What's Next

It was time for me to renew the domain name, and after some consideration, I decided to cancel the subscription.  I hadn't written a post in months, and every attempt to relaunch the blog was short lived.   Right now, at this point in my life, video game blogging isn't important in my life.  My life priorities at the moment look like this:

1) Go to work and get a paycheck
2) Pay off student loans (getting closer)
3) Save some money for eventual mortgage payment/moving/emergency/etc
4) Adopt a healthier lifestyle (slow process, but much better than when I started this blog)
5) finish writing my novel (closer to completion)
.
.
.
.
99) Play videogames
100) Write a blog about videogames

Maybe placing them at 99 and 100 is a slight exaggeration, but as you can see, it's not a priority.  I don't want to abandon it forever, but I just need an extended break, at least until this novel is finished.  APU in its current form will not continue.  Should I ever relaunch, it will be under a different name.

Ciao for now.

Wednesday Special: Max's Severed Head

"Wednesday Special" is a post scheduled for the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month. It is always something sort, possibly sweet, and usually accompanied by images or videos.

---

"I will make hat from you, little bunny."

It's currently after 10 PM and The Cave is slowly downloading on Steam. By the time it finishes, it will be beyond an acceptable time to start playing a brand new game. (Unless I want to be a zombie at work in the morning.)  And then it hits me: it's time to do a blog post!  And I missed Monday's post!  Oops... so much for that schedule.  I suppose I could just make it up on this coming Monday.  But today is the fourth Wednesday, which means I can do a quick 'n easy post!

I love exploring Etsy and Pinterest for all things geekery.  Granted, there's a lot out there on the good ol' internet that is just plain terrible, but every so often I find items for sale where I yell, "I WANT THAT!"  A seller on Etsy created an incredibly accurate Max's Severed Head hat for all of your dual Sam & Max and Team Fortress 2 cosplay needs.

Max's hollowed out skull will set you back $40 plus shipping, which may seem expensive, until you compare it to the market value of the rare TF2 in-game hat.  According to the TF2 Spreadsheet, Max's Severed Head is worth at least 50 crate keys.  So if you either buy the keys from a player for $1.50 each or directly from Valve for $2.50 each, you're looking at minimum value of $75 for a virtual hat.  I'd much rather have the real hat.

Now Playing: January 18th

"Now Playing" is a post scheduled for the first and third Friday of every month. Here I'll give an update on what I'm currently playing. Just because I'm playing it now doesn't necessarily mean that it has been recently released.

---

One of the few opportunities to take a screenshot in Super Hexagon

Terry Cavanagh is an evil, evil man.  And I love him.  The man behind the likes of Don't Look Back and VVVVVV has done it again with Super Hexagon.  Despite the fact that a single "life" in the game can last just mere seconds, I find myself playing it and losing track of time as I die over and over and over again.  Congratulations to Mr. Cavanagh for creating yet another game where I can lose a hundred times in a short amount of play time and still itch to give the level "just one more go."  (And the music is awesome!)

I also played through the first episode of The Walking Dead Telltale Games series.  I was surprised that unlike other adventure games from Telltale, much more focus was placed on the storyline and the decisions the main character needs to make rather than solving puzzles that are traditional of the genre.  I feel like this decision worked better for the source material, and I'm curious to see how decisions I made in the first episode will affect the remaining four.  (Which would also warrant at least another playthrough.)

Wednesday Special: Kid Kirby

"Wednesday Special" is a post scheduled for the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month.  It is always something sort, possibly sweet, and usually accompanied by images or videos.

---

If it weren't for the hair, I totally wouldn't have been able to tell that Kirby is a baby.

The film industry seems to love the idea of prequels when they run out of ideas for movie sequels.  The video game industry seems to love this idea as well, but one series that I would have never imagined to get the prequel treatment would be Kirby.  Apparently, back in 1995 Nintendo thought a Kirby game featuring a "young" Kirby would be a good way to showcase the SNES mouse.  Alas, Kid Kirby never saw the light of day.  You can read the little information that exists for this game and see a few screenshots over on Unseen 64.

Con Girl: NYCC 2012

Multiplayer Cosplay

I'm going to dedicate my first content post of 2013 to an event I should have written about months ago: New York Comic Con 2012.  This past October, I was determined to make my second outing to the massive east coast pop culture convention even better than last year.  In short: I succeeded, and exceeded my goals.

Now Playing: January 4th

"Now Playing" is a post scheduled for the first and third Friday of every month. Here I'll give an update on what I'm currently playing. Just because I'm playing it now doesn't necessarily mean that it has been recently released.

---

Dueling Team Fortress 2 teams in Hero Academy for iOS/PC (Steam).

Now is the time of year when everyone plays all of the video games they received for Christmas! Or, in my case, the games I purchased for myself... months ago.  

Recently I've been playing some more Team Fortress 2, as my play time has significantly increased now that I have a close friend who plays consistently.  My lone purchase for the Steam Winter Sale so far is Hero Academy, a strategy game I can also play on-the-go on iOS.  While the base game and one team is initially available for free on iOS, my $1.24 Steam purchase unlocked the Team Fortress 2 crew for me to use and removed the ads from the iOS app.  I like it enough so far that I'm considering the purchase of the rest of the teams should they go on sale again, just to give myself some more variety.

I also made a little bit more progress in Torchlight II.  I had been holding the game off a bit since that friend I mentioned earlier is interested in playing co-op, but is a Mac gamer and that port isn't finished yet.  For some reason I thought the Mac port would have been ready by now, but considering that the initial launch on the PC overshot its original release date by about a year, that was some wishful thinking on my part.

Lastly, I found myself playing Dr. Wario.  No, not Dr. Mario, Wario, as in the "knock-off" version found in WarioWare, Inc. on my 3DS (thanks to the Ambassador program.)  Now if there was only a regular game on the 3DS that could hold my interest. 

Kicking Off the New Year with a Fresh Start (For Reals)

For the possibly two people that may check this blog on occasion, you can see from the number of posts in the past year and a half I haven't been consistent at all.  I would go months without an update, make an apology post, post solid for a few weeks, then drop off the face of the earth yet again.

Well, it's a new year, so now is as good a time as ever to get back into the swing of things.  So here I'm going to propose a new posting schedule and see how things go:

• 1st and 3rd Mondays - a post with substance!
• 1st and 3rd Fridays - a quick update to what I'm playing now, or the latest game I purchased on Steam and added to my backlog
• 2nd and 4th Wednesday - I'll continue the Wednesday "anything goes" series of posts, possibly under a new title
• Last Friday - some sort of monthly wrap-up, akin to the old "Tweet20" posts, title and theme pending

That makes for a total of seven posts a month, with the first post coming up this Friday.  I'll try this for the month of January and go from there.