To put my review of Assassin's Creed: Valhalla in context, I'm going back to the distant days of 2007, when we were all so young and innocent (or at least unindicted). I played the first two games in the Assassin's Creed series. The overall framework of the game hasn't changed in the past 14 years: You play…
I first got involved with Wicca 30 years ago. It's my tricennial! That makes it my pearl anniversary, if you believe the marketing of the jewelry companies. I don't have much to add beyond what I posted for my 25th anniversary in the Craft. There are a couple of minor differences: World of Warcraft is no longer…
I heard about the video game Control around the time it was released in 2019. I thought about getting it (I was still spending a lot of time at home recovering from medical stuff). But a little bit of research told me that the game was quite difficult (on the level of Dark Souls) and there was…
Let's start with what you want: cat pictures. The video above shows 95 seconds of the kittens wrestling in my bedroom. During their first week in my apartment, I restricted them to that single room. This let them get used to an environment that was much larger than their cage at the vet. I should add: While…
For my review of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, it may help to go back to my review from three years ago on its prequel/main game, Spider-Man. The ambiguity of "prequel/main game" depends on your perspective. SM:MM is either a short sequel or a very large expansion of the original game. At a current street price of about $50,…
Here we go! This time around, I'm giving my cats names in Klingon. This one is jI'IHqu', which means "I am very beautiful." The "'" signifies a glottal stop; that's what you say between the "uh" and "oh" of "uh-oh". The H signifies a hard "ch" sound, like in Bach or chutzpah. However, it's hard for cats…
I have a few games to review in my personal queue of "essays I plan to write long after a game has been released so that any review is meaningless": Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Control, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. I decided to bump Mass Effect Legendary Edition to the top of the queue because this isn't a review. The…
If you go by the number of times her work has been reproduced, Pamela Colman Smith is probably the most popular artist in the world. She is the one who created the artwork for the so-called Rider-Waite Tarot Deck; the claim that she's the most popular artist comes from multiplying the number of Tarot decks with her…
On the surface, Hades sounds exactly like the kind of game I wouldn't enjoy: you fight a lot; you die a lot; it looks like another pointless arcade game. It wasn't until I saw Felicia Day play the game on a YouTube video from her Twitch stream that I became interested: So what makes Hades different from…
This game and the next game I plan to review (Hades) have been labeled "rogue-like" or "rogue-lite" games. For the folks who read this post who don't know that means, I'll describe what's generally meant by the term. Rogue was a video game from the early 1980s. The game was originally developed to use ASCII characters for…