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(05/16/18 8:25pm)
By Tanner Kinney
Disclaimer: This review is of the PC version and was conducted on a PC with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960, i7, 8GBs of RAM.
Flash gaming has a significant place in gaming history. Both indie games and mobile games owe a lot of their tropes and gameplay models to older Flash games. Angry Birds was inspired by Crush the Castle, for instance. However, since the slow death of Adobe Flash Player, many of those Flash developers have moved onto creating mobile games or smaller indie titles. Some of the biggest Flash games have even found revivals on the Steam platform, which is a joy to see. Epic Battle Fantasy IV, for example, is a fantastic and relatively successful game that stays true to the Flash originals, but adds enough to make it worth the full release. Similarly, Infectonator 3: Apocalypse keeps the essence of the original games alive, but in this situation, fails to really make itself noteworthy on a legitimate game platform.
(04/23/18 9:11pm)
Throughout gaming history, there seems to be a trend of the kings of a genre being a second or third major title released in that genre. It’s strange, but there is a bit of a trend. The first-person shooter genre was launched by Wolfenstein 3D, but was popularized by Doom. The real-time strategy genre as we know it now may have started with a game called Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, but came into the popular consciousness with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. The Japanese role-playing game was first introduced with Dragon Quest, but would become overshadowed by the more well-known Final Fantasy. Those games, however, were widely single-player genres. Now, the battle royale genre has both the major pioneer in the genre, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), and the real success, Fortnite: Battle Royale.
(04/23/18 11:30am)
By Tanner Kinney
Throughout gaming history, there seems to be a trend of the kings of a genre being a second or third major title released in that genre. It’s strange, but there is a bit of a trend. The first-person shooter genre was launched by Wolfenstein 3D, but was popularized by Doom. The real-time strategy genre as we know it now may have started with a game called Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, but came into the popular consciousness with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. The Japanese role-playing game was first introduced with Dragon Quest, but would become overshadowed by the more well-known Final Fantasy. Those games, however, were widely single-player genres. Now, the battle royale genre has both the major pioneer in the genre, Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), and the real success, Fortnite: Battle Royale.
It’s pretty much impossible to escape Fortnite. It’s a free-to-play multiplayer shooter that is available on anything with a screen and a graphics card. Younger kids without access to their parents’ credit cards can now play a shooter like their wealthier friends, and since it can be played on any console (other than Nintendo Switch, for now), most families have access to the game. Hell, it can be played on smartphones, and almost every young adult has one of those (back in my day grumble grumble gurgle roar). Yet, my friends and I all joke about the game, calling it a Pixar game, complaining about the obnoxious young fan base, and watching League of Legends viewer numbers plummet while streamers like Ninja are raking in six-digit viewer numbers and playing with Drake. Yes, that Drake, the rapper Drake, the actually successful celebrity. He’s playing Fortnite with some pleb who was a former Halo pro player. That’s how big Fortnite is.
(04/17/18 1:55am)
It’s been two weeks since the last article, mostly because I unintentionally skipped over the semi-finals matches. So, let me just sum them up here: Echo Fox are memes and Clutch Gaming don’t know how to play around Baron. The two teams that moved onto the final match were Team Liquid and 100 Thieves. For 100 Thieves, it was their freshman split, and they were already fighting for the title. For Team Liquid, they were fighting for their first title victory in their entire history in the LCS, which is as long and storied as TSM and CLG. Former teammates were battling each other for a shot at the LCS banner and Spring Split trophy. It was truly a highly anticipated match-up.
(04/16/18 1:09pm)
By Tanner Kinney
It’s been two weeks since the last article, mostly because I unintentionally skipped over the semi-finals matches. So, let me just sum them up here: Echo Fox are memes and Clutch Gaming don’t know how to play around Baron. The two teams that moved onto the final match were Team Liquid and 100 Thieves. For 100 Thieves, it was their freshman split, and they were already fighting for the title. For Team Liquid, they were fighting for their first title victory in their entire history in the LCS, which is as long and storied as TSM and CLG. Former teammates were battling each other for a shot at the LCS banner and Spring Split trophy. It was truly a highly anticipated match-up.
So, of course, it was over in three games. The entirety of game five between Clutch and 100 Thieves almost lasted as long as the whole series. Life is full of disappointments. Massive, terrible disappointments. Like Clutch Gaming, and the ADC meta, and Zven and Mithy’s botlane duo. So how did this final shake out, and who secured the coveted third place award of almost greatness? Let’s go over the games.
(04/14/18 9:41pm)
Consider the following: you’re out and about, enjoying yourself and having a great time. Perhaps you’re walking through the park or an aquarium or, I dunno, New Jersey. Suddenly, you notice a fellow civilian collapse on the ground, crying out in pain. You run over to them to record the event for your Snapchat story, as does a crowd of people. You realize that, by the loud growling noises, that he’s simply hungry. You smile, because you came prepared. “Do not be alarmed,” you cry out to the people holding their phone cameras up, “I have a solution.” You press the button on your Pizza Hut Pie-Tops, and after some quick taps on you iPhone X, you order your favorite type of pizza for this person. The crowd cheers as the Pizza Hut driver arrives, and you open the pizza box for the hungry man on the ground. At first, he’s overjoyed, but he looks in the box tosses it to the side in disgust. His final words: “Pineapple does not belong on pizza.”
(04/12/18 11:45am)
by Tanner Kinney
Consider the following: you’re out and about, enjoying yourself and having a great time. Perhaps you’re walking through the park or an aquarium or, I dunno, New Jersey. Suddenly, you notice a fellow civilian collapse on the ground, crying out in pain. You run over to them to record the event for your Snapchat story, as does a crowd of people. You realize that, by the loud growling noises, that he’s simply hungry. You smile, because you came prepared. “Do not be alarmed,” you cry out to the people holding their phone cameras up, “I have a solution.” You press the button on your Pizza Hut Pie-Tops, and after some quick taps on you iPhone X, you order your favorite type of pizza for this person. The crowd cheers as the Pizza Hut driver arrives, and you open the pizza box for the hungry man on the ground. At first, he’s overjoyed, but he looks in the box tosses it to the side in disgust. His final words: “Pineapple does not belong on pizza.”
Now, that’s obviously a fantasy. Most people don’t have the money to afford an iPhone X. But everything else is now entirely possible, thanks to Pizza Hut’s new technological advancement in pizza ordering technology: the Pie-Tops. With these shoes, you can now order pizza with just your shoes and your phone, rather than using only your phone. It seems like one of those advancements that doesn’t add anything, but tries to simplify things. As much as I love technology and technological advancements, I want to know why we are spending time and resources implementing Amazon Dash buttons (which already seem unnecessary) into shoes. But here they are. At the very least, they seem to work, which is better than you can say for some of the dumber ideas.
(04/10/18 11:00pm)
(04/08/18 2:00pm)
Remember Back to the Future? Remember The Iron Giant? Remember Akira? Remember Godzilla? Remember Battletoads? Remember Chucky? Remember The Shining? Remember Marvin the Martian? Remember Atari? Remember Asteroids? Remember King Kong? Remember Jurassic Park? Remember Star Wars? Remember Battlestar Galactica? Remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Remember Halo? Remember Street Fighter? Remember Sonic the Hedgehog? Remember the Sawmovies? Remember Van Halen? Remember the Bee Gees? Remember Overwatch? Yeah, I remember.
(04/07/18 6:30pm)
By Tanner Kinney
Disclaimer: This review is of the PC version and was conducted on a PC with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960, i7, 8GBs of RAM.
Level-5 released Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch back in 2010 on the PS3, and received a lot of praise from critics. Yet, the game still ended up being relatively divisive. Some people were able to commend the game for its absolutely stunning visuals for the time, fantastic score, and a great story. Others wouldn’t give the game that credit, because even with all of those factors, the gameplay was an absolutely confusing mess that wasn’t that fun. Even for a fan of the first game, it still has gone down in quality upon playing it again due to how not fun the gameplay is.
Ni No Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom manages to keep everything that made the first game amazing, improved on it, then added gameplay that’s fluid, satisfying, and loaded with legitimately fun things to do. This may honestly be one of the best JRPGs of the decade.
(04/05/18 4:10pm)
by Tanner Kinney
On April 4, 2018, ex-StarCraft GM Eli Brown and his team launch the new beta of their eSports team management website, Guilded. The site was first put into development a year ago, with Brown and his team wanting to create a much easier way to manage all the different happenings within the specific eSports teams. Brown’s goal was to create a program that streamlined the team management experience as, being a former GM himself, he understood that managing a whole bunch of different programs was clunky and not user-friendly. With Guilded, he hoped to provide a solution to these teams.
The website contains a number of valuable features for eSports teams and communities. The site allows users to find and create teams, either using accounts created through the site or by linking a Discord account. Users can then apply to join teams or simply follow them for more information about upcoming events. These teams can also create community forums for fans to discuss changes within the game or recent team results. This is designed to help foster a greater sense of community outside of other social media platforms, like Twitter or Reddit.
Features within the team environment also got overhauled as well. The team rosters system has been completely changed to allow sorting by specific games. For example, a team like Cloud 9, who is in partnership with Guilded, has teams in a number of different eSports.
(04/04/18 12:30pm)
By Tanner Kinney
Remember Back to the Future? Remember The Iron Giant? Remember Akira? Remember Godzilla? Remember Battletoads? Remember Chucky? Remember The Shining? Remember Marvin the Martian? Remember Atari? Remember Asteroids? Remember King Kong? Remember Jurassic Park? Remember Star Wars? Remember Battlestar Galactica? Remember Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Remember Halo? Remember Street Fighter? Remember Sonic the Hedgehog? Remember the Saw movies? Remember Van Halen? Remember the Bee Gees? Remember Overwatch? Yeah, I remember.
Remember when Hollywood had interesting and original ideas? Nope!
(04/01/18 6:03pm)
The quarterfinals this year were quite historic, for once. Every single team who previously won an LCS split has now been knocked out, leaving an empty banner for either a new team fresh into the split or a team who has been competing for the banner for a while now. How did this happen? Who destroyed this world we knew for so long? Why did TSM not wonnered? Well, let’s just hop straight into talking about the quarterfinals matches
(03/31/18 10:12pm)
By Tanner Kinney
The quarterfinals this year were quite historic, for once. Every single team who previously won an LCS split has now been knocked out, leaving an empty banner for either a new team fresh into the split or a team who has been competing for the banner for a while now. How did this happen? Who destroyed this world we knew for so long? Why did TSM not wonnered? Well, let’s just hop straight into talking about the quarterfinals matches
(03/28/18 8:30pm)
By Tanner Kinney
The internet is a place filled with many strange things. If this column has covered anything, it’s the bizarre and oddly specific nature of internet obsessions. Some things may start as jokes, fun memes that originate from small communities. Then it spreads, and suddenly people that would never expect to stumble upon something strange end up on some bizarre website. But that’s enough about the forum for weirdos who chew ice, we’re obviously here to talk about vaporwave. First, start up this song, which is the first result when you type “that one vaporwave song” into basically any search engine. It’ll get you into the a e s t h e t i c mood.
Now, dear reader, your first question is probably what is vaporwave? Well, that or “why is this so pink?” or “what is the statue head doing there?” or “isn’t this just a Diana Ross song slowed down with some synth put over it?” I’m not going to answer those questions, because I don’t think anyone knows the answer. I do, however, know much about vaporwave. Vaporwave is a music genre that originated in the early 2010’s as an ironic version of chillwave which is a subsection of synthwave which spawned from electronic music. One of the earliest known songs to use the vaporwave name was a song called “Laserdisc Visions” in 2011. This song shares all the hallmarks of vaporwave: chill beats, stanky 80’s synth and midi loops, and parts of the song seemingly getting stuck and jumping back like a scuffed music CD. It’s all very a e s t h e t i c.
The video accompanying it also does a good job showing that delicious vaporwave aesthetic. It’s very 80’s, loaded with washed out, neon colors. In most cases, blues and pinks are used, combined with distortions on parts of the image, and use of Japanese text I can’t read, but I’m sure it means something. Actually, I’m not sure anyone making vaporwave with Japanese text can read it either, but it’s a key part of it. Old tech, like bulky computers and ancient Windows/Macintosh logos are also a part of aesthetic. Particularly, the Windows 98 GUI finds itself in a lot of vaporwave aesthetic images. These images are also loaded with dated references to things that would be only found on old internet. I’m not sure why a dolphin is trying to convince me it isn’t a virus, but that’s just suspect.
But that’s just base level vaporwave, and most of that is the publicly known meme side of vaporwave. Vaporwave, however, has deep lore and a number of artists that go beyond the ones already mentioned. My favorite Spotify playlist to listen to is a vaporwave playlist, which consists of artists like James Ferraro, VAPERROR, Black Banshee, Saint Pepsi, death’s dynamic shroud.wmv, 18 Carat Affair, and artists who have a lot of Japanese characters in their names. Even though much vaporwave is best when listened to as a full album from front to back, somehow shuffling all these different artists and music styles blends together into an aesthetic soup that is just addictive. I drink this soup by the gallon straight out of the pot and even though it burns my soul, I keep doing it.
Another staple of vaporwave is using soundbites and imagery from advertisements in the 80’s within the music, or creating a mock of those sort of soundbites. The album v i r t u a l r e s o r t ™ by the group CYBEREALITYライフ is a good example of this, as the lead on that album uses various text-to-speech programs (another very aesthetic thing) to introduce a fake website that’s actually a real website: http://virtualresort.org/. The website, of course, plays that song as well, which is just beautiful. The amount of care and effort put into something that seems like a complete joke is phenomenal and I wish I cared as much about things in my life. Saint Pepsi had a widely popular music video on YouTube that uses “Mac Tonight” from 80’s McDonalds commercials to accompany a song that really is a jam. Now, while Mac Tonight may have a… questionable image nowadays thanks to some little Fasclets on /pol/, the song is just so good, like the whole album.
A lot of vaporwave music videos (made by fans of the music more often than the artists themselves) use this kind of grainy VHS footage of old advertising to go with the songs, and it fits together very well with the aesthetic of the music. Particularly, videos that use clips from bizarre Japanese advertisments are my favorites, because Japanese culture is also a part of that vaporwave aesthetic. It may all seem a little strange, but that’s just how it is. I didn’t make it, though I sure wish I had. I’d love to have that tied to my life history, instead of just being a fraud.
Of course, all of this is still kind of a meme. Things like Simpsonwave or other pop culture icons with the word “wave” attached on the end seem to stem from vaporwave, even though vaporwave itself is a legitimate genre of music. Synthwave itself has a number of meme songs that aren’t considered vaporwave even though vaporwave is that sort of meme genre. This is just one of those times that the joke is so high quality that I actively want to listen to it. Vaporwave is like the Poe’s Law of music: you can’t tell if it’s satire or genuine until you ask the creator themselves. Then again, does it matter if the music is good? Even Simpsonwave is good despite being a meme. I’d say my particular favorite kind of vaporwave are songs that sample old video game sound effects, particularly Mario’s voice from Super Mario 64. I don’t know why I like it so much. I don’t know why I like any of this so much. I stopped worrying about it long ago. Don’t you understand? It’s all in your head.
And that’s about it for vaporwave. Does that explain anything? No, it probably doesn’t. There’s so much about vaporwave and its aesthetic that just seemed to spawn out of nowhere and our collective unconscious just accepts that it’s how life is. Of course vaporwave uses Japanese text and sculpture heads, why not? Even vaporwave itself just seemed to appear one day and had a small group of people latch onto it and spread it out beyond their subculture. Then the normies find it and are no longer normies because they understand vaporwave. Fun fact: I once tried to create a new genre of music that mashed up vaporwave and nightcore. I still have them buried deep in the hard drive of my computer. They’ll never see the light of day again. Trust me, it’s better that way.
(03/29/18 4:00am)
The internet is a place filled with many strange things. If this column has covered anything, it’s the bizarre and oddly specific nature of internet obsessions. Some things may start as jokes, fun memes that originate from small communities. Then it spreads, and suddenly people that would never expect to stumble upon something strange end up on some bizarre website. But that’s enough about the forum for weirdos who chew ice, we’re obviously here to talk about vaporwave. First, start up this song, which is the first result when you type “that one vaporwave song” into basically any search engine. It’ll get you into the a e s t h e t i c mood.
(04/01/18 2:00pm)
TRIGGER WARNING: POLITICS WILL BE DISCUSSED
(03/27/18 8:07pm)
Disclaimer: This playthrough is based on the PS4 version of the game. This copy of the game was provided by the developer for review purposes.
(03/27/18 6:14pm)
By Tanner Kinney
Disclaimer: This playthrough is based on the PS4 version of the game. This copy of the game was provided by the developer for review purposes.
The “Ubisoft open-world” game has become somewhat of a joke among the gaming community. Since the underwhelming Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed: Unity hit the market, Ubisoft began receiving a lot of flak for producing underdeveloped, buggy, and cookie-cutter open world titles. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate didn’t make anyone more hopeful, and Far Cry Primal allegedly re-using the map from Far Cry 4 just looked lazy. However, Ubisoft actually took a lot of these criticisms to heart, and brought what used to be annual franchises back into their game development oven for a bit more cooking. Watch Dogs 2 turned out to be a bit of a sleeper hit, and Assassin’s Creed Origins revived a lot of what people were looking for in that franchise by providing an interesting new location and much improved gameplay.
With the release of Far Cry 5, Ubisoft hopes to repair the name of that franchise as well. And despite a somewhat bumpy journey at points, they’ve managed to create one of the most truly open worlds in gaming. This game surpasses all expectations, and creates a Far Cry game that even surpasses the greatness of Far Cry 3.
(03/24/18 10:29pm)
There’s a big meme about Riot’s esports department treating EU LCS like second class citizens. Through not giving visas at the proper times, not stepping in to stop really terrible stuff from happening in the participating organization (shoutouts to MoveYourMothers), and then the shenanigans with giving EU LCS best-of-twos, but NA LCS best-of-threes, it’s kind of true. That, along with making more cash money here in the States, is probably why NA tends to import so many EU players. It seems they’ve now overpowered us though, because they’ve infected our beautiful LCS with something people didn’t expect:
