUser crowd. So here's my story of what is, without question, the best date I ever had; though, to be honest, it wasn't really a date. A date would imply that I went out somewhere with a girl, but instead I just went to this girl's house with the premise of spending Memorial Day together. Backstory : This girl and I had been "together" for what may have been fourth months at this point. We become an "official couple" a ...

My site, Polycat.net , has been without a focus for a long time now, as my pathetic excuse for a blog has been the sole purpose it has been serving since... well, it's existence. The time for change is now. In the coming week(s), I will be working on a new system to support the new focus on short stories. Once the system is in place, I will be writing a new short story every week, and releasing it on the site (I will also update this blog, on JoeUser, with news of the release) every Monda...