Virtual Verve: A Review of VVVVVV

The Steam holiday sales are probably easier on my wallet than other people; to start with, I'm restricted to games that release on OSX, and furthermore set my price cap at around $5. So despite the multitude of offerings, it's rare that I see something that fits both my criteria.

However, one that did recently was VVVVVV, which was on sale for the incredibly low price of $2.50. The reviews were all positive, and although I wavered for a bit, there wasn't a downside to a game for that cheap, and after briefly playing the demo I semi-impulsively purchased the game.

Food for Fantasy: A Review of "Badass: Birth of a Legend"

Readers of the blog made remember me reviewing the first Badass book (cleverly entitled Badass: The Book). I quite enjoyed it, but the gigantic timesink that is A Song of Ice and Fire consumed all my reading time. However, I decided to take a short break before what is sure to be the huge pit of depression that is A Dance with Dragons, and decided I might as well finish off the second book by Ben Thompson of Badass of the Week fame.

The Cycle of Fate: The Crash

Wait.

That was something he could do. Stillness was far easier to achieve, especially compared to the wretchedness of escaping the sizzling hulk of metal that had minutes prior been a transport.

Observe.

That was another thing he could do, something he had honed in his profession. He tried to take everything in: the cackle of flames and its associated stench were hard to ignore, but his training allowed him to do just that and focus on other aspects of his surrounding.

Analyze.

Obviously some kind of a sparse forest with large, thick trees on a slightly rolling valley. He thought that he could even make out some kind of reptile in some of the trees, although the wind and rain made him slightly less than certain. Although the smoldering promethium masked practically everything else, with his face close to the dirt he could take in the earthy perfume, and noted the slight differences that set it apart from other, similar worlds he had visited. The scans had indicated that the atmosphere and environment were not dangerous, and he had taken the usual cocktail of preventative medicines, but it was always reassuring to breath the air and not feel his lungs constrict, as had happened on Pneunym IV back--

Concentrate.

Slipping like that was unlike him. Perhaps the crash had disoriented him more than he had realized. He began to take a mental stockpile of himself. His weapons and equipment were miraculously intact; that had been the first thing he checked. Likewise he didn't sense any broken bones or ruptured organs, and his bio-signatures seemed to confirm this. Bruises and cuts everywhere, naturally, but he was long since past noticing or caring about such trivial wounds. After all, compared to the pain that cursed xenotech blade Inquisitor Bianchi had shoved up his--

Concentrate!

Now he was truly worried. This was entirely unlike him, to get so distracted in an emergency. He was supposed to be calm, supposed to be rational, supposed to be an observer, and one cannot truly observe when one's inner eye is someplace else entirely.

Focus.

That's what he needed to do. He drew his pistol and quickly checked it over before arming it, and likewise flexed his glove and was pleased to see it bend smoothly. He rechecked his surroundings, and was pleased to note that his survival instincts seemed to have functioned correctly despite the crash, as he was situated in the ideal viewpoint to observe his surroundings. He tested his mic again, but either his vox was completely broken or his allies were not currently in a condition to respond. Both thoughts were troubling.

Wait.

He pulled off his cloak to ensure the fires had not damaged it, and was satisfied to see that the cameleoline was undamaged. He flung the smooth, water-like material over himself as he laid back down, and felt it naturally flow to cover and conceal him. Unfortunately, the rest of his equipment would require a tech-priest to determine whether it still functioned; perhaps the one known as Ceros would deign to inspect the pieces. Something was missing, though, although he couldn't quite--

React.

The sudden movement would have made a less-experienced man jump, but he was trained in concealment by some of the best his ordo had to offer. Instead, he flicked only his eyes over to observe whatever had suddenly appeared, and only as he was pleasantly surprised to see his loyal familiar flapping towards him did he realize what had been missing. The crash had been fortunate indeed, and Kwoth quietly settled besides him and then held perfectly still. Some of the others questioned his choice of the psyber-raven, fearing it might prove too much of a conspicuous characteristic, but if they had seen how invaluable the little creature had been in coordinating the action that had resulted in such a decisive diplomatic victory over the Uwanäri they undoubtably would--

Concentrate!


His familiar flared its wings in response to the sudden surge of emotion, but he managed to eventually quell the feelings, although it was swiftly replaced with the unbearable weight of an emotion he rarely felt: uncertainty. The planning had not even considered such a catastrophe so early into the mission, and he never would have imagined being so completely cut off from the team. What the Marines would do in such a situation was unclear to him; his dealings with the Astartes prior to this endeavor had been marginal.

Observe.

With nothing else to do, he reverted to his base state. The fierce storm that had brought down the impressive bulk of the Stormraven seemed to be dying down and he noticed tendrils of smoke seemed to be rising from the wreckage. He felt a faint glimmer of his usual confidence begin to reassert itself; with such an obvious trail, he was certain the Astartes would be able to locate the crash site, and then things would be much clearer.

Analyze.

Of course, that meant anything else with even a remote amount of intelligence would also likely be honing in on his location. Although the survey stated no intelligent lifeforms had been detected, the storm that had created this predicament seemed thoroughly unnatural, and he was utterly certain that this remainder of this mission would be anything like he had expected. He would just have to wait, and hope his team appeared before anything else.

Wait.

That was something he could do.

Metareview: Thoughts on the "Mark Does" Websites

I think it's often easy to overlook how unbelievably vast the internet is. It's one thing to read the number of pages Wikipedia has, or hear how many hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every second, but I don't think anyone can actually comprehend how much content is stored across the world at this point.

This is compounded by the fact that at this point, my internet browsing habits are pretty circular. I check my emails and Facebook, read through the webcomics I like, look for updates on blogs I follow, browse Reddit's main page and the subreddits I actually care about (Starcraft, Gaming(news), RPG, Warhammer), etc. I even have almost a routine of websites I tab through when first logging on my computer every day.

Even though I visit a lot of websites through Reddit, I wouldn't really consider that finding new territory. It's easy to see the internet as consisting of a lot of content I purely don't care about (celebrity news gossip anyone?) or pages that I glance at for one second before moving on and never looking back (hello image memes).

Therefore it's always a very nice surprise when I actually find a website that I end up returning to and browsing much of the content, and I had just such a surprise the other day. A friend has recently started up a website where she blogs about reading A Game of Thrones and that she drew the inspiration from two of her favorite blogs, Mark Reads and Mark Watches. I was very much intrigued by the GoT project; I had just recently finished reading the series and expressing my reactions to a friend, and then turned around and talked to another friend as he started the same journey. I was very curious what another person would think of what I consider a fantastic series. Out of curiosity, I clicked through to the websites that inspired this venture, not suspecting that I would spend the majority of two days reading the content there. (Also, forward apologies for no pictures in this post)

Beegu News Des!: An Announcement of Sorts

Today I spent a large majority of my day reading a blog (something I intend to return to at some point), and this naturally led me to think about the current state of this, my own blog. After some considerable thought, I've come to a decision that I hope to keep: I'm going to start blogging more.

Specifically, a quota for myself: once every two days. I feel like daily might be a bit too much, whereas every other day gives me a bit more breathing room and even time for editing.

There are actually a number of reasons for this, which follow below in no particular order.

- I enjoy writing. I don't think I'm even one of the best in my group of acquaintances, and I usually at least somewhat question how much/little other people enjoy the writing, but I like doing it, so I'm going to. I don't think I work up the energy enough for it enough, and by setting a deadline I hope to propel myself into doing it more.

- I need something else to do over the summer. I'm starting to get annoyed at how often I'm sitting there wondering what to do, and this gives me one more option.

- I have a large stack of ideas, some of which have been sitting around for probably close to 8 months now, and which I have not acted on probably due to just pure laziness or inertia or whatever. I should probably set a better precedent.

- It provides an outlet for thoughts, in a way. Not just for reviews, which I do enjoy writing, but perhaps more serious topics of discussion. I think I've been focusing on reviews because they've been easy (I watched something, now write down what you think!) but there have been other thoughts I've been having that I'd be interested to see responses to, like the e-sports post, and this seems a much more viable platform than IM or Facebook status updates, for instance.

- On the theme of reviews, I really should start writing longer ones. In looking over the last 3 Mini-Review Rampages, I noticed that the individual reviews kept getting longer and longer over the trilogy, which probably means I have a lot more to say about these pieces than I'm allowing myself. And at least one person has expressed interest in reading them, so that's enough for me :-P

- This last reason is probably the biggest one, in retrospect. Recently an epilogue was completed for last year's Dark Heresy campaign that I ran, which brought back a lot of fond memories. I ended up going back through Mister Flask's blog to reread the various hijinks the group got up to, and looking through the content and comments, it kind of struck home how our little circle of blogging has kind of died off.

I obviously can't make that come back by myself, despite how much I enjoyed the content of everyone's various blogs. What I can do is at least force myself to start contributing more regularly, and in a perfect world this might inspire the rest of you to follow, or at least compete :-P. I don't know how many of you actually regularly check any of these anymore, though.

I guess what it comes down to is I'm privileged to have a large number of very talented, very creative friends who are willing to express themselves via electronic medium, and while I feel my own material is never quite up to par, I'm happy to be a part of it. Whether it's Aaron's impressive ability to condense humor into unlikely places, Max's impressive analysis, Rome's excellent reviews, Jesse's expressiveness, or Matt and Kory's immersive fiction, I always enjoy reading all of your works and end up wishing there was more. So on that note, thank you.

So maybe this will have the desired effect, and maybe it won't. But regardless, after today you'll be a seeing a new post every two days on this blog, at least until summer's end (hopefully further, but I have no idea how hectic my semester might end up being). If I don't, I ask you to publicly harangue me in whatever fashion you feel appropriate. I do hope you enjoy though!

And to end with something completely unrelated but awesome...

-HTMC