Boy games were long in 2017. Sure, this might have been the best year in gaming maybe in two decades, but I admire the person who got in all the ones worth playing with how bloody long they all were. If all these open-world games could kindly come to some kind of agreement to reduce their average length by about thirty hours next year, it’d be just great. All right, I’ll stop being a curmudgeon...
So I've decided to start a series of quick blog updates as I try to clear my backlog from 2016 before games start happening again. It's worth noting that the first week's worth of updates will include what I've actually been playing the past two weeks. It's also worth noting I've been spending more time with two of my favorite games from 2016: Hitman and Overwatch. As a quick Hitman update, I m...
Let's face it: 2016 sucked. But it was a hell of a year for video games at least. It was such a good year I needed an extra couple weeks to finish playing the last few games I had hoped to finish before writing this list. Let's get right down to it. A Series of Random Awards/Complaints/Whinings The Top Game I Have Sitting Around I Need to Play Still: Final Fantasy XV Runners Up: Obduction, King...
I'm growing tired of the complacency shown in video game storytelling. For a few brief moments, I thought we might have turned a corner in 2015. From indie games such as SOMA, Cibele, and Life is Strange, to AAA games such as Witcher 3, it was actually a year where gamers could hold their heads high and proudly proclaim why yes, video games can tell meaningful tales. And then, 2016 was a crushi...
Remember Evolve? Me neither. The year 2015 was a rough one for the shooter genre. Turtle Rock’s lofty hopes for Evolve as an eSport were crushed under the weight of microtransactions. It was soon followed by the pedestrian and tone-deaf Battlefield: Hardline. The fall brought us a series of middling shooters: Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Star Wars: Battlefront, Halo 5, and Rainbow Six Siege. Even...
Sombra has been out a whole two days on the PTR, so it’s time to jump to a bunch of conclusions that will obviously all be proven correct. I’ve spent a lot of time the past few days playing her on the PTR as well as watching streams and analysis of her gameplay. While the following will be nothing more than speculation based on all this early information, I think there is a good sense forming a...
As there are ten different DPS options (per common Meta definition) that compete for just two spots in most Overwatch lineups, there is general confusion as to which characters work best in different situations. The following guide is an attempt to help players select the right DPS picks based on your composition, enemy composition, and game mode. A couple of quick notes about this: If you lack...
Please Symmetra responsibly Originally my intention was to include a Symmetra guide here, but given the recent word from Jeff Kaplan that she would be receiving a significant rework in the coming months, I’m going to hold off for now. Honestly, there isn’t a lot to say anyway about how to play her. Her shield boosting ability is an odd relic of the game’s beta period. Her turrets only work on m...
Now that we've covered our primary healers, this guide will focus on the DPS/Support hybrid characters. I’d like to start by debunking a popular misconception about “advanced” characters in this game. Those star ratings indicate the learning curve for the character, not necessarily the “skill” needed to play them or how good the character can be. Fighting game players know this all too well. Ry...
Welcome to Team Scapegoat... err, Support So you want to play Supports in Overwatch? Excellent choice! You’re in for a wild ride filled flankers diving you while your teammates are too busy shooting into Reinhardt’s shield, salty DPS players upset you stole their Play of the Game, and most importantly, being blamed for every single last thing that goes wrong. Support play is the backbone of eve...
CaptainPlanet over at Overbuff (formerly at Planet Overwatch) writes an Overwatch Meta report on the state of Eleague play that is a great read if you're really into the game. If you’ve ever dabbled in online gaming before, you’ve probably familiar with the concept of “metagaming.” If not, it’s quite simple: metagaming refers to a game’s generally accepted strategy that has been developed by th...
I generally hate reviewing multiplayer games. While reviews offer static windows into what content is at a point in time, multiplayer games, especially competitive shooters, are fluid experiences that continue to evolve. While single player games may be patched post-release, the core game remains the same. Multiplayer games continue to change and evolve. How a developer curates their game over...
Boy has 2016 been a year thus far. Vinny's favorite tagline for the Beastcast might be slightly sardonic, but it is hard to remember a better period of time for video games in recent memory. The quantity and quality of games in the first half of 2016 has been astounding. At this point, the current generation of consoles is in full swing. PC gaming is still going strong. From sequels to original...
The 999 series has been one of the most critically acclaimed and cherished cult series of the past decade. Originally debuting in 2009 in Japan and a year later in the U.S., it told the crazy time-and-reality-bending tale of nine people kidnapped and forced to engage in a life-or-death room escape game. After Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward was a financial disappointment, fans were left for y...
Saved games are kind of like officiating: the subject most often comes up when something has gone wrong. I had been playing Rebel Galaxy for about twenty hours when my save was corrupted. Apparently, a bug has existed for a long time with the game that several patches still hasn’t squashed. This bug results in mission cargo getting stuck in your hold, which also results in you being unable to c...
Every now and then when navigating the site, I glance over at my 2014 Game of the Year list and think about how much my opinion on some of the games listed there have changed. For some time, I've wanted to experiment by revisiting this list and seeing what has changed. So I've used the first few months of 2016 during the lull in new releases to finally catch up on things and now feel pretty goo...
Wing Commander: Secret Ops is a free, downloadable, fifty-six mission episodic follow-up to Wing Commander Prophecy released in 1998 All of the information in that sentence is correct, and yes, even at the time it seemed just as crazy as it does today. While Steam and Half-Life 2 are largely credited with firmly establishing digital releases as the way of the future, Secret Ops predated it by a...
I enjoy writing. Though I ultimately pursued a degree in Computer Science, my best subject in school was always history. Even though I didn't go to college for it, I ended up taking just shy of the necessary amount of courses to pursue a history minor. The great thing about taking collegiate-level history courses is that they really help you improve at writing long papers in a short amount of t...
Ending a story is hard. Consumers of any storytelling medium have a tendency to place a disproportionate amount of importance on the ending of a story. There is of course logic behind this. A story’s ending after all represents the final moments an audience has with the author’s work. And yet, you are far more likely to hear “the ending ruined it for me” than a comment about the first chapter o...
This has been a seminal year for gaming to say the least. I barely had time to even touch my back catalog of games with how much came out this year. I probably ended up playing somewhere upward of 40-50 games, which might be the most I ever played in a single year. Even then, there are still a handful of games I didn't get to that I really want to. I decided to write an blog covering the games...