Like my alliteration?

Here’s a brief round-up of some cool geeky gifts you can find and buy on etsy.com, a website that’s is filled to the brim with all sorts of handmade oddball stuff. Don’t wait till Christmas Eve to do your shopping!

This “I need a <br>!” shirt is actually available in real woman’s sizes, which is nice since a lot of nerd-oriented clothing is made just in mens styles and sizes. This goes for a super cheap $12.49 is available in three different colors from TheShirtDudes.

Now admittedly this gift could go for either gender, but it’s so cute I’m filing it under the girl category for now (though if I were a dude, I’d want it). This handsewn 3×3x3 companion cube can be sent to your doorstep for $15 from Colorswirl.

Continuing with the Portal theme is this awesome “The Cake is a Lie” pin, it’s a little bigger than a quarter and is available for $1.50 from Vickinator.

This is a Swarovski Crystal Headdress! It’s a tad pricey compared to the other gifts on this list, but at $65 with free shipping this amazing piece of wardrobe from venusinchains will make any chain mail enthusiastic ecstatic on Christmas morning.

Last but certainly not least on the list are these odd, yet fun and surprisingly practical Alien Hand Knit Kiwi Green Warm Three Fingered Gloves. At $24.99 from SaintReagansHollow, these mittens would be great for a Christmas afternoon snowball fight.

–Stephanie

So this weekend, I did something that I thought I would never do. I went over to a friend’s house and watched Twilight, the first movie in what is laughably called “The Twilight Saga.” The reason I did so was because they were “getting ready” to see New Moon, the latest edition of what threatens to be a four movie saga — possibly more given the massive box office numbers of the latest installment. I went because these are my friends and I love them and I love getting together with them. Plus my friend Theresa makes some awesome chips & dip.

Now full disclosure. About a year ago, my wife brought home the first Twilight book on CD. At the time I was working at GameSpy and I had a massive commute every morning so I spent a lot of time listening to books on CD they she would borrow from the library. She knows I like fantasy and SF and according to the book’s description, Twilight was about vampires, so she thought I’d like it. I didn’t know anything about Twilight either, so I listened to it — and I liked it. It wasn’t great literature by any means, it was cute in that “High School Musical” sort of way — it’s a romance aimed at tweeners that just blew up into this massive thing that defies reason.

The benefit of that was that by circumstance I happened to have read Twilight before it blew up into this big pop culture phenomenon and that offers an interesting perspective on it. When my friends and I got together to watch the first movie, about half of us are really into it, while the other half are what you might refer to as “haters.” The thing was that my friend Theresa actually had T-shirts made up that said “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob” and she had gotten her husband a T-shirt that said “H.A.T.E. — Husbands Against Team Edward.” It was then that I realized that none of us was actually serious about this.

Here’s the thing, I know that there are people out there that really like Twilight and enjoy getting caught up in the hype of a phenomenon. We’ve all done it with summer blockbusters or best-selling novels or other “madness of crowds” moments. The thing is that the other side of that also enjoys it on a certain level. “Haters” are also caught up in the hype and they’re enjoying provoking the fans. Having listened to Twilight and enjoyed it and now joining the “haters” camp kind of gives one a bit of remove from the whole process. I’m having fun poking at all the Twilight lovers out there but do I truly “hate” the book? Obviously not, I already mentioned that I enjoyed it.

To me, the only real danger of something like Twilight is there are always those who forget that no matter what side of the “debate” you’re on, it’s all ultimately inconsequential. The fact is that young girls need their dreamboats. Team Edward and Team Jacob are just the latest in a long line of bobby-sox idols that stretch back through the New Kids on the Block to David Cassidy to Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee. Twilight will fade, as all such fads do. If something like Twilight excites your anger to the point where you get really mad about it, may I suggest you take two spoonfuls of perspective and call me in the morning?

I just saw this on Attack of the Show’s “Around the Net” segment and felt the need to share it with all of you. One of the funnier things I’ve seen this week.

J.

Well, it’s available today for the PS3 and that’s all that really matters to me. Anywho, looks like I know what I’m doing tonight.

Side note: Since it’s Thursday I was planning on doing the “Question of the Week” post but Elliott has started doing these Daily Polls. Do you guys still want my question of the week or would it just be overkill? Let me know.

J.

I really like Kyle Orland. As a games journalist his quiet ambition for pushing games journalism beyond what it is is matched an underappreciated talent. Sometimes though even a good writer can miss the boat. That’s what I think happened in his interesting but underthought series of What if? articles at Crispy Gamer. In the articles, Orland attempts to look at key gaming moments and ask what might have happened had a different course been taken. Some of the questions he asks are interesting ones — What if Magnavox had decided to enforce Ralph Baer’s patent for a “television gaming apparatus” and gone on to become the almost monopolistic holder of the video game industry through its Odyssey 3 system? What if Nintendo had never released the Game Boy? That sort of thing. It’s an interesting concept, but Orland doesn’t really think some of the implications of the questions he’s asking through.

Take for example his segment on what if Atari had avoided the videogame crash in 1983 and gone on to face Nintendo. He posits that a forward thinking Nolan Bushnell pushes the development of the Atari 2700 — a more advanced console replacement for the 2600 that would be backward-compatible with 2600 cartridges. The console takes the market by storm and Atari survives to push upstart newcomer Nintendo into a corner of the market by 1990. What he misses in this posit is that the Atari 2700 actually existed and it was a disaster. It was called the Atari 5200 and while unlike the Orland’s fictional 2700 unit it wasn’t compatible with 2600 cartridges, that wasn’t really the deciding factor in its eventual death. The 5200 had the horsepower to compete against both the Intellivision (which it was designed to destroy) and the Colecovision (which had more graphic power but horrible controllers). Even without the backwards compatibility, the 5200 was certainly no disaster right out of the gate and after the unit was redesigned to accept 2600 cartridges could have been a success under the care of a competently run company.

The issue was really the glut of poor Atari 2600 software, the proximate cause of the great videogame crash of 1983-84 from which the Western industry almost didn’t recover. Orland’s 2700 system — even with backward compatibility — doesn’t address this problem. Indeed, it actually makes it worse because one of the first things a 2700 user would do would be to buy the bargain basement software that was currently flooding store shelves because it would be cheaper than the newer 2700 software. That would have killed the 2700 through word-of-mouth much faster than the 5200 died in the real world thanks to corporate stupidity and neglect. The institutional rot at Atari was already a foregone conclusion by 1983 and the innovation that eventually saved the Western side of the business – the Nintendo Seal of Quality – only came about because the fledgling Nintendo of America had learned the lessons of the crash. Without the crash, it’s extremely doubtful that Atari would have come up with the idea of licensing third-party software developers for the 2700 by virtue of the fact that they never thought of it for the 5200.

More importantly, Orland misses one of the real “what if?” scenarios that jumps out of Atari’s crash and burn – the fact that even if Atari had managed to survive the great crash it would not have gone on to face off against Nintendo – it would have survived by becoming Nintendo! In 1983, Atari under the “leadership” of Ray Kassar was on the verge of inking a deal with Nintendo to distribute Donkey Kong on home computers – a deal that was designed to be the precursor to Atari distributing Nintendo products outside of Japan. Given that Nintendo’s reason for wanting the deal was Atari’s impressive worldwide marketing apparatus, it’s entirely likely that the Famicom (which became the Nintendo Entertaiment System in the West in our world) would have been Atari-branded. That would have been the Atari 2700.

The problem with that scenario would have been – once again – a glut of poor software. Without a Nintendo Seal of Quality and a system of third-party licensing, there’s no doubt that crappy software for the 2700 would have flooded the market soon after the system was released. Regardless of the quality of the games that would be produced by Nintendo itself (we’re assuming that Atari would recognize Miyamoto’s genius and not try to slap a license on Super Mario Bros., by no means a slam-dunk), the 2700 would soon be buried in a bunch of crappy Chase-the-Chuckwagon clones. Atari would still have collapsed – albeit a year or two later and this time it would have taken Nintendo’s hope of Western expansion with it.

The result would have been a videogame drought that makes our crash in 1983-84 look like the glory days of the PS2. Nintendo in our world had a hard enough time getting into retail because of how badly retailers had been burned by the crash – they invented R.O.B. the robot specifically so they could call the system a “toy” rather than a videogame. After the crash of the Atari 2700 there isn’t a retailer in the Western hemisphere that would have touched a videogame with a 10-foot pole. Most Atari 2600 gamers would have either moved on to PC gaming as I did or simply forgotten about gaming altogether – except for dropping some quarters into the occasional old Pac-Man machine at a local 7-11 (the arcades also hit a big slump in this period from which they never really recovered). It wouldn’t have been the “end of videogames” but it’s entirely possible that gaming would never have become the relevant cultural force it eventually became. PC gaming could never have taken the place of console gaming because it wasn’t gaming that drove the adoption of the PC – it was spreadsheets.

In my mind, the true frontier of videogaming in such a world would probably have been the handheld system. In that case Nintendo, burned by the failure of the 2700 would have focused on expanding its Game & Watch line of products, introducing the first GameWatch Boy in 1986 (later the name would be shortened to just GameBoy) packed in with Tetris. About a year later the GameBoy would be rivaled by NEC’s Turbo Express and the two handheld systems would split the market between them, though NEC played second-fiddle to Nintendo until about 1995. Atari’s Game Gear – a joint venture between them and Sega – never managed better than a distant third in the marketplace.

In 1995 however, NEC would expand the capabilities of the TurboExpress by utilizing its heft as a consumer electronics company to link the TurboExpress into the burgeoning “multimedia” revolution by incorporating PCLink capabilities that allow users to download applications – including music and video files – into the newly renamed “TurboPod.” Eventually the TurboPod relegates the Gameboy into a niche as a mere gaming toy while NEC faces off against its real competition – Sony’s new line of Digital Walkmans that perform similar functions utilizing technology developed by Apple.

I think somewhere in that world I’m playing a lot of pinball.

There’s a lot of rumors flying around message boards across the internet that Episode 3 news is imminent. And while I hate to be debbie downer – it’s not. We’re not going to hear anything (at least not soon, as rumors would have you believe).

I’m greatly disturbed that a person running a fake twitter account posing as Gabe Newell (twitter.com/GabeNewell) is managing to fool so many people – for the record Gabe Newell does not have any twitter account at all. I was made aware of the fake Gabe yesterday, and have been wondering just why whoever the person behind the account is was keeping up the charade for so damn long. But then today there was a link posted to a supposed trailer for Episode 3. The link directs you to a website called rolenation.com where you are instructed to sign up to view the trailer, and a tiny little message also says “Valve, if you want to discuss buying this domain. E-Mail me at kuromeku@gmail.com”

So that is apparently what this is all about. Some peon driving traffic to his website by masquerading as a Valve staff member. Fail kuromeku, fail.

My only other puzzling thought is – why hasn’t Valve had this fake account yanked yet? It doesn’t serve any purpose but pissing people off even more when they get their hopes up and are let down.

Nothing to do but go back to the waiting game and hope we hear some (legitimate) news someday in the near future.

–Stephanie

So, yesterday I accidentially happened upon a launch party for the new ubuntu distribution – Karmic Koala.

I’m all for ubuntu in relation to boot-time, time to boot apps, look and feel etc… but from talking with the geeks at the launch party I realised that ubuntu will never succeed. I run both ubuntu and windows, since some of my needs are only met by windows, especially in regard to being certain that you can access basic functionality with 3rd parties, such as my eBank, my tax registration etc. And apparently so do most ubuntu users.

I learned that even the ubuntu geeks run windows to be able to play the newest games… so it is all over, ubuntu… even your dedicated followers are sleeping with the enemy…

And some tiny details like the fact that you need to actively enable mp3s and similar file-formats is separating ubuntu from being a truly “walk-up-and-use” system for the average user.

I’m perfectly happy running both, though. C’ya,.

Felicia Day will be co-hosting Attack of the Show on G4 tomorrow.

That is all.

J.

OK. That headline is really just Google fodder looking for Obamacare search traffic, although reading the announcement about the release of Sanitarium at GOG.com did make me think about our current health care debate in a weird way. If you’ve never heard of Sanitarium, that’s a damn shame. It’s one of the most underrated and tragically ignored games of the 1990’s. It was put together by the Dreamforge Intertainment and published by ASC Games, the outfit that was working on an action game version of White Wolf’s Werewolf: the Apocalypse that showed a lot of promise and still stands up as one of their finest titles. (Spoiler warnings ahead!)

The basic storyline is as cliched as they come. You’re a man who awakens as a patient in a horrible sanitarium, your face covered by bandages and you have no idea who you are or how you got there. The staff tells you you’ve survived a car crash suffered during an escape attempt and that your memory will return once you recover your sanity. What follows though, is a truly surreal journey into insanity as you as the player keep shifting in and out of bizarre worlds and the very shape of reality changes while you struggle to recover your memory. As you play, you as the player will find yourself in a 1950’s small town being absorbed by an alien invasion, an Aztec village being threatened by a hostile god, a strange house being haunted by ghosts and a hive of intelligent bees on an alien planet. Even your identity keeps shifting as you change at intervals from a scarred man to a ten year-old girl to a four-armed alien warrior to a living statue.

What makes Sanitarium amazing and still timely though is what all of these different worlds have in common. As you play, a thread between these different worlds begins to emerge, all of them relating to your shrouded past and to why you’re in that Sanitarium. There’s also some interesting commentary on the nature of pharmaceutical companies in a for-profit health care system and the realization that the true horror you face isn’t supernatural at all — it’s the very human emotion of greed and what some people will do to protect a profit margin. It posits a drug company that will murder a researcher who develops a cure for a deadly plague because it threatens to cut into the profits generated by the stopgap drug that merely allows you to live with the disease.

Here’s the thing, though, the commentary in Sanitarium misses out on a very important point in the for-profit world of medicine — or the for-profit world of anything. Yes, there are unscrupulous people who will do anything to protect an individual company, but I’ve discussed health care with too many people who seem to believe that it’s the profit motive itself that’s the problem, rather than the illegal or criminal actions of an individual to protect a particular set of profits. Put simply, profits are the engine of progress. Even if we could magically create a socialized medical system that actually worked, it would bring medical research to a grinding halt. When doctors and researchers make the same money as McDonald’s fry cooks, you get the same quality of doctors as McDonald’s gets workers. Remove the chance to profit, remove enlightened self-interest from the equation and you put the kibosh on the chance for cures to AIDS, cancer or anything else that currently plagues us. Ultimately, you get what you pay for.

To be fair, not even Sanitarium makes the argument that Big Pharma and insurance companies are in a giant conspiracy to suppress the cures for diseases in the pursuit of profit. That game is mostly a thriller about an evil pharmaceutical executive — an individual who commits multiple criminal acts. They leave that to big budget Hollywood movies, Michael Moore and a delightful conspiracy theorist of my acquaintance who will wax rhapsodic on how we never landed on the Moon. I leave their arguments in the Sanitarium where they belong. But even making that argument betrays not only a blatant hostility toward capitalism, but a profound misunderstanding of how capitalism works, how research works and eliminates even the possibility of finding common ground in the health care debate.

Even if a company does manage to Silkwood a particular invention, there are too many other companies out there working along the same lines who will eventually make the breakthrough. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, he merely made the light bulb so good it became commercially practical. If some candle company had had Edison murdered, the light bulb would have been discovered by one of dozens of other researchers working along the same lines.

None of this, by the way, should stop you from checking out Sanitarium if you can. It’s a genius game that never got the credit it was due. At $9.99 on GoG.com, it’s well worth your time.

So now that it’s up, I can tell you that one of the reasons blogging has been so light for the last week is that I have been hip deep in reviewing Dragon Age for G4. It’s brilliant and amazing and I spent close to 50 hours over the course of five days playing through it and I’ll probably do it again with a different character. If you’d like to read the rest of my take, check out the full article on the G4 Web site. This particular post isn’t about the quality of the game, which is beyond question for me. It’s about the problem that I had with the Darkspawn, the main threat to the world the player faces.

Here’s the problem. Like the Orcs or goblins in Tolkien’s world, the Darkspawn are an embodiment of absolute evil. They are like locusts, driven to destroy, unable to be negotiated with and seemingly incapable of any higher desire than to burn, crush and destroy and make more of their kind. In short, they’re a typical rampaging fantasy horde that exists merely to provide sword fodder for the player to hack through millions of them without the annoyance of feeling guilty. That bothers me. I don’t like unredeemable fantasy monsters. It was one of the awful influences of Tolkien that turned me off of fantasy for many years.

Now, I’m not a pacifist. I’ve supported wars in the real world knowing that real people on both sides would suffer horrible deaths and injuries because of it. Even as I did it though, I never bought into the simplistic propaganda that those on the other side were irredeemably evil or anything less than human. War is a serious matter, requiring serious deliberation with full appreciation of the consequences of legally sanctioning the killing of other sentient beings. Even when the cause is just, the process is tragic. Like my recent bout of guilt fighting the Morroval in Moria, I’m wondering how to feel about the Darkspawn I’ve killed. (Yes, I know they’re not real and that “it’s just a game.” That’s hardly the point, is it Captain Metaphor?)

What makes the moral simplicity of the Darkspawn especially glaring in Dragon Age is the incredible level of characterization the other races and societies are given. Every character and race in the game has realistic, multi-layered set of motivations. They’re not purely good, nor are they purely evil. Even the “villain” the player faces throughout much of the game is given a believable, though twisted, sense of moral purpose for the actions he takes in defense of his homeland. In fact, at one point one of the character’s henchmen, when asked about the actions she takes, scoffs at the player. “It’s really easy to be an adventurer,” she says. “No one weeps for the death of an ogre. It’s much harder when you’re facing enemies who look just like you.”

She’s right and it’s to the game’s credit that despite the threat they pose, the Darkspawn are actually in the minority of the foes you’ll face. One of the toughest choices you’ll face in the game is deciding which side of a Dwarven royal succession struggle you’ll support — knowing that whichever way you choose, you’re going to have to kill a lot of dwarves whose only real crime is choosing to support the side the player didn’t pick.

No such grace is granted to the Darkspawn, though. They are sword fodder, there to be killed in order to rack up the experience points. Yet the darkspawn wear armor. They carry swords and medical supplies. Clearly they have a culture — someone must be forging this stuff — and value life, their own if no one else’s. Who are they? Are they sentient at all? If they’re nothing but locusts, then they’re not truly evil, are they? This was the reason why in Sufficiently Advanced Magic I chose to avoid having an “evil race” and made sure to explain the motivations for why two nations are at war. I have my sympathies and they come out in the book, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m ready to retire Tolkien’s orcs once and for all.

A rather random, yet epic trailer to what’s considered to be the most anticipated musical game of the year (tell me what you think, in the comments). The possibilities are virtually endless with what you can mix in DJ Hero, however only a limited amount of songs can be mixed, that is… Until some genius plays the game for two hours before realizing ‘Hey, you know what? I wanna hack my DJ hero to mix ANY song.’ I’ll give it two months, max. And as an added bonus, a trailer featuring everyone’s favourite electronic duo; Daft Punk.

]]> http://jokesterdotbe.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/pense-bete-de-la-ligne-de-commande-sous-unix/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:27:22 +0000 jokesterdotbe http://jokesterdotbe.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/pense-bete-de-la-ligne-de-commande-sous-unix/ http://jokesterdotbe.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/initiation-a-latex-pour-les-non-matheux/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:26:10 +0000 jokesterdotbe http://jokesterdotbe.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/initiation-a-latex-pour-les-non-matheux/ http://jokesterdotbe.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/filesystem-hierarchy-standard/ Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:07:54 +0000 jokesterdotbe http://jokesterdotbe.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/filesystem-hierarchy-standard/ http://delsyn.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/the-tipping-point-nexon-reports-36-growth-in-3q/ Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:39:25 +0000 delsyn http://delsyn.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/the-tipping-point-nexon-reports-36-growth-in-3q/

Game Informer is reporting that Nexon’s America had a 36% jump in revenue in the third quarter. Between this and things like Dungeons & Dragons Online switching to free-2-play and the really fun League of Legends being offered for free I’m starting to think we may be reaching a tipping point where game developers are realizing that the traditional methods of revenue generation from gaming are being supplanted by a whole new method of monetizing products. What makes this especially interesting is that this is Nexon America, not Nexon as a whole which was already a successful Korean developer. Nexon America is a separate business entity designed to sell it’s products in the Western market. It’s apparently working.

The key of course is offering products designed with that kind of business model in mind and overcoming the impression of F2P being the catch-all for crap games not good enough to be sold at retail. In the case of Dungeons & Dragons Online, the game was always good. It was just saddled with the wrong business model. The design of DDO was always more suited to small groups of friends pushing their way through the content at a much slower pace than the ticking clock that a $15 a month subscription fee would allow. So what you had was people bulling their way through content over and over again in pick-up groups because they felt like they had to play to justify the expense. What people are finding now is that they can go through the game at their own pace and spend money or not as it suits their game style. From what I understand, the result is people spending a lot more money than they ever did as subscribers.

The thing about Turbine is that they essentially lucked into an F2P game by virtue of having DDO. This isn’t something that would work with The Lord of the Rings Online because the game structure is completely different. Nexon, on the other hand, has games that explicitly built around this kind of mechanic. If you get the majority of your gaming news from hard-core gamer sites like IGN, GameSpy or GameSpot you may have never seen or heard of Maple Story or Mabinogi. If you’ve seen some ads for it you may have dismissed it as the cutesy free-2-play MMO that “real” gamers wouldn’t give the time of day. When I was PC editor for GameSpy I know I’d get calls constantly from PR reps throwing games like that at me that — blinkered as I was by the “real” games that were sitting on my desk — I’d just ignore and dismiss. To be fair, a lot of them are really bad knock-offs that aren’t worth your time. The beauty of being out on your own though is the opportunity to explore areas of gaming that you’ve missed (I’ve become a hard-core Mafia Wars fanatic). I’m beginning to realize now the kinds of experiences that I’ve missed out on.

Take Mabinogi. On the advice of a friend I downloaded it and started playing and I immediately couldn’t believe how good it was. Mabinogi is a classic example of a game that doesn’t push the envelope as much as origami it around into a new and pleasing experience. Everything you might expect from an MMO is there — questing, leveling, killing monsters, crafting. Rather than the more linear experience that suddenly levels out into lateral advancement after the level cap is reached though, Mabinogi is a broad-based experience from teh get-go. It’s a game that encourages you subtly through things like the “Part-time job” mechanic to really explore and do different sorts of things during the same play session. Rather than mindlessly grinding through monsters or quests, I found myself in Mabinogi really running around and dabbling in the many different things to do. It’s got a fun arcadey combat system and randomly generated dungeons that actually utilize items in your inventory to create them.

More importantly, it’s got the kind of wide progression scheme that encourages you to get involved on your schedule rather than the game’s. Without those huge time-sucking raids or the kinds of tricks that encourage players to devote big chunks of time to make any sort of measurable progress. That’s the kinds of things you need to justify a monthly fee. If a player doesn’t feel like they need to be in the game in order to advance, they’ll begin wondering just what they’re paying all that money for. It’s also why people feel like they can only play one subscription-based MMO at a time. For most people that’s World of Warcraft, the king of that sort of vertical-based progression scheme.

In WoW you HAVE to devote time to raiding or PvP in order to advance once you reach the level cap and old content is abandoned once the majority of the player-base moves through it. Free to play games don’t need that and consequently they can devote less developer time to creating these huge content chunks. There’s certainly room in this world for both types of games but it seem like there are more people with limited time who would prefer the F2P model than the kind of “health club” mindset of the traditional subscription model that really only appeals to people with lots of disposable time. It’ll be interesting to see how Nexon does once its yearly numbers come out. If it does as well as it has over the last few quarters, I think more than a few big western game companies are going to sit up and take notice.

(and yes, I did put another picture of a sexy night elf in here.)

From PWMania:

WWF Hall of Famer Captain Lou Albano has passed away aged 76. Albano suffered a severe heart attack in 2005 and has had failing health ever since. We reported the news yesterday that Albano had been put in a hospice.

Captain Lou will forever be remembered as being, first and foremost, one of the best managers in the history of professional wrestling. Growing up in the eighties I also remember him as Cyndi Lauper’s “father” in a handful of her music videos and the live-action personification of Mario on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. Rest in peace Captain.

J.

Last night I tried to complete the final mission of “Fallout 3″ and ultimately failed–but not because I was poorly skilled. I had been playing the game for a few months and since then, completed tons of bonus missions, loaded my character’s stats and skills and found a few unique weapons (Lincoln’s Repeater and A3-21’s Plasma Rifle FTW!). I could have finished the game a lot sooner, but I found Fallout’s world to be so intriguing and immersive that I wanted to learn more. I had no problem spending hours wandering through the Capital Wasteland and discovering every little nook I could find, but this was always met with frustration and not because of the game’s design–it was my laptop.

The laptop I have is a Dell Inspiron e1705. If you look at it now, it’s a clunker: extremely wide, heavy and immobile. It was too big and heavy to haul around, so it became my halfway desktop computer, though, to my demise, did not function like one.

The laptop is over two-years-old now, and while the graphics processing unit (GPU) was great at the time for games like “Half-Life 2″ and “Doom 3″, it really isn’t up to par for graphically intensive games from 2008 and beyond. “Fallout 3″ (a 2008 release) is mostly playable with the frames-per-second (FPS) ranging from 15 to 30, depending on the amount of action happening on screen, but it was when I reached the climax of the game that I had to stop because it became too mind-boggingly slow to play on.

For one thing, I know my laptop needs to be cleaned out. Either there is some dust build-up or a broken fan, because my GPU’s temperature often reaches up to 90 degrees Celsius in big games like “Fallout 3″. But I have a feeling that won’t fix all of my problems. My GPU is simply outdated and I cannot afford the $400 to $500 upgrade; I’d rather just build a new computer at that point–but I’m too poor to do that right now.

I’m currently paying the University of Southern Maine $800 a month for this semester, and I just put $500 down to buy my mom’s clunky, yet awesome car. I have enough money for the essentials–and please don’t read this the wrong way; in relation to the rest of the world, I’m doing very well since I can pay for a college education and a car amongst other  things–but as an aspiring journalist who wants to specialize in computers, technology and computer games, it kinda sucks to be so behind in the latest and greatest in tech.

It seems that affordability is the biggest issue for wannabe tech gurus like me. I aspire to be like the people I watch and listen to everyday on Revision3 and Twit.Tv, but I have no idea how I could reach that point where I can have access to trying out all these new cool gizmos and gadgets all the time. I suppose one answer is to “start small.” I know a lot about my laptop and all of the components connecting to it. I have a Sony HD Webbie loaned to me from Sony Music Entertainment for my College Marketing job, and my fiancee, Stephanie, has an iPhone she lets me play with.

Luckily, working for the USM Free Press has started to show its perks. A representative from Verizon Wireless contacted the A&E editor about having a Free Press writer review some of their smart phones and the message was then forwarded to me. While I’m not exactly a big phone guy (I still have a dumb phone, the only one I can afford), I’d love to test some phones and get some experience writing tech reviews.

Before the phone review opportunity appeared, I was already finding another way to cope with my geeky poverty: cheap gaming.

Valve Software’s Steam has become the premier platform for PC gaming, and one of the reasons why it’s such a strong platform is the ever-expanding library of games available on the Steam store, especially cheap indie games. Over the last 10 months, I purchased three great games for under the total price of $10: “World of Goo”, “Blueberry Garden” and “Audiosurf”. Besides being extremely affordable for a poor geek like me, these games run great on my laptop, they look great and they’re a lot of fun.

Halflife2.net is looking for some community members to review games for the website, so I’m hoping to use my newfound specialty in indie games for a shot at reviewing them. If they accept me, the moderators would assign me to review a indie game once in return for a free copy. It would only happen once a while, but it would still be another way for me to slowly creep into the world of nerdy journalism.

I’m anxious to reach that point where I can own a brand new computer again and review flagship games, but until my I get enough birthday money to afford all the computer parts, I’ll be playing my heart out to games like “Audiosurf” and testing out smart phones while the Capital Wasteland patiently awaits its clean water supply.

–D

Actually, I should say “Things that I have learned this week by reading comments left by our some of our wonderful viewers of CCW TV.”

1. Elliott is ignorant if he thinks that Batwoman’s lesbianism is NOT a marketing scheme by DC in order to sell more comics.

4. Elliott really puts up with a lot of stupid shit from a few of our viewers.

I really don’t know how he does it. It probably has something to do with the fact that the man is a true professional and a class act. I could be wrong though.

J.

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