Brett's Gaming Blog

If I had to stick my gaming interests down to one dial on the spectrum, I'd have to go with mainstream indie games. Now this sounds backwards in all sorts of ways, but let me explain. Why didn't he say FPS or RPG? I love those games but I can't get over the artistic and simplistic nature of indie games. What the hell does he mean by mainstream indie games? The indie scene is huge, and I dare not call myself and expert in the category. I'm always being surprised by what is out there, that has been there for years, but I don't know about until it comes up in conversation. So what I mean by mainstream indie games are those that get into the public eye. It could be by remarkable game play and is getting talked about by the press and by gamers, or games that are getting promoted and marketed in a way that the message reaches a mass audience (like summer of arcade games on XBLA). XBLA is by far in a way my favorite gaming source. I eat up games like Cas...

Hey all, not much to talk about today, but I wanted to give you all an update on what going on in my head recently. I have been thinking about ways to expand my writing topics and create a better read for you all. I wanted to start weekly segments so there was a little bit more reliability in my posts. Also wanted to do more than just opinion pieces. I feel like writing opinion pieces is all there is to do that is actually interesting. But I really need to hammer out a long opinion piece rather than throw one together like I have been. Also in the spirit of full disclosure like in my season two opener, I have a new goal in life and its intertwined with the blog. I want to start writing freelance articles for videogame publications. As I said before, I wanted to join the videogame industry in some way, and becoming a freelance writer seems like a fruitful journy. Although my grammar and spelling stink, and not a single friend I have would ever think that I could enjoy writing, ...

If you have not heard the news, 38 Studios (creators of Kingdoms of Amalur) has laid off it's entire staff, along with the entire staff at Big Huge Games (responsible for KoA: Reckoning). This comes at no surprise after the headlines that have been springing up this month about missed payroll and overdue loan payments, but it's still a sad week for us all. When Reckoning hit in February things seemed hopeful. It ranked 4th in the NPD for the month and sold 1.2 million copies overall. I highly enjoyed the game, giving it praise to everyone who enjoyed Skyrim and other games of the genre. It's Metacritic score is an 80 for the Xbox 360 version of the game which was also promising. It seems things went wrong from a managerial standpoint and a money management point of view. I'm not here to point judgement or place blame, but rather than talk up something else I wanted to bring up a topic that is near and dear to me. Many friends of mine are now without wo...

If your like me, you're always looking ahead to the future when it comes to videogames. New releases, new content, anything new you can get your hands on. As we approach the summer drought, most gamers are looking to the fall to start planning their gaming fixes. As we all know last year had an epic list of releases (and surprisingly a lot of 3's) such as Gears of war 3, Uncharted 3, Portal 2, Skyrim, Dead Space 2, Saints Row the Third. The list goes on and on. After that massive year I thought there was no way this year could compete, until I started looking at the fall release schedule again. A lot of big hitters looked to be on the horizon. Halo 4, Assassins Creed 3, Resident Evil 6, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Aliens: Colonial Marine. Although last year was great, this year looked even better, until the delays started to happen. The last three games from the list I brought up have all been delayed until 2013, making this fall line up a little less s...

If you guys ever want to slap me for not posting, be my guest. Maybe that will jar me into actually doing it. So it's been about a week since I posting some nonsense about Battleship, and I'd like the blame my absence on Diablo 3, but its only been out for a few days. So again sorry for the delay, but here we are again, new post, new day. As you might have guessed I have been rocking Diablo 3 pretty hard. I picked my copy up at midnight (pretty much required because I was working). Came home and installed it, then after updating my video drivers went to bed. Oh no sacrilege you say? Well the game didn't go live until 3am EST, and I'd rather get a full night sleep and play in the morning rather than try and deal with the server load for this game at launch. I got to play a few hours Tuesday with no problems, but I heard there was a lot of servers going down and kicking people off. I played a lot yesterday, got to the end of Act I. My major problem was I kept getting...

WTF? So I didn't know what to write about, and the first thing I saw surfing this internet here was an ad for this new movie Battleship. What the hell is up with this movie? Who thought this was a good idea? Did someone at Milton Bradley see a few too many Transformers movies. I saw the first ad for Battleship months ago. Since then I have rapidly been trying to avoid any news or opinions about the movie. I was just dumb founded when I learned that this movie existed. There is even a video game movie tie in coming out next week up against Diablo 3 and Max Payne. Now that the movie is on our door step and getting lots of marketing hype I again cannot avoid this movie.  Get popcorn at the movie, Battleship. Get a drink at Subway, Battleship. Close my eyes to go to sleep, Battleship! Enough is enough. I know a lot of people want to see this movie just to laugh and see how bad it is, but I plead you, avoid Battleship. I cannot deal with a future that is all giant ro...

Words cannot express my excitement for Diablo 3 in a week. I have not been so jazzed for a game since... I guess Halo Reach. Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning got me pretty jazzed too, but only after I had played the demo so there was only a month or so of jazz. I have been eagerly awaiting Diablo since june 28th, 2008 when the game was announced. Almost 4 years later it will finally be arriving. I know I have talked about Diablo in the past and I'm not trying to sell anyone on it again, but I just wanted to say that I have been playing a ton of Torchlight in preparation for Diabo 3. Torchlight is a great game that I first played back at Pax East 2010. From the looks of it I thought it was a multiplayer dungeon crawler, but just missing the polish that was D3 which had yet to come out. When I returned home I bought the game on sale on Steam for 5 bucks. I quickly learned that the game was single player, so my roommate forwent buying it as well. I toyed with i...