Hi everyone. Amanda here! Or AJ for short, if you want to be gender-neutral about it. Some of you may remember me from a previous article that I wrote on the site as a “celebrity” guest. Since then I’ve been asked to come back and share more things, so I’ll now be up to providing reviews, impressions, and editorials on a regular basis as a Tap contributor! Now with that out of the way, take …
“Good day, sir. Say, that’s a fine hat you’re wearing.” “Indeed.” “Would you mind if I tried it on?” “Beg your pardon, I daresay you’re a madman, sir. You? Try on my hat? What would the lawman think?!” “By my best estimation, good sir, the lawman would hum a gay tune, tip his own headpiece, and go about his business. Why, didn’t you hear? Today’s the day the proposed law of Wearing Another Gentleman’s Hat has graduated …
I’m a little busy with stuff that pays the mortgage right now, so Steerpike will be quiet here at Tap for a while. Happens every year around this time.
In the interim, though, I’d like to note that it is currently – according to my neighbor’s outdoor thermometer, at 7:58 PM – 113° in Ann Arbor. That’s 45° to you Metricles. My poor air conditioning is struggling to keep it a mere 82° in my condo.
Via Steam. First with Armand, then with Dobry. Who still owes me a Shogun 2 review.
“Well I did it,” begins a recent post on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft forums. We often discuss here at Tap-Repeatedly how killing, in its many forms, has long been the predominant form of expressing progress in the medium of video games. Today it is such a given to seasoned gamers, most of us would never give pause to even consider what we’re doing. Although the how has evolved — from the hell-spawn in Doom, to …
For those who are not already, please cease current activity and toddle over to our friend Harbour Master’s Electron Dance, and read The Aspiration, in which he is chronicling a game of Neptune’s Pride. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, even emotionally exhausting, it is always epic and written in a classic Harbour Masterian style that many can emulate but none can match. Preview—— Part 1—— Part 2—— Part 3—— Part 4—— Part 5 It’s not …
Sometimes, when you create something and don’t get all dicky when other people want to build on your work, nice things happen. Consider Beyond Black Mesa, an 11-minute fan short set in the world of Valve’s Half-Life 2, using characters from it. You see a lot of this stuff from fans, like the Purchase Brothers’ Escape From City-17, and the still-hopefully-in-development Black Mesa Source. The common thread among all of this is that Valve has …
We’re getting all academic around here! Good buddy, all-around stud and Celebrity Guest Editor Ben Hoyt of 47Games pointed me to the yonder video of his friend professor Jeremy Douglass of UCSD giving what I can only describe as a really fascinating lecture on passwords. Sound boring? Sound pointless? Wrong! Not only is Dr. Douglass a great speaker, but he’s not just talking about how passwords should have symbols and capital letters. He’s talking about …
Last week Joel Goodwin (a.k.a. Harbour Master of Electron Dance) and I got together to have a chat about Puppy Games’ upcoming Revenge of the Titans. Harbour Master, being the big softy he is, came away with a different take on the game to me so it’s well worth a read if you weren’t entirely convinced by my glowing first impressions. The discussion can be read here but while you’re in the vicinity you really …
Things have been awfully quiet around here lately; so quiet in fact that if you listen carefully you can hear the muffled staff beatings being issued by our Overlord Steerpike deep within the bowels of the Tap-Repeatedly silo. It’s only right that I distract you from their disparaging (and hopefully short lived) whimperings with the sweet, sweet sound of music…
Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the Sony PlayStation in Europe. OK, OK, so it may have reached this milestone a couple of weeks ago in the US, and is rapidly approaching its sixteenth birthday in Japan, but as I’m in the UK and have a particular admiration for the good old grey slab of love, we at Tap are going to celebrate it’s 15 years! So, what do you remember most about the PlayStation? What did it …
“A guy at work created this using facebook images of people from work… me included! Its epic!” I’ve got a friend. A very tall and lanky friend. That friend is called Simon, and he’s awesome. But yesterday he somehow became more awesome thanks to a certain Steve Cutts who has created the rather special Shoreditch of the Dead using Adobe After Effects and a load of his work mates’ Facebook photos to render the characters. …
This last week my family and I were camping in the woods at Farragut State Park in Idaho. We had planned to go check out the shopping for house stuff in nearby Spokane and take the kids to Silverwood amusement park to give them a taste of a real roller coaster. The land is very similar to the terrain around where we live and since the water in Pend Oreille is very cold and immediately …
Valve has a history of slurping up talent from the fan/mod community – Adam Foster, creator of MINERVA, now gets his paychecks from Valve. So does the team that created the popular Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients, a game I never really got into. Also scribe Erik Wolpaw. And we’d be remiss not to mention the jewel in their recruitment crown, the DigiPen Institute student team that created Narbacular Drop, a senior project …
I’m screwed. We’re all screwed. We’re coming back as dung beetles and fruit flies and those parasites that swim up your urine when you pee in the Amazon. Why? The Karma Police.