How a game renting service is making me a much more relaxed gamer

It might seem ironic to a lot of people that you can get stressed out about your hobby and especially a hobby like video gaming. Playing video games should be all about punching out from your everyday obligations and just relaxing, but that's not always the feelings that I associate with my favorite pastime.

You see, I am what you may consider to be something of a fanatic when it comes to trying out all the latest and greatest games. Whenever I start hearing people rave about the greatness of a game I get a terrible itch to go and check it out, to the point where I almost feel that I *have* to try the game in order to be a "real" gamer.
It's a big part of why I know all the stuff that I know about games and it's a trait that comes in very useful when you're running a blog about video games.
But it's also somewhat of a curse that can make me feel guilty about not having played Assassin's Creed Revelations yet, or drive me to play Rayman: Origins even though I really don't care at all for 2D platformers.
It's the kind of drive that really has no place in a hobby that is just there to waste away some excess hours of my life in an entertaining fashion.

But it is part of my personality and I guess if that is as quirky as I get, then I should consider myself lucky. At least I don't have some kind of debilitating OCD condition (12345), OCD condition (12345).

Sci-Fi Do Want: The Pulse Rifle from Aliens

There's a wonderful aesthetic to the "Alien" movies that's difficult to describe. It's a grimy universe with extremely advanced technology that somehow looks both sophisticated and simple at the same time.

This is a design paradigm that the Pulse Rifle encapsulates perfectly, with it's bulky shape and digital ammo readout it looks futuristic and potent, but also like something that you would be able to mend in the field without being a tech expert.

I'm not sure that the side of the gun is the best place to put the ammo readout, guys

When the Pulse Rifle is fired it spews out a huge muzzle flare, but rather than sounding like the pounding hooves of the horsemen of the apocalypse, it has a much more subtle noise that sounds more like some sort of electric power tool than a deadly assault rifle.
This is another example of how the Pulse Rifle combines the bulky and brutal and the sci-fi into something that is the best of both worlds.

Throughout the Aliens movies we get to see that the Pulse Rifle is quite up to the job of killing one of those slimy double-mouthed wall crawlers, but it requires several bursts of concentrated fire to take one of them down, and this makes the weapon feel potent but somewhat insufficient at the same time.
Sure, you can go hunting Aliens with a Pulse Rifle, but you better be quick and accurate or you will very quickly find yourself with an empty gun and a pissed off acid dripping Alien that's about to suck your juicy face meat off your skull.

4 Ways to make more money on the GTN in SWTOR

Making money in Star Wars: The Old Republic can be hard work. So you'll want all the help you can get to make credits as easily as possible in SWTOR so you can focus on the fun stuff like blasting people or slicing them into neat little cubes with your lightsaber.

I've previously written about the 4 steps I used to get 100k in SWTOR by level 25 and that's probably a good starting point if you've just come in fresh off the shuttle and need to make your first credits.

I've also talked about the 3 ways that you can make money off the GTN, which is the "auction house" system of SWTOR, and that's going to be my jumping off point for this post, so if you haven't already read this post then I recommend that you give it a quick read.

I'm going to take a little time and share a few pointers as to how you can improve "playing" the GTN. By "playing" I mean the act of buying and re-selling items from the GTN without adding value to the items.
In this post I'm only looking at crafting materials as these items are the easiest to "play" the GTN with.

I've used these steps for about a week, spending maybe 10-15 minutes every day, and so far my profit is about 400k credits.

Thanks to these tips I can now call myself a bona fide SWTOR credit millionaire

Here are my 4 basic tips to playing the GTN:

Light Speed Gaming week in review: January 16

January marches on relentlessly with its cold, grey and generally soul crushing dreariness.
Or maybe that's just how January is for me?

In any event, the cold weather and the financial Christmas hangovers shall not stop me from bringing you more content right here on Light Speed Gaming!

Glowing purple wrist swords aside, the Reckoning demo was a big letdown for me

Last week kicked off with the second chapter in my personal SWTOR gaming journal. In this installment I traveled through the Empire capital world of Dromund Kaas and discovered the continued joys of tomb raiding.

I also spent a few good hours of the week in the company of the demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and I took some time to share my impressions of the demo.
Initially I was pretty disappointed after playing through the demo on Xbox, but after also playing the demo again on PC I found it to be a significantly better experience. I'm still very much on the fence about the game but I'm crossing my fingers that the developers will tweak and bang away on it right up until the time it ships.

Another game that the developers are apparently still tweaking and banging away on is Diablo 3. This week Blizzard shared with us that they are still making large changes to game mechanics, which makes it seem extremely unlikely that we'll be seeing Diablo 3 anytime soon... Baaaaaaaah!

Finally I turned the brass crank on my steam powered typewriter and cranked out a book review of the steampunk novel "Boneshaker".
The book was an interesting trip into a corner of science fiction that I have very little experience with, and despite some concerns that I had with it, I found it to be an entertaining read all in all.

So that's what was on the table of sci-fi and gaming goodness last week.
I hope you all had a great weekend and are ready for another healthy helping of blog ramblings from your favorite purveyor of video games and science fiction related scribbles!



 Subscribe in a reader

Sneak preview of what's coming in The Old Republic

BioWare released this short video Friday to let us in on what we can look forward to in SWTOR:

No huge surprises really and not much in terms of concrete information.

I guess the few new bits of data that we can take away is that guild banks will be the first new guild feature that we'll see and that this "Rise of the Rhakghoul" storyline is going to take place across two content patches.
Oh, and also UI customization which I'm sure a lot of people will be very happy about.

Personally I would have liked some more information about the legacy system aside from "we'll do stuff with it!".



 Subscribe in a reader

Book Review: Boneshaker - Steampunk with a side order of Zombie

A few weeks ago I asked on my Twitter stream what sci-fi book I should read next.
I had just come off the Warhammer 40k book Savage Scars, which I did not much care for at all. So I was in the mood for a real palette cleanser that was completely different from the 40k universe.

Twitter user Trin quickly came to the rescue and recommended that I take a gander at Boneshaker, which is a steampunk novel that ups the ante by mixing in a bit of zombies with its world of airships and grinding gears.

I haven't really read much in the way of steampunk before, so this book sounded like just the thing to break up my series of Warhammer 40k disappointments.

Goggles? Gotta be steampunk then, I recon!

It's the late 19th century as the sparks of a civil war began in America, the Russians had their eyes on Alaska and the rumors of large gold deposits hidden in the frozen underground. To mine the gold in these harsh conditions the Russians contracted the brilliant inventor Leviticus Blue to create "The Boneshaker", an incredible mining machine that would be able to drill out the gold in the hostile Alaskan wastes.

But the Boneshaker never got to mine any gold in Alaska, as Leviticus instead drove the machine out from the basement of his home in Seattle and used it to drive straight through the underground vaults of the city banks and steal their money.
After the dust settled it became clear that Blue had not just performed a spectacular bank robbery but had also caused the release of some unknown gas that seeped up from the underground.

Fast forward 16 years later and a huge wall has been erected to seal off the gas from the rest of Seattle. The gas, now nicknamed "Blight" has the unfortunate side effect of not only being deadly, but also reanimating the victims as shambling monsters with a hunger for flesh.