Gurl Likes Girls Like Robots

It's time for another video interview from PAX East 2012!

This time I stopped by the PopCannibal booth in "Indie Alley" and was so impressed with all the indie games this year! I interviewed the charming Margaret Scott about the game Girls Like Robots.  I know I say it a bunch in the interview, but I am super excited about this game!

If you can't see it embedded below, watch it on my YouTube Channel.

Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker (A Nerdy Movie Review)



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 Last night Boyfriend and I attended a one-time-only screening of Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker. The movie is a feature-length animated movie produced by Bioware and FUNimation and is set in the Dragon Age universe. The Japanese film was released in February and the English release will come to DVD and Blu-Ray May 29th. The story follows a young Navarran royal Seeker named Cassandra Pentaghast as she uncovers and tries to stop a conspiracy to overthrow the chantry. That's really all you need to know.  Why? Well, to say that this movie was boring is the understatement of the week. Cassandra, the main protagonist is an angry bitter bitch, to say the least. Her family was destroyed by blood mages when she was a child, thus she holds a burning hatred for all mages. I don't know why she was so pissy about mages, none of the mages in the movie used their magic all that much-they fought with sticks and sythes. (Yes really.) The most magic we see is when the circle mage helping her on her journey, Galyan, is healing her injured inner thigh with his "filthy mage magic" in the most awkwardly semi-sensual scene ever. #ThingsThatMakeYouGoBleh

I can't tell you anything about Cassandra as a character other than she is angry and I'm not sure why anyone else likes her.  She's a kick-ass strong fighter, but she's an angry angry bitch. I got tired of her spitting out all of her lines "angrily" the whole movie, but maybe that's just the actor in me.

Speaking as an actor who loves cartoons and video games, all the voice "acting" was appalling.  I didn't care what anyone had to say because I didn't believe they meant the words that were coming out of their mouths. I just kept picturing these tired voice actors in a studio fighting to not roll their eyes while they said the dialogue with as much conviction as they could muster. I'm willing to concede that the dialogue problems may stem from some lost-in-translation issues when converting it to English from Japanese, but I'm being extremely generous there. Especially since the movie was very dialogue and "knowing glances" heavy. Boyfriend and I believe we could have cute down at least 10 minutes of the 90 minute movie just by cutting out all of the "knowing looks" and "pensive face" moments.


This man has no cheek bones and is guilty of far too many "knowing glances"
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I did notice that the movie was shot very cinematically.  Then I realized that the reason for that was that all the animation was MOCAP and rotoscoping, which gave the movie a very unique "live-action-anime" look to it. I actually thought it was really interesting and pretty.  However, it would have looked a lot better had the shading and texturing guys spent a little more time on characters' faces, the armour, the horses, etc. There were shiny horses people! Shiny horses! All the horses looked like they were made out of rubber and plastic and were full of helium.  They had no weight to them, it was silly. Also, all of the chracters' faces were white with no shading or shadow. which I know is common in the anime style, so maybe that's what they were going for, but it made it look flat and like each character could only do 3 facial expressions: angry/fierce, pensive/sad, and happy.


Believe it or not, this is "happy" Cassandra
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The coolest parts of the movie however, where the monsters and dragons which, for a movie entitled Dragon Age, did not get enough screen time. The final dragon fight scenes were really exciting and crazy (and would have been more so had I cared about any of the characters involved.) Once we got to the big dragon and monster scenes, it became clear what the texture and shading guys were working the most on. The ogres, golems, and dragons looked really scaly and rough and heavy.  They were bad-ass.

The dragon! The dragon! The dragon!
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So, was it worst thing any of us had ever spent $10 on? No. Was it worth the $10 and the free t-shirt? Not really. Nevertheless, the overall experience was fun-ish, but the movie itself was lacking a lot.  I would say it was more appropriate for kids with how simplistic, predictable and condescending it was towards the audience.  I would say it's for kids aside from all the violence.  Lots and lots of awesomely glorious violence. And blood.  Goopy goopy blood.  But, what do I know? I'm just a nerd. You can view the trailer here and judge for yourself. Let's see...on my patented rating scale of 5 nerdy objects:

I give this movie 2.5 out of 5 Blood Mage Icons, because I'm feeling generous.
(Did I mention that the mages didn't fight with magic, like, ever?!)


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Get Excited For Another Birthday Post: Or Nerd Lub - Embrace it!

Note: Normally I'm not into a lot of mushy stuff, I try to describe my affection in the least "girly" of terms, but this blog post is about to be a love-fest.  You've been warned.

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Today is the day of birth of someone very special.  You may have heard of him, I call him Boyfriend. Boyfriend grew up in NC and I grew up in CO. We graduated from two different colleges, with two different majors, in two different cities, in two different states. We both moved to two different parts of the east coast at two different times. How on earth did the two of us get together in such a big city like New York? The story of how Boyfriend and I met is sort of weird and a tad "unconventional" but I was never really one to follow expectations too much.

I went to college with a great guy named Tommy who I had a bit of a crush on. We were buddies, but he graduated long before I did, moved to NYC, and got married to the-bitch-who-shall-not-be-named-and-if-I-see-her-again-I-have-vowed-to-kick-her-in-the-box. BTW their marriage did not end, shall we say, non-violently.
(I just realized that made it sound like murder was involved. It was not. No murder, just a broken heart and a broken nose, but I digress.)  Long-story short: Tommy happened to meet Boyfriend while they were working at a restaurant on the day his marriage officially fell apart and those two became fast friends.

Some months later, Tommy came back to Colorado to visit his family and he and I started hanging out a lot. My big ol' crush on him flared up again, but he threw me a curve ball and told me I should meet his best friend because he's boyfriend material. Whaaa? So, just to humor Tommy, I looked up Not-Yet-Boyfriend on MySpace (oh yeah, remember when that was a thing?) We became "friends" online, and that slowly evolved into texting, and then evolved into calling each other every night. This went on for 5 months or so until I visited NY to find an apartment before I moved to the east coast. Not-Yet-Boyfriend and I went on our first "date" that weekend.  We got a slice of pizza in Chelsea and then we went to his apartment to play Mario Kart Double Dash. Nerdiest. Date. Ever.



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Boyfriend later told me that he knew he was falling in love with me when I called him crying one night because I had to sell my GameCube so I could have some extra money to move to NY. I honestly can't say the exact moment I knew we were right together. Once we officially started dating after I finally moved, it just felt right like your favorite pair of shoes, like it was always meant to be that way. In our five years together, we've had some less-than-perfect moments, some disagreements, some fleeting moments where we probably wanted to stab each other in the leg.  I know I can be exasperating with all my idiosyncrasies and neurotic tendencies. Boyfriend talks a lot, especially when whiskey is involved. No matter. I can't imagine there is anyone else on the planet who would be a better mate for either of us. We're nauseatingly perfect together and disgustingly in love. It's gross, we know. Nerd lub is the best lub.



Happy birthday, my lub!
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Z is for Zooming Zeldas in the Zazzle Shop! I survived this challenge!



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 FINALLY!!!
That was a rough month.  I started the challenge a little late due to PAX East, but I did it!!! The most challenging part was actually finding an idea or a topic to write about each day, yet alone a video game topic to write about each day.  Anyone who wants to get serious about exercising their writing muscles and pushing their creative mind to do more, I would recommend doing the A-Z Blog Challenge.  It doesn't have to be in the time frame set by the challenge blog itself.  I didn't let missing the deadline stop me, and you shouldn't let it stop you. In elementary school when they made us run a timed mile every quarter, I was always the slowest, but I always finished. Taunting ensued regarding my slow-ass time, but I finished and I took pride in that.

I found it much easier to blog or at least plan blogging time having this challenge in place, it gave me an attainable daily goal but it also pushed me.  There were days where I didn't feel like writing at all.  There were days where I was too exhausted to even think about writing something, and there were other days when the thought of trying to be funny made my brain hurt.  But, there were plenty more days where it felt easy...or at least easier. Some days I thought of a brilliant idea for a letter that would be days away, so I would save it in the draft folder. Sometimes I would write almost a full post under a letter that wouldn't be posted for a week, and then by the time that post was scheduled to go up, I'd think of something entirely different and better for the letter and I would have to do some post rearranging.

At any given time, I have at least 5 drafts in my draft folder.  Sometimes they are just a jumble of words that are complete gibberish to anyone who reads them, but I know exactly what idea they are referring to. Other than my draft folder, I also have 10s of notebooks, scrap papers, post-it notes, notes-to-self stored in my iPod, and just random scribblings lying around. Whenever I think about getting around to digitizing all of the paper notes, I get distracted by a game, or a brilliant writing idear, or the occasional shiny object.

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This blog post is brought to you by sleep deprivation, loathing, and by the Crappy Company Coffee Co. 

P.S. I now have a Zazzle Shop! Thanks to *popular demand, you can now buy your Epic Girlfriend/Boyfriend gear today!

P.P.S * Popular demand = 2 people.

Y is for Youda



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 No, I did not misspell the name our favorite green Jedi Master.

Hmmm, methinks misspelled my name you have.

No Yoda, I'm not talking about you, and stop ending sentences with prepositions! It makes a grammar nerd crazy. I love you, but please speak normal English. Wait, you're in my head why are you using poor grammar if you're in my head? Leave my brain alone, Yoda!

Hmmm, I sense much anger in you. Anger lead-

SHUT UP YODA-IN-MY-HEAD!

I love simulation games.  I grew up playing SimTown, then SimCity 3000 and Sim Theme Park and then the big papa of them all, my favorite, my obsession: The Sims. You know how some people lose hours, days, weeks, months, years of there life to WoW? Like crack addicts they just can't stop?  The Sims is my crack. The Sims is my WoW. It's like logging in and playing god for hours.  You plan all these great futures for these little beings that you make and then they csn go and screw it up all by themselves.  Or you can screw them over yourself. Bwahahaha.  They were my own personal voodoo dolls at times.  Ways to act out my darkest fantasies without hurting anyone.  It was my own digital dollhouse. It makes me think that if I really am "made in God's image" then that dude has one sick sense of humor...but I digress.

Some of my favorite quickie downloadable simulation games are Youda Games. (Like Youda Farmer...You da farmer and game title AND a pun?! Yes!) Have you ever played these?! It's like the best of Harvest Moon meets Diner Dash meets SimCity! Some games are much better than others and like the Playfirst Games' Diner Dash franchise, Youda Games are simulation, time management flash cheapy games (as I refer to them-games that you can download for $10-ish.)

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I think Youda deserves a mention because I quite enjoy their games and I am struggling finishing out this A-Z challenge in a timely manner.  I know not all the posts in my alphabet were amazing pieces of writing, but I know that it fulfilled its intention which was to stretch my writing muscles every day and to challenge my creativity.  It did these things.  I know I didn't quite fulfill all of the requirements for participating in the challenge-I didn't complete it in the month of April, having started the challenge a couple weeks late due to PAX EAST; I didn't post every day due to that pesky thing I have called a job.  I thought at least some of these A-Z posts should revolve around gaming, so I chose Youda Games for today.  Plus it's just fun to say.  Youda. Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuda.

Phoned this one in methinks you have.

I hate you, Yoda-in-my-head.

Note: I'm blogging from the road for a few days with iffy Internet connection, so sorry for the infrequency of posts and the possibly questionable quality and rambly-ness of said posts.

P.S I wrote the majority of this post whilst sleep deprived riding on a bus crossing 3 state lines. No drugs were involved in the writing of this post. Does that answer your question?

X is for XBOX360 and why I prefer my Playstation (UPDATED)

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Ever since my first experience with how defensive other gamers could get during the console wars of the 1990's, I haven't really been hard core one side or the other. In the days of cartridge game systems, I was in love with my Genesis and I admit I scoffed at the idea that a console that used an optical disk could ever be better than a cartridge. I changed my opinion slightly the first time I played a Playstation. 

I was babysitting and had put the kids down for a nap/bedtime.  They didn't have cable and I had not brought a book or magazine to read, so I was bored after cleaning up the house (yes, I was an amazing babysitter, I also cleaned.) Bored obsessive gamer me noticed the kids had a Playstation.  I managed to hook it up to the TV and started playing the only game it looked like they had: Spyro. The graphics were so clean and crisp and the joystick controls, while it took a moment to get used to, were so smooth in comparison to my fumbly control pad of my Genesis, or the jerky joystick on my N64. Even though the loading screen irked me-with cartridge games there was no load time-I quickly got over it.  Ever since then, I remained fairly neutral about the console competition until I had personally tried one or the other.

That all being said, I LOVE my PS3, even when it succumbs to the YLoD, again and again. Boyfriend's co-worker/friend gave us his first gen XBox360 last year because he wanted a newer one, plus his had suffered from the "Red Ring of Death" and Boyfriend figured it would be cheaper to fix this one than buy a new one. Yay free console! (And it turned out to work just fine!) Currently we only have a couple of games for our XBox because we strongly prefer our PS3. The XBox controller is large and clunky especially for my tiny girl hands. The buttons get stuck (even after buying a new slightly smaller controller) and the user interface screen is not user-friendly, even if my avatar is super cute.  What really pisses me off the most about XBox/Microsoft is while generally the XBox360 tends to cost less than PS3 (with the exception of the awesome special edition Star Wars kinect console...not the game though...*sigh*) Microsoft is crafty in their ways. They find ways to make up for their console costing less. After our PS3 crapped out for the second or third time, we discovered that to watch Netflix streaming from our XBox, we have to upgrade to the "Gold member" account and pay a monthly fee.  
So, let me get this straight-I have to pay Netflix for the access to their streaming movies, PLUS I have to pay Microsoft to use the console that was already paid for just so I can watch said movies that I'm already paying for? I call bullshit. I've already had Netflix screw us out of a bunch of money by jacking up their prices despite having been a loyal customer for a long-ass time, I don't need Microsoft taking my hard-earned monies too. So there. PS3 is better. The end.

Wow, that was a bit of an angry rant.  I must be stressed out. More coffee!
Let's go kick ass today.

UPDATE: 5/17/12
Of course our PS3 would die the day after I write a shitty post professing its superiority to our XBox.  Why wouldn't it? *sigh* Seeing as how the rumors of the newest console from Sony seem to be just that, looks like we'll be saving our pennies for a new PS3. 'Tis a sad sad day.

W is for Who Has a New PAX East Video up..?

This girl!!!

OK, so I'm cheating a little bit by posting a video for my A-Z challenge post, but this is my blog, so I make the rules. So there.

Enjoy my quickie interview with Jeremy Handel of Handelabra Studios about their new iOS game, Uncle Slam.