eclectika

So I've spent quite a bit of time away from here. While there is a giant gap in content since my last post, I thought I'd offer up this post as a form of explaination. I've been going through a lot of changes lately. You might say I've been evolving. Yeah, I think evolve is a good word to use here. Now that my children are running the house, I have been forced to re-examine my purpose in life. It turns out, after all, that my function is to wait . To help better explain how rewarding I find the act of waiting, allow me to first define the term— wait: to assume a form of stasis whereby one remains open to additional instruction while maintaining an active queue of established tasks for prompt execution after stasis has been terminated but before anyone notices that nothing was accomplished during the time stasis was being observed. I find it interesting that as primitive beings we were physical creatures of action. Almost as if we were sharks—the ceasing of movemen...

Some days you're untouchable. If the enemy is careless enough to run near your crosshairs, you arrange their personal face time with God. Other days, you spend more time in the great beyond than on the battlefield. Regardless of how well you do, a losing streak melts away the moment you make that impossible shot or pull off an unbelievable maneuver in a vehicle. For those moments when the teamwork just 'clicks' or you're the one that captures the flag when all others fail, Battlefield 2 truly makes you feel like the hero of the hour—even if your score is the lowest on the server. It is a remarkable mix of weapon and vehicle balance that allows players to play on their own terms and have fun with wildly different play styles. I like to fly choppers (the AH-64 specifically) and am happiest swooping down on enemy tanks, hovering over flag capture points or simply providing a steady platform for my gunner to mow infantry down. When I'm not flying, I'm sniping—yo...

Ever since PONG, I've been fascinated and sometimes obsessed with video games. At one point, I remember long summer nights in front of my IBM monochrome monitor exploring the mysteries of Colossal Cave . These days, games have become so much more sophisticated that entire worlds are fleshed out for our curious alter egos to explore. Games such as Guild Wars (pictured here) offer up a long and engaging story to work through while other titles simply present a vast world for you to discover at your own pace. No matter how cinematic or sophisticated the gameplay becomes, however, the thrills, immersion and wonder of that old Cave still haunt me. What has been lost since the days of the old text adventure? Is it that we've allowed our creative minds to become lazy and therefore require game designers to fill in the blanks with more polygons or do we simply lack the patience to fully adopt each new world's mythology? Perhaps the problem it is the abundance of these games wh...