video games

Chris Knight's avatar

Earlier tonight I was checking some things on Facebook and there was a memory that popped up, from a year ago.  Usually I don’t look at those, there have been just so many things I’ve shared over the years.  But for whatever reason I went down the rabbit hole and took a gander.

Here is what it pulled out from this day in 2025.  A few things: this references the time I spent at the nearby Whataburger (the first location in the state of South Carolina).  I was there for awhile, earning some supplemental income to the artificial intelligence training I’ve been doing a few years now.

And at this point Keeping the Tryst had pretty much gone through editing and revision.  This was heading toward the final stages in getting it published.  This was also the time when I had started designing the cover.

 

I went further.  It turns ...

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It is official: Fallout 5 is in development.  Bethesda mastermind Todd Howard confirmed it yesterday.  Right now it’s being called “in pre-production”, which could mean a lot of things.  Depending on how far things are it could mean that concept art is being created.  It could also mean that the staff are still trying to determine where this new Fallout game takes place.  Previous games have been set in the California desert, the ruins of Washington D.C., the Boston region, and the landscape surrounding Las Vegas.  Where will the next Fallout take us?

Speaking of Las Vegas, Howard also said that remasters of Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 are coming.  Which will become an enormous time sink for me.  Fallout 3 sucked me in so hard that I spent over 130 hours playing it.  I got sooo obsessed with finding every secret, talking to every character that I ...

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This is why I still cherish my Game Boy Advance.

I found this story at Not The Bee: the “real life news” daughter site of The Babylon Bee, one of my favorite places on the whole heapin’ World Wide Web.  Seems that 13-year old Vlad Skuridin of Cypress, Texas was playing a game on his computer.  Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck his house and blew him out of his chair.  For good measure the lightning strike also set a small fire in the attic and knocked a hole in the wall.

Here is young Vlad describing the incident to KPRC reporter Corley Peel:

Okay, let’s be clear: playing the video game itself did not cause lightning to strike Vlad.  It doesn’t sound like the bolt was channeled through his computer and from there jumped to Vlad.  He just happened to be touching a metallic surface when the ...

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…it’s being made by Obsidian, the studio that almost 16 years ago brought us Fallout: New Vegas.

 

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the new Fallout game is guaranteed to be good.  But a lot of people put great store in Obsidian.  New Vegas is widely considered to be the best Fallout game produced yet and the onus is going to be on the studio to deliver.  They know this.  I have faith in them.

And I say that as someone who has still not finished playing New Vegas.  It’s sort of become a curse in my life: I cannot continue that game without something happening to throw me so far off course that by the time I get back to it, I’ve forgotten where I was and how I got there.  The last time I played it I had just come to New Vegas itself ...

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This is terrible!  But having endured more than two hours of tech support based in India during the past few days, I’m feeling ornery enough to share this anyway.

If you’ve ever wondered what it is like to live in India, those good people have produced Indian Simulator.  We have gobs of simulators about American life already – flight simulators, goat simulators, and of course the Grand Theft Auto games.  But what is it like to make one’s home on the subcontinent?  Indian Simulator is the game for you then!

Now that’s ONE pre-order I for one will be avoiding like a disease-ridden brahma bull!
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Are massively multiplayer online role-playing games still a “thing” anymore?  Oh sure there is EVE Online (more than two decades old and still going strong) and I’m going to hazard a guess that World of Warcraft is even today enjoying much play.  And every so often when curiosity hits I log into the original Guild Wars, now 21 years since its launch and as beautiful as ever while also remaining free to play.

Once upon a time though, MMOROGs dominated much of the market.  And one of those games was Star Wars Galaxies.  It was a title that gave me countless hours of enjoyment and thrill and it did for many others too.  At last we would not be simply watching the Star Wars saga, we could be living in it too.
So it was that a few days after Christmas 2003, I signed in and began my
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I’ll be the first to admit: I have no idea if this is going to actually go anywhere.  But for the past few years I’ve had an idea and it’s always seemed like a fun one.  And it would definitely be a challenge to pull off.  But things have changed since my forays into programming (with the C language, in 1995) and I’m thinking that this might really be possible so, we’re going to find out.

A while back a crazy notion hit me: to play Zork on my iPhone and iPad.  Yes that Zork: the 1977 text-only role-playing game.  A game that kept countless insomniacs awake long into the night as they explored the Great Underground Empire in all its riches, its horror, and occasional hilarity.  There were no graphics at all involved with Zork: like most any good story it played out primarily in ...

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For some time now there has been one ultimate benchmark for whether or not something has a truly computerized central component: Does it play Doom?  More than thirty years after iD Software released their 3D first-person shooter, it has been ported to seemingly everything from refrigerators to tractors to home pregnancy tests.  And more often than not, they do indeed run Doom.

A few years ago an outfit in Australia called Cortical Labs, working with lab-grown human neural cells, coaxed a Petri dish of neurons into playing Pong.  Which is about as rudimentary a video game as there can get.  Almost immediately the company started getting asked the same question: Could their “brains on a chip” play Doom?  Something that would require substantially more sensory input and calculation than simply moving a virtual paddle up and down.  The real matter was, people didn’t want to know if the neurons
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Released on this date in 1986.

I played the heck out of The Legend of Zelda when I got my Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas 1988.  It was so much fun exploring around, setting fire to every bush that was within reach.  To say nothing of always keeping bombs on hand to blow up possible hidden entrances to shops (or to caves with old men who make you pay for destroying the front door).

Now I have the Zelda theme playing in my head and it won’t stop!  I don’t have anything to play the original game with but I think in honor of the fortieth birthday of the start of the franchise I’ll play The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my Game Boy Advance.

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The second season of Fallout premiered a few days ago on Amazon Prime.  I haven’t seen it yet but I’ll probably watch it later this evening.  Have had a few things on my plate lately.  Although at the recommendation of a friend last night I did watch Wake 

Up Dead Man, the latest of Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” series starring Daniel Craig.  I really liked it.
Anyhoo, the new season of Fallout is unfolding this holiday season.  And as part of the festivities Amazon has posted on YouTube a special lil’ treat.  In the tradition of broadcast Yule logs that goes back many decades across the history of television, here is… the Ghoul Log!


Nothing says Christmas cheer quite like ninety minutes of Wayne Newton music and the fattened arm of some poor sap roasting over an open fire.

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