all the gamers were stirring, with a click of the mouse.
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Greetings bipedal organisms. It has come to my attention that we as human beings (or you as whatever you are) need food to live. While eating a few meals a day typically sustains us, we often crave something more: a snack! We also like to combine our snacking with doing things we love, such as playing video games. Woe is us, however, as many of us fall into bad snacking habits while playing. Since the holiday season is upon those of us in the good ol' US of A is mainly about eating (don't let anyone tell you otherwise), I figured it would be a good time to address the pressing issues about safe snacking.
One of the biggest drawbacks of the NES Model 2, or the "Toploader," is its lack of AV out. Being tethered to coaxial output these days seems almost barbaric, especially since the Model 1 Nintendo has it standard! Thanks to the wonders of the internet, and a neat little circuit board, I fixed that issue in short order.
As a bonus, I did some repair to my GBA SP, which warrants some attention in case any would be handymen decided to undertake the job themselves.
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Extra Life Day 2016 is less than two months away (November 5th 2016), and I thought it may be interesting to give the community an insight on what it takes to run a successful event...and also, so that I can have a space to vent about how much work / craziness goes into setting up one of these ridiculous events.
First, for those of you not familiar with it, Extra Life is a fundraiser similar to events such as walks for cancer or bike-a-thons. Essentially, you sign up via their super user friendly website and then get friends, family, and people on the Internet to sponsor you. You then play games instead of getting all sweaty and exercising (ewwww). Most events go for 24 hours, but you make your own rules regarding the length. Finally, all the money you gather goes to your local children's hospital (through Children's Miracle Network). What is not to like?! Play games, Raise money, Heal kids!
Continue reading Extra Life 2016: Part 1- Planning
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Game: Tecmo World WrestlingDeveloper: Tecmo
Platform(s): NES
Average Member Rating: 70%Recently, I had a run in with one of my favorite NES games as a kid, and thought that it might be worth a closer look.
Tecmo World Wrestling or
Gekitou Pro Wrestling!! Toukno Densetsu (that is a mouthful) is the premiere choice of wrestling games on the NES, which is surprisingly a pretty crowded category. Not to spoil things, but of them all,
TWC stands far above as the clear winner here.
Continue reading Tecmo World Wrestling
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What is Rogue?
Recently, there has been a flood of games touting to be "Roguelikes" in both the Indie and AAA design spaces over the past few years. Even more perplexing, the titles claiming to be Roguelikes seemingly spanned all genres. With the new update of one of my favorite Roguelikes (more later), it seemed only fitting to really examine what a makes a game a Roguelike, and more importantly, what a "rogue" is.
For the full version, you could always Wikipedia it, but in brief,
Rogue is a PC dungeon crawler with ASCII graphics. The premise is pretty simple: go from the top floor of a dungeon, get an item, and then escape. The game features turn based combat and movement; for every action you take, all the enemies get a turn, similar to a game of chess. Each level of the dungeon is semi-randomly generated, and populated with a myriad of enemies, items, and interactable objects to make each delve unique. Being simple in the graphics department,
Rogue could also go much deeper in item interaction than most games, as not having to animate things saves considerable time. Other things that make
Rogue different from most games is that items do not come identified, and the user usually needs to figure out what they have via trial and error. This generally leads to some hilarious situations, like drinking a potion of fire when you badly needed healing instead.
Continue reading Much Ado about Roguelikes
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Over the past couple of weeks, you have undoubtedly heard people talk about a new IP from Blizzard called
Overwatch. Blizzard usually has a pretty good track record (
World of Warcraft,
Starcraft, and
The Lost Vikings, to name just a few) so a handful of my friends and I decided to check this game out during the beta. What we did not know at the time was that this weird mash up of Valve's hat simulator,
Team Fortress 2, and the snorefest of the MOBA genre would take over our lives so completely.
Overwatch is a typical team based objective-centric FPS with a twist. All of the characters have different abilities that are on cooldowns, similar to a MOBA or like some RPGs. This cooldown helps to balance some of the more powerful abilities, and allows for vastly different play styles between characters. Instead of worrying about a loadout, like so many FPS games have been so fond of, each character has their own weapon and set of abilities, and you only have to customize a few tidbits of cosmetics, like pallet swaps and some extra dialogue choices, which are all earned through "loot boxes" (pronounced "crack").
Loot Boxes are packs of 4 cosmetic items that are dropped for a player at every level up, and during a few other instances. You can also buy them (YAY MICROTRANSACTIONS!!), but since they are cosmetic only, they really have no effect on the game.
Since the bulk of what makes Overwatch great is its roster, I thought I'd take you through each of the main characters and give a few brief thoughts from what I have played so far:
Continue reading Who Watches the Overwatch?
