Final Post of the Year

Hello, everyone. I hope the Holiday season has not left you too exhausted. Here at Chrontendo HQ, we've been pretty busy -- not only with Christmas stuff, but also Chrontendo 46.

A few quick updates today: Once the excitement of obtaining the Westvlateren 12 passed, I got around to actually drinking a bottle. And it's quite good! I planning on aging a couple bottles (note to non-beer geeks: much high quality beer improves with age, just like wine.), though at some point in the future, I hope to do some sort of Westvlateren/St. Bernardus comparison. That will be a very special episode of Beertendo.

I was surprised to spot an appearance of the elusive Chronogamer in the comments recently! His own attempt on chrongaming was the original inspiration for the Chrontendo project. I hope the dude will get back in the game soon, though currently he appears to be writing about Star Trek.

So.... on top of everything else currently going on, I've had this little distraction called Skyrim. Yes, it is sucking up time that should be devoted to Chrontendo. But can you really blame me for wanting to play Skyrim over Tenkaichi Bushi Keru Nagūru?

Seriously, just look at this crap.

To make matters worse, I've started exploring the surprisingly deep world of Skyrim mods. It's been a while since I been actively involved in PC gaming. The few big PC blockbuster titles I've played in recent years have been on consoles. So, I was a little surprised at the sheer number of impressive mods for Skyrim. And there are even a few that don't involve adding naked ladies to the game! There are plenty of those, of course; in fact the second most popular mod on the main Skyrim mod site, Nexus, is something called a "female body mod - big bottom edition."  But there tons of things like high-res re-textures for the environment, improvements to the UI, some amazing lighting mods, and tons of very specific alterations such as adding insects and birds to the game world. The overall philosophy of the Skyrim modding community is pretty amusing: "We love this game! Now let's change absolutely everything about it!" Anyway, it's possible to get totally lost in this stuff, so I apologize for being so distracted this month.

To make matters even worse, I received my end-of-year bonus last week, and decided to use a little bit of those surplus funds to pick up a new graphics card.  My current system has a decent mid-range card, but it's nowhere near cutting edge. I decided to upgrade to a Radeon 7950. I currently have an AMD card, and it was a tough choice between sticking with AMD or trying out a GeForce. It's amazing how fired up people get over their choice of graphics cards manufacturers. There are some serious AMD/GeForce partisans out there who have very strong feelings about the superiority of their brand. This reminds me of Nintendo/Sega back in the day.

In the meantime, Chrontendo 46 continues to putter along. It's actually a pretty strong lineup of games this time.  We have a few lesser known, culty games that received US releases. One standout among them is Human/Bandai's horrific platfomer, Monster Party. This must be one of the weirdest damned games released for the NES. If you've never played it, expected to be a little shocked once you see some of the creepy stuff in this game.

What a cheery fellow!