Titanfall

Titanfall is a highly anticipated game being developed by Respawn. It will be available for Xbox One and PC on March 11th with a Xbox 360 version being released later in the year.  If you haven't heard of Titanfall yet, then where have you been.  It's an online based video game, made by the same group of people who made some of the Call of Duty games.  Essentially you play as a pilot, and you have these giant mechs called Titans. You have the option of either fighting Call of Duty style "run-and-gun" or you can call in a Titanfall and battle with your mech.  I managed to play a bit of Titanfall during the open beta on PC, and I was impressed.

You can fight Titans by foot with an Anti-Titan Weapon.

You start out the game by going through a series of training excersies which help you learn the controls and get you fimiliar with the Titanfall universe.  You'll start off by learning the basic looking up and down, and walking around.  It gradually gets more advanced, all the way to the end where you learn how to run the Titan.  The Titans are really impressive.  They are big and bad with badass weaponry.  The really cool thing about the Titans is that you have the option of either operating the mech or letting the automation take over.  It was amazing to run around as the pilot, shooting down enemies while the titan did the same thing.

Be cautious though because pilots on the ground have Anti-Titan Weapons which are specialized weapons that are for destroying Titans.  If you are not paying attention with shields down, then your titan will not last long.  Some Titans can deflect bullets and send them back to the assalant.  Which can be really effective.  While the Titan is reloading, using the deflection move will help from getting damaged.  However Titans cannot deflect Anti-Titan ammunition.

The Titan is absolutely fun to operate!

When playing on the PC, it ran smoothly on the Radeon HD 7770.  Running at smooth 60 frames per second.  Would highly recommend getting this game on launch day if you have an Xbox One or PC.  That is if you either enjoy shooter games or want to experience a cool mech game.  From the experience of the open beta, it ran smoothly and was fun.  Rating from playing the beta: 8/10.

Do Video Games Cause Violence

"Incoming!” “Take cover!” “Flank!" are just some of the words that could be heard while playing war games such as Call of Duty or Medal of Honor.  When someone thinks of video games they tend to think of war games.  The media has put a lot of negative feedback toward video games.  Opponents who are against gaming state such things as video games cause people to become violent, that they become anti-social and that gaming is overall a waste of time.  The negativities toward interactive entertainment are not all bad.  In fact, there are a lot of perks in playing video games.  Video games do not make people violent or anti-social and it helps improve valuable real life skills such as hand-eye coordination, memory, decision making, and judgment.

The biggest question that is being asked by non-gamers is: Do violent video game make people more violent?  There are many people out there that would argue that, yes; violent video games do make people violent.  Ever since the invention of video games, there have been parents who argue that video games are too violent and that their children are becoming aggressive because of the computerized entertainment.  The gaming industry complied with the parents and formed the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) which gives video games the simple letter-rating that can be seen on all of the video game case covers. The ratings are there to inform parents as well as gamers which age group a particular game is toward.  The letter “E” is for everyone from any age group.  The letter “T” is for teens from thirteen to seventeen.  The letter “M” is for mature from eighteen or older.  Then you have the rare rating of “AO” which stands for adults only, which is basically a sex game.  To this day, some parents neglect the ESRB rating, allowing their children to play such games as Call of Duty which is rated M.  Often when there is a shooting at a school some people will instantly blame video games, believing that by playing a violent video game such as Halo or Resident Evil, that the player themselves become violent.  A psychologist from New York by the name of Dr. John Ryder would argue that video games do not make people violent. “‘Usually violence begets violence, not watching it on TV or play-acting in a video game. There is no reason to assume that doing that will make someone more violent. That is just ridiculous.’” says Dr. Ryder (Kotecha).  Psychologists like Dr. Ryder point out that violent behavior can often develop with children who are raised in an aggressive surrounding.  Let’s say that a child is growing up in a family where the father is abusive to the mother or both parents disrespect their child.  Theoretically speaking, the child would most likely become aggressive because of viewing his or her father being abusive or by being abused themselves.  So it’s safe to say that video games do not make people more violent.

The next biggest issue that non-gamers argue about is that video games cause people who play them to be antisocial.  With today’s technology, that statement is most likely the opposite.  With the ability to play games online with other gamers with such thing as Xbox Live or PlayStation Network they are socializing.  There is a class of games known as massive multiplayer online (MMO) such as EVE Online, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars The Old Republic where gamers often times have to perform “active teamwork and high-level project management” (Steinburg) to be able to do well in some in-game missions. Even before games became capable of being played on the worldwide web, gamers often times met during game releases.  While standing in long lines to get their hands on the next big thing in gaming, gamers often times communicate about topics such as gaming, comics, and life.  Today’s technology allows gamers to become more social than ever.

How does gaming improve hand-eye coordination?  Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York have conducted studies that suggest that video games actually “boost visual skills” (Roach).  Gamers are focused on their surroundings as they drive a vehicle through a war torn residential street or walking through a lush forest full of adventure. "‘It is certainly good training for people in situations where they need to detect things in their visual environment at any time in any location, like ground troops going through uncharted territory,’" (Roach) said brain and cognitive sciences Professor Daphne Bavelier.  Through the research at the University of Rochester in New York, researchers discovered that avid gamers have increased attention abilities.  Also researchers from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk have actually designed some video games that help children with attention deficit disorders, which help instruct them to control their brainwave patterns.  Tests have been conducted between gamers and non-gamers as well.  The first test had a small circular object on a screen that would flash for 1/160 of a second. Gamers noticed the split second object more than the non-gamers.  The second test showed one to twelve small objects on a screen simultaneously and the participants had to type how many objects they had seen.  Gamers tend to be correct on the number of seen objects compared to non-gamers.  The final test would flash black letters on a screen quickly and one letter would be white.  Gamers would pick out the white letter and be able to identify what letter it was more often than non-gamers. Why is this important?  Because gamers have a good eye for detail, these skills could be beneficial in the workforce. Lets say that an avid gamer is fully employed as a police officer.  The skills he has developed from video games could very well enhance his observational skill while on the job.  He could notice a slight mound within a criminal’s jacket without much effort, or even identify a weapon concealed within the criminal’s clothing.

Memory is an important human ability. How do video games help improve memory?  Some games require a gamer to memorize certain sequences or sounds to be able to complete a certain mission. Video games such as Alpha Protocol and Splinter Cell require gamers to remember passwords to get past highly secured doorways.  Sometimes a gamer has to memorize a certain password throughout the whole game, and other times only having to remember it for a few minutes.  This helps gamers memorize better in real life as well.  With this enhanced memory, gamers can remember phone number more effectively or important dates of the year.

Can games really improve decision making and judgment?  There are some games out there that have an emphasis on the skills of decision making and judgment such as The Walking Dead and Mass Effect.  While playing these games there are times in-game where the player has a short period of time to decide from several choices and each decision has a huge impact to the game’s storyline. For example, in Mass Effect, you have a huge decision to sacrifice one of your team members in order to successfully complete a certain mission. Each team member is highly skilled in a certain trade which makes them important in-game, but the gamer still has to make that emotional decision to sacrifice a team member.  The Walking Dead does an impressive job of testing a gamers judgment.  The gamer has to decide to either save a child or an elderly person from certain death within a very short period of time.  A video games fast-paced atmosphere helps gamers with their real life decision making. Let’s say that there is a maintenance professional, who is an avid gamer, encounters a boiler with no water in the gage glass.  A boiler with no water is no good.  In fact any maintenance professional will know that by adding water to a boiler with no water will cause an explosion.  This gaming maintenance professional will be able to make the smart decision to immediately shut down the boiler without any hesitation.

In all, video games are not a waste of time.  In fact, gaming helps enhance a person’s hand-eye coordination, memory, decision making, and judgment.  Also releasing some built up stress or anger from the busy workweek. Video games do not make people more violent or anti-social. So go to your local game store and give video games a try.

Limbo

Ever wondered what it be like to go through purgatory? The developers at Playdead do a very impressive job at making an eerie black-and-white visual design of what purgatory may very well be like. You play as a young boy, and what a very courageous little boy he is. With absolutely no way to defend yourself within this dreamland-like world, you face many opponents that are there to kill you. With smarts and courage, that little boy can get away without one single scratch. You’ll face hostile natives, an assortment of traps and other deadly creatures.

The developers really suck you into this game. Between the gorgeous 2D side-scrolling black-and-white action, the sound effects, and an amazing sounding musical score, you just can’t put down the game. There are a lot of puzzles, which will also get you real involved in the game. Some puzzles are really simple, but then later in the game you’ll encounter harder and more complex puzzles. Some puzzles you can take your time on, but other are timed and everything must be done perfectly or you’ll have to face the consequences.

Limbo is a well-designed, visually astounding game with amazing sound and a down right impressive musical score. But sadly, however, as you get real into the game, it abruptly ends and all you can say is “I want more!” So hopefully the developers at Playdead hear our plea for another installment for this awesome and involving game.

Call of Duty Black Ops

Call of Duty is the largest and most well-known franchise in the gaming industry. There are a lot of expectations from this series, and Treyarch has once again met those expectations and brought us the new installment of the franchise – Black Ops. Call of Duty Black Ops delivers intense action, glorious visuals, impressive audio, and ingenious multiplayer. Similar to Modern Warfare 2, but with a little more modifications.

The storyline take place mostly during the 1960’s and takes you to Cold War hotspots such as Cuba, Russia, and Vietnam. The protagonist of Black Ops is an elite covert operative named Alex Mason. You start out the game in a room, and find yourself being interrogated. Mason doesn’t remember anything, and throughout the interrogation you play Mason’s memories. Each mission slowly comes together to build a momentum as each interrogation cutscene puts another piece of the puzzle together. The hazy edges of your consciousness conceal information that must eventually come to light, and the erratic visual effects and unnerving audio that encompasses your interrogations sometimes bleed into your mission memories, creating a great tone of uncertainty that plays out in astounding and substantial ways.

Black Ops covers a wide array of geographical landscapes and gameplay. A dramatic breakout from a brutal Soviet prison is one early highlight, and later missions feature frontline conflicts, urban firefights, and mountainous infiltrations. Environments are richly detailed, and though the campaign may have a few technical problems - such as the occasional problematic checkpoint or the odd teleporting ally – these moments aren’t likely to impede your amusement. In addition to the on-foot action, you do use a wide variety of vehicles to achieve success in your missions. Sometimes you’ll be in the gunner’s seat while other times you’ll be behind the wheel, and although the vehicle handling is discreet, the thrill of blowing stuff up and speeding through hostile territory is unquestionable. The core run-and-gun mechanics remains exciting as ever, and the gameplay variety throughout the campaign keeps the action moving at a great pace.

Although the campaign is a adrenaline-fueled good time, it’s not that long. The thing that will most likely keep you coming back to Black Ops for months to come is, predictably, the online competitive multiplayer. At its basic, this is the accustomed top-notch Call of Duty action that gamers have been appreciating for years. You gain experience for doing well in battle, and as you level up, you gain admittance to new and influential ways to customize your loadouts. New weapons and maps freshen things up, and one of the new killstreak awards is an explosive-laden remote-control car which is a pleasantly lethal device. The key new element to the multiplayer is currency. In addition to receiving experience for battlefield performance, you earn Call of Duty points, which can then be spent in a variety of ways. Most perks, weapon attachments, killstreaks, and equipment items are obtainable early on, providing you to bomb out the points to equip them. Customization selections like face paint, player card backgrounds, and the new create-your-own-icon tool are all accessed by spending points. Having the option to pay your way gives you more loadout options at lower required levels than previous Call of Duty games.

The Call of Duty points also permit two awesome new mechanics, the first is contracts. Like many multiplayer challenges that reward you with experience points for completing goals, which contracts you have to pay to complete them. If you do so within the prearranged time period, you receive an organized payout. If you pay 50 points for a contract and succeed in that contract, you’ll earn 11 points for all your trouble. If time expires before you complete that contract, you loose the points. The tougher the contract, the more it’ll cost, however, they have the larger payouts. You can have up to three contracts active at a time across three different categories – Mercenary Contracts, Operations Contracts, and Specialist Contracts. Contracts offer a nicely incentivized version of challenges and gives you something fun to attempt for if you ever get bored.

The other cool new mechanic is wager matches. In these matches, you pay an entrance fee of 10, 1,000, or 10,000 points, depending upon how much points you have, and then you get to play some of the most unique game modes that Black Ops has to offer. One mode gives you increasingly better weapons for each kill you tally, while another gives you a pistol with one bullet and only three lives to live. At the end of the match, the points is split proportionally among the top three finishers while everyone else comes away empty handed.

The rather popular four-player cooperative zombie-killing mode that was first debuted in Call of Duty World at War has returned. The fight to stay alive against wave after wave of zombies is still an intense and strange struggle, and new maps and playable characters take the eccentric humor of the situation to a whole new level. This mode supports four players online or two locally. Two local players can also play split-screen competitive multiplayer online, while four can divide the screen equally among them and set up competitive local matches.

Call of Duty Black Ops is an amazing game with new modes and mechanics that give a jolt of enthusiasm to the game. Though the campaign may be short, but the engrossing storyline gives this game the best thrill a gamer could ask for. Black Ops lives up to the top-notch lineage that the franchise has earned, giving gamers a tremendous new shooter to enjoy.

Heavy Rain Review

Heavy Rain, a PlayStation3 exclusive, is a unique new kind of game developed by Quantic Dream. The game is a powerful interactive drama, with intensely absorbing experiences that precisely conveys the tension, urgency, surprise and tragedy that the characters feel. The ongoing narrative changes to your every action and improving a deeply personal journey that leave everyone who undertakes it with something slightly different.

“How far are you prepared to go to save someone you love?” is the central question within Heavy Rain. The protagonist, Ethan Mars, is compelled to answer that question. After Ethan’s son goes missing and is rumored to be the latest victim of the mysterious Origami Killer. Ethan vows to do whatever it takes to save in son. Besides playing as Ethan, you also play three other characters who are seemingly unrelated to one another but are drawn into the case: Scott Shelby, a private investigator; Norman Jayden, an FBI criminal profiler; and Madison Paige, an insomniac.

Heavy Rain is an immersive interactive drama that will suck you in and not spit you out. As you control each of the four characters, onscreen prompts will have you pressing buttons in sequence, move the right analog stick in the exact directions as shown onscreen, shake the controller, and more to interact with the scenes. Each input is correspondingly difficult to the tasks being performed. When a character is scared or stressed, the floating onscreen prompts will tremble. The exceptional control scheme does a marvelous job at grounding you to the characters and their emotional states. A lot of action is to be found in forms of brutal or violent brawls, heart-pounding chases, and deadly gunfights, but even with such things as brushing your teeth and rocking a baby are rather engaging tasks which strengthens your bond with the characters.

Heavy Rain does not bother keeping track on your progress in terms of success and failure, for there is no right or wrong way to play. No matter what your outcome may be, the game will move forward and adapt to the consequences of your actions. Although the overall narrative framework is firm, your performance throughout the game can have a variety of effects, ranging from subtle changes in how a scene plays out to much bigger problems. Entire events might not even occur due to your actions and choices causing the plot to branch in a new direction. It’s even possible for one of the characters to die, consequently eliminating any subsequent contributions to the story that they might have made.

Heavy Rain is gorgeous looking game. The visual design of the environments is rather outstanding, and weather your visiting a dirty old creepy apartment building or a gorgeous forest utopia, the thorough amount of detailing put into the game in incredibly fascinating. Character models are so realistic, predominately in the way they move and interact. An irregular awkward animation can occur, like a robot-like move up the stairs or your stuck in place for a split second. Overall characters move extremely well.

Music will stir up your emotions in just the right way. When a scene starts to intensify the music becomes rapid paced, indicating that something bad is happening or will happen. When something depressing happens in a scene, the music becomes rather slow and gloomy. The voice acting is amazing, completing the human element to round out the experience.

Heavy Rain is a bold and revolutionary game that should be played by all who look upon its cover. Everything that happens in Heavy Rain will effect your emotions as it engages you into it’s universe. It’s astonishing visuals and outstanding voice overs will have you admiring the game every moment you click a button. The soundtrack will have you sitting at the edge of you seat. Hop on the roller coaster and give Heavy Rain a try!