So I’ve been a bit busy lately, as you may have gathered. In the last few months I’ve had a lot of personal stuff going on, including the passing of a close family member, but it hasn’t all been sad. I’ve also been writing for PopOptiq.com, a pretty rad site with some great writers that cover movies, TV, comics, games, and whatever else they can find to write about. Given that I haven’t had the time to write stuff for the blog that I’ve been thinking about (the draft posts are getting a touch too numerous), I figured I should post a round-up of my first few pieces over at PopOptiq.

My first piece was a review for the amazingly good Devil Daggers, an indie game that begs to be played by anyone that ever loved FPS games in the late nineties and early 2000s.

My next piece was something I’d been wanting to write for a long time. I’m almost inclined to call it “real journalism”, or at least resembling something closer to it than I normally get. It’s about living without broadband as a gamer, and all the complications that come with that.

I immediately started getting to work on the Grim Dawn review I’d been itching to write. I thought it would be a reasonably easy affair, but let me tell you, there’s more to that game than I imagined (you can watch my Grim Dawn Let’s Play on YouTube, though something got massively screwed up in the re-encoding YouTube does upon upload, leaving some audio sync problems I didn’t initially catch that I now just plain don’t have time to fix). It took me a good while to get through it, but it was totally worth the journey.

And lastly, I just finished up playing Hyper Light Drifter, a fantastic little game by rookie developer Heart Machine. A truly wondrous little piece of art that delivers a fantastic game to the core gamers that will appreciate it. Not for everyone, but something I wish everyone would experience. The review has a lot more details.

And that about does it for now, but there’s certainly more to come. I’ll be hard at work on a Dark Souls III review just as soon as I’m physically able (sadly, no prerelease copies for me), and hopefully also a big Dark Souls lore post at some point in the fairly near future. Yes, I’m really working on a legit lore article, and I’ve got a working database in Scrivener with more than 90 crosslinked entries already. Yikes.

Hope you all have been well. Can’t wait for the rest of this month!