Tag: gaming

Override Mech City Brawl: Preview

Override: Mech City Brawl is exactly what it sounds like, a mech brawling game. Over the weekend I was lucky enough to be part of their preview this weekend with Modus Games. I honestly never expect much from mech games. In my experience, they are usually clunky to control lack any real replay value. There are obviously a few exceptions, and I am happy to say Override is one of them. The preview was lacking the arcade and single player modes and focused on beating the crap out of your friends and other people, it also let you add CPU bots into the mix which me and my friend added in a few times. I will add a few videos below so you can see the game in action.

The controls felt nice tho and with so many mechs to choose from I really thought at least a few would feel like just copy and pasted versions of another but I never felt that. Each mech had its own special moves and strengths and weaknesses. Some take more skill than others to master but all are very viable contenders with none being at a particular advantage. This game will absolutely be on my list of games to watch when it releases on PC and PS4. 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.

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.

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.

Epic Dumpster Bear Dumpster Fire Redux (PS4)

First and foremost I would like to thank Log Games for tossing us a review copy of the game. It is always a pleasure to be given the chance to check out a game that a company works hard on making. Now without more waiting, let us check out Epic Dumpster Bear.

The first thing to know is the game is a side-scrolling platformer much like the Super Mario games, in fact, you will be collecting coins, both gold, and red as you make your way through levels.

Epic Dumpster Bear_20181111095018

The controls aren’t perfect but they are more than serviceable for the task at hand. The staples are all here, wall jumps and sliding down walls as well and of course after a few levels you will be able to eat fish heads to do double jumps. For a little childish humour the double jumps are caused by farting.

The one major flaw to this game is the graphics. They are quite honestly not that good, but for the price point of $4.99 I won’t complain or hammer them too hard. Especially since the gameplay goes beyond expectations for a game of that price. The game takes a solid amount of time to beat as well and has numerous bosses. They certainly did not cheap out on this one anywhere else.

Epic Dumpster Bear_20181111094955

Now for the end where I tell you a score and recommend you buy or not. A score is hard to say, I don’t like to compare indy titles to AA titles so obviously, this won’t be compared on the same 1-10 scale as say Red Dead Redemption 2. I wouldn’t feel right comparing a small dev like this to a dev that has tens of millions at a title. For an indy title, this is a 7/10 must buy for any fan of this type of game. They did an amazing job and the only real downside is the graphics and even that is usually much worse when you see games in this price range. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Another Bloodborne 2 Rumor

If you want to read the full story, check out Express.co.uk. The short version is as copied from the article.

Deracine features an item referred to as the Fiona Doll, which contains an interesting nod to Bloodborne.

The item description reads: “A doll of the stone girl Fiona, who appears in the unfinished tale.

“When a person has a bad dream, Fiona appears and helps them flee.”

The doll is also performing the ‘Make Contact’ gesture, which suggests that the Bloodborne tale isn’t over.

Perhaps we’ll see a Bloodborne 2 reveal during The Game Awards on December 7.

Before anyone gets too excited it should be noted that these rumors come around much like New Years, E3 or @torstenvblog sex life. It comes around every year or so and there is nothing you can do about it but at the end of the day it is usually not that special. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

PlayStation Now Is The Biggest Gaming Subscription Service, But How?

Recently PushSquare released an article stating that the biggest market share in gaming subscription services ( not counting things such as Xbox Live and PlayStation Plus) inexplicably belonged to PlayStation Now. You can see even more on that from the people that did the research at SuperData. But how can this be accurate? I have used the service, and it isn’t great. Playstation Now is a solid but flawed and overpriced service against a reasonable and useful Gamepass from Microsoft, tho admittedly it PSnow has more games. So how did this happen? Well, let us try to figure this out.

First, there are a couple things we need to get out of the way. In pure sales alone, not accounting for anything else, there is no console war between Sony and Microsoft because Sony has won this generation. This report is a little dated but as you can see here. We can estimate that Xbox has sold around 30 million units while Sony has sold around 70 million. Obviously, both of those numbers have since gone up but seeing as how Sony has over 2-1 on consoles sales we can see that that gap hasn’t closed significantly.

What this means is Sony has a huge advantage in potential customer base for their subscription market. Now this has recently gone up with Microsoft launching Gamepass on PC so this gap will close as time goes on, but for now, the gap exists.(Sony also has theirs available on PC. The price point also matters as market share is determined as a percentage of total sales in an industry. For example, if you were selling candy bars and your class sold 100 bars for $1 and you sold 1 of those candy bars your market share would be  1%.

Gamepass is (rounding up) $10 and Psnow is (again rounding up) $20 you can see Sony only needs to sell 1 to get the same share as 2 of Microsoft. With what can only be described as a huge advantage in potential customers and twice the price point while it seems highly unlikely, this is how Sony has managed to have a higher market share in streaming service. They simply have a larger customer base and price point. This is also why Sony does very little to improve much of what they have, they are making money at an amazing rate and have no reason in their minds to change. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Red Dead Redemption 2, Another Look.

I did an initial Red Dead Redemption 2 First Impressions and I have to admit, I still haven’t beat the story. Outside of games, I have reviewed and what my friends and daughter have asked me to play I haven’t played anything else, but I still haven’t managed to finish the story. That isn’t to say I haven’t done some great stuff. I have explored a beautiful world, tamed a rare horse, threw dynamite at the KKK, murdered and robbed my way across the entire map and spent hours upon hours hunting.

Quite honestly, the game is most likely game of the year. I can’t imagine a game-winning out over Red Dead Redemption 2. The story so far is amazingly done. The characters are deep, the world is rich and vibrant and each person seems to have their own personality and wants and needs. The game is truly a work of art.

That being said, I won’t pretend the game is perfect. The controls can be a bit weird at times, but mostly they are as I said in the past quite fluid and well done. The aiming while great with the aim assist can also be a bit janky when you attempt to not use the assist. I also still have no idea what happens when your horse dies because they don’t really explain what happens if your horse dies. There are actually a few things the game doesn’t explain very well tho admittedly this was half the fun, just discovering how to do these things.

No, the game isn’t perfect and the online portion isn’t released yet to even comment on. But game of the year? Almost guaranteed. Game of the decade? It’s definitely in the running. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.