I Have Written

Hey friends. Just wanted to plug my writing. If you haven't realized it, I am a writer. It may not be complete or super full of content but I do have some cheap offerings over on Amazon. If you like what you read here I'm willing to bet you'll like my fiction. So give my page a click why not? You'd make a writer-guy super happy. Brand Mark's author profile.

Thanks,
Brand

Late Gamed: Lord of the Rings: War in the North and the Fore-Shadow of Mordor

<**HEY! There be spoilers right away. But really...you know how LotR ends, right? So it shouldn't really surprise you...**>

“Yes, I can feel it too, it's as if a great burden was lifted. The Ring is destroyed.” reports Farin, and thus do we hear of Sauron's demise, via the simple reports of the three main characters of War in the North. It is a telling scene for a game that can both thrill and frustrate even the most epic of fans.

Video Game Appetizers No Longer Served (but please enjoy our many entrees...)

It has been sometime since we've had them, but no longer are they served. The menu has changed. Akin to a magazine, or rereading the same chapter of a book over and over, demo discs were for gamers what cassette tapes were to people in the 80's, short, limited selections that you were likely going to repeat. Repeat and enjoy. So let's all take a moment to remember something that hasn't been with us for some time now, but we probably haven't missed...yet.
Especially if you were a young adolescent in the late 90's-early 2000's, you had no income, and therefore little likelihood of any new games, Demo Discs were a treasure trove of possibility and gameplay. And we've lost something, I think, now that these samplers are an artifact of gaming's past. We play our games differently, both what we play and how, and I wonder if we've made it harder for smaller studios to get their games noticed when in this last generation of consoles, even my collection, is marked by a dearth of 2nd and 3rd party developers and case after case is marked by the title of some mega-conglomerate's flagship series. Have we really lost that much?

Most Wanted Scenes from Desolation of Smaug Extended Edition

Like Unexpected Journey before it, the Desolation of Smaug has rolled out to generally mixed to favorable reviews, with many calling it the better of the two. And with a more action-oriented and faster pace it's understandable, but there is always the flip side; where Journey slowly meandered and delivered nearly every morsel from the book, Smaug races us through some chapters deliriously while extending and expounding upon others, one might say disproportionally. And while I did love the movie, and cannot wait to see it again, I can't but help wish there were more--from the book. This leaves me no choice but to anticipate next year's inevitable Extended Edition with hope of the addition of these certain scenes...

My Drawrings

Hey looka this!
It's my portfolio.

Brand Mark's Pictures of Neat Stuff

Seasonal Gamer: 10 Games to Play in the Colder Months

Not sure what games to play over your Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Winter break? Want to catch up on some older titles you may not have played through when they were contemporary? Do you need a very particular and abstract reason to play a game? If so, who are you and what enjoyment do you get out of video games?
I doubt I'm the only one who is apt to play more games when the cold months come around. In fact I hold a special kind of nostalgia for games during the holiday/winter months. Whether it was getting a specific title for Christmas or working through the final boss over college winter breaks, there are certain games that seem inseparable from the late fall to winter months; so much so that sometimes it just feels wrong playing them any other time of the year.
Being that it is now November, and that, for my part of the world, the landscape has turned rather brown and the morning air now threatens the first dusting of snow, I thought it might be fun to look at a list of games that seem right for the season. Let's not call them holiday games but...let's call them the Brown-White games, for the respective October to February months it would be most appropriate playing them.

That Persistent Hedgehog

I think I have found that whatever games I find myself enjoying I can't help but think of how I would have liked to make it, or how I would have done things differently. Or at the very least, how it has inspired me to want to make a game of a similar type. This has been true since I owned my very first console. In my parents' house, and my current collection, there are stacks and stacks of notebooks and doodles of the games I wanted to make. And I think I have it all to blame on a persistent, little blue rodent on the Sega Genesis named Sonic.
To say that I liked Sonic would probably be a bit of an understatement. After first getting the Genesis with a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 it's probably safe to say that my childhood was taken over. I had the bedspread, the comics, the t-shirts, the McDonalds toys, the strategy guides, and of course just about all of the core games. No other character was probably ever doodled in the margins of loose leaf notebook paper more than this guy. I would spend whole bus rides home silent, looking out the window, thinking up new levels for the next Genesis title that I was going to make. My friend on the bus and I would make up new sonic characters every day.
My addiction over the years may have waned but it's never completely faded. In fact, recently it's only been reinvigorated. Last Christmas I got a copy of this: