Apex Legends

I mentioned this game in the vlog above but unless you've been living under a rock for the last week or so then at this point you've probably heard of this hot new title that's taking the gaming world by storm.  A spinoff to title to Titanfall, it's a Battle Royale game that no one asked for but apparently everyone needed in their lives.

I think the best way to describe Apex Legends is sort of PUBG meets Overwatch.  At the start of each match you are grouped in teams of 3 and 60 of you (instead of the usual 100) are dropped onto an island with no gear and it's up to you to find loot and kill everyone else until you're the last team standing.  Of course there's a standard array of weapons to find and kill people with but to assist you in your killing each character you can pick has a different skill.  For example, one guy called Bloodhound has skills that reveal people close by to him  and as a passive he can sense "evidence" of other players if they did a thing within 60 seconds of you arriving.  Another character, Gibraltar, is a big dude who sets up big fat shields to help protect teammates when you get yourself in a pickle.  As of now there's 8 characters, 6 playable from the get go and 2 of which are locked and you have to "buy" with either in game or real currency.

When looting not only are you looking for guns, ammo and protective gear but you're also looking for gun attachments.  The guns themselves, for the most part, seem neither here nor there and you're allowed to freely pick and choose whatever weapons you like based on your personal play style.  What a gunfight really seems to come down to is what attachments you have for that gun.  As you're looting you'll find barrels, stocks, sights, mags etc that will help you kill your fellow man and it's these items that make ALL the difference.  In one game I had a fully kitted out rifle which turned my SMG into death laser but the next game I had the same gun with no attachments and could barely hit shit as the recoil sent my view flying about 180 degrees with every bullet.  I quite like this approach since it allows you to play with whatever you want while in something like Fortnite I was always just looking for rare versions of very specific weapons every game.

The absolute best thing about this game however is the team communication.  You can play with no mics and still be able to communicate really clearly thanks to an absolute genius pinging system.  Of course, mics are better overall but if you get paired with some really annoying morons you can give yourself some peace and quiet and still be able to point out an enemy or a useful bit of loot for them.  The downside of the coms in this game however is that if you DO have a mic, it's IMPOSSIBLE to mut it (at time of writing).  This is unfortunate for someone like me who lives in a Japanese apartment because if my wife wants to listen to music while I'm playing then I risk getting mad hate as Celine Dion blares down my playstation mic.  I could just unplug it but I shouldn't have to, just put a fucking mute button in goddamnit. 

Of course, since it's a free game there are microtransactions but they aren't too intrusive.  You can pay for currency or you can get an in game currency by leveling up and this will allow you to purchase characters or cosmetics for your character.  Also when levelling up you get a pack that contains items like gun skins or character related voice quips and other things and the drop rates on these packs seem pretty good.  I'm only level 13 and already have 2 epic tier skins and there is A LOT of skins despite the fact the game just launched so if you like Overwatch style lootboxes then this game has a lot to offer you.

Anyway, the game is free and it's surfing a wave of popularity right now.  Will it kill Fortnite? Probably not but it's gearing up to be a decent contender for a quality alternative. No longer will you have to suffer the buggy, broken mess that is PUBG or the skid stain that is that Call of Duty thing.  Worth trying once at the very least 

Fortnite Season 4 and leveling frustrations

If you've been watching the stream you might now that I've jumped on the Fortnite wagon pretty hard.  How could I not when for a while almost every advert I saw was "CHECK OUT THIS AWESOME FREE GAME!"  I wanted to try a battle royale game but PUBG was £15 and looked shit, Fortnite at the very least had some personality.

So it dragged me in really hard with its fast paced game play that was enjoy to enjoy in short bursts.  It also helps that I can just camp in solos while I do housework or work on other things and the occasional fiddle to get inside the zone helps break the monotony. I really enjoyed the the event with the meteor and the map change that came with it too, the game is telling a sort of loose story without words that you have to figure out by yourself by observing small changes to the map.  It's a cool way of doing it that gets a community discussing ideas about what might come next.  

I enjoyed it SO much I ended up dropping 1000 yen on a premium battle pass, which is very out of character for me since I've not payed for a cosmetic since about 2010 but I just couldn't help myself.  The battle pass and the challenges that come with it are a nice mixup to play and without them I'd probably play at lot less.  It's crazy how a simple objective like "get a kill with a trap" can make you want to play over and over again until you get it.  

The big pot of gold at the end of the battle pass is the Omega skin and the "omega challenges" that came with it.  I was hyped for this, I was expecting some really hard shit that would really test my skills but when I unlocked it all it asked me for was to level to 80.  That's not a challenge, that's just demanding my time, and a huge disappointment for all the work it took to reach tier 100 on the pass.  

Still, the good thing about the premium pass is that it spits out enough currency to get the next one for free.  Now that I know what's coming I know that AFKing for exp is something I need to do more of if I want to 100% everything in season 5 but I don't think I'll ever quite forgive Fortnite for this crushing letdown 

Show Don't Tell

One thing I occasionally hear people complaining about when it comes to games is that they are becoming too cinematic at times.  Sure there are plenty of great cinematic games like The Last of Us Metal Gear Solid or modern Final Fantasy and while the use of cutscenes is a fine way to tell a games story, it's the ones that marry the two that really stick out as great experiences in my mind.

Take a Souls game for example, this is an absolutely amazing case of a game marrying game play and story telling in a really masterful way.  When it comes to these games there's usually a scene at the start and a scene at the end and everything in the middle is straight game play.  Very rarely will a Souls game interrupt play to show you a thing and when it does it's usually just creatures flying you off to the next area or something like that.  That doesn't mean however that the Souls games are devoid of story, the world is teeming with all sorts of details that tell you a story by showing you what's going on rather than telling you about it.  Instead of having a bombastic cutscene of monsters killing people, it has you run through the aftermath and letting you put the pieces together yourself.  For more detailed parts of the plot you have to look to item descriptions for the things you find in the world which is a sort of interesting take on the tired cliche of data logs.

Another great example of a game that does this is Fortnite.  You wouldn't expect there to be much of a plot in a battle royale like that and there isn't but the game does subtle things that show the player how the world is going to change.  While other games may make announcements on a news page like "NEW FEATURE!" Or "map changes coming for the next season, Fortnite drops subtle world changes that hint to how the island will change for the next season.  For example right before season 4 started a meteor appeared in the sky and a few hints were left around the map as to where it was going to strike.  It was the devs way of saying "we are reworking an area" using the game itself rather than just announcing it on an update page.  

There's nothing wrong with the classic cutscene, I would never want to see it go. However when a game does marry gameplay and story the experience becomes much much more memorable 

Gaming Disorder Is Bullshit

Gaming Disorder is now officially a thing according to the World Health Organization and when I hear news like this I can't help but raise an eyebrow and let out a rather exasperated sigh.  Gaming Disorder is where a person just wants to plays games SO DAMN MUCH that they let other aspects of their life fall into disrepair or it starts to have impacts on their own health.

Now I'm not saying that some kind of addiction to a game or gaming at large isn't a thing AT ALL.  We may have experienced or have known someone who has played a certain game and been absolutely OBSESSED with it.  In my teenage years I was guilty of letting my studies slip a little in favor of playing World of Warcraft but to turn my momentary lack of self control into a full blown "disorder" is just insanity.

From what I can gather it's mostly based on how much you game and where you priorities lie but this is a stupid way to gauge it because one might be gaming not because of an addiction to the medium but because they don't want to do something else.  For example when I was younger I'd game an absolute shit ton because I was being bullied at school.  I didn't want to study because that would just remind me of all the shit I was going through and I didn't want to talk about it with family because doing that never fixed a damn thing so I resorted to escapism through gaming.  It wasn't addiction to games as much as it was just wanting to think about ANYTHING else.  Funnily enough, it was when some other people in that school reached out to me to play Counter Strike that things started improving so if anything gaming helped and I can't imagine just how miserable I would have been if on top of everything I started getting diagnosed with bullshit disorders.

The other thing that irks me is that most of the stories around this topic that I've seen are involving children.  I saw one article that talked about a 10 year old who was gaming so much that he refused to go to the bathroom, fucked up his bowls and had to get surgery.  Of course the article was like "AREN'T THESE ADDICTIVE GAMES SO AWFUL?!" when the question that should have been asked is "Where the fuck are the parents?".  If you're such a weak piece of shit that you can't get a 10 year old away from Fortnite for a few hours then you probably should have never had children in the first place.  Don't demonize my hobby just because you can't take charge of your shitty kid.

Millions of people play games and the vast majority of them are fine, well rounded people.  Trying to lump some fakey illness on those that like to do it a little more than others is pathetic and damaging to those who might have an ACTUAL problem with addiction.  Still, there's a number of experts that have come forward and criticized the listing so it just goes to show that not everyone discussing the topic is a moron.

 

Fortnite

Every so often a game will come along that completely dominates the landscape for a while and Fortnite is one of those games.  Created by Epic Games and originally showcased WAY back in 2011, Fortnite is the current big-hitter in the now popular Battle Royale genre and it's basically impossible to have at least not heard of it given all the publicity it's been getting.

Fortnite is actually some kind of zombie survival game that I've ever played.  I think it involves a team of people scavenging and building a fort in order to survive against waves of zombies that get progressively harder.  I think it has characters that have unique abilities and you're supposed to work together to save the world, or at least that's what it says in the menu.

However following the popularity of Player Unknowns Battlegrounds they added a battle royale mode where 100 players skydive into an island to kill each other until there is only one player remaining.  You start the game with no gear save for a pick axe that you can use to gather materials and from there it's up to you to find guns and supplies in order to kill everyone else.  As you play there's a storm that encroaches on the play area every couple of minutes forcing the survivors to get closer and closer to each other as time goes on.

Games of Fortnite are very quick too despite how many people are involved in each match.  Landing in popular areas where all the sick loot is will get you murdered quickly and if you are lucky enough to survive then the deadly storm which shrinks on you every 2 minutes or so will ensure that you're in someones face sooner rather than later.  The quick nature of the game prevents it from being overly frustrating on a loss since you can pretty much instantly get into another game with very small amounts of downtime which means you can enjoy it in quick bursts or for extended periods depending on your mood and schedule which is rather nice.

The big gimmick that sets it apart from PUBG though is the building.  You can an interesting situation where when the circle starts to get really small players are forced to sort of just build upwards since a more horizontal approach to combat is out of the question.  I'm bad it at at time of writing but seeing the speed and skill with which players build these forts at each other to try and get the upper hand is absolutely mesmerizing and it gives quite an interesting spin on the late game combat.

It's also weirdly addicting, invoking that "just one more game" mentality that I've personally not experienced from a title since I used to play League of Legends back with my university buddies.  Not only that but there's a certain thrill that comes from being within the last 5-10 survivors on the map and then getting into a fire fight which could either mean victory or a painful reset to the lobby menu.

The game also has a ton of style with it's cartoony graphics and a "battle pass" feature, bought for about £10, which allows the player to unlock a metric fuckton of cosmetics.  I never usually drop money on a free game for something as inconsequential as cosmetic items but even I couldn't resist the allure of Fortnites battle pass.

If you're on the fence about it, I'd say give it a go.  It's free, it's fast and it's fun and even if it doesn't hook you like it completely hooked me you'll still have a good time with it.