Grand Walking Dead

I've seen a few Grand Theft Auto-themed shirts before, but this is the best. It's The Walking Dead! Unfortunately, there is only so much room on the shirt and it's missing Maggie, Glenn...wait a sec, where's Carol? Rick and the Gang only survived Terminus because of her. But Gareth gets recognition? Well, yeah, I can see that, because season V started with his nonchalant murdering people for food. Carl should have given up his spot to Carol. Because of this little oversight, I checked IMDb just to be sure that the show and game match up, that this is the fifth season of The Walking Dead, so I Googled it because that's always faster with the way my iPad first puts the cursor in the search box. The snippet said "Spoiled playboy billionaire Oliver Queen is missing and presumed dead..." I think we have another crossover here. ;)

Anyway, I'm just now realizing that I don't think I have a TWD tee or a GTA tee. That's not right. I have to remedy this situation. Eventually. I have bought too many things lately, like an iPad Air that should be arriving by tomorrow. But you can get one for $10 today or $15 tomorrow at Ript Apparel.

Buy Grand Walking Dead

 

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Dragon Age Origins Free for a Limited Time

Through tomorrow, October 14, you can download Dragon Age: Origins for free! Yes, I know it came out years ago, so it'll be a bit dated. But free is free, and that's great for me because I never had a chance to even think about buying it. In 2009 I was running a 5-year-old PC, and I only just replaced it a couple years ago. I hope this one lasts like that one did, though I don't suspect I will wait as long this time to upgrade. It was a matter of not having extra cash then and so I was never much of a PC gamer. Just too broke. Anyway, my brother loved the game and now I get a chance to play. I'm definitely going to have to remember to keep a watch on that site to see if anything else comes along for the right price. I think I've gotten emails before, but I just forgot to do anything about them.

Oops, not enough free space. Let me change the install path then. It would have been nice if it let me do that in the first place. I have too much crap on my small SSD. No, wait a sec, I have room on my SSD but not in my programs drive. Don't want to put it one of my media drives either. Been meaning to get a another, but, again, money is required and I have more pressing concerns. SSD it is.

Get Dragon Age: Origins at Origin.com

If you miss the giveaway, you can get Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition for PC , Xbox 360 , or Playstation 3 on Amazon. The regular editions are also available.

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Portal Balloon

I just realized that out of the few shirts I've posted here so far, now two of them are now about Portal. There have been a fair number of video game shirts, but I either miss them because I'm busy or they're about games I never played. Somebody please make some more for Bioshock. Actually, that's well represented. You know what I never see? Halo, Splinter Cell, Gears of War, God of War, Psychonauts, Alan Wake, and many, many more. I'm currently playing The Last of Us, so that would be a great one to see.

This shirt is by Valentinaocchiblu, creator of the adorable Some Peanuts UP There. You can get Portal Balloon today for $10. Tomorrow it increases to $15. After that it will be gone forever unless the designer puts it up for sale elsewhere.

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If You Have Always Wanted to Wear an N64

It's about time there's a video game shirt that I actually want to post. There have been some since the last one that I've liked, but I completely missed them while I was working. Also, I don't do Link, and it seems more than half of the game shirts I see feature him. I know it's terrible of me, but I never got a chance to play more than a few hours of one Zelda game. I probably got distracted by the latest FPS or racing game, and my brother played it enough for the both of us. Eventually I may finish Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, or Wind Waker, but I have a backlog of games extending into the dozens of dozens. Just like all the books on my shelves I'll never have a chance to read, some games keep slipping further and further into the past. But I will always fondly remember the little N64, which I still have and which still works, for giving me Super Mario 64, Star Fox 64, and Goldeneye. To this day I love bouncing on top of things, shooting things out of the sky, and thinking about martinis while shooting things on the ground...virtually, of course.

Today is a versus day, so you can pick Titan Pilot Traing Academy over 64 Bit. Or get both! I don't have money for an Xbox One yet, but I really wanted to play Titanfall. By the time I can afford a new console, everyone will be playing the next thing. Hopefully a sequel.

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8-Bit Legend ~ E.T. Tee

Gaming tees are few and far between at the daily shirt sites, and there are even fewer that I like enough to post about. So I'm very happy that there's a great one today that also happens to be connected with a real-life story. I was always interested in the game so bad all the unsold copies were supposedly trucked to and buried in the desert in New Mexico, It's part of gaming history; all of it interests me. And now they've unearthed poor little E.T. But why? It's for a documentary that Zak Penn (The Avengers) is doing for Microsoft. I might just watch that doc.

8-Bit Legend is available until the end of the day and starts at $11. Shipping starts at $3.

Related //
A First-Hand Account of the E.T. Landfill
The Dig Uncovering the Arari E.T. Games Buried in New Mexico Desert

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I Need More Time to Read

I have been really neglecting things here lately, and besides reading that Ken Levine is "winding down" Irrational and moving ahead with a smaller team, I've hardly kept up with gaming news. I only knew because I follow him on Twitter. Whatever time I have I usually spend improving my blogs, drawing knives, tweeting, or writing about The Blacklist - the incredible James Spader series, not the Splinter Cell entry I'm playing right now, though I really like the game so far. Of course. It's Splinter Cell.

I still get my beloved magazines Game Informer and EGM. Yeah, sadly, it's down to two, but that's all I have time to read. Even then I have hardly looked at them in the past year. I spend way too much time on everything else and have none left over. When I play games (a few times a week) I will write down thoughts about them. I've been doing so since I started L.A. Noire last summer. I vowed to do something with this site, but my original plan years ago had changed and then I didn't know what I wanted. So I kept that diary, but then I hardly did anything with it. The Blacklist and other favorite shows, like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Almost Human, always took precedence. Well, not today. I finished a long Blacklist post yesterday and I have no current worries about anything with a deadline. Got a bunch of things done this week that have been hanging over my head, like insurance.

So now I have a moment to at least get one idea across here. It's about gaming magazines. I am going to be really sad when physical magazines go away completely. It's really the only way I find time for gaming (or entertainment) news. I just don't read them online. I'll read the random article now and then, but I never sit for an hour or two at my PC and read an entire magazine. Just doesn't work for me. If I'm on my computer, I'm working, writing blog posts, making GIFs, etc. If I'm reading articles, it's for research. The only time I relax is while reading a book or a magazine (even while watching TV I'm usually doing something else, unless it's a favorite show) and I can't do that staring at a computer screen. I love feeling the pages in my hand, smelling the paper.

I started writing this because I recently finally forced myself to spend some time away from the iPad and spend it with the magazines I always forgo for more pressing things. When I opened it I got an instant contented feeling that this was always how it was and how it should be. The smell brought back memories (admittedly always near the surface) of hilarious sessions of Bumper Hogs (smacking the crap out of Halo's Warthogs to see how high they could fly into the air) with my brother and a flash of nostalgia that reminded me of when I was younger and gaming magazines were my most prized possession...after my plastic Voltron with the missing yellow lion.

Speaking of magazines as a prized possession, they can be yours, too. I don't have room anymore and I can't throw them away. I'll keep a few of my favorites, like a beautiful issue of Game Informer with Dead Space on the cover. But you can buy most of my other back issues of Official Xbox Magazine, Official Playstation Magazine, Next Gen, Play, Game Informer, Nintendo Power, Computer Gaming World, GamePro and more at eBay. I have hundreds. Just don't tell me if you're going to make papier-mache out of them or throw them into a bonfire. I couldn't handle that.

Gaming Magazine Back Issues for Sale

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Nintendo Shutting Down Servers for the Wii and DS

I never had a Wii and I don't utilize the multiplayer component of any game, but this Nintendo decision to shut down their servers still got under my skin. Prepare to no longer be able to play any of your Wii or DS favorites online on May 20, 2014. Of course, it's their business and they have to do what they feel is right for the company, but it's still a crappy decision. How does a worldwide company not have the money to keep the servers going or give an option to fans? According to CNN, Nintendo's revenue last year was $7.7 billion. That's billion. And according to Forbes, their market share is $14.4 billion. It seems ridiculous. But I guess the big guys have to be always moving forward.

This is just another reason for me to never play multiplayer. The other reasons are that I can't spend all my time with one game, and I don't need the aggravation of other people. On a related note, I've always been hesitant of the move towards download only. Some titles being downloadable only are fine, like the independent ones that don't have the support of a big publisher. I'm all for that. But imagine that game you bought a few years ago that you haven't had the chance to play yet was a download. I'll use Grand Theft Auto IV as an example. (Yes, I know it's not a download.) I might take a while longer to get to it. I have so many to play. I'm currently on GTAV, and then I have Assassin's Creed Revelations and Mass Effect 3 to start. At some point I have to finish Borderlands, Fallout 3, and even Okami. I really, really want to finish Okami.

There are dozens of games I never got to play, but if they were online only they would run the risk of being shut down when the number of players dropped, or for any arbitrary reason. Imagine spending hundreds of dollars on a bunch of code that did nothing. Even if that didn't happen, anything else could. Your console could commit suicide, your account could be shut down, you could lose your purchases because of some idiotic glitch. You ever have a hard drive die that had software you paid for from a company that has incredibly poor customer service, who wants to charge you for support and then charge you for a new copy even though they have your order in their system, you have the receipt and the serial number, and you even have a copy backed up but it can only be installed on one machine or a certain number of times? This is a thing that happens. (Actually, that's probably the worst that can happen. It's an amalgam of a few things that I've been through before.) You can probably tell I have a hard time letting go of physical media. I want to own what I buy and have the ability to play it forever. Screw the companies who take that away.

More about the Nintendo shut down is available in the place I read about it, The Day the Mario Kart Died ~ ArsTechnica.

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