Kanah Belflower

It started when I couldn't finish Fallout: London, despite loving it. Then my exploration of Enderal was cut short after reaching Ark, when I didn't want to go back out into the world that wanted to kill me. I purchased Syndicate and never finished it; I then bought a ton of great games on GOG and Steam during sales, playing introductory bits of all of them just to get an idea of where I stood with them... and I barely felt a spark beyond that initial intrigue. I wasn't quite sure if it was a problem with my tastes, or my health, or my time. But then I played Tyranny for the first time, having never played Pillars of Eternity, and I powered through 25 hours of gameplay without skipping a beat. Tyranny managed to grab my attention quickly, and maintain it throughout a relatively short (but deep) gameplay experience. I don't have any plans for an actual review of it, but it kept me going for a while and I appreciate it for not wasting my time. The sheer excitement and fun...

God, I have no idea how to start this. Perhaps the beginning will be a good place. I am taking a Humanities course in college at the moment, and my final project is a research paper about my personal views of art as a whole. What does art mean, how does art feel, the whole shebang. But I don't know much about "traditional" art. I'm a relatively smart guy, I know that art is multifaceted and has a litany of purposes depending on who makes it and who sees it. But I don't actually have much of a dog in the fight, you know? That's why I'm changing the game - rather than focusing on painted works or written words, I want to spin this paper around the thing I love talking about more than nearly anything. Let's talk about videogames. I know, I know - this isn't exactly a novel approach. Videogames under the lens of art are the "get out of jail free" card for every nerd in high school who doesn't wanna touch classical forms with a ten foot po...

I have been playing the absolute shit out of Fallout London for the past week. And I think I've finally met my match, because at Level 14 with a decent chunk of quests under my belt, I have only explored about 1/4th of the city. When I look at the mostly uncharted map, and realize how much I have already done, I cry angry tears. This is my London Low-Down. Mind the fucking gap, samurai. The Good Doggie There are few things in life more satisfying than a bowler-hat-wearing, cigar-smoking British bulldog. Or pug. Or maybe a mutated rat - I honestly don't know what breed the game's resident Dog Companion™ happens to be. With a name like Churchill and the scariest walking sound effects known to man, this powerhouse can really lay down the law while I get my ass handed to me by a giant wombat. I was actually worried that I would have trouble finding him, as my first thirteen levels passed by without so much as an introduction to any of the companions. Once I began to focus on th...

Oblivion hath no fury like a gamer bored. I returned to my bi-monthly Skyrim grind with a spark in my gullet: there be glory over yonder way, and by golly I'm gonna grab it by the throat. The playthrough is my attempt at an Iron Man playthrough, but with like all the hard shit removed so that its more akin to an Ironheart or Iron Lad. I restricted my primary gear to crafted stuff only, I decided that I can't hoard looted potions and can only use crafted ones, and I downloaded SimonMagus' survival mod to make it a bit more fun to freeze my balls off. My objective is simple: follow a clear path of progression that makes sense for my character, and beat the main questline in the process. No cheats, no shortcuts, no exploits - if I happen to know something about the game that could make things easier, I purposefully downplay it or avoid that change altogether. A true testament to my own skill. And I immediately fell into mod hell. The vanilla start was buggy, and some fast-star...

Hi, another lie from me. This is not the correct posting date, and this is not the Halloween post; I sat down to write about my spooky Hallows Eve, but realized very quickly that...I don't care. I actually don't want to talk about Halloween at all, because something much more relevant has taken my interest: Let's talk about why my Assassin's Creed Syndicate review won't be here for a long time. And, in the process, I'll be giving my current thoughts on the game that have brought me to this moment. The Good To be clear, I do enjoy the gameplay of Syndicate. This title has a bunch of mechanics that all play into the experience of taking London back from the cruel grip of the Templar Order. Different mission types that vary wildly in objectives and optimal paths, a focus on upgrading your skills and your gang to show the Assassins' growing influence, and a very methodical path to beating the Templars through simply exploring the map. As for the characters of Ja...

Howdy y'all, I've been...well, I would say busy, but I really just prioritized different things this week. You likely noticed that there wasn't a drop this morning, and that's because I legitimately had nothing to talk about at the moment. Because, to my utter disappointment, I have wasted around three afternoons attempting to get Skyrim's Level-of-Detail to work right on my system with DynDOLOD. I've done this before, many a time, but for some reason I just could not get it to work like last time on this new modding load order. So, I decided tonight to just screw it and deleted all mods that could change the landscape itself, focusing on scripts and quests and so on. LOD doesn't look as good as it could even still, but I'll trudge on. I'd like to do a post about my new Skyrim playthrough and what I'm wanting to get out of it, but that'll be for another day. In other news, Saturday will be my Halloween postmortem. We'll be discussing my f...