Category: Video Games

Some Of My Favourite Casual Video Games

Published January 2, 2023

I’ve spoken at length about the topic of difficult video games as I’m a big proponent that difficulty can often add to the experience rather than take away. However, this doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate games that are simpler and easier, casual if you will. Therefore, I thought it would be a nice change of pace today to take a look at some of my favourite casual video games and why they’re worth playing.

We should probably start by defining what a casual video game is for anyone unfamiliar with the term. While the term can be somewhat vague, the typical criteria for a game to be considered “Casual” is that the rules and goals are clear to the player, that the skill required to play the game can be achieved relatively quickly, that the game doesn’t require a big commitment in time each session and that the gameplay incorporates various aspects from everyday life. However, even this attempt to define what a casual game is often falls short as I can think of many games that I would consider to be casual that do not manage to fulfill all of these criteria. Nonetheless, it is somewhat helpful in explaining the concept at the very least even if there are many exceptions.

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My First Impressions Of My Steam Deck

Published December 19, 2022

After selling some of my physical games for my older consoles on eBay recently, I decided to spoil myself by buying an item that I’d been debating for some time, a Steam Deck. Having heard much praise for Steam Decks, the recent availability of Steam Decks without reservation encouraged my interest in picking one up. I ordered a 64GB model and ordered a 512GB microSD card to use with it and it arrived within a couple of weeks. I’ve been using it for about a month now and, while I don’t think I’ve used enough of its features to do a review, I thought it might still be interesting to share my own first impressions when it comes to the Steam Deck.

When I first got my Steam Deck, I ran through the games that I had currently installed on my computer and looked to see which ones were either Verified or Playable and that I thought would make a good fit for the device (sorry Point and Click, First-Person and Strategy games). I ended up installing fifteen video games on the Steam Deck and have played through four of them since, Higurashi Chapter 1, Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Lucah: Born of a Dream. I’ve yet to explore much of Desktop mode with probably an estimated five minutes of use since I first got it so don’t expect me to touch on that in this article.

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What Are Musou Video Games And Are They A Genre?

Published December 1, 2022

Earlier this year, I had the fortune/misfortune of being given a copy of Touken Ranbu Warriors to review for UK Anime Network. My experience with the game wasn’t particularly pleasant but it did remind me of a term that I see thrown around every so often, Musou. I’ve limited experience with these games but I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what Musou video games are, whether they’re a genre and if they deserve the somewhat negative reputation that they’ve gained over the years.

Let’s start with where their name came from and what they are. The name “Musou” comes from the Dynasty Warriors series which is called “Sangokumusou” in Japan. These games follow characters who are capable of wiping out hundreds upon hundreds of rank and file troops and who occasionally fight stronger enemies like commanders and captains as they complete missions. The success of Dynasty Warriors has inspired some competitors to adopt this gameplay style while Koei Tecmo, the publishers of Dynasty Warriors, have been developing licensed games using this gameplay as well.

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What Sony Need To Do To Correct Their PC Strategy

Published November 17, 2022

It’s been a little over two years since Sony released Horizon Zero Dawn on PC and we have since seen a slow trickle of first-party PlayStation games make their way over. These PC ports have proven to be generally successful and I’ve had high hopes for this PC push from PlayStation. However, we’ve begun to see some fumbling from Sony recently and I thought it might be interesting to examine the cause of these problems and what I think Sony need to do in order to correct their PC strategy.

Let’s start by taking a look at the two recent PC releases from Sony that have demonstrated the flaws in their strategy. First, the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection was released last month on the 19th over a year after it was initially announced. While the game didn’t perform poorly, it did prove to be, up to that point, the weakest PlayStation PC release since Sony began their push. The lowest performing title before Uncharted was Days Gone with a peak concurrent player count of 27,450 but Uncharted ended up getting a mere 10,851 peak concurrent player count.

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My Own Thoughts On The Launch Of Overwatch 2

Published November 7, 2022

While I predominantly play single-player video games, there is an exclusively multiplayer video game that I’ve been playing and enjoying for years now, Overwatch. As you can imagine, I was quite excited about the eventual release of Overwatch 2 but, as the years went on, the fanbase, which includes myself, began to become more and more weary as Overwatch languished with little to no new content and the release date of Overwatch 2 seemed to be increasingly nebulous with an expected 2021 release passing by with only rumours circulating. However, the launch of Overwatch 2 finally came a few weeks ago and so, as a longtime player of Overwatch, I thought it might be interesting to share my own thoughts.

The first thing that I have to specify is that, as of this article, I can only share my thoughts on the launch of Overwatch 2 rather than the whole game of Overwatch 2. If you’re wondering why this is the case, it’s important to know that Overwatch 2 as it stands now is, for all intents and purposes, an early access game that has yet to deliver much of the content that was announced with Overwatch 2 such as PvE story missions, hero missions, customisation and leveling. Therefore, I can only examine Overwatch 2 as it stands today and not what it may be in a year or two from now.

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The Fascinating Point And Click Developer Daedalic Entertainment

Published November 3, 2022

I’ve recently been playing the Monkey Island games, specifically The Curse Of Monkey Island and Escape From Monkey Island, and I’ve been in a mood to play more point and click adventure games. However, as I mentioned when I spoke about the Monkey Island games, the point and click adventure genre isn’t anywhere near as popular as it once was and it feels rare enough that a modern point and click adventure game like Return to Monkey Island or Thimbleweed Park gets released. I’d heard the name “Daedalic Entertainment” before but it wasn’t until I began looking for more point and click adventure games that I learned that the genre was their specialty. Conveniently, their catalogue was on sale on Steam for steep discounts and I picked up a bunch of them. Now that I’ve had some time with their games, I thought it would be fascinating to take a look at Daedalic Entertainment, their history as a developer and their future in the point and click adventure genre.

Daedalic Entertainment is a German video game developer that was established in 2007 by Carsten Fichtelmann. Over the course of the next several years, they released a wide variety of point and click adventure games such as the Edna & Harvey games, The Whispered World, the Dark Eye games and their Deponia series. In 2014, a German company called Bastei Lübbe bought a 51% majority share in Daedalic Entertainment but ran into financial trouble years later. Earlier this year, it was announced that Nacon, a French video game publisher, was acquiring Daedalic Entertainment for €60 million.

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The Ultimate Audio Easter Egg – The Wilhelm Scream

Published October 24, 2022

I was recently replaying Ori and the Blind Forest, an excellent Metroidvania game, and I used a stomp to cause an enemy to fall off the edge of a cliff. As it fell, a sound played that I was quite familiar with, the Wilhelm scream. I paused for a moment, processing what I had just heard and then burst out laughing. It was so unexpected that I couldn’t help but laugh. Being reminded of its existence, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the ultimate audio Easter egg, the Wilhelm scream.

The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that was originally included in the 1951 film “Distant Drums” but was named after its use in the 1953 film “The Charge at Feather River” where a character, named Private Wilhelm, gets hit by an arrow and screams. While it is not definitive, it is generally accepted that American songwriter Sheb Wooley provided the audio for the scream. Afterwards, it was used in a few other Warner Bros. films such as A Star is Born, Sergeant Rutledge and The Green Berets but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the Wilhelm scream truly rose to prominence.

Sheb Wooley is generally considered to have provided the Wilhelm scream.

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What Is A Metroidvania Game And Why I Love Them

Published October 20, 2022

When I was younger, I played a decent number of 3D platformers but generally steered clear of 2D platformers. This changed around the mid-2010s when I ended up playing the earlier Sonic games along with Super Meat Boy. Afterwards, I was far more receptive to them and would actively seek them out. However, as I continued to explore 2D platformers, I gradually became aware of a subgenre that is commonly, but not exclusively, associated with 2D platforming, Metroidvania. As I’ve played more and more of these games, I’ve come to realise that they’ve become one of my favourite genres. Having said all that, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what a Metroidvania game is and how I’ve come to love them.

First, let’s start by looking at the name “Metroidvania”. Interestingly, the genre name is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania and, understandably, speaks to the influence that these two franchises had. The original Metroid game, released in 1986, helped to establish the concept that your character starts out relatively basic with few abilities but explores a large map while gaining new permanent abilities that allows you to access areas that you weren’t able to before. Castlevania originally started out as a more typical platformer but shifted, with the release of Symphony of the Night in 1997, to a style similar to Metroid but including more RPG elements.

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An Overview Of The Monkey Island Video Game Series

Published October 13, 2022

I have a great admiration for the classics of the point and click adventure genre as many of them have a wonderful charm, sharp humour and interesting puzzles. However, there’s no debate that the heyday of these games has long passed and, while the genre certainly isn’t dead, new point and click adventure games are certainly much more sparse these days than in the past. However, with a new release in the venerable Monkey Island video game series, I thought it might be interesting to provide an overview of the games that make up this franchise.

The Secret of Monkey Island

The first game in the series, The Secret of Monkey Island, was originally released in 1990 and was directed by industry legend Ron Gilbert who also cowrote the game with Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. It follows Guybrush Threepwood who has just arrived at Mêlée Island in the hopes of becoming a pirate. The games style of humour has been rightly praised but one of the most important innovations that The Secret of Monkey Island contributed to the genre was the lack of death or dead ends. Prior to The Secret of Monkey Island, it was common in point and click adventure games to die due to a mistake or end up running into a dead end due to missing a key item earlier in the story. Ron Gilbert opposed this form of game design, saying “At no point should the player’s journey through the story in a game come to an abrupt end because they did something wrong.“

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Comparison Of Most Popular Games On Steam And Steam Deck

Published October 6, 2022

I’ve spoken about the Steam Deck before, what my thoughts were, how I hoped that it would increase the Linux market share within gaming, provide competition in the portable gaming market etc. Now that it’s been out for a while, and clearly been successful, we’re continuing to see more and more fascinating information come out about the platform and its impact. One piece of info that I’ve found particularly interesting is the games that people are choosing to play and I thought it would be interesting to do a comparison of the most popular games on Steam and the Steam Deck.

Let’s start by taking a look at the most popular games on Steam itself. Looking at the chart below which was taken on the day that this article was written, you’ll notice that multiplayer games, particularly shooters, dominate the Steam platform with only a couple of games that could be considered single player scattered among them. This makes sense to me as multiplayer games tend to be highly replayable while also receiving content updates regularly.

Observe the dominance of multiplayer games on Steam.

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