Media Recap: Q4 2014

Posted on Fri 02 January 2015 • Tagged with Media Recap

I have not stopped writing down my consumed media. Neither do I feel the need to stop sharing them with you. However, my current schedule happens to exhaust me a lot easier than previous ones. It is because of this change in workload and scheduling that I need to change my Media Recap series to 4 times a year instead of every month. Here’s what I checked out in Q4 2014.

Presentations

You need to have watched this presentation. I am fully aware than it seems long and sometimes long-winded but it is essential for your understanding why IT infrastructure is again and again undermined by politics. Germany’s De-Mail is just one of the examples why politics cannot be responsible for the security of data.

Movies

TV series

We subscribe to Netflix and while the girlfriend mainly insists on watching movies together, I take the dive into a complete season of TV series from time to time. I’ve known Prison Break from TV back than but never got around. Elementary and Grimm play to my fondness of Crime and Mystery.

Games

  • Guild Wars 2 - didn’t play a lot even though new story snippets were released, logged in at the end of the year to unlock the Wintersday tree for the home instance
  • Mass Effect 2 - finished one last playthrough, please send help. Girlfriend dragged me through this.
  • Fruit Ninja HD: Puss in Boots - Evergreen. Played one evening, broke own record.
  • Risk of Rain - I suck at this. Devastatingly difficult. Still like it.
  • Letter Quest - Scrabble-like combat system for a tiny RPG. Has obvious display of removed IAPs than were converted to in-game currency on the PC version. Adorable graphics, lots of fun but requires at least intermediate grasp of English language.
  • Ratchet & Clank - Nostalgia flash. Must’ve been more than 9 years ago that I played that one last. Bought on PSN during the holiday sale.
  • SSX - Needed to see whether this is a worthy successor to SSX 3. Mostly, it’s not. The dangers suck, the parks I’ve seen so far are not as over the top. I find it to be less fun than 3. It’s unnecessarily restrictive. A lot better than Stoked and Shaun White Snowboarding however if you like non-realistic snowboarding. No buy if you dislike the Deadly Descents - I certainly don’t.
  • Fallen London - I got into Fallen London. I soaked up its lore. I spent almost every minute of waiting during another activity playing the game. I even ended up converting a friend to the game and making item conversion tables to avoid more round-trips to the wiki.
  • Sunless Sea - A gift from my girlfriend since I spend so much time and effort on Fallen London. I sure wish the game supported either a higher resolution or retina-level graphics given that has heavy emphasis on text and the text is awfully blurry on this glorious screen.

Books

Podcasts

Web series

  • Extra History - The Punic Wars
  • Extra History - The Seminal Tragedy
  • Extra History - Sengoku Jidai

Extra History uses the popular combination of humorous drawings with neatly narrated information for specific periods in history in the same entertaining way that Extra Credits already did for video game development insight.

Let’s Plays

  • Dangan Ronpa was a hilarious, insane and extremely weird read and reminded me strongly of the Persona series whose Lets Plays I enjoyed a lot in the past.