Mountain Dew Voltage

Recently, Deana Burke, who is working on behalf of Mountain Dew, contacted me to see if I would write a short post about their new upcoming product and get the word out about their online sweepstakes.

Anyone who’s played video games for any length of time knows about Mountain Dew and its association with gaming. I can fondly remember more than a few caffeine-fueled gaming sessions where I happily consumed quite a bit of the stuff.

Before I agreed to write this post, I asked Deana to send me a sample of the product, since I’ve never really tried this flavor of Mountain Dew. Deana obliged by sending me with three bottles, one of which I carefully tasted tested, and a free T-shirt. I was going to include a nice picture of them (since the T-shirt is pretty nice), but alas there seems to be an issue with my digital camera. Hence, you’ll have to be content with just the picture to the right, which is courtesy of Mountain Dew.

So how did it taste? Generally, if I receive a free sample of something I won’t write anything negative just to be polite.  But I won’t endorse it either. However, in this case, I don’t have to be so circumspect. I liked it. It was a warm 68 degrees yesterday in Portland and the raspberry taste of Voltage really did hit the spot.

The berry flavor is bit stronger than I thought it would be, since I thought it would be more of a blend between the original Mountain Dew flavor and raspberries, but the overall, the taste is pleasant. This is something I would buy on my own. Read more

Is the PlayStation 3 Over-Reliant On Exclusive Games?

Sony is betting that a price drop in their PlayStation 2 console will cause many of those buyers to eventually adopt the PlayStation 3, better securing its foothold in the North American market. Unfortunately such a move will not free Sony from its dependence on exclusive gaming content to stay relevant. Read more

Girls’ Generation’s Jessica Promotes Dungeon & Fighter

A charming video was recently aired in Korea which features Jessica of the K-pop band Girls’ Generation fighting off a monster attacking Seoul. The commercial promotes the multi-player video game Dungeon & Fighter, a game which is pretty much unknown outside of Korea. Although if they continued to show cute videos such this in the United States and elsewhere, the popularity of Dungeon & Fighter is sure to increase.

Girls’ Generation promotes Dungeon and Fighter:

Via AllKPop.

Why I’m Dropping K-On!

While K-On! have seemingly won over the much of the blogosphere with its characters gushing with overwhelming moe, it is this very same cuteness overload, among other things, that has turned me off this series.

Read more

Netharuka Reboot Continued

I’ve been playing with the code on this website off and on for the last couple of days. Don’t worry, you won’t see any more of the weirdness you’ve seen in the last couple of days if you’ve visited, since I decided to put most of the changes on the test site first and not make the changes directly to production.

As I mentioned in my other post, I decided that this site needed a conceptual and visual face lift. One of the things I’ve dispensed with are the category thumbnails and the featured content gallery. They looked nice, but manually configuring them every time I put a post up just took too long. I could implement some code that could automate it, but in the end, I’d still have to use custom fields, etc. to link the thumbnails to the main article. One side benefit I’ll be gaining is the ability to use long titles. I disliked how long titles screwed up the formatting the category thumbnails due to how they interacted with the cascading style sheet.

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Netharuka Reboot

If you’ve visited this site lately, you’ve probably noticed a conspicuous absence of new content. No, I haven’t gone away, but I felt I needed to get some time away from writing to think about how I wanted to approach this site.

For a lack of a better way to put it: it’s grown dull. It’s not that the articles I wrote were bad per se, but after a while even I get tired of stuff borrowed from other web sites. I got lazy and little by little most of my original content was slowly disappearing from this site.

This also coincided with my involvement with Sankakucomplex. I’ve been regularly contributing over there, and it has definitely had an impact on how I perceive this site. I’ll leave the details about that for another post, but suffice it to say, it’s made me motivated to make this site better.

Bear with me for the next couple of days as I redo this site both conceptually and its overall design.

Age of Conan trial

So Funcom is offering a free 7 day trial of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. I’m slightly tempted by this, but  I am more than a little disappointed that it’s only seven days. With only seven days available, you will probably have enough time to roll a couple of characters and maybe try out a few missions. For MMOs, that isn’t really enough time to get a feel for the game. Most of MMOs play pretty much the same in the beginning part of the game. Your character runs around with beginning equipment, mostly fetching things for non player characters and killing small numbers of low level monsters and critters. Hardly exciting stuff.

I’m a little surprised Funcom is so stingy. This is the game that’s supposedly bleeding subscribers, getting the majority of their lunch money taken away by World of Warcraft and the remainder by Warhammer. I haven’t paid a ton of attention this game, but even I’ve heard of the server merges and the resignation of their CFO. Supposedly Funcom has also made a lot of changes to their game, balancing classes, fixing bugs and improving PvP. That makes the short trial even more ridiculous because as a new player you probably won’t see any of those improvements until you reach the mid levels, which is hardly possible within a scant seven days.

Anyway, if you want a diversion from your main game, you can download the trial here.

12-year-olds on Counter-Strike

A recent video reminded me why I stopped playing Counter-Strike with random people and stuck with matches with friends and people I knew in real life. Take a look at the following video; the kid in it is one of the most obnoxious examples you’ll ever find of the horrors you may encounter in a random public match. Just a warning the video is very NSFW due to racist and foul language:

E-sports on the ropes

Forgive me if I crow a little bit.  The New York Times recently published an article that questioned the sustainability of e-sports in North America. The article notes that Rupert Mordoch’s News Corporation and DirecTV unexpectedly shut down the Championship Gaming Series and that several major e-sports tournaments have been canceled citing the bad economy and lack of sponsorship. Read more

Tauntaun sleeping bag

Wow. It’s cute, cool and disgusting all at the same time. It’s cute because watching a little one snuggle into their favorite animal character sleeping bag is never un-cute. It’s cool, because if you’re a Star Wars fan, you’re impressed how well made that Tauntaun is; it doesn’t hurt that the little tyke is cosplaying Luke. It’s disgusting because if you remember the film, Luke was stuffed into the body cavity of a dead Tauntaun after Han disemboweled it and pulled all the guts out of it - possibly the grossest scene in the Star Wars franchise. It doesn’t help that the sleeping bag lining looks like entrails.

By the way, you can actually buy this if you want - it’s $39.99. Maybe a must-have for a true Star Wars fan?

Via ThinkGeek.

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