The Professional Gamer - June 20, 2014

Hi everyone! I hope you had a great time last weekend. I know I did. If you've been paying attention to the site, you know that I was at Denver Comic Con. Please have a look at some of my earlier posts discussing the convention for that coverage. In my weekly article here, I am going to concentrate on some of the other geeky things that I've done this week. Read on to learn more about my week.

Reading: Yay! Lord of the Rings! So far, I've followed the Hobbits into the Old Forest to meet Tom Bombadil. As strange as it may sound, Bombadil feels more a part of the world this time around than he has on previous readings. However, the voices when I read the characters are a strange mixture of the Peter Jackson movies, the Bakshi movie, the BBC radio drama, and the Robert Inglis audiobook. In spite of this confusion, returning to an old familiar book feels really good right now.

Playing: Since I was at a convention, I spent most of the weekend playing with the Nintendo 3DS StreetPass games. I finally bought the remainder of the StreetPass games. Here are my thoughts. MiiForce is frustrating if you don't meet a lot of people regularly. Flower Town is a bit boring, but that just maybe due to my low turnover of passes. Warrior's Way is a fun take on a massive battle of rock, paper, scissors. Finally, Monster Manor seems cool, but meeting a lot of people wearing the same color removes almost any chance of encounters with ghosts. Still, they provide some fun fodder for convention time.

Watching: In the week before DCC, I started watching Sword Art Online I haven't finished the series yet, but my impression so far is that it is similar to .hack//SIGN, except that the plot is a bit more straight forward and the storytelling is much better. At least for the first arc. I feel that things have taken a bit of a turn for the worse, especially since some fairly bad tropes (damsel in distress, rape threats, and implied incest) seem to be cropping up. Also, when the stakes in the first half of the series are the lives of several thousand people, it is difficult to keep the tension up for a second plot arc. I'm going to go ahead and finish the series due to the sunk resources fallacy, but I worry that I'm going to end up regretting it.

That's all for the Professional Gamer this week. Watch this space for more coverage of Denver Comic Con. I have a few more panels to write up and we have audio from two panels that will be posted to the site. Have a great time and Game On!