What I’ve Been Playing – September 2018

It’s already October, holy cow. Well in case you hadn’t noticed I’ve been a little busy in September as I launched my first podcast Make Me A Gamer with my pal Harvey Z. As such I haven’t had as much time to write articles – I’ve also been kind of saving some of the more interesting topics that I would normally write about for discussions on the podcast. So please check it out – all four episodes so far are available here on this site as well as on Apple, Google, and Stitcher Podcast apps.

But since it’s October, it’s time for another update on what I’ve been playing! There’s not as much this month – a majority of my gaming time was taken up by Spider-Man which I already wrote a full review for here. But what else did I play? Well I dabbled a little into Destiny 2 since it was free for PS+ users this month in hopes people would then get addicted enough to buy the new expansion. I also jumped back into Fortnite for a bit thanks to the new season 6 launching. On PC I played a lot more of Into the Breach and Audiosurfed for a little bit. And on Switch I finally tried out Breath of the Wild – a year and a half after the hype died down.

So what did I think about all these games? Let’s find out!

Continue reading “What I’ve Been Playing – September 2018” →

Episode 4: Internal Taco Trucks

On this week’s episode of Make Me A Gamer, TMan and HarveyZ briefly discuss the Overwatch League expansion teams and Valve’s upcoming card game Artifact. Then we experiment a little bit with format as TMan tells HarveyZ the story of the rise and fall of 38 Studios. (This episode was recorded September 8th.)

**NOTE** There was a minor recording error for this episode and we lost about 20-30 seconds of audio at the beginning of the 38 Studios discussion. Thankfully, it was just me explaining how Curt Schilling named his studio 38 Studios after his number from when he was a pitcher. So there you go – that’s all that was missing and hopefully the edit doesn’t seem to abrupt. Thanks for listening!

Episode 3: You’ve Gotten Shivved, Too?!

In this episode of Make Me A Gamer, TMan and HarveyZ discuss the controversies leading up to the Spider-Man game along with a few games they’ve been playing like Into The Breach and Candy Crush but with Vikings. And Harvey Z tells a story about an early experience with an arcade tough guy. (This episode was recorded September 1st.)

What I’ve Been Playing – August 2018

As September is upon us and the great rush of big fall releases starts, I figured it would be a good time to sit down and talk about what I’ve been playing during the month of August. I think I’ll start doing this as a monthly effort at the beginning of each new month in order to talk about games I’ve been playing that I haven’t had a chance to do a full review for. It’ll allow me to talk about more games instead of having to dedicate a full review to every game.

So what have I been playing in August? Well after rebuilding my PC and upgrading it so it can handle more recent games I’ve booted up XCOM 2 and started messing around with mods for it – including the official Long War 2 mod. I’ve also been playing Into the Breach and I dipped my toes into the PC Overwatch pool – having been playing strictly on the PS4 for the last two years. On my Switch I’ve been occupied with the new roguelike Dead Cells, and on my 3DS I’ve been played the rerelease of the JRPG Radiant Historia. Finally on PS4 I’ve finally started playing Life in Strange after swearing I’d get around to it for a while.

That’s the summary – so now let’s go into a bit more detail!

Continue reading “What I’ve Been Playing – August 2018” →

E3 Breakdown Part 2: The Games

Hello and welcome to part 2 of my E3 extravaganza! I’m only a month late, which isn’t too bad, right? I apologize for the lateness of this continuation – I was very busy after coming back from E3 since I ended up moving into a new place recently so I just didn’t have the time and energy to sit down and finish my write-up until now. But here we are!

In this blog post I’m going to discuss all the games that I got to play at E3. I know I said I would also discuss what I was looking forward to after the E3 conferences as well, but the write-ups for all of the games I played went on for a little longer than I initially expected so I’m only going to be talking about the demos I played for now. I may do a part 3 about the E3 conferences, but I have other more timely topics I’d like to talk about first so we’ll see if I get to it.

So here we go! Let’s talk about some games!

Continue reading “E3 Breakdown Part 2: The Games” →

E3 Breakdown Part 1: The Expo

Last week I went to E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo) for the first time. A lot of people in the gaming world associate E3 with the developers’ press conferences and that’s what sticks it people’s minds: trailers and gameplay for new games, release dates being announced, etc. The press conferences happen before the actual expo, though – this year there were press conferences on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (along with Nintendo’s on Tuesday morning) before the expo itself opened to press Tuesday morning and then to the public who had bought tickets Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday through Thursday both media and enthusiasts were able to wander the halls of the LA Convention Center and play all the hottest upcoming video games.

This hasn’t always been the case, though. In fact, up until last year, E3 was a media-only event. 2017 was the first time that people who weren’t a part of gaming press or associated with the industry were allowed to attend the expo. There’s was an experiment in 2016 called “E3 Live” which was a separate event – the public could attend (for free) a separate event where games were available to play, but the main E3 was still closed off from them.

As a person who has followed the E3 press conferences for many years and has also attended some other different conventions related to gaming (including MAGFest, RTX Austin, and PAX West) I felt like it would be fun to actually attend E3 this year and write about it. After all, who knows whether they will keep E3 open to the public in the future. So for this first article, I will be discussing the E3 event itself and how it felt to be on the floor. I will post a second part later this week that talks about the games specifically that I played along with other trailers I’m excited for.

Continue reading “E3 Breakdown Part 1: The Expo” →

Heavy Rain Is Bad

On Friday the newest game by David Cage and Quantum Dream arrives – Detroit: Become Human. It’s a theoretically interesting game that explores three different perspectives in a futuristic sci-fi world where androids walk among humans. It will likely cover the usual sci-fi tropes of whether artificial beings are actually people and I can understand why people could be excited by this. Especially since the game boasts many different branching narrative paths including the possible deaths of all your characters.

I’m personally avoiding getting the game (at least for now) due to a multitude of reasons. First off, Quantic Dream is rumored to be a bit of an awful workplace. There’s been accusations of racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior from people in charge, along with unhealthy forced working conditions. David Cage himself is an egoist who is rumored to asked to be called “God” and “Sun King” by his employees. While Cage and the studio executives have denied this and sued the media for covering the story, these rumors came from several different sources and I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt, and thus my enthusiasm for giving Cage money is limited.

The other reason is that, well, the game I have played of his – Heavy Rain – sucks. When you break the game down, it’s just not a good game. I didn’t always have this opinion – in fact I raved about Heavy Rain after I finished my first playthrough of it. However as time has passed and I’ve looked back on the game, I’ve come to realize that the game itself is pretty terribly designed and a decent analysis of it can help unlock the so-called Sun King’s psyche.

(Spoilers for the entirety of Heavy Rain will follow – so if you haven’t played it and don’t want to be spoiled, don’t continue. Otherwise, read on.)

Continue reading “Heavy Rain Is Bad” →

Pacifism in Video Games

A few weekends ago I was playing Fortnite while a friend of mine was visiting (the wonderful Harvey Z who frequently guest stars in my YouTube videos). He’d never played Fortnite before and after playing it myself for a bit I let him take the reins on my PS4 because Fortnite is very casual play friendly – there’s no ranking and no stats to skew, so turning my controller over to a completely new player was not going to be detrimental to me in the slightest (another point for the accessibility of the game).

His strategy was very specific – he tried to stay out of combat as much as possible. When he discovered that there was a bush item you could use to become even more stealthy, he was all about the Bush Victory. In one run, Harvey made it all the way to 3rd place in a solo royale without killing anybody. He stuck to his pacifist gameplay pretty regularly (partly because he didn’t trust himself to be good at the combat with a PS4 controller, but also because he was determined to get a pacifist victory) and usually was able to get fairly far into the tournament by simply avoiding the high encounter areas.

I myself got my first Victory Royale in Fortnite last week with the introduction of the Thanos solo mode. I succeeded in finishing Harvey’s strategy – when it was just me (as a bush) and Thanos left, I was able to hide and outwit Thanos and he ended up killing himself. I was awarded a victory without having killed a single person the entire match. It was pretty awesome – but it is also not what people want to see in Fortnite. They want to watch big plays and showmanship – like rocket rides into 360 sniper no scope headshots. Pacifists are the “boring” players – despite the fact that my Victory Royale counts the same as one who racks up 10 kills in a match.

Continue reading “Pacifism in Video Games” →

Review: God of War

I finished God of War about a week and a half ago. I started trying to write a review for it but ended up with an immense case of writer’s block, which struck me as weird because I really, really liked the game. So I shelved the review and stepped back to think about why I was having issues writing it out. And the writer’s block basically creeped into all writing as I just sat and stared at the computer screen any time I attempted to write for the last week.

What I finally realized was that I was trying to contextualize my review and base it off of my pre-God of War post – which you can read here – and trying to discuss all the things I brought up in that post and that was not only overwhelming me but it was causing me blockage (heh heh) because I didn’t know where to begin or how to approach all the issues. So instead I’m just going to review the game like I would normally and maybe touch on a few things here or there related to my initial musings on the game before I actually got my hands on it.

There will be some mild spoilers on early game story beats in the review, so if you aren’t a few hours into the game and care about those sorts of things this is your last chance to abandon ship. For the rest of you, let’s begin!

Continue reading “Review: God of War” →

Rampage Against the Video Game Movie

In 1995, Paul W.S. Anderson directed Mortal Kombat, a movie based on the popular video game. In the 23 years since the CGI has become dated and none of the fight scenes have aged particularly well – the choreography isn’t bad but isn’t anything to write home about either. Its most high profile actors – Christopher Lambert and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa – both have very hammy performances and none of the other principal actors really had breakout careers. Since then, technology for both video games and movies have improved and video games have more and more interesting stories to tell. And yet, despite all that, Mortal Kombat is still generally regarded as one of the best video game movies ever made and possibly the best of them all – by video game players at least.

These past two days I saw both Rampage and the new Tomb Raider, and I can tell you that neither of them will come close to the best video game movie ever made. Neither of them were the worst video game movie ever made either – I’ll get to what holds that title later on – but they were sufficiently bland enough to knock themselves out of the running to be a favorite.

So why is it that video game movies have such a bad rap? Movies that are based on books, or comics, or TV shows, or pretty much any other form of entertainment – they can turn out well. But when you add “based on a video game” to a movie there’s going to be a loud groan and a fierce rolling of the eyes. It’s almost expected for video game movies to be bad, and people are “pleasantly surprised” when they’re “not awful.” But why? Well, I’m going to dissect Rampage and Tomb Raider and hopefully provide a little insight as to how Hollywood keeps making clunkers out of possible interesting storylines.

Continue reading “Rampage Against the Video Game Movie” →