Tag

Blockbuster

Browsing

Truth is what we’re best known for and I’d like to start this off with an honest one: Testament: The Order of High Human is expected to be perfect and is not. It is a beautiful, gorgeous game with deep lore and very fun puzzles with some decent combat. It has an old school scrappy developer vibe to it that makes a lot of old games endearing with graphics that appeal to the modern eyes. We don’t use numerical rankings because it’s sitting on 6/10 on Steam right now and is at “All Reviews: Mixed” on a sample size of roughly ~20. I don’t think games that have the artistic depth that Testament does deserve to be put on a numerical scale where anything below 8 is a waste of your money. There’s an audience out there for Testament who love this style of game and when it comes to…

GameStop is the last vestige of brick and mortar electronic gaming stores. It is a business of acquisitions, claiming most other large competitors and merging them into the fold and is on every YouTube and blog’s “Top 10 Companies Soon to Pull a Blockbuster” for the last six months to a year or so. Are they right? Is GameStop about to go under? I honestly am not some kind of market wizard, I can’t say if their current plans will save them or not, but we can talk about what’s gotten them to this point, in context of video game sales (not the whole who bought who what when and where, lots of that is already out there). So this chart pretty much tells a very, very interesting story. The company went public in 2002 at around $10 USD a share. In 2002, we were still in the world of…

Video game publisher Ubisoft has come forward with yet another installment within the Far Cry franchise. With the title having recently hit shelves, it’s time to take a look at some of the best guns-for-hire to make their way into the game. Far Cry New Dawn made its official release Feb. 15. Set 17 years after the events of Far Cry 5, the direct sequel is featured within the fictitious world of Hope County, Montana. Adding onto Far Cry 5’s follower system, Far Cry New Dawn offers players guns for hire and fangs for hire. Both systems provide players the chance to gain an NPC companion to accompany them on their journeys. While there is a bevy of options when it comes to companions, there are five followers that truly stick out. Here are some details for each character and directions for how to add each one to your team.…

Crowdfunding has become somewhat controversial as of late. For every story about a successful crowdfunding campaign, there seems to be a tale about a crowdfunding recipient running off with their spoils and leaving backers high and dry. That being said, crowdfunding may still be precisely what the gaming industry needs right now. Before we delve into the nitty gritty of crowdfunding, let’s look at another aspect of the gaming industry. AA developers are about to be in high demand. Within the world of gaming, the industry did away with the term “blockbuster” years ago in place of calling massive, highly funded, world-class games “AAA.” Still, the meaning is analogous to blockbuster. Some AAA developers include Bethesda, DICE and Infinity Ward. The issue with AAA gaming is that it has reached a level of success similar to film. A blockbuster film requires massive sums of funding to produce. Consequently, the films…

The recent hype around Obsidian Entertainment’s new The Outer Worlds title has drawn an interesting point. AA developers can still lure the attention of the video game industry’s exponentially growing video game audience. It’s a good thing too, because we need those developers now more than ever. First off, before breaking down why we need smaller developers, let’s dig into why The Outer Worlds is getting so much attention right now. Obsidian Entertainment includes members of the development team involved in the original Fallout franchise. Video game titan Bethesda purchased the rights to the franchise before producing Fallout 3, Fallout Shelter, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. Obsidian was later contracted to make Fallout: New Vegas, however. Bethesda has been receiving some heat from fans as of late. Many hardcore fallout fans were seemingly underwhelmed by Fallout 4 following the critical success of Fallout 3. Beyond that, the release of Fallout…

So I wrote an article recently on Blockbuster and the lost art of renting games, which gave me an urge within myself that I hadn’t felt in years. I needed to rent a game. I needed to satisfy that deep, long-lost urge inside of me, but where does one start? The only rental service that I even know of is Redbox, so operation Redbox Rental came to fruition. I had never rented anything from Redbox before, so the question became how do I even do this and what game do I rent? I had watched movies with friends who had rented them through Redbox, and I had even seen them operate the mystical, Redbox machines (SPOILER ALERT – they look like red boxes). However, I had never physically interacted with the machine itself. I would look like a fool if I went up to my first Redbox and not even…

There is nothing quite like a good RPG. The open world, expansive quest lines and in-depth levels of customization and choice are each endearing to the genre. That being said, there is a problem within the RPG world that is not being addressed. Well, now it is time to take a gander at that bloated elephant trouncing around the room. RPG games are about as poorly balanced as it gets. RPG is a pretty expansive genre. Everything from Assassin’s Creed to Tomb Raider could fit under the modern definition, making the term nearly meaningless. It has become more of a marketing term to excite casual fans into a frenzy. Simply placing the term “RPG” on a game box seemingly adds the belief that the game will now offer a deeper and more expansive experience. With that in mind, it’s somewhat understandable that marketers want to see it on every game…

I know it is irrelevant and it’s 2019, but I’m going to say it anyway; I miss Blockbuster. There was something magical about going into a Blockbuster as a kid, and I feel sorry that children of this day and age will have no idea what Blockbuster was or even the concept of how it worked for that matter. “What, you went into a store to find games or movies to rent, and if you couldn’t find it you had to settle for another?” Yep, that’s the way we had it back in the day. Simpler times. Nowadays, video game rentals are pretty much non-existant. If you want to test out a game you can download the trial version and play it on your system. If you like it you can go out to the store and buy the disk or even buy a downloadable version on the system itself.…