Tag: gaming

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition Out Now

The following is taken directly from The Square Enix press launch Email:

LOS ANGELES, CA (November 5, 2019) – Square Enix® is proud to announce that Shadow of the Tomb Raider™: Definitive Edition is now available digitally and physically at retailers in select countries for the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, Windows PC/Steam®, and the Xbox One family of devices, including Xbox One X, with the Stadia version launching on November 19, 2019. Featuring the base game and all seven post-launch DLC, the bundle gives players the chance to experience the final chapter of Lara Croft®’s origin story with every challenge tomb, downloadable weapon, outfit and skill.

 

Farming Simulator 19 Platinum Edition

As always, full disclosure, the fine folks over at Focus Home Interactive tossed me a review copy of this one and I would like to both be honest about that and thank them for it. Good people over there that are always friendly and I hope this is just the first of many chances to work with them.

I am also a huge fan of the Farming Simulator games, Picked up Farming Simulator 15 randomly on sale for like 8 bucks years ago and fell in love with what I thought would be a boring game, then I bought 17 and that love continued. I never got the chance to buy 19 tho, so when they gave me this edition I was excited to get started. In fact, day 1 of playing I unlocked the trophy for 10 hours on one farm.

That is what this game is at its core, a Farming Simulator nothing more and nothing less. There is nothing else going on here. There are basically three ways to start your farm on the map of your choice, you can be a new farmer, get some basic equipment and a field and this is where I recommend you start. The middle difficulty so to speak will give you a little less stuff some money and the third gives you money and nothing else. You will need to buy everything from scratch and it is sink or swim. It is clearly for the more advanced players. Tho before this, the tutorials are a great idea if you have never played the series. They do an excellent job of showing you the ropes.

After making this choice, I will assume you took my advice, you will need to start harvesting your starter crops, plowing fields, planting new cops and deciding exactly what you want to do on this farm of yours. Are you going to grow some crops, raise animals, chop down trees? The choice is yours and honestly, in Farming Simulator 19 for me, this felt like it was true like never before. I quickly started harvesting wheat to feed my chickens and sunflowers for some profits. I used this to start chopping down some trees while I waited for things to grow.

What started as a trickle of money coming in from two fields became a small creek from 4 fields as I took out some loans and doubled in size and quickly paid those loans off. All this, however, means nothing if the game isn’t fun or looks and sounds bad.

In the sound and looks category Farming Simulator won’t be winning any aways, it isn’t a AAA title after all. It is, however, the best the series has ever looked or sounded, and it is also the best one you will find on the console market. The joy of driving any of these hundreds of machines around is unmatched by anything else in the simulator console market, and even without all the DLC from the season pass, there are so many machines to do so many jobs I doubt I will ever use them all. The options feel limitless.

That isn’t to say the game is flawless. The physics in the world have always been sketchy at best. The number of times I have launched my tractor or truck through the air like Eddie Gordo from Tekken or got a trailer stuck somewhere is a number I never bothered to count, luckily for me the store the machines revert to is close to my farm and rarely causes me any issues. It can also be a pain to line up the bucket or trailers or drop trees in stuff, something that after hundreds of hours into the series I have never mastered and have just accepted I never will.

To close this out tho, the new animals like horses and that you now buy plots of land not just fields is a nice touch but giving this game a number score is a bit rough. If you don’t like this kind of game this one won’t change that, its more farming. If you do enjoy it, this is the best of the best 9/10 must buy. That is honestly the best thing I can tell you on this one, it is worth it for those that enjoy the series or games like it, but if you don’t this isn’t likely to change that. Happy farming my friends, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

SpaceWhip (PS4)

SpaceWhip is a free to play game on PS4 that is quite similar to the old Asteroids game from years ago. You defend a stationary city by shooting aliens from the city. The game looks pretty nice and sounds pretty good for a free to play, and is quite simple for both adults and kids as the description claims.

The game, however, is extremely short and while fun truthfully if I had paid money for this I would have been very pissed off. Don’t get me wrong, since it is free it is worth a playthrough but it won’t take you very long and that is the issue for me. Even for free they could have put some effort into it beyond it being fun for half an hour. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Second Galaxy (Mobile)

Some games just should never be put on a cell phone, and this feels like one of them. The game isn’t actually bad by the way. It looks beautiful and sounds great. It controls just fine with most of it just being you choosing abilities at the push of a button. It just feels like on mobile it is so much more limited than it needed to be. What could have been a wide-open and amazing instead it just felt like nothing special in any way shape or form to me. I played for a few hours and lost interest. Truthfully there is nothing wrong with this game, it looks and plays well and the story is good, I just didn’t enjoy it. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Last of Us Two Delayed Until May

Sadly the rumor was going around and confirmed by Naughty Dog, The Last of Us Part 2 has been delayed from February 21st, 2020 until May 29th, 2020. This was probably done for many reasons tho I have seen some speculate that maybe they just don’t want to compete with other large games coming out around that time. Either way, this is sad news for many of us. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Adams Family Mystery Mansion (Mobile)

Adams Family Mystery Mansion is another game where they took a popular franchise and found a way to take their city, or in this case their home, to pieces and you get to put it back together. This time after a vacation Gomez decides to surprise Morticia by reverting their mansion to how it was before they bought it. Tho their kids and stuff are still inside it when you unlock their rooms.

It also quickly becomes quickly apparent there is quite the cash grab involved. Probably the 2nd character you can unlock basically requires quite a bit of grinding or for you to buy in-game currency. This one just wasn’t fun for me despite the fact that I loved it when they did this with Family Guy and even the Simpsons was quite a bit of fun despite it being a worse game from a technical standpoint.

Truthfully unless you are a big fan of The Addams Family, just skip this one. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Disgaea 4 Complete + (PS4 Review)

Hello everyone, it is that time of again where I give a huge thank you to my friends over at NIS America for hooking us up with a copy of Disgaea 4 Complete +. Disgaea 4 as actually the first game in the series I played so when I heard there was a version coming to the PS4 with everything that has ever been in the game included with updated graphics and sound I just had to have it. So getting to play it for weeks in advance, you have to belive I was more than excited.

To get us started, the story about a vampire named Valvatorez, a vampire that ruled as a tyrant before swearing to never drink human blood. Doing so cost him all his powers, and reduced him to nothing more than a lowly Prinny instructor, possibly the lowest job in all of Hades. However when the Corrupterment starts making life difficult for him and everyone else in Hades and causing the honorable name of demons to be sullied Valvatorez won’t sit by and allow it to happen, so he and his trusty right-hand werewolf Fenrich will recruit an army to set things right.

The gameplay is pretty standard Disgaea. It is a turned based strategy RPG that will see you attempt to outmaneuver and overpower your enemies through the use of magic, skills, and geoblocks that chance the attributes of the squares you stand on. Some are beneficial for you so as upping your attack or defense, others help your enemies in the same way. Some are equal opportunities for whoever is on them while others just make life miserable by warping people around or being impossible to pass them. These can be manipulated tho by moving or destroying blocks. You can even change the colors of squares by destroying different colored geoblocks to damage enemies and suck.

Graphically the game is beautiful, a nice step up from its PS3 release back in 2011. There is a new level of detail to the character models and the levels themselves which is great to see. The sound is also superior to the original release tho none of this is at all surprising considering the substantial time gap and system upgrade.

The game itself, however, has insane replayability, and can actually be as hard as you want. you can beat the game around level 60 or 70 if you want, or you can go all in and level up to level 9,999 and do insane amounts of damage up into the hundreds of thousands. If you want you can create a party of pirates to harass other players in the item world. The item world lets you level up your items to insane levels and increase their powers while leveling up your characters. There are also at least 30 characters to unlock and entire dungeons designed just for the post-game.

Truthfully any fan of Disgaea or strategy RPG’s in general need to pick this one up, the game is a solid 9/10 and I will be playing it for a long time to come. Best wishes, may the gaming gods bring you glory, and all is for my lord.

Crusader Kings 3 Announced

For those unfamiliar with the Crusader kings franchise from Paradox, they are almost like Game of Thrones. You take control of a real-world country, get married have kids, make decisions as to what you build or whom to go to war with. Do you want to imprison your wife and kill your nephew to make sure your daughter and her husband get the throne when you die? Feel free. Want to unite Ireland and become the high king? Do it. Turn the world into a Muslim world in retaliation for the crusades? That is on you, the only thing stopping you is, well the rest of the world and your skills. The thing is the history of the world is no longer set in stone, and there isn’t much stopping you from manipulating things or marrying your sister. Check out the trailer below, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.