I'm The (Stephen) King of the Castle! - Discordia

To my great shame and regret I have never read Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. There they sat on the rotating display of short horror and sci-fi books in my secondary school's library and for all those years I never once picked them up. (The same thing happened with Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and other staples of modern graphic novel culture).

I'm A Bad Man (An Apology)

It's true, I'm awful. Unprofessional, undependable, un...  uh, unbelievable and unhygienic.

So yes, I've not posted since *cough* 27th October (my, has it been that long?) and I never did deliver that The Void review I promised, nor written reviews for the games I've played since then such as Dragon Age and Batman: Arkham Asylum, nor have I even so much as posted links to interesting articles written by much wiser and older men and women than I.

Yet, to my eternal disbelief, StatCounter kindly informs me that some of you have actually been checking this site even up to today. For that I say "Thank you, thank you for your faith and interest good Sirs and Madams" and add "Why?!"

Live (Action) By The Creed: Assassin's Creed 2 Webseries

The PR machine for Assassin's Creed 2 ramped up its efforts today with the release of the first part in an on-going, live action webseries detailing the cloak-and-dagger exploits of the father, Giovanni, of the game's main character, Ezio Auditore.

It looks really very interesting just by itself, using a blend of live-action, green-screen backgrounds (a technique pioneered online by the web-then-TV-series Sanctuary) and fully CG footage from the game's other trailers. This episode is 14 minutes long and we can expect at least two more before they complete telling the story.

You can catch the short trailer for Legacy below the jump, and see the first episode HERE.

Going Underground (Again, And In Moscow)

Take an ounce of vault-dwelling hero thrust into the greater world from Fallout, a kilogram of subterranean network of subway train tunnels from Hellgate: London and all the grit, bleak horror and vodka you can extract from a serving of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., mix it all together and you might come out with something that strongly resembles Metro 2033, THQ's newly announced post-apocalyptic shooter from their Ukranian developers, 4A Games.

World of Goo for £X.XX

Late to the party as always, I can reveal to you that 2D Boy's wonderful, delightful physics and hilarity game World of Goo is now available for... well, whatever you want/can afford! This is in celebration of WoG's first birthday - has it really been that long? My, how it's grown.

Get over to its site immediately - just be sure to offer at least 50p, else my understand is that 2D boy will lose money because of the transaction fee charged by PayPal. And we don't want that!

Buy!

Korsakovia (So You've Decided To Become a Lunatic)

Late to the party it seems. I had meant to play Korsakovia immediately upon its release on 20th Sept but what with starting uni it got pushed back and then forgotten until now. So I am fresh to this but the world is not - perhaps most of you too are unfamiliar with it. The rest of you, take the day off.

(Korsakovia concept art by Ben Andrews)

Korsakovia is the new mod for Half-Life 2 from games research group thechineseroom. Like their previous work, Korsakovia is intended as an experiment in games design, this time specifically in 'madness, reality and the end of the world' and 'in seeing just how far you can push things'.

FATALE - Released, Pseudo-Review

Very last on Monday night, FATALE (creators' capitalisation) was released to a small but expectant audience. It is the third commercial release from Belgian developers Tale of Tales who you might remember for delivering Red Riding Hood tale The Path. It is an 'interactive vignette' based around the Biblical tale of the young dancing girl who called for the head of John the Baptist and jumping off from Oscar Wilde's interpration, the play Salome.

Why Do You Play What You Play?

Through the wonders of the Twitter I have been directed to an interesting little personality test of sorts for gamers. BrainHex is intended to help 'study the reasons why players enjoy different gaming experiences'. You just answer a couple of pages of short questions and they tell you what kind of gamer you are (Daredevil, Seeker, Mastermind etc).