oxyborb: game

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My Time With Splatoon’s Global Testfire

I took part in the Testfire Demo for Nintendo’s new shooter. Here are my thoughts:

1. The motion controls are dreadful. It made me sick to move my character at the same time I moved my controller. Trying to use any weapon, save the Splat-Roller, was impossible with motion on. Luckily, you can switch it to normal controls. Someone needs to tell Nintendo that moving the Gamepad like a camera is NOT fun. It’s frustrating.

splatoon inkling

2. The Inkling/Squid’s jump is useless. Honestly, it needs to be 3 times as high as it is. I couldn’t even get up the side of a ramp with the jump. It was pathetic. As soon as I figured out that the jump is useless, I started to win. Just keep rolling and never jump.

3. Why is it possible to fall off the platforms? Who designed it like that? Shooters are not supposed to be about staying on platforms. Save the platforming sections for single player.

4. Swimming up walls needs some serious work. Unless you 100% cover an entire wall, your squid will just begin flailing around uselessly until you give up and fall. I recommend changing it so that if your squid jumps while going straight up a wall, he gets a boost so that he can bypass a short hop up onto a wall. That, or just make the ink shots cover more of the walls when they hit. I once cornered a squid up a wall. I had my roller down below him. He had nothing to do but drop and die, but he just sat up there flailing. I just waited for him to fall and die, and he did.

5. Only the Splat-Roller is even an option, at the moment. I realize that there are four guns in the demo, and that there will be more in the full game, but the Splat-Roller was totally overpowered. I suspect the reason is that it is extremely difficult to aim any of the other guns, but it is easy to roll over people. I won almost every game I played, getting the top score, as soon as I began using the roller. I suggest giving the Splat Shooters more range/faster shots, and giving the Charger gun more of an area-of-effect when it launches.

6. Aiming is not good. It’s hard to be accurate, even with motion-control off.

7. I hate how many of the ledges are “non climbable.” I don’t understand why one of the coolest ideas—swimming up walls—is limited so frequently. Many of the ledges, even ledges where one is allowed to be on/paint, have black-and-yellow police tape on them which keeps you from swimming up over them, even if they are 100% painted. I don’t understand why they have this. The one factory-like map had the most of it. For some reason, Nintendo wants us to use these two ramps rather than swim up the walls. It makes no sense. Take down the police tape.

8. 4 on 4 is really limited gameplay. I wish it were more players with bigger maps.

9. Nintendo doesn’t do dedicated servers; Nintendo relies on everyone’s connections being perfectly compatible. For this reason, several of my games dropped for player-to-player connection issues (not because of my Internet, trust me).
10. I like being able to jump across the map and help people on the front lines. That was the coolest feature.

11. Spawn-camping was easy on the factory map. I held up the entire other team with my Splat-Roller and grenades while the rest of my team painted the entire map. I wish there was more than one spawn-location.

splatoon inkling

12. My favorite thing to do in the beginning was instantly turn into a squid and ride out as far as I could, or follow behind someone else with a Splat-Roller.

13. I wish there was voice chat. I want to talk with the gaming community.

14. I wish Nintendo had a unified achievements system.

15. If two Splat-Rollers run into each other, pick one and kill them, Nintendo. When you kill both, nobody wins and that’s no fun.

16. Finally, I hate that I’m stuck with one set of weapons for an entire match. Why not be able to change out when you die? Allow users to build a couple of pre-sets, and then pick when they die. Not that anyone would ever switch from the Splat-Roller, since it’s the only weapon that is any good.

I’m probably not sold on this game. It’s fun in some ways, but not as fun as games like Fat Princess. If it were on Playstation 4, I’d probably go for it since the multiplayer userbase would be bigger, there would be dedicated servers, voice chat, and trophies to collect. Right now, it’s like going to a laser tag arena. It seems like it would be fun once and awhile, but not something I would get deep into.

Mass Effect - I beat it, here's what I think:

FYI, I only played ME2 and ME3, because ME1 wasn’t out for PS3 when I felt like playing it. So, this is all about the last two games. Also, for ME3, I played Citadel, From Ashes, and Leviathan DLC (I skipped Omega). I played as an Engineer; my most used sidekicks were Liara, Garrus, and Javik. I played on Insanity. I achieved the platinum trophy on ME3, but not 2.

SPOILER WARNING: I am going to litter this with spoilers, so if you haven’t played the game, go play it. That’s all you need to know. Mass Effect is amazing. Go play it immediately.

Mass Effect was beautiful.

I loved the worlds. I loved the set pieces. I loved looking out from where my shuttle landed and seeing a grand expanse of terrain. The views were incredible. Whereas most video games place you in a windowless room to fight through so that they don’t have to worry about creating outside visuals, Mass Effect creates large open windows and allows the player to see the world beyond. I loved looking around and admiring the horizon, seeing the battles unfolding far beyond the space that my character can go. The indoor settings were even expansive… seeing the inside of the Geth Dreadnought and the endlessly large tunnels… Incredible.

The graphics were some of the best I’ve seen on the PS3.

On the critical side of the visual spectrum, I will say that Bioware games have always, for me, had a problem with coming to life by way of motion. Whereas in games like Skyrim, the NPCs walk around, sharpen tools, use the log cutter, ride horses, etc… Bioware games, like ME, usually are populated with static NPCs that don’t move much beyond idling animations. I would like to see Bioware work on this, as their worlds are some of the most engaging and immersive ever created, they deserve to have NPCs that feel alive. Why is the same Volgon always in the Embassy when I show up? Why always standing in the same place? Doesn’t he live somewhere? Doesn’t he have other things to do?

My Nintendo Diet

Kind of an oxymoron, right? Well, that is what I wanted to attempt to do in this previous blog post. That was in December of 2013. I know, crazy, right? Why didn’t I ever update my blog about my progress?

le sigh

I know, excuses to not follow through with weight loss are a dime a dozen, but I ran into an issue. I had been doing so well for like 3 weeks, checking every day and doing an hour of exercise. Eating healthy and nixing my soda intake. But… then… my Wii Fit game disk got scratched up so bad it wouldn’t work. My Nintendo was on the fritz, too. So, yeah, I sorta got discouraged. And busy, and excuse, excuse… sorry.

BUT NOW I’M BACK, FROM OUTERSPACE!

I bought myself a Wii U and the new version of Wii Fit, which comes with a step-counter. It’s a much-improved version, and so I’m going to once again try and make this diet thing happen. No, really. I mean it.

I’ve been tooling around with it, trying to decide which games and exercises will be a regular part of my workouts. I dig the new rock climbing game and the water-shooter. The trampoline isn’t fun, but it got my heart beating. I took a walk—I really love the new step counter. It tallies up your steps and calories like experience points and shows how far you would have gotten if you had been in New York or other major cities. It’s fun.

Because I need working out to be a game. I need it to be like earning experience points, because working out hurts and is boring. I’m not a hamster; I don’t like running and running and not getting anywhere, not doing anything else. Video game workouts seem to me to be the one thing that might make my mind occupied enough to keep at it.

Anyway, we’ll see.

I am going to try and do another blog about this after doing this for a few weeks, so I’ll update here if I do. Click that little follow button on the sidebar to keep up with my posts! Follow me @Oxyborb and check out my website at http://www.harrisonaye.com Thanks for reading!

I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag

And I’m loving it very much.

I played the very first Assassin’s Creed on PS3, and I enjoyed it well enough. I did, however, get bored at a certain point, and I found the missions to become the same thing over and over.

Lately, however, I’ve been needing some pirate in my life, and so I made the purchase of Black Flag on that whim. Let me tell you, the game never gets boring. Ever.

overloaded

This is some of the most varied gameplay I’ve ever experienced in a single game. Every time I began to feel like I was hitting that “peak” moment where I’ve experienced everything, they threw something new at me. Other than the basic Assassin’s Creed stuff, you can hunt whales/sharks, dive into sunken ships, go hunting for jaguars/monkeys/wild pigs, purchase art for your home, craft health upgrades/clothing/gun hostlers, capture rival ships, build a fleet and send them around the world to trade, capture naval fortresses, have bar fights, sail around with pirates singing sailing songs you can collect, explore smuggler’s dens, pet cats, feed chickens, rescue pirates and add them to your crew, use blowdarts to put guards to sleep, and upgrade your hideout cove by purchasing shops, brothels, and guest houses...

I honestly couldn't imagine a better pirate game, and just when I think I've seen everything, they throw out new gameplay that I wasn't expecting, like finding Mayan ruins, obtaining Templar keys, or hacking computers. And, of course, there’s also multiplayer on top of all of that. I’m overwhelmed by how great this game is. It’s LOADED with content, and I give it my full recommendation for anyone who wants an amazing collect-a-thon to play in a pirate setting.

The gripes I had

...were very, very few. One was that there’s no way to run without accidentally clinging onto stuff you didn’t mean to. Another is that, when standing on a “sync” tower with the hawk circling around, they decided to use the same button for descending that they do for syncing, so I inevitably sync several times in a row if I want to climb down without jumping into a haystack.

The last thing I think is a shame is the lack of ship battles in multiplayer. The best part of the game, for me, was battling ships on the seas. I really wish that they had made naval combat the focus of the online multiplayer, rather than the hide-and-seek gameplay that is. The multiplayer can be fun, but I probably wouldn’t play it as much if I didn’t want the platinum trophy. If it were ship battles, you’d bet I’d be playing it all the time.

That’s all! Buy Black Flag! It’s amazing!

The Spiny Blue Shell of Mario Kart: An In-Depth Discussion on Why It Sucks and How to Fix It

We all know that the spiny shell weapon in Mario Kart is the cheapest load of crap ever, but I’ve never seen an article articulating exactly why it is so unbalanced and unfair. So, I sought to correct that gap (much like the spiny shell tries to correct the 1st position gap).

As with any weapon in the game, there is an attacker and a target. In the case of the blue shell, the attacker is usually one of the last positioned racers and the target is always the 1st position racer. This is half the reason why the blue shell sucks.

Look at it from the perspective of the attacker: If you’re way behind, you want a weapon that will put you ahead. Your direct rivals must be taken out or bypassed before you can even think about going for the leaders. So if you’re in 7th place, who are currently your biggest rivals? 6th and 5th place. Who do you target when you fire a blue shell? The guy in way up in 1st place.

If you’re like me, you shoot the blue shell immediately to make room in your inventory for something more useful (is there any sense in holding on to it?). The 1st place kart that you’ve just taken out will surely be up-and-running again before you get close to catching up with him, and, even if you do catch up, whoever was in second place just took over as the new first place.

Some help.

hit the jump for more

Should I buy Animal Crossing?

I will answer that question in the end. For now, I will ask another: Is Animal Crossing obsolete? Is there a better game with similar game mechanics?

Yes, Minecraft.

Hear me out. Minecraft has caused Animal Crossing to become obsolete.

Why?

On the surface, these two games seem like they are very different. However, that’s not the case. There’s no real purpose to Animal Crossing, and, you know what? There’s no real purpose to Minecraft.

They both put you out there with nothing in your pockets and no goals more intricate than simply: gather stuff. They both allow you to do as you wish. You can choose where you want to go and how you want to spend your time. You can move into a house, upgrade it, add stuff to it, and live out a virtual life.

But Minecraft does everything better. Hit the jump for the full article!