(01/15/18 7:54pm)
Use the fields below to perform an advanced search of Ball State Daily's archives. This will return articles, images, and multimedia relevant to your query. You can also try a Basic search
62 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
by Jake Doolin @ClingtoaScheme This review is based off the Mac and PS4 versions Is there any concept more American than moving out to the woods and building a life for yourself? That very idealistic view that you could escape from the world and just exists among the plants and animals. It’s ridiculous of course, and yet as far removed from the wilderness as I am (mostly due to gaming) I can say that thought has crossed my mind at least once or twice. Maybe I’d grow a beard, or more accurately a patchy mustache, and I’d be able to leave behind all the issues in my life. That’s where Henry, the protagonist of Campo Santo’s humorous and often brilliant game Firewatch, finds himself. At the cusp of one of the biggest decisions of his life he runs into a job that gives him that opportunity to escape. But as Henry and the player learn throughout the game, the wilderness takes as just as much as it gives. In the weak last gasps of the evening’s dying light Opening with a scene that reminded me of Pixar’s Up in both it’s scope and emotional venerability, the player is introduced to Henry (Mad Men’s Rich Sommer) and his wife Julia. Jumping between snapshots of the biggest moments of their lives together the player begins to see the cracks in their relationship form slowly until an emotional gut punch leads to Henry taking the job in the woods as a fire lookout. There he meets Delilah (Cissy Jones), his supervisor and only emotional connection to the outside world during his time in Wyoming wilderness. It’s the relationship between these two that makes up the crux of Firewatch’s narrative and the excellent writing from Sean Vanaman (Walking Dead: Season One) manages to capture the budding friendship between the two quite well. The day-in-day-out experience of being a fire lookout offers up plenty of time for Henry and Delilah to talk about subjects ranging from marriage and pets to an awful pun or two. There is no signpost moments in their exchanges that signal the player to feel one way or the other, instead the game smartly allows their relationship to ebb and flow to a point where their friendship becomes one of the most believable I’ve seen in a game. Sommer and Jones give it their all throughout the game, both shining when the script asks them to lay their lives bare for the other to comment on. There is a bigger story that starts to come in around the halfway point of the game, the duo begins to suspect there are being watched, but Firewatch never loses its focus on the core bond between Henry and Delilah. The big moments at the end of the game hit harder because of this, instead of thinking about how something would affect a specific character I kept thinking how it would affect their relationship with the other. All of this comes together in an ending as fine as I have seen in a game in sometime. Connecting all the strands of mystery in a conversation that speaks to the core themes of the game. When the credits rolled, I wondered where Henry and Delilah would be now, how they might have been changed by the events of the game and how much impact they had on one another. Maybe, to a greater extent, how much they had an impact on me. From the highways to the hills The Wyoming woods where Firewatch is based offer up their own unique feelings that add to the games narrative. Artists Olly Moss and Jane Ng create a feeling of warmth and mystery through their designs of the surrounding woods. Players will get the pleasure of seeing the sunset over the mountains while also dreading what maybe lurking behind the trees once the night sets in. This is helped also by the level design, which takes players to caves, lakes and burnt out sections of forest. As the narrative shifts so does the environment. Starting off as welcoming and warm it soon shifts to ashy and chilling as the bigger story comes into play. There is also a detailed level of care in the environmental story telling. The claw marks on trees and scattered beer cans strewn about make the world feel lived in, which makes some of the later sections of the game feel even more mysterious. All of these elements come together to give the game a very comfortable feeling that lends itself well to the frequent walks on the trail the game puts you through. Both the Mac and PS4 versions of the game look beautiful, with the Mac version working slightly better and with less framerate drops compared to the PS4. No matter what version you pick though your eyes will be in for a treat. TL;DR Firewatch is a game that cares about its characters and its world. Both feel real, offering up sights that stun and words that sting. It’s a story about people who can’t keep running from the issues in their lives, and the way they chose to deal with them will either engulf them or make them anew. + Fantastic relationship between characters + The finale +Unique visuals - Framerate issues on PS4 Originally posted on February 8, 2016
Intro, Birthright, and TL;DR by Jake Doolin @Clingtoascheme Conquest by Graham Taylor If you were to tell me four years ago that the Fire Emblem series would be making a comeback I wouldn’t have believed you. The series was on a downslope in 2012 after poor sales from its last few games and a general lack of interest in another game. A final game, Fire Emblem: Awakening was planned for the 3DS for the following year and was set to finish the series proper. Thankfully though, Awakening managed to sell well enough to bring us to now and the newest game in the series, Fire Emblem: Fates. And in a way one could look at Fates as the series victory lap, where at one point it seemed to be all but doomed it now boasts its biggest sales yet. But even beyond sales Fates feels like the culmination of decades of work and care, taking all the best elements of the series thus far and creating a game that works as another entry as well as a love letter to fans. Birthright
by Jake Doolin @Clingtoascheme There is a good chance that when you saw a game titled That Dragon, Cancer, someone popped into your head. Be it your family member, friend, or acquaintance, cancer is all too familiar for many of us nowadays. We all have some kind of personal connection to cancer; for me, it was my Aunt Sandy. Because of that, cancer has become something of a hard subject to discuss broadly. We know the pain and confusion that cancer brings on a singular level because we see it, we felt it, but when the statistics of cancer come up, (13,000,000 living with the disease in 2012 alone) it becomes hard to comprehend. This is the challenge that That Dragon, Cancer tackles head on, attempting to tell not just the cancer story of Joel Green, but manages to tell a story that encompasses cancer as a whole. And while the game is inconsistent, it still manages to soar. The Diagnosis Joel Green was only a year old when he was diagnosed with cancer. Over the course of the next four years, he and his family experience the most harrowing and painful time of their lives, culminating in Joel’s death in 2014. The thought of somehow turning that experience into a game seems impossible, but developer Ryan Green and his wife Amy, who wrote the script, managed to turn this tale from one of woe into one of hope. Told in short five- to ten-minute vignettes, That Dragon, Cancer follows Joel through his fights with cancer as well the Green family’s attempts to deal with it the best they can. Moving backward and forward through time, the story mixes the real and surreal in a (usually) seamless way. Segments may start in a hospital and end in the vacuum of space and, to the game’s credit, the shift feels natural. Some of the game’s rawest moments, such as the scene where doctors tell the Green family their son has weeks to live, are underlaid with dreamlike moments that heighten the emotion. While this mix of dreams and reality can be distracting, the times where it works create a feeling that elevates the game’s story to new emotional peaks. That Dragon, Cancer’s narrative is not an easy one to endure; though the level of insight into their lives that the Green family grants you through audio messages and diary entries can be overwhelming sometimes, the game is always grounded in a sense of hope. By the times the credits rolled, I was crying not only because I was sad for the loss of this child, but also because the game affirms that he had a good life filled with love from a family that clearly cared about him. Joel’s story is not unlike many others’ cancer stories, filled with heartbreaks and triumph, and it’s because of this that That Dragon, Cancer is able to convey its story so well to so many. It knows cancer is around us all and yet it also knows we are ready to fight it. Metastasis While the game’s narrative works so well, it’s actually the game aspect of That Dragon, Cancer that makes for the game’s few missteps. While the game’s mix of the real and surreal can be a great driver of emotion when it works, the times it doesn’t often ruin the emotional impact of a scene. During these segments, the games usual point-and-click style is switched to anything from a Balloon Fight style platformer to a Ghost’n’Golbins style hack-n-slash. Most jarring is when the game punctuates what might have been the most impactful moment, a voicemail from Amy discussing their son’s failing health, with a kart racer segment through the halls of the children’s ward. These traditional “game” segments do only harm to That Dragon, Cancer’s tone which made for an odd gaming experience that had me weeping one moment and scratching my head the next. The best moments of gameplay in That Dragon, Cancer comes from the quiet moments. Walking around Joel’s hospital room, pushing him on the swings, e.t.c. These are when the player really feels an attachment to the characters and because of that, they become all the more memorable. It’s almost amusing how the removal of the more traditional “game” moments in the narrative would improve the game’s overall quality, allowing for the player to fully lose the fear of being pulled out to “do” something. TL;DR When I first heard of That Dragon, Cancer all I could think of was, why? Why would you want to relive this moment of your life; why would you want to remind yourself of your child whose life was cut short; why would you try and make that a game? After playing the game, I completely understand. That Dragon, Cancer matters because Joel mattered. You can feel how much Joel mattered to the Green family through the game they lovingly constructed in his memory. Even with its flaws, That Dragon, Cancer is a game that succeeds not only in telling a story of cancer, but of a family whose love shines though the screen. + Beautifully written narrative + Mix of real and surreal - Traditional “game” elements halt emotion Images from: Indie Megabooth, PC Gamer, Wired Originally posted on January 13, 2016
by Jake Doolin @Clingtoascheme This review is based off of the Mac edition The complaint of "style over substance" is usually leveed at media that really doesn't desrve it. Often it's the media with the most defined aesthetics, films like Drive or the work of the PC Music collective come to mind, that gets lumped into this category. Doing so fundamentally undervalues the deeper themes games like these present under the well-defined looks and sounds of their exterior. Hotline Miami comes to mind when thinking about the "style over substance" trend. Where many put that game into a box because of its style, those who dove deeper found a thoughtful narrative about the implications of violence. For any media to truly be defined as style of substance, it needs to have nothing going on for it outside of its core aesthetics. Superhot is unfortunately one such game, offering a compelling look and feel but offering none of the insight to make it truly memorable. Real Human Being A promising start to the game's narrative had me hopeful, but as it continues along its two hour runtime it becomes clear that developer Superhot Team has no idea what they were doing. Going from a fairly interesting plot about two acquaintances hacking their way into a company's servers to play an unreleased game to a lame conspiracy thriller that attempts to bring out the same thematic points as Hotline Miami give the game tonal whiplash. For every moment of brilliance, such as a sequence where the palyers visit themselves playing the game, there are two or three that make you shrug. A good example of this is when the game force quits around the halfway point in an attempt to startle the player. This could have been a powerful moment if it hadn't been done more successfully by other games in recent memory, like Undertale. So instead of being frightened I was merely annoyed, as I had to wait five minutes for the game to boot back up again. I almost wish the game hadn't tried as hard because, when it's not shoving conspiracy and faux-deep ideology at the player, the game can be pretty immersive. It's easier to connect to a game narrative like Hotline Miami's, which gives the player scattered pieces to the puzzle, over Superhot which gives you the whole box. Under Your Spell If there is one thing that will keep me coming back to Superhot, it is the gameplay and design of every level. Superhot's core mechanic of enemies moving only when you do makes every level feel like a John-Woo style action film. Jumping in slow motion into a group of thugs while carefully disarming them gave me a real feeling of being powerful in this world. Even with a limited supply of weaponry, an assortment of guns and melee tools, the game never felt stale when it came time to make some folks dead. The inclusion of an endless mode as well as a selection of level-specific challenges gives you even more reason to continue playing for hours. It also helps that the design is so unique. Every level presents a white concrete jungle of obstacles populated by crystalline baddies. It can't be overstated what a treat it is to blow up an enemy and watch them burst into a collection of crystals that move and crash in slow motion. More than once I had to stop my carnage to just marvel at how beautifully the game rendered that destruction. Sadly, however, it's not uncommon to experience total game crashes during these moments. Over ten different times I had to restart the game after a crash during the challenge mode which left me more than a little sour. When it does work, the gameplay and design of Superhot offer a beautiful look at utter devastation. TL;DR More than likely I will be returning to Superhot over the next couple of weeks. While its story and deeper themes are muddled, its gameplay and design work well enough to keep my interest. It's hard to say how long I'll be invested in Superhot, because, like all style-over-substance media, it's fun in the moment but once the next piece of vapid media comes out, it's quickly forgotten. + Gameplay is a unique twist on the shooter genre + Design mixes well with gameplay - Narrative that tries too hard - Frequent crashes Originally posted on February 29, 2016
On a special Button Mash, the editors gather to talk about their favorite thing, Death! Whether its fact or fiction the old chief editors and the new are breaking down some of the most tragic losses. Check it out!
On this episode, the editors sit down to discuss mob mentality and the anonymity of the internet and the problems that arise from it. Check it out!
In honor of Women’s History Month, Byte is doing a month long Byteing Question about the most iconic female characters and why they matter. Every day two writers will look at two characters that are important to them in many different ways. Today, we look at Mad Moxxi and Yukiko.
2 critics, 2 pieces of media, 2 different perspectives. On this brand new format Input 2, Jake and Aidan talk about Netflix's Flaked, Louis C.K's Horace & Pete and 10 Cloverfield Lane. Check it out!
Venture fans have been waiting for three years, give or take a special, for a new season of Venture Bros. This past January, we were given just that in a new 8-episode season.
In the great mash of buttons, the editors convene to talk about the Always Online gaming trend. Check it out!
The Board gathers to highlight their thoughts on Co-op games and the conservation of certain games, films and music! Check it out!
If you were to tell me four years ago that the Fire Emblem series would be making a comeback I wouldn’t have believed you. The series was on a downslope in 2012 after poor sales from its last few games and a general lack of interest in another game. A final game, Fire Emblem: Awakening was planned for the 3DS for the following year and was set to finish the series proper.
The critics sit once again to discuss all things TV and film. This week they breakdown Bordertown, Venture Bros, Deadpool, and 11.22.63. Check it out!
This week the Ed Board sits down and talks about some of their favorite memories of Pokemon in celebration of it's 20 year anniversary! They talk their favorite games, spin-offs, and movies! Check it out!
This week, the council convenes once again. This time breaking down the internet and its impact on daily life as well as release dates for different games and the problems with them. Check it out!
@ClingtoaScheme
Toby Fox, creator of one of last years biggest indie games Undertale, has taken to Twitter to talk about a possible Wii U port of the game. Fox acknowledged that he had been talking to a Nintendo representative about a port "months" ago as well as the challenges he would face if he decided to go forward.
The dynamic duo is back at it again, this time breaking down Grease! Live and the new Venture Bros. Season premiere. Then when they slip the disc, they break down the hype around Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! Check it out!
@ClingtoaScheme
