Tap-Repeatedly
Tap-Repeatedly is only electrons.
Tap-Repeatedly is only electrons.
Some of you may remember Celebrity Guest Editor Zeke Iddon visiting us here on Tap. His hilarious review of Bientôt l’été is still among my top favorite guest posts. Now he’s back, sharing wisdoms and intelligences and Yoda-like prognostications. Believe me, you’re going to want to click that Read More link.
Our topic today is dungeons, and the keeping thereof, from creature management to the ongoing nuisance of “heroic” dungeoneers. Evil is good — we learned that in 1997, with Bullfrog’s seminal Dungeon Keeper; again in 1999 with Dungeon Keeper 2. Recreating that wicked goofballery has proven an elusive brass ring. Subterranean Games is grasping for it with War for the Overworld, which promised to be Dungeon Keeper 3 in all but name. Did they succeed? Or is evil thwarted again? Gregg and Steerpike cackle their way to the answers you need.
Sincere apologies for the lengthy outage over the past week, fellow Tappers. A whole bunch of problems happened at the same time, and we’re still working with our wonderful hosting service to identify exactly what’s going on and why. The site may be down again intermittently over the coming days, but hopefully this will be no more than a minor inconvenience. Some details of larger inconveniences below…
It’s been not two but three weeks since our last On Tap, because, like, sometimes Dix gets lazy. In that time, one of this console generation’s first anticipated releases has hit with Watch Dogs, and proved that we’ll likely have no shortage of sociopathic protagonists in case anyone was worried; LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow blew the lid off Kickstarter by getting all the money; and everyone’s been placing their obligatory E3 bets.
But since we have a little time to kill before Geordi can once again read us to sleep, we’ve had to turn to the comforting embrace of these games…
Zeke Iddon is a good friend of Tap-Repeatedly, and of gaming in general. He penned a hilarious Celebrity Guest Editorial (with equally hilarious video) on Tale of Tales’ Bientôt l’été – that’s Flemish for wander pointlessly on a beach – and now his long-running comedy gaming blog Iron Man Mode is coming to a close. To make sure it goes out in a fiery orange boom of screams and death, Zeke has declared that starting May 23, at 9:00pm GMT, he will-
You know, I better let him speak for himself. He speaks good.
It is with great sadness that we mourn the passing of another two weeks. So let’s drink to the last fortnight and have another for the next. Here’s what’s On Tap!
Where did the last two weeks go? What even happened? I totally wasn’t paying attention.
Well, I guess the Star Wars cast got announced. That was pretty big. But we here at Tap don’t have time for motion pictures based on older motion pictures. We only like games here. Games only!
Like these…
Holidays are notorious for being bad times to be on the road, what with the higher volume of people traveling. Of course, based on what we’ve been up to this last week, apparently, it’s probably pretty unsafe to be on the road with anyone who writes for Tap, ever. There should be a registry or something.
People think it’s an obsession. A compulsion. As if there were an irresistible impulse to act. It’s never been like that. I chose this life. I know what I’m doing. And on any given day, I could stop doing it. Today, however, isn’t that day. And tomorrow won’t be either.
Batman: Identity Crisis
by Brad Meltzer, 2004
That quote, more than anything, sums up the character that will form the centrepiece of this article; one who has transcended printed page, cinema and television screen, and now onto gaming consoles and PCs.
Can you believe that just one week ago, we couldn’t catch Pokemon on Google Maps? And we didn’t know how badly we need a Blizzard tournament fighter? It was a world without Captain America: The Winter Soldier. A world where former Uncharted creative director Amy Hennig wasn’t yet attached to the next big Star Wars game. A world in which five-year-olds were widely believed (unjustly) to be unable to crack the security on an Xbox One. It was truly a time of darkness and ignorance.
Good thing we had these games to keep us warm at night.
Hey, we managed to get a regular feature two weeks in a row! That’s a new record.
With the acquisition of Oculus Rift by Facebook, I know that all of us – every reader, every staff member here at Tap, and really everyone – cannot wait to get our FarmVille fix through a headset. That’s all I’ve been thinking about this week! Being able to see my computer just really takes me out of the social game experience.
That said, Rome wasn’t built in a day (it took at least eight turns, I expect), so we have to find something to occupy ourselves until we can bug our friends incessantly from right in front of their faces. Here’s just a few things that the Tap staff have been using to pass the time.
It’s a little known fact that, behind the scenes at Tap, everyone is required to report every game they so much as look at. This is important so that we know who to ostracize for their gaming tastes in the secret staff forum. In this, the first installment of On Tap, our newest regular feature, we share some of our current gaming adventures: ones that don’t rate an article of their own – good, bad, or ugly – or ones still percolating in our tiny minds. This is important so that we know who to ostracize for not contributing to On Tap any given week.
Just…just assume everyone else’s contribution this time would have been Dark Souls 2. That’s probably where they are right now, in Drangleic. Except maybe Steerpike, who might be driving to Oklahoma as we speak with an axe and a shovel and fire in his eyes. But mostly Dark Souls 2.
Today, Dix and Steerpike take the tap.
Yesterday afternoon found me at my desk with the vague expression of a lobotomy patient or a recreational user of thorazine. If a passerby had said “whatcha thinking about?” I’d have said, “Nothin’,” which was better than the truth. I was really thinking about narwhals, and Kate Beckinsale. I rarely think of narwhals, since they don’t usually impinge on my day. Kate Beckinsale is a more frequent mental guest, though not one I typically associate with narwhals – or, indeed, with any marine life. Then, because I hate myself, this reverie was interrupted by The Other Voice: “No wonder that Thief article is four days late, you’re so busy there.” God damned Inner Guilt.
Being a couple days late on a game nobody expects much from isn’t a big deal, but yesterday had been a bad day – and I’ve been late on stuff a lot recently, and kinda kicking myself for not having as much time to write like I did, and the usual. Something about the day made an otherwise innocuous deadline push feel like a double helping of Ennui Cake topped by the Scrotum-Pulverizingly Judgmental Cherry of Self-Loathing. Fortunately, my mood was about to improve dramatically.
Deep in the Tap-Repeatedly missile silo headquarters, it has come to our attention that kids these days use something called “social media” to communicate. Apparently “The Faces Book” is the most popular of all the social medias, and we are determined to be among the first to use it.
Tap-Repeatedly is a website, it has no face. It is made of electrons. Still, some form of Face is now in this Book, and you can… you can visit? Look at? The Face is available here. It is still under construction and stuff, but early adopters like us are always on the bleeding edge. Bear with the dust and what have you.
Once you’re at our Face you have the option to Thumb us, apparently a compliment among the youth, and leave pithy messages on our “wall,” which is like graffiti but less damaging to property. I guess. It’s digital? I’m not sure what that means.
So a couple weeks ago I’m minding my own business when the email dings – it’s a rep from the New York Film Academy’s School of Game Design, asking about the possibility of one of their people doing a guest piece. Technically it was from their marketing department, which always makes me suspicious since I get about eleventy-five of those a week and eleventy-four of them wind up trying to sell me Cialis™, which I’m told is for Whenever the Time is Right®. Every now and then I bite though, which in this case was a great thing since it turned out to be both legit and totally worth it.
Thus do I introduce Iron Man Mode Blog Overlord, freelance writer, Guitar Hero master, and NYFA staffer Zeke Iddon, who for reasons soon to become clear is slightly less than overjoyed to share with us his feelings on Tale of Tale’s latest nongame Bientôt l’été, which I just know is going to mess up the site’s text display. Despite the pain, he even made us a video. You gotta watch the video, it’s freaking awesome.
Take it Zeke!