battle royale – Atma's Weapon

After dancing around it for a good while, on Monday night for the first time I played Fortnite’s battle royale mode. I’ve never played PUBG or any of the other battle royale mods of other PC games, so it was my very first experience with the genre. And I have to say, due to me staying up way later than I should have after playing a good three hours of continuous games – I think I can see the appeal of Fortnite. (And then I played for a few more hours yesterday just for good measure.)

The thing that struck me almost immediately was just how easily I got into it. It’s one of those games that is very friendly to new players – even if you suck at it. I didn’t win a match (and honestly didn’t even come close despite having a few top 10 finishes) but I still had a lot of fun playing the matches. Unlike games like Overwatch where I get frustrated with multiple losses in a row, every time I died early I was easily able to shake it off and immediately requeue without any negative feelings or frustration.

So what is it about Fortnite (and the battle royale genre as a whole) that is so attractive and user-friendly?

Continue reading “Fortnite Fervor” →

So I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus due to a long out-of-country vacation. I wasn’t planning on starting up my blog entries again until next week, but something of a big deal happened last night in the video gaming world and I figured I’d throw up a quick article about it.

Late last night, Drake (yes, the rapper/singer/gif star Drake) casually dropped on Twitter that he’d be playing some Fortnite with a popular Twitch streamer named Ninja. Over the course of the stream Drake learned what Discord was and installed it, got carried to a Victory Royale by Ninja after he accidentally died (although he did survive pretty long in that particular match), and oh, Ninja’s stream broke over 600,000 concurrent viewers, shattering the previous Twitch streaming record of a little under 400,000.

If you don’t follow video games you might not know what Fortnite is or even understand how the battle royale genre craze is sweeping video game culture. But don’t worry, that’s what I’m here for! I’m going to give a brief history of how battle royale became a thing, how Fortnite has suddenly blossomed into a huge phenomenon, and why Drake breaking Twitch is a big deal for the future of gaming.

Continue reading “Fortnite ft. Drake” →