PixlBit

Thanks! Everything I've heard about the series sounds real interesting. I've never seen Rothfuss' blog before so I'll have to go give it a look.

I'm pretty happy about everything I found today. Your version of The Silmarillion sounds amazing, I bet the fold-out map is pretty neat. My version has a little map in it but it's squished onto a two page spread and a lot of the place-names are hard to make out because the writing is squished as well.

That's pretty cool. I've spent lots of time on the LOTR wiki and I've read about a lot of the stuff that The Silmarillion covers and I always wanted to get the actual book for myself and read through it. I love the stories and histories behind Morgoth, the Two Lamps, the creation of the different races, and all the other stuff I'm sure the book has in it. I'm really glad I have the real thing now and can read it.

 I'd love to visit Maine. I like seafood and lighthouses so I think there'd be tons to see and do, I bet Maine is my kind of place. I've never even seen the ocean with my own eyes before. The biggest body of water I've ever been around was Lake Michigan when I was younger and mom took me to the beach in Michigan City, Indiana. It was a long time ago but I remember seeing a lighthouse there on a pier of some kind and it was awesome. In Maine you guys have an actual ocean, and a ton more lighthouses I bet!

I never played Golden Sun but I do remember Jade living in a lighthouse in BG&E, that's really cool. I'd like to see as many lighthouses as I can so that I can build cool ones in games and have lots of references to pull from. Every time I see a picture of a lighthouse it seems very unique, like they all have their own identity.

I love lighthouses but since I live in a landlocked place with no huge lakes we don't see them. I have dreams sometimes where I simply am walking around meadows and forests and I come across any random lighthouse along a shore and I can walk up to it and explore all the insides and get to the top and everything. And there's sunlight pouring in through the little windows on the way up. I love games that have levels where I can explore a lighthouse, like Half Life 2, parts of Bioshock games, even Oblivion had a cool lighthouse to explore in the town of Anvil (that was my favorite area in the whole game).

This game isn't fun to play in any way at all, but once you get into it and you get to know the characters it's incredibly hard to walk away from. Once I boot the game up and I'm in Greenvale listening to the music and hearing the dialogue, I end up spending the whole rest of the evening playing the game unable to quit. It's a very time consuming game in all the worst ways, and ridiculous in how it hides super useful items like the fast-travel radio in an obtuse side quest, but it has so much charm and personality that I fall in love with it every time I play. It's a super ambitious design without any of the design experience to accomplish the ideas, but when you look at that type of game they're going for you can see all the ambition behind it. The characters and plot never cease to be interesting to me and often funny and silly, unquestionably weird. It's just the process of interacting with the plot and progressing it that sucks.

I know the horror sections are funny to a lot of people, the sound bite that plays when you kill a zombie is hilarious, but in general I find the horror sections to be scary! The sound design, visuals, and the way that zombies blur around as they walk towards you is creepy. I get stressed out by the atmosphere that they built in the otherworld sections. The combat and death sounds are the only parts that pull me out of it. Other than that I genuinely get freaked out being there.

I've been hearing that same thing from some Song of Ice & Fire fans, the reception to the 5th book A Dance With Dragons has been very mixed. I'm 300 pages into the 3rd book, and I have the 4th book ready to read when it's time. I've enjoyed the series a lot so I hope George RR Martin can keep me into it.

I'm planning to give the Kingkiller Chronicle series a shot because people here have said good things about it. I'll read The Name of the Wind first certainly. I also want to see what the Farseer trilogy is all about and read The Assassin's Apprentice. I still have a ton of Larry Niven books to read in the Ringworld seres ever since I finished the first book. Amazon keeps recommending the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson to me but I don't know what it's about, I'll have to do more research to see if I might want to get into those.

I've been watching a Let's Play of Crusader Kings 2, the PC strategy game, ever since I found out about the game here. I haven't played games on PC in a long time and I'm new to Paradox studio games and grand strategy games, but seeing how they work really makes me excited to play them. Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, and even Total War Rome 2 look like the kind of games I'd love if I started getting into PC gaming again.

I've also been looking at LPs of STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl and STALKER Call of Pripyat on PC ever since I saw a video of one of the games on Giant Bomb. They look like my type of games, survival FPS horror.

Back when I had my Xbox 1 I had this tiny wireless controller that was modeled after one of the S controllers, not one of the huge Dukes. It was awesome because very few controllers were wireless back then and it was a pretty good one as far as wireless controllers went, and it was super comfy, you might have liked that one. It might have been a Madcatz, I don't recall. The mircocon was rad too, it was perfect for people with smaller hands. Does anybody make smaller controllers anymore? I haven't looked into it since way back when I had that small Xbox controller, is there still a market for that stuff?

Clash of Kings was really good, Tyrion's chapters were always my favorite. Things get really crazy during the battle at the end of the book, it's a little different than what happens in the tv show and it's kind of crazier in my opinion. It's a wild battle and it's illustrated and described so well in the book. I'm a big fan of the series now that I have the first two books done and I'm in the third.