The PD Chronicles

Anyone who keeps a blog or other such similar medium will always have this urge to make a post on New Year's Eve.  I'm not sure why.  Perhaps it's to validate their existence, or to give themselves a feeling of completion for the year.  In any case, here is mine.

Let me start by hoping that everyone has a good 2013.  It's going to be an interesting year, I think, and it's quite likely that we'll be starting it all off with a brand new financial crisis.  I can't WAIT to take a pay cut!  Woo!

Worthless politics aside, I'd rather focus on staying positive for the new year.  So, um...well, the snow is pretty.

Despite how utterly exhausting the holidays tend to be, there's always a part of you that wishes, despite everything, that every day could be like Christmas.  The presents, the happy family times, and best of all, not having any responsibilities whatsoever since all the preparation is finally, finally done.  But then everyone leaves and you stop and think, "Fucking hell, I just want everything back to normal so I can get on with my life!"  
In any case, I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, and the best for the year 2013.  Provided below are some pictures from my Christmas Day.



I must say that one of the reasons why I'm glad Christmas is over, is because I can now walk around my house without tripping over gifts.


























There's a tradition with holidays.  There's always a picture of Brandon giving the camera the finger.  Go ahead, look for it.  You'll find it.  Also, the funny thing about Christmas this year is that the very next day (today), it seems that…

A heavy armored pirate steps in front of a wall, placing him out of line-of-sight of his equally heavy armored buddy.  I pop off a silenced shot from my suppressor-equipped sniper rifle, splattering his brains on the wall.  Bonus XP for a headshot goes to me, and his buddy is oblivious to what just happened.  I exhale, smirking deviously.

I'm racing down a dirt road in a jeep, speeding towards a bridge that suddenly pulls up.  It's a drawbridge, and the commandos I'm running from raise it.  I speed up and jump the gap, landing safely  on the other side, only to be accosted by mortars incoming from a nearby truck.  I jump into the back of my jeep and man the turret, riddling the offending truck with bullet holes until it explodes.  I drop back into the driver's seat and continue on my way.

I'm walking through a field of illegal drugs with a flamethrower, lighting every plant up in a brilliant haze of orange fire.  I say to myself, "This is fucking awesome!"…

A little over a year ago, id Software released their first new IP in quite a long time.  It was called Rage, and it was a post-apocalyptic shooter utilizing id's new idTech5 graphics engine.  The game received generally mixed to positive reviews when it came out.  One of the main complaints, if I remember correctly, was the technical problems that the game had when it was first released, especially on the PC.  The other most common complaint was that the game seemed like it was trying to be Borderlands and Fallout, and failed to live up to either.  If you recall my posts about Rage back around October 2011, though, you'll remember that I absolutely loved it.  Take that, majority!
Fast forward to this week.  To everyone's surprise, except perhaps the devs at id, new content for Rage was announced after a long period of utter silence.  And that's what I'm going to be talking about today.

I haven't touched Rage since I finished it back near the end of 2011, but I o…

Let's have one of those general, talk about anything posts, shall we?  It's been a little while since I've done a good, old-fashioned ramble.

First of all, let's touch upon MLG (Major League Gaming) for a bit.  I believe it's generally accepted that League of Legends has pretty much surpassed Starcraft 2 as far as popularity and overall influence within the MLG world.  This doesn't really affect me all that much, because I don't play either game at all.  I of course HAVE played both, as I try to play just about every game that I can.  (At least the major releases.)  It does make me feel sort of left out that I don't particularly enjoy either game (for differing reasons), especially when I look at how many people do.  LoL is the most popular video game in the world right now.  It's not often that I don't like a game that a majority of people do.  Even when it comes to Call of Duty games, I'm quite sure that if I were to play the single-player…

Alright, so I mentioned the baking, didn't I?  I should have.  It's been going on for 7 days now.  We took last night off due to it being poker night, of course, but every other night we've been baking away.  Let's have a bit of visualization, then.  


This is Mom and John putting icing on the gingerbread and sugar cookies.  John delved into his artistic side and decorated the gingerbread men (the whole three that he managed to do in two hours) with faces and accessories.  They look brilliant.  No one's allowed to eat his.  They are for display purposes only.



My favorite part about this image is that you can see the icing that he got stuck in his hair.



And here are some finished products.  You can tell which ones I did (where I simply sprinkled the chocolate bits onto the cookies)  and the ones John did (where they actually have proper faces).



Sugar cookies with white icing and colored sugar.



Before the icing and sugar.  The one gingerbread cookie in the corner was le…

Far Cry 3 has quickly become my favorite game of the year.  I'm getting so much more out of it than I expected, and I'm surprised by how well it has done many things that have been in countless number of games.  For example, I wasn't expecting the game to give me a huge dose of nostalgia, reminding me of old school Lucasarts computer games such as Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.  I also wasn't expecting to start making comparisons to Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed.  But I have.

The island is so much bigger than I expected, and I am amazed by how much there really is to explore. Obviously, the environments do not change all the much -- you are on the same island the whole time, after all -- but the island looks so GOOD that you really don't care that it's all a tropical landscape.  Besides, who doesn't want to live in the jungle?  Seriously.

The thing that has surprised me the most are the part of the story dealing with the subtle supernatural …

It's always nice when you go into a new game with a certain expectation, and those expectations are immediately exceeded.  I feel that lately, the game industry has become rather predictable in a lot of ways, and not just in the fact that there are so, so many sequels to existing IPs these days.  With the gaming media becoming so fast paced, it's quite easy to find out just about everything about a game near-instantaneously, due to how rabid the journalists are to be the first with their review.

Far Cry 3 has ended up being a rather unique situation that I probably won't see again for a very long time.  I saw a few advanced reviews of the game, but I really didn't pay much attention to them.  I saw they were very positive, and that prompted me to preorder the game about a week ago.  But aside from that, I didn't know that much about it.  In addition to that, I wasn't particularly a fan of Far Cry 1 or Far Cry 2.  So, going into this game, I really didn't ha…

Balls.