"Once I Think I'm Out, They Pull Me Back In!" (Editorial) from 2007

This editorial from Mr. Nash dates back to 2007 and recounts his year away from World of WarCraft. With all the MMO's that have come and gone during the intervening years, it's still a little mind-boggling to think that WoW is still going strong. Maybe it doesn't post the same kind of numbers that it once did, but WoW probably still has many, many years left in the tank.

Video: Mega Man X (SNES)

Mr. Nash takes a look at 1994's Mega Man X (SNES) in this Random Game Talk.

Playing Dress Up in Games

Bards are arguably one of the most stylish jobs in
Final Fantasy XIV.

Customization has become increasingly popular in games over the decades. Whether it's something on the technical end like tweaking graphic settings or an RPG where players have points to allocate to various stats on their characters, this sort of thing has been quite useful and people really eat it up. While customization has been a big thing on the practical side of the spectrum, it's also become all the rage from a stylistic standpoint. It could be something like having multiple costumes for fighting game characters, or graphically reflecting equipment upgrades in an RPG, or it could be like in MMORPGs where many games have gone so far as to allow vanity gear that players can acquire simply to make their character as stylish as they like while still retaining stats from other gear that actually is useful in battle.

I remember it being a very simple thing, back when my friends and I played Street Fighter II in the arcades during the early 90s. Get into a mirror match with someone and inevitably one of you would be stuck with a color scheme on your character that you probably didn't like. This used to happen to me with Ryu all the time. I was a traditionalist with him and many of the other SFII characters at the time, and much preferred their original colors, as opposed to the alternatives, and couldn't help but cringe when I didn't get them.

Video: The Weekly Checkpoint 88

This week Jeff takes a look at what he feels to be one of the more overlooked developers of the 80s, 90s, and 00s: Irem.