Games | Mumbology

25Nov

Cash Is Never A Good Thing

Posted in Games, Hardware, Random | Leave a comment

As you might have noticed from some of my comments before, I might have a bit of an issue when it comes to buying things that I really have no need to be buying. If the steam sales aren’t enough proof, I got some news for you today. I got a new Nintendo Wii U last night so that I could play the new Super Smash Bros.

Let us go back to the beginning for a second on how this came to happen. I was watching a stream one day of the new Smash and realized that it looked pretty cool. I was somewhat sad that I didn’t have a Wii U to be able to play the game, but wasn’t interested enough to be bothered going and picking one up. I had also heard they were much more expensive then the last few Nintendo systems. Then we come to last night when I get home from work and realize that I have a giant wad of cash in my pocket. Having cash on hand is probably the worst thing that can happen since it just sits there mocking you daring you to spend it on something you will never need. Then I was at Wal-Mart with my roommate buying some food and we walked past the electronics section. He stops in since he just bought a DS2 the day before to check them out. At this point the money was practically screaming at me to spend it on something and really the only thing on my mind that day was Smash. So we try to get a Wii-U at that point to appease the money gods.

Of course Wal-Mart doesn’t have it, which normally would be a good thing since that means I didn’t spend the money. I think the money had somehow absorbed into my body at this point because the only thing we could think of was how the decision was already made to get a Wii-U. So we drive down to GameStop just to buy this stupid console and spend this useless paper that was somehow still in my pocket.

The cash might have been gone, but the inner gamer in me took over at this point. As I was sitting around today trying to finish up a bunch of stuff I had to do at work, I was thinking how dumb it was looking that my Wii had exactly one ipad shaped controller and one game. What kind of self respecting gamer would I be if I let that stand. A quick trip to Amazon fixed that issue with some additional controllers and useless games that will probably never get played arriving tomorrow…just in time for when my family comes down for Thanksgiving.

Hopefully the system will look much less lonely once those things arrive, and who knows maybe I’ll break the trend and actually play a fighting games more then once this time. I mean it has to happen eventually, right? I wonder if this is what women go through when they start looking at clothes.

07Nov

Overwatch – We’re Watching You

Posted in Random | 1,303 Comments

Pop Quiz. When’s the last time Blizzard released a new franchise? If you said 17 years then you either know way to much about Blizzard or have obviously been reading all about the new game they announced today, Overwatch. It doesn’t seem like that long but I guess if you don’t consider Starcraft Ghost a new franchise then it makes sense. Blizzard does after all make a company like Nintendo look like it has tons of different franchises.

The game does look interesting though and since it’s going to be a new genre for a company like Blizzard as a first person shooter, I am interested to see what they do with it. The little bit of game play that I’ve been able to check out reminds me loosely of Team Fortress 2. Which if it turns out to be true would make me pretty happy. The game takes a pretty original turn to start things off by taking place in the future. Not like that’s been done before.

Ok maybe not a completely fair comparison, and future settings do lend themselves pretty well since you get more freedoms in your gun designs and levels. The rest of the small bit I’ve managed to find looks decent so far. Small 6v6 battles, different classes to choose from including a big slow gorilla and a fast blinking around woman. If you squint they might even look like a Heavy and a Scout. Not really to much else I can say about this for now since I don’t really know anything about the game but we can always hope that it turns out better then Ghost did. They’re planning for a beta in early 2015 so maybe we’ll get lucky and get a chance to try it then.

Oh and before I forget. To any news sites that want to write about game announcements, please make sure your writers know something about games when they write about them. Trying to say that Overwatch is “similar in some respects to multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games including League of Legends and DOTA” just makes you look silly. Unless there are npc minions that roam around the map in lanes, each team has a base they need to defend, and there are levels and item upgrades to purchase; there is no way you could possibly say the game is like those. I guess that’s what I get for clicking the link to a normal news site.

06Nov

The New Internet Arcade

Posted in Games | Leave a comment

Thanks to the Internet Archive everyone now has a place to go to play all of their favorite old school arcade and console games, the Internet Arcade. With over 900 old arcade games, there is something for everyone. There are plenty of games that I had no idea what I was looking at, but also snuck in there are classics like Street Fighter, Defender, and my personal favorite BurgerTime. It’s been said that some of the games have issues, but in my extremely limited testing, they all seemed to work fine. Just make sure you aren’t in an active mumble channel and have your alt key bound to talk when you try to play. There is a good chance you will be messaged asking wtf you are doing.

Just the internet arcade was enough for me to become excited and decide that’s what I was going to write about today. Granted as you can probably see, it might have been a stretch to turn this into a full post without spending a lot more time trying the games. But as I was casually looking around trying to find more cool things to add to the story, I found something else that just made the deal so much better. Not only does the Internet Archive have over 900 arcade games to play through emulation now, but it also apparently has tons of old school console games from some of the old greats and not so heard of beginnings on the Console Living Room.

Not it doesn’t have any Nintendo consoles, but it’s easy enough to find those on any rom site out there. Instead it has games from some of the classics like the Sega Genesis, and Atari 2600. But it also has some lesser known systems like the Bandai Super Vision 8000 and the Mega Duck WG-108. I still hope that someday they get a Virtual Boy emulator so I can tape a box to my monitor to look into and play it just like the real thing. Nothing is better then ruining your eyes looking at bad red vector graphics for too long and getting horrible headaches.

02Jul

Dreams Do Come True

Posted in Games | 24 Comments

I know most of you have probably never heard of this game. It was old when I played it back in the early 2000’s and has been completely shut down for a few years now. It’s still one of my favorite games I’ve ever played and also was one of the early games in my competitive journeys. That game of course was Wulfram 2. Today while I was bored at work while browsing the internet instead of doing any actual work I was able to stumble across a new site for a new version, Wulfram 3.

What is it?

Wulfram 2 was a hybrid rts/fps tank game where you would be split into two teams to fight over control of a map. One player on each team would be able to pick up a link to be a commander and order parts from ships to build bases and defenses not unlike newer games like Natural Selection 2. The main difference here though is the maps are much more open and both teams consisted of the same units and buildings to provide a completely level playing field. The people playing as the fps soldiers would be able to pick between a beefy tank and a nimble scout.

The goal of the game was to kill the other team. In order to do that though, you had to first make it so they could no longer respawn by destroying their spawn pads located throughout the map. Another unique part to the game was that buildings came down from ships in cargo crates, and both cargo crates and the command link itself could be stolen by sneaky players. That was pretty much the entire game and as simple as it might sound, it provided a surprising amount of depth and teamwork to the game.

The good ol’ days

The game had a weird way of splitting people up to try to make the game fair. There were 11 levels you could get in the game which decided what servers you could play on. Trainers would go into the lower level servers and help the new people get familiar with the game and test the people to make sure they were ready to move up into the next server. I still remember the first time I logged in, had no idea what I was doing and was getting destroyed the these people with [TRN] in their name. Of course little did I know at the time they were holding back and doing just enough to point me in the right direction to figure out what I needed to do.

After moving up to the max level, I thought it would be loads of fun to go back and give back to the community by helping the new people like the [TRN] of old had helped me. That time helping people brand new to the game was one of the most fun experiences I ever had in a game outside of competitive game.

Of course I wouldn’t have stuck with the game for very long at all if there wasn’t a competitive side. Sure it might have been a little primitive with needing to schedule matches and only having two servers to use for matches, but it was still a ton of fun. I was also lucky enough to play for two of the best teams in the game in Tactical and Genesis. So many fond memories in that game that I can’t even list them all.

It’s still super early in the development but I’m very hopeful that they are able to get something going in it. I would love to see the game again with an updated engine and new player base. I’m also sure that I am not the only oldie out there that is hoping they pull through. IYAIAFFYDNPIP!

19Jun

The Summer Sale

Posted in Games | Leave a comment

The best part of summer started today with the annual Steam Summer Sale. That time of year when gamers everywhere can waste all their money buying games they will never play because they are on big discounts. Or perhaps I am the only person that does that. I’m sure this year will be eve worse since I’ve been pointed out towards the sales tracking over at steamdb.

I think we got a problem

It hasn’t even been 6 hours yet and I’ve already bought 31 games. The saddest part is that I probably wont even play half of those games but I had to get them because thanks to steamdb, I was able to find them on the cheap. Really though, can you even call it buying a game if they are only $0.50? It’t basically a free game at that point. So some might say that I’ve hardly bought any games at all.

16Jun

The $750,000 Collection

Posted in Random | Leave a comment

Over at Game Gavel the owner of the largest video game collection in the world recently put that collection for sale. It is quite an impressive collection featuring over 11,000 different video games. I knew it was going to sell for more than the couple hundred thousand that I originally thought of, but I didn’t think it was going to make it up to $750k. Of course it contains many games from the systems you would expect including: Atari, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Dreamcast. But it also contains many games from systems that you might not expect to see like: Tomy Tutor, V Flash, and Leap Frog Leapster.

How was this guy able to get his hands on all these games you might ask? Well it’s pretty easy when you manage a chain of retail gaming stores. Even with that being able to get this many games and resist tearing into them to have week long gaming marathons is pretty impressive. It might sound like a collection that he will never be able to come close to acquiring again, but it’s not the first time he has sold his massive collections. Hopefully by selling this collection he will be able to give the help his family needs. Maybe with all the new found space, he can turn his home into the best house ever.

15Jun

Enemy Front – Impressions

Posted in Impressions | Leave a comment

It used to be that you would hear about a new WWII fps game coming out every other week. For the last couple years though most companies seemed to have stopped living in the past and now cant stop looking into the future. That’s why I actually found it somewhat refreshing to see a new fps game that goes back and give a new entry into the WWII genre with Enemy Front.

In the game you play as a resistance fighter in France. Although the developers went back to a classic setting for an fps game, they did bring some of the newer features from games into the mix. There is more stealth available in the game then in most shooters that I’ve played recently although it was kind of hit and miss in the execution during the levels. Most of the time I found it easier to just run forward and kill everything then it was to try to sneak around. Additionally, when you end up with a sniper rifle in your hands, once in a while the camera will follow a bullet as it travels to its eventual target similar to what is found in the Sniper Elite series.

It wouldn’t be a shooter if it didn’t include multiplayer and Enemy Front provides the basics that you would expect in any shooter. You wont find the leveling or cover systems that most games have and instead just tried to focus on giving a classic multiplayer shooter experience. You can choose a primary and secondary weapon as a way to customize your guy. I can’t really say too much more about the multiplayer since every time I tried to play it, I was unable to connect to any servers. From the little bit I did get to play, it seemed like the gameplay although pretty basic would provide an ok experience.

What I liked:

Price. Although the game doesn’t give all the bells and whistles that you might expect from a new fps game these days, at $30 you get an ok game that has all the basics.
Graphics. Graphics normally aren’t that important to me, but the game does look really nice if you are able to turn the settings up

What I didn’t like:

The difficulty. Even when playing on the hardest setting, the game just isn’t very hard.
The AI. They aren’t the brightest bunch of soldiers you will run into on a battlefield.
The Multiplayer didn’t work very well. Like I said earlier, I was only able to connect to a server a couple times, and when I did it was a very laggy experience.

12Jun

Mario Maker – The Mario Level Editor

Posted in Games | Leave a comment

As I was reading about Mario Maker from Nintendo, I couldn’t stop wondering why people were getting so excited over it. It is Nintendo after all. A new year and a new Mario game? Not that I hate Mario or anything, capable of creating a new character anymore? It sure seems like all they can do these days is stick their old characters in new games and hope that is enough.

Beyond the fact that apparently Nintendo will never create a new franchise again, what’s the big deal about a level editor? Sure it’s still early and they might add some kick ass story or something, but right now and they’ve showed so far is an editor. Maybe because I’m more of a pc gamer then a console gamer I’m spoiled, but level editors have been pretty common as something you get for free for a while. Hell even flash games have level editors now, and those are free. There is even a flash game of a Mario clone that not only has the ability to create and share levels, but also has a full game for you to play.

I guess I shouldn’t just be a negative nancy about this. The interface for placing objects in the game did look very simple to use, and like LittleBigPlanet, I’m sure the game will be a huge hit. The ability to switch between retro graphics mode and the newer graphics is also a nice touch. Platformers like Mario, are also a great fit for a create your own levels type thing, which would help replayability of the game. Just look at Trials: Fusion. If that game didn’t have a level editor to create and share levels with, would people play it after the first few days when they play through the stock levels?

Like with most game announcements and previews, I’m going to hold my final judgement until the game is much closer to release. I just feel like Nintendo should have either shown off more of the game if there is more to it, or packaged the editor into a new full featured Mario game.