Category: Opinion

Green Lanterns rebirth: Rage Planet

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Over the past few years I’ve been watching how DC’s rebirth has been going and finally I took my first step in with the newest Green Lanterns series, following the adventures of new Green Lanterns, Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz.

Baz, a troubled, arrogant young Muslim found himself in deep trouble with the government only to be rescued by the fabled Green Lantern ring; Cruz is a young woman who had fallen victim to depression, anxiety, and Agoraphobia after a tragedy befell her. Both are assigned to protect Earth by legendary Lantern Hal Jordan, but when he notices the friction between the duo, he assigns them the same power battery, forcing them to work together. What could go wrong? A exiled, fugitive Guardian finds his way to Earth searching for Jordan, finding his way to Baz’s family with a powerful weapon that can potentially dwarf the Green Lantern’s ring. But this event gets swept aside when the Corp’s nemesis and Red Lantern leader Atrocitus plans to unleash Red Dawn on the Earth, infecting the world with rage. Can these rookies work together, get a grip on there powers, and stop the rage?

Rage Planet is a good start for DC rebirth as well as for a Green Lantern or comic fan. Baz and Cruz are solid characters I found relate-able, especially Cruz who struck a note with me. Atrocitus has some awesome moments and some depth to him that makes him one of my favorite Lantern characters. It’s a good start up story and I’d say its well worth a read for fans and readers new to comics. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

 

Yu Gi Oh!: The Dark Side of Dimensions (2017)

After a long hiatus, in 2017 Yu Gi Moto returned to theaters in the 2017 movie The Dark Side of Dimensions. The movie took place about 3 years after the original series, after the duel between Yu Gi and the Pharaoh that left Yu Gi alone and without the puzzle and the Pharaoh back in his rightful place.  An old prophecy has come to pass have and the Plana have received a magical power that will allow them to reshape the world into a better place free of evil. As we know however absolute power corrupts absolutely,

The movie will see Kaiba attempt to reconstruct the Millennium Puzzle so he can finally defeat the Pharaoh in a duel which will cause Diva of the Plana to attempt to stop him and kill Yu Gi so the power of the Plana will be safe forever.

The movie is well done and has something for fans that wanted something new but also gave fans what they also wanted, which was a duel with Yu Gi and Kaiba as well as new monsters, one of my favorites was Deep Eyes White Dragon.

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Tho Gandora-X The Dragon of Demolition was pretty cool as well.

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The movie did an amazing job demonstrating that Kaiba is obsessed with something to the point of almost insanity. That obsession also brought back old enemies long since forgotten and defeated and are more dangerous than ever. For Yu Gi Oh fans this may very well be the definitive movie and ending they always wanted. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Valthirian Arc Hero School Story (PS4)

Valthirian Arc Hero School Story is a cute and fun idea that is home to one of the worst design choices I have ever come across. We will get to that later tho. The game itself puts you in the shoes of a school principal with the responsibility of building a school and training heroes for the queendom. The queendom consists of one High Queen and five lower Queens, tho as you would assume the High Queen dies and you must find her one heir as the place is thrown into chaos.

The game is fun and easy to control, and there are 2 types of quest, errand quest which you send your students on and quest you send your quest on that you control. Each quest will take a set amount of weeks, but here is where the worst design choice ever comes in. If you send all of your students on errand quest, there is no way to speed up time. You have to sit there and wait for time to pass, slowly. It took over 30 minutes for a few weeks to pass with nothing for me to do except watch the screen. Nothing to build, nobody to control. Just wait. Now, this is easy to avoid obviously, simply send one set of students on errand quest while you yourself control a different set on a quest you control. The weeks will pass no problem, but do not send all your students on an errand quest because you will regret it.

The game is quite interesting and while not 100% original, it isn’t something you see often and it is refreshing to get a taste of it. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 first impressions

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As is customary, I’m starting this semi review with a shout out to my friend Autobot who played what I did. Always awesome dude.

First things first, there isn’t a campaign which brought on a lot of rolled eyes and angry fans. This is strictly multiplayer. Essentially the game boils down to three major game types: the pretty common, fast paced, multiplayer modes COD is famous for by now,  the zombie stuff people love, and the battle royale shit because well…Fortnite. We didn’t touch zombies, hence why I call this a semi-review, but I played a good half a dozen matches or so in the other two- enough for a good feel.

For the standard multiplayer, much of it feels like it did in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 without the wall running and the super slide. The guns handle nice and it’s easy to die, but this time there is a med injector feature much like Battlefield: Bad Company   in which adds a little spice to the matches. The maps are a little wider than my previous experience and a little strategy can go a long way but ultimately it comes down to reflexes and the guns you’re packing. They pulled back on the specials from 3, now if a player uses them it doesn’t feel as game breaking, and thank god they ditched those pain in the ass wheels from 3.

Battle Royale plays almost exactly how Fortnite does. There’s a pre-game screw off, you jump off onto a island that looks pretty much like a twin to Fortnite’s and let the games begin. I always liked the concept of Fortnite but never liked the actual gun play  but I have to admit I personally believe COD fixes the problem. Matches are challenging but the gameplay is crisp and well done in COD fashion. I think the storm bubble could close in faster but it’s not a huge complaint.

From what I played, I can say there is a surprising amount of fun to the game but not $60 worth. 30 I would think about it but I can’t evade a empty feeling with it and I’m sure Activision will beat more maps and such out of us with DLC and such. May the gaming gods bring us glory.

Europa Report (2013)

Europa Report is a fictional story of a manned mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it should be noted it is based off the actual idea that many scientists have and one simple question that again many real-life scientists ask. Is there life on the moon Europa? Obviously, I am not going to answer that question, how the hell would I know? I am just a blogger with an interest in science that picked this movie because of what it was about. So how does a movie such as this stack up? Well much like the mission in this movie it mostly misses its mark.

The movie starts off slow, and I do mean slow. This wouldn’t be so bad but it tends to skip around without warning and without explanation. At one point I thought I accidentally restarted the movie because it skipped back and it was very similar to an earlier part.

The movie also never really speeds up, this wouldn’t be so bad, however, this time isn’t used to make you care about the characters. Not to say the time is wasted, they use it to push how important the mission is which isn’t bad, but really we know it’s important, anyone watching the movie is watching because they love this sort of stuff.

The movie also doesn’t speed up or get interesting until the last 20 minutes or so. Now I will admit, this end portion of the movie is quite amazing. In fact, I won’t even spoil that for you simply because of how amazing it is. It gets exciting, the pay off of the trip is finally found you start to wonder how it will all turn out and even start to see how they will get out of these problems. Scientifically speaking they also do a solid job of making things sound good. That being said, that ending is only worth it for huge fans of science and space. your average person should avoid this movie. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Omen Of Sorrow (PS4)

Omen Of Sorrow is an old-school 2D fighting game that honestly I did not have high expectations for. It kind of looked like a sort of Killer Instinct clone which really probably wouldn’t play very well, but it did look pretty awesome at the very least. Here is the trailer so you can see what I mean.

When Aone Games gave me this one to try it out, which I am always grateful for I figured I would stream it and give my impressions live. For those that watched you saw me jump right into an online battle and get annihilated. After that, I jumped into the Arcade mode, picture a sort of Mortal Kombat Tower experience where you pick a character and fight your way through opponents. This mode went much better on the I didn’t get killed.

After this, I was encouraged to hit the story mode. The story mode will see you going from character to character as you attempt to discover the secrets behind what happened behind a village of monsters. I won’t go into this but the chat agreed the story was quite compelling and interesting, with some planning to buy the game themselves.

That being said the characters are quite varied and based off the lore of monsters and more with characters such as Imotep and Quasimoto. There is a werewolf and a vampire and more. The characters are beautifully designed and control nicely, each with their own moves and personalities to go with them. In fact, my only real complaint here is the voice that says the characters name and introduces the rounds. She seems disinterested and out of place to me more than anything.

Now the reason you are all here, should you buy this, or simply move on to something else. Truthfully for a fighting fan, this is a good buy, the game could use a few more characters but in a world dominated by high profile fighting games, it is hard for a newcomer to enter the arena. Mortal Kombat and Injustice basically have the genre on lockdown with DBZ right there. Omen of Sorrow isn’t perfect, but it is the best 2D fighter to come along in many years and it is nice to see a fresh face that is fun to play. 8/10. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Volcanoids (PC Preview)

The other day I am sitting at home, wallowing away self-pity and despair,which actually means I was sitting around bored waiting for dinner to get done. That is when I got a text from my friend over at gamingwithnoobs. He tells me he got an Alpha code for this game called Volcanoids. We toss stories back and forth but he usually isn’t so excited about telling me about games I have never heard of so this alone makes me take notice. So I looked up the trailer, which you can see below.

As you can see the game is a survival game, much like 7 Days to Die or The Forest but with a twist. It takes place in a more steampunk world with a mobile base and a volcano. This is the part that intrigues me. Many times I have built a base and realized its placement is not as useful as it used to be, but it would take to much work to rebuild it and move all my stuff so I simply travel back and forth. Now you won’t have to.

The robots, known as COGs will appear randomly for now, but eventually, enemy diggers will appear that will spawn them and as you take out the diggers, the COGs disappear as well. That will be in the future, however. I tell you that to show you that the people making this game (Volcanoid) have future plans for the game beyond simply making it work.

I have also spent some time on the Discord server, which is quite exciting in itself. I have spoken to both Tomas and Richard a little bit, both of which are the actual developers and they are friendly and willing to answer questions from fans which is always awesome to see. I don’t want to go into more details right now until I see more of the game in action, but this is a game fans of survival will want to keep an eye on. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

R.I.P Stan Lee, a legend

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I’m very sad to say a few days ago we lost a beloved icon in nerd history, the man himself Stan Lee. For those who didn’t know ( how can you not in this day and age, but hey it happens) he was one one Marvel comics earliest writers giving us such beloved heroes such as the X-Men, The Fantastic 4, The Incredible Hulk, Dr Strange, Daredevil and Marvel’s iconic Spider-man. Stan Lee helped revolutionize the way we think of superheroes and villains because him and Marvel were the first to treat them like real people that dealt with real issues: the F4 were a dysfunctional family, the X Men were outcasts in a time of the Civil Rights and several other movements in our country- Magneto was a traumatized holocaust survivor, the Hulk openly talked about the effects of child abuse, and Spider-man was an average teenage geek. Marvel characters were the first to feel like us, people we knew. I once heard Stan Lee say the point was that any of us could be heroes, no matter what and the world was full of them. I took that to heart a lot as a kid.

He’s appeared in so many shows, video games, and of course his awesome cameos in Marvel movies, which sometimes were the best part. I think I speck for nerd kind when I say I don’t what will be harder, seeing Stan Lee’s final cameo with a dedication at the end of the movie, or watching a movie all the way through and knowing he won’t be there.

In closing, I just say be a true believer: believe in the extraordinary, believe you can be extraordinary no matter if your thin, big, small, where you came from, what color your skin is, or even if you’re a chess geek that got bitten by a spider. There is a hero in all of us, even the villains, and we are all people. From Savior and I, rest easy Stan Lee and for those he inspired in his wake- Excelsior!

Cryptract (PS4)

Crytract is a fun JRPG with a full story that is told almost like a storybook with nice graphics, with the classic turned based battles. The story itself is quite solid and concerns a mystical beast and the gameplay itself can be quite entertaining. Here is where the issue comes in, the game is free to play.

Free to play sounds like a good thing considering I just said I just complimented a JRPG, but the reality is it is essentially a pay to win cell phone game on the PS4. Sure you get plenty of free orbs to buy new characters with, but many of the best characters are locked behind “can only be bought with paid orbs” sure the characters you get with the free orbs are useful but against some of the heavier hitting monsters they start to be less desirable. Now the game is less pay to win than many mobile games but the game is greatly designed to get you to spend real money in order to compete in the events. The game is fun and you can grind out and with a little luck get some great monsters, but money makes the world go around. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.