Hey hi!

Remember when I used to write all sorts of everything on here? I ended up signing on with a little site called VideoGameChooChoo. I'm doing a lot of editorial work and even some news, check it out!

I also ended up on the most recent edition of their podcast, alongside Altgames queen Aevee Bee, check that, too!

I'm still pushing for more paid work these days and hopefully graduating from my bachelor's program in broadcasting, so perhaps I'll be doing this more in the future.

In an astounding 42 minutes, Dan Ryckert defeated Mike Tyson by way of Technical Knock Out in the third round, becoming the new world champion in Punch Out! After a reported 25 year rivalry with Mr. Tyson (in the game), Dan came close to knocking Mike out in his first attempt, but cleaned things up a week ahead of schedule.

Yo. I recently picked up a 3DS for the first time for the release of Persona Q. Here's my thoughts so far!

From the opening sequence, the P Studio has nailed making a Persona game in appearance and aesthetic; from the rocking intro to the serene start screen, everything looks and feels like a main numbered title. So far, the art style has been delightful, as familiar characters have been made into smaller, cuter models that still retain their original attitudes and facial expressions. In the first few cutscenes, the new voice acting is slightly different, but just like Golden and Arena, Atlus has chosen perfect new talent to cover the dubs. In my review for Ultimax, I made a note of criticizing the corners that the characters from both games were written into, becoming a bit flat given the different medium. In an RPG like PQ however, everything you know and love about these characters is able to be fleshed out; plenty of pitch perfect interactions and reactions from Junpei, Aigis and new to the series Ren & Zei flavor the cut scenes and in-game dialogue like a classic Persona game (For this review, I chose the Persona 3 side for the intro, however, at some point the 3 & 4 cast will collide and make one story line). From what I’ve seen, even the dungeons and enemies are borrowed and tooled towards 3 a little more, with plenty of classic Shadows returning, albeit tuned more for this battle system.

The dungeon crawling and map making lifted from the Etrian Odyssey series work amazingly well, and for a series rookie like myself, are easy enough to learn and use. I had worried about having to maintain the map and how different the dungeons would feel, but the combat reminds me enough of old MegaTen games, and works well for me. The one thing of note about this round of dungeons, either because of me or the size of the layout, it has taken me 3-4 hours to get to the third floor of the dungeon. Compared to the relatively fast nature of mainline Persona games, this is a snail’s pace. But, combat is engaging enough and there’s plenty on the map, from shortcuts to traps to treasure to ensure this by no means a boring long haul. FOEs (again, borrowed from EO) act more like the Shadows we are used to, being visible on the map and in constant motion, but keep a set path and are extremely, butt-clinching hard. Most will be able to kill party members in one swing, so avoid them at the beginning.

In my few hours, the item shop and Velvet Room have returned as primary sources for items and Persona respectively, and a for-profit clinic run by Elizabeth has been set up to heal and restore SP. A good mix of familiar elements and new mechanics means I am able to balance healing, item synthesis and purchase, and Persona fusion in a similar manner to my usual method.

Persona usage, in fact has been changed for this title, allowing all party members to carry a sub-Persona tacked on to their prime Persona. This eschews the usual battle method of relying on your main characters 12 slots of Persona switching and spreads that responsibility to the whole team. It’s been interesting and fun to try to get the perfect team of Persona matched to my party members, in order to cover weaknesses, add more elements to my repertoire, and try new moves and strategies. It’s also been a pain in the ass to try and remember to equip new Persona each time I fuse new ones or receive them in the field, but that’s more to blame on my slept deprived brain than anything.

I’m gonna check back in when the two parties collide (spoilers, I suppose), which may be anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on how much more this first dungeon will take me. All I know is, if I had to review this game for scale, I’d be a little late out of the gate, even if I got a review copy! And that’s not a bad thing in my books.

I decided to pop in my old copy of Skate 3 last night and tooled around with some of the cooler parts of the map. They had some really well thought out environments in that game, from real skateparks to a skateable stone quarry. I bought this game right around the end of 2010, when I had to take a break from engineering college and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It wasn't circuitry and coding, that was for sure.

As I pulled up some of my old saved clips, I realized this was one of the first editing tools I had available. A part time college student couldn't really afford Adobe Premiere (I still can't and I'm about to graduate), so beign able to edit in house was amazing. I ended up making my first Youtube video with a hastily edited clip of my guy bailing off a huge ledge before flipping and landing in a perfect handstand, because the Hall of Meat system was awesome like that. I'm starting to realize that this may have gotten me started in television production, and got me back into school for a real vocation: making dumb videos. Or just good videos, whichever I have time for.

Blackbox made the Skate series as a much closer to real life simulation than the Tony Hawk series had ever been (despite venerable attempts in Project 8), and even included dumb little details like your camera being an actual camcorder with a wide angle lens, like a shredding Lakitu. The ability to create shot for shot stylized skate videos was a blast, and allowed me to experiment with creative processes, setting up shots, scrubbing footage and making the right cuts to create, at least what I thought were neat little promos. I balanced my time in that game, somewhere nearing 100s of hours as we speak, making legitimate attempts to skate and documenting every bad glitch and bail in that game, and boy where there some bad ones.

From there, I ended up applying to one of the biggest media and production colleges, and I now spend my days in a truck full of splitters, switchers and monitors, live cutting or post editing footage of just about anything from NCAA basketball games to interviews about arsons (yes multiple arsons, dumb kids), Also ended up buying a good old pine and grip tape and busting my ass learning to skate over the past few years. Honestly, between the two, these are the first few hobbies turned lifestyle for me. Often I would pick up whatever was trending and ride it til I got bored (looking at you Razer Scooters) and move on. It was a major change of pace to find something as simple as recording a sick trick and posting it to be a relaxing and creative moment, something I'm still trying to capture today.

This is effectively a follow up to @patrickklepek and his write up entitled "Suddenly, Big Budget Games Love Horror Again."

Horror games have had a storied and changing dynamic with just about every aspect of the greater games community. When a good, scary game comes out, it has a round of fascinating effects for everyone from developer to consumer. While most genres have some sort of following, the horror subset seems to have the most ravenous fans and producers alike.

The recently released and revealed P.T. teaser for the new Silent Hills has shown, from its conception, a fantastic model for how the world reacts to the next big scare. Starting with attaching big names to the director chairs, leading to constant speculation by forums and emulation/production by the Youtube and Twitch equipped "Let's Play" crowd, the potential for the next big scary hit is palpable.

The fact that Hideo Kojima, father of the Metal Gear Solid series, is attached to this latest rendition of everyone's favorite vacation spot is a massive bulletpoint that proves Konami wants the attention and ability of a superstar name running the show. This point is made exponentially louder by Guilllermo del Toro, a man more known for psychological and fantastic films than games, is also on board. The works created by these captains of industry are enough to bring in the attention it has (if you haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth, no wonder you slept so well last night), but the combination of two such heavy hitters is usually reserved for games that need to make AAA sales and AAA scares.

If this game is successful, the fans' yearslong cries for a back to basics scary game will be not only placated, but justified. This could mean a return to classic scary games, rather than Konami and Capcom's recent forays into experimentation with action elements and (in a short burst of personal opinion) bad spinoffs. Big developers have as of recent let the indie crowd run the horror game...game, to mostly successful results. However, a big enough response to this would mean a return to form for companies that were built on scary games. Since Konami took its time and got possibly the best people money can buy behind Silent Hills, this could represent a jumping off point for other developers to invest in horror games.

The result of this collaboration so far? This game is fucking scary, and everyone loves it. Let's not overcook things, the teaser is one hallway, over and over again. But what they crammed into that hallway had people buzzing. NeoGAF can't stop speculating and "holy shitting" itself, and the Let's Play community, one that thrives on scary games like Slender & Five Night's at Freddy's. The adoring public loves a good scare, despite millions of years of evolution to avoid them, as evidenced by the many videos of the teaser made so far, such as this one from Ireland's JackSepticEye, and even our own Scoops on his Spookin' coverage. People love a good scare, but what people really love is watching other people getting scared, so much so that the first promo involves a recycled gag from recent movies and games showing a bevvy of people flipping wigs at the scares.

What this is the first steps to something much like the original Silent Hill games in their effects and the progression of going from some nebulous, possibly scary thing, to a full blown horror blockbuster, assuming the game can keep up with this first wave of speculation and production. What we may be looking at is the next centerpiece in current and coming horror games conversations. I, for one, welcome our pants-shitting overlords, Kojima and del Toro, as well as the entire team behind this coming project.

Twitch has become the premier streaming site for most if not all gamers, from both a producer and consumer standpoint. For those behind on the current state, it was bought by Google recently. Follow this news, Justin.tv, the parent site that spawned Twitch shut it's doors just yesterday. Following that development, the official Twitch blog announced two new policies involving past broadcasts/VODs and third party content identification systems, recommending users export their past broadcasts before deletion, and to, you know, not listen to music while streaming.

The two policies come as the first heralds of changes to come with Youtube/Google integration (the third party ID system being lifted directly from Youtube it seems) and are the first two roadblocks with this purchase. The question these policies raise is one of balancing the new resources a Google branded Twitch can offer versus the historically unwelcome transitions Google integration has bought (see the Youtube Google+ complaints still to this day being lifted.) These new policies reflect a very similar contested point in the balance of free speech versus copyright law that has been brought up in other corners of the online world.

The question I pose tonite is this: how far will Google press on, and how much of a response, negative or otherwise, will we see from both big names and normal users of the site?

Hello.

I made a playlist of ~2 hours of the Destiny Beta. I didn't play the Moon mission. Forgive me.

Here go.

This is going to get personal, heavy and probably will not be read by the greater Giant Bomb community. Which means not only am I in a rare position to speak freely, but in an even rarer position of being right down the middle on a lot of the topics being brought up.

Fuck it, wrote it on my tumblr.