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

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.

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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.

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

How I got rickrolled by Kotaku about Dragon Age

So this morning, I got lured in by this Kotaku article titled Dragon Age: Origins - A Tragedy in the Making? I say lured in because as much as I appreciate Kotaku for their extremely broad coverage of the gaming industry, I don’t like being rickrolled by a writer by making me think that a game that I’ve been following for awhile is in trouble for no reason.

AJ Glaser, who’s a regular writer for Kotaku, wrote about how Dragon Age is under tremendous expectations. That it’s being billed as the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate and the fact that it’s ship date has been delayed to allow for a  simultaneous release on both the PC and on gaming consoles makes its release that much more difficult. Read more

Are games too juvenile?

It’s not often that the game industry receives a general dressing down and have it stick. At the last day of the Game Developer’s Conference, Heather Chaplin, a journalist who has been covering gaming for eight years for such media outlets like NPR, addressed the gaming industry at large. Calling games in general deeply stunted in guy culture, Chaplin stated that the gaming industry is too old to simply rehash zombies, aliens and girls in metal bikinis wielding axes.

According to Pixelvixen707:

Like Wendy slapping around the lost boys, Chaplin patiently but firmly laid down the line. “It is you guys as game designers who are mired deeply in ‘guy culture,’” Chaplin said. The problem isn’t the medium: “You are a bunch of stunted adolescents.” Games avoid any of the things that separate men from boys: responsibility, introspection, intimacy, and intellectual discovery. And “when you’re talking about culture-makers, this is a problem.”

Criticisms of the gaming industry have been made before, but rarely at the developers themselves at the conference dedicated to them. Certainly a market argument can be made that video games, like movies and music, caters to the tastes of its audience. In recent years, games featuring the aforementioned zombies, aliens and metal bikinis have often done well.

I take no sides on this issue. I enjoy a lot of the “schlock” that Chaplin criticizes, but acknowledge her point.  I’m interested to hear your opinion on this.

From Pixelvixen707 via Game Politics.

13-year-old gamer fails DNA test, not father after all

In February, we learned about the remarkable case of Alfie Patten, the young gamer, who at age 13 allegedly fathered a little girl with his 15 year-old girlfriend, Chantelle. When questions were raised about the paternity of the child, Alfie swore to take a DNA test to prove his paternity. Well, the results from the test were just announced and Alfie is not the father.

This must be a blow to Alfie who had stood up for his girlfriend in the circus like conditions that surrounded him after the birth of Maisie, Chantelle’s young daughter. Thirteen seems awfully young to learn about the hurt that can be caused by infidelity.

According to sources, Alfie’s world has fallen apart and the young man is at odds about what to do with his girlfriend of two years. There is no word as to who the real father is, but the list of Chantelle’s sexual partners, the potential fathers of her newborn daughter, is allegedly long.

Honestly speaking, as much as Alfie wanted to take responsibility as a man, the DNA results may be the best thing to ever happen to him. Perhaps this will afford him the opportunity to become a kid again and maybe offer him a return to normalcy.

Via Bild.

Why OnLive won’t work

Now that the euphoria from the OnLive presentation at the GDC has dissipated a bit, there’s been a host of articles today that casts quite a bit of doubt of what OnLive claims it can deliver to what’s physically possible. Here’s a couple of the better ones:

Eurogamer makes three main points in its criticism of OnLive’s technology.

1. OnLive has mastered video compression that outstrips the best that current technologies can achieve by a vast margin. In short, it has outsmarted the smartest compressionists in the world, and not only that, it’s doing it in real-time.
2. OnLive’s unparalleled grasp of psychophysics means that it has all but eliminated the concept of IP lag during its seven years of “stealth development”, succeeding where the best minds in the business have only met with limited success.
3. OnLive has developed a range of affordable PC-compatible super-computers and hardware video encoders that are generations beyond anything on the market at the moment.

Of the three points Eurogamer makes, the most damning one is how to counter the notion of Internet lag. Just because you happen to have a large amount of bandwidth doesn’t make up for the fact that you may be hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from the OnLive servers. Read more

Changing my mind on Stuttgart

I’m not afraid of expressing unpopular opinions. I’ve done it a few times on this site, and will probably do so again in the future. Recently, when I took a stance in favor of a lesbian gamer who had banned on the Xbox Live network, I got quite a few negative comments that implied more or less that I was wrong and lacking in the intelligence department. I felt somewhat vindicated when Microsoft did what I suggested they do in the first place: seek dialogue instead of indiscriminately banning people. Strangely, after I updated that bit of information on my site, the comments vanished. Read more

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