Category Archive

Opinions/Editorials

A Few Things You Learn When Buying A Used Oculus Rift Off Of Kijiji

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

Two weeks ago while pursuing the online computer classifieds I came across something I didn’t think I’d see locally for some time, an Oculus VR headset at a reasonable price. After the announcement that Oculus wanted $600 USD for the upcoming consumer version (known as CV1 in the Oculus community) I figured my dreams of trying modern VR were all but washed away, except for maybe the odd industry convention for the foreseeable future. Here are three things that I’ve learned after acquiring and using my Oculus DK1 for more than a week.

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Team Fortress 2: Over the Years

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Erika

Team Fortress 2
Late 2009 would be one hell of a year for me with online gaming, starting with me playing a console online for the first time: a friend’s Xbox 360. Battlefield Bad Company was still going hot, and Modern Warfare 2 would be coming out shortly. Before then, all of my online gaming consisted of PC games Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament ’99, so I started exploring “modern” online gaming. I logged into steam for the first time in a long time to see what I could get, and I eventually bought Half-Life Deathmatch. Eventually, I saw a game called Team

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Secret of Evermore | Retrospective

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Kenny Keelan

When I was younger, I had a thing for giving games a chance when they weren’t rated so well or they weren’t getting a lot of media attention. If I was at a local video store and I hadn’t seen a game before, I’d always get excited as though I was the first person in the entire world to play it and I’d found some kind of hidden gem. Back when I first started renting SNES and Genesis games on my own – before that, I needed parental or brotherly approval – the Internet wasn’t nearly as relevant as it

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What It’s Like Entering The World of Virtual Reality With A Vision Impairment

Posted on January 9, 2016 by Rae Michelle Richards

R2D2 Google Cardboard
With the Oculus Rift finally available for pre-order it’s easy to argue that the conversation surrounding virtual reality has never really been hotter. With all of the immersive enhancements that products like PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Open VR are providing to players – stereoscopic 3D, head tracking etc. I’ve noticed very little discussion about what VR could mean to individuals with disabilities.  I’m near blind in one eye and after having an interest in virtual reality for a number of years I finally got the chance to try out VR recently. It was a hell of a

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The Joys of Import Gaming: How easy we have it these days

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Erika

As a kid having grown up during the 90s, I got to experience the height of the console wars in full swing: Nintendo vs Sega. Both of those companies duked it out for the dominance of the console market, with several other competitors such as Atari with their Jaguar and NEC’s TurboGrafix-16 lagging severely behind. Unfortunately, with growing up in the US, gamers such as myself missed numerous releases. Some of those were either not localized from Japan, or the translations of various games that did make it over were severely butchered by such things as Nintendo’s no-religious imagery/text policy,

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Oculus Rift Priced; Internet Freaks Out

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Kenny Keelan

Paradigm Shift In case you missed it or you’ve been living underneath a gaming rock for the last little while, Oculus announced a price and start date for shipping for its Rift VR Headset: 599$ USD and March 28th. As one can expect, the reaction was generally the same as it is with things that have been hyped a lot: “gaming company does a thing; the internet freaks out.” I could talk about the reasoning behind such pricing, why some people think it’s outrageous, why I think it’s perfectly reasonable and should have been expected, and why expectations were set differently

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Kenny’s Fallout 4 Log – Almost Two Months

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Kenny Keelan

It’s about five or six days short of two months owning the game and I’ve still been playing it, off and on, to pass the time when I’m bored with other games. There’s always downtime with Final Fantasy XIV, too, as my server has some pretty well defined times when it’s better off you just log off if you don’t want to solo quest. I’ve found that in playing it for as long as I have, I’ve pretty much done all that I can do, short of starting again or waiting until Bethesda patches the multitude of issues the game has,

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Kickstarter has become a wasteland for games

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Fionna Schweit

Kickstarter is often a place where you can find interesting and odd things. But it’s also a place where you can go to get a lot of money and not do a lot. It’s both great and evil at the same time. This project is a wonderful example of what can be a disaster on Kickstarter. Started just a few days ago “Star Wars Open World RPG” is a project started by “Devin” a 20 year old man from Grapevine Texas who just wants to make an open world star wars mmo to answer the question “Ever wonder what if would

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Xenoblade Chronicles X Offers A Lot To Explore

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Les Major

Xenoblade Chronicles X First Impressions
Traveling across planet Mira in Nintendo’s latest Xenoblade game may seem incredibly daunting at first. You’re given a lot of missions to keep you close to home and some pretty big, scary, aliens roam the plains around the city of New LA. Are they aliens if you’re on their home planet? I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Today we’re taking a look at what it’s like to play Nintendo’s latest exploration JRPG!

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“Please Understand”: Nintendo is failing Pokemon fans abroad

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Fionna Schweit

Am I mad?  Probably? Why you ask? Because I was told that if I wrote an article about something I was mad about it would get published on this site. Now if you ask why I would ever feel an urge to have anything published on this site the only compelling answer anyone could possibly give is that they are a twisted person. Anyways, I’m Szko and I’ll be your rage columnist this evening. So what am I mad about? I’m mad about all the god damn Pokémon events Japan gets that other countries do not. I’ve been a Pokémon

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This year was great, but when can I play all of these games?

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Chelsea Richards

Let’s be real, 2015 was a fantastic year for gaming. Of course, there were some misses like the monetization for Battlefront and EVOLVE, and… whatever the hell happened to the PC release of Arkham Knight. But, stepping away from those, it’s after Christmas, so let’s look at our definite hits that we have, and enjoy 2015’s gifts to us. We were rewarded with not-one-but-two solid MMO expansions, through Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, and Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, both building significantly on the groundwork by their previous launches and content updates. Keeping in the multiplayer line, we were graced

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Is Fire Fall finally at its end? Red5 and their game are in trouble we try to find out why

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

The headline that greeted me was “Firefall studio Red 5 couldn’t make payroll on Christmas Day” I suddenly felt nostalgic. Red5 I said? Firefall? The game with thumpers and chosen and the melding had been a home to me and a few of my closest friends for a period of an about a year between its mid and late stage Beta testing. An MMO fps, with an open world, Fire fall promised a lot and delivered on very little. So I thought to myself what killed Red5? And their brainchild and babby Fire Fall? Was it the lack of content?

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The Shady Side of The Steam Bundle You Just Bought

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Rae Michelle Richards

We’re smack dab in the middle of the vaunted Steam Holiday Sale – it’s just that time of year when snow is in the air, Christmas Carrols ring through the halls and PC gamers rejoice at the low prices Valve has been able to negotiate with publishers. Saving a few bucks is fantastic but be on the lookout for the shady side of some publishers “franchise packs” lest you be the next victim of bundling. Call them “franchise bundles”, “series bundles”, “2015 Game of the Year Bundles” or whatever you please but in the end these bundles allow fans of

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Hideo Kojima and Konami: “You Ever Dance with the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?”

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Kenny Keelan

Seems only fitting that this article be titled with an older movie reference to Tim Burton’s Batman, honestly, as it seems Hideo Kojima and Konami have had the same kind of symbiotic and rather tumultuous relationship in the past as Konami was the one company that would give Kojima a chance back in the 80’s and, now, with the post-Metal Gear Solid V dramatics, they will be the ones to finally see him go and make something of himself elsewhere. While there’s word that Kojima is under an NDA about his departure from Konami, there is plenty of speculation as to

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Steam sale: the greatest good, or the worst evil?

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Fionna Schweit

The Beginning I remember a time when you couldn’t get computer games any way but by going out to Funcoland, or another store to buy them. In those days places like Funcoland had bargain bins, whole large bins full of games that were often rightly called shovelware. Most of these games would have fit right in on todays overcrowded indie game sphere, with the one difference that they had a box. Digital distribution has killed the bargain bin box, but not what lived inside it, it’s found a new home on Steam, and to a greater extent the twice annual

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