Probably Biased

In 1787 an Englishman named Jeremy Bentham, while traveling in Belarus, put together the initial series of ideas that would become the concept of a revolutionary prison known as the Panopticon. The idea was to create a prison that could allow a very small number of guards and overseers to manage a large number of inmates. In essence the Panopticon is a circular structure with prison cells built into the circular walls of the prison. The center is a completely open space dominated by a central tower with windows facing in every direction. The cells all face inwards towards the tower and are all open fronted with bars. This allows the overseers to observe the actions of all the prisoners at all times from a central location while the prisoners cannot see the overseers due to mirrored windows. This means that the prisoners may be under observation at any or all times, or not at all, they do not know. Without knowing when the prison guards may be watching prisoners essentially have t...

For the last fifteen days I have sunk well over a hundred hours into Assassin's Creed Odyssey. As a fairly fanatical fan of the series from the very beginning with the first Assassin's Creed back in 2007 I am almost always hyped for a new entry in the series. However I think most fans of the series will openly admit that the franchise has not been exactly stellar since the release of Black Flag in 2013. For many of us Black Flag marked the high water mark of the franchise, it had a griping story, well-polished game-play largely free of bugs or other issues, interesting characters, visceral and intense naval combat, it was everything we wanted from Assassin's Creed and more since it also stands as basically the best pirate game ever made. A quick search on VGChartz  reveals Black Flag has sold the better part of fourteen million copies across six platforms, the PS3, PS4, XBox 360, XBox One, PC and WiiU. Meanwhile the second most recent entry, Origins, has yet to break fo...

For thousands of years human beings have struggled to cope with tragedy and loss. Departed friends and relatives have been honored and remembered in countless different ways from graves and shrines to poetry and legends. Keepsakes have been handed down for generations, artifacts of ancestors long-gone. Yet for the first time in history human beings who have passed now often leave behind a much more immediate and potentially eternal form of remembrance: their social media accounts. From facebook to twitter, instagram and tumblr there are dozens of ways we connect in the digital sphere and our profiles and the data these services build on us does not just disappear when we pass away. It often falls to friends and spouses, parents or children to take over a departed person's social media accounts and decide what to do with them. Some are deleted, some are preserved as an archive of a person's life. If preserved there is really no way to tell how long a dead person'...

For a considerable eight years since it's launch in early 2010 the serially under-rated massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Trek Online has been plugging along. From a shaky beginning STO has slowly grown into something rather remarkable, showing more staying power in a relatively crowded market of free-to-play MMO RPGs. Steady patches and fixes combined with regular and completely free expansions and content drops has kept STO steadily growing for the last eight years. When the game launched players were limited to exclusively playing as Federation captains, a small roster of ships and not much in the way of endgame content. Now new players can choose Federation, Klingon, Romulan and now Dominion factions, play as dozens of species or make their own and have a roster of ships numbering in the scores. Endgame content includes numerous public events, five-player pve missions, a dozen reputation systems with unique abilities and gear rewards, battlezones, social...

For some reason the American midwest setting of the latest entry in the Farcry series is all anyone can seem to talk about. Almost every review I see spends most of its time complaining about the indecisive and politically neutral tone and messaging of the game, not its mechanics, story or gameplay. So instead of talking about the politics of the game I want to talk about everything else and frankly, there are a lot of problems with this game. To begin with Farcry 5 seems to have taken some previous suggestions to heart. Instead of climbing radio towers to fill in your map and discover quests the player has to travel the map and discover things personally or through a handful of scattered area maps. Personally I liked the tower-climbing of previous open world games, it provided a reliable structure to discovering areas of the map and marking things to do. However I can admit it was a mechanic that was getting old and tedious and it is probably good that it has gone. That said F...

For the last few weeks I have been completely obsessed with the buggy but beautiful Kingdom Come Deliverance, a historic fantasy role-playing game set in Bohemia in the year 1403. I have distant recollections of the kickstarter campaign that launched this project years ago but lacked the money to devote to such projects at the time. Fast forward a few years and the release date for the game was finally announced and the trailers started to circulate. I was blown away by the ambition and the concept behind the game. Most fantasy RPGs that we see these days are engorged wonders like Skyrim or the Witcher, settings that only loosely relate to anything historical and as a lover of history the unique scope of Kingdom Come Deliverance sold me on the game almost immediately. I could hardly wait for the day to come that I could finally fire up KCD and get into the world of 1403 Bohemia. But behind all the hype was something darker, something nastier, you see apparently Kingdom Come Deli...

I have to admit that when I saw the first trailers for Altered Carbon it looked interesting but likely mediocre. The concept of human consciousness transfer between bodies was interesting but I did not know if it was good enough to be the basis for a science-fiction world. All that changed when I happened on my brother watching the first episode and looked over his shoulder for a few minutes. Very quickly we both sat down and together watched the first three episodes in one sitting and came back for the remaining seven over the next few days. From one episode to the next the story got progressively darker and more complex, weaving the backgrounds and traits of each character together in astonishing and refreshing ways. The technology of the Settled Worlds set up a narrative that allows for characters that are truly different and unique in a genre that feels like it ran out of new ideas decades ago. In addition to the stacks, physical storage devices for the human consciousness imp...