DOOM: The Review. Modern Classic or Just Another Shooter?

Titles that refuse to admit they are sequels must be the “self-titled white album” trend of the gaming industry. Xbox One, Tomb Raider, and now DOOM. Bethesda and id have had a pretty good track record when it comes to keeping an older series alive. Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and Wolfenstein are both great examples of taking franchises in exciting new directions and succeeding. Fallout and TES became the most popular and celebrated first person exploration/RPG games on the market, and Wolfenstein found its niche by being a FPS that stood out from the rest with a very unique story and unique gameplay/stealth mechanics. While these games have found a foothold in the modern gaming market, they did so by changing very fundamental pieces of the games in big ways. Players of the original Interplay Fallout games or even the 90’s Elder Scrolls games often find that the newer additions to their beloved franchises aren’t at all the same games they once were, relying more on combat and severely limiting dialogue when compared to the older games. This worked out pretty well, since it turns out mainstream gamers enjoy looking at pretty landscapes and shooting bad guys a bit more than engaging in tribal politics. With DOOM though, they took one of the biggest, baddest, most violent and most fast paced games ever made, and simply made a new, even more violent and still fast paced game where the goal is basically “shoot everything until it dies”. So, with a studio that has lost most of the minds that helped create the original, a poor showing at last years e3, and abysmal reception to the multiplayer beta, expectations were low and DOOM seemed, well, doomed (I’m so sorry). However, it’s finally here so we can answer the question, “Were they able to create a game worthy of it’s own name?”.

No time to play Pt1: How to make the most of your limited time for gaming

I woke up one morning in the past and realized something terrible had happened. During the night someone must have come into my house and destroyed everything I knew and held dear. Suddenly when I woke I realized that I had to go to work, there were bills to pay and I even had to make my own breakfast. The unthinkable had happened. Against my own will I had become an adult. Not only did this mean I would begin drinking coffee and listening to NPR daily, but it also lead to dust collecting on my PS4 and my Steam account thinking I was dead or had at least been kidnapped.

I hadn’t been kidnapped, though. I was simply busy. Between work, relationships, learning new skills, and putting out the endless number of metaphorical fires in my life doesn’t leave a lot of time to sit in front of a TV. I didn’t stop playing games, though. If I did it might be a bit silly to run a gaming blog, wouldn’t it? Instead, I find that my gaming habits have changed significantly. In some ways for the better, even. So now I want to run down my methods of being a dedicated gamer on an extremely limited schedule.

Yes, gaming can be a good thing

Most gamers have heard it all of their lives.

“Stop wasting your time in front of that screen!”, “Don’t you have something better to do than play games?”, and now years later “Why are you still playing games? You’re an adult! Grow up!”. It’s crushing to hear those around me, even my loved ones putting down me for my choice in hobby or even my work in gaming. The laughter and snide remarks of those who feel themselves “above” gamers comes out whenever the topic arises, causing me to feel like an outcast in certain groups of people.

How easy it is to let their words enter my head. To let them convince me that something I love is useless, immature, a distraction from truly living. So many have let the derogatory remarks of those surrounding them ruin their love of gaming. They put the controller down, and never return to the hobby and community that once meant so much to them. I stopped listening to the negativity. I know that gaming is more than a bright screen in a dark room. It’s more than an escape from reality, even more than just a game. Gaming can be these things, but it can also be so much more. It’s something that most outside of the gaming community miss. It’s a part of who I am. Gaming helped mold me into the man I am today, and I hope to help mold gaming into what it can be tomorrow. I can look myself in the mirror and be OK with who I am even if others aren’t, and I can tell you that despite what you may have heard, it’s OK to be a gamer. In fact, you might just be better off for it.

I’m not here to defend a life of playing games in solitude, wasting away behind a monitor. I’m also not here to condemn those who don’t play games. Instead, I think it’s important to realize the important and positive role that gaming can play in one’s life. Gaming has had such an impact on my life and the lives of many of those around me that calling them games seems almost unfair. We are able to experience things that no one else does. We can interact with incredible worlds that only exist in 1s and 0s. We find friends in strangers from all corners of the world who happen to be put into the same online match as us. We even get to experience one of the most complex art forms in existence.

When I say that being a gamer has helped make me who I am, I’m not speaking in hyperbole. Gaming has had a profound effect on so many aspects of my life. My earliest memories of developing musical taste date back to the soundtracks in the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater series. Many of my favorite moments of spending time with friends as a child are centered around having a PlayStation controller in my hand. The sports I like, my love of history, even my current obsession with motorcycles can all be traced back in some fashion to a game I played. Sure, maybe NFL Blitz wasn’t the most accurate depiction of football, and maybe I shouldn’t have picked my favorite team for life while playing it in the arcade (please Buccaneers be good again before I die, k thanks), but playing against my dad in that empty mall arcade as player 2 and feeding that machine quarters will always be one of my favorite memories of spending time with him during my childhood.

As an adult, gaming continues to impact my life in big ways. I meet great people from parts of the world I’ll probably never see in person, and learn about their culture and who they are simply because I have a controller in my hands and a headset on. I’m able to interact with and experience very personal stories that give me insight and make me face emotions that could never surface in quite the same way in any other medium. Believe it or not, gaming drives me forward in life. I find inspiration and motivation somewhere in between the 1s and 0s. With each digital adventure I have through an on-screen character, the drive to have my own adventure increases. I’m introduced to new concepts and places. Sometimes I’m even shown things I didn’t want to experience, only to have my point of view change as I’m introduced to new and opposing ideas.

It’s due in part to these experiences, interactions and friendships that I continue to grow and evolve as a person. The gaming community inspired me to write, something I may have not picked up if not for the brilliant gaming writers I followed years ago. Now I’ve written hundreds of articles, about not only what new game came out, but about the deeper issues and topics embedded into gaming culture and even several pieces on affairs outside of the gaming sphere. I’ve somehow managed to meet and develop relationships with people who hold positions that I idolized all because I wanted to write about a game.

Sure, the average gamer doesn’t exactly decide to take to the internet in a linguistic tirade about how terrible that Game of Thrones role-playing game was, but that doesn’t mean that games can’t have positive effects on them that translate to the outside world. Everything we do has the ability to positively or negatively affect us, it simply depends on how we react to the experience. Gaming is no different. We all know playing games can go downhill quick and have serious negative impacts on someone’s life.

As much as I hate to admit it, the stereotypical TV portrayal of an unhealthy, unhygienic guy in a dark room playing games every possible minute of every day is real. It’s certainly not a correct portrayal of the average gamer, but it exists all the same. Gaming can be and often is used to escape from reality into simpler, happier, or simply different worlds. This can be a great tool to combat stress, anxiety and in some cases even cope with emotional trauma, but it can also be used as an unhealthy crutch used to avoid negative emotions and reality altogether. Some players use games as an attempt to escape completely, substituting their reality with a more stable digital reality only to become the stereotype I speak of. This is obviously not OK.

It’s easy to slip into a unhealthy relationship with games. In fact, I think most of us have done just that at some point. For me, there’s really only two ways to get out of it. Either force yourself to completely quit gaming for a period of time and then limit your hours per week or day when returning, or make yourself too busy to constantly play. Like basically everything else in the modern world, gaming can be an addiction and in those cases must be treated like one.

Somehow, though, I’m able to keep a healthy relationship with gaming and allow it to have a positive, rather than negative, influence on my life. This is partly due to the fact that I simply don’t have enough time to let gaming control my life, but I also find that engaging in the community rather than always just playing games can have some great positive effects on my relationship with gaming. Not only does it allow me to do things like write, make friends, gain perspective and learn, but it also makes the time I am able to play so much better. If you’re a gamer, keep tabs on your gaming and try to find ways to allow gaming to make you a better person. If you’re not a gamer, simply recognize that gaming is rarely a waste of time or mindspace.

King’s Quest Chapter 2: Rubble Without a Cause Review

In King’s Quest Chapter 2, King Graham (Christopher Lloyd) continues to recount the adventures of his younger self to his grandchild(ren). In chapter 1, he was simply an adventurer hoping to become a knight to the king, but in Rubble Without a Cause, he himself is now the King of Daventry. That doesn’t mean his adventuring days are behind him, though. After a quick intro showing that Graham was actually not that good of a king in his younger years, he and his friends who work in the town square are promptly kidnapped by goblins and taken into a secret cave illuminated by bioluminescent lizards and held as prisoners. For some reason, Graham is chosen by the goblins to perform their chores for them which means he is the only prisoner able to wander the caverns unsupervised. This of course means that he takes it upon himself to figure out how to break everyone out and get back to Daventry.

Creed just might be my new favorite sports movie

That’s right, I’m actually writing about something other than games for once! I’m no professional movie critic, but I feel that Creed is a movie worth writing about. I just recently went to see Creed and came in with high expectations due to the surprisingly high Rotten Tomatoes score of 93% (I didn’t read reviews to avoid spoilers). Even with my high expectations, though, Creed surprised me and may now be my new favorite sports movie for a multitude of reasons. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

How open worlds can detract from narrative in games

I recently reached into the black hole that is my gaming backlog and pulled out Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. Anyone who reads my work regularly is aware of this as I have mentioned quite often my many problems with the game and how vehemently I yearn for those hours of my life back, especially considering I was playing it on the recommendation that I would “absolutely love it”. At one point in my enthralling adventure as a pirate that was getting a divorce or whatever the hell that story was about, I found myself in a situation in which I was told of this terrible thing happening on some island and how I should immediately sail there before it’s too late. So I did the reasonable thing and spent the next several days (in game time) sailing the open sea and killing fellow sailors because they had some kind of material I needed to put an extra cannon on the back of my ship. Eventually I made my way to whatever the actual story objective was and of course things played out exactly the same it would have if I had gone there immediately. How nice of them to wait for me to begin the festivities, eh?

Needless to say, events like this destroy the already small suspension of disbelief I afford the Assassin’s Creed franchise. If Ubisoft was hoping I would simply submit to their will and automatically invest myself in the world they had haphazardly constructed, they were sorely led astray. However, experiences like this do raise interesting questions. Is it my responsibility as a player to do what the developers hope I will? Or is it on the developer to make me care about their narrative before trying to create a sense of urgency?

Updownright first impressions: Onion Force

Yes, I know, the world really needs another cartoon-styled tower defense game, but don’t give up on me yet. Onion Force (formerly known as Dirty Rascals) is the first game from independent studio Queen Bee Games and has to be one of the most charming games I’ve played recently. Onion Force does it’s part to stand out from the overabundance of simple tower defense games, and the promise of hand drawn animation and apparently no microtransaction BS instantly made me interested in this game, but did it hold my interest once I got my hands on it?

Developer Q&A with Kathleen and Steve Cassidy of Queen Bee Games

Queen Bee Games consists of the Prince Edward Island based husband and wife team of Kathleen and Steven Cassidy. They had a baby in 2013 and chose to do the obvious thing and immediately start an indie game studio… Somehow, though, they seem to be making it work, and their first game, Onion Force, is a highly stylized and charming game set to come out in January 2016. I found Queen Bee to a very interesting developer, especially for a first time developer. I was able to speak to both Steve and Kathleen about the challenges of being a first time indie developer and about their first game Onion Force. So, sit back, close your ey…OK maybe keep your eyes open unless you have some magical internet powers and can read this with you eyes closed…just enjoy it, alright?

The most important skill that every indie developer needs

This post is about marketing, so I should probably post some kind of graph so people take me seriously. Yes, this one will do.

OK, so you’re ready to be a game developer. You’re not some “sellout” going to work on the next over-budget AAA military shooter, oh no. You’re going to make your own game, your way. In fact, not to brag, you see yourself as the next Notch. So, before you get to work, you go down your checklist entitled “Necessary things I should probably know about before trying to make a video game”. Alright, here it goes. Coding? Check. Animation? Check. Ability to make up story that gives you an excuse to fight dragons? Check. Ability to say you chose pixel art animation because it’s “retro” and that you could totally animate in 3d if you really wanted to? Double check. So, you’re good to go right? You start making your game and it’s absolutely incredible. Surely everyone will simply throw money at you as you walk down the street to help you fund it. Something’s not right though. Your Kickstarter has only been funded for $10 and you’re pretty sure that came from your Mom, and the only person to vote for your game on Greenlight is that guy who always followed you around and tried to join your clan-only Team Fortress 2 matches on Steam. What could have possibly have gone wrong? Oh no, you left something off of your checklist! But what could it have been. Then, suddenly, it comes to you in a vision. Marketing.

The problem with the term “video game”

What comes to mind when you hear someone say “video games”? No, seriously, I want to know, put it in the comments. For those of us who consider ourselves “gamers”, we probably think of the entire hobby and culture that makes up what video games are to us. To the more casual gamer or those on the outside looking in, a different picture may take shape in their mind when they hear the term “video game”. I had never really put much thought into the use this term until I was working on my last post “With release of “9/11 simulator”, journalists once again criticize any game that wants to speak on a sensitive subject“.

I realized that when video games are spoken of in mainstream media, calling them “games” often immediately devalues the projects themselves. When calling something a “game”, it causes many people to automatically categorize whatever the subject is into things that are fun and usually for kids. This is fine most of the time. For most big developers, the term game works perfectly. Games are meant to be played for fun and entertainment and many of them are developed with kids in mind. Over recent years, though, video games have evolved. Not all video games are just “games” anymore. Video games have things to say, places to take the player, and narratives to tell. Many releases like The Beginner’s Guide, Gone Home, and Cibele are amazing experiences, but calling them “games” (even though The Beginner’s Guide is about games) doesn’t seem to quite fit.