Media Recap: August 2012

Posted on Sun 02 September 2012 • Tagged with Media Recap

Games

  • Command & Conquer: Kane’s Wrath
  • Mass Effect 3: Multiplayer
    This month I took part in Operation OLYMPUS. It might be the last ME3 operation I participate in due to my Xbox Live subscription running out and me losing interest in ME3’s Multiplayer which is the only thing I got the subscription for in the first place.
  • Mass Effect 2
    My run of ME2 is finally done and I’ll keep posting to the mailbox as long as it takes to wrap up the game. I also plan to release this as a free e-book after the project is finished.
  • Fallout 3
    I gave F3 another chance of entertaining me. While I did some exploring and saved hostages-soon-to-be-dinner-for-mutants it failed to provide more than an hour of fun again. Maybe I’ll come back another time but I’d say I probably won’t.
  • Spellforce 1
    As Fallout failed to entertain me I turned to Spellforce 1 because I feel that this is one of the games where one is able to sink a great amount of time into without the feeling of wasting time but on the other hand it’s not giving you a feeling of progress if you stay on one map. Sadly I somehow did something bad in the preferences and now it won’t start.
  • Dungeons of Dredmor
    While visiting a friend I came across DoD another time. I still consider the game a very good purchase given its low price and the time I’ve happily spent playing it so far. Recently I upgraded my game with the You Have To Name The Expansion Pack, the Realms of the Diggle Gods and the Conquest of the Wizardlands add-ons.
  • Guild Wars 2
    After initially lending my GW2 account to a friend I played some time during the headstart period that pre-purchase customers were able to enjoy.

Podcasts

Since IRQ Conflict does not have separate pages for their episodes I’ll point you to their website where you’re able to subscribe via RSS or iTunes. Or Zune. Not that anyone knows what that actually is.

  • IRQ Conflict 39 - 7% Of An Ice Cream Sandwich
  • IRQ Conflict 40 - Moses Burger
  • IRQ Conflict 41 - Someone Hire Justin

Once I was listening to Build & Analyze I was pointed towards Hypercritical, another heavily Apple focused podcast on the 5by5 network. I’ve immensely enjoyed reading John Siracusa’s review of OS X Mountain Lion last month and listening to Hypercritical is equally inspiring and in a way enlightening.

Other than that I sat down and listened to a special podcast: The Game Informer Skyrim special which must have been lingering in ~/Downloads forever.

Novels

I got the chance to work a bit on my backlog which includes several books that Amazon gave away during their 2012 Easter promotion as well as some other vampire-themed promotion. I wasn’t entirely happy with the free books all being German, but read them nevertheless. With free books it’s basically a hit-or-miss thing, I think. Given that the result was okay, but not great.

  • Eva Almstädt: Grablichter, ein Pia-Korittki Fall
    A murder story in which fascinatingly nothing was thrilling. I’m not sure what the argument to read this is given that the most interesting part of those stories are either the ‘detecting’ or the ‘being close on their tracks’ parts. Neither of those managed to drive away the boredom of the rural location the novel took place in. - MISS
  • Matthias P. Gibert: Zeitbombe - Lenz’ Achter Fall
    The second murder story. This one was clearly better, although that might be my bias towards urban settings for that kind of story. My favorite part is the dialog which is often written in a very sarcastic way - I truly enjoyed that even when the topics were serious. - HIT
  • Klaus Erfmeyer: Todeserklärung
    This murder story was a bit different than expected since it was shown from a lawyer’s point of view instead of an investigator. I was amazed that even the personal touches in the story didn’t bore me. - HIT
  • Charlotte Schaefer: Cedars Hollow
    Ugh… I should’ve looked at the cover more closely. The heart might’ve signaled what I didn’t realize when obtaining this book: It was a kitschy girl-meets-vampire romance; I had to force myself to keep on reading through the more boring sections and found myself rolling eyes on so many occasions that my optometrist might’ve worried. - MISS
    Also I’m not sure whether my mind was a little absent or if this book’s formatting is really messed up and not all paragraphs have a font of equal font size. Which. was. distracting. as. fuck.

When I was not particularly interested or engaged in the content of one of the novels I tended to scribble in the Kindle notes section. Most of those notes were predictions of how I thought the story might proceed according the the things I’ve read so far. I tried to figure out what was misdirection and what was indeed lampshading.

Videos

Summary: 7 games, 4 novels, 1 presentation, 14 podcasts