Playstation 4 and why I wont be buying one yet

This really shouldn't come as a surprise. The PS4 was released and everyone is rolling around in the next gen experience while I sit here with my PC that can barely outperform my PS3. Upgrading my PC is one thing, but new consoles always seem to tempt me in some way or another. Has the PS4 really caught my attention enough to make me want to buy it? The short answer is no. The long answer is... longer...

Ever tried to make a video game?

I'm going to put this out there: Making a video game isn't easy. Especially when you want to make something competitive, fun and innovative. I have no real experience making a game myself and have a friend building the actual program. I design everything to go into this game including items, characters, map ideas etc. I thought it would be much easier than this. Turns out I was wrong.

MMORPG's and what I want to play

This is more of a question than an answer. What on earth do I want to play? What do any of us want to play? What has happened to MMORPG's these past few years? Has anything good actually been released lately? Why am I asking so many rhetorical questions?

The future of Pokemon X and Y

Careful! Spoilers ahead! Stop reading if you don't want to know anything about post-X and Y content.

Pokemon X and Y have been out for several weeks now and many people have steam rolled through the game, beaten the elite four, caught the legendary Pokemon and are trying to catch some of the older generation Pokemon in friend safari's. However, is this all there is to do now? is there something to look forward to?

The perfect Pokemon Team: Garchomp

This is probably down to a combination of both preference and following the meta of Pokemon. By that I mean, you find Pokemon you like and enjoy using but make sure that in the competitive field that your choice is not useless or underpowered. This is exactly what i did with my favourite Pokemon Gardevoir. She is a pretty good Psychic type but she isn't competitive whatsoever. The recent changes to make her into a Fairy type might raise her ability but I have yet to get one of my own so I can't say.

October MCM Expo 2013: Mario Kart 8, Super Mario Land, Legend of Zelda and Dragonball Z

So I go to this little event semi-annually. This little get together of thousands of people all in and around a gigantic building in the middle of London. Why do I go there? That's because I love pretty much everything about it (except for the odd issue or two). Anime, Video Games, Food, Cosplay, you name it. It's great to see all of these people in impressive outfits all mingling amongst one another.

This time round though, I sort of messed things up a bit. I decided I would dress up as a character from Shingeki no Kyojin (or Attack on Titan for those that don't know its Japanese title) and I had discovered that not only did my boots cut my heels to ribbons, but my harness was too short and my jacket was too small. I really know how to plan my costumes for events like this don't I? Oh well, onto the gaming side of the Expo.

The Kenway Pong Incident

If you have read my previous post regarding the incredibly hilarious AI for Guards and NPC's in Assassins Creed 3 then you can guess what this post is going to be about.

This happened around the same time as most of the other issues I had run into that I mentioned before. However this felt like it deserved its own spotlight. Allow me to tell you about the story of The Kenway Pong Incident

The Hilarity of Ass-assins Creed 3

Assassins Creed is a very popular franchise and it's not hard to see why. Altair, Ezio, Kenway are all incredibly cool characters that do their jobs in style and the games combat system and storyline are both thoroughly enjoyable. That's pretty much the only thing that kept me going through Assassins Creed: brotherhood. After a while it all started to become stale and I had to rely on the characters being interesting and the combat to intensify to keep me playing. It almost didn't, but eventually I made it.

Shiny Pokemon Hunting

I'm curious. I read about a method for collecting shiny Pokemon in the new X and Y versions of the game. I have been playing it on and off since I got it on release but I haven't felt that pressured into completing it yet. Maybe that is because I recently discovered my favourite Pokemon Gardevoir isn't actually that good. Maybe it's because that Abomasnow I caught is 20 levels behind my Japanese Absol. Maybe I'm just lazy!

What's going on?

Right, I've been slacking. That much is VERY obvious. There are things that are more distracting than writing on this blog and I need to use those alternate distractions to provide more content to this blog. I want to post more and so, I shall attempt to write 1 thing for this blog every single day (providing i can). The posts will generally be about gaming, opinions on it, maybe even something cool that I find. I don't know.

I thought maybe taking this blog into a 'Game website' style would be a good idea. hence the league of legends pool party skin post and the call of duty video link. That isn't the way to go about things. I will leave those posts up there, but hopefully they'll be swallowed up by the cluster of posts I hope to begin writing.

Look forward to seeing 'something' from me and thank you for reading. Check back soon!

FFXIV 'Looks' brilliant

Iv'e said it once before and i'll say it again: Final Fantasy XIV: A realm reborn looks absolutely beautiful and this Dungeon Fly-through video shows off the games brilliant locations and fearsome creatures without the potential risk of being eaten, chopped, sliced and diced by them.

League of Legends Pool Party Skins!

New League of Legends skins making a splash onto ours servers soon. Personally, i will likely be purchasing the Leona and Lee Sin skins but Renekton and Graves both looks great as well. Have a fun day at the beach!

Call of Duty Blitz Gameplay

I didn't really know what to expect when I saw the new game mode 'BLITZ' but I can certainly say it isn't what I expected. Where Battlefield 4 takes on the old favourite 'Bomb' aptly renamed to 'Obliteration', Call of Duty tries something new with blitz that involves running from point A to point B without dying.

The first hour of Wildstar

Now don't take this to heart, but I didn't play Wildstar for that long so I have obviously missed out on the late game stuff and all of the little gimmicks that make Wildstar different to its rivals. However, first impressions can mean a lot especially when it comes to MMO's that want to keep their players interested long enough so they can get to the decent features at later levels that keep them nailed, glued and duct taped to the game for several hours more.

Firstly, I can assure you that Wildstar is your usual MMO with wandering monsters, character customisation, loot and hot-key based combat. It also comes with a confusing user interface and heads up display which you'll probably get used to after 15 levels of trial and error where you press every button and hope it doesn't remove something you probably needed.

The combat is actually quite fun where everything is skill-shot based which is something that Guild Wars did with 50% of the spells you were given. This means you will have to learn a completely different method of pulling the targets you want. You WILL hit everything you don't want to hit and I found this out the hard way because my shots were going through enemies and hitting people behind them. All of my spells did this. I ended up pulling the one creature I wanted, fought with it a short while before shooting the other 3 things that happily wandered by me that i didn't want anything to do with at this stage.

Microsoft E3 Conference. Personal Reactions

So after wandering around outside in broad daylight, which is something I don't usually do unless I can help it, I finally managed to get the teabags and chocolate I was sent out to collect before rushing home to slide into my chair and miss the first half an hour of the Microsoft conference at E3 this year. Great.

Luckily, I could rewind the live stream (thank god) and watched it from the beginning. After about ten minutes, I realised Facebook and all social interaction had suddenly become dangerous territory. Spoilers were flying in every direction and before I knew it, I had already learned about the first half of the conference before I even had the chance to watch it. Also great.

So, lets get down to the nitty gritty of why I personally, wasn't satisfied with Microsofts Press Conference this year:

Everything made for the Xbox One couldn't be done anywhere else.

That just makes me angry for reasons I cannot explain and what made it even more aggravating was how one of my favourite games developers: Insomniac was the one to say this first. Seriously? Your game couldn't be made on another console? I would understand if that was because the game requires specific gimmicks of a console such as the Wii's motion controls but even then those will eventually be pulled to other consoles. Yes, i'm looking at you Playstation move. So what is it about the hardware of the Xbox One that makes you say 'It couldn't be done anywhere except on the Xbox One'?

Shootmania Storm Open Beta First Impressions

I have been a big fan of the Trackmania series ever since I first got my hands on Trackmania nations. Too many hours of my life were spent racing around their roster of tracks and the ones made by the community and I regret none of it. Then out of the blue Trackmania 2 Canyon appeared and I had to grit my teeth as I notice it now had a price tag. How long has it been since I saw the game arrive on steam and how long have I been putting off buying it? You can guess how excited I must have been when an open beta for Trackmania 2 Stadium appeared. However, even though my mind was set on Trackmania, I noticed something else has been opened to the public with a similar name. That game is called Shootmania.

At first I wasn't entirely sure if this game was going to be any decent as Iv'e always known Nadeo, the people behind Trackmania, to make racing games and not first person shooters but once I had dived head first into Shootmania I realised my assumptions were wrong. When I had to explain what the game was like to the rest of my group, I simply told them to imagine it as dodge ball with guns. You are dropped into a map with many players and the object of the game is to hit your opponents without being hit yourself. Get hit twice and you are eliminated until the next round until the last man standing wins.

However to actually be able to eliminate your opponents entirely and stop them from respawning, the flag in the centre of the map must be captured. This causes a huge tornado to start closing in around the arena and forces everyone to move towards the flag or risk being eliminated as the it wipes out those left behind. This means the remaining players are all closer together for a close-quarters finish. Considering the game doesn't actually come with a tutorial of sorts I had to find out what everything did myself and never before have I been ambushed by a natural disaster. That tornado seems to come out of nowhere and usually takes the less experienced players by surprise.

Trackmania2 Stadium Open beta First Impressions

I'm not going to lie. I expected something to actually be different about the sequel to the global racing extravaganza known as Trackmania but after only ten minutes of navigating the menu's and racing the first set of tracks I realised that there was really only two major differences between Trackmania Nations and Trackmania 2 Stadium.

Trackmania in short, is an online racing game with single player and multiplayer content you can download from steam. Every race is either a checkpoint time trial or a lapped circuit that become progressively harder as you make your way through the many tracks in the single player mode. What makes this game so appealing is the way each track is somewhat over the top, incorporating loops, driving on walls and launching your car off of ramps to get to that finish line in the distance.

The game doesn't just stick to racing though as the in-game level editor used to make the single player tracks is open to the players to build something themselves. That is where multiplayer stands out the most, gathering huge amounts of players all on the same track created by other players where the creativity of the community is only limited by what blocks they can use. I myself recall competing against these other players to see if they could beat my time (of which they managed every single time) on some peculiar track that involved hurling your car sideways so that you do not crash into a billboard and still maintained your speed round the corner.

League of Legends Review

Created by Riot Games, a company that had concealed itself beneath the radar and devoted most of their time into this one video game, have put together one of the most popular online video games out there today even though they had not actually released any other video game before it. Inspiration for League of Legends would most likely sprout from the Warcraft III mod: Defence of the Ancients which set the bar for Riot to hurl themselves over. And they did exactly that.

League of Legends isn't the hardest game to understand and get good at but it does take some time getting used to. Once you have figured out how everything works and what buttons you need to be pressing it can become very enjoyable. The easy hot-keys and controls allow newcomers to the game to dive right in. But what does League of Legends actually involve?

The League was created to settle disputes between the many different cities around the land. Instead of letting war break out, they all agreed to place their most powerful warriors into an arena and whoever won got the final say in the arguments. Although this is only the bare bones of what the story is all about as each champion has a different lore that explains why they joined the league. You can delve into these extra snippets of information or ignore them entirely as it has no real impact on the game.