Category: Mobile

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Shmee’s Top Five Games Of 2016!

I got to play a lot of video games this year, and for the most part they were good.  All the ones I played but didn’t like, generally I didn’t pay for, so that was nice.  This list was harder to make than my movie list because the game selection was so good this year, but enough of my rambling, to the games!

5: Overwatch

I wanted to hate this game.  They charged $60 for a multiplayer only shooter, but I don’t hate it.  I love it, and if my friends played it more so would I.  Yes Overwatch is pretty much just Team Fortress 3, but since Valve didn’t make Team Fortress 3 then I am happy that Blizzard did!  With Blizzard’s signature polish.

4: Hyper Light Drifter

My brother told me to back this game, and I am glad that he did.  It is a fantastic throwback.  Hyper Light Drifter plays like you remember Super Nintendo games playing, so in other words it is better than they ever were.  It is a little on the hard side, but never frustratingly so.

3: Titanfall 2

I don’t love all the changes they made to Titanfall 2’s multiplayer, but the single player they added was pitch perfect.  I never play single player campaigns twice, but I am jonesing to get back in to Titanfall 2’s.  It is great from beginning to end.

2: Forza Horizon 3

Forza Horizon 3 is my favorite racing game of all time.  I never thought any game could be better than Project Gotham 2, but Forza Horizon 3 is, and by a wide margin.  If you have a PC or an Xbox One you need to get Forza Horizon 3.  It is the realization of the open world racer that studios have been trying to make for years.  I am not sure how they will make a better Forza Horizon, but I hope they do.

1: Hitman

I thought 47 was a goner after Absolution, but Hitman brought him back with style.  This is the best Hitman game that has ever been made, and you should buy it post-haste.  You feel stealthy and lethal in just the right ways, and every mission seems to get better.  I cannot wait for season 2!

My Honorable Mentions go to Batman: The Telltale Series and Pokémon Go.  Batman: The Telltale Series is the Bruce Wayne simulator I never knew I wanted.  I hope I don’t have to wait as long for season 2 as I have been waiting for season 2 of A Wolf Among Us.  Pokémon Go is light on actual gameplay, but it merges the real world with the video game world in a way that has not been tried before.

This has been a great year for games, and it is also the year that I got back in to first person shooters.  I thought my FPS days were behind me, and that I would be playing only RPGs from here on out.  I was wrong, and I am glad that I was.  What were you top games of 2016?

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PAX West 2016 Wrap-Up!

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Another PAX West (formally PAX Prime) has come and gone, and I am exhausted.  There is so much to see and do that it just overwhelms the senses.  Every show that I have gone to is different, and this year was mostly about just hanging out with my friends.  One big reason for that was the huge indie game presence at PAX, and a lot of them were similar, so nothing really stood out.  Indies are usually well represented at PAX, but this year they were everywhere.  Word to the wise for all you indie game creators out there: if your new game features the terms rougelike or procedurally generated, your game had better be amazing.  There are like eighteen million (not exaggerating) procedurally generated rougelikes out there and they are all pretty much the same.  They are not bad, but just not good enough to care about.

Which is why the only indie game that I really ended up enjoying was an old school four player party game called Death Squared from SMG Studios.

Death-Squared

In Death Squared each player tries to move their cube to their colored circle.  Once all cubes are on their circle the ‘room’ is complete.  The problem is by moving your cube you are causing problems for the other cubes, so you all have to work together.  It is so simple, but so well executed.  This looks to be a must buy.

For board games I was starting to feel the same way that I was feeling about indie games.  They all have different settings, but in the end they are pretty the same three or four games.  However it took a trivia game called America by Bezier Games to prove me wrong.

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I generally am not a big fan of trivia games, but America’s excellent design makes it a ton of fun.  Pretty much there are three tracks for every question: the State the question takes place in, the year the question happened, and the amount of something in the question.  You get more points for getting it right, but if you are close you get points too.  That way even if you don’t know the answer you can guess based on whether you think other people know the answer or not.  It is great.

Like I said above with this year kind of being different it took a while for me to come up with a game of show, but I ended up picking Cowbots and Aliens.

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This game saved VR for me.  Every VR experience I have had thus far has been kind of so-so.  Some of it has looked cool, but none of the games have been better because they were in VR.  Cowbots and Aliens by Wizard Games Inc. was different.  It puts you in a saloon where you can use anything in the room as a weapon.  You can flip tables, deflect bullets with spittoons, break bottles over counter tops, you know pretty much everything you have ever wanted to do in the wild west while fighting an Alien Squid.  It was a blast.

The best panel by far was Telltale’s group play of Batman.

telltale-batman

It was so fun to control Batman with a thousand other people.  If you have not picked up their Batman yet, you should.  Like everything they do it was well done.  I can’t wait to play the rest of this great game.

That was pretty much my PAX West, and while I will need a few days to recover, I can’t wait until next year to do it all over again!  I wonder what PAX West 2017 will be like?

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The Worst Thing And The Best Thing About Pokémon Go!

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The Worst Thing:

The original Pokémon games were all about finding cool Pokémon, leveling them up, naming them, and building attachments.  They grew as you became a better trainer.  People always had their favorites.  Pokémon that they had since the beginning that were now unstoppable.  Not so with Pokémon Go.  Pokémon Go is a meat grinder.  You find your first low level Pokémon to help you level up you, but later you find new better Pokémon, so you send off you old ones to the Professor for candy.  I am not sure how the Professor makes candy out of our old Pokémon, but it is probably best if we don’t think about it.  Poor, poor Pokémon.

The Best Thing:

The game show the a bright future for AR (augmented reality) gaming.  I am not sure how long Pokémon Go is going to last.  There is not a lot of game in it, and I am seeing a lot of people having trouble trying to stay motivated once they reach level 20.  When the game becomes less about hunting Pokémon and more about hatching 10K eggs and taking down gyms to pay for incubators to hatch said eggs, but even if Pokémon Go fades away it has shown how cool AR can be.

VR (virtual reality) is good at showing a whole new universe, but there is something special about overlaying a different universe over our own to tweak it a little.  To see fifty real people standing in front of a coffee shop all trying to catch a rare Venusaur that they can all see through their phones.  I can only imagine as things like Google Glass and Microsoft HoloLens progress that AR games will only get better.  Who knows in the future we all might have so much AR tech that the difference between what is digital and what is real might be trivial.

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Pokémon Go Is The Pokémon Game We Have Been Waiting For!

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Nintendo’s first smartphone game is a raging success, and they shouldn’t be that surprised.  Twenty years ago Nintendo launched a video game, card game, and cartoon show about roaming around and capturing Pokémon, and now all those kids that played and watched Pokémon when it came out have grown up and got smart phones.  Thanks to those phones they now get to actually roam around and capture Pokémon.  It is twenty years of dreams coming true in a small way.  Kids and adults hitting the streets in small packs trying to fill out their PokéDex’s.

While there isn’t a lot of game in Pokémon Go, you pretty much just swipe, there is a feeling of adventure and accomplishment wandering around to new places and adding the little guys to your collection.  Not to mention the sense of community that Pokémon Go is building.  You can just talk to random people in the grocery store and ask them if there are any good ‘Mons around, and they will know what you are talking about and no doubt tell you where they got their last critter.

While Pokémon Go is shallow gameplay-wise compared to all the new Pokémon video games, this is the game people have been waiting for twenty years.  It is the fulfilment of a concept Nintendo has created and maintained for decades.  We all get to be Ash hunting through the forest looking for just one more Pokémon to add to our collection.  Now if only Nintendo would release the game on Windows 10 Mobile so I could stop stealing my wife’s phone I would be truly happy.