thebrainrotcollective

EA announced that they will be bringing Wing Commander to the xbox live arcade! This is pretty exciting news. Note that this is Wing Commander Arena, a mulitplayer only style game set in the Wing Commander universe. This has great potential to either rule, or suck hard, and it will all come down to performance. I think if we can find a great match-making system in place and lag/bug-free 16 man matches, we’ll have a game worthy of the name.

Although, some initial screenshots have me a little worried.

Another RPG for the DS… I’m officially never going to be able to clear out my backlog. Gametrailers has some gamplay footage up for the sequel of Final Fantasy XII. FF Tactics look/feel + RTS combat + touch screen control = me feeling real good about this one.

Fuck yeah. I’ve been looking for my Ikaruga dreamcast disc for awhile now, hell I’ve been considering getting the entire arcade game. Maybe I’ll still do that, but in the meantime this classic SHMUP is coming to the Xbox Live Arcade. Read the article over at CVG.

Alright, our album (Cathedral of Demons) is back from mastering and it sounds really fucking awesome. We have some final tweaks then its off to Europe to get the 7 inches pressed. I think one of the guys put up a song from the album on our myspace page (www.myspace.com/neardark666). So head over there and give it a listen. Hopefully we’ll have the records ready to go by the end of March, then expect a dope CD release party shortly after that. Details to come…

So I checked out this thread on the SA forums and was instantly hooked on playing roguelikes again. Nethack was the first one I played many years ago, and Dungeon Crawl is what sucked me in this time. I found the unforgiving gameplay to be really fun and challenging. In fact, as most RL players will admit, winning the game isn’t really the fun part – it’s seeing how far you can get before something absurd kills you. Someone on the SA forums described Nethack as this: “Nethack is a computer game in which you die. There are many ways for this to happen and quite a few of them will make you want to throw your computer out the nearest window.”

Read the rest! Click below
Continue reading ‘Roguelikes!’

I picked up a pre-order of Vanguard last week so I could try out the “play 3 days early” feature that the pre-order provided. It’s not that I was particularly excited for this game – I can vividly remember being excited for Star Wars Galaxies, AC2, EQ2, and WoW – it was more that I was hoping this game would just be amazing, for no good reason. No screenshots I saw really amazed me and the main website really didn’t have much info about the game. Reading forums on the matter (especially official forums prior to a games launch) really just end up being flamewars and fanboys going crazy. So I just tried to keep an open mind and hoped something would stand out. Unfortunately, the only things that really stood out were its lack of polish and graphical errors. Continue reading ‘Vanguard: Saga of Heroes – First Impressions’

Well we’re all done recording and mixing now (some final tweaks to some samples, and it will be finalized). We will be sending it all out to be mastered next week, and we hope to have the records pressed very soon. This is very exciting for me, can’t wait to see how sweet the vinyl turns out – and I know it will be good. Mike (wartornrecords) only puts out sweet fucking vinyl.

Once we have some previews for artwork I’ll post it up. In the meantime check this audio sample out of our work.

My friend Mike sent this to me. This is fucking great. I’m a huge fan of Lovecraft and own many things related to The Great Old One. I’ll have to post up some pictures of my Cthulhu toy, its a bit more grimmm than this. However, I will definitely be getting one of these too!

My band (NEAR DARK) has been in the studio, for the past month now, recording our album. I’m not sure if the title is top-secret or official yet, so I won’t say it – but it rules. We are releasing a 7″ first on wartorn records, with an eventually CD release after that. The art and packaging for the 7″ is going to be fucking sick, so get ready for it!

We will be mixing the album in a few weeks, then I guess its off to be mastered. We should have all the art done by then, so I’ll post some images up once I have them.

I wanted to launch the brainrotblog over the Wii Launch weekend. That didn’t happen, but I will still share my experience.

Day 1: Well like any good (read: obessive) gamer, I decided I wanted to have the Wii at launch. All the reports said that there would be over 1 million units dropping on release day, much more than the PS3 and other consoles at launch. But I still knew people were being overly confident about getting one that day, so I started working on my plans to acquire the device on Nov. 19th.

The initial plan was to campout at a local Best Buy or Target. This seemed like a decent idea at first, but then the weather started getting real shitty on the days approaching the weekend. So then I started looking to see if any stores were doing a Midnight release. The only one in the area was a Walmart, and I refuse to shop at Walmart. But I still considered it… I considered standing in line there from 7pm til Midnight and decided thats a pretty shitty way to spend my Saturday night. It was then that I recalled reading that the Nintendo World Store in NYC claimed “everyone who comes to buy a Wii on sunday will get one”. I also saw that the Toys’R’Us in Times Square was doing a Midnight launch party with all types of madness, and a shitload of Wii’s. I got in touch with my boy Hiddi, who I knew I could count on for latenight videogame madness. He said he was down, so we got some friends together and headed up to NYC. Continue reading ‘My Wii Adventures’