Written Opinion: the 1986-1994 Era of Gaming.

The 1986-1994 era is one of my all time favorites in gaming history. While there was some semblance of a console war prior to this era, I always thought that this age was home to some of the most brutal console battles in gaming history. While the two major players during this era were Nintendo and Sega there were still other players that entered the field but ultimately failed.

The battle between Sega and Nintendo was one of aggressive marketing. Nintendo had already made major headway in the industry, while Sega's original delving into the console wars with the Master System hadn't made a dent in Nintendo's progress. Sega needed something new, something fresh and they opted to make a leap in technology with the Sega Genesis. Sega assaulted the market with newer edgier titles, as well as arcade titles that Nintendo didn't have. Sega's strategy was to go after the teenage market of gamers, who would hopefully influence their younger siblings to hop on board. Nintendo however still were able to give them a run for their money with already established mascots and series such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda. Sega needed a mascot of it's own; enter Sonic the Hedgehog, a lean, mean, blue, speedster machine. He was the the opposite of Mario in almost every way, he was edgier with his spiked hair and stylish sneakers and helped push Sega ahead in the console race.

This is where things started to go terribly awry. Nintendo opted to stick to it's guns with making unique and fun titles while Sega attempted to secure it's position with hardware. This spelled out disaster for Sega however. With the release of the Sega CD, and then the 32x, sega was pushing out hardware that had no software that was worth purchasing, while Nintendo continued along the same track by making good, fun, and exciting original software. This was something that even to this day companies seem to not understand, and why Nintendo is so successful, it's not about how powerful your console is, it's all about the fun.

Episode 4!!!! Follow me on that there twitter thing. @akaAxi0m



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Initial DK Episode 3.

Episode 3 is go. Also follow me on that Twitter thing @akaAxi0m



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Initial DK Episode 2. Leveling Changes Part 1.

Here ya go folks!



View in 720p HD!

When I was initially creating this blog it was something kind of private, used to track progress and could show friends from other servers, well now I'm going a different route and well you shall see the results in my first ever.......... video blog oh no!

Razer Naga

So after much research and some skepticism I decided to pick one of these bad boys up. I figure $53 bucks and a 30 day return policy isn't too shabby to test out some new hardware since my Steelseries mouse was starting to wear out anyway.

First Impressions:
I got the thing home and unboxed it and had it installed within ~5 minutes. Install was simple and straight forward, updating the firmware was kind of annoying because my case is huge and you've gotta unplug it then hold Left, Right and Middle down while plugging it back in to boot into the firmware update mode of the mouse.

The feel of this thing is absolutely incredible, it's taking some getting used to given the switch from the WoW Steelseries beast, to this smaller more reserved shape. It glides across my mousepad effortlessly and has very good balance and weight compared to the Steelseries mouse. I used to play FPS (Counter-Strike specifically) competitively so it's something I tend to pick up on and appreciate greatly.

I have a very static UI that I spend hours upon hours putting together and I absolutely love it, after about 15 minutes of tweaking around I was able to replace bartender in my UI package with the Naga addon which is built off of Dominos, my UI typically doesn't have any of my action bars except my consumables/mounts visible so I've got the Naga UI bars visible to get myself a bit more associated visually with the button layout.

All in all I'm pretty impressed with the mouse so far, they claim it takes an average of 18hrs of playtime to get fully accustomed to using the mouse but I must say in the 2 hours so far in tonight's raid I've been slowly mixing in using the mouse along with my old keybindings and I'm slowy shifting the balance over to the mouse and noticing a lot more maneuverability and quicker reaction on a lot of what I'm doing (I'm a tank so).

I'll give a more in depth review later in the week once I've had more time to play with it.

Saronus Out.

Also read the full review over at World of Raids.

PeeVeePee?

So new PvP changes are upon us, this should be quite interesting. I've always been a huge fan of BGs over arena, just because I prefer large group based strategy in compared to tiny small scale battles. I remember the days of yore getting premade AB games together after a raid in our bleeding edge PvE loots and completely dominating. Those were the good old days, the old BG grind for rank and competing with your friends or even enemies to hold rank week after week, the dreadful fear of town raids and accidentally attaining DKs because someone decided to attack the wrong NPC. Hopefully with the coming of these changes along with the improved focus that is supposedly being brought along with Cataclysm we'll see a huge revival in the battleground scene. Only time will tell however.

On a side note because of this I've upped the timetable and rearranged some of my projects. Now seems like as good a time as ever to go for 100k HKs and Battlemaster. Wish me luck folks.