A Blink Return of Splinter Cell

First look at Splinter Cell animated series. Taken from Twitter.

Splinter Cell is one of those franchises I loved since I was a kid. Before falling into a rabbit hole with World of Warcraft, I remember playing the Game Boy Advance version of the original game on my Game Boy Advance SP. And I was very excited to watch my dad play through Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Double Agent on his Xbox 360... which is kind of funny since nowadays I don't want to touch both versions of that game. As well as two mainline titles that followed before the series stepped into shadows.

And it is great at staying hidden. So much so Ubisoft can't spot it for long enough to make a new proper game. Instead, we get various Sam Fisher cameos in different games, VR title and animated series. Of course, not having Splinter Cell being twisted over by their current formula is a gift to be cherished, and you can even say it already endured that with the likes of Conviction, but it doesn't change the fact that many players around the world are hungry for some proper stealth action with Third Echelon, Lambert and famous night-vision goggles.

A Few Thoughts about E3 2021

Taken from E3.

Despite the fact that it did lost quite a bit of relevance in recent years, many people still anticipated E3 2021. Including myself, in a way. Obviously, I didn't have any specific expectations as 94% of the titles that get announced here are "out of my jurisdiction", but it's still often interesting to look at what comes out when it, well... interesting.

For example, only Metal Slug Tactics caught my attention during the opening of this years' Summer Game Fest. I really love the artstyle of this series ever since I've seen my dad playing one of the games from it (I don't remember which one it was) on original Xbox. There's still so many games to play, really. Here's yet another series in my "Should play it one day" list.

Low Spec Breakdown

My scuffed setup.

This post was a long time coming, but not in a way it'll most likely end up being. It's going be kind of "off-topic"... again. I was always kind of a retro gamer, especially nowadays. Multiple factors played their roles here: those games are cool, fun, and they can run on pretty much everything. Latter part is something I wanted to talk about for some time as I think it could be interesting to view how someone like me tried to play some games.

With a "screenshot inside" from my Slayer Arc post, its pretty obvious that I'm sitting on weak and old machine. So, I would start from here and share some insight on other similar examples and stuff like that. I think it's still important for second half of this post. After that, I'll walk even more about some other personal things as I think I just need to do that, despite me thinking that's a bad idea and wouldn't make me feel any better. Even though, some might say it should.

Expanding My Self-Improvement Journey

I could use some creativity for making better thumbnails, I know.

As a part of my incredible luck, I got sick last week and that really put me off track. It was nothing serious (just a cold), I'm feeling better now, and I don't want this post to turn into a rant about my scuffed and cyclic nature of life. Instead, I would like to take this as an opportunity to address my next steps in my quest of productivity and self-improvement in order to give me this illusionary nudge for myself to actually take action in it and not fall into miserable state of uncertainty.

I want to open my mind, sort of speak. Try out different hobbies in order to learn something, see if it would actually "click" with me and force myself to become a more active person. As with Ilko's Hall, the path of least resistance and gravitate towards things related to video games: something more familiar and appealing. There's been a few options under my radar and I would like to talk about each for a bit.

Examination of "00000002001"

Scientists Concept Art by 3D Realms/Slipgate Ironworks. Taken from Twitter.

I started to notice how my interest in all kinds of games started to slowly increase lately. Current state of Warcraft and Blizzard themselves gets more tiresome day by day, so sticking around them is getting harder. On the other hand, my interest in upcoming 3D Realms releases has really bumped up recently among other things.

At the time of Realms Deep 2020, GRAVEN and teaser of Ion Fury: Aftershock were the things that got all my attention. Now I looked deeper into Core Decay, got to know about Kingpin: Life of Crime more than before (basically nothing) and Rise of the Triad with SiN suddenly grew on me even more. It went from "Oh, neat" to "Would be nice to play them".

Which leave only one unannounced FPS from 3D Realms that's currently titled "00000002001" on their Discord server. Even though there's next to no actual information about it and I might very well end up being not be really interested in this game after its proper announcement, I thought it would be nice to dig up what's known since I like that sort of thing.

The Oddity of Apogee Dilemma

"The Apogee Model."

Rebranding of Apogee Entertainment caught my attention and that's something I wanted to cover as it gave me an excuse to focus on one of the questions that were floating in my mind. After reading into it and looking around, the weirdness of this subject was clear more than ever. In short, that got me really curious as it really is just... odd to me.

But hey, at the very least I get to write a bit about some old games and just have fun with it in more relaxed form this time around. That's enough to make me happy for a moment.

Just an Idea: Trial of Runes

"Now, you have all four Runes..."

A lot of people fairly often ask themselves "What/How I would do that?" whenever in comes to games, mods, their story... Or anything else, really: from meal you just ate to how you put things on the table. Recently it has been like that for me more than ever in the context of video games. So I decided to begin this kind of series where I focus on one of those ideas. Attempting to somewhat finalize and contain them in order to get them out of my head with a pleasant sense of satisfaction.

Nowadays I dedicated a lot of my time to original Quake: dealing with ezQuake for the first time out of curiosity, returning to Arcane Dimensions with various degrees of success and thinking about where the series can go with a new instalment. Playing Hexen 2 for the first time is also contributing to it since I've chosen Paladin due to my need of more melee combat in a Quake engine game. Not to mention poking around Quake Champions with its lore and recent updates that might suggest that something is coming for the series' 25th Anniversary.

With all that, I had some ideas for an original Quake mod that would've served as a proof of concept for things that could've been done in a theoretical sequel of the first game (and its mission packs) in the series.

Remember: It's just an idea.