Burke's Joystick

[Wow, it has been a long, long time since I blogged!  Truth is, I finally hit the tipping point when it comes to gaming.  As I've detailed here , I've just become sick of the shenanigans that currently enfold gaming - both the hobby and the industry.  If it isn't disreputable game developers and publishers shoveling high priced garbage our way, it is an equally disreputable gaming press that is conspiring to help devs and pubs shovel garbage our way, but with their added touch of college-level Marxism and militant feminism.  I'm sorry, but things have become too toxic and juvenile for me to put up with that for long.  So, I've taken a big step back from gaming and have instead begun focusing on other hobbies, some new, some old.   Now, that doesn't mean I will never touch a game again.  No, I always have an eye out for a glimmer of hope.  Gaming has been in tough straits before but has managed to recover.  I suspect history will r...

“How could you possibly allow the election of a citizen of a socialist country as pope?!?" - Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB  [1] In the tumultuous events of World War III, perhaps the most tumultuous was the so-called "Polish Summer" of 1982.  While short-lived, largely the result of the brutal Soviet reprisals upon Poland, the Polish uprising of that hot August caused a great deal of chaos within Pact ranks while it existed.  It is now known that the cause for this revolt, also known as the 'Stanislaw Uprising", was the attempted KGB assassination of Pope John Paul II.  While initially blamed upon a Turkish "lone wolf", evidence quickly mounted to the contrary conclusion:  that this attempt on the pontiff's life was a tightly-controlled "wet op" locally orchestrated from within the Bulgarian embassy in Italy, specifically by Bulgarian military attaché Zilo Vassilev , but most definitely managed by the KGB from afar.  It i...

So, I was rummaging in the basement of my apartment building the other day, looking for some stuff I dumped down there when I first moved in, when I came across this old, dusty shoebox.  I didn't know what was in it, but I could see that on the outside someone wrote the words "Norway '85" on it's top with a pencil.  Out of respect for the privacy of whomever owned this box I should have really put it back where I found it...but I just couldn't resist taking a peak.   I've read a lot about the '80s over the years: that iconic decade of music, movies and, sadly, the 20th Century's last great war, what was logically called World War III.  Heck, it was the decade I chose to do my freshman history thesis on!  So I had to take a peak. Inside I found a bunch of old analog pictures of some battle in Norway involving the Danes and some Warsaw Pact troops.  From what I could gather the pictures w...

Well, this continues to be embarrassing.  After just swearing off video games, I am suffering from quite the addiction to Eugen System's Wargame: AirLand Battle .  I really have to say how impressed I am with the amount of polish that Eugen has applied to the game over the last few months.  And they are clearly not stopping, what with the news that another patch and the "Magna Carta" DLC (free!) were released today!  I might have my gripes with a big portion of the industry, but I think Eugen is one of the good guys of 2013. Anyway, to celebrate my new addiction, I'd thought I do another AAR, this time with me playing as the East Germans against the AI-controlled United States Marine Corps!  Can I stop the famed Devil Dogs?  Check and see.  And to just switch things up a bit for this AAR, I will be using touched-up screenshots for a more realistic effect.  Enjoy!

It looked like such a nice place to work.  I mean, the map merely referred to it as 'Delta 3', but it must really have had a much nicer name that that, something like "Happy Cow Milkery"...or something: Sure, it was only two agro centers - Agro South and Agro North, as I referred to them - but what nice places they were.  I imagined myself as someone who had to work there, imagined driving through the pastoral fields, admiring the bucolic scenery the entire way, and pulling into my parking spot with a smile on my face because I was just thrilled with working in such a beautiful settng.  What could ever go wrong in paradise? Well...this: War.  War never chan...er, I mean: WAR!  War came to paradise!   Right out of the blue.