They were not invented this year, and were popularized at least by last year as you see with games like Overwatch, but the gaming trend of the year is the loot box. This exploitative idea takes the collectible card pack and brings it to the world of videogames, so instead of just getting items, or being able to buy them, you have the "privilege" of spending money on random chances for the item! Joy! You might get what you want, but you're far more likely to just be throwing your money away on nothing of note. It's bad stuff, but it has become popular because it works brilliantly. Some publishers have recently announced that look boxes make them more money than game sales, in fact, and given their exploding popularity this isn't too surprising.
So, seeing the potential money they can extract from their customers, the way every game implements loot boxes is different, but what most major game releases this year have in common is having a loot box system of some kind. Sometimes the boxes only contain cosmetic items, but sometimes they also contain items which directly affect play. Sometimes you can only get the boxes with real-money purchases, sometimes you can buy them or get them ingame... though they're almost always designed to make you want to spend that money, of course, and not rely only on the free ones. Etc.
There has been criticism of loot boxes from many gamers, though, for how they exploit people to get money out of them, for how they are basically gambling in that you spend money without knowing what you're getting for it, how they don't usually tell you the likelihood of getting any one particular reward and the good ones drop quite rarely, and more. These criticisms are, I would say, largely very accurate. Apart from the baseball cards I bought as a kid I've generally stayed away from random-draw gaming stuff myself, and playing Overwatch now has made me think about how this fundamentally really good game is being held back by its annoying loot box system. Why can't you just get money, to get the things you want with? I know, the answer is "because it makes Activision-Blizzard more money this way", but that does not make it okay or good game design! "Here's cool looking stuff, but you only have any chance of getting it if you throw a lot of money at us" is REALLY obnoxious game design and it hurts the game, as fun as it is to play. And this stuff is apparently in almost EVERYTHING now, Nintendo console games excepted... though with how they've now adopted microtransactions otherwise, I expect to see them soon in Nintendo games as well I imagine. Ugh.
On that note, I have been disappointed to see how enthusiastically Nintendo has gone for microtransactions. Oh, things like DLC addons to games are just fine, but then you have pure money-sinks like the Badge Arcade for 3DS... ugh! That thing exists just to take your money and give you nothing of note, because those badges sure aren't useful. I haven't spent anything in the Badge Arcade myself, but I'm sure many people have because of how few free plays you get, and that's too bad. At one point Nintendo was better than this, but not anymore sadly. Too bad.
A Hat in Time? GET OUTTA HERE! We don't love you any more. Super Mario Odyssey is the one true god of 3D exploration based platformers. Yes, you can become just about anything. You can be a fish. You can be a tree. You can be a goombas (sic). Never mind that though, because Mario controls like fine silk, if silk was a liquid you could control with your mind, via your arms attached to controllers. There's so many ways to keep your momentum going. You can use so many unintended (or maybe they were intended) solutions to getting to various places, and it feels great doing it!
Play this as soon as you can. Switches are a lot easier to find now, so hop to it!
I got a Steam Link recently. This hardware device streams a computer monitor screen to your television, allowing you to play PC games remotely. It's made by Valve and named for Steam, but actually does stream anything on that monitor, not only Steam, so you can use it for non-Steam Big Picture Mode stuff if you attach a mouse and keyboard to the thing. It's a pretty good idea, if lag doesn't break it, and I've been interested in the concept but only for the right price. Well, this offer was for $1, plus about $8 shipping, but there was a catch -- it was a bundle with a game, ICEY, which cost $7.69 itself; that is an okay price for that game, but not as low as it's been. ICEY looks decent (it's a sidescrolling action/platformer) so I decided to keep it anyway, though, so I have that too now. The total bundle was a bit over $15, which is quite reasonable. Now you can get the Steam Link alone on sale for $15 on Amazon, so Valve seems to want to clear their warehouses of these for some reason... moving over to more built-in apps (TVs with the capability included out of the box and such), instead of an external device, probably is what I've seen for a good guess for why?
Anyway though I tried the thing out today and it works pretty well, most of the time anyway; it does vary from game to game. I have it connected by wired internet to my router, which connects to the PC via another wire. I only have one ethernet cable long enough to reach from the router to the TV, so my 360 now doesn't have wired internet. Ah well... either I'll have to see how well the 360 handles wireless, or get another long ethernet cord. I'll probably get a cord eventually, wired really is better... though my other devices (PS3, Wii U, 3DS, tablet) use wireless and do decently with it, wired is faster and more reliable. It's apparently especially important to sue the Steam Link with wired internet, though, for lag reasons, so I will do so. But as for the Steam Link, as I said it seems to run fairly well. Games definitely don't run as smoothly as they do just on the computer, surely in part because of having to duplicate the monitor image (maybe I should try 720p streaming instead of 1080...), but it works and controls are responsive. Between the distance and extra rendering there is more lag playing games on the TV than there would be on the computer, and faster-paced and higher-end 3d titles do seem to run worse, but even those games are playable so long as they work on a gamepad, I think... though people will vary on this depending on their tolerance and system power, for sure. In some games I didn't notice much of a difference between PC and Steam Link though, so it works great if your system can handle it. Being able to play computer games on my television, while the computer is still in another room, is great and I think I'll use this thing a good amount; it's kind of like having a new console, only it's my computer! Sure, there is more lag and slowdown in games, and worse image quality too (because while my TV is HD and largeish, it's pretty old), but still it's pretty great.
So I have this now, and I've been using it with my Hori EX2 Turbo pad, my favorite xinput gamepad. It works great with that in games, but for things like text input it's miserably bad, and it cannot act like a mouse. So, I need a mouse and keyboard solution for the TV. I generally prefer wired things of course, but I'd need what, a long USB cable, and maybe a hub too? Mouse and keyboard cords are not long after all, and the Steam Link is over 10 feet from the chairs. And that would mean even more wires going across the room, too... I could do that and might eventually, but as much as I dislike them maybe a wireless thing is a better answer. I don't own any wireless mice or keyboards though, so I'm not sure what to get... hmm. Do I just get some portable thing with a keyboard and trackpad for starters?
(One option is to get the Steam Controller, and if it goes on sale I am somewhat interested, but I'm not interested enough to pay full price for that thing.)
So yeah, overall the Steam Link is pretty cool. Beyond the above section on lag and slowdown it has some other limitations too, though. First, there is no power button on the thing so you need a compatible controller to do that with. It seems most reliable with a Steam Controller; with the 360 pad it can work, but also can have issues. That's annoying. Worse, though, even if I had a mouse and keyboard for the living room they wouldn't be nearly as convenient to use as ones at the computer are the Steam Link really is only good for games that can entirely be played on a gamepad, most obviously. Additionally, there is going to be lag because of the distance between your computer and TV. In some cases this lag can be crippling, though thankfully it isn't for me. Additionally, I also have worse image quality on the TV than you'd get on a computer monitor, and sitting a lot farther from the screen makes small text unreadable in cases because PC games assume you will be close to the screen. For games where none of those things are an issue however the Steam Link is a good idea executed fairly well, and I at least have a lot of PC games that would be awesome to play on my TV too. Well, now I can, and the thing that allows it is (or has been) available for pretty cheap. Cool stuff.
... Is, for me at least, kind of the understatement of the year. So, early last Monday morning there was a strong wind and rain storm here in Maine, and between the up-to-70mph winds and its unusual wind direction (coming from the south, not the north) it knocked out power to almost half of electricity customers in the state -- 480,000 customers lost power. I'm not sure if the national news noticed, but it was a pretty big deal. Where I live now usually has quite reliable power, but sadly a huge tree branch took out the line going from the pole to the house, so we lost power as well. The huge branch and downed line were cleaned up by later Monday, but that's where it stopped for quite some time.
Now, the local power company, CMP, prioritized things by focusing first on line outages that would get a lot of customers their power back, then slowly working their way down from that. So, we were pretty low priority, so I didn't get power back all the way until this morning. They said they were trying to get everyone back up by Saturday night, but missed that goal. I just got power back this morning, and it sounds like a lot of other people only got it back today as well. This is a huge relief, because this has been a pretty awful week due to not having power. Some of that of course is because most of what I like doing (except from reading books) requires power, but also my hot water and stove are electric so they didn't work, and the furnace needs electricity to turn on so it didn't work either. I do have some gas heaters in some areas (and electric, not that they're useful here), and since those have pilots they worked thankfully, but the furnace is essential.
Now, Maine had one previous storm like this, the great Ice Storm of '98. That storm in January 1998 knocked out power to a lot of people, including us. We lost power for longer then; it was at least a week and a half, where I lived then. Conditions in general were a lot worse because of ice and temperatures, though; this time few people were forced out of their houses because of cold, 6-plus days in moderate above-freezing temperatures is not enough to do that. That's a huge thing, because in '98, while we were able to stay in our house because the house had a woodstove as well as the (not-operational-without-power) furnace, a lot of neighbors had to move out if their only heating system was a furnace. I remember it being kind of boring, with no power or school (since the schools were shelters for people who had to leave their homes) for several weeks, but no similar power-outage event had happened again here, until now.
This outage was similar in many ways to the one from '98, but different of course -- there were more outages (in my hometown for instance, the downtown and mall areas never lost power in the '98 storm, but this time lost power for days...), warmer temperatures, a faster recovery, and such. So really this wasn't as bad as '98, despite more people losing power -- CMP does seem to have learned from the previous storm. Still though, I really disliked this experience (and worried a lot, of course, since that's what I do). Sure, I love reading and did a good amount of that and still could use handhelds (if you find a way to charge them for newer ones that don't just use batteries), but electricity, the internet, and modern life are so closely entwined that it is jarring to suddenly be without those things.
So yeah, while we had it really bad here this last week, thanks to lots of work from line crews from all over the Northeast and Atlantic Canada, power is back on in most places at last. I feel for all those people in Puerto Rico who have been without power for over a month now! Sure, they don't need to worry about literally being frozen out of their homes given the climate there, but otherwise it's an incredibly unacceptable thing to allow a part of America to have no power for that long. The place needs a massive response that our racist president obviously has no interest in giving. Sad stuff... but anyway yes, I'm back!
Behold, Martin Amis' take on 80's era arcade game strategy guides. A sample about Space Invaders itself:
Quote:The phalanx of enemy invaders moves laterally across a grid not much wider than itself. When it reaches the edge of the grid, the whole army lowers a notch. Rule one: narrow that phalanx. Before you do anything else, take out at least three enemy columns either on the left-hand side or the right (for Waves 1 and 2, the left is recommended). Thereafter the aliens will take much longer to cross their grid and slip down another rung. Keep on working from the sides: you’ll find that the invaders take forever to trudge and shuffle back and forth, and you can pick them off in your own sweet time.
Amazing.
Here's one regarding The Packed Man.
Quote:Those cute little PacMen with their special nicknames, that dinky signature tune, the dot-munching Lemon that goes whackawhackawhackawhacka: the machine has an air of childish whimsicality. ... Do I take risks in order to gobble up the fruit symbol in the middle of the screen? I do not, and neither should you. Like the fat and harmless saucer in Missile Command (q.v.), the fruit symbol is there simply to tempt you into hubristic sorties. Bag it. ... PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.
(Note: I saw the original Blade Runner once, probably nearly 20 years ago, and haven't watched it again. I remember very little about it, but we went to this new sequel anyway because it sounded interesting. And it is.)
Is mostly a good movie, particularly for its presentation. The visuals are fantastic, you can really see the $150 million budget. And that soundtrack is amazing! It's an atmospheric techno soundtrack, kind of like the original Blade Runner, but with even more loud, ominous tones that play while a cityscape scene slowly passes by. I really like this kind of music so I thought it's great. The frequency of scenes like that makes this movie overlong and very slow, and those are faults, but I liked the visuals and music, and scene-setting those things combine to form, enough to not mind this too much. I will say though, see this in a theater if you can! Unless you've got a great home cinema setup it'd look and sound far worse at home, and that is a big part of the movie.
As for the plot, however, that's where Blade Runner 2049 has more problems. I won't spoil it, but the plot is a little too predictable most of the time, probably. There is one major twist late in the film, and it's pretty good and I didn't see it coming, though, so there is that. On the other hand though I don't like the somewhat open ending, it feels like a sequel hook that may or may not ever be followed up on. And other than that one twist the story could have been better. Maybe the movie could have used a bit more plot (and backstory), and a few less of those long scenes where nothing is happening except a background and an audio tone... ah well. Because of all the story issues I didn't love this movie and definitely have criticisms there, but it was good enough to see at least, particularly in the theater.
By all accounts, where Yooka Laylee was a decent game that got too much flak for being what it is, A Hat In Time is the one that shines like the sun's sun.
