Blue Screen of Awesome
Wasting your precious time of life since 2011.

In the previous installment of Jarenth Tries His Hand At Warlocking, I started turning St. Mouseberg, Greatest City In Pretty Much All Of Ardania, into a city worthy of that (admittedly self-appointed) title. I explored a little, built and recruited, killed some giant spiders, and I’d just found some Imps ripe for the slaughter. Crucially, I hadn’t found any opponents of significance yet, which surely implied that everything was going well and would remain well forever.

Of course, peace, in a game such as this, can never last long. I’m surprised it made it into the second episode, to be honest.

If that sounds a little gloomy, let me assure you that I’m not dead yet at the end of this episode.

This week on the HUNT, we tackle the RTS that’s oft-quoted as ‘one of the most influential RTS games of all time’: Starcraft. Developed in 1998 by a yet un-Activision’d Blizzard Entertainment, Starcraft was met with almost universally positive reviews, with an 88% on Metacritic (noting the lack of negative critic reviews and dearth of negative user reviews) and a 92.85% on Gamerankings, as well as a long list of Game-Of-The-Year-type awards from sites like Gamespot, GameInformer and PC Gamer. Its expansion, Brood War, met a similar reception, with an ever higher Gamerankings rating of 95%. Starcraft spawned a merchandising empire, influenced Korean popular culture to an unprecedented degree, and has even been into outer space.

But does it still stack up? Read on after the break.

Alright, let’s get this party started! In our previous installment, I introduced the game, then proceeded to set up my character: Jarenth, the bitchin’-wizard-hat-wearing, sun-worshipping, researching boss of the Goblin race. That episode ended with us staring at my newly founded capital, the city of St. Mouseberg. It is my hope that from these humble beginnings, we will eventually end up with all of Ardania living under my iron, mouse-appointed fist.

Either that, or I’ll crash and burn spectacularly. Either thing should be amusing to read.

But seriously though, I’m shooting for the iron mouse-appointed first option.

This week, Jarenth, Jasper and PlayerIII play Risen 2. Note that, for this podcast, Jasper wasn’t actually physically present, instead contributing via the Internet. So if we cross-talk a lot more this time, that’s the reason.

After the break: How is Risen 2 like Risen 1? Not enough, that’s how.

Warlock: Master of the Arcane, the latest Turn-Based Strategy offering from Paradox Interactive, has been released on Steam a few days ago. I had a great time with the demo, to the point where the game had to wrest the controls away after two hours because I was *far* from done, and I subsequently immediately pre-ordered it. Because I had so much fun with it, and to mark the couldn’t-arrive-soon-enough release date, I’ve decided to chronicle my first full game in text-and-screenshot form. Hopefully, I won’t fail immediately and spectacularly — although that would be amusing all by itself — and hopefully, I’ll be able to convey why I enjoyed this game as much as I did.

After the break: the adventure begins! Sort of.

We’re in the process of getting the website up again. We got a backup of everything, did a hard reset and changed all the passwords so hopefully we’re good again! Sadly we made some adjustments to the original theme which might take a while to get fixed. Also Jarenth made a back up of all the pictures, if everything goes well they are back soon as well.

We were hit with some sort of malware, we’re not quite sure how it got on our website in the first place, but more sites were hit with this and hopefully we’ll know more soon. If you are using Google Chrome you should have gotten a warning. In other browsers we’re not sure, running a program like Hitman Pro might be a good idea though.

EDIT: The site has been restored to more-or-less 100% functionality. There are a few missing featured images; that’s largely unavoidable for now, but will be addressed later. If you find any missing images, featured or otherwise, or anything else that seems out of whack, we’d greatly appreciate a heads-up.

On a more positive front, an in-depth sweep of my PC (which had visited the malware’d site directly) has turned up no particular threats. Silver lining, basically.

I got interested in Capybara Games‘ enigmatic Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (which, from now on, will be referred to as ‘Sword & Sworcery’, because screw that noise) when news of it being cool started popping up all over the net. I didn’t actually read most of the news, mind: I had an immediate feeling of possible-future-review, which means keeping myself as un-influenced as I can manage. But the graphics looked neat and pixelly, I heard that the writing was good, amusing and self-referential, and the official website has a list of gleaming recommendations for the music of Jim Guthrie. With that much praise strewn about, I felt a me-sanctioned review of the whole shebang was in short order.

Plus, I got a coupon. For, like, 25% off. Wasn’t about to let that go to waste.

(Mechanical spoiler level: Medium. The controls are fairly obtuse, so it’s actually nice to know them, but there’s a few ‘interesting’ bits that might get spoiled.)

Why yes, I am a Dutchman who’s spent a not-insignificant amount of time in Scotland. Why do you ask?

In the second part of the first episode, JPH and me run around, shoot zombies, die a lot and talk smack about this game.

How does this differ from the first part, you ask? You’ll have to watch the video to find out!

As always, the video resides after the break.

The hunt hunts ever on. This week, we look at an oft-regarded classic: Rise of Nations. Developed by Big Huge Games in 2003 under the supervision of industry veteran Bryan Reynolds (who earned his chops on such games as Civilization II and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri), and published by Microsoft, Rise of Nations was released to highly positive reviews, gaining over-90% scores and perfect 10s on many websites, reaching an 89% aggregate score on both Metacritic and Gamerankings, and collecting four Gamespot best-game-in-some-category awards in the year it came out. The 2004 expansion pack, Thrones and Patriots, received similar markings.

After the break: Rise of Nations, then. What’s this game all about?

A little while ago, I played a little bit of zombie survival game Trapped Dead with my friend and all-around Internet strongman JPH. During our play session, we discovered that Trapped Dead is, in fact, hilarious. Mostly hilariously bad. Especially when played cooperatively.

Being who we are, we immediately resolved to mock this game the only way it deserves how: in terrible, stilted-dialogue video. Because what goes around comes around. Here’s the first part of our first play session, which should run about three videos total.

The video resides after the break. Sorry about that; it keeps the main page looking better.