Brandon Strader
Blog and Portfolio of Digital Media

The year was 1987... While certain individuals were wasting their time "being born", others were off starting a legacy that would last for generations. I'm talking about the Final Fantasy series, of course. This game was created by Squaresoft in 1987 as a last resort for a failing company, but ended up changing their future. It made the name 'Squaresoft' synonymous with RPGs... The music was created by a man named Nobuo Uematsu. He made all of the greatest Final Fantasy music from FFI to FFX. Right now, he is working… Read More

This is just a quick shout out in support of this really cool game a friend worked on. It's called Kaleidoscope, and it was released on the Indie Games platform on the Xbox 360. I've got to say this is easily the most colorful game I've played on the Xbox, and yes, I have played Beatles Rock Band. The colors are very bright, yet also soft.  It is very easy on the eyes, and for that reason alone, extremely enjoyable. It's a great break from the usual explosions, and break-neck… Read More

This past Tuesday, two big games came out: BioShock 2, and Dante's Inferno. I went with Dante's Inferno, and I am really glad that I did. I enjoyed this game a lot, and I'll probably have a lot more fun with it in the future. The re-playability is insane, and the Resurrection mode (new game+?) will help me max out the rest of my stats and such. I have never read the Divine Comedy, so I only basically knew what to expect from the story. I really enjoyed the… Read More

My parents are insane. Well, maybe not, but there has to be something wrong with them… Read More

I have been a writer on the staff of Maelstrom since Issue #43 in March 2006. Over the years, I've had a really great time writing about a huge abundance of diverse music. I used to spend so much money buying CDs, which has lowered to about 0 to 5 CD purchases a year at this point. Last year, I bought Darkest Hour, Muse, Dream Theater, and that was near the end of the year, but I digress. I've been working on a lot of my own music, so I haven't… Read More

Some of you might remember the website I spent about a week on fairly recently. Well, I got rid of it, and hooked up this blog-type Wordpress thing. I wanted to have the freedom to post stuff whenever I wanted to without editing HTML or anything like that. It's going to have a lot of stuff. I just wrote this little bit because I didn't want to leave the basic "Hello world!" message on here. Hello world! Read More