Note: I will have to refrain from using any names or anything, as I'm not sure if I'm allowed to do so.

I will mention one name, which is his nick-name: Oz, because he comes up a lot in this story. Me and him are good friends, we were the first two employees and so we've been friends the longest of anyone in the office (except for Oz and my boss, who is an awesome dude and a great coder). We are bro's.

I'll try to skip over the coding shit I do, because that's not really interesting, nor the point of this article.

---

Before I leave my house for work, I open up my Outlook to see if there's anything going on at work already. I have an email stating that one of our sites is throwing an error on the "Support Request" page. It's just a simple page that you fill out a form and will send and email and while I didn't build that page, I was certain it'd be an easy fix. Perhaps the SMTP address is wrong. Well I think "Ok got something to do this morning," and head out. ...

Okay now I may not be a Pokemon, or someone with any SIGNIFICANT TALENT, but hey it's my job to write stuff and I'm out of practice.




Okay so we have a member of our community, he goes by the name of Steel, or more recently Pidgeotto26805465-whatever (fucking evolve, srsly).
He waltzes on in here like he owns the place, fucking beats cancer, becomes staff and writes articles that set the bar above the rest, I mean fuck, you call him 'Steel', I call him 'Made of'. Anyway fuck him, this article isn't about him, it's just my way of saying "Good job man! You are a Winner on the Internets!", (thanks for making us look bad, chump).

This is an article similar (but not rivaled to), his College Prep Courses.



Now unlike Mr. Oh look at me, writing huge walls of stuff for you to do for College, I'm going to take the short and sweet (lazy), approach.
While your friends(?) are out there trying to earn an education (since 13 years through compulsory education wasn't enough), you're free to roam the internet. ...

First off: have you checked out this yet? A hundred bucks! FREE HUNDRED DOLLARS!!! Click that topic, stupid. Post in it or the thread it links also. Also, Sarevok posted some shit about Dwarf Fortress in the Games blog! Play with dwarves, love dwarves.

Okay let's get this out of the way: this article, and none of the ones that follow are actually a synopsis of everything you learn in college. These are what you should know PRE-college, or on graduating high school. Unfortunately, four years tends to blur together with all the shit I learned out of class so I might stretch out of the bounds of high school occasionally. Just keep in mind I'm not talking about shit you read in middle school or learned in high school because it's what you also go over in college.

It's English 101! Unlike your college English 101 I'm not going to teach you how to write an essay about your favorite color, but instead about literature. Let's get started!

Books You Absolutely Should Read

I'm going to go through a pretty good list of things but honestly some of them can actually be faked if you just read the wikipedia article or cliff's notes. The following cannot. People will call you on your shit and you'll fuck up because you didn't read books that are almost universally read in high school. ...

A few people on IRC have suggested we play a succession/bloodline game of Dwarf Fortress on GW. Over the months I've dismissed the idea as a bit shit and unfun, but having read the tales of all the games people have played it actually seems incredibly good. By posting this on the blog not only am I hoping to get much more attention to the idea, but I also get 100% credit for it and it help me keep my ego at suitably high levels.

BUT WHAT IS DWARF FORTRESS?



Dwarf Fortress is a Roguelike city building game, where your main 'aim' in the game is to build a fortress for your dwarves to survive the coming winters, goblin sieges, undead whales and crazy elves. The game is almost completely sandbox, and straight from the getgo you're never funnelled into any specific play style. It's basically what Spore could've been, if Spore wasn't so pretentious and shit. And it only had text for graphics. The whole game is currently being made by just one guy and his brother, has been in development for over 6 years, and is unlikely to ever be finished. Updates are constantly being released for the game, and it only ever gets better. ...

HEY GUYS!

 

Resident contest head Nackster has put up a very generous offer that you all should take advantage of. It's a free-for-all, Halloween themed game creation competition using the maker of your choice. You have roughly 20 days from now to make your games and the prizes are no joke, so lets see some entries!

GET ON IT!

 

Details are as follows:

I remember being eighteen. This is not too difficult of a feat, not because I'm only four years older, but because all any male does at eighteen is 1. touch his dick or 2. figure out how to get someone else to touch his dick. Women on the other hand all developed earlier so while we (no women on gaming world) tried to see if we could fit our dicks between the mattress and boxspring, they were finishing up their agendas all the way through grad school. This is reflected in an analysis of girl's diaries versus boy's journals. Where as a diary tends to be filled with monitoring of complex social networks and mention plans far in the future, the average journal seems to be filled with a single number a day, a slowly increasing inch measurement that eventually plateaus and the handwriting becomes increasingly distressed.

(Fun fact: despite the average penis size being 5.4 inches almost requiring that about half the population have one smaller than that, on the internet every single person, without exception, has a seven inch penis. This is because it's larger than 5.4 but sounds plausible in a world where porn stars have 13 inch dicks). ...

(first off: I'm probably not gonna finish the college degrees series mostly because it wasn't fun to write, but to be fair: poli sci degrees are worthless, fetch me my latte you scrub no one gives a shit about your classes about the Hawthorne Effect and Thomas Paine when you can't even pull a goddam lever).

September's approaching, as are college applications. Seniors in high school are finishing up those SATs (hey someone tell me why they made the score different, what section did they add, I thought the analogies were tough but fair), trying to find recommendation letters, and tearfully grabbing their girlfriend's boobs while promising to stay together even if we're going to two different colleges...because That's Love. And so it is with the GW member, except he's touching his own hairless ass and pretending it's a boob. There is balm in Gilead.

It's scary and a lot of stress, but what is the single most important order of business to get out of the way? Is it getting last second extracurriculars? Visiting campuses to see which fits you? Taking the AP exams to save money later? No, the most important thing you must do before you begin your collegiate career: create a Facebook. ...

Kazakhstan is a huge country in Central Asia and believe it or not, Europe. A chunk of its territory about the size of up-state New York is actually west of the Urals. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is the world's largest landlocked country, with a territory of over one million square miles -- greater than that of Western Europe. It is bordered from west to east by Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China. Kazakhstan lays claim to part or all of some of the largest landlocked bodies of water in the world, the most important being the oil-rich Caspian, followed by Lake Balkhash, and the disappearing Aral Sea. Kazakhstan only has two major rivers, the Syr Darya and the Irtysh, and most of the country is defined by its empty steppes. Kazakhstan's geography, however, is very diverse. Its home to some of the worlds highest mountains and incredible gorges. Despite Kazakhstan's rugged natural beauty, hardly anyone from the western world ever was able to go to Kazakhstan before the 1990s. Ever since Ivan the Terrible conquered Kazan in the 16th century the Russians have been encroaching on Kazakh lands, and completed their takeover of the entire country in the 19th century. At that point, they sealed the country and its staggering abundance natural resources off from the rest of the world, and what is now the 9th largest country in the world quite literally disappeared from the map. The efforts of the Kazakh people and their government since 1991 have done everything they can to put Kazakhstan back on the global map and to create an oasis of stability and prosperity in a war-ravaged and ecologically fragile region. ...

Indie In-Depth is a new GW article series focusing on indie game releases from all around the world. Covering the best (which will get a 'GW recommended' stamp) to the worst, the biggest to the smallest and the ones you send in, we’re hoping we can provide a bit of in-depth analysis of indie games off the site and beyond. If you have a game you’d like us to review (whether your own or one you’d like to see covered) then drop either me or Aurabolt a line. We’re aiming to make this a monthly series which will go up near the end of each month – if you’d like to suggest changes, additions or contribute then shoot over a PM to one of the writers. Enjoy!




This month we’re going to go over a couple of the bigger releases of the past few months - Tales of Games’s chaos dunk Barkley, Shut Up and Jam and Kentona’s retro-throwback Hero’s Realm. Mini-reviews this month are the gorgeous French RPG Aëdemphia and LOLNinja’s puzzler Make It Work!



Hero's Realm
Developer: Kentona
Download: RMN

RPGs have gone through many phases in the relatively short life-span of the gaming industry, much like the whole genre. While the genres of first-person adventure and real-time strategy came into the spotlight in the early 1990s, RPGs developed from world-driven story-lines with a nameless hero thrown into a dangerous environment with a free-form objective in an expansive world, to character-driven story-lines with unique settings and flavor than their predecessors. This new take on the genre focused much more on specifically defined characters and their well-defined abilities in a world that was governed by their actions and beliefs, their personality and mannerisms (if any) firmly established, unintentionally sacrificing gameplay at points to tell a story. It was clear that both forms flourished in their respective domains; low-character depth RPGs moved from the consoles to the personal computer with games such as the Elder Scrolls series, System Shock, and the Ultimas while the character-heavy games-such as the Final Fantasies, Star Oceans, and Tales series dominated the console world. ...

Welcome everyone to today's show, joining me today I have Metanet, before now the only things most people knew about them was only what they chose to reveal to us:

Metanet Software is comprised of 2 individuals: Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard.

They met in 1998 and discovered that when they combine their efforts,
they are able to transform into a rather large robot made up of small mechanical cats.

I do indeed have Raigan and Mare here to shed some more light on their famous indie game, N and now most recently, their XBOX Live, PSP and Nintendo DS release, N+.
For those who have just tuned in, Metanet (or Metanet Software), is a team of two people who have achieved what indie developers today dream of doing, their ideas and hard work have resulted in their own game being released on the latest generation consoles, what better way to motivate some of you than to show you a shining example of how plausible it is to make dreams a reality.

But without further ado, please welcome Raigan and Mare. ...