It the announcement that’s been the talk of the Internet over the last week. A lot of people are surprised, which surprises me. The Elder Scrolls (TES) is an RPG, so it’s not surprising to me that Bethesda and ZeniMax Media Group are interested in moving the franchise into the MMO space. There are subscription [...]

In three years of bogging I’ve broken most of the suggestions you’ll see other bloggers advise. I don’t have a consistent posting schedule. I don’t do any marketing or link trading. Most of my posts don’t use screenshots or pictures. This site started because I had a few rants about DRM to get off my [...]

Guild Wars 2 & 1 Like just about every MMO player (or so it seemed) I played Guild Wars 2 during the recent beta weekend. Despite never playing Guild Wars 1 for longer than a week, I’ve still been interested in how the sequel would turn out. ArenaNet still has problems to fix, they’ve resolved most [...]

From the crazed mind of Syp from Bio Break comes the New Blogger Initiative (NBI). For the month of May, the goal is to encourage anyone that has been thinking of starting a blog to go ahead and do it. Throughout the month there’ll be articles posted here and on the other participating blogs (over seventy at last count) to [...]

First, I know a few of you were expecting to see an update on my newest hobby, specifically the Enterprise-B that I recently finished. Unfortunately my plans for the week changed radically on Monday, so that will have to wait until next week. Second, Scarybooster is having Bloggerpalooza this week. He emailed a bunch of [...]

In my Developer Appreciation Week posts, I’ve gone from thanking developers in general to a specific team, and today I wanted to thank two specific developers from Cryptic who work on Star Trek Online. First, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Al Rivera, aka Captain Geko. Last year was a pretty rough year for STO [...]

Continuing with Developer Appreciation Week, today I wanted to thank the Rift team at Trion. It feels strange highlight a game that I’m not currently playing, even more so since my subscription lapsed about a week ago. But that has everything to do with lack of time and nothing to do with the game itself. Rift [...]

I don’t envy game developers, and especially not those making MMOs. It’s an impossible task, trying to make everyone happy at the same time. I was playing STO the recently and in the general chat people were discussing the new mining daily that was implemented. I’ve played it myself and had fun bouncing around the [...]

I’m not going to give any spoilers or talk about the ending (see here for that), I just want to address the story and game mechanic changes from ME2 to ME3 and give my general impressions. Story There was one often asked question when Mass Effect 2 was released that’s been making the rounds again, [...]

This post is going to have lots of spoilers. If you haven’t played any of the games or haven’t finished the third one yet and you plan to then you should stop reading now. I want to start at the end first. The final 15 minutes of the game aren’t perfect. What did happen was [...]

Just wanted to share some quick shots of other ships I’m getting started on and/or working up to. The Enterprise-D will be the largest model I’ve worked on yet, so the detail paining and assembly should be easier. Although, it may just provide a different set of challenges. The decals for this one will likely [...]

After finishing spray painting the base colors for the NCC-1701-A, it was time to build the sub-assemblies, do some detail painting, and then attach the saucer to the engineering hull.   I’m not particularly proud of black highlights on the front of the nacelles, but I’m hoping that the decals that cover most of the part [...]

Found this in my Evernote drafts, pretend like I posted this a week ago as I’d intended to. Obviously I need to work harder on my resolution not to publish and not over-edit or leave stuff in drafts forever. I’ve been catching up on my news feeds today and just ran across the drama about Mass Effect [...]

Finally finished my TOS era Enterprise.  When last I mentioned her, I had completed painting and assembly with several significant mishaps, also known as learning experiences. The completed ship was a little misshapen but turned out better than I had expected. But it wasn’t done as I still had a sheet of decals to apply, something I was [...]

If I didn’t have a three year old who would destroy it in minutes, I’d make the time to build one of these. Lego Millennium Falcon Stop Motion Assembly 3d from Francisco Prieto on Vimeo.

After my experiences with gluing a model together first (see here and here), before I even opened the plastic on the Enterprise A, I got smart and searched for model painting videos on Youtube where I found an excellent suggestion. Why not remove the parts from the sprues so I could clean up any edges, [...]

The mistakes that I learned from on the original Enterprise went a long way to helping the Excelsior, Enterprise B, turn out better. It also helps that this model is larger and includes a post on the bottom for a stand so I had some way of mounting it while painting. I took the MacGyver approach [...]

Star Trek Online went down unexpectedly last night for a few hours. I only ran into the tail end of the outage as I was working on some Enterprise model kits, so it didn’t actually impact my playtime much, but I did realize something. There really are a lot of people playing STO since the [...]

Honestly, pretty much the last thing I needed was an additional claim on my time and money. Yet I’ve somehow found myself waist deep in plastic model kits for Star Trek ships. It began innocently enough, a few weeks ago I saw on Twitter that StarTrek.com was having a sale. I’d been wanting to pick [...]

Pro-tip for the next time you decide to do some Spring cleaning on your computer like I did recently. Make sure before you spend the weekend replacing your primary hard drive and reinstalling Windows and gigabytes of games, that you are sure that the new drive is the correct speed. I mistakenly used a 2GB [...]

If you had told me a month ago that I would be watching a game pitch video and laughing, not to mention watching it multiple times, I would’ve thought you were nuts. I have been though, and I have to say if the documentary that comes out is as entertaining as the pitch, I’ll still [...]

Some interesting news today from Cryptic, Daniel Stahl is back as the Executive Producer of Star Trek Online. I was wondering if he was going to take up his old position. He returned to Cryptic from Zynga in December after only two months away, but not to his original position. I assumed either Dan wanted [...]

I’ve been thinking more about last week’s post on Star Trek Online, F2P, and lock boxes. I’ve looted a few lock boxes since then and left them sitting in my cargo bay. I’m still not planning on spending money or dilithium on keys, but I’m not as bothered by having them show up as drops as [...]

Family Before I get into what games I’m looking forward to, I wanted to mention some personal and blog related things. My wife and I are expecting our second little Kae to show up sometime in June. I’m sure that’s going to kill any time I have to play MMOs for a few months. I [...]

I still don’t like the idea of having multiplayer injected into an excellent singleplayer series. It feels like an attempt by EA to broaden the game’s audience at the risk of alienating the existing fans. Of course that’s something they’ve already risked by scaling back on RPG elements from ME1 to ME2, and I still [...]