In the year 20XX...

Hey, everybody, and welcome to another year of Pointless Side Quest!

2012 was a bit of a slow year at the blog- in large part because my grandfather and both of my cats died, so if you have ever so much as contemplated being annoyed by the slow pace of new content here you are officially a horrible, horrible person- but I have higher hopes for 2013.

I'm also inaugurating a brand-new regular feature on Pointless Side Quest that, at the risk of seeming hyperbolic, will be a greater and more important development in the history of video games than Pac-Man, the joystick, Shigeru Miyamoto, ROM cartridges, ENIAC, and the nucleosynthesis of the first silicon atoms in the cores of dying primordial stars, combined. It's not far away, so don't miss it.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Happy New Year, everybody!

All in all, I'm quite pleased with how things have turned out for Pointless Side Quest in 2011 and hope to increase my output in 2012. I hope you've enjoyed reading it, and will continue coming back here. I wanted to start this year off on a positive note by thanking some people who have helped this blog in one way or another. Some names have been truncated to protect the innocent:

My friends JT, Kevin, Dave, Peter, Lecester, Cheryl, and Catherine. Especially Lecester, since without him the idea for this blog would most likely never have even occurred to me.

Midnight and Toshi.

All of my other friends, who know who they are.

My family.

Dr. B and the other Kevin.

T and F.

Damon, Jay, and Elena at Boomtron, Dan, Corey, and Nick at Robot Geek, and Sam and Matt at Kuribo's Shoes.

People online who have helped me in one way or another: Jacob, Danny, Jim, Daran, TB, Jeremy, Alfonso, Keisha, the other Peter, and everybody else.

My beloved Unattainable Bar Chick, for her unfailing friendliness, kindness, waitressing and bartending professionalism, willingness to laugh at my stupid jokes, and Velma Dinkley/Lisa Loeb-esque hotness. You were always far nicer to me than you had to be, and were the brightest spot of my week whenever we spoke. I always knew that I would never tell you how I felt about you, but you made me wish I could have. Thank you, and best of luck with everything.

(Readers are encouraged to imagine a voice-over of me saying that while I stand in solemn, dignified silence and a single manly tear rolls down my face like at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3. The resulting mental image will be wildly inaccurate, but I endorse it as the official, canonical version nevertheless.)

And, of course, everyone who takes the time to read Pointless Side Quest or my writing on other sites. I tend to be pretty useless trying to express myself with spoken words when I'm face-to-face with people unless it's with folks I already know well, so being able to do so by writing online is very precious to me, and so is knowing that someone is actually reading it.

Thank you all. 2012 will be Pointless Side Quest's best year yet!

Kuribo's Shoes and Pointless Side Quest, crammed into uncomfortable proximity at last!

Just a quick announcement: In addition to stuff written specifically for this site, I'll soon start cross-posting some of my articles from Kuribo's Shoes here at Pointless Side Quest as well. They're somewhat different from what I write here, since at Pointless Side Quest I at least try to discuss actual video game news and mostly limit the parts where I I just make shit up outright to throwaway jokes, while at Kuribo's Shoes blatant lies* are the very clay from which everything is built, but if you enjoy what I've posted here in the past you'll probably like these too, and Kuribo's Shoes in general. (See my previous posts here and here.)

*(Except the one about Mega Man becoming an embittered twice-divorced cocaine fiend. That one's completely true, sadly.)

Speaking of Kuribo's Shoes, the site is currently running a small online fundraising drive to raise funds for better web hosting, which will make it possible to create a bigger, better site with the sort of exciting new features that you only get on a website that isn't hosted on a server in rural Belarus that goes offline every time fluctuations in the price of kerosine force them to shut down the generator that keeps it running. I I have been assured by sources in whom I have a reasonable degree of confidence that the bulk of money donated will not be going up Matt's nose.

But, in all seriousness, if you like the sort of stuff I do here and the sort of material at Kuribo's Shoes, please consider chipping in. Supporters also receive some snazzy benefits including the ability to plug whatever link you want in a special post we'll have on the site and getting to appear side-by-side with our own golden tones on an episode of the future Kuribo's Shoes podcast.

 

Or don't. Go ahead and break my heart. See if I care.

Coming soon

Hey, all. My apologies for my recent dearth of posts; I've had business elsewhere tying me up lately. I've recently become a writer at the gaming site Robot Geek, which I heartily recommend to you. I've also been getting my other site, science fiction review blog Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic, up and running again after its hiatus.

Fortunately, this blog is about to pick up its pace again, so if you've been suffering from nausea, tremors,  hallucinations, impaired memory formation, or any other withdrawal symptoms, relief is at hand. Among other things, I'll shortly be starting a weekly feature looking at some of the games coming out each week. The purpose of this is twofold:

1. It gives me a chance to throw together lots of jokes and topics that aren't long enough or funny enough to justify a full post themselves. (Thus freeing me from my previous constraints , which limited me to only those that weren't funny enough.)

2. It provides an excuse to link to lots of games, now that the commission money I made when some guy bought Batman: Arkham Asylum through an Amazon affiliate link last year has almost run out and I find myself facing the prospect of having to give up the luxurious lifestyle those funds have made possible.

 

So, don't go anywhere. I mean that literally; just remain at your computer until the next post appears. There's probably some condensation on the nearest window if you get thirsty.

Pointless Side Quest turns 1

It's hard for me to believe, but this past Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of Pointless Side Quest. From its humble beginnings Pointless Side Quest has become a colossus of the blogosphere, drawing threes of readers each and every day.

At times like this, it's only fitting to take stock of the past. Cue up the schmaltzy romantic flashback montage ballad of your choice as we look back on a year that brought us:

My groundbreaking proposal for what promises to be the hottest game yet in the ever-popular "God of War clone based on Macbeth about fighting an army of genetically engineered monstrosities in a steampunk alternate-history 19th-century Scotland" genre!

A chilling look into Mario's secret world of underground blood sports, drug smuggling, medical fraud, and gangland brutality!

The most terrifyingly evil artificial intelligence since Ro-Man!

Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and the phrase "time-traveling Otacon in drag," in the same sentence at last!

The day Fist of the North Star opened my eyes to a new world of crudely pixelated, ludicrously violent entertainment!

Ill-fated attempts at legitimate commentary!

Final Fantasy brings us an epic saga of childhood orthodontia-related emotional trauma, those obscenely expensive bags of nuts sold at hotels, and Cloud Strife's dark and tragic history of minimum wage recreational facility employment!

Sentient talking birds who sell insurance and challenge our rigid binary conceptions of gender!

A cavalcade of middle school-level jokes about topics including, but not limited to, porn, women's sanitary products, venereal disease, constipation, sexual aids, and much, much more!

My inexplicable recurring fixation on regicidal 17th-century statesman Oliver Cromwell!

My ability to enjoy Christmas, Star Wars, or Bea Arthur is destroyed forever!

Illegal drug use!

Subtle, tasteful discussion of EA's subtle, tasteful marketing for Dante's Inferno!

Crude sexual objectification!

Crude 19th-century anti-Irish propaganda!

A ten-year PlayStation 2 retrospective that degenerates into a distasteful anecdote about the time I became violently ill playing Half-Life!

Quite a year, indeed.

2009: A year in childish mockery

It's been a satisfying first year here at Pointless Side Quest. From humble origins, the blog now draws threes of readers every day. Before we move on to 2010, I'd like to take a look back at some of my favorite Pointless Side Quest moments of 2009:

Horrific violence with edged weapons!

Rambling, barely coherent attempts at serious, legitimate commentary on gaming!

Cloud Strife's epic struggle with malfunctioning bowling equipment!

The nightmarish and most likely drug-fueled landscape of Illinois insurance advertising!

Star Wars, Bea Arthur, and Jefferson Starship, together at last!

A veritable ocean of smut, vice, and depravity!

The first and, God willing, last time the words "William Pitt the Younger" and "time-traveling Otacon in drag" appear in the same sentence!

Fist of the North Star confronts the bowel-dissolving horror of Miller Chill!

Crude ethnic stereotypes!

And, of course, picking on Dante's Inferno over and over and over again! (Incidentally, has anyone else checked out the demo? It's sort of what the God of War series would be like if the design document for the first God of War had been the notebook doodlings of a 13-year-old boy trying to think of ways to shock his mom.)

I'd like to thank my friends and associates Lecester Reed, JT Molloy, David Lanzafame, Kevin Folliard, and Kelly Goldston for their input when I started to seriously consider doing this blog. I'd especially like to thank Lecester for helping me decide on the name "Pointless Side Quest" by talking me out of my (ill-conceived, in retrospect) original plan to call the blog "Baron Heinrich von Markley's Fantastickal Video Funatorium."

Thanks also to:

The guys at Wrestlecrap.com, who inspired my love of the phrase "Speaking of..."

Everyone who has linked here.

My beloved Unattainable Bar Girl, waitress and occasional bartender at the local bar I frequent, for her friendliness, professionalism, and Shion Uzuki/Yomiko Readman-esque hotness in the face of several years of my poorly executed attempts at conversation. She's sort of like the Beatrice to my Dante, though hopefully my unrequited infatuation will never spawn a God of War knockoff that looks like it was designed by Beavis and Butthead.

And, of course, everyone who's read the blog so far. If you want to keep up with Pointless Side Quest, you can subscribe to the blog's feed, follows me on Twitter, or join the blog's page on Facebook. Happy New Year, everybody!

A chilling vision of things to come

In my intro post to this blog, I promised/threatened that I would occasionally include some actual serious commentary on video games to balance out the pointlessly obscure references, sniggering 3rd-grade humor, cruel mockery, and outright lying that usually fill this space.

To that end, I’ll be doing a series of occasional posts on games I’ve recently completed. I don’t expect them to be systematic or objective enough to be considered “reviews” in any proper sense; it’ll just be whatever thoughts about the game come to mind. So, when I do a post on Battlefield: Bad Company and interrupt my discussion of the various multiplayer modes to go on an 8,000 word rant about how the four soldiers who serve as the protagonists in the single player campaign are consistently referred to as a “squad” even though in the U.S. Army the four-man unit portrayed in the game is more properly called a “fireteam” and a squad is actually comprised of two such fireteams and seeing the terminology wrong just makes me SO INCREDIBLY ANGRY, don’t say you weren’t warned..

I have a bit of a backlog of older games I still want to play, and I’m generally not in a huge hurry to get games as soon as they come out unless there’s some sort of really cool preorder incentive (e.g. many of Atlus’ games) or I’m worried about having trouble finding a copy later (again, Atlus). So, when I start talking about this cool game I just beat called Keith Courage in Alpha Zones and post my treatise on what it might mean for the future of the Turbografx-16… Well, again, you knew what you were getting into.

My first post in this vein will be about Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 from Atlus. Gird your loins while you still can.

It begins!

My name is John Markley. Last year, I started writing a humor/news column for Lecester Reed’s currently (and I hope temporarily) inactive site, the Diverse Nerd Association. The format was elegantly simple- mention video game-related news, make ostensibly humorous and frequently rather mean-spirited remarks about video game news, repeat.

I’ve missed having that outlet, and my attempts to find alternate targets for my bitterness, sarcasm, and lifetime of barely-repressed hatred have resulted in a number of interpersonal problems, misunderstandings, and a narrowly averted gangland-style execution, so I’ve started this blog to do some more writing about games in that same vein, posting on gaming news as it comes up. I may also have some more serious things to say on games from time to time, and perhaps a few posts on my other interests.

My first experiences with video games were on my cousin’s Atari 2600. I got the NES a few years later, and have been a devoted gamer ever since. At the moment, my systems of choice are the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, and PC. My favorite types of games are RPGs, strategy games like Europa Universalis or Master of Orion, and space flight simulators, though I play other stuff too. I don’t have an Xbox 360 and have never even played the Wii. However, I believe those who write about video games should aspire to the same standards of ethics and quality as mainstream journalism, and so I am quite comfortable making authoritative-sounding statements on subjects I know absolutely nothing about.

Stay with us at Pointless Side Quest, where we’ll be bringing you:

The hottest gaming news, a mere 3-5 business days after it appears on Kotaku!

Ridiculously self-indulgent references to ancient history, personal stories, and pulp science fiction that amuse no one but me!

The scintillating literary stylings of a man whose writing experience comes primarily from newspaper articles about zoning board meetings!

The diverse array of embarrassing typographical errors and bizarre malapropisms that only someone using cheap voice recognition software in a noisy room can provide!

And joke after childishly filthy and/or impenetrably obscure joke!

So, stick around.