Beholding The Ultimate Force

Terrible Photo of ASUS TUF FA507RC A15 Gaming Laptop.

It's very rare that I get an opportunity to talk about something good in my life and, after some of recent events in the last few months, I think it would be right to highlight this optimistic anomaly. As I've mentioned in July 2023 Update, I've recently witnessed another coma of my old Lenovo G505s laptop. It is during these few days when one of my good friends decided to express his generosity by offering to buy a new laptop. He actually suggested that before, but I just laughed it off to myself and forgot about this.

When this suggestion was brought up as I was talking to my friends how problematic my situation at the time was, I agreed to give it a try. We both looked into Microless as an option (he called them and I read what people in my country had to say about it). Everything seemed good, so I send over all the information he needed to make an order, and we just had to wait. My only hope was that it would have more than 4GB of RAM and Wi-Fi support: I didn't feel like I had any right to actually ask for anything rather than a bare minimum. There was also some worry about the duty-free importation and stuff.

Anyway, it seemed like there was a reliable way ahead of us. And so, after twelve days of waiting for mysterious package, a courier delivered to me (I thought I would have to pick it up myself) what turned out to be ASUS TUF FA507RC A15 Gaming Laptop. He did mention that laptop would have 16GB of RAM and 512 GB SSD, which was already more than I could've dreamed of. Imagine how stunned I was once I realized what kind of device I ended up getting... That is pretty much what this "article" is all about.

The Sandbox Paradox

Minecraft: Bedrock Edition Screenshot.

During my recent years of "gaming freedom", I was able to experience and revisit many games with various genres. Having variety in certain aspects of your routine is nice as that not only helps you keep things interesting, but also allows you to discover something new or look at things differently. There's probably a lot I can say about prioritization of completionism, achievements themselves (already talked about that) and how changing your approach to games can really reinvigorate your desire to actively launch them again.

However, one topic in particular stood firm in my mind and it's about my experience with sandbox genre. In particular, with Minecraft and Terraria since I didn't really have much experience with other representatives of the genre... Nah, Stardew Valley is a farming simulator. I guess I should just get to it by stating that I'm terrible at sandbox titles and I find this fact to be pretty amusing for a number of reasons.

Just an Idea: Hexen's New Backstory

Hexen: Beyond Heretic's Cooperative Ending.

I've been in a Hexen mood recently. Not only I finally revisited my old saves for both games from 2021 and completed my playthrough, there's also been some small talks about the franchise thanks to Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. All because Phil Spencer mentioned Hexen by name once and then showed up on Xbox Games Showcase with game's key art on a t-shirt. Even though the latter "was just about nostalgia". It's not much, but sometimes you need even less to spark a discussion. So yeah, I'm taking a bait.

Alright, so how Heretic & Hexen franchise could be brought back? I'm not going to try and guess what genre it could take on. For all I know, they could focus on cooperative for it and try to mix both Hexen 2 & Heretic 2 for something closer to that illusive Hecatomb idea. What I'll focus on is the narrative of the world as I think there's enough good pieces to put together a proper starting point for a new story with some minor tweaks here and there.

Spidey's Animated "Firstborns"

Screenshots from Spider-Man: The Animated Series & Spectacular Spider-Man.
Taken from Season 1 Episode 4/8 (TAS) & Season 2 Episode 2 (Spec) respectively.

A long time has passed since I rewatched the entirety of Spider-Man: The Animated Series. Not only it feels like that, but it literally happened over the course of multiple months in the first half of 2023. Initially I wanted to write down something related to that, but then I decided not to as I figured that all those silly Just an Idea "articles" would be more than enough. However, there's still something I can rumble about in regard to this amazing animated series and this time I'm taking this opportunity.

There's actually a lot of things that The Animated Series did before that would later on be used in other Spider-Man projects and become more popular/prominent. It was a pioneer in many ways. Certain aspects of Peter Parker's mythos that many take for granted nowadays have originated from this cartoon and I think it's important to look back and celebrate that. Some of them are pretty obvious while others might actually catch you off guard.

July 2023 Update

"Monthly Update" Thumbnail.

Two words: déjà vu. Despite being paranoid and suspecting that something bad would happen this Summer, part of me hoped things won't get as bad as this May. However, I couldn't imagine just how bad these past couple of weeks would've been. It also feels like it's been forever since the release of last Update and I think I was somewhat more confident there. Either way, I was getting more worried and there's no way I could've been prepared for this dark and miserable chapter of my life.

Well, I will try to talk about it here. I'm all over the place right now and wasn't even sure if I could or should write this "article", but at the end I feel like it's best to go all the way and be open "until the end". I was already talking the worst parts of this month with my friends and didn't really shy away from them before in this blog, so I don't see any reason to change that now. Although I'll get back to that later.

Wasting Time on Gaming Chronology

Abstract Gaming Chronology.

Time moves forward and so does the game industry. New titles get developed just as older ones slowly lose their audience as players move to something different. The history of video games is often viewed through "console generations" since it's just easy to look at it this way... Well, at least I think it is. Kind of. Despite this, you can see how a lot of people on Internet reflect on how old they're because certain game or platform reached a certain anniversary and, in this outburst of nostalgia, they talk about how it's now "retro".

While this is far from being a confusing mess in style of re-releases & remasters, such narratives occasionally bothered me and I found myself thinking about it. It is really a good idea to just keep throwing every game and console into "old" category simply because of their age? What's the right or clear definition of a "retro game"? Where do you put the line between old and new? You know, these abstruse questions that (if anything) just waste your time. I just wanted to write something similar to "The Achievement Parable".

Recent Tides of Warcraft 3

Warcraft 3: Reforged's "New Grunt" Model by Wanmin Gee. Taken from ArtStation.

It's been a while since I really thought about Warcraft franchise, no matter what game or other form of media we're talking about. Even though I stopped actively tracking out Blizzard's news for a long time now, some echoes regarding various games still reached me since many of my friends still keep an eye out and joke about some of that stuff. This includes Warcraft 3 as I have a few friends who still try to play the game on regular basis. I'm also still watching Grubby's videos, so that also helped.

Despite taking notes of some interesting development around tormented real-time strategy, I was very hesitant to actually brought it up in this blog since I wanted to have a prolonged break from these topics. However, completely cutting myself off from it seems counter-intuitive. Especially since all of my most successful Ilko's Hall "articles" are all directly related to Warcraft 3. I might not care about getting a massive amount of readers, but it's logical and not completely depressing to make sure your most popular post this year would have more than ten views.

So it's time for catch up. Look at these aforementioned details in order to see what it could mean for Warcraft 3. This time it should feel more definitive in comparison to "The 'rocPortraits' Mystery" that I initially conceived as a part of a series that would've followed further developments with those "Classic+" Portraits (I'll get to them later on though).