James Cunningham

1 week ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

Work is work and it doesn't really care who does it so long as it's completed. Washing all the dishes by hand may bring a little spark of pride in a job well done, but tossing everything but the delicate stuff in the dishwasher and hitting a button works just as well. There's also the question of time management, because the number of things that need to be completed is just about always greater than the worker-hours available for that artisinal hands-on approach.

1 week ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

RPGs have been on computers almost since there were computers to play them on. Every Commodore 64 probably had a Temple of Apshai disk somewhere nearby, with about 75% odds it was copied in a high school's computer lab from someone else's also-bootleg copy. Wizardry and Rogue kept the dungeon-crawling going while more story-oriented RPGs started turning up like the Ultima games, all part of a long process of genre evolution that eventually sprouted the branch of the JRPG.

2 weeks ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

The world came to an end again, as the world tends to do. This time it was flooding, with the melted ice caps covering almost the entire planet with a giant ocean that makes Earth's big blue marble even bluer than it had been before. Remnants of the structures created by centuries-gone humanity still poke above the waves, but that's the only thing indicating people lived on Earth for millennia before finally breaking it beyond repair.

2 weeks ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

Everything breaks and entropy always wins, which is all very nice for the nihilists, but the rest of us are trying to get things done. Inevitable deterioration is a problem and in the long run all is dust and ruin, but the long run can be pushed relentlessly into the future seeing as people are basically tool-using monkeys that have gotten very good at making things as they could be rather than accepting them for how they are.

2 weeks ago | hardcoregamer.com | James Cunningham

Out there in space are all the resources a planet could ever hope for aside from air, food, water and all the other necessary bits needed for Earth life to survive. Minerals are available in endless abundance, though, and what's scarce on Earth is merely inconveniently located far beyond humanity's current reach.