So I made a blog...

Of all the many people on this planet, I'm the last one to make a personal blog. I haven't so much railed against blogs and MySpace, so much as simply ignored the constructs and hoped that while I wasn't looking they would go away. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case, in fact they seem to have gotten only more and more popular.

Not being one to pass up an opportunity, I've decided to finally join the game, if at even just tangentially. This blog will be mostly devoted to my two pet projects. My game, currently titled Birth, and GTFUG (Grow the Fuck Up Gaming).

Birth, which can be found at www.thetagamerz.com/BirthV0.10.2.4 , is most definitely some distance off. For now I have some basic functionality while sitting still, but actual ship movement is some distance off. Closer than you'd think, but further away than I'd like. Feel free to check out the current version, or, if you have some gift with web design and like to work for free, drop me a line about getting this bad boy something resembling a true web page.

GTFUG is a little more complicated. The basic idea is pretty simple, tell the game industry it's time to grow up. I'm not saying that games need to drop more f-bombs or make all their characters nude, I'm saying that we shouldn't be afraid of making those artistic decisions. It's actually somewhat annoying to be playing through a perfectly good story in a game and come upon the obvious moment for a sex scene and the characters peck each other on the cheek and the most the player gets out of the deal is a raunchy joke. It's breaks anything resembling dramatic tension and makes the player think, "oh yeah, just a game..."
Some people, myself included, tend to get rather attached to characters in books, movies and games, enjoying their triumphs as if they were our own. When the character is in a bad situation we expect them to say things like, "well this is fucked up", or "god damn it". In games we tend to get one side of the profanity spectrum, "fuck fuckity fuck fuck fucker", or the other, "I do say say this rather seems like a mildly annoying situation my good boy", each sounding more childish than the other. A simple, "well shit", might have expressed the same thoughts more tastefully and less condescendingly.
Don't even get me started on humor.

Anyways, I'll leave you a link to The Escapist: Zero Punctuation (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation) since viewing Yahtzee's reviews was a large part of what actually made me decide to start this blog. (Oh and if you have the time check out his games at Fully Ramblomatic (http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/) . 5 Days a Stranger and 7 Days a Skeptic are awesome games. Sadly I haven't had the chance to check out Trilby's Notes or 6 Days yet.