Maximum Verbosity

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Old Man, Look at my Life

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
Had you asked me in my mid-twenties whether I thought gaming would still be an integral part of my life when I turned the corner around forty, I have to admit that I would have said no.

Burnt Ships

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
The one thing I can say with some confidence about the videogame industry as a whole is that it rarely, if ever, runs in reverse. While trends and fads may resurface from time to time, usually in the context of nostalgia, the industry at large never says things like, “You know what? 3.5-inch floppy discs really were the best medium.

Six Good Hours

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
In the interest of saving you any suspense, here’s where I land on the issue. If a full-price game provides 6 good hours of a dense, fun single player campaign, then I can be satisfied with that. In fact, in many cases I would prefer that to 15 hours where any substantial part of that time is spent slogging through extraneous “content” just for the sake of dragging out the time commitment.

The Personal Demon

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
Doom was my first ultra-violent video game, as it was for many of my generation, but Doom wasn’t really about the violence. It was a horror story portrayed through an action lens, and looking back from our era of hyper-realistic military shooters, it was almost shockingly tame to have caused the stir it once did.

Decade

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
It was early winter 2002 when Shawn Andrich, a guy I sort of knew pretty well through a website we had both worked on together, came to me with a remarkably bad idea. “We should make our own gaming website,” said he.

Uranus is ..

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
My youngest son is interested in the planets, and so we have a series of short books written for pre-schoolers that teaches him about each planet. Every night before bed we read some of these books, usually beginning with his favorite planet, Saturn, and then cycling the others in and out of the rotation. These books are filled with short facts that should not be comical in the least.

A Multiplayer Illusion

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
A long stretch of desert highway extends before me as my engine growls angry. My thumb pulses on the accelerator button, trying to hold my RPMs just short of redline, and my trigger fingers are primed above the buttons that will function as a gear shift.

The Big Finish

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

A Quick Note on My New Phone

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
The first time I played a game on my phone was 2005, and it was before anyone would have called that tiny, dense machine “smart”. I was on a shuttle bus in Los Angeles, riding, groggy and bleary-eyed, to day two of E3 ‘05.

Questions of the Perverts (NSFW language)

Posted by Sean "Elysium" Sands –
It’s been a while since we explored the deeply disturbed minds of the many, many people who arrive, however briefly, at GWJ through questionable internet searches. The reality is that it’s become a harder and harder proposition to scan the search terms that lead, through sorceries I couldn’t possibly fathom, to our quiet corner of the net.

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