Burke's Joystick

Things are coming up mecha! It's funny: until Hawken went into open beta roughly a year ago, I never was interested in the sci-fi concept of 'mecha'.  It just always seemed really silly to me for an armored vehicle to drop the inherent stability of treads for balance-heavy legs!  In retrospect, maybe it never was a silly as I once thought it was as legged machines seem to be all the rage lately in the world of robotics research.  Go figure. Be that as it may, once the mecha bug bit me, it bit deep.  Those main battle tanks that had somehow managed to grow a pair of legs can be quite addictive!  I have found that there is a thoroughly unique feeling of power that comes with the ability to stride across a battlefield rather than ride across it like some peasant on a donkey. What is more, I quickly learned to appreciate the distinctiveness of the combat that surrounds bipedal tanks.  Because something with legs is always going to be more elegant in ...

I don't know about you, but I find that my gaming almost always drives my reading.  That is, when a game ignites a spark of enthusiasm for a particular topic, I almost always find myself reading a book that is related to the game's subject matter in some fashion, be it fiction or non-fiction.   This is a powerful symbiosis, so powerful in fact that I notice that when my gaming roster becomes bare, my reading drops off precipitously as well.  Likewise, when I am powerfully invested in my latest pixelated love affair, my reading skyrockets in sympathy to my gaming. I guess this shouldn't be a surprise to me as it was gaming that made me into a book lover from the get-go.  That's right: despite all the yahoos out there projecting all their worst fears onto video games, the truth is that video games can powerfully stir the imagination in the same fashion as a book...which is why a lot of gamers are naturally drawn to reading.  Heck, but for my unexpected...