Attic Cleanup! 17-11-2013

So another week has gone by and it’s been a mixed bag of interesting and terrible, not fatally so but it could’ve been better.

This week marked the release of the PS4 and I have never found myself caring so little about a new console, but it might be the over-saturation of “next-gen” news and hype in the past couple of weeks. So far, from the videos I’ve seen, I found most of the launch-titles to be underwhelming. Extremely good looking but shallow in everything else, or as you may know by now, what I really care about in a game. Visuals are secondary for me and for a couple of those games at least, it seems it’s the only thing they have to offer.

But launch titles usually aren’t the best of the bunch, so I’ll keep an open mind.

Now, let’s start the cleanup!

On the real world side, work took much more time, effort and sanity than I would’ve wanted, which left me too tired most days to do stuff, and with an epic level of tension, resulting in near constant migraines and actual muscular pain. Sadly there are no vacations for me, not yet and not for at least 6 months. I’ve taken a bit of the edge off with exercise, but it’s not enough.

But I always consider a week good if I managed to do something new, learn something or come up with brand new story ideas and this week had it in spades. First, I defined a few more characters for Igniters, the upcoming Star Wars Web Novel for the site (I’ll probably work on the first couple of chapters in December), and they’re all pretty cool, but they make me desperate for an artist for them, because they’re just freakin’ awesome. Secondly, powered by my love of WoW and everything Azeroth-related, I came up with a new set of noir-detective stories, featuring a High Elf Paladin called Thadil Swiftgale. It’s a work in progress but it sounds really cool in my head.

Lastly, I came up with a new setting for a novel, or a series of novels, still haven’t decided, and departing from my usual style, it’s not fantasy but Science Fiction. I can’t talk much about it, not until it’s more defined, but it’s really cool, trust me on that.

On my gaming side, I returned to The Old Repubic with my Jedi Shadow, just remaking him in a Euro server. The plan was to play with V, but she stood me up :P. It was nice to come back, and it’s amazing how much my Game Memory kicked in, and I knew just how to do stuff, not only play but also strategize when I went for 2+ player content on my own (Heroic missions). There are a few things that I still don’t like about the game and its “free-to-play” style, but I can deal with them for now. Maybe in the future I’ll subscribe again, but for now, WoW gets my monthly money hahahaha.

I finished the last in the Gabriel Knight series, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, and I never want to play it again, unless it’s remastered/revamped/rebuilt from scratch. It has ONE awesome puzzle that kicked my ass until I saw the light. Okay, I used the hint system a bit, but I don’t feel bad ’cause it doesn’t tell you the answer right away, just points you in the right direction, which I think is a very good implementation. The game has its good things, but sadly it also has a lot of bad stuff…but I won’t get into it here and now.

Needless to say, I’m washing the bad taste from my mouth with Gray Matter, another Jane Jensen game.

This coming week will be a busy one on the gaming side with both Assassin’s Creed 4 releasing on PC TOMORROW, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds on Friday on 3DS.

On the Attic side, this was a bit of a slow week, and I only managed 3 posts, and not a single review or story, which I consider a tragedy.

I wrote about the site stories’ style and format, and what sacrifices or concessions I have to make for each, and I hope, if anything, that’ll direct you towards my fiction sections. They need a bit of love.

Following V’s posts on her “insane” amount of DVD/series she has in queue for reviews, I decided to list all the stuff I watch on a weekly basis, and her reaction was worth it hahaha.

Closing the week, I had the Dead Space scarethrough, the second (first official) collaboration with the 1001up.com crew, the aforementioned V and John Heatz. John, despite some technical difficulties, managed to pull through and give us a short video of his Dead Space experience, and has since started looking into better options for streaming, since XSplit really doesn’t like him. Hopefully, we’ll see cooler stuff from him in the future.

On the 1001up side, I’m sure we’ll see their Scare-Up soon, maybe even today, and I’ll update the post as soon as it’s up!

V, sadly, stood us up! But we forgive her because her job has been kicking her ass without mercy; and we’ll wait for her to make her debut.

For next week, I’ll probably work on the new Roberto story and if possible, I’ll start working on at least one of the three new Unnatural Investigations Inc. stores, and the first few of them to feature different characters as protagonists, as Weston splits the team into pairs and sends each pair to tackle one of the Icons he’s interested in “recruiting”.

I also have the Batman Arkham Origins review in the works, and I promise to be merciless. On the TV side, I’ll review the recently finished Legend of Korra season (I actually saw the last episode about an hour ago). I haven’t had the time, or energy, to go see a film, but hopefully I can catch both Gravity and Thor this weekend and put up a review for whichever I end up watching.

For the playthroughs, videos, etc, hit me up in the comments if you have suggestions for future entries. I really want for us to play a coop game, maybe Diablo 3 or Borderlands 2, but our time-zone differences make that a bit hard to coordinate, but I will try to convince them!

P.S: If you’re wondering where the featured image is from, it’s from a hilarious anime called Acchi Kocchi