Gamers With Jobs

Julian Murdoch and Amanda Cosmos tell you all about Pidgeon Dating in Hatoful Boyfriend!

This week Shawn, Elysium, Cory and Allen talk about their ongoing relationship with multiplayer gaming.

APPLICATION FORM HR-042

Job Opening: The Game King's Court Jester

1. Tell me about yourself.

Not much to tell. I'm a pig farmer, son of a pig farmer who, was married to another pig farmer. The difference is that I have a sense of humor, which my father, Mr. Pig Farmer, most certainly does not.

2. What interests you about this opening?

Prithee, sirrah, to jest in the halls of the Game King would be the greatest honor in the land.

Time for a little survival horror this week, with the release of Dying Light on PS4, Xbox One and PC. Assuming you're not tired of zombie apocalypse games, and there's a good chance that you actually are, Polish developer Techland and Warner Brothers offer up a dynamic day-night cycle, tons of weapons and a large urban environment. There seems to be a very action-oriented bent to Dying Light, with shades of Dead Island, and I do have to admit that I'm intrigued.

That said, my appetite for zombie games is decidedly waning. I used to be interested in what the zombie fascination says about our cultural mindset, but honestly that conversation doesn't even interest me anymore. Zombies are starting to feel like an easy, video game friendly, stock bad guy. Doesn't tend to require a lot of AI programming. Shows off cool visuals. Fun to hit with sticks.

Zombies check off a lot of convenient boxes. But, all the games are just starting to meld together in my mind, and the apocalypse is becoming as boringly standard as a trip to Target to pick up dishwashing tabs and milk. Even as I look at my Steam featured items, no fewer than three of them are zombie centered: H1Z1, Dying Light and Resident Evil HD.

Which is why my game of the week isn't Dying Light. It's Grim Fandango Remastered, a game that would be really hard to pigeonhole into some overly repetitious game type. Go play that!

A new venue brings new challenges, new friends and new fun!

Check back here for random news, pictures and general mayhem.

Sunday 5:06pm
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Results are coming in as we pitch up to the final round of the Omegathon:

– The winner is in for the PAXvsMAGfest Katamari Damacy competition. PAX South pulls it out with a 38.1cm roll. See the hashtag for the play-by-play.

– Here's the winners at the top of the standings in the Steel Battalion tournament.

Sunday 5pm
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The flag is back down in Tabletop if you want to go say hi. Grumpicus said that PewPewRobo and his wife are in a Race to the Galaxy tournament down there.

Every PAX I always end up doing a craft project of some sort, just to keep my hands busy. One year my elder daughter and I made a stop-motion movie out of those papercraft Lolth: Queen of Spiders handouts. This year it ended up being the Thwomp Hat, and there's a story behind it.

Prime before last, my younger son was Enforcing and he wore one of his cowboy hats. While he was working, the band fell off. He brought it to me for safekeeping. My younger daughter, who was also Enforcing as my evil minion, made him a new one out of a bunch of paper Thwomps (falling stone enemies from the Mario series). When I was packing for South, we ran across the hat, and it was suggested that if there was a PAX where this needed to be worn, this was it. The paper ones had long since become a decoration on his bedroom door, but since I had a bunch of ends of felt left from making the flag, I decided to see what I could do about a new one.

So check to the right and you'll see the hat, in all its full glory.

Sunday 10am
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Welcome to the 3rd day of PAX South.

-- We've had the Indie Showcase for video games for years, but did you know there's one for board games now, too? The Tabletop Indie Showcase shows off some great new indie games. Take a look at this year's winners down in Tabletop (or here if you're not onsite)

-- We have the last two rounds of the Omegathon today. The 4th round is Peggle, starting at 11am in Falcon Theater. The 5th and Final round (and the closing event of PAX) will be at 5:30pm in the Main Theater (and streamed live on Twitch)

Sponsored By: Gravey

Time Played: 23 glorious, people's minutes

Sandbox Review

Why are you reading this when you should be playing Spintires? Why am I writing it when I could be playing Spintires? Let's all forgo the rest of this review and go play some Spintires!

There's very few ways outside of the donation drive we're comfortable earning money through GWJ. Most of that is because ads feel icky and unrelated to what we're actually doing here day to day. One of the affiliations we always enjoyed was GOG (formerly Good Old Games) because it's actually a service we use and the extent of the ads is just clicking a link and then buying what you're going to buy anyway. Costs you nothing and we get a little shaving off the purchase.

GOG shuttered that program a number of years ago but now they're back and ready to do it again! We're pleased to say if you click the link on the left of the page there and then sign up for GOG or buy some stuff you'll be helping us out too!

We also still have the ol' Amazon search box which you'll see if you don't have any ad blockers enabled on the site. Thanks for your time and support!

The first text message read, “Ready the Swarm!”

The second, immediately following, “Amon forces spotted on the Shakuras Plateaus!”

I looked at the obtuse messages for a moment, and then got to my feet. Crossing the house, I tracked the noise of Minecraft videos being watched on a handheld tablet, and knocked on my oldest son’s bedroom door. He was stretched across the floor in a t-shirt and his comfiest pajama pants, looked up from his Amazon Fire tablet and gave me a decidedly pre-teen, “Yeah?”

He made no effort to hide the fact that I was, 1) bothering him during his video, 2) now immediately a suspect for being No Fun by coming up with some BS parent-stuff to divert him from his chosen activity. Both my children, these days, seem on pretty constant high-alert against artificial quality-time activities. This past weekend, as temperatures soared above normal for January in Minnesota, getting them to take twenty minutes for a family walk can only be described as having been an ordeal.

I hand him my phone. “I think these are for you.”

He bounds up from his repose, snatches the phone from my hand and is already sailing in great bounding steps down the stairs before he perfunctorily asks if he can use the computer to play Starcraft with his friend. I don’t think he ever even hears my acquiescence. I shout “thirty minutes!” arbitrarily after him, and wonder for a moment why. He probably knows as well as I do that I’ll get distracted and let an hour or more go by before I remember that he’s dispatching zealots and colossuses (colossi?) on an alien world.

My younger son runs past, holding an odd lump of slapped-together Lego pieces that don’t appear to be organized into any recognizable shape. He’s making spaceship noises as he dashes through the hall and into the living room, infinitely content and enraptured by his own imagination.

I realize that I’m beginning to live in a very different world than the one to which I had grown accustomed to when I had very young kids.

One thing I can say for sure about last year's predictions, I gotta learn to trust my gut more. Despite the Steam Box announcements at CES mere days after my prediction, Valve's initiative failed to get off the ground in 2014 as I'd originally guessed. My real whiff was thinking the Oculus Rift would launch in 2014. Like so many failed predictions, this one really comes down to wishful thinking.

This year though? This is the year the Rift launches. I can feel it in my bones. Read on for the GWJ staff's predictions and then feel free to enter your own in the comments! We'll lock the thread in a few weeks to prevent any sneaky post editing later on. If you want to hear some more predictions check out the latest Conference Call podcast! Oh, and if you want to crow (or groan) about your 2014 predictions here's the thread to do it in.

This week Shawn, Elysium, Cory and Julian listen back to their 2014 predictions and boldly go forth and predict 2015!