Hey Destructoid, it's been awhile eh? I've been a busy little robot, let me tell you. I just graduated from RPI with a BAS in Video Games and Simulations Arts and Sciences and a BAS in Communications so I'm looking for a job. On top of that, I got together with some friends (fellow RPI students, soon to be graduates) and we're in the process of creating our own company, one we call Darkroom Games. More information on that will be soon to follow, so keep on eye on the Cblogs if you're interested.

Let's get to the real point of this blog. I feel the word "epic" is thrown around a lot these days and has lost its meaning. That being said, I feel it is appropriate to say that this past Christmas, I got the most epic present I've ever received: a life size statue of Master Chief! It was used in stores to promote Halo 2 and only around 600 of them were made, a number of which were merely thrown out after the promotional period. I feel very lucky to call this guy a part of my collection and would like to state publicly to any women that may consider calling themselves Mrs. DaedHead8 in the future: If you ever ask me to choose between you and the Chief, you'll find yourself lacking a husband very quickly. This guy is going to guard over my apartments and houses for the rest of my life and there isn't a single thing anyone can do to stop it.

Enjoy the pics!

This blog was written as an assignment for my Experimental Game Design class, so if it seems more formal than my usual entries, that's why.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of the very few games that I can claim legitimately scares me. This game scares me so bad that I haven’t even finished it yet, despite having owned it for almost an entire year. It’s not that the game is long, I am just literally afraid to sit down and play more of it.

Amnesia is a first person adventure game. There is no combat in the game and very few enemies, but the enemies that are there are among the scariest that gaming has to offer. You see, if you spot one of the monsters and look at it for too long, it will sense your presence and start chasing you. Because you have no way of defending yourself, your only option is to run into a darkened room (preferably one with a door you can shut behind you) and wait and pray that it didn’t see where you went. If it did, it will follow you into the room (breaking the door down if it has to) and potentially kill you. If the room is dark enough and you don’t look in the monster’s direction, you may escape its wrath by crouching in a corner, if you’re lucky. This design choice reminds me a lot of the movie Alien, where the titular alien was rarely seen in the film. This lent a serious sense of dread to the movie whenever you spotted part of the alien. I feel the same way about the monsters in Amnesia. Since you never get a really good look at them, they are ten times scarier than they would be if you saw them in full every 30 seconds.


Amnesia is a very dark game, check out this screenshot from one of the "safe" areas in the game...

When you’re not running for your life from monsters, the game plays like a standard adventure game. You find objects and use them to solve puzzles, such as getting a steam engine to work so you can use an elevator to get to the next level. The catch is that the game is very dark, and darkness causes your character to go insane. Going insane means that the graphics will warp and bend, a creepy crackling noise will start playing over your speakers and you may even start hallucinating and seeing things that aren’t there. You can combat this by using matches you find to light candles throughout the environment or by using an oil lamp you carry with you. Both the matches and oil are in short supply, so you should use them sparingly. In addition, light will attract the monsters in the game, so whenever you’re running from them, you must also suffer the effects of insanity. It all makes for a very compelling and emotionally charged experience, as you must decide between the comfort that lights brings and the safety of darkness.


This is what most of the game will look like for you scaredy-cats out there. Put that oil lamp away, you'll be fine, I promise. (cue evil laughter)

The scariest moment of the game for me happened early on. I was walking around in an area with ankle deep water on the floor. I was just doing my thing, exploring rooms and looking for matches/oil and items I may need to progress when all of a sudden, footsteps started appearing in the water near me, despite there being nothing there to make said footsteps. Clearly there was some sort of invisible monster in the room with me. The footsteps started coming straight for me and naturally, I freaked out. I tried running but it was too quick for me. It caught up and within seconds, I was a corpse. My game reloaded and this time I was ready for the footsteps. When they appeared, I quickly tried to run past them, only to end up just as dead as I was earlier. The monster was too fast and too strong. The third time, I tried something new. When I got to the area with the monster, I stood on some boxes up out of the water. This proved to be an effective strategy, as the footsteps stopped just short of where I was standing. Clearly the monster knew where I was, but was unable to reach me unless I was in the water. Feeling triumphant since I had figured it out, I shut the game off, saying to myself that it had scared me enough for one night. I didn’t play again for more than two weeks.


Most of the game's story is told through notes you can find in the environment but there are also flashbacks that occur when you step into certain rooms.

Amnesia is game that everyone should experience in my opinion, even if you’re not a fan of having the pants scared off of you. I say this because it proves once and for all that video games are capable of delivering the same emotional intensity and indeed the same scope of emotions found in other mediums like film, music and literature. Not only is it capable, Amnesia proves that video games may even be the most effective medium for delivering emotion, since it is the only medium where things are happening to you and not someone else. You are the person being chased down a dark hallway by a deadly monster; you’re not watching it happen to some teenage girl. You are the one suffering from insanity; you’re not just reading about someone else’s breakdown. I think Amnesia is one of the first games to deliver these types of experiences but it certainly will not be the last.

Okay, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself with my blog title here, but after buying the first gen DS and first gen GBA, I can't help but feel paranoid that Nintendo will be making such an announcement now that I'm the proud owner of a cosmo black 3DS.

Yep, in celebration of my birthday last week, I decided to take advantage of the early price drop on the 3DS at Walmart. That's right, I am now a 3DS ambassador all at the low low price of $170. I also picked up Super Street Fighter IV 3D to play until my 20 free games are ready.

In addition to all that, while at Walmart I ran across a new copy of Tony Hawk Ride for the PS3 for only $15! I always planned on buying this game and despite the fact that I would have rather gotten it for the 360, at that price, I just couldn't pass it up. I can't wait to try it and see how terribad it really is. I love collecting stuff like this.

In that picture up there, you undoubtedly noticed 4 other DS games and Wii game I haven't talked about yet. The 4 DS games were a gift from a friend and they are:

Chaotic: Shadow Warriors - A pokemon-like game, it's actually pretty good which surprised me since I had never heard of the game or the anime it's based on.

WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010 - Despite being a huge wrestling fan, I don't own any portable wrestling titles, until now. This is one of the better Smackdown titles on the DS and it really plays like a mini version of the console title. Not bad at all, especially considering my friend got it for free from GameStop since the case is damaged and they likely have 100 copies of the game in pristine condition.

Geometry Wars Galaxies - A portable version of one of my favorite XBLA games, getting this game on my birthday inspired me to order the Wii version from Amazon (only $10!) which just so happened to arrive in the mail today, just in time for this blog. They're both awesome titles and anyone who likes Geometry Wars should check them out, especially now that they're both as cheap as their XBLA counterparts.

Super Scribblenauts - The sequel to one of my all time favorite DS games. The weird thing is, my friend had no idea what this game was and just bought it for me because she knows I like weird and quirky things.

So yeah, between this and the two Fallout games I bought on Steam yesterday (3 GOTY and New Vegas) I have a pretty kick ass birthday haul here. It's time for me to open it all up and make it official!

Everyone's excited to celebrate mah birthday!

So I just got off the phone with Obama, who had just gotten off the phone with several other world leaders. It seems they all agree that we need a summer holiday that rivals the birth of Jesus and they decided my birthday was the perfect choice. I can't say I blame them. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!! WOOT!

All joking aside, it is my birthday today. I turned a quarter century old today and I'm feeling pretty good. I don't really have any vidya related plans for my birthday nor did I receive any awesome vidya related presents (yet) so for my birthday post today, I thought I'd share the game prototype I helped create in my Game Dev II class last semester.

The game is called Season of Thorns and I promised to get it to you guys months ago but I never followed through, for that I am sorry. The reason it took me this long is because I had planned on writing up a big blog post explaining everything about the game, from how to play it to how I went about creating it. Unfortunately I just do not have the time for that. I started another project for school which has been dominating my summer. My new project is an adventure game that aims to teach its players Mandarin Chinese. This is a very exciting project for me because not only do I love adventure games, but I also am very passionate about education reform using video games. I am also extremely fortunate to be working under the leadership of Lee Sheldon, a professor at RPI who is at least famous enough to have his own wikipedia page. However the coolest part of this project is that the game will take place in what is known as "The Cave": A 40x40 foot room with screens on all 4 walls. That's right, this game will immerse you in a virtual reality recreation of China in order to teach you the language. How cool is that?

Anyway you can download Season of Thorns here. Extract the .rar, open the folder and click on seasons.exe in order to play. Fair warning: The game is very glitchy, the animations that you see aren't final and they tend to glitch a lot. In addition to that the movement isnt as smooth as we would have liked it. Here are the controls: WASD moves your characters, 1234 switches between the 4 characters, the left mouse buttons fires off a spell and the right mouse button allows you to switch between spells.

Here's a few hints to get you started: The round torches you see on the ground throughout the environment automatically teleport the ladies to your current position when you get close to them. This can be very handy when entering a new area but also very annoying if you have placed your ladies in a spot they need to stay in to complete the current puzzle. So steer clear of the torches unless you actually want all 4 ladies in the same spot. The first puzzle involves placing the 4 ladies on 4 switches at once, causing a bridge to appear to a previously inaccessible area. The second puzzles involves putting one of your ladies on a special platform and somehow levitating her up to the second set of spells. This game is very challenging in the sense that we don't tell you at all what to do, but if you explore and experiment enough, you'll find your way. Since I didn't write an all inclusive blog post about the game, I promise to keep a close eye on the comments and answer any questions you all might have. Good luck everybody!

Hey everyone, it's been awhile since I've been around these parts. I figured I'd drop by, see how you all were doing and give you a bit of an update on myself. Life has been pretty crazy for me as of late, I'm one semester away from graduating with a dual major in video game design and communications and my life has been almost non-stop work for the past half year or so.

Most of the past six months were spent working on a video game for my Game Dev 2 class. I worked on a team of 5 people and our game is called Season of Thorns. It stars four princesses on a quest to rescue four heroes from the clutches of the evil wizard Equinox. The game features no combat and puts a heavy emphasis on exploration and puzzle solving. Solving puzzles unlocks new abilities and new abilities allow you to explore new areas and solve increasingly complex puzzles. The game is unfinished, it only exists in demo form but it got a great crowd reaction when we showed it off at GameFest. For that reason, I intend on making it available to my Dtoid brethren in the near future as I think it might be of interest to some of you.

Some of you may remember me talking about making my projects from Game Dev 1 available here but I'm not so sure I'm going to do that anymore. If I can get an executable working for the first game I did in that class, Zenshiro: Astro Samurai, then I'll throw that up here along with Season of Thorns but I've been trying for almost a year now and it isn't looking good. Games written in Pygame are a pain to export to an executable file. It's a real shame. In the meantime, check out the text adventure I made a few semesters ago if you're really dying to play some of my work.

Other than creating games, I've been busy putting my resume and portfolio together and looking for a job. It hasn't been easy but RPI has some great connections with the industry so I should eventually find something that suits me perfectly. Currently I'm also taking computer science 2 as a summer course, it's really tough since I'm not a programer but I should get through it. I need it to graduate after all.

As far as playing games goes, I've been into a lot of stuff lately. I played through Bayonetta finally, I loved it but the repeated boss fights were a pain in the ass. I also picked up the Medal of Honor reboot. I was actually surprised by that one, I wasn't expecting much but it ended up being a much more realistic take on the Call of Duty formula and I ended up really loving it. I haven't played the multiplayer at all but from what I hear, I'm just missing a sniperfest, still I'll check it out some day. I also bought and played through Portal 2 and the new Mortal Kombat, I won't spoil anything but I thought they both had excellent single player campaigns. Also, the co-op in Portal 2 is a blast, I'll be finishing that up tonight with my cousin. Portal 2 is the front runner for GOTY so far, we'll have to wait and see how it stacks up against Duke Nukem, Skyrim and Dark Souls.

So sorry I haven't been around lately, it's not because I don't love you cbloggers, you know that. I say this a lot but I'm going to make an effort to find more time for you, I promise. This community is just too awesome to not be apart of.

Once upon a time, I was in a Best Buy and I saw the worlds greatest invention;The Guitar Hero Air Guitar Rocker. Sadly, an evil witch convinced me not to buy it. I have been sad ever since. Today, this grave injustice has been rectified. This most excellent of toys just arrived in the mail and now I'll be able to live happily ever after, knowing that whenever I want, I can walk into a room full of strangers and blow their minds with an air guitar solo THAT ACTUALLY PLAYS MUSIC. Truly, my life is complete.

That's not all I got in the mail today. I also received my stuffed beedog and plushtoid from Zodiac Eclipse and Story Builder Toys. I'm very happy with the quality of the toys and how quick they got to me. It was just as quick as amazon! That's really saying something. Also, I'd like to thank her and Topher Cantler for donating $12 from every beedog sold to help Japan. Knowing that I helped contributed to charity AND got an awesome stuffed beeddog just warms the cockles of my frigid heart. So thank you for that opportunity Zodiac and Topher, you guys rock!