The New Doom and an Uncomfortable Problem with PC's Gaming Elite

So I have a cool new computer. It's another laptop, it's built specially for gaming and it means I can actually play my video games instead of them lagging to crap. To be specific, it's a HP Pavilion Gaming laptop with an Intel i5 processor and an NVidia GeForce GTX 950M graphics card. In broad terms, this is a huge step up: my old laptop (and the one I'm writing this on, because it still has functionality and I'm not above keeping this old thing so my new laptop can be a dedicated gaming PC) had an i7 processor, but the graphics card was a much older GeForce GT 640M which meant I had trouble playing games like Bulletstorm or even Doom. The original Doom. That started lagging on my laptop, it got that bad. But that's why I upgraded.

Only now, I have a new problem.

The Choice Between Mind-Controlled Orcs and Riding Elephants is Surprisingly Difficult

Well I'm having no luck with motivating myself to write anything for uni, so I'm gonna write a couple of reviews instead. They're a little late - both games I'm talking about here came out late 2014, so why not ring in the new year with them? I wanna talk about two of my favourite games: Shadow of Mordor, and Far Cry 4.

A look at good games and "meh" games

I haven't been to see any movies recently, as you might have noticed, and that's partly why I've been branching out into book reviews and game reviews. These past coupla weeks I've been reading about game design and what makes a game good or addictive, so today I'm going to talk about a couple of games, one an example of what I consider good game design, and one I consider not-so-good game design.

Hacked Off

I have to start this review by saying I'm not all that far through Watch Dogs. What I've heard of the storyline (and it's very little) is promising, but for my part I haven't really done much of it. I've had it for a few days now, and every time I play I get stuck on it, sucked in, unable to quit or leave. Many a night has been spent staying up 'til three in the morning trying to finish another side mission or just muck about and hack as many random NPC's as possible. Because here's the thing about Watch Dogs: there's so much of it, and it's all so much fun.

Summon Creature of Habit: my experience with HabitRPG

The past few weeks I've been trying to make better use of my time than simply watching YouTube videos and neglecting to practise my languages. I've already told you how useful I find Duolingo as a tool, but the reason I've been using it daily is because it's one of the habits I've been training myself to pick up, thanks to an ingenious little tool which has been helping me pick up better habits.

It's called HabitRPG, and it works like a traditional 8-bit RPG: you get hit points and experience - you gain the latter by ticking things off your to-do list, and you lose the former by avoiding your daily tasks (for me, that's usually language practice and writing). Okay, so maybe not entirely like an 8-bit RPG. But the principle is the same; if you lose all your HP, I assume you die. I haven't been apathetic enough to try this yet.