EEEEEEEEEEE! Sports.

The Overwatch League started this past week and it’s kind of a big deal. It’s the first real push to make e-sports into a viable, watchable event in the same vein as regular sports. Normally e-sports are focused around tournaments – a company or organization sponsors a particular team who will work together and compete in tournaments across the globe all year for money and prizes. One organization can sponsor teams for multiple different games – Cloud 9, for example, sponsors teams in Rocket League, Dota 2, Counter-Strike, and Overwatch among others. In certain genres, though, there aren’t teams and it’s just individual players who play at all the tournaments that are hosted at different conventions. Fighting games are a specific example – for tournaments like EVO it’s all individuals who are competing for the prize money.

Overwatch League is an attempt by Activision Blizzard to make e-sports more than just single tournaments that happen across the year. They’re specifically using the popularity of Overwatch as the game to launch their bid into a possible multi-billion dollar sports league that will generate revenue through thousands of fans watching the games. Like regular sports teams, the teams competing in the Overwatch League are based out of particular cities so there are “home” and “away” teams just like other sports. There are owners of teams who are forking up the cash to get the team in the league – Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, is the owner of the Boston Uprising team in the Overwatch League. If that doesn’t make you realize how big a deal this is and just what Activision Blizzard is attempting to accomplish with the Overwatch League, I don’t know what will.

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A Direct Descent Into Memetic Madness

The internet is a weird place which is a given to most people. It’s by design all-inclusive – which means you only have to take a little bit of time to look for something your interested in and then you’ll be able to find other people who are also interested in the same thing. Because of this aspect, all sorts of groups spawn both good and bad. It also results in a weird groupthink that ends up generating movements that can sometimes be weird, but sometimes be powerful.

These movements take life almost by themselves due to the repetitive nature of the internet – especially in the age of social media. The like and share and retweet culture enables ideas and oddities to spread at a pace that’s almost too fast to keep up with. A week-long break from the internet could result in you missing the rise and fall of an entire fad. The #MeToo movement that spawned out of women sharing their stories about sexual harassers is an example of a powerful one. Doge, Grumpy Cat, and Leroy Jenkins are examples of the sillier and weirder ones.

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Help! I’m Playing XCOM 2 Again…

I have a love-hate relationship with XCOM 2. When it was first announced Firaxis gave the pretty strong impression that the game would not be coming to consoles. And that made sense. Despite XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within both being released on consoles, the game was a much, much bigger seller on PC. Most of their sales and profit had come from PC, while the console release was a dud.

So me being a huge fan of the first game, looked into if my PC could handle it. It turned out that my computer met the bare minimum requirements except for the graphics card. So I upgraded my graphics card so it could also handle the minimum requirements, and then waited patiently for release. And in February 2016 I got to play XCOM 2 on my computer!

And it was a mess.

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Top 100 Games of All-Time: #100-91

So here we are. It’s time to start the largest list undertaking I’ve ever done. 100 games. My personal favorites – this is not the most influential or the best made or anything like that. These are just my opinions on my favorite games. I’ve decided from 100-51 I’ll be doing them in ten-game bursts, from then we’ll see. So without further ado, let’s start with #100:

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Review: Xenoblade Chronicles 2

So as of writing this, the in-game counter for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 has me at about 50 hours of playtime. I haven’t finished it – in actuality I just finished Chapter 5 and it supposedly can take close to 100 hours to finish entirely – but I figure 50 hours is a solid enough amount of time to spend with a video game for a good review. And while I can’t say Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a bad game since I’ve spent over two days playing it, it definitely has issues that detract from the overall experience.

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Reference Player One

A little bit ago a full trailer for the Ready Player One movie was released and let me tell you, the resulting discussion from everyone made a whole bunch of old feelings resurface. Namely just how much the book sucked and how awful a thing it is despite its popularity. If you don’t know what Ready Player One is or haven’t heard of it, here’s a quick summary: it’s the future and the actual world sucks, but there’s a virtual world called Oasis where everyone can go and be different people. The creator of Oasis hid an Easter Egg in the virtual world somewhere and whoever finds it inherits control of all of Oasis, so there are people who dedicate their lives to finding this Easter Egg so they can become the world’s most powerful person.

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The Peculiar Future Obsession of Video Gaming

Last Thursday were the Game Awards which are basically the video game version of the Oscars – a selected group of games journalists vote on the best games of different genres released over the year, along with other categories like vocal performances, soundtrack, etc. The Game Awards only loosely resemble the Oscars though as they are a work in progress. From 2003 to 2013, Spike TV produced the Video Game Awards (VGAs) and much like anything you’d watch off of Spike TV it was mostly a trainwreck every year. Spike “cancelled” the Video Game Awards in 2014, which led Geoff Keighley – a games journalist who usually produced and hosted the VGAs – to create and fund The Game Awards on his own. Since this is only the fourth year he’s done it, he is still working the kinks out of the system but it has gotten progressively more professional since Spike stopped being involved. Of course we haven’t reached Oscar level of professionalism yet though – for example, you’d never see this happen at the Oscars, but it sure did happen live last Thursday!

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Top 100 Games of All-Time: Honorable Mentions

I’ve been working on a project for a little while now and while I’m not 100% ready to start on the full scope of it yet, I’m going to go ahead and talk about it now for multiple reasons. One – just to gear myself up into this massive undertaking and by putting it out in public I’ll create some momentum. Two – because nothing else is really jumping out at me to talk about video game wise right at this moment. And three, because I love ranking things.

I’m working on my top 100 video games of all time.

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Overwatch’s Failure at Casual Competitiveness

I briefly touched on the new mobile game South Park: Phone Destroyer in the first post I did for this blog. Since then I’ve put a lot more time into it and I’m actually enjoying playing it a lot. The game itself is a weird tower defense/RPG/beat-’em-up/card collecting hybrid where you, as the New Kid, have a deck of cards that you use with your phone to summon other South Park denizens. Collecting cards and upgrade items allows you to make your cards stronger like an RPG, and the main campaign is a side-scrolling beat-’em up where the cards you summon automatically attack enemies on-screen. If you, as the New Kid, die from enemies on screen, the level ends a la tower defense – but as long as you’re alive you can keep summoning your cards over and over ad nauseum to complete the level. It’s surprisingly fun and engaging for a free-to-play mobile game as one person observing me play it actually said “wow, that looks like it needs attention like an actual game and not a phone game.”

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