Dragons Crown, Vanillaware's latest upcoming title, publishes by Atlus. Gameplay wise I get the unmistakable feeling of it being an Odin Sphere clone, which I rented back in the day and returned the same day. Its also being driven in it's marketing by the outlandish bust of the Sorceress class, the game is made by a Japanese developer, custom in Japan is that showing a lot of leg is an ok and often everyday occurrences. When it comes to showing anything above the waste however its looked upon as trashy, for lack of a better term.

It's for this reason that the game is being targeted by a large population (mostly women) about the games blatant sexism and lewd depiction of said female character. I for one find it distasteful and down right embarrassing that games in general are still relying on the gross disproportion of the female anatomy. This is only adding fuel to the fire of games not being taken seriously by the non gaming community, and pushing a wedge withing the community itself.

Candy Box, what is it and why did it come into existence A text based farm sim/rpg filled with ascii artwork gathered from roughly 10 artists. In the past 24 hours I've seen it sweep twitter by storm, and have myself found it still open in my chrome browser, farming away until I get enough candy to slay the dragon. As of right now there's roughly 241202 people "playing" Candy Box, which I suspect will grow exponentially in the coming weeks. I have reached out to the author(?) of this text based rpg for further info.

Steam-itis, has digital distribution made games and media less meaningful? Those with Steam accounts know what this is and suffer from it frequently, having hundreds of games organized in a neat list for you, one click and your game is installed and ready to go. Has this made going out with friends to get a game at a store, renting a game and playing it round robbin style akin to Ouija boards or Pogs, a thing of the past. They have, and it's disturbing to think that I have several hundred games at my disposal and no real drive to play them, or even finish ones that I have not if only just for the reason that its all too convenient.

Horror games, I have a love/too-chicken-shit-to-play relationship with horror games. As far as video games go, they are the most passionate the media gets, a group of people putting that much effort to evoke a legitimate feeling of fear and shock out of players. So why then do I not want to play them, that is the main reason why I love video games for the emotions they bring people to feeling while playing them. I'm not sure if its just a fear of fear (fearophobia?) or if I am content seeing the reactions of others and hearing them recant their stories from their experience. As of writing this I am going to make a conscious effort to play, and finish, the horror games that I have available to me. Maybe.

Open betas are great, they allow players to feel as if they are a part of the development and get a sneak peak of a game, reporting bugs, trying to find work arounds for said bugs and hoping that their feed back is actually heard. But lets be honest, that's in a perfect world, out of all the people that get allowed access to a beta how many people do you think actually submit bug reports, let alone intellectual ones during an open beta. We can only speculate on these numbers I'm sure they are kept private from the public's eyes, but what really bothers me is the actual term "open beta" in the new free to play market.

Open betas and free to play games have been around for years, but if a game company is accepting your hard earned cash for a free to play game, that is not a beta. That is a product that has released an is being updated constantly, having such a model will only lead to ill will from the players who actually spent money on the game and then are unable to even play the game all together. Along side the server issues, most commonly the long queue times, why is it that while so advanced the technology available to us that we still hit a gate to access online material, queues ended with 56k connections, have a little more foresight then that. These two words should never meet, they should say a game is released and do so after a solid amount of crippling bugs have been fixed in closed betas, and release a product that will actually work as intended.

I am an ex-cook, full time gamer, cat owner, aspiring writer, media consumer, lover of spell check. What does that mean to you? Absolutely jack shit, but because of the wonders of the Internet I will still be able to say what I want. This blog will encompass my opinion and nothing less, there will be some factual information here and there but mostly it will be my views on said facts.

The reason I'm stating that these are my opinions are because of the recent Adam Orth debacle, his "resignation" from Microsoft. For those who don't know, he was "asked" to resign from Microsoft or just left, I'm betting my measly checking account on a forced resignation, for comments he made on twitter about the next Xbox being an always online console. And as far as I've seen it's caused several people on twitter to change their headings to state that everything on ere is going to be their opinion. Well no shit, that's the point of the whole thing, to have that freedom to say what you want, and unless saying something contradicts with any NDA you have signed who cares.

That aside, what will be discussed here? Well, everything, there will be an occasional game review, I will put my opinion of current events here. I pretty much just have those two goals in mind for this blog, now as far as my personal rating system goes it will be fairly simple, I don't agree with number ratings. I think they're stupid. Ratings are as follow:

Buy it - Plain and simple, buy the game, it was that good.

Rent/Borrow it - Means the game was good, but only for one play through, maybe.

Wait to buy - Not full price good.

Stay away - Needs no description. There won't be too many of these seeing as I play games to have fun and only play ones that actually interest me, but you never know.

I believe all opinions matter, there are no right or wrong opinions, mine matters because I am a consumer, I am the person who is playing these games and ultimately the one putting food on the developers table.

I think that'll do it for now.