After-Action Report: Ghost Recon Wildlands Open Beta

After running around for four days in Itacua and Montuyoc, I can claim that my missions to defeat elements of the Santa Blanca cartel were successful.  However, just as no battle plan survives the battle, there were some snags along the way which tempered the successes.

Rant: Toys In The Attic

In retrospect, I may have gone a little overboard on the whole Skylanders thing.  I have a very large collection of the figures at this point, though I did swear off them cold turkey after Superchargers came out.  And Trap Team pretty much guaranteed I wasn't coming back.  I had done the same with Disney Infinity 2.0, though I had picked up at least one starter for that.  You may ask why I'm bringing this up, and it's mainly as a preface to the point at hand.  Disney's games division has declared that they're getting out of producing their own games, which means Infinity (all three versions) will have their servers shut down on March 3rd.  All of the user-generated content will no longer be available for download.  Multiplayer games will be impossible.  To turn a phrase, Disney is taking all of the players' toys and going home.

Rant: Steam Stoplight

Valve recently announced that they were terminating their "Steam Greenlight" program, where people vote to add games to Steam, and will be replaced with a "Steam Direct" program, where devs pay an as yet to be determined fee to have their product be on the store.  Naturally, this is pissing everybody off on both sides of the debate.  Let's take a quick look at their positions, shall we?

Random Access Mutterings: Silicon Hells - Anime Set In Game Worlds

The last few years has seen the rise of a highly specific sub-genre of anime, the "trapped in an MMORPG" series.  While it's true that .hack has been around for a while, and the progenitor of the concept can safely be presumed to be Tron, no less than four anime over the past few years have come out, and that's just the ones that have been produced.  Apparently, the conceit has been reaching a saturation point in Japanese media circles, as evidenced by a restriction on the genre in a writing contest.   As an anime fan, I've been enjoying these series.  However, I've been enjoying them in spite of their game-like elements.  The writer in me likes the characters and storylines.  But the gamer in me just shakes his head and goes, "What the hell?"  I thought I'd take a look at some of the recent series that have come out and dissect some of their underlying "games."