With some of my colleagues doing their roundups for the month/week, I decided to give them a shot. As V so kindly put it:
They’re fun and they don’t require too much thought, perfect for a Sunday eve.
So, let’s go over the last few happenings in The Mental Attic
In the past month or so, I started talking, commenting and interacting with other blogs, more than I had before, and in the process “met” some really cool people, including John Heatz, V & the cool crew at 1001up.com, whose sites put mine to shame…and thoroughly so. Before October, I was considering on closing the place up, boarding up the door to the Attic, because of the excruciatingly low hits, but it has since picked up, and it’s not a coincidence. It’s all thanks to all these wonderful people I’ve met over the past month; they’ve brought attention to my humble little blog and in doing so they’ve renewed my creative energies, and I can’t thank them enough for it.
I also received my first-ever WordPress award nomination, the Versatile Blogger award, and receiving it was awesome.
What’s been going on here and in my geeky life? Let’s start with The Attic.
I’ve been reviewing my fair share of games and TV series, some good and some nauseatingly bad, and there’s still a big backlog of games that need/deserve a review. I’ve also changed up the review scheme and I’m happy with it for now. In the coming weeks, I’ll be reviewing one of the best JRPGs I’ve ever played, Xenoblade Chronicles, just because I need to spend an hour or so ranting about how good it is. Batman: Arkham Origins will get its review soon enough as well since I finished it this week, after suffering every game-breaking bug the game had to “offer”. I’m also thinking of revisiting the Ys series review I wrote some time ago, because I really think those games deserve me going in-depth on each of them. By the way, if you’ve got a ton of money and don’t know what to do with it, you could always gift me a Vita and the latest Ys game…it’s a worthy cause hahahaha.
For the most part, I’ve been mostly reviewing Adventure Games…competing with Kim from 1001up.com on who plays the most Adventure games in a year.
On the series side, I’ve reviewed everything for this season, since there are a few I won’t talk about until the end of their current run, such as Arrow, S.H.I.E.L.D., Grimm, Sons of Anarchy, etc. I’ve focused on a few of the newcomers, and of those I’ve reviewed, it’s been a 50/50 deal: 2 good, and 2 bad. I’ll have to depend on suggestions & V’s reviews to pick up new stuff to review myself. There are 2 comedy series I haven’t reviewed because I want to wait till the end of the season: The Crazy Ones, with the awesome Robin Williams; and The Michael J Fox Show…with Michael J Fox.
There are very few UK series I’m watching these days, I think just Downton & The Ambassadors. If some of my UK friends could recommend something, I’ll take a look. Oh, that reminds me, I’m going to watch the 6th Doc Martin series this week 🙂
Last week also had a nice Urban Arcana comeback, with my first Roberto story in over a year. I was shocked when I saw the date for the last story, November 2012. Sadly (mostly for me), Urban Arcana is the least read bit of the blog, but I don’t mind, I like writing those stories. I’ve already outlined the events of the next few stories, and I’ll be slowly writing them. My greatest issue now is I want to have art with the stories, to help bring them to life and to break up the long walls of text.
I’ve also started work on the outline for my Star Wars web-novel series, called Igniters, and I should start work on it soon-ish. It’s a departure from the short-story style (This week I’ll explain about that), and it’ll focus on 3 characters, 2 boys and a girl: Yander, Mekki & Lakim…their names after my players’ characters in my current Star Wars RPG game. The story is set a good 1000 years before Episode I screwed up the saga with mentions of Midichlorians and Jedi Jesus Christ, Anakin 😛
I’ve also, thanks again to the 1001up.com crew, gotten into Streaming and recording playthroughs. You can check out the first few here, here and here, or just go here for all of them. We’ve also started planning a few more plathroughs like these, and maybe some other stuff, none of which I can mention…yet, but I’m excited.
Lastly, I’m still working with a cool designer for The Attic’s banner & background. If you’ve hung around here for long enough, you know I’ve gone through several placeholders and themes, but nothing final. I’ve recently changed theme to the current one, which I really like, but now I just need to complete the look. After that’s done, I just need to coerce someone into making some character drawings for me.
On the geeky life side of things:
I’ve recently finished reading the 2nd Stacraft: Ghost novel, Spectres, which I enjoyed quite a lot, and I’m currently reading Hideyuki Kikuchi’s 1st Vampire Hunter D novel. I’d seen the films and I bought the novel a long time ago but hadn’t had the chance to read it.
Aside from Arkham, Outlast & Deus Ex, the games I’ve mentioned, reviewed & streamed, I also played The Wolf Among us, the newest of Telltale Games’ visual novels (they’re not adventure games anymore, at least in my opinion), based on the Fables comic. It’s pretty good but I decided against reviewing it, at least not until I’ve played the whole story. I’m currently playing Gabriel Knight 3, giving it another chance, even if the game’s pace, control and almost everything else infuriates me to no end…but at least it’s not the FMV nightmare “The Beast Within” (GK2) was.
In 2 weeks’ time, I’ll also be playing 3 games: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag (delayed on PC) and Pandora’s Tower…so if you don’t hear anything from me after that, just know that I’ll be okay, just entranced by these games!
I’ve been waiting for this week for some time now, because of Blizzcon, and it was worth the wait. The things they showed for World of Warcraft, Diablo and Heroes of the Storm were enough to almost melt my brain. There’s so much good stuff coming in the future and my WoW friends & I can’t wait for the next expansion to come, dreading it’ll take too long.
Next year I have to go to Blizzcon, and of course to the UK to meet up with the awesome people I mentioned further up. I’ll do London and then Dublin if I have to, just to meet them all. I just need to square that plan with my Standup Comedy trip. What’s that? My plan for next years is to go to UK and catch the shows of some of my favourite comedians, such a Russel Howard and Ed Byrne. I need to see how many of them have new shows and plan my trip accordingly!
I haven’t caught any new films in the past few months, but going to the Cinema has become a rather expensive activity. I need to see Riddick & Thor before the year’s out.
Speaking of year, as of last month I’m 30…and I don’t mind it one bit, and in fact, I laugh how some people are so caught up with it. I think the 30s are a wonderful age to have: you look as good as you did in your 20s but you have a decade of wisdom to go with it!
There’s a lot coming in the next few weeks, on reviews, playthroughs, stories and other stuff, and I hope you’ll keep coming back here.
Related Posts:
- The Sunday Spew (verbalspew.wordpress.com)
- Weekly Recap #13 (JohnHeatz.com)
- 9 Months Up (1001up.com)