Kick Ass!! Lego is seriously bringing their A-Game (and Team) here. With new add-ons for Lego Dimension coming this fall, Nu Ghostbusters, A-Team, E.T, Gremlins and GOONIES!!!!! to name just a few. Check out the awesome trailer!!!

 

 

 

So hot off the heels of replaying Uncharted 1 through 3 I could not wait to dive into Uncharted 4.

I was expecting the usual fare, good dialog, charismatic characters, beautiful locations and of course, some great adventuring.

Well let me tell you just how surprised I was to find out this was barely even the surface of Uncharted 4, and instead I got a much deeper experience, a masterful mix of Assassin’s Creed, Metal Gear Solid with a pinch of Tomb Raider for good measure.

If you took the good from all those franchises and mixed them up, you would have the delicious game that is Uncharted 4.

What UC4 does that all the previous iteration have not is feel deeply human. Don’t get me wrong, the reason most of us keep playing the Uncharted series is the wonderfully human Nathan (Fillion) Drake. But this go round is much more complex.

We get to see where his relationships have taken him, his wife, his brother, best friend, all very well developed into what is essentially one long interactive movie.

Nathan and Elaina interact in a way that so many couples do, and it feels real, you can easily buy them as a real couple out exploring the jungle together.

The game play as well has seen a major advancement in design. What was a polished 3rd person cover based shooter, is now a full on sneaking mission game if you choose to play it that way.

You can in many cases bypass any combat at all if you choose stealth, from hiding in long grass, to immobilizing enemies with total stealth. There are even trophy reward for just such actions as passing an entire encounter without alerting any guard or killing anyone.

This significantly adds to the Ludonarrative Dissonance of past games, where mild mannered nice guy Drake goes from friendly banter to full on murder mode without a second thought.

This makes for a much more “real” story, in which you feel like you are more of a cat burglar than a death machine.

On top of all this the games visual are unlike anything I have seen in a game before, PC or otherwise. Naughty Dog has truly outdone themselves in the polish department, from the opening boat scene with water dripping off Nate’s face, to the most intricate details in caves and ruins you are exploring.

The pacing of Uncharted 4 is spot on as well, a mix back and forth of puzzle solving and combat / stealth, then the occasional exploration level thrown in for good measure.

And, as a final cherry on top, UC4 is no longer the short 6 hour romp we have seen in past games. I managed to make it through in 17h 30min on hard, with minimal exploration outside of the main path.

And speaking of paths, Uncharted really has gone off the beaten. In previous games the way forward was cut and dry, there was simply one entrance and one exit, and things were very linear in nature.

Well about 50% of the way through UC4 the series goes in a whole new direction, trading tight quarters for full on sand box mode. Exploration of Madagascar is done via vehicle, and there is no set path forward, with optional ruins to explore, and fights to be had (or avoided) From this point forward the game opens up in almost every level, with multiple routes to achieve your goals, and more than one way to proceed.

Never have I played a more well rounded, well thought out and conceptualized game than Uncharted 4. It has gone on to be my all time favorite game I have ever played. A title previously held by Final Fantasy 7 for the past 20 years.

Giving Uncharted a 10/10 does not do it justice, we almost need a new scale as the bar has been raised so high.

Go buy it now, you owe it to yourself as a gamer.

 

So in preparation for Uncharted for I decided to break my 1 golden gaming rule.

Never play anything twice…

Now to most folks this seems like rather lousy rule, I have been asked a great many times over the years why I do this and it is pretty simple it comes down to two things.

1. I find very little value in solving puzzles a second time, and repeating a story, no matter how great, to me just seems pointless. I also never read books twice and seldom watch a movie or even TV series again.
2. I just don’t have the time to revisit games. When you play 60+ games on average a   year, there is no time to go back and play something again. With a backlog pushing 200 games, it is really hard to justify another round of an old fave.

But after reading so many good things about the Nathan Drake Redux, I decided I may as well take a shot and it would help continuity wise on the overall Uncharted story.

Well color me surprise to find that I remember slightly over 1% of the games… My wife calls it C.R.A.F.T. disease, as in Can’t Remember A Fucking Thing. And she is not wrong. I was dumbfounded to find that I recalled literally zero plot from Uncharted 1 and 2 and only a few little plot points in 3.

I remembered no puzzles, no locations, and had some faint memories of big actions scenes in 3 and the train climb in Uncharted 2.

So needless to say, I may need to revise my no second playthrough rule, shit, I may as well keep my games instead of selling them and just rotate the playlist ever 5 year, I may never need to buy a new game again.

So back to more important matters, how does the Uncharted trilogy hold up after 10 years?

In a word, Fantastic.

The games offer nothing much in terms of new content, as there is nothing added to the stories or such and it is all primarily retextured graphics, but boy have they done a good thing here.

If you have never played these games on the PS3, do yourself a favor and stop reading now, and go buy the collection. You will not be disappointed at all.

The games themselves hold up extremely well, they look like they belong on the PS4, and you would be hard pressed to find any technical reasons that they feel last gen.

The combat holds up well, the AI is reasonable with only a slight glitch here or there.

The visuals have received a substantial bump though. Check out any of the side by side videos on YouTube and you will be shocked at how good a job the did with the remaster. They revamped Drake in 1 and 2 to look much more like his Uncharted 4 counterpart.

Some of the additional content comes in the form of and added difficulty (Brutal) and speed run modes where you can compete via a leaderboard for the fasted run through the game.

There is also a new Explorer difficulty that allows for you to explore and look for treasure without the bother of enemies harshing your game.

Lastly the have added a fantastic camera mode to all 3 titles. You essentially pause the game and have full control over the camera, more so than in traditional game play. You can tilt, pan, zoom and off set the camera, then snap some amazing shots of the beautiful world of Uncharted.

For the bargain basement price $49.99 for 3 full games you can’t go wrong.

On a single play-through on Crushing difficulty you will be looking at about 10 hours for story more per game, a little more depending on your puzzle solving prowess.

A Solid 9/10.

So after what has felt like a lifetime, my Oculus Rift has finally shipped. The little VR that started it all is finally coming home to roost and it is a bittersweet culmination to years of waiting on VR.

From a completely botched launch, to Oculus screwing its day one pre-orders by sending thousands of Rifts to retail before fulfilling their obligation, it has been one bumpy ride for the last month and a half.

Now that I have spent the last 40 days with the Vive, is the shine off the VR diamond?

Yes and no.

While having spend a considerable amount of time in VR in the last month, it has left me feeling a little wanting.

Now don’t misunderstand, I love the Vive and the idea of where it will be in a year is very intriguing, but it lacks one very major aspect. Polish.

The Vive offers something the competition does not (not now at least) and that is room scale VR. But at what cost? Polish.

The Vive feels like the DK2 did back in the day, with tons of things to do and try, but none of them with any real substance. The Steam store is littered with expensive tech demos. Throw away titles that you buy, try, and never turn on again sadly.

That is the key difference between the Rift and Vive, the games. Where the Rift itself has a full library of games, and by games I mean completed, start to finish, 8-10 hours, games! Not half baked, over priced, money grabs that fill the Steam store.

I have yet to spend more than 2 hours in a single story type game on the Vive. Why? Are they not good enough? Nope, it is certainly not for lack of wanting. It comes down to devs offering up tease like tastes of full products. There isn’t nay full length games for Vive at the moment unfortunately.

Where the Vive is filled with episodic content and tech demos, the Rift delivers full games. With titles like Chronos, The Climb, Lucky’s Tale, Eve: Valkyrie to name a few, all of which offer full in depth games.

I think this is one key factor to the Oculus store, it is as if Oculus has told devs that you have to offer full products to be part of their storefront, and good for them if that is the case, because it only furthers their stance on quality.

They seem to be going the route of Apple, where standards come into play for their products. That is not a slam against Vive, but it is akin to the age old war of Mac vs PC.

Oculus is trying very hard to emulate Apple / Mac. Making for a more refined experience, at the sacrifice of customization. And the Vive is the PC, sacrificing ease of use for flexibility.

You can play just about anything on the Vive, including some Rift titles with some hacking, but it is a flaky buggy product most days, oft requiring tweaks and frequent reboots just to get it running.

So for the time being, I fully intend to keep both and see where the dust settles. For the time being there is a huge divide in content and until that gap closes, the only way to get all VR has to offer, is purchase both and enjoy it while it lasts.

So I have had my Vive now for almost 4 weeks. I have dropped about $350 on content and a disturbing trend has emerged that needs addressing.

Indie devs are treating VR game pricing like a flea market. Because the market is so starved for good content, it is a free for all for our wallets, and this needs to stop.

So after a small sale on PSN I decided it was finally time to grab Firewatch by Campo Santo.

This is a tough one to review without giving anything away. At its core it is a first person exploration game.

You are a new ranger in Yellowstone national park in the late 80’s, armed with nothing more than a backpack and a walkie-talkie, you set off to keep the park safe from the threat of fire.

The voice on the other end of the radio is your partner in crime, Delilah, a smooth talking long time ranger who really makes the game what it is.

At the core this is  a deeply human story, something I did not come to expect at all buying it, the trailers eluded to same witty banter between you and ranger D, but it is much much deeper than that.

It is about home, and what it means to run away from your problems, to walk away from the things we should be holding on to.

I can’t say more than that without spoiling things, but trust me, this one is a rare gem in a sea of mindless action games.

The game is rather simple, there is not a whole lot to do per se, and it mostly exploring the park looking for this object or that, all while having interesting conversations with Delilah. But this is in no way a negative, the game plays out more like an interactive novel in a sense than a true adventure game.

The conversations do have paths to them, and you have a limited amount of time to answer or ask a question, and I am not certain how things could play out differently based on your choices, as the narrative seems pretty set in stone.

That said I may take another spin towards the end to see if I can change a certain outcome.

With many plot twists and turns, intrigue and emotion, it is very easy to recommend Firewatch.

It will set you back about $15 on PSN when on sale, and took me about 4 hours to make my way through.

All in all well worth the price of admission.

A solid 8/10

 

So I just finished up Gunjack by CCP, made famous by the incredible Eve Online, Eve: Gunjack takes you to a deep space mining operation and it is your job to fend off pirates and Asteroids alike from the comfort of your 5 ton turret.

Though taking place in the Eve universe, outside the name itself this could simply be any alien spaceship hoard mode game.

Don’t get me wrong,  I think CCP did a good thing leveraging the Eve name as they did with Eve: Valkyrie for the Oculus Rift, but if you are looking for any ties to the Eve universe you will not find them here.

What you will find however is a decent shooter with a cool control scheme that sets it apart from any other titles currently available for Rift or Vive.

The version I played through was for the HTC Vive, though from what I understand the difference between the Rift and Vive version is minuscule.

The control scheme in this game is often slammed in reviews, as it does not use the Vive-motes for anything other than the trigger buttons to shoot and touch pad to reload.

Personally I found this to be perfectly fine, the turret direction is determined 100% by the direction you turn your head, and while it may be a little jarring at first to some, it ends up working very well long term.

Though it is recommended you play seated,  I found it much more enjoyable to play standing, giving you a much greater sens of presence and allowing you to feel like you were actually in the turret.

The game spans 20 levels and will offer about an hour and a half of game play for a single 20 level run. There is scoreboards and the ability to get a “Master” level rating on each level if you get a high enough score, this will be required if you intend to get all the Achievements available. You can also find 2 boss fights and 2 “bonus” levels which are destroying an endless onslaught of asteroids until you turret is damaged enough to have to pull out.

My only gripe is that, as with most VR titles, this game is really short. Given the simplistic nature of the game itself, CCP could have easily made this 100 levels had they chosen to do so at very little extra expense.

The level are all fairly similar with wave after wave of enemies showing up in varying patterns and formations. Enemy types continue to get more and more challenging over the 20 level by adding attacks that will disable your turret, or scramble your radar, etc.

You also have additional power ups to add to your arsenal that are dropped by destroying green ships, they will include things like homing missiles, a powerful focused laser and even a stasis bubble that will slow ships down in time.

The game retails for $10.99 Canadian and I can easily recommend it. It will make for a good demo for friends if you plan on showing off the VR HMD you own. Controls are intuitive enough that in a minute or so even non-gamers can jump and feel comfortable.

All in all a worthwhile endeavor and a solid 7/10.

So I just finished up with Light Repair Team 4 by Eerie Bear Games, this is their first foray into the world of VR and it is a solid start.

The game sell for under $10 cdn on Steam and will offer you about 2 hours of game play  depending on your puzzle solving aptitude.

Puzzle games have taken on a whole new dimension with the inception of VR, offing a scale we have never seen before in traditional puzzlers. What would have been small room puzzle now in a traditional 2d puzzler, now become a whole world of its own when you are standing amongst the  beams of light that make up LRT #4.

The concept is simple, and so are the first 10 levels of the game, get a beam of colored light to a small circular receptacle on the other side of the area you are in. This will light up the building around you and let you move on to the next level.

You have small mirrors at your disposal to reflect the beams and bounce them in the right direction. This grows in difficulty as the level progress with the addition of beam funnels that can take 2 or more colors and combine them. So if you need a green beam, you will have to get a yellow and blue beam focused into the funnel.

It is a simple concept the by the end of the 25 levels grows to a complex web of lights and mirrors.

The game functions in full room scale, so you will be walking around an elevated platform and placing mirror and the like all over the place, checking for line of sight and crawling on the ground to reflect a beam just right.

As levels go by they introduce more complex mechanics like moving platforms which throws a whole new spin on things.

All in all this is a decent game for the price and offers a lot more than most similarly priced VR games, at under $10 you cannot go wrong for the 2 hours of time you will get out of this game.

While it is basic and offers little in the way of replayability, it will make for a decent VR demo for any friend you may have that are into puzzles.

One of the shortfalls though is, as with most of the Vive’s offerings, this still feels a little more like a tech demo than actual complete game.

While the Vive boasted just shy of 100 titles in the VR library for launch, I have yet to play any that serve to be more than a couple hour romp showcasing what VR can do, more so than offering anything of substance.

While that is not necessarily a bad thing, the gamer in me is craving a more meaty experience. I am a hardcore gamer and tend to play primarily for the story, so sadly this is where most titles fall short, with the exclusion of a few gems like The Gallery, there is little to no story to be found in the majority of VR games as of yet.

I am sure this will change as time goes on and we get past the honeymoon phase, but until then, we need to take what comes along and enjoy the little gems like LRT #4 for what they are, simple showcases for what will inevitably become much greater titles in the coming months and years.

So I just finished up Vanishing Realms Chapter 1, available now on Steam early access.

I will start by saying this is by far the best VR game I have played yet. I will be putting out more reviews shortly, but I had to rush here and let you all know this is worth buying right now, if you have a Vive, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

The game itself is a melding of classic adventure games by the likes of Zelda or even old school dungeon crawlers from the 90’s like Eye of the Beholder or the much loved Elder Scrolls: Arena.

You begin your tutorial by traversing a series of floating rocks that serve to teach you the controls and start the story through a few scrolls and books. From then on you are on your own.

You are thrust into a dungeon with nothing but a torch and your wit.

Now that is one of the things I am loving most about VR at the moment, there is very little hand hold, much like in real life, you do not get a pop up telling you to turn a doorknob, so in virtual reality (for now at least) there is very little in the way of guidance.

Some may find this daunting, but personally I find it very refreshing. In a sea of inequity that is video game challenges it is a breath of fresh air to find games that actually want you to figure things out, not hand you the answer on a silver platter.

This game is filled with riddles and does not feel the need to baby the player. When you purchase your first sword there is no tutorial, because the game just assumes you are not an idiot and know that the pointy end goes in the other man. Same goes for the shield and bow. These are basic things in life you should know how to use, or at least seen a movie in the last 50 years to understand how the items work.

Take a torch and touch the flame to a sconce and it lights up, this actually gave me a great sense of joy, more than it should have I think, I have pretty much set everything that can be lit on fire aflame thus far.

It is these little bits of detail that sets Vanishing Realms apart from the other VR games out there, the world, though cartoon like and stylized, is quite interactive, from crates and boxes to break, to the health system. Whereby if you are low on health you can eat to replenish your low HP, to do so, grab a piece of food and hold it in front of your face. Again, this is the intuitive side of gaming that can only be achieved in VR. There is no “Press the trigger to eat” you simply mime eating.

All in all the first chapter will take you about 2 hours to finish, longer if you are aiming for a 100% clear and it will leave you longing for more content.

No word from the dev yet on when chapter 2 will be out as he is still working on refining the bugs from chapter 1.

I did not encounter anything game breaking and the experience was very smooth for an early access game, the game is way more polished than I would expect for something on EA.

All in all well worth the price of admission. The game sells for 21.99cdn and include the future Chapter 2 when it launches.

A solid 9/10.

Check back soon for my review of Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed, theBlue and Light Repair Team #4 coming this weekend.

Also coming soon is the Vive unboxing and setup videos.

 

 

So it has been 4 days now since I was able to step into virtual reality and man what a ride.

I have been to the bottom of the ocean, looked a whale in the eye, fought off hoards of evil robots, flown spaceships, shot off fireworks, made popcorn, met an old friend and made some new enemies. All from the comfort of my basement.

So then I ponder, when does the virtual world, become my reality?

In theBlu you travel to the depths of the ocean and watch as a blue whale swims past a shipwreck, stopping for a moment so close that you can see the pupil in his giant eye, close enough to touch, close enough to make your heart skip a beat. Now as a real life scuba diver I can tell you this, theBlu was so real I found myself breathing through my mouth, I felt the weight on my chest of the water, the quickened heart rate that comes with the excitement of being in a foreign place.

So when you combine all those things together, was my mind not at the bottom of the ocean? And if your reality is no more than your perception, then was I not truly somewhere other than my basement for I did just perceive I was somewhere else?

That is at the end of the day the crux of virtual reality, we are tricking our minds into believing we are somewhere other than here. And how this differs from regular video games is you ARE the person in the game, you are no longer a silent observer subtly manipulating the actions of your onscreen avatar, you ARE the on screen avatar.

In The Gallery – EP1: Call of the Starseed each controller you hold is represented in game as a pair of hands in some stylish gloves. You squeeze the trigger and your hand closes and opens. You can fully interact with your world, pic up bottles, fireworks, jiffy pop popcorn, the list goes on, and those disembodied hands actually start feeling like you own, it is hard to explain, but your mind simply accepts what you are giving it, the controller vibrates when you break a bottle on a rock, giving you the sense you actually smashed something.

So I ask, was I not just on a beach rummaging through washed up garbage? My mind sure seems to think so, so then does that not mean it really happened?

I have yet to spend any sustained period of time in VR, thus far my visits have been about an hour each, but the more time you seem to spend, the harder it is for me to accept I have not actually been somewhere else. Now I know as a sane person, sure, I have not been magically teleported to the cockpit of a spaceship trying to save humanity, but that does not make it feel any less real.

VR games are so much more than video games, and comparing the two is akin to saying a junior hockey team is the same as the NHL. They quite literally are in completely different leagues.

So then I have to wonder, should we even be calling them VR games anymore? What virtual rality is selling you selling you is experiences, life and mind altering experiences. You are no longer the omnipotent overseer of a hero, you are the hero, you are slaying the dragon, you are saving the princess and you are humanities last hope. So to call them a games, is in reality an insult to what they really are…