Tag: gaming

Kingdom Hearts 3 & Disney’s Controlling Hand

I’ve been playing Kingdom Hearts 3 and it’s been an up and down journey. While on the one hand I’m enjoying the moment to moment gameplay and there have been some genuinely great scenes and events, there’s also been something missing from a lot of the worlds so far.

Kingdom Hearts as a series is ostensibly about being able to interact with the Disney worlds and characters you love. It’s what attracted hordes of children and teenagers to the series when it debuted in the early 2000s. There was something magical about getting to explore Agrabah with Aladdin and swim through the ocean with Ariel.

But some of that magic is missing in KH3. Perhaps it’s because the Disney of 2019 is different from the Disney of 2002, but there is a corporate oppression lurking in the shadows of KH3’s overall design. I just completed Arendelle, the world based on Disney’s Frozen, and it was by far the worst and most glaringly obvious showing of Disney’s influence on the game. And considering I’m a person who hasn’t seen Frozen but was still frustrated with the world…well, that’s saying something.

Spoilers for KH3 Disney worlds and their plots will follow – no spoilers for any overarching KH plots will be in this article.

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TMan’s Top 5: Games In My Steam Library I’ve Never Played

It’s Friday, which means it’s another Top 5 day! I’m still on my self-care week, which means even though these haven’t had a ton of work to them I’m still going to take it kinda easy and do a light-on-the-writing topic for this week’s top 5.

Like most gamers who have Steam, I’ve amassed a library of games through sales but haven’t gotten the chance to play a lot of them. So this week I’m going to be going through my Steam library and picking out the top 5 games I have in my library that I bought but have never actually touched! Enjoy!

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TMan’s Top 5: Worst Robot Masters

Last week I talked about my five favorite Robot Masters from the Mega Man series. Now, as a continuation, we’re going to be starting off February with the five worst Robot Masters! Then I promise to take a break from Mega Man for a while and thrill you with some other amazing Top 5s!

Without further ado, let’s get to those wily Robot Masters!

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Review: Pikuniku

Before I begin, I’d like to say that this is being posted on January 31st, which means I have officially made it through the entire month of January with posting some sort of content on my blog on every weekday. That is an accomplishment I’m very proud of and nobody can take it away from me! Aha!

Now with that out of the way and before I get completely sucked into the thrall of Kingdom Hearts 3, I’d like to focus your attention on this wonderful indie platformer game that I got on the Switch called Pikuniku. Devolver Digital published it and I saw an ad for it via their Twitter earlier in the month. The short minute and a half ad was so charming that I knew I had to get it when it came out.

And I’m really glad I did. It’s quirky and simplistic but amazingly fun. I haven’t quite finished it yet, but from what I understand it’s a fairly short overall experience. But if you’re looking for a quick 3-4 hour game that has a lot of humor and heart I highly recommend this one.

Well, I guess I’m getting ahead of myself and spoiling my own review, but who cares! Pikuniku is great!

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Review: Sid Meier’s Witchersiders Chronicles 3-4-6

Kingdom Hearts 3 comes out tomorrow and it will become the primary focus of my gaming free time for the foreseeable future. Which means R.I.P. to any games I was trying to finish before then. There’s quite a few games I’ve started and put several hours of time into but I haven’t completed. Is there a chance I’ll eventually finish them? Sure. But I haven’t done a full review in a while so I thought I’d combine the games I’ve played but not completed within the last month or so into one big review.

The games in question offer a wide variety of genres – I’ll be talking about The Witcher 3 (about 8-10 hours of play on PS4), Sid Meier’s Civilization 6 (about 10 hours of play on the Switch), Darksiders 3 (about 10 hours of play on PS4) and Valkyria Chronicles 4 (about 20 hours of play on the Switch). An Action RPG, Strategy, Action, and Strategy RPG. Got just about all my bases covered.

I’m going to try and take a slightly different format with this review as I’ll talk about my experiences overall with them – what I enjoyed about them and why I found myself not finishing them or eager to return to them. Most of the reviews I posted last year were games that I really enjoyed and wanted to gush over, while games that I only played for a little bit and didn’t like I ended up not talking about that much. I also fell away from my mini-reviews of what I’d played each month after I got busy during the holiday season – I’ll likely be returning to them in February but I’m not going to bother with January because this mostly covers everything I played (except for one other game which I will also make a review for and will talk about later this week).

Okay, with all that out of the way, let’s talk about games.

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TMan’s 2018 PS4 Stats

So Sony is doing a neat thing for US PlayStation users where they compiled a list of relevant stats for your PS4 playtime. While they’ve stated the data may not be 100% accurate it’s still fairly close to correct. You can check it out here if you want if you’re a US PS4 owner.

I’m posting this as a little bonus to the top 5 since I find this data neat and wanted to share, but don’t want to dedicate a full day just to these stats. Anyway, fun stats after the cut!

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TMan’s Top 5: Favorite Robot Masters

Hello again! It’s the last Friday of January, which means it’s been four weeks of continuous daily updates of some form! I’ve been doing pretty well with my New Year’s Resolution and I appreciate everyone who has been reading and keeping up with everything I’ve written! Next week Kingdom Hearts 3 is dropping which is going to be the first test of my commitment to daily writing since I’m going to want to do nothing but play through that as quick as possible.

But before we get to that, it’s time for another Top 5! This week, after a little bit of deliberation, I decided to dig around and re-explore one of my favorite series of all time – the Mega Man series – and list my top 5 favorite Robot Masters! Enjoy!

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Bandersnatch: Expanding The Gaming Medium

This past weekend my friends and I got together and watched Bandersnatch – the standalone Black Mirror episode/movie on Netflix. It was highly talked about when it released at the end of December last year, but I had put off watching it in favor of making it a group activity. My friends and I had fun playing both Until Dawn and Hidden Agenda (although we all agreed the former was way better than the latter) and this was likely going to be a similar experience.

Bandersnatch was touted as a kind of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure movie where you get to make choices for the protagonist and affect the ending of the episode. It ended up being very similar to a Telltale game or Until Dawn – where two choices were presented to you and you had a time limit as to decide which way to direct the character. The group seemed to have a lot of fun with it and the episode itself was pretty entertaining – over the course of about three hours we managed to see most of what the episode had to offer.

The idea of an interactive story has been around for a while – after all Choose Your Own Adventure as books for kids have been around since the 1980s. However Bandersnatch was definitely targeted towards adults and adds an interesting data point towards the future of interactive media (especially with virtual reality possibly just around the corner). But Bandersnatch’s viewer engagement also intersects with the world of gaming and how they give you choices, and I’d like to take a moment and talk for a little bit about Bandersnatch, games like Until Dawn and Telltale choice-based games, and games like Mass Effect which also offer the illusion of choice.

Since it came out several weeks ago, I’m going to be talking very openly about Bandersnatch, so just as a warning spoilers will follow for the Black Mirror episode as well as some of the games I just previously listed. You’ve been warned.

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Episode 19 – HYGGE!

HarveyZ’s back for a new episode of Make Me A Gamer! After educating TMan on the philosophy of HYGGE! the two talk about the latest Overwatch news & controversies. They also cover the hit new Venmo trend that’s been going around, along with Nintendo officially making Bowsette non-canon, Soulja Boy’s consoles getting pulled off the internet, and Bethesda’s Nuka Dark Rum misfire.  Then they end with a short discussion about board games. (This episode was recorded January 8th, 2019.)

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