Looket the pretties!

So I went to wales last weekend to camp out at the foot of a mountain. It rained for most of the time, but I still got some nice pictures, and here they are, enjoy.

It was a pretty area, Snowdonia if your interested.

Tubage
- James
P.S. WILDSTAR HEADSTART TOMORROW! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Camping

I'm going camping tomorrow. Which means nothing to you of course since I've pretty much only been posting once a week. But on Wednesday night I'll be heading up to meet with some friends and then going on to Wales for some fun camping excitement.
Hiking.
Walking.
Sleeping outside. You know; the usual.
Hopefully there will be lots of sun, we can have a camp fire and a great time.
In fact. I'm going to check the weather report right now. I'm sure it'll be great!

Well shit.
rain every day and nothing higher than 15C except on the day we're heading home. well aint that a kick in the nuts?
I bought a new tent and everything!
Still I'm sure it'll be great fun. Its the first time I'll be able to use any of my survival stuff so I guess we'll be able to learn weather or not any of it was worth the money I paid.
If not I guess I'll be dead... Hm... not great.

Plus side; if I do survive Wildstar's early Access is next weekend and I'm super psyched!
And so should you be,
Hit me up with your usernames when the game goes live!

WILD-Video-tube
- James

Doctor Who Legacy

I found this game on accident. Really, most things work out that way, right? But I found it while looking for a different Doctor Who game in the App Store. It was free, so I figured what the heck.

Now before this game, I was kinda addicted to Candy Crush. And I HATE that game. The company is horrible IMO and I didn't want anything to do with it, but the game was simple/challenging and I needed a mind-clearing game before bed.

So I started up Doctor Who Legacy and was surprised to find it's a gem matching game. Like Candy Crush, but so much better and more complex. The game works like this - you have a bunch of colored gems, and you match them in a row of three or more. Even better, you have a team of Doctor Who characters that you put together, that dictate what attack type (by color and strength) you do.

That means I can have my favorite character of all time - Stormmaggedon!!!! - and other favorites - like Elizabeth X and Clara - damaging up while Rory heals. Sounds fun, right? Hopefully, cuz I'm horrible at explaining it.

The art is the real shine of this game. The characters are beautiful in their own right, and the backgrounds look fantastic. Aside from the occasional confusing background (Rorybot in New York?), the cleverness and thought process into the details is fantastic.

Gameplay is repetitive, which is to be expected, but it's still fun. I find myself playing this outside of my "bedtime" because I enjoy it so much. Plus the different characters and abilities make the game exciting and challenging in an enjoyable way.

Bottom line: it's free. Seriously. You should try it out. And when you love it, drop a few bucks and buy some crystals in the game. It helps you out AND unlocks the fan area, which lets you get some characters first and easier. Plus it supports the game, which it is well deserving of.

Sword Art Online

It appears that in recent weeks I've been neglecting all of you. Its not that I dont want to hang out. it's not that I'm uninterested blogging, my weeks have just sort of ramped up in terms of work. We're releasing two projects, and still updating the last one, two out of those three projects I'm responsible for.
Also; I've been watching a lot of

Sword Art Online.
It's an anime series, not an MMORPG like you'd guess from the name.
It is however about an MMO. So I'm going to try not to spoiler anything because I want you all to go and watch it, but I need to talk about it a little so there are some minor spoilers.
The show is set in an online world called Aincrad, it sounded a lot like .hack// to me at first but there are some major differences, the first and foremost one - the one that changes the story completely - is that on the first day of the game the creator removed the log out button and turned off the safety of their virtual reality helmets and made it so that if the players died in the game world they'd be killed in the real world.
The VR Headsets were also different than in .hack// in that they completely controlled your neural pathways, blocking you from moving. In Sword Art Online you moved the exact same way you do in the real world. In .hack// on the other hand you had a VR headset but you were still using a controller. SAO's nervegear took you completely into the world.
Now before I continue, can I just point out how awesome that is already. Now you may not like games that much, and that's a valid reaction, games aren't for everyone - though I'm not sure what your doing here considering how much I play and talk about games - but for those of you who do play games as a form of escapism you can't deny that taking the controller out of the game and usign your own movements and mind is a dream that we wish would come true.
I know I do, so much so that I think I'd have real problems with this technology. real addiction and problems makign myself log out. That said it would be an ideal dieting method.

Anyway, so the creator traps everyone in this ridiculously hard medieval game and tells them that the only way to escape is to beat the game, all 100 levels when the Beta testers only got to level 8 and it took them 4 months.
Then most of the rest of the series follows Kirito, a former Beta tester as he deals with the world, tries to save everyone while simultaneously he's being treated like the enemy because he was once a part of the Beta.
I absolutely loved it. So much so that at the end I got sad that the technology doesnt exist.
So much so that I realised being trapped in that world, my life at risk all the time... it would be brilliant, amazing... dream-like.

Regardless of your feeling towards games it's an amazing anime, and that really comes across in the third episode. It really stops feeling like your run of the mill 'everyone the main character runs into is going to be okay' anime.
Not to give too much away.

Sword-tube-online (I watched it subbed not dubbed)
- James