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You Found a Secret Area!

You Found a Secret Area!

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You Found a Secret Area! posts

Blood: Just what the hell does "Crudux cruo" even mean?

Blood: Just what the hell does "Crudux cruo" even mean?

Oh, right! It’s October. Usually that means having some kind of “spooky” game to write about. Under normal circumstances I would find some fairly obscure Halloween-themed action game and write about that. But it’s been quite a busy month f...

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My First Sony and my love for cassettes.

My family is a packrat kind of family. For the longest time, we’d just hoard things that we might need someday. But as time goes on, we’re slowly culling away those things we held onto, often times just books and old toys. During this process ...

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The Mercy Rule: A proposal to fix unbalanced FPS matches.

(As always, feedback is appreciated!)

It’s no secret that I play a lot of competitive first-person shooter games. While I vary in skill from an absolute noob to top of the leaderboards depending on the match, I do play a fair shar...

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Duke Nukem: Alien Armageddon - Time to kick ass once more.

Duke Nukem: Alien Armageddon - Time to kick ass once more.

(As always, feedback and comments are appreciated either in this article or on my socials.)

The Build Engine is a fascinating piece of tech. Made by a young Ken Silverman, the engine was made as one of those engines that could rival...

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A little Weekend Writing about 1980s white guy pop music.

As I’m writing this, I’m listening to Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, his fourth solo album, and what spawned his first #1 solo hit on the Billboard Hot 100: “Higher Love.” The #1 hit isn’t that amazing – mid-80s pop ...

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Magrunner: Dark Pulse - Now you're thinking with polarity.

Magrunner: Dark Pulse - Now you're thinking with polarity.

(as always, any feedback is appreciated!)

It really cannot be overstated how much Portal made an impact to gaming when released in 2007. Valve snatched up a few Digipen students, gave it that high quality Valve polish and released i...

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Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II: From quality to jank.

Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II: From quality to jank.

(Any feedback or comments about this before it goes live for the public are welcome.)

It’s time to head back to the unofficial expansion mines once again. I’ve been down this road countless times at this point, but this one is o...

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Doom Eternal: Time to Rip and Tear Once More...

(What you are seeing is not the final text, but is what I consider “good enough.” I’m open to any suggestions or feedback on this post before it goes live on my website.)

Something I’ve constantly talked about on this blog i...

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Alien Rage: Old school in more ways than one.

Alien Rage: Old school in more ways than one.

Over the 10 plus years I’ve been writing about video game stuff, one thing that’s stayed constant is me writing about the most jankiest, clunky games out there, often in January. So much so that I almost considered making an event called “Ja...

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Die Hard Vendetta: The forgotten McClane.

Die Hard Vendetta: The forgotten McClane.

It’s the holidays again – at least as of this writing – and naturally I thought about writing about a holiday themed game. Realizing that’s not a particularly big pool of games to choose from, I opted for games based on media franchises th...

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Zaero for Quake II: A return to unofficial expansions.

Zaero for Quake II: A return to unofficial expansions.

When I wrote about the previous Mods and Maps article about Soldier of Fortune, Inc., I honestly wasn’t expecting it ...

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Mods and Maps: Soldier of Fortune, Inc. for Quake -- Not the Soldier of Fortune you're thinking of.

A few months back, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Bethesda re-released the id Software classic Quake on modern systems. Ported to the versatile KEX Engine by Nightdive Studios, it added the base game, the two official Mission Packs, t...

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Darwinia: An early Steam darling.

Darwinia: An early Steam darling.

I’ve had a Steam account for about 18 years. I got mine the day it was available to the public: September 12, 2003. More than half of my life has been giving money to Gabe Newell and the folks in Bellevue so I can play PC games. It’s kinda sur...

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Pat Sajak's Lucky Letters: Crosswords hosted by the Wheel of Fortune guy.

Pat Sajak's Lucky Letters: Crosswords hosted by the Wheel of Fortune guy.

Late last year, I had written about Interplay and Platinumware’s attempt at trying to make a fake game show, Lexi-Cross. It was surprisingly inte...

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Gemini: Heroes Reborn: A puzzle platformer based on a TV show.

Gemini: Heroes Reborn: A puzzle platformer based on a TV show.

If there’s anything I kinda miss about the modern age of video games is that there's not enough video games based on media properties. They were so ubiquitous throughout the '80s and '90s where we had classics like Disney's DuckTales an...

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Peggle spinoff games: Popcap has the crossover fever.

As of this writing, the famous Electronic Entertainment Expo – E3 for short – has come and gone. Lots of companies announcing hot new games slated to come out later this year or the next, people pushing polygons to the limit, and your favorite...

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Weekend Writing: BioShock Infinite, the polarizing third installment.

It’s been about several months since I last wrote a Weekend Writing post. Admittedly me playing games has slowed down considerably in 2021, due to a multitude of factors. Fed up with playing 2021-05-15 17:43:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Terrorist Takedown: More like Stereotype Shooter.

Terrorist Takedown: More like Stereotype Shooter.

(content warning: Depictions of violence and war within.)

In 2021, it was announced that the previously canceled game Six Days in Fallujah was being brought back. With some of the original development team ...

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Candy Crush: From mobile game phenomenon to short-lived game show.

Candy Crush: From mobile game phenomenon to short-lived game show.

As someone who loves the world of game shows, I’m honestly amazed that there haven’t been many game shows based on video games. We have game shows based on board games – Monopoly, Scrabble, Scattergories, stuff lik...

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Bingo Story presents The Price Is Right: You've all overbid.

Bingo Story presents The Price Is Right: You've all overbid.

I’ve been struggling to find motivation to play new games lately. I’ve gotten a bunch of games thanks to them being on deep discount, but then I don’t play them and just default to playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War instead. H...

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Covering the end of Battleborn: A MOBA with an identity crisis.

Covering the end of Battleborn: A MOBA with an identity crisis.

I never thought I’d be starting 2021 with an article about a game that's shutting down. While I’m often behind the curve and don’t play games until years after the fact – some of last year’s posts being about games that are 5-10 years ol...

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Cybermania '94: An extremely '90s video game awards show.

It’s that time of the year again. The Game Awards, a show that’s ostensibly about giving awards to the biggest games of the year, peppered with occasional celebrity guest talent and reveals for hot new games. A continuation of the Spike Video ...

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Game Show Themes vs. Their NES Counterparts Volume 3: The Forgotten Leftovers.

(NOTE TO PATRONS: Patreon's blogging feature isn't as robust as Wordpress' blog setup, where I can upload audio files and put them into the article itself. To get around this, the audio clips are under the article as attachments instead. This ver...

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Lexi-Cross: A futuristic game show from the past.

I’ve been writing about game show video games here on and off. It’s a fascinating genre, especially ones that aren’t based on standard TV game shows. I’ve written about ones using licensed properties like 2020-10-13 15:29:59 +0000 UTC View Post

Carmen Sandiego Out of This World: A bizarre album based on the game show.

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego is one of those rather ubiquitous edutainment titles of the late 80s and early 90s. A geography-driven game, the goal is to find clues around the world to stop Carmen’s henchmen from stealing some o...

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Shellshock: Nam '67 - A War game from somebody you wouldn't expect.

There was a brief time around the 2000s where there were a bunch of shooters based on historic events. Medal of Honor in 1999 kick started the craze of World War II-themed shooters, which lasted well into the late-2000s. During this time ...

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There was going to be a new post, but it's gone now.

Hey. I rarely get to talk about the behind-the-scenes nature of how I prepare blog posts in a public space, but I figure I should write about this. It's about how I was going to publish something, but realized how bad of an idea that was.

So...

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Some Weekend Writing about Far Cry 4.

I rarely abandon games. Mainly because of the infamous “sunk cost fallacy”: I spent money on this, thus I must play it in its entirety to get my money’s worth. Even for a person like me who doesn’t buy a lot of games these days, there’s ...

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Stacked with Daniel Negreanu: Poker without guns.

 

There was a time around the 2000s where you just could not avoid poker on television. Thanks to Chris Moneymaker making a decent bank in an online poker tournament, suddenly Texas Hold’em Poker got big and started being the next big...

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Counter-Strike Global Offensive Music Kits Series 5: Of Masterminds and Missing Links.

I never thought I would ever come back to this. After a steady stream of music packs released throughout 2014-2016, I assumed Valve was done with the whole “CS:GO music kit” concept. After the Radicals Box hit in 2016, there had been nary a pe...

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