ENTER: NEVEL PAPPERMEN | Leave It All To Us Ep. 2
This week, we meet a very important character…
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Adam
Too Many Feet | Leave It All To Us Ep. 1
Come join Deanna Minasian and Adam Osmani as we discuss episodes 1-5 of the hit late 2000’s Nickelodeon show, iCarly. This week involves dancing, stalkers and too many damn feet.
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Overwatch: Summer Games 2017
In a developer update that released on August 1st, our boy Jeff, from the Overwatch team stated that the Summer Games would be coming back for a second year in a row. Although some of the skins will be the same, it’s not without some changes.
This time around the Summer Games take place in Sydney, Australia. The event will have all of the skins from the previous year, but this time all of them will be available to purchase with in-game credits, a feature that wasn’t present in last year’s summer games. The old skins will be available for the same amount of currency that your standard items have (1000 for Legendary, 250 for epic, 75 for rare and 25 for commons), while the new ones will stay with the traditional event price gouging (3000 for legendary, 750 for epic, 225 for rare and 75 for common).
There will also be a new map for Lucioball, a soccer game mode where the only playable character is Lucio. The new map will be set in Sydney, Australia while the Rio map will also be available to play. This game mode will also feature a ranked mode where players can get competitive points for participating. There are also some balance changes for Lucioball. Lucio’s ultimate ability will now raise his speed and decrease his cooldowns for a period of time. You will also no longer be able to boop enemies, only the soccer ball.
Summer Games 2017 will start on August 8th and will run all the way to August 29th.
Release Roundup 8/1 – 8/12
The next week and a half of video games is on the slower side, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to check out. Here’s the stuff coming out that I think will be worth checking out. Take a look!
Patapon Remastered
Patapon is a beloved series of rhythm games that released on the on the PSP starting in 2008. So, if you happened to miss out on the PSP era now is your chance to make up for it. In Patapon you control a tribe of small, black creatures that are mostly eyes, called Patapon. You charge the small Patapon into battle while they rhythmically and menacingly chant past any other tribes that get in their way. This remaster only has the first game in the series and you can get the game digitally starting today for $14.99 on Ps4
Tacoma
Tacoma is Fullbright’s highly anticipated second game, the first being Gone Home. Tacoma is a narrative based sci-fi adventure set in a space station in the year 2088. If it’s anything like their previous work, Tacoma will probably focus on the more personal and human side of being in space rather than the sci-fi aspect of it. The review embargo lifted today and the game will be out on Steam and Xbox One starting on August 2nd for $19.99.
LawBreakers
LawBreakers is the first game made by Cliff Bleszinski’s new studio Boss Key Productions. It’s a first person arena shooter made in the style of games like Unreal Tournament while mixing it with modern shooter abilities and mobility options. This game has seen a lot of iteration through many closed and open beta sessions and seeing the final product is something I’m excited for. You can get it starting August 8th for $29.99
Knights of the Frozen Throne – A Hearthstone… Adventure?
During a Twitch livestream on July 6th, Game Director Ben Brode and Production Director Jason Chayes announced Hearthstone’s newest upcoming expansion, Knights of the Frozen Throne. Fans of World of Warcraft will immediately remember this as an iconic raid featuring the Lich King himself.
In the announcement video, Blizzard announced some new cards and mechanics. The major one being the fourth card type, hero cards. The current card types are minions, spells and weapons. The hero card is something that works much like the card Lord Jaraxxus. The hero that you have chosen to play will be replaced with an undead version of themselves to fit the whole Death Knight theme of the raid. You will also get some armor, a new hero power and in Rexxar’s case, a battlecry. Here’s the hero card they showed off.
The other new mechanic that they showed off is called Lifesteal. Whenever a minion or spell does damage with the keyword Lifesteal on it, you will heal for the amount of damage done in that instance. Here’s the two Lifesteal cards they showed off.
The full expansion will feature 135 new cards, 8 free boss fights for everyone to partake in and a unique hero card for every class. After playing through the prologue, every player will get one of the hero cards given to them at random for free, so everybody gets a fair chance.
There will be more cards revealed on July 24th and the expansion will be available to all in August, no specific date has been given. You can also pre-order 50 packs of this expansion for $49.99 and you can get a bonus Frostmourne cardback.
Titanfall 2 Tech Test Impressions – Week 1
Something very important happened in between the release of Titanfall 1 and the upcoming release of Titanfall 2. That important thing is that Call of Duty Advanced Warfare came out and did it’s job significantly better than the first Titanfall. Sure, it didn’t have big ridable mechs. But it really solidified how futuristic first person shooters should feel. The past weekend Respawn Entertainment ran a technical test for Titanfall 2, and it feels like a piece of the core from the first Titanfall is among the missing.
With the time I spend with Titanfall I learned a few very important things. There wasn’t a SINGLE, not a single issue with any technical aspect of this game. It ran beautifully, no latency in any of my matches and I found matches absurdly quickly. This is all stuff they learned from the first Titanfall, during the Titanfall’s technical tests and on release date, it was a mess. So it’s nice to see that Respawn has figured out their server issues.
I also learned that this game plays surprisingly different from the first one. The controls feel clunkier than before, and it feels significantly slower paced. The thruster packs don’t seem nearly as fast and useful and the wall running also seems substantially slowed down. It also showed me the only bad grappling hook I’ve seen in a video game. It feels absurdly limp and almost useless. Whenever a game adds a grappling hook it’s almost always a positive thing, this is the exception. Something I really enjoyed from the first one was how snappy and quick the game felt at all times, even if it was often erratic.
During the test, they were showing off three game modes. Amped Hardline, which is your standard Domination game mode. Pilot vs Pilot, which you should never play if you’re playing Titanfall in the first place. And finally Bounty Hunt, which is a new game mode that really intrigued me. When you start the match, the team is drawn to a location where there’s going to be a bunch of grunts. When you kill those grunts you get money added to your player. At certain points during the match, the bank will open up. This is when you take the money you’ve earned and you deposit it to your teams score. The team that reaches a certain amount of money first wins the match. While all of this is going on, the other team is still there to stop you from killing these poor helpless grunts. Also, during specific points in the match, higher valued targets will spawn randomly and teams will have to get together to take them down. I had a good amount of fun with this game mode, even if it can get a little hectic at times it’s a neat twist on the stale Horde modes we’ve seen for a long time now.
During this test, they had two maps available and they are making a third one available for the second test weekend. Out of these two maps neither of them had any interesting points in them. Maybe it’s because Overwatch spoiled me with cool looking maps, but they just seem super generic and grey-washed. If you can picture what a generic Titanfall map would look like, I promise you, that’s what they look like.
They also made some massive changes to the mechs themselves. Now each of the mechs have MOBA like abilities that are on cool downs and they even have ultimate abilities. This is definitely a good change and it helps making the mech gameplay more diverse rather than just running around and shooting things. It also makes the mechs feel like much more of a formidable opponent.
I’m excited to see what the future holds for Titanfall, but it seems like the need to make some fundamental changes to how this game plays. Even Respawn Entertainment agrees with me.
We Happy Few: Early Access Impressions
For a long time now we’ve been hearing about We Happy Few and during that time people managed to create their own expectations for it. These expectations basically boiled down to a Bioshock-like experience. Basically what we’ve been told is that it will be a story driven experience with some forms of procedural generation. Now before I get into this discussion I’d like to make a few disclaimers. This is an EARLY ACCESS PRODUCT meaning the game is nowhere near being finished and any judgements being made are for in its current state, not what it will be. Therefore, there will be no review score at the bottom. I should also mention that I’ve been playing the Xbox One version, so any performance issues I’ll be talking about don’t represent the PC version. Ok, let’s get into it.
When you first start up We Happy Few, it takes you to the section that was shown at E3 this year during the Microsoft press conference. This E3 gameplay trailer ended right as the game actually opens up. You get knocked out by the guard and you end up in your underground residence. The game doesn’t really tell you how you got here, you just have to keep moving forward. That’s all they have for the story parts so far. They even mention it in their disclaimer before you start playing the game.
*said disclaimer* (source: Google Images)
So there’s not a hell of a lot to judge on that front other than its immediately interesting, this opening section is immediately interesting and I would like to know more. Unfortunately we won’t know any extra story bits until 1.0 comes along, and judging by its current state that’s going to be a long time away. After this opening segment you’re introduced to an open world where you can wander wherever you’d like, until you either die or run into a bridge that is.
Much to my surprise, this game is actually a roguelike with survival elements. When I say survival elements, I mean it’s got them all. It has a crafting system, survival meters (hunger, thirst, sleep and health), and you even search through abandoned houses and such to find these scraps. There’s also other elements of the survival aspect that aren’t immediately apparent. Some examples being, if you eat rotten food you’ll get sick and if you take your Joy pills you’ll go through withdrawal symptoms when it’s over and your other meters will drain faster. This wouldn’t be all that bad if it wasn’t so damn overbearing. The meters are draining at an almost constant basis and after a little while it just becomes a massive burden. Rather than surviving while playing the game, you’re just spending all of your time surviving.
When getting into the other roguelike elements, like restarting after your character dies just seems unnecessary. Now, I’m a massive fan of roguelikes Spelunky is one of my favorite games ever made, so I’m not necessarily a stranger games resetting your progress upon death. However, in We Happy Few, it does something that I’ve never really encountered in any roguelikes and it really rubbed me the wrong way. When you die and restart, the quests seem to stay the same. So every time I had to restart I found myself doing the same quests over and over again. It became very repetitive and almost completely unnecessary. They way that Compulsion has set this game up is basically an open world adventure style game, only when you die you have to repeat the same quests. When you have a roguelike set up like this it massively takes away from the fun. I found myself doing the same quests over and over again. It inevitably started to feel like a chore. It got to the point where I just decided to turn the permadeath off completely and it ended up providing a much better experience. This game misses the core of what makes a roguelikes so damn fun, learning from your mistakes. Instead of attempting to change how you approach each run, it felt like I didn’t have any options and it was just trial and error. The way you play this game doesn’t lend itself well to traditional roguelike tropes.
Now, it isn’t all necessarily negative because this game doesn’t really have to change a hell of a lot for it to drastically improve. This game has a fantastic art style and mood. In the first few minutes it really managed to make me feel weirded out and very interested to find out more about what happened to the world. There’s something to this game and I can’t exactly put my finger on it. Basically, it’s just trying to accomplish too many things at once, it almost feels like somewhere along through development it lost its destination and now it’s just going wherever the hell it wants.
In its current state, We Happy few also has some massive technical issues on the Xbox One version, but that’s to be expected in an early access game. Frequent frame drops, excessively long loading screens, a lot of texture problems and sometimes signs even turn up in the middle of the street. In addition to these technical problems, the A.I is also incredibly wonky. A lot of the time there’s no given reason as to why some of them will attack you, they just do. I’m not sure if that’s something that was intended or not because of how little they actually tell you about the game, but regardless when it happens it seems to have no rhyme or reason to it.
A happy little sign (source: a screenshot I took)
For an example on how buggy this game currently is, there are bridges in this game that serve as checkpoints. You need to have a few things accomplished in order to enter them. I tried entering one of them with none of the criteria met. The gate opened and it let me through which was already surprising. However, after it let me through I got stuck in a wall and beaten to death by the guards that let me through. This wasn’t a thing that was supposed to happen either, other times I had tried to enter the guards tell you that you can’t get through and then proceed to beat you to a pulp. But the game saw it that I had met all of the criteria in order to enter, then realized it fucked up and murdered me.
We Happy Few in its current state does not leave good impressions with me. It’s currently a mess and it has no clear focus. I’m not entirely sure if releasing this game in early access was a good idea for them, especially because Compulsion Games has been getting such a massive pass with its aesthetics alone. If you’re considering buying into We Happy Few now, I’d suggest maybe waiting a little bit until they have some things figured out.
Standard Play: The Hearthstone Cards I Miss the Most
When Whispers of the Old Gods came out a couple of months ago, Blizzard also implemented a new way to keep the game “fresh.” They did this by adding seasonal rotations, meaning that older expansions are no longer part of the main competitive format anymore. They added Wild mode as well, which is where you can still use any card from any expansion. However, I dare you to play this mode without getting Dr. Boom, Mad Scientist and Piloted Shredder PTSD triggers. Recently I’ve been trying out this Wild format and I came to the realization that I miss some of the cards that rotated out so damn dearly. If you had asked me before the patch went live, I probably would’ve told you that the cards I’d miss the most were Loatheb and Sludge Belcher, but I was substantially wrong. Here’s the ones that I miss the most.
LIGHTBOMB / DARK CULTIST
Somewhere in between League of Explorers and the announcement of the new formats, I became very fond of the Priest class. Priest was a class that I never really played until Entomb and Elise Starseeker came out. However, control/monkey Priest is one of my favorite decks to ever grace this children’s card game. You can still play this deck but it’s nowhere as good without these two cards. Priest is in a position right now where it’s really suffering in the meta game. It doesn’t have any powerful defining archetypes anymore and it’s almost completely because cards like these got removed from its arsenal. Priests no longer have a great way of dealing with boards anymore without the Auchenai + Circle combo. They also lost a massively powerful 3-drop in Dark Cultist. For a portion after Naxarramas, Cultist was a shoe-in for almost any type of priest deck and now priest has a massive hole in the 3 mana spot. By taking this card away it made an already reactive class even more reactive and it gives Priest less options to keep up on the board.
MUSTER FOR BATTLE
In the same way that Priest is in a bad way, Paladin is also in a bad way. At the beginning of expansion once the meta settled for the first time Paladin had one very strong deck and that deck was N’Zoth Control Paladin. A deck with massive amounts of healing and board clears, it was basically every control players dream deck. However as the meta shifted, aggro got better and better making control decks like these almost impossible to play. Muster for Battle was a fantastic card and was an auto-include in every Paladin deck regardless of play style. With this gone, as well as shielded minibot, Paladin doesn’t have a good minion-centric deck anymore.
MAL’GANIS / DARKBOMB
The reason why I miss these two cards so much is because a whole branch of Warlock decks died when these cards left the competitive format. Demon based and even slower Warlock decks are no longer playable and these are the cards I miss the most from those kinds of decks. There was nothing more satisfying than dropping a Mal’Ganis on turn 5 thanks to a Voidcaller. With Darkbomb also missing Warlocks lost a really good way to stabilize the board. However, with the new zoo deck, they hardly need any control tools.
Vitality Totem
I miss this card solely because it makes the outcomes of Tuskarr Totemic strictly better. If you had asked me before the patch, this wasn’t even something I’d consider, but here I am. Vitality Totem’s weren’t necessarily all that useful and it was one of the drawbacks to playing this card. Now, Tuskarr Totemic is almost guaranteed to give you something extremely useful. The Flametounge Totems, Totem Golems and Mana Tide Totems are almost standard now and are very common.
Steamwheedle Sniper
So I don’t really miss this card, rather miss the potential that it could’ve had. Steamwheedle Sniper never got its chance to see competitive play, or any play really. I kept my Steamwheedle’s around for a while hoping that the card would see play. This card would potentially add a little bit of a control playstyle to the Hunter and as time goes on, we’ll probably see more cards that would synergize it. Unfortunately, when Standard came into play poor Steamwheedle never got its moment to shine.
Antique Healbot
There have been so many situations since standard came out where Antique Healbot would’ve completely changed the pace of the game. This little guy was a shoe-in for almost every single Control/Mid-range/Rogue decks and I see why now more than ever. Rogue is suffering immensely without it and the Mid-Range style of deck has died out with the lack of this card and a few others. It was a quick, fairly cheap and efficient way of healing. All while giving you a small bit of tempo so you could potentially keep up on the board. That’s something we just don’t really have in the current meta-game.
Hitman Episode 3: Marrakesh Review
In the three episodes of Hitman we’ve gotten so far, they’ve all been set in very diverse locations. I don’t mean only setting wise, each of the three episodes gives us very different play styles that fit according to each location. In Paris, it was all about infiltrating a runway show. It had quiet outskirts and a very dense center, this allowed the player to do all of their dirty work on the outskirts and plan their way in. Sapienza was very sparse and had a lot of hidden entrances, this time the player could explore the vast setting of Italy and really plan how they got the job done. In Marrakesh, the area is as dense as it could be and it makes you react quickly and improvise frequently. Marrakesh provides the most unique experience while giving you plenty of options to dispense of your targets, making it the strongest episode of Hitman so far.
When you start your mission in Marrakesh, you immediately realize that this isn’t the traditional in-and-out hit. Both of your targets are in two heavily guarded areas on opposite sides of the map. You quickly realize that you won’t be able to get away with that much when the whole area is filled to the brim with witnesses.
As you start exploring and plan your infiltration a lot of “opportunities” will arise. Opportunities are Hitman’s way of telling you that there might be a way in if you follow through with what’s going on around you. Opportunities are multistep processes that will eventually lead you to your target. This time around the opportunities let you do some incredibly fun things. One of them you get to pretend to be a masseuse and snap your targets neck while massaging him. While in another one you can pretend to be a cameraman a drop a giant moose on your target. However, my favorite of the opportunities involves shoving a toilet onto your targets head. I won’t ruin all of the fun for you but trust me, it’s pretty damn awesome.
Source: Namelessdreadx37x
In the other episodes of Hitman you don’t necessarily need to complete the opportunities because of the open nature of them but Marrakesh provides a much more tight and controlled experience, which I ended up liking a lot more than Paris, for example.
The opportunities also make replaying Marrakesh more fun than ever. In previous episodes the opportunities were often left to the side and it wasn’t that fun to see them through. This time around I ended up playing the mission multiple times just so I could see how each of them played out. Each of them have some bizarre and fun twist in them like the ones I mentioned earlier.
Exploring the areas of Marrakesh also end up being more interesting because of the nature of the mission. When going into places you’re never guaranteed to get away with anything. There’s always someone around to ruin your plan making your windows to get stuff done a lot smaller and a hell of a lot more satisfying when it all falls into place. This also makes it so you can’t necessarily brute force your way through the mission like you could in the other two episodes.
Fallout 4 Far Harbor Review: Far From Home
*This is a review of the PS4 version of Far Harbor and I cannot speak for the performance issues on PC*
Far Harbor is Bethesda’s first meaty expansion for the underwhelming Fallout 4, they had some additions like Automatron and Wasteland Workshop, but this is the expansion that everyone was looking forward to.
Taking place on Bethesda’s representation of the Coast of Maine, Far Harbor starts you right where you left off the last time you played Fallout. Unfortunately for myself, the last time I actually played Fallout before this was back in December so it ended up being a little jarring trying to remember where the hell everything is. Much to my surprise, I forgot I managed to piss off every faction and was immediately being shot at upon loading the save.
After I handled all of that, I started the expansion. You arrive at Valentine’s office and quickly learn that a girl named Kasumi Nakano is missing and you have been hired to go find out where she is. You go look for evidence around the house, and this is when I was immediately reminded that I was still playing Fallout 4.
Far Harbor is great so far! pic.twitter.com/GJSscfKCvQ
— Adam 'Poland Spring' Osmani (@AdamDasani) May 19, 2016
After finding out she went to a place called Far Harbor, you follow suit and go find out what’s really going on. Upon arrival, you’re greeted by one of the new factions called the Harbormen. The introductions are quick as you’re thrown into a fight with creatures that come from the Fog. The dreaded, dreaded fog. And with an otherwise very interesting introduction, this is also the first time you realize how much of a problem the fog is going to be. It’s not because the enemies are tough or anything, but because the frame rate drops substantially whenever you’re fighting anything in the fog. Unfortunately for the players, the entire island is covered in this fog and this makes traversal through the island almost unbearable. Which is a shame, because I really like the aesthetic of the island. It presents itself as very eerie and mysterious. Throw in some abandoned ships and sea creatures and I’ll be bound to enjoy the look.
In between meeting these factions, you get an important quest that the Children of Atom have useful information and you need to go get it. Once you get to the computer that has what you need, it sends you to this virtual world and you find out that there’s puzzles separating you from potentially having fun again. On PS4, this area runs like crap and the puzzles aren’t fun whatsoever. It’s basically just horrible filler that made me angrier at the game just for including it. It almost felt like the game was wasting my time. Just take a look for yourself.
Source: HarryNinteyFour
The other two factions you meet along the way are The Children of Atom, who are nuclear energy addicted crazy people with no real relevance to the storyline and Arcadia, who are a group of Synths. Most of the important quests are linked to Arcadia as DiMA, the lead synth is the character you’re dealing with a lot of the time. None of the newly introduced characters are necessarily interesting either, most of them are one track minded and don’t add anything to the story other than “I’m a synth and synths are great” or “I’m not a synth and I hate synths” until much, much later in the expansion.
However, every character in this expansion seems to have two things in common. One being, their hatred of the fog and the other being how much the Children of Atom suck. The game doesn’t do much to sway your opinion from this and it ultimately ends up with the player not necessarily caring about what happens to them. *HEAVY SPOILERS, SKIP A FEW SENTENCES AHEAD IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOLIED* Which is why I ended up blowing them up to smithereens the second I had the chance to. Right when I was almost finished with the game they give me this decision, so I finished all of my side quests with them and quite literally, blew them to the wind. Now, the really unfortunate thing about this is that there’s no repercussions for this decision whatsoever other than one line of dialogue. When I went back to Far Harbor, it went a little like this. The leader said my decision to do this was unbearable and wasn’t justified. That conversation ended and I started another one with the same character. She then began to praise me for all of the fantastic work I had done for them so far. It was a very polarizing minute and a half.
Since this is probably the last time I’ll be playing Fallout, there was nothing keeping me from doing whatever horrible actions I wanted to do. I feel like now, more than ever the game needed consequences for your actions but I literally eradicated an entire faction for no good reason other than wondering what could happen. *SPOILERS OVER* The finality of this expansion was something I think worked against it substantially. Even if they plan on making more expansions, which they do, they make this whole expansion feel like one last trip back to the wasteland.
Source: Kotaku Australia
The expansion ends on a high note and actually wraps the character arcs up a lot better than I was anticipating. However, they don’t necessarily give you any reason to go back to the island. It ends with you leaving in the boat that you came in with and I think it ends like this for a few reasons. One, so they can load in a whole new island because the game already runs like crap without the added island to it. And the other being because it thematically fits. I ended up finishing all of the side quests before I saw the ending and it felt like that was the way to play this properly. By the end of it I had a good sense of accomplishment in my pocket and the way it ends gave me a sense of relief. Unless you care about settlement building or want to find secrets, there’s no reason to go back after you finish the main & side quests which took me roughly 12ish hours give or take.