Do yourself a favor, if you`re thinking about spending six of your precious dollars on this game, don`t. Take your money go find a homeless person and give him your money and get him to tell you a story. The hobo's ranting and ravings will bring you more pleasure than this game ever could. Not only will the transient's tale probably last longer than the mere two and half hours it takes to finish the first episode of the Tell Tale game and not only will you be doing a good deed thus aquiring calmness to your soul but it will be a more enjoyable process than playing this game.
I'm bitter and i have a right to be. We've been waiting 5 years for Minecraft to finally release something that resembles any sort of an ultimate purpose to sinking our lives into Minecraft days at a time. Instead we get nothing more than reading conversation trees and quick time events. This would be the equivalent of asking your parents for He-Man's Castle Gray Skull for christmas only to find an abomination built out of duct tape and pencils by your weird single uncle under the the tree on Christmas day.
I guess I could be to blame here since the tagline of the game is "a choose your own adventure based in the world of Minecraft." It was wishful thinking to hope it would be anything more fun than those shitty schoolastic books from 30 years ago.
The buzz on this game is that it's actually aimed at a younger audience which terrifies me. Somewhere out there are kids building castles and putting their bed exactly enough blocks out of the corner for it to have the proper fung shui and they're thinking to themselves "if only this game got rid of all the building aspects and made me read for a couple hours straight."
Minecraft Story Mode sucks
You don't have to pay money to play Hearthstone
...but you should pay money to play Hearthstone.
Hearthstone is a deck building online multiplayer game staring the characters from World of Warcraft. Each deck contains a hero and 30 cards that you pick from an available pool. Each hero has a class warrior, rogue, preist etc. These classes all have their own cards that include spells and effects on your gameplay and some even have exclusive minions. This gives you a lot of variables to take into concern when building your deck as well as upping the learning curve.
If you read learning curve and just had that mini gamer panic attack we all do when we realize we're getting in pretty deep pretty fast don't worry there is a cornucopia of websites and forum posts dedicated to the minutia of deck building and which cards will help which hero the most. Of course I have looked at these sites exactly no times at all because who wants to do research to play a game. I'll just fail constantly for a while and have irreparable stats as my legacy. After playing for hours and hours it is pretty obvious what type of deck i will be building. My most succesful deck uses the age old strategy of online multiplayer gaming, the cheaper and more obnoxious you play the better you will do.
In fact I built a deck with the only motivation of causing whoever played to me to suffer an anger stroke at just how obnoxiously my cards played out. If your interested, this is my Paladin build. If you don't care or haven't played the game yet skip this part it will just annoy you (mission accomplished).
blessing of might x2 (paladin card)
hand of protection x2 (paladin card)
Humility (paladin card)
redemption (paladin card) (white gem)
shieldbearer (white gem)
holy light (paladin card)
ironfur grizzly x2
raid leader
silverback patriarch x2
truesilver champion (paladin card)
blessing of kings x2 (paladin card)
consecration (paladin card)
hammer of wrath (paladin card)
sen'jin shieldmasta x2
abomination (blue gem)
booty bay bodyguard
darkscale healer
frostwolf warlord
lord of the arena x2
reckless rocketeer
sunwalker (blue gem)
guardian of kings (paladin card)
stormwind champion
The stars indicate rarity of the cards. Don't fret I got these all pretty quickly in the game. there are 5 levels or rarity for cards: basic (no gem), common (white gem), rare (blue gem), Epic (purple gem), legendary (orange gem). It's pretty easy to build competent decks with all basic cards if you want to be a purist since they are all unlocked just by leveling the different heroes up to 10.
Whether they be physical or digital there are a veritable shit tonne of deck building games out there so why should you choose the newest version of Yugi-oh? Well because this is the only deck building game made by blizzard and even though i'm not a honk i do admit that when they finally make a game once every couple of years that game ends up being pretty sweet and literally an amazing amount of fun to play. Hearthstone isn't even done yet, It's still in beta! It's already well polished but it's a fair bet Blizzard is still working away on their genius machines in addiction headquarters making this game better and better every day. The game is free there is nothing to loose so you should play for realz bro.
Yes it is a free to play game. Yes there are in game purchases available and I have heard the lamentations of gamers out there. "I would try Hearthstone but I don't want to pay money to be able to match the other players." I don't want to sound like a Blizzard PR rep but these worries are wrong and you should give blizzard your money anyway. We've all played WOW and we've all payed money to play WOW and we all felt like we got adequate returns on our investment. Unless you didn't play WOW and somehow are reading a video game blog post about a game that is a spinoff of WOW in which case you should go play WOW. Just enough for it to ruin your life and keep you from judging the rest of us who have already been there.
Lets get back to the super interesting financial part. Hearthstone rewards you with packs of cards that you buy for in game gold. 100 gold gets you one pack. You get gold by completing quests or racking up wins streaks in multiplayer. Each pack of cards contains 5 individual cards with at least one being a rare or better. So you can get even the rarest cards in the game by chance and all you have to do is play enough to get a little bit of gold which really doesn't take that long.
Real life actual money comes into the equation because you can buy the packs of cards in various bundles at different prices. They start at $1.50 and the bigger the bundle the more you save. Basically like the vast majority of free to play games you pay money just to save time but since the time investment in hearthstone before you see rewards is minimal it's not really that important. You might get a slight edge by being able to get cards faster than using in game money but it is still up to chance and ironically enough I've gotten a fat goose egg by going this route. Yes that is right I paid $10 to get seven packs of cards and I got basically nothing. All my strongest cards came out of packs that I bought with gold. I'm not urging you to pay real life dollar bills on this method of getting cards instead I urge you to pay to play in the arena.
The arena costs $2 to enter or 150 gold and your deck is random. You start off by picking a random hero class and then the cards come up three at a time and you pick your favorite. The bad effect of the randomness is how hard it is to build a deck that synergizes very well within itself. On the other hand the best part of arena is all the cards are potentially available to your deck so you might get to have a taste of the most powerful cards in the game.
In the arena the more wins you rack up in your three lives the more glorious loot you get. Your drops are varying amounts of gold arcane dust and best of all just for entering you get a pack of cards.
What makes the arena the best play mode in the game is the old school arcade multiplayer feel to it. It's not unlike when you used to walk up to Street Fighter II cabinet in an arcade, drop in a quarter and start working over the computer as dhalsim because you feel quirky today and even though Ken is the best fighter in the game when you want to rack up some victories, you woke up with a case of the fuck arounds and dhalsim's arms stretch pretty effin long and the first time you went to yoga and your arms didn't stretch you got totally bummed out. That's why you should play arena mode on hearthstone because the people who designed the characters in Street Fighter II, although colorful and inventive as they might be, are fucking liars. Did you know that the three skulls around Dhalsim's neck are the remains of children from his village in inda that died during a plague. Now how the fuck do you step against a dude who has kid skulls around his neck?
The super mega ultimate exciting world of micro transaction funded gaming. yay._.
I'm going to use Tiny Tower as an example to conveniently bring up the factoid of it being the first mobile free to play game i played. TT has you construct floors in an apartment building. You gain points by building different business that are essentially a floor in your tower. You also have to make residence floors so you have customers to shop in your sky scraper. The more floors you build the longer you have to wait, in real time no less. This is where the in game currency comes in. You can get rid of the wait time of the floors being constructed.
Instead of closing the game and doing something productive you can get rid of the wait time so you can continue being active in the game while you finish your business call. Business call is code for pooping. I made the term up a few years ago while i was a shift leader at Blockbuster video. "You guys hold the fort i gotta make a business call." See it sounds much more classy than admitting you're going to go into the dank staff washroom to play tiny towers while you dump.
In FF you build an army base and over time you can upgrade your base, defenses and battle units. Your base operates in the same manner as a Real Time Strategy game. You mine for oil and metal to build the tanks and planes you need to attack other players bases. The unique twist is the fact that you pick where your base is set up by putting in your address. The game then uses the street layout in the area of your neighborhood as the layout for your base. This gives the game a nice personalized feel.
Of course the game is just a mobile experience so you can't expect an entirely indepth RTS experience. The game is simplified and streamlined. Instead of having full unit control you pick a drop off point for your tanks around the enemy base. Then your forces roll into the enemy base on auto pilot and wreak havok all the while you can drop bombs via airstrike with pin point accuracy. When you defeat an enemies base you take some of their dog tags but if you loose they take yours. There are leader boards for the world all the way down to your city. Another unique feature is when you are attacked by another player you can get revenge on them and you awarded bonus dog tags for your effort but then they can do the same to you. The more you attack each other the bigger the bonus.
Problem is you never really get anything good without paying real money. Blood Brothers even limits the highest level of monsters to such rediculously high levels of in game currency you're basically left with no other option than to pay high amounts of money for a chance to draw for a powerful monster... Which means even if you do part with your hard earned money you can still get stuck with a shitty mage who has no real influence on your battles and you will end up getting ripped apart in all the PVP fights.
Eventually the frustration will be too much and you'll get sick of these games... all of them. Thanks but no thanks Blood brothers, Hell Fire, what ever that marvel game was called, that shitty transformers game and even Puzzle and Dragons. Yes Puzzle and Dragons is the top of the heap for these games but it's just a shitty stink heap anyway.
I live tweeted Final Fantasy XIII-2
I'm starting final fantasy XIII-2 Pretty slick opening video with some ambient music and a guy carrying a girl into water
shits going down in the opening fmv. Oh damn that's a big spell raining down on enemies. Why is the theme from love boat playing
I only played about an hour into the story of Final fantasy 13 so i hope this one makes sense
Oh great now that i started the game it's the same video with awesome narration "engage in battle and rejoice"
Ugg cinematic button que events are THE WORST they always seem so hamfisted into the gameplay. The battle tutorial is nice though
"Cinematic action. Press x repeatedly" how bout you go fuck yourself and get on with the fight
The bad guy caius is awesome. This game better pull the switch over where he becomes a playable character
Just got 5stars on the first battle. SUCK IT GAME. So if my name's lightnig and i'm in valhalla and i shoot bolts am i a sexy zeus?
Aaaand it doesn't matter because lightning is dead and now i'm controlling her sister serah
Noel has to find serah to change the future which doesn't make sense, lightning is dead in the present so won't she still be dead
This game's story better not get too complex because i'm drinking beers while playing and i'm already lost
Oh nice you get to pick how you control the camera that's big points
Oh if you haven't played ffxiii you can read the datalogue in the menu to catch up. Or not read and screw it i'll take option b
Wtf there's a jump button? I better not have to do any effin parkour while the buildings around me and underfoot crumble
"One more thing, don't ever lay down AND WAIT TO DIE" I fucking love cheesy final fantasy dialogue so much
nice there's a battle element called paradigm shift. You can focus on attacking one enemy with your party each memebr can take one
When your party attacks one enemy you get a chain and enough chains lowers the enemies defence. Shit just got real
Sweet there's a bestiary i can't wait to fight tonnes of enemies and fill it up and then nerd the fuck out
THERE'S DIFFERENT OUTFITS I CAN UNLOCK HELLS YES. i can't wait to get the whatever weird japanese emo one there is.
So your weapon is actually a moogle and when you're done a battle you cuddle it. Perfect victory celebration
I'm wandering around in the night screwing around and there's blaring up tempo viola jazz music wtf.
I'm not sure if it's just weird japanese mannerisms but i think the big tough guy character in the game just had a hissy fit
Great i'm barely an hour in and already i don't know how to get to the next area of the map... stupid jump mechanic
This fucking terrible music isn't helping the frustration any #cheesypianobreakdown
Using the paradigm shift repeatedly mid battle to go from a defensive formation to offensive is interesting but incredibly tedious
Noel's voice over sounds like an over articulated tom cruise
The music is great again sultry saxaphoneis just what I want in an RPG I just never knew it untill now
This game is gender confusion to the max. The guys look like girls and the girls look like 12 year old boys
I think playing this before XIII might spoil the plot of XIII
These conversation trees are just filing me with anxiety. What if I choose the wrong one and don't get a giant sword
I think life would be a lot more hilarious if we all adopted FFXIII-2 body language
Come on it's been over two hours where's my new outfit
The most impressive advancement is the design of the chocobos
And they sqwak like a peacock when you jump. That'll be 20 minutes of added gameplay
Now the dogs in my house are going apeshit because they think there is a peacock outside. Make that 40mins of extra gametime.
That's two cut scenes while I wait to leave the starting area RAAAAAAGE
There's a character named godot and his voice over sounds like a petulant Bruce Campbell AND HE'S NOT A PLAYABLE CHARACTER WTF
Sweet there's a new time travelling element where the more places you go the more places open up so i can literally get lost FOREVER
Turns out you can change which character you have as party leader in battle and exploration. Sorry girl with a bow and arrow I would rahter be the dude with two swords. Have fun questioning the meaning of EVERYTHING while I just smash it all
ARE YOU SERIOUS I CAN ADD MONSTERS TO MY PARTY?! THEY FIGHT FOR ME?! best thing EVAR
The monsters have a special ability that you can use once their battle bar builds up TOTALLY AWESOME the first monster i'm using is a cat and it's special ability does a tenth of the damage as a regular attack NOT COMPLETELY AWESOME
other than the one song i was complaining about earlier the sound track is totes rad. Except when you talk to characters in the game the music stays the same volume, which is off puting
Oh nice my cat monster, which looks like a cross between a grey alien and a mogwai, heals me which makes up for his completely wussyness
Oh nice i found a traveling merchant... who is dressed up in a super sluty chocobo outfit... it's weirdly very sexy... don't tell my mom
Holy crap you can infuse one monster with the skills of another by combining them. This game is going DEEEEEEEEEEP
How is this game still throwing new elements at me. Now i'm stuck inside the temporal paradox and i must solve a dissapearing floor puzzle *gilz*
So far I've gotten two battle achievements and both had vague descriptions. "defeated an army's worth of enemies" How many is that? "fought a significant amount of battles without using retry" Sweet what's the numerical equivalent of significant. I think i just wrote a rap lyric
The best feature of this game so far is the fact that if you don't want to fight a random encounter you can just run past the enemy and skip it
All the characters in this game look like gelflings from the dark crystal
Oh man two gates to choose from do i go for the one out in the open or the one off the main path. Which one will have better loot? For the record i could not read a choose your own adventure book without cheating. THIS IS KILLING ME
So i jump 295 years into the future and the loading screen is only half of thay HEY OOO
I'm in the woods fighting a giant tomato monster
I feel like this is one of those bosses i'm supposed to loose to since i've been fighting him for ten minutes and have only gotten him down about a sixth of his life bar he keeps healing himself and my cat monster keeps healing me. Lets do this i got allllllll night
Thank god for autobattle. Spamming 'a' button
(ten minutes later) I've got a quarter of his life bar down
(22 minutes into fight) Just over half way. If he has an epic attack at low health i'm effed
(26 minutes into fight) Tomatoe monster is down to a quarter health
I died... eff sakes i think i should have levelled up a bit more haha
If i get stuck fighting this bad guy a half hour each time just to repeatedly fail that'll be a game breaker
I levelled up my crystal skill tree thinger so maybe i can beat him this timI levelled up my crystal skill tree thinger so maybe i xan beat him this time
This is that effin tomatoe monster i'm fighting his or her name is royal ripeness which is kinda funny
I BEAT IT... but then i screwed up the button prompts because i was trying to take a picture
Look who brought his big dumb face to help fight the tomatoe. A toqueless snow
Well that wraps up the first six hpurs of my gameplay i should be done most of the tutorials by now right?... RIGHT?!
Ok i looked it up and in the american military a platoon is 26-64 which what i am guessing it would be since i got the achievement pretty early
Ok i found an achievement description it actually is 100 enemies. And the achievements that say a significant amount of ________ is 50 fiddy
I like loot
When I play an RPG my priorties are in descending order are: loot, fighting mechanics, character skills, level design, graphics and last and most certainly least, story.
Don't get me wrong I love a good story but I'm going to be honest I don't pay attention to said story. Really I only talk to NPCs so they can give me clues on where to find the treasure or who to shoot to get treasure. Sometimes they tell me how to advance the story but this is only an indirect tactic that leads me to more booty.
I choose you xbox one
Well it's that time again. Where fan boys and girls pick which of the big two systems they are going to not shut up about for the next six months.
Sometimes it seems like the quicker out of the gate your choice is made the more virulent you preachings will be as is the case with microsoft haters.
I call them haters because a lot of people made their choice in the never ending console war not because they favored one system but instead they decided who had their allegance by who they disliked less.
Sure the xbox one's "always connected" was a disasterous idea and even a common simpleton had to know it would be redacted. It has been redacted almostnimmediately after the xbox one's anouncement. Yes nerds your river of tears at e3 lubricated the decision your cries were heard and now you only have to log on to the internet once a day.
You know what the internet is right? That thing you've had the other end of your umbilical cord hooked up to for the past five years? The thing that only a terrorist would dare ask you to be forced to be in contact with. Those fucking monsters. They did fix it right so are we going to call xbox and say we're sorry?
You're still going to buy a playstation aren't you.
I don't want to pretend to be better than the internet policy alarmists because when it boils down to it i am a xbox fanboy. Have been since i fought the flood in the library of the original Halo and guess what i most likely always will be. In kind, right out of the gate i'm against the ps4.
I hate the dual shock controllers and have never understood how anyone's hands could possible hold those in any semblance of comfort. Sure they are a servicible cintroller and could be worse. They could be made of barb wire.
Xbox has always had more comfortable ergonomic controllers. Even the first xbox giant controllers were at home in my hands. I like em big. I rest my hands in my lap so the weight of a turgid interface has never been a factor for me. You can talk up and down about games and performance and connectivity issues but if i don't like the controller my whole experience will be tainted by the figurative thorn in my paw.
Since i brought up games lets talk about platform exclusive titles. Actually lets talk about one game. My most anticipated next experience.
Dead rising is my favorite ongoing series. Better than halo, gta, uncharted, god of war, assasins creed, gran turismo, call of duty, battlefield and every other current cannon i haven't mentioned.
At this point i really shouldn't have to explain dead rising to you. If you haven't played it before it is a openworld hack and slash time sensitive action rpg made by Capcom.
The first game was set in a mall. The second installment was based in a vegas-like casino village. Dead rising 3 is set in an entire city that is probably L.A.-ish. Although the thought of trying to memorize an entire city is pretty intimidating the zombie massacre that awaits with a plethora of weapons makes it more than worth the hassle.
There are new combo weapons including A HAND GRENADE SLEDGEHAMMER.
How would that work you ask? Well it's simple you find an in game work bench and if you have a sledgehammer and hand grenades in your inventory YOU TAPE THE GRENADES TO THE SLEDGEHAMMER.
Is anyone else hard right now?
Really that's the reason i am going to buy an xbox one for a hundred extra dollars over the ps4. An exploding hammer. It's unrealistic, cheesy, immature and guaranteed fun as fuck.
When i play games i don't want realistic and evolved. I want rediculous over the top. I have no problem admitting i'm the lowest common denominator.
I want to feel like a little boy smashing dinky cars with a baseball bat. I will settle for smashing zombies with a grenade hammer.
secret of the magic crystal
Written in July 2012 (I forgot to publish this one)
Mike messaged me on twitter yesterday. @_Rades: @superdalebot Do you have Steam? (PC game thing, you buy/DL games through it) Go get it b/c I am going to gift you this bit.ly/a36k9C Free game? "alright I'll bite what's this about anyway" So i click on the link and i immediately know this is going to be one of the best presents I have ever received. You can grow and care for a UNICORN and then race it and run through obstacle courses to level up your unicorn. YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR UNICORN. We all know the only thing more totally awesome than a unicorn is that same unicorn but stronger, faster, my dexterous and full of even more spirit. I mean come on at this point it's taking everything i have to not just start fist pumping with one hand and slap my keyboard with the other while i make screaming chimpanzee noises. Once my unicorn fueled tumescence has finally subsided I decide to view the different options offered on the farm. Different buildings allow for different services.
At the blacksmith you can make magic horseshoes by using the anvil. You do this by picking three elements to combine and the smithing process is you hitting the arrow keys at the prompts either left right up or down (pretty much the same for all minigames). The ratings are boo, early, late, good and if you're lucky enough to be the unicorn whisperer like myself you get the occasional perfect.
Each new building is more magnificent than the last. My horse is tired from running through the forest jumping over logs and branches so i decided to check out the barn. Or should i say MAGICAL UNICORN HOSPITAL. "If your horse got ill, you would have to look for the stethoscope on the table to examine it." YES PLEASE. "You can cure it with an injection. If your horse is healthy, you might try to mix a magical potion by clicking on the mortar."
By now you can pretty much guess what all of the buildings contain. Either something you make by combining 3 different items or a way to train your magical steed to increase it's stats.
If you don't feel like doing anything productive you can actually just take your unicorn aside and brush it's mane or scrub it's feet... which can actually be quite addictive. You can even send your horse out to race and win money to buy better brushes and even a marble water trough.
As mind shattering as this game is initially there is a reason the price tag is so low and that is there's not much to the game. Once you do a couple of the training mini-games and build an item or two the game gets very repetitive. I actually only played the game a couple of times and that's why it took me so long to publish this post. I kept meaning on coming back to it and to play the game more thoroughly but then Diablo 3 came out, then Borderlands 2, then Call of Duty Black ops 2 and then i dabbled in Star Craft 2 and all the time my poor golden unicorn withered with neglect.
Back into wow... and it's broken
So Mike sent me a scroll of Resurrection for my WOW account. It's been roughly a year and a half since I turned my back on WOW and never went back.
live tweets from arkham city from December
MW3 fiiiinally
It's inevitable I write about Modern Warfare 3. I'm not saying this begrudgingly the Call of Duty franchise has become a stable in the Game industry. A flag pole every November that fans can look forward to. When Modern Warefare 1 came out it took the industry by storm and every FPS has been using the franchise as a ruler since. Whether you like it or hate it if your gamer your well aware of it's presence when it's on the horizon. That all said this is the fifth installment since the game got it's revitalizing injection and I've bought over iteration happily.
I finally finished Dead Island
I finally finished Dead Island using the character Sam B. As you can tell, since the game came out roughly two months ago, it took me quite some time. 24h 46m 04s to be exact. Actually that's not quite exact since I died a billion and two times and I am almost convinced that your game clock doesn't ding you for the multitude of times you play for two minutes from your save just to get punched in the face and genitals by a grandma zombie and loose your pocket wad. (The game dings you a random amount of money every time you die.) Since there is no way to tell how much time I wasted falling of cliffs and getting brain punched by Thug zombies we will just go with the aforementioned amount of gorey hours.
Live tweets from Deus Ex Pt:3
Live tweets from Deus Ex Pt:2
Live tweets from Deus Ex
I decided I would Live tweet my experience while playing Deus Ex. Here are those tweets.
I wasted my time and money on Brink
I should have known it would be just alright. That's what Brink is, middle of the road, luke warm and all the various other terms that mean some good and some bad.
RIP poffo
"Macho Man" Randy Savage is dead. As one of the greatest wrestlers OF ALL TIME had a heart attack at the wheel of his jeep and crossed over a cement meridian and through on coming traffic to hit a tree more than just a legend was leaving us. A piece of my child hood went away with that man.
