I mean really really weird people…

Bonus Round:

Ancient Romans carved winged penises to ward off the evil eye

Cover illustration by Kim Rosen

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nuff said

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A clip from our shoot at Gates of Fire for an episode of Nerd Out. The lead medic explains to us the difference between LARPers, Foam Fighters, and SCA. Apparently where LARPing is based more around the Role Playing aspect and introduces elements like magic, Foam Fighting focuses more on semi-battle field realism. Keep your eyes peeled for more bonus clips of our web series!

Please visit our IndieGoGo campaign for more information on Nerd Out!

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Sadly, for a game that’s based of a story driven show like Walking Dead you’ll find the story is probably weakest element of the game. Essentially you play as Daryl at the beginning of the outbreak and after a hunting mishap where he loses his father to walkers, he sets out to find Merle and find a means of escape from the infestation.  Essentially, that’s the whole plot. Not uncommon for a zombie game but pretty bland. It’s marred by the fact that at least 95% of the characters you meet in the game don’t really have any major story interaction aside from the mission you are in. If you complete their very poorly acted side quest  they can join you and scavenge for supplies in later missions (and will probably die in the process). Because of that, all of Daryl’s lines are responses to quests. They are hacky, forgettable, and allow for no character development or growth.

As a first person shooter from a technical standpoint, its functional. The graphics aren’t exactly triple A but they did look much better than the commercial makes them look. It uses the right amount of blood splatter when cracking a walker with a melee strike and has a nifty little sweat trickle down on the top of the screen when you become fatigued.  The melee is visceral and has the right amount of weight and reaction to them for it help immersion which might have been one of my favorite things in the game. The gun combat is pretty forgiving as well as you don’t need to be laser precise for head shots, although firing in the game almost ALWAYS alerts the attention of more walkers than you want so its usually better to find a stealthier approach.

But while this game has some good ideas and its heart was in the right place, its execution was incredibly poor. The game starts off murderous in difficulty as your melee is weak and the ammo is too scarce to fight off major hordes if you fire once.  But when you get Daryl’s signature crossbow, the game becomes insultingly easy. The scavenging for survival is a good idea, but gets horribly boring after one or two missions. In between story missions you get plunked into occasional scavenge quests with about 3 different small maps, which just makes them a waste of time to pad out game length.

There are literally no special walkers or human enemies in the game, so basically all walkers you see at the start are all you’ll see by the end. God forbid you get grappled by a walker too, because the escape mini game is cool but will leave you trapped and force you to do it for every zombie in the group. It drains your health and basically extends your game over by like 3 minutes. Micheal Rooker and Norman Reedus are brought in to reprise their roles as the Dixon brothers, but the story is so poor there’s only so much they can do with the lines (which is a shame, because Rooker is a really good voice actor).

There are nuggets of good ideas in this game, and I really did want to like it more than I did. It started off so hopeful, and has some decent mechanics built in. It sadly shoots its wad right out of the gate and basically has nothing to follow it with. No varied style of missions, no boss fights, no real story development. Bottom line is though, Walking Dead: Survival Instinct is just another entry of popular properties getting a bare bones shitty game to cash in on it. Rent it if you have to, but even that much is overspending on it.  Survival Instinct bites.

Y’all kin fine mah full r’view at Rage Quitter, Y’hear?

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CLICK HERE TO GO TO INDIEGOGO PAGE

What we are doing

“Nerd Out” is our first endeavor into the web series realm under the Hashtag Nerd Brand. The series will consist of six special-interest, micro-documentary episodes telling the story of individuals with nontraditional obsessions. Topics will include comic and toy collectors, LARPers, tabletop gamers and many others.

Help us with our vision

We have already begun filming, but we need your help to finish this series.

Hashtag Nerd and all of the projects surrounding it, including “Nerd Out,” are passion projects for our us. We dedicate our time and money to help make our visions possible, but sometimes those visions are bigger than our personal budgets allow. That is why we are asking you – our friends, family and fans – for help.

Filming a series like “Nerd Out” is one of the largest endeavors we’ve undertaken thus far, and with our DIY spirit – and your help – we feel confident that we can succeed. Any amount of funding we reserve will help us achieve our goals, with contributions going toward necessities like gear rental, filming permits, transportation of crew and talent, and other expenses. If we raise more than our goal of $500, the excess will be rolled into improving quality of the final outcome.

If we do not reach our goal, we will use any amount we do obtain to create the best experience we can offer.

We already have many talented friends giving their skills away for free on this project, such as Kyle Harlan and George Hoefer (Spaceman Fantastiques) with motion graphics and soundtrack creation.

How it will go down

Hashtag Nerd will film for three to four months throughout the summer of 2013, then take up to a month for editing. We aim to release the first episode on Youtube in the fall, with subsequent episodes released every week. These will be accompanied by as much relevant bonus content as we can provide.

Other ways you can help

We understand you can’t always give financially, but there are plenty of other ways to help out. Please spam the crap out of your friends! Post this campaign to your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other social media accounts; if there is a way to Vine it or pin it, please do so!

Additionally, you can send episode ideas to phil@hashtagnerd.com.

We hope to make season one of “Nerd Out” so successful that we can continue to produce a second season in 2014. Thank you for any contribution you can make!

The post Help fund our “Nerd Out” Web Series appeared first on Hashtag Nerd.

Will Wheaton explains what it is to be a nerd and he covers a lot of what we try to get across on this site.

A nerd to me has always meant someone who enjoys something that might traditionally be considered uncool. Being a nerd is so much more than the pocket protectors, the glasses, and lacking muscle definition. It’s a passionate person who loves somethings more than others love anything.

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One of my biggest selling points in the original Bioshock was its atmosphere. Scary setting, creepy enemies, excellent use of darkness and pacing. Infinite manages to flub on almost all of these points right out of the gate. Instead of the dark collapsing atmosphere of Rapture, we have the perpetually bright and sunny yet outwardly racist streets of Colombia. Instead of the terrifying creepy Splicers or the monstrous Big Daddies, we have 1920′s well dressed assholes with guns, and giant Mecha-Washington or the Handymen (which are just some asshole in a robot suit with a big glowing weakness on his chest). Sorry, other people with guns are uninteresting and get a big red X from me.

I felt they messed up with the equipment as well. In the original you got 8 or 9 weapons varying from boring old machine gun to fun weapons like the chemical thrower. In addition to having multiple weapon choices, you also had various types of ammo you could use for each weapon which had different effectiveness to different enemies. Bioshock Infinite instead decided it would bet better to fall in line with every other shooter and only allow you to carry two guns at a time with only one ammo type. Some people think its exciting to constantly be interchanging weapons. I do not, I don’t want to be stuck with a sniper rifle when I’m only sparsely in situations where it would even be useful.

Tacking on with disappointment of the guns, the Vigor’s of Infinite weren’t really as up to snuff as the Plasmids of the original. There are a handful of cool ones like sending a murder of crows after someone or the ability to send a ghost after machines and people, but after I maxed out my Shock Jock and Devils Kiss (read Electro Bolt and Incinerate) all of the other vigors I could use were useless or ineffective. It felt like I had less options too since some of the effects of the older plasmids were condensed to a single vigor. Useful maybe but I liked the variety better, these you at least get to switch between all of them whenever you want unlike the weapons.

I will say there were two points in this game that I really did like. First off, Booker (the protagonist) and Elizabeth (the support character) make for an incredibly likable pair. Booker isn’t a silent protagonist like in the previous Bioshock games so it allows him to have some very good character building moments and with a pretty deep backstory allows him to grow as the game progresses. Elizabeth is a great support character because she is competent and confident without being aggressive or arrogant.  She also helps while you fight by finding ammo, restoring your health or salts (for vigors), and she even digs up money as you are exploring.  She really does get you to fall for her right off, and she seems to have this understanding that something big is going on around her.

Because these characters are so strong, it goes a long way in helping the storytelling. Bioshock Infinite easily has one of the best stories in the series by far. It does have a bit of a slow beginning to it, but without spoiling just after half way the story goes batshit crazy and completely alters the dynamic of the story with a very sci-fi concept. And while the climax was disappointing with a lack of any real boss fight, the storytelling was beyond exceptional with a very incredible ending to the tale that left a lot of people with their jaw on the floor. It may be a little cliche given the introduced concept but it was executed so well I was willing to over look it.

So then, recommendation? How can I put this….  Well, I guess the best way to say is I’m glad I didn’t buy it, but glad I got to play it. From a strictly technical gameplay standpoint, they completely watered down the well established Bioshock gameplay aspects to make it fall in line with the every other 1st person shooter released in the past few years. It was boring to me in that regard. But the game weaves such an exceptional tale that it would be worth your time to at least see the game through to the end, either through purchase or rental. I don’t think it merits the near perfect scores its getting, but its a solid play.

Would you kindly see my full review on Rage Quitter?

The post #Quickie: Bioshock Infinite appeared first on Hashtag Nerd.

This is the third trailer for J.J. Abrams “Star Trek Into Darkness” which will be in theaters May 17th. This trailer gives a better feeling of the relationship between James T. Krik played by Chris Pine and rumored Khan (but I sort of hope it is an alternate universe Picard) played by Benedict Cumberbatch.  I am glad to see some space in this trailer as previous trailers seemed to have been stuck on the land and well… land is boring!

The post Star Trek Into Darkness – Official Trailer #3 appeared first on Hashtag Nerd.

I love modern furniture and decor… Let me rephrase that. I love to look at modern furniture and decor as I couldn’t possibly afford any. Luckily I stumbled upon HomeMade Modern which has many DIY tutorials on how to create fantastic modern home decor! Including a Quikrete Stool that won’t break your bank. Using a bucket as a mold, wooden dowels, and a bit of elbow grease you too could have a set of fantastic modern stools. Be sure to visit their site and look at all the other great tutorials they have.

HomeMade Modern

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