Star Wars: The Old Republic is a rad game. You all know how much I was looking forward to it because of the fifty other articles I’ve written about it. It absolutely delivers in every way and is even better than I’d hoped. I’m not going to bore you with more talk about the game today, though. No, I’ve been taking screenshots since I started playing on December 13th (Early Access what whaaat) and I wanted to share them with you. My character is a Mirialan Jedi Knight named Zetharis.

There won’t be any plot spoilers or anything for the Jedi Knight class story, but there will be location spoilers (spoiler alert: You go to Tatooine like in every other Star Wars game!). These are all shrunk down, so click to see them full size. Enjoy!

There’s been three big games released recently, and I’m a lazy good-for-nothing so I haven’t written about them yet. Let me rectify that, as a Christmas gift to you, my handful of loyal readers.

I haven’t written much lately. Looking at this front page, I’ve hardly written anything of substance in the past month! Sorry about that. That’s just like me, saying I’m not going to stop writing and then doing exactly that. In my defense Christina and I have been very busy, she’s been sick and those Blogimations that no one watches are a LOT of work.

Rather than spend another day doing nothing and complaining that I don’t know what to write about, here’s a few quick thoughts on what I’ve been up to.

I’m writing about Star Wars: The Old Republic again. Considering that literally about 85% of my day is spent thinking about it, you’d better get used to me talking about it!

Anyway, what I’m writing about today is the decision I’ve made regarding what class and faction I’ll be playing. I had originally planned on playing on the Republic side as a Jedi Consular, because hey, it’s Star Wars, who DOESN’T want to be a heroic Jedi character? I had been talking to my friend Matt, trying to coordinate things since we planned on playing together, and he had mentioned that some of his coworkers would be playing as well. He later informed me that they’d be playing Imperial characters.

Well, I finally got bit by the Minecraft bug. My gaming schedule cleared out a bit (Torchlight got too hard and I stopped having fun and Bleach is more of a “once in a while” game) so it was time to get into it. Thanks to my awesome friend Matt who gifted me a copy I’m part of the global sensation!

Up until now Minecraft didn’t really register much on my radar. I didn’t have anything against it, really; I loved the visual style and seeing what people were building in it was always fun. I’m just not a very creative person (you should see the eyesores I made in Spore) so I felt that it wouldn’t be worth the price of admission for me. It wasn’t until Matt described it as a survival game that I really started thinking about it, and once he gifted me my copy it was all over.

There is only Minecraft.

Last night I was at GameStop buying a copy of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift for PlayStation 3 to play with the super rad WhiteDragonNall when I noticed something strange. This was a pretty large GameStop with high ceilings, so the had shelves above the game racks for bulkier items, like DJ Hero controllers, Dance Dance Revolution bundles and what have you. I noticed they had three copies of the Final Fantasy XIV Collector’s Edition for $25, so after coming home and discussing it with my wife like a rational adult (and fighting to quell the impatient fanboy within me) I went back and bought it today.

This post is about Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Despite my best efforts, I’m stoked for Old Republic. I deliberately didn’t pay much attention to it until this point, but the trailer shown at E3 (which I guess is the opening movie) blew me away. From there I read into what the game actually entailed, and I’m sold.

My original intent was to just ignore the game and let it go by. There were a lot of reasons for this, and at the forefront was my experience with Star Wars Galaxies.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a PK Bloggin’! style review of a game (that is to say, a review that isn’t really a review) but I wanted to talk about Alice: Madness Returns because I’ve been spending a lot of time with it and it’s a lot of fun.

Alice: Madness Returns (for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC… we got the PS3 version to try to flesh out our library a bit) is a sequel to American McGee’s Alice for the PC, which was released in 2000. For those of you who don’t know, American McGee is a guy who’s made a name for himself by taking classic stories and making them dark and gruesome. No joke, I once saw an “American McGee’s OZ” figure at an f.y.e. store that was two fat little munchkins who had Dorothy tied up, blindfolded and gagged.

Luckily, Alice: Madness Returns isn’t tasteless like the OZ figures. I never played the original (although it’s bundled as a free download with new copies of Madness Returns for consoles), but the story is able to stand on its own, and a quick reading of the original game’s Wikipedia entry is more than enough of a briefing to get you ready to jump into the sequel.

So Square-Enix announced a North American release date for their upcoming MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV.

Actually, they announced TWO North American release dates.

That’s right, the game will launch on September 30, unless you buy the Collector’s Edition of the game, in which case you get to start playing September 22 and laugh at all the peasants with their noses pressed against the window, wishing with all their tiny little hearts to be inside.

I’m going to tell you a little story about a game that’s just magical.

Chex Quest is a total conversion of Ultimate Doom created by Digital Café that was packed into boxes of Chex cereal in 1996. It’s a first-person shooter based on a breakfast cereal. There’s no joke there, it’s real. I’ve played it.

I remember having a pretty good time with it when I got in in 1996, and really I just made my mom buy the cereal because it had a video game in it. I mean, Doom was fun, so this had to be fun too, even without the hell demons and chainsaws.