Sim-plicity

I am a Bus Driver

Over the course of my long and storied gaming career, I’ve done a lot in service of saving the world. I’ve slain dragons, rescued princesses, and disarmed nuclear weapons (not to mention, detonated a few). I’ve protected the President, assassinated Hitler, and obliterated aliens from other galaxies. I’ve piloted fighter jets, submarines, battle mechs and interstellar space ships, all with the goal of saving humanity from utter destruction. Long story short, I’ve saved the world. A lot.

Frankly, I’m tired of it. Let other gamers save the world: I just want to live in it. Luckily, there are a number of down-to-earth simulation games that will allow me to do just that. Today, I’m looking at a sim called Bus Driver, by SCS Software, that lets me inhabit the presumably uncomplicated guise of a driver of buses.

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Summer Movie Fantasy League

The Second Annual Summer Movie Fantasy League!

If you recall, last year my wife Kris and I engaged in a summer movie fantasy league (we got the idea from Film Drunk), where we held a draft and picked summer movies based on what we thought their opening weekend totals would be. I won, but not by much.

We’re now in the midst of our Second Annual Summer Movie Fantasy League, and I’m long overdue for boring you with the details.

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Movies

Prometheus: Two Reviews

Kris and I took a day off work to go see Prometheus on opening day, so eager were we to see the new sci-fi film by Ridley Scott, creator of Alien and Blade Runner. I’ve written two reviews, and here’s the first one:

It’s a good, entertaining monster movie, but not the landmark piece of science-fiction I was hoping for.

Okay, now onto the second review, which is absolutely filled with spoilers, because despite my disappointment in the film as a whole, it was very entertaining, and it is a great deal of fun to talk about in detail.

Spoilerslots of them — below.

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Site Blather

Once More, With Feeling

Okay, I’m back. I’ve said this before, but this time I mean it. Well, I’ve meant it before, but this time I totes double-swearsies mean it. I am going to write some things for you to read, or at least for you to scroll through quickly before unsubscribing.

As you can see, provided you’ve been here before and remember what things looked like, and provided you’re actually here now and not viewing this through Google Reader like a jerk, things look different now. Also, there is more stuff here than there used to be. This is due to the efforts of my friend Des, who has redesigned the site and also gone and yoinked everything I’ve ever written for all the other websites I started and then abandoned, and stuffed it all in here, because I couldn’t figure out how to do it myself and even if I could have figured it out I probably never would have taken the time to do it (lazy).

Over to the right, there are what we will call “features” while trying to keep a straight face. These are all things I’ve done that have appeared elsewhere on their own sites, but are going to live here now. The features are still in various stages of reassembly, mainly due to me letting my other websites expire without making sure I had everything backed up because I am an idiot (also lazy). Here’s the current state of the union:

  • Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman. This is my Half-Life 2 webcomic. With the exception of a couple navigation buttons everything seems to currently be working, but if you spot any errors or problems, drop me a line.
  • Living In Oblivion: My blog about playing as an NPC in The Elder Strolls IV: Oblivion. Currently, it’s a bit of a mess: The entries are all there but I lost the cropped images for the most recent few posts. I still have all of the originals so I’ll be replacing them soon. There’s also some weird question mark thingies in a lot of the posts — working on removing them. Once that’s done, the old WordPress site will redirect to its new home here. Not sure if I’ll ever finish this blog, but maybe!
  • The First-Person Observer: My fake in-game news site. Everything is archived and should be readable; again, if something seems to be malfunctioning, let me know using the contact page. I plan to start writing entries for this (occasionally) again.
  • The Elder Strolls: A ten-part series I wrote for PC Gamer’s blog about playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as an NPC. The content isn’t hosted here, but the page links to each of the ten entries. This series is complete.
  • The Demo Man: I used to write reviews of free game demos, because who would ever need such a thing? They’re free! That’s the joke, see. Right now, this section is incredibly incomplete: I wrote these reviews on like four different sites, including Shacknews back when they were into that sort of thing. So, I still need to find/rebuild them all. I will, eventually. And maybe I’ll start writing new ones from time to time.
  • To The Death! A little project I did in Garry’s Mod where I made AI-controlled people and monsters from Half-Life 2 fight each other. I doubt I’ll ever add to this, but I included it because people still ask me about it sometimes.
  • Not My Desk: My old temping website. I haven’t really looked through it so see if it’s all working, but it should all be there: essays, archives, etc.

I also have a huge backlog of blog posts from some of my old, long-gone blogs, like 1fort and First-Person Shouter, and they’re all still around, somewhere, and I’ll see about building them back into the site at some point. At the same time, like I said, I’ll be writing new things, hopefully regularly.