Crimson Crux

After years of waiting, a third Diablo game has been announced.

Damn.

Last year, it was StarCraft II. Now, this industry-shaking news. What more can I, a Blizzard fan, ask for?

I’ll spare you from a litany of how much I became engrossed in Diablo II, and I’ll instead point you toward the official D3 site, where you can get all the game info to your heart’s content. But for those who don’t have the time (or net speed) to view the Diablo III cinematic trailer, here are some vidcaps I took:

Blizzard kicks ass.

Hmmm. New location?

(more…)

StarCraft was the very first game I popped into my very first computer (yes, I started quite late — I was in first year of high school). The years haven’t sullied the great gaming memories from ‘98-’99, and those memories are almost exclusively StarCraft memories — Zergling rushes, jaw-dropping Blizzard cinematics, mostly one-sided Battle.net matches (with me on the losing end), and so on.

Which is why I’m proudly displaying that banner above. It’s actually part of the new Blizzard “I <3 SC" Photo Mosaic contest that celebrates the franchise’s ten-year anniversary (as well as drum up publicity for the upcoming StarCraft 2).

I won’t be joining the contest. Rather, this post is just a little tribute to one heck of a game…the game that made me a gamer.

Longtime PC gamers will know what Simlish is — a fictional and unintelligible language used in the revered Sim franchise of Will Wright and Maxis.

Well, surprise, surprise — Simlish is partly a child of the Philippines! If you’e going to trust Wikipedia’s article on the language:

The Sims development team created the unique Simlish language by experimenting with fractured Ukrainian and Tagalog (one of the major languages of the Philippines).

Just one of those amusing tidbits of trivia. Now, this begs a question — did the Maxis devs include a Filipino in their ranks, or did they just pick Tagalog for its qualities?

Because I have this fanboy-ish devotion to Blizzard games, especially StarCraft (a fact not lost on my scant regular blog readers), I regularly drop by the Blizzard Fan Art gallery. When I saw this recently added work by Marek Okon, my fingers froze above the keyboard in stupefaction.

Right at that moment, I knew that I was staring at one of the best Blizzard fan art pieces of all time.

What can I say? This work just captures the “Queen Bitch of the Universe” so vividly. Add to that the fact that my eyes are getting tired of seeing WarCraft-themed art dominate the gallery; I can’t wait for StarCraft II to balance the field.

Enough words. I’ll let Marek’s art speak for itself.

This video game article over at SomethingAwful.com supplied me with a couple of laughs that I desperately need in these times of, uh, impenetrable darkness. Heh.

My favorites:

Valve - “Step on it, boys, we’ve got a deadline to meet!”

PopCap - “Here’s an original idea.”

GameSpot - “I’m giving the game a 9 because it was fun as hell. Innovation is great and all, but we play it up way too much.”

Sony - “It sure feels good to be on top of the console industry.”

I’ll be adding one:

Blizzard - “Let’s prioritize the StarCraft universe, who needs WoW’s billions, anyway?”

Read the rest here.

While aimlessly wandering around YouTube, I came across this three-minute gem from Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach. It plays to the tune of Electric Six’s Danger! High Voltage, which has suddenly found its way into my playlist.

Funny video + funky song = a great way to kill your time. Enjoy!

Fire in the disco! Fire in the Taco Bell! Oops, couldn’t resist…! In any case: Electric Six Danger! High Voltage lyrics.

Whew, that was quite a blogging break!

I’ve been back here in Manila for several days already, though I had to sort out some things first. Hence, upon arrival I had resolved to hide from my blogs for a short time, but one big gaming news forced to me to break the silence (on Gadzooki) — StarCraft II has been announced. It’s a development that is much-awaited, yet still took me by surprise.

For the meat of my thoughts, read my post on Gadzooki. Disclosure: I’m a StarCraft fanboy. I *heart* Blizzard, SC’s makers. And I won’t give a damn if the WarCraft and Diablo franchises magically vanish from the Earth right now. That said, here are some more points:

• Is this all a face lift? Probably yes. I’m hoping that Blizzard adds something new to the gameplay, but if it’s just Warcraft III in space (oops, Artanis* will get angry with me), I’ll still take it. SC’s gameplay was excellent in the first place, and half of my feverish anticipation is for the story and the cutscenes, two things Blizzard excels at.
• Who can forget the frenzied multiplayer SC battles over LAN and Battle.net? I see no multiplayer letdown with StarCraft II. And who knows, we might even see DotA in space!
• I can’t emphasize this enough — come on Blizzard, give us more than three races. It’s not that we’re sick and tired of the Terrans, Zerg, and Protoss, it’s just that, hey, WarCraft III had more races than WC II! (All right, Blizzard wants us to stay tuned until SC III, I guess.)

Here are a couple of vidcaps I took from the StarCraft II cinematic trailer, which you can download from this page:

(more…)

Shortly after accepting the problogging job at Performancing.com, I was approached by Pinoy problogger extraordinaire J Angelo Racoma to write for four more Splashpress Media blogs. To make a long story short, I accepted two and kindly declined the others (too much food to chew on already!).

Hence, I’m announcing on this good ol’ pseudo-tech blog that I’m now writing for Gadzooki, home to all things gadgetry, software, gaming, and cars, and Blog Tutorials, where you’ll get to pick up some tips for creating a successful blog.

I’ll be blogging alongside some real-life friends — Ia, Mia, Ariel, and my older cousin, Anne. To find out which blogs they’re writing for, you’d have to drop by Gadzooki and Blog Tutorials, as well as their sister sites Travelogger and Froodee.

To send you off, here are my first four entries on both blogs:

• Gadzooks! New Writers!
• Three Games to Watch Out For
• New Blog Tutor, Signing On
• Use Image Attributes to Boost Your Blog’s SEO

One of my all-time favorite games, Rome: Total War definitely has its quirks. The picture above says it all. Now, this bug had me also thinking, Costner’s Waterworld might be due for another video game version, this time in 3D!

These past days, I’ve once again turned to PC games to help relieve stress. A few bugs of the amusing type (such as this, as opposed to the gameplay-ruining, insanity-inducing ones) certainly go a long way in stress management.

However, even with rare but bizarre graphical glitches, RTW remains a fine game for the ages. If you’ve been visiting this blog since its Blogspot days (highly unlikely!), you’d remember I gave RTW’s expansion, Barbarian Expansion a highly positive game review.

Enough talk — I’m off to crushing the Senate and the People of Rome, as well as their lap dog Houses! (Yeah, I’m against ‘em this time around, playing as the Macedonians — a ‘non-playable’ faction made playable by a quick game file hack, hehe.)

While writing some posts for a Dungeons and Dragons Online site a few weeks back, I chanced upon a highly entertaining webcomics by the name of DDO1Liners. Highly entertaining, that is, if you:

• Are a fantasy geek,
• Have played D&D or any similar RPG systems,
• Have played the DDO MMORPG or any similar online games, or
• Have a sibling whose endless ‘dice rolls’ and ‘dungeon delvings’ with his/her friends at your house have somehow ingrained the terminology and lingo into your otherwise innocent brain.

Needless to say, those items can overlap! Anyway, I found myself going through every strip in their archives, which I don’t usually do with other webcomics. (more…)