Crysis 2 Multiplayer Review

Crysis 2 is a fantastic game, and the multiplayer is surprisingly good for a no'n-multiplayer oriented game. The graphics are fantastic, of course, and there are quite a few interesting takes on the normal multiplayer modes. The two game modes I play the most are Crash Site, which is like Domination i.e. you have to capture a point but the point moves around, and Instant Action, which is similar to Team Deathmatch.

 There is an interesting gun variety and the upgrades system is good, but what distinguishes Crysis 2 MP from all other MPs is the Nanosuit. It adds a whole new level to the game, for people who want to go Rambo-style or be sneaky-sneaky. There are 2 modules in this game, instead of 4 in Crysis. The 2 modules are Armor, to increase defense, and Cloak, which is good for sneaking.

 I do think, however, that the guns that are unlocked for you up to level 10 are underpowered and it's a lot harder to get kills than in other games at the beginning. As you play on, Crysis 2 will grip you and you will become more skilled with the Nanosuit and the weapons, which will lead to you enjoying Crysis 2 thoroughly.

Score: 82/100
Verdict: A very good multiplayer which is unique.

Read More

New York

Well, it's been a while since I posted, but life's been hectic.

I went to New York City in June/July and it reminded me of how much I like that city. I don't know if it's the atmosphere, the architecture or simply the environs itself, but New York is definitely my favourite city in the world. I dream to study at Columbia University in the City of New York, not just for the standard of education, but also to live in New York.

While I was there I read The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger and I must say, it's a good book. The apathy of Holden Caulfield, the antagonistic protagonist, is one of the best captivations of emotion in a book I've seen. This book is a sad on a different kind of level than the usual kind of sadness, and I highly recommend reading it, especially if you go to New York.

Another culture reference to New York is Castle, which is a TV series starring Nathan Fillion as Rick Castle, the roguish crime writer who is tagging along with the homicide squad at New York's 12th precinct police station (for inspiration), and Stana Katic as Kate Beckett, the sassy detective who Castle bases one of his protagonists on. With assistance from Castle, the team solve murders, but the main reason to watch the show is for the back-and-forth between Beckett and  Castle, and to see New York.

I suppose everyone has a favourite city, and mine is New York. The combination of architectural and natural beauty, and the ambiance and symbolic skyline draw me.

Read More

Fame: The sad truth

I am an active member of Youtube, and I have noticed that people will do pretty much anything for fame (people who do giveaways and have less then 10000 subs, I'm looking at you). There has been a lot of controversy in the last few months about people doing giveaways, basically buying headsets or something like that, and then making people subscribe and favourite their video to get the prize. That kind of whoring is just sick, and it has lead me to think: fame makes people do crazy things. Even worse than that, was the supposed "suicide livestream" where somebody was supposedly going to stream their own suicide. It is easy to see they were just bluffing, but it is still sick. I don't get why people are so limelight-craving. Grow up. Peace. 

Read More

Planes: Rage Time

As much as I love travel, I despise planes (and airports) with a passion. Seriously. I think the airline owners should be dragged out into the street, and killed by a horde of Gummi Bears. That's pain.

Anyway, on to the reasons.

1. You have to constrict your legs until you get thrombosis.
2. There are screaming babies everywhere.
3. The food is so bad, I'd rather starve then consume it.
4. The air-conditioning is either stiflingly hot, or ice cold.
5. The air is stale.
6. It sucks

Airports have got progressively worse and more paranoid over the last 30 years. I hope that, at one point, something will snap and airports will go back to being pleasant. Anyway, enough rage for now. Peace.

Read More

CANADA

I am currently in Canada, which is pretty awesome. I have just visited Ottawa, the capital, after visiting Quebec City yesterday and Montreal for the first 3 days. I have a few rants about travel that are too short to post as a full post (I don't want to flood my blog with posts that are bitty) ,so here they are:

• First off, tour groups. Tour groups are the scourge of all independent travellers, because they make all the lines longer, bunch together in front of the site you're trying to take a picture of and generally make everyone else feel uncomfortable. The people who take tours seem to instantly revert to a primitive herd mentality and bunch together like Armageddon will happen if they don't stick with the group. They travel around in big buses that really destroy the atmosphere for everyone else, they make loads of noise and the guides are so boring you want to commit suicide. I hate them.
• In underdeveloped countries, all the hawkers really get on your nerves.
• Other things that annoy me when I travel:
• Tour guides.
• European waiters.
• Screaming children. Everywhere.
• Pompous security guards.

That's all I have for now. Apart from that, travelling is awesome.
Shipping out to NYC tomorrow\:D/

Check out Black Rebel Motorcycle Club-Beat the Devil's Tattoo.

Read More

Movie Review: Super 8

JJ Abrams' newest movie,Super 8, is a fun blend of alien and youth adventure movies. It is set in the 70s sometime, and 6 kids are trying to make a horror movie about zombies.  They are filming a scene at a house next to a railway track and a crash occurs, which the director (probably a semi-analogy for Spielberg) thinks is fantastic for his "production value", but has disastrous consequences for his town.
Watch the movie if you want to know the rest, I don't want to spoil it.

I was, however, surprised at how unoriginal Super 8 was. It seems a bit like a tribute to E.T. with bits of Indiana Jones thrown in (not that this is a bad thing), but it is slightly disappointing that Spielberg's nostalgic film tribute doesn't have a great original plot.

Abrams stresses the importance of kindness and understanding for when humans have First Contact. This may seem like a corny idea, but as we progress, we have to keep that in mind... anyway, backt ot the review. There are quite a few tropes of both the alien and youth-adventure genres in Super 8: The bad authority figure (an evil, sadistic USAF colonel), the hopeless parent who is good at heart from the youth-adventure genre and the protagonist who saves the day. The movie is not original in most aspects, as you see, but what saves it is the nostalgic feel and the 70s setting.

Super 8 is not a masterpiece, but it's a fun movie and definitely worth seeing. Peace.

7.5/10

PS: I saw it at the IMAX \:D/.

Read More

Review: Plague by Michael Grant

Hey everyone.
Mull over this review of Plague by Michael Grant.

Plague is the 4th in the FAYZ series. You'll need to have read the first 3 books or you can get a basic outline for the first three books from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gone_(series) (only read the synopses for Gone, Hunger and Lies). It's a good series.

Plague continues following Sam and Co, however several important characters do die in Plague so when the next book (Fear) comes out, the character pool will be slightly diminished. The new aspect introduced into plague is of serious diseases, one is a cough that makes you cough out your guts, and the other is a parasitic infection in which bugs eat at you from the inside. Nasty.

As you'd expect, Sam and Co have to save everyone again, however the problems do escalate and are more serious than in the previous books. I liked Plague, but I think it's time for Michael Grant to pull the plug. He is going to drag it out if he keeps writing.

7.5/10

Read More

Karma

First off, I'm going to start posting a lot more regularly, even though I will be away for my entire school holiday.

Secondly, I am now going to rage about "karma" in video games.

I don't really understand what most game studios are thinking when they put the idea of "karma" in games (except for Naughty Dog, who made inFamous). If you don't know, karma is basically the type of personality you choose to have in games, be it good, bad or neutral. The thing I don't understand about karma is that no matter which karma you choose, the storyline stays extremely similar.

If karma only makes the NPCs go :o (shock) and run away, what's the point? Game studios need to make karma have a bigger effect on the environment (again, refer to inFamous), for instance being chased by the law, or having underworld connections. I really don't think giving someone horns or a black aura is satisfying. Also, I'd like karma to evolve out of the RPG genre, because, frankly, after a while RPGs get very boring and monotonous.

I understand that studios have a deadline and can't always finish and buff all the details of the game, but I'd rather have no karma aspect than a bad one. I'd particularly have liked Lionhead (the creators of Fable) and Bethesda (the RPG masters) to have taken karma into serious consideration. Mull it over.

Read More

Review: Homefront

Hi everyone, first off I'd like to apologize for not posting for the past 11 days, I haven't thought of anything to post. Please accept this meagre slice of game review.

When I started Homefront, I was expecting a run-of-the-mill FPS (first person shooter), with the same combat system and a similar plot as a hundred other games that the producers are still marketing as 'original'. It turns out I was wrong. Thankfully.

Homefront is set on Earth, sometime around 2028. The People's Republic of North Korea have occupied a bunch of territories under the leadership of Kim-Jong-Un. One of these territories is most of the USA, from San Francisco to Colorado or something like that. The North Koreans don't seem to like the USA, so they have used measures similar to those used by the Japanese in China during World War 2. Labour camps, mass murders and curfews are the order of the day. You are an ex-Air Force pilot called Jacobs (I can't remember the first name) who gets arrested put in a bus for deportation, but then rescued by the Resistance. You fight with the Resistance and finally make it to San Francisco where you secure the Golden Gate Bridge and then... nothing. That's it. That is the major flaw in Homefront. The single-player campaign is ridiculously short. You could take more time trying to finish Super Meat Boy.

Otherwise, the combat system is great and fair, the plot is fantastic and the graphics look good. The only other flaw is that playing Homefront is like being nannied. You can only open doors on special occasions, and the NPCs are either doing everything or you have to babysit them because they seem to be dumbstruck by the fact that you cannot help them for every second of the game.

Plus:  Great combat system, immersing plot and solid graphics.
Minus: Finishable in the time it takes to buffer a Youtube video, and you hardly take part in Homefront.

Score: 80/100

Overall verdict: A good game, would have been better if it had more levels and you could do something without waiting for the NPCs. Not worth 400 rand.

Read More

An output for violence

As you may or may not know, I've been playing a lot of the game Bulletstorm recently. Bulletstorm is, how do you say... a little bit on the gory side. This is fine by me, but some people seem to have a big issue with violent video games. I don't understand this because apart from a slight desensitization to violence, it hasn't affected the world population in the least.

There were more wars 100 years ago, before any kind of video game, even Pong, than there are today. While I'll admit using a charged drillbit shot from a modified gun to impale someone on steel poles cannot be very good for you, it hasn't turned all gamers into savage monsters who want to rip your flesh out. Yet.

People are so paranoid that they are blind. Video gaming obviously hasn't created brain-slurping zombies out of young children. Give up anti-gamers.

Why aren't you following? Hmmm?

Read More

Retro

Hey everyone, I'm going to talk about retro tonight (as you may have guessed). For those of you who don't know, something comes into fashion, then becomes unpopular and when it becomes cool again, it's retro. Weird, huh?
\
Retro is a strange concept,  I think it is often used solely as a sales pitch for old stuff, but I think it mainly comes into fashion because of a new generation who did not experience the craze of the earlier generation when the item of clothing/sunglasses style/(insert suitable word here) came out, therefore they are ready to accept it as it is not an overworn item as it has gone out of fashion.

But I digress, the reason I wanted to talk about retro is Minecraft. Minecraft is a game with what could be described as retro graphics (I'm starting a Minecraft series on my YouTube soon by the way) but it is really fun in spite of that, and the graphics do not even seem to make the game feel old, just natural.

I don't know how retro works, but it does. There will be more about Minecraft and retro in my next post. 

Read More

Bulletstorm

If you've read my Intro Blog, then you will know that my favourite game at the moment is Bulletstorm. What I'd like to bring you know is my honest review/wildly biased opinion.

I love Bulletstorm. I find it extremely hard to nitpick about it as there is hardly anything to nitpick about. This game is almost perfectly balanced. The violence is gratuitous, but in a comical way as opposed to disgusting gore as in Dead Space or a similar game. The graphics are crystal clear and the slightly thicker outline somewhere between Borderland's semi-celshading and normal graphics produces a great effect. The plot is original and interesting, it's the first good Science Fiction plot for a game that I've ever played or heard of. The combat controls are great and it feels like wearing a second skin when you fight in Bulletstorm. The last great thing about Bulletstorm is the skillshot system. This is a very original idea and the satisfaction of collecting new skillshots is a great feeling. Any game that rewards you for impaling someone on a spike is already a great game in my book. The moment I got the skillshot database I realized that no other thing in my life could interfere with my ultimate goal- collecting every single skillshot in the game.

This is about as much fun as a game can give you. Bulletstorm is worth whatever you spend on it. Buy this game. Now.

Plus: Fun- Awesome Graphics-Original- Combat System

Minus: Nothing

Score: 93/100

Verdict: Play this. It's awesome.

Read More

Intro Blog

Hey everyone, this is my first post on The Rorschach Blog. I hope this blog is succesful in spreading my opinion to everyone and (if i have the right idea) making them think in a different way, but most of all to provide captivating and interesting material to my readers.

I enjoy gaming and pursue many other interests, but let's talk about gaming for now. I watch a lot of Youtube videos; some of my favourite youtubers are Seananners and UberHaxorNova. Check 'em out. I have all 3 major gaming platforms (PC, PS3 and 360) and I enjoy them all, I'm not a ridiculous fanboy. I have a Youtube channel (in my links) which i'm starting to post on, so please check it out and subscribe. My favourite game these days is Bulletstorm, which is great fun and has amazing graphics. I play mainly FPS games, but I do branch out.

I use social media a lot so if you want to follow my journey stay with this blog.

Peace everybody.

Read More