Hey everyone, how’s it going. As some of you guys may know, I’ve been in a bit of a single player game drought recently, and it’s kind of been alleviated by the recent spate of amazing games that have been released recently. Oh , and I know I really do neglect my blog these days, but I also feel like it would be a great idea to get back involved in writing short pieces for it because the guys who do read it always supported me really well. And it allows me to express my thoughts in a way that is a little more coherent than through the Youtube videos I make. With all the gameplay in the background, me getting sidetracked and all the little nuances of commentary that are involved, my train of thought sometimes gets completely off topic. I’ll link to the video where I spoke about the upcoming topic at the bottom of the post though, so you guys can check out my thoughts in audio form.
And that topic is of course single player games, which I mentioned above. The thing which has been rolling around my head today is the game Dark Souls, which released yesterday in the UK (Thursday) and has course met with some really great reviews because it is one of very few games which caters to a crowd of hardcore gamers who are often left out in the cold. I was having some thoughts about Dark Souls in particular because of it’s insane difficulty levels and it reminded me of something from my heavily single player gaming past which haunts me to this day – getting stuck on a boss bottle. The idea alone chills me to the bone. A good example is Dragon Age II, where recently I got stuck on a boss relatively near to the end of the game, the Arishok. What really got to me was that because I couldn’t for the life of my defeat him, I was being denied the ultimate ending of a game for which I had paid good money for. Dark Souls then presents an interesting conundrum: how do we balance difficulty with enjoyment, and the progression of the storyline itself? Would it be so hard for games with few bosses like Dragon Age II to offer up a negative outcome to losing a boss fight without it simply resulting in death?
My lack of exciting single player experiences over the past six months since Fallout: New Vegas have made me strangely rusty on the subject of difficulty, but I felt today that I had almost matured as a gamer and therefore a person: instead of desiring a quick thrill, with variable difficulty levels, allowing me to revisit the experience but in a different light, I instead now prefer much longer titles which do not present me in any way as much of a challenge: I want to be told a story, primarily, but at the same time be involved in it’s progression. Movies and games that are too linear become boring because of their predestination, wherein there is only one fixed outcome, just like a Call Of Duty game. I prefer a game like Fallout 3, or to a lesser extent Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which offer alternate endings based on your actions throughout, (the former) or your opinions after experiencing the game world (the latter).
So, even though I don’t have much to say on the topic, I would love to hear your opinions. You can either comment on this post or head over to my youtube channel and leave me a comment there or message me. Hope you enjoyed both this and the video!
I was always a sucker for the FPS/RPG cross genre which was essentially spawned way back when Fallout 3 dropped. Since then I’ve had the pleasure of checking out Borderlands and New Vegas which are probably the two most entertaining games I have played in the past two years from a length and depth standpoint. SO coming in to Deus Ex: Human Revolution I had high hopes that it would be a combination of the exciting fast paced gameplay with blood-rush storyline that was provided by those other titles. I certainly wasn’t disappointed. View full article »
I haven’t posted over here on KGB for months and months, but for once I thought I would write down my thoughts on a topic rather than making a video about them. I realised recently something I realised a long time that I should never have forgotten – you can never please people. No matter how hard you attempt to make people laugh, smile, or help them to enjoy something, it never works, especially not to the desired effect. View full article »
MLG Dallas wrapped up yesterday and Quantic Leverage, the #1 seed going in to the tournament thanks to their impressive 64-6 showing in the Gamebattles online qualifier, have reigned supreme in the first ever Call Of Duty Black Ops tournament on the MLG Pro Circuit. Going in to the championship match against Resistance, Leverage had a 3-2 game deficit but took four consecutive game wins to pick up the trophy. The 11th seeded team Resistance had previously knocked Leverage down to the losers bracket, and played very well on the main stage but could do little to prevent the truly unstoppable force of Leverage’s Scumpy and Aches.
The Final Standings
1st Place: Quantic Leverage
2nd Place: Resistance
3rd Place: OpTic Gaming
OpTic Gaming were arguably the success story of the whole competition, Nadeshot (who quit the competetive team last year) was drafted in a week before the tournament due to the loss of team captain Rambo, who was hospitalised before the tournament. The switched up roster meant the new players had only 6 hours of scrims in which to practise for Dallas, and managed to place 3rd, losing out to Leverage in the Losers Bracket Finals.
So here’s a little gem I spotted on the free top 25 averaging somewhere around 3 or 4. Now I’ve never been a one to cash in my own money for apps even if it is $1 for Tiny Wings, Angry Birds or Doodle Jump which are actually really great, because I usually play a game on the iPod for maybe a week at most and throw it. Overkill is free, which is awesome, and plays out like a kind of static Time Crisis game. It cashes in on the Call of Duty hype by throwing in 10 customisable weapons and a number of different levels where the difficulty increases in waves eave time you kill a certain number of enemies.
One of the most important things for an iPod game to latch on to is an online leaderboard, without a doubt, letting people share their hard-wasted time to their friends and compete against strangers, just like 20 years ago. Yeah its old fashioned, but there is much more to expect from a device which in reality has no definite control scheme and a tiny screen (looking at this from a gamer’s point of view). It incorporates Game Centre, is free, and is worthwhile playing a little bit on a long bus journey or if you are suicidal or something and want a fulfilling experience from your MP3 player. Check it out.
If y’all hadn’t heard, an engineer at Bioware, the producers of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises, posted a review of Dragon II (his own game, essentially) to the review site Metacritic in the past couple days under the pseudonym Avanost. He rated it 10/10, highly controversial considering at this moment the average reader review score is just 4.2/10. So what does the esteemed speaker Kazzerscout think of the sequel to one of his favourite RPGs ever? View full article »
Call of Duty games should be packaged with a disclaimer:
WARNING
‘Purchase and participation in the online features of this video game title may and most certainly will result in a loss of social capability, friends, a lack of motivation, piles of unfinished overdue work and piles of other unfinished long overdue video games for any platform.’ View full article »
Welcome to Aftertouch, where this week I’m gonna be having a look at my first Xbox 360 game, and it’s a classic, the original Mass Effect. You can pick this up at a pretty cheap price these days as well as the sequel which has won GOTY 2010.
Mass Effect presents us a ‘Space Opera’ of a storyline, focusing much more on storyline than on immersive gameplay, but effectively combines third-person cover based shooting similar to that used in Gears Of War with an average RPG element based around 6 basic classes, including the Soldier, Vanguard, Adept, and others. The story follows Commander Shephard, who is thrown straight into a mission to eradicate the Geth, a species of Alien AI from the human colony Eden Prime. What follows is an expansive campaign combining travelling between separate planetary systems in search of the rogue Spectre Saren, and protecting the Citadel (a multi-race space station) from a new alien threat. View full article »
Hey everyone welcome back to Sunday Syndrome here on KGB, this week I’m gonna take a look at a game that was ridiculously widely played back at release, which is Need For Speed Underground. Thankies to Sara for lending me this before Christmas! Haha. View full article »
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
If y’all hadn’t heard, an engineer at Bioware, the producers of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises, posted a review of Dragon II (his own game, essentially) to the review site Metacritic in the past couple days under the pseudonym Avanost. He rated it 10/10, highly controversial considering at this moment the average reader review score is just 4.2/10. So what does the esteemed speaker Kazzerscout think of the sequel to one of his favourite RPGs ever? 
Where Lies The Balance In Difficulty
And that topic is of course single player games, which I mentioned above. The thing which has been rolling around my head today is the game Dark Souls, which released yesterday in the UK (Thursday) and has course met with some really great reviews because it is one of very few games which caters to a crowd of hardcore gamers who are often left out in the cold. I was having some thoughts about Dark Souls in particular because of it’s insane difficulty levels and it reminded me of something from my heavily single player gaming past which haunts me to this day – getting stuck on a boss bottle. The idea alone chills me to the bone. A good example is Dragon Age II, where recently I got stuck on a boss relatively near to the end of the game, the Arishok. What really got to me was that because I couldn’t for the life of my defeat him, I was being denied the ultimate ending of a game for which I had paid good money for. Dark Souls then presents an interesting conundrum: how do we balance difficulty with enjoyment, and the progression of the storyline itself? Would it be so hard for games with few bosses like Dragon Age II to offer up a negative outcome to losing a boss fight without it simply resulting in death?
My lack of exciting single player experiences over the past six months since Fallout: New Vegas have made me strangely rusty on the subject of difficulty, but I felt today that I had almost matured as a gamer and therefore a person: instead of desiring a quick thrill, with variable difficulty levels, allowing me to revisit the experience but in a different light, I instead now prefer much longer titles which do not present me in any way as much of a challenge: I want to be told a story, primarily, but at the same time be involved in it’s progression. Movies and games that are too linear become boring because of their predestination, wherein there is only one fixed outcome, just like a Call Of Duty game. I prefer a game like Fallout 3, or to a lesser extent Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which offer alternate endings based on your actions throughout, (the former) or your opinions after experiencing the game world (the latter).
So, even though I don’t have much to say on the topic, I would love to hear your opinions. You can either comment on this post or head over to my youtube channel and leave me a comment there or message me. Hope you enjoyed both this and the video!