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Sony's PlayStation Plus service was launched in 2010 as a paid online service mainly for the PlayStation 3. As a further incentive to sign up for the service to play games online, Sony began offering a series of games each month for the PlayStation 3 and PSP, eventually adding the Vita and PS4. PSP games were eventually dropped and to me the heyday of PS+ were the few years where we were getting PS3, PS4, and Vita games every month. Any games claimed while subscribing to this service can be re-downloaded on any console that is signed into that account as long as the account is current. In the current world of the "all digital future," it is important to note that your PlayStation Plus games are being "rented" in a sense that you will only have access to them while your account is active.
Continue reading Playstation Plus What?
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I'm not really a big fan of Miley Cyrus. I think "Party in the USA" is a great song, but I find her more recent material to be too hedonistic and oversexualised for my tastes. However, as a fan of pop music in general I was excited to hear about Miley being involved with one of the few live action television shows which I find interesting, Black Mirror. The most recent season launched on Netflix in my region recently, and I've watched "Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too" a few times now. I have found the general consensus to be that this new season in general and that episode in particular are rather weak. I actually agree with this assessment, but I still love the Miley episode. Let's see why.
Continue reading Ambition and Verve
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As Rich and I discuss on our last episode of the Playcast, technology can be pretty amazing. It has allowed people from all around the world to connect and communicate in real time, for better and for worse. As someone who works for a massive company with global reach, it never ceases to amaze me that my coworkers and I are in daily communication with people around the world. Similarly, it is astonishing to think that one could form a friendship with another person who lives about a thousand miles away simply by working together on a podcast for the better part of six years.
Continue reading BRO-FEST 2019!
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If you have ever been playing a Call of Duty game and thought "I wish I could just whip out a katana and slash through these fools up close!" then boy do I have a game for you! Devil's Third is an obscure title only available on the ill-fated Wii U, but fans of schlocky action games should take note.
Continue reading Devil's Third
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I am a huge fan of "to do" lists. I use them at work and in my personal life. There is nothing quite as satisfying as lining up chores and knocking them down until your entire list is obliterated. Why then, have I never used a backlog for video games until this year? Throughout my life as a gamer, as a child, teenager, or adult, I have never so much as jotted down what games I wanted to play or even prioritized what I wanted to play in any way. I play whatever I feel like. I've noticed in the last few years that I fall prey to the FIFO principle, where I end up playing the most recent incoming titles to my collection rather than enjoying a game I have owned for years.
In past years I have made gaming resolutions of all kinds of different types. Whether it was my life-changing resolution of 2012 to finish every game I started, or my 2017 resolution to not spend any of my income on video games, I always find it fun and sometimes challenging to think outside the box and adjust my habits with some kind of goal in mind. This year, I decided to create my first backlog. I'd like to share it here and give an initial status report, as well as give a little insight into how I chose the titles or categories that I did.
Continue reading My First Backlog
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Eagle Flight is a PSVR game published by Ubisoft. I got it in my initial haul from Disposed Hero. After finishing the main campaign in Skyrim VR, I was looking for something short and sweet to bang through before jumping back into Skyrim to knock out the DLCs. In Eagle Flight, believe it or not, you are an eagle who flies. The game takes place in the city of Paris after humans have gone extinct and nature has reclaimed the city.
Continue reading Eagle Flight
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I recently acquired a massive Playstation VR package in a mammoth trade with our very own Disposed Hero. You may recall from our podcast my initial excitement at PSVR being announced and my further excitement after actually trying it out at a friend's house. The steep cost of the add-on kept me from procuring one earlier, as did some apprehension about playing games in VR for prolonged periods of time. Would VR games just be gimmicky, short experiences, leaving me in a situation where I wouldn't feel like mustering the energy to set up and put the helmet on every time I want to play it? Or, is it possible to take deep, lengthy dives into more meaningful experiences like the ones I cherish on conventional platforms like televisions or handheld devices?
Continue reading I've been playing Skyrim VR
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I planned to make this post a review of the original Xbox version of Dead to Rights. I picked up a copy after I saw it was part of Xbox One's backwards compatibility list. I started to playing the game and immediately was blown away by how good it looked on a modern television. When you put a compatible original Xbox or Xbox 360 game in your Xbox One, it doesn't play the game off the disc but rather downloads the game to your hard drive and uses the disc itself as a form of DRM. Sure, it's just an up-rezed game from the sixth generation, but Dead to Rights looked so clean and sharp it made me really excited to play it. Not to mention, the main gimmick of the game is the main character's dog Shadow, who can be used in certain sequences to rip the throats out of the hapless thugs who were stupid enough to mess with you.
Continue reading Take this Game and Shelve it!
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While I remember VHS board games from the 1980s, I'm pretty sure I never played one. I remember a Wheel of Fortune game that was supposed to be played with the TV but instead of doing that, my family would just type phrases and proper titles into the game's handheld device and have another person try to solve the puzzle. I still have no idea how the VHS game was supposed to be played, and although there are playthroughs of it on YouTube, part of me doesn't want to know! The 2016 indie film Beyond the Gates explores the nostalgic world of VHS in general and VHS games in particular. Based on a fictional VHS board game which shares the title of the film, this gory horror movie will take its viewers to a new domain, but will it give them a good movie watching experience?
Continue reading Beyond the Gates
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I have been a Batman fan since I begged my parents to take me to Tim Burton's 1989 film for my eighth birthday. As we all know, that movie once again made the caped crusader a household name perhaps for the first time since the campy 1960's television series. While I've been a comic book collector up until very recently, I was always a bit of a poser when it came to comics in that I owned many, but actually read very few. I gave away all of my comics before I left New Jersey, but recently playing through Batman: A Telltale Series with the community lit a spark that has led me down quite the Batman rabbit hole. Let's take a look at the second installment of Telltale's Batman series as well as a few of the graphic novels and trade paperbacks I've checked out recently.
Continue reading The Neverending Batman Rabbit Hole
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Hey gang! It happens every once in a while that no particular topic lights a fire in me for my monthly front page entry. I haven't begun work on my next Black Mirror episode review and I don't want to rush it. So as I have done in the past, here is a more traditional "blog" entry for this autumnal equinox, with just a few things that have been in my orbit lately. Thank you as always for your support!
Continue reading Autumnal Equinox Randomness
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Black Mirror is a British television drama series currently hosted on Netflix in my region. The show explores future technology and its consequences. Most of the tech used in the show seems just over the horizon from our current vantage point, and is almost always based in current tech. What makes the show so interesting, and at the same time unnerving, is the believably of it all. There are a few episodes of the show that are centered around video games and today I'm going to take a look at "Playtest", which is the second episode of the third season.
Continue reading Black Mirror Episode Review - Playtest
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For part three of my Tom Clancy on the Wii series, I'm taking a look at Splinter Cell: Double Agent. This is the fourth installment in the main Splinter Cell franchise and it is the third one I have played, although the other two were the games released after this one. In effect I have been playing the series in backwards order. There were actually two different versions of this game developed by Ubisoft back in 2006. As you may guess, the Wii version is in the less technologically advanced of the two groups, but does that make it a bad game? Not at all. The motion controls almost do though.
Continue reading Tom Clancy on the Wii - Part 3 - Splinter Cell: Double Agent
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After the surprisingly fantastic experience I had with Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon on the Nintendo Wii, I became curious about one of the other two Wii games with Clancy's moniker, H.A.W.X. 2. I have been aware of this series for quite a while but had never played one of the games. Much like Ghost Recon on the Wii, H.A.W.X. 2 is a game completely independent of games with the same title on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. With H.A.W.X. 2 I kept my expectations low and went in hoping for a low-rent Ace Combat rip-off. To a certain extent, that's what H.A.W.X. 2 is. So, is it worth checking out? Let's take a closer look.
Continue reading Tom Clancy on the Wii - Part 2 - H.A.W.X. 2
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As I mentioned in a previous entry, I'm a huge fan of light-gun games and specifically such games on the Nintendo Wii, which carried the torch of light-gun games into the world of modern televisions.
I recently played through the Wii version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and I was absolutely blown away by how much fun I had with it. My expectations were very low going into the game, but the fact that I continued to play the game after completing the campaign demonstrates to me that there is a solid title here, and one that is sadly underrated and largely forgotten by the Wii community.
Continue reading Tom Clancy on the Wii - Part 1 - Ghost Recon
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