Yes, well, quite. No posts in a while aside from the new comic, sorry about that. I have been distracted by various PS2 JRPGs, a new TV, lots of comics and the idea of classes starting again next week. The latter, I think, is the major culprit. The idea of writing a post is one of the further things from my to-do list while I have the inevitable to worry about. You understand. However, some talking points do exist…
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Once in a while I stumble upon a comic creator that is so good at what they do that it’s very difficult not to obsess over them for a good long while. This has happened to me in the past with Garth Ennis, Robert Kirkman, Jay Faerber, and now it’s happening again with Jonathan Hickman. My initial experience with his creations was through the first issue of Transhuman that I pulled on a lark because the idea of a mockumentary comic sounded novel and the cover was interesting. Now I simply cannot get enough of this man’s work, and that’s unfortunate since most of it – including Transhuman as well as A Red Mass For Mars – has been heavily delayed.

Jonathan Hickman has completed one mini series so far, however, called The Nightly News. The original 6 issues first shipped between November of 2006 and July of 2007. Unfortunately, I was late to the party and didn’t find out about the book until I visited Hickman’s website, but I immediately put in an order for the trade paperback. It arrived this week.
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If you know anything about me, you know that gaming is my passion. I love this medium. I love this artform. I love this industry. I feel fortunate to be alive during a time of such innovation in the melding of visual and interactive entertainment. But for the last few weeks, ever since the beginning and ending of E3 and its aftermath, I’ve been worried about the state of certain facets of our industry — namely, our gaming press.

I have been wanting to write a post addressing certain issues for quite some time, but I could never collect my thoughts well enough to put together a case to present. So during this year’s E3 I made a point of listening to responses from both the gaming community and the gaming press via forums, comments, blogs, and podcasts.

It is apparent to me that the press is not happy about where E3 stands as an event. I haven’t been able to discern whether or not if, overall, they are dissatisfied as games journalists or simply as gamers, but I am not sure that it matters. I don’t know that they have much reason to be upset either way.
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Late last year, before the launch of what would become DoSu 2.0, I went around and checked out a variety of different streaming video hosts. Youtube, the popular choice, wasn’t cutting it in terms of quality and features. After looking at some cross-comparisons and checking out several personally of those that looked good and had the features I wanted, I came away with the following list. Each had their own advantage that we could use for the site.

• Youtube.com — community; you can drive a lot of traffic by uploading videos to this site. They had some pretty good community features, too.
• Stage6.com — quality; there’s no limit to the specifications of video you could create, it just needed to use the divx or xvid codec. It unfortunately required users to install a not quite mainstream divx web player plugin.
• Vimeo.com — ease-of-use; bar none the simplest site to use and probably the prettiest presentation on the video page itself. It even features an HD stream, but that couldn’t be embedded, unfortunately.
• Blip.tv — features; this video host had pretty much everything I wanted from a video host and more.

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Welcome to the new iteration of Bearly Commentary. You may have noticed that I have not updated the comic version of this feature in some time. This happened for several reasons.

I was never entirely happy with the way the comic ended up being formatted. It was an experiment to begin with and I felt that it worked, for the most part, at first. However, it became apparent after not long that the space limit for text that I had arbitrarily set for myself was proving to be too restricting for all that I found myself wanting to say on a given subject. Being humorous in every edition wasn’t my intention and I felt that I had shoe-horned myself into that. Rather than let it get out of control I decided to come up with a new way of doing this.

I have grown attached to the panda as well as the name of the feature, so they will be staying, but I will be using them in blog posts as opposed to regularly in a comic. The comic itself will, I think, not appear anymore in its current form. Instead, I may adapt it later on down the line to supplement the blog posts. No guarantees, though.

This post has simply been to update you on what’s going on. I will have a real edition of Bearly Commentary for you in the near future.

It’s that time again. To snort lederhosen and call 911, you ask? Nay, it’s time to look into the future of gaming. Outside of the comic we don’t actually write much about current and future games here. This is the specially reserved segment, last posted three months ago, to unleash our lists of anticipated PC titles. (obvious ones excluded) As you see, it’s my turn.

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