Bioshock Themed Clothing Line For Women!

Love Bioshock? Now you can express your enthusiasm in a fun way! Living Dead Clothing that is also known for Final Fantasy themed apparel has launched a line of Bioshock dresses, leggins, t-shirts etc. You should find something fun to fit your fandom, since all three games of the franchise are included. The sizes go from xs to xxl so there should be something for just about everyone, but do remember to check from the size charts that you get a fit thats right for you!

Want to check out the complete catalogue? Look no further: catalogue

Here are some examples (my personal favorites) from Living Dead Clothing’s new collection.

 

Play(and get dressed) with passion!

auburn.geek

REVIEW: Stellaris

Review: This article goes in depth about a game and opens a dialogue about the positive and negative aspects that compose that game. At the end of the review, the author notes whether he or she feels this game was worth playing. Keep in mind that this review reflects the author’s opinion; you may have a different experience with this game!

Time Spent: 88 Hours

Version Played: PC-Only Release

Holy crap. I genuinely have no idea how I’ve spent so much time on a game that released less than a month ago. Where did all of that time go? What happened?!

Crafted by the same minds behind Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, Paradox Interactive has made their first foray into the 4X genre of video games. Called Stellaris, this insanely addictive grand strategy video game revolves around exploring your randomly generated galaxy, completing unique and entertaining quests, and building up your interstellar empire. Time seems to evaporate when playing Stellaris; indeed, the need to explore just one more system or complete one more piece of technology drives you forward in a fascinating romp through your galactic neighborhood.

Let’s start with the basics. Built in the same vein as games like Civilization, Endless Legend, Endless Space, and probably most like Sins of a Solar Empire, Stellaris is a 4X game. For those of you not familiar with the “4X” title, it means “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate” which runs the gamut of what you can accomplish in a standard game of Stellaris. I’ve often been a fan of 4X games and their insanely addictive turn-based or real-time gameplay usually has me staring at my clock wondering how much more time I can put into the game before I absolutely have to sleep. Stellaris is no different. Put in charge of a galactic empire of your choice (you can choose from pre-made empires or create your own with a wide variety of options available), you must explore all of your nearby systems and begin colonizing planets in order to expand your empire. Resources such as energy and minerals help power your fleets and build your structures while the ever important influence resource fuels diplomatic and empire-wide decisions and helps you recruit new leaders such as scientists and admirals.

Building your own empire is half the fun!

Simply moving past the empire builder can become a difficult task as you are given a plethora of races, racial traits, colonization options, government ethics, and ways of space travel from which to choose. Some of these remain purely cosmetic; my lovely bird people certainly look spectacular, but that doesn’t affect how other empires see me. Other options, however, impact how your people interact with their environment and the plethora of empires you’ll meet. When building a race, you can select from many positive and negative traits that could boost their ability to produce minerals or make the migration of your citizens take longer and cost more. Beyond that, your government ethos will play a dynamic role in your overall empire as well as your interactions with other nations. Depending on what you choose for the ethics section, this will open up new government types that could fit the style of play for your empire as well as offer bonuses for your people. It’s all a little complicated at first and I highly recommend reading a guide that discusses some of the major differences between the ethics.

It’s a shame that Stellaris doesn’t expand on the variety of options and give players more information on what bonuses, technologies, and buildings each ethos allows them to research or create. Such knowledge remains vital when crafting a unique empire! When beginning a new game, though, the amusing and sarcastic tutorial serves as a very helpful guide. Some 4X games have difficulty introducing new players, but thankfully Stellaris seems to handle that with relative ease while not overwhelming a player with absurd amounts of information. Do not mistake me for saying that Stellaris is a simple game; the complexities available to the avid grand strategy player are abundant and the AI can be utterly ruthless. It’s just that Paradox manages to present their newest title in a way that offers new players a beautiful interface and a quick entry into their first game.

The AI empires in a single player game all have unique personalities and along with exploring the galaxy, meeting these new empires fills the exciting early portions of the game with a bit of tension. Who will you meet: the peaceful mushroom people that wish to form alliances or the crazy spider people who desire nothing else except to purge everything in the galaxy? Like many 4X games, you can engage in diplomacy with every race you meet and while the diplomacy section seems a bit more detailed than some games of its ilk, Stellaris‘ diplomacy remains cluttered and annoying. As of the recent Clark 1.1 patch, asking for things such as civilian access through another empire’s borders became a bit easier, but the process still remains convoluted. Even if you remain on excellent terms with another empire, they might laugh in your face if you suggest things like an alliance or a non-aggression pact. The update added more notices for diplomatic events in the galaxy so hopefully Paradox continues to refine their diplomatic system.

As you expand into the galaxy, your science ship will encounter intriguing anomalies on the various planets it scans that could provide resource benefits, empire-wide bonuses (such as this floating tree that produced a sap that helped reduce the aging of my people and gave me a bonus to my overall happiness), or that could kill the scientist and the ship he/she/it tried to research the anomaly in the first place. As I mentioned before, this makes the beginning portions of the game a huge blast. After discovering all of these planets and mapping the galaxy, Stellaris comes down to two options: eliminating or subjugating the opposing empires or colonizing/conquering 40% of all colonizable planets in the galaxy. This doesn’t give players a wide range of options in which they can win the game. What if someone wants to form the first United Galactic Nations? What about if someone researches a piece of technology that allows them to transcend existence? Stellaris moves away from other 4X games that give players these options and simply demands that they engage in warfare to achieve his or her goals. While I don’t necessarily disagree that moving away from those general tropes is a bad thing, I feel like every style of play should have a way for players to achieve victory.

The galaxy quickly becomes a crowded place.

The scale of Stellaris becomes readily noticeable when you begin your first playthrough. You can customize your galaxy by choosing its size (150 systems is considered small while 1000 is the largest option) along with its shape (spiral, ring, etc.). You can even designate how many AI empires exist in the galaxy with you and how many get a head start as well as their aggressiveness and the overall game difficulty. The size of the galaxy generally determines how long that game will probably take; small is perfect for a day-long session while the largest setting may take you quite some time. Managing your empire as it grows becomes a daunting task. You can only directly control so many planets on your own. Beyond that, you must create sectors and assign governors to manage your ever expanding nation. These sectors act as miniature empires of their own and produce their own resources, science output, and construction ships. While it takes them some time to get started, you can help them out by giving the sectors some resources from your own pool to accelerate their growth. You can even tell the sector governor what you would like them to focus on producing: Energy, Minerals, Science, or Military. Before patch 1.1, the sector governors were practically useless. I generally began building up a planet and taking a resource penalty for having too many under my direct control before adding that planet to my incompetent governor’s sector. This made expanding out into the galaxy aggravating. Thankfully, patch 1.1 helped relieve some of these issues and greatly improved on the sector governor AI. While it’s still not as good as running everything yourself, I look forward to Paradox’s continuing updates.

In the end of the game, you only have one option: war. You have to expand your control in order to achieve victory and warfare in Stellaris resembles warfare in Sins of a Solar Empire. You can build fleets, assign admirals, and upgrade their technology in order to defeat your opponents. I’m still not entirely sure what the best weapon combinations are, but the computer can customize your vessels for you and it does a reasonably good job. You can only conquer so much of another empire’s planets at one time, however, and attaining overall galactic victory will take some time. You could even encounter crazy endgame events that pit you and the other empires against powerful new enemies such as hyperdimensional invaders if someone researched the jump drive or a rebellious machine consciousness hellbent on annihilating organic life if another empire researched artificial intelligence and refused to treat their synthetic people with respect. The middle of the game seems dull by comparison, but you rarely have nothing to do and Paradox has promised more scripted events for the middle game. As always, it’s nice to see a publisher supporting their product and listening to their fans.

Tired of the crazy AI? Try multiplayer! Having played with several of my friends, I can confirm that coordinating with actual humans helps in your galactic conquest. You can even play in massive 32 player games! The server begins to lag as players engage in large scale fleet battles and this becomes especially prevalent in a larger galaxy, but interacting with other players feels more natural than the sporadic AI. Stellaris also supports an incredibly active modding community and I can’t wait to see what people create. There’s already a Warhammer 40K mod in the works! Woo!

Stellaris has floored me with its craftsmanship and ingenuity. It certainly has its issues, but with the generally rapid pace at which Paradox has released patches, I remain confident that Stellaris will only get better with time. If you like space and 4X grand strategy games, definitely consider giving Stellaris a try.

Happy gaming!

-Valiant

500 Fans Will Gain Early Access To The New Legend Of Zelda Game At Nintendo’s Super-Fan Signup Day!

Nintendo is organizing a “Super-Fan Signup Day” on June 11th at 9 a.m. At this event The Legend of Zelda fans are given a rare opportunity to experience the company’s upcoming title in advance! The first 500 people in line at Nintendo’s New York store(Nintendo NY, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020) will gain access to playing the new game on designated times on june 14th-19th.

There will be a lot of other festive activities on the above mentioned dates. This is what Nintendo has told the press: “The six-day free event will begin at noon ET on June 14, when fans will be invited to watch gameplay of The Legend of Zelda live-streamed from Nintendo’s booth at this year’s E3 video game trade show in Los Angeles to the 15-foot gaming screen inside Nintendo NY,”[…]”From June 15 to June 19, Nintendo experts will also be giving guided game-play demonstrations on the big screen for everyone to watch and enjoy. Several fans may even get the chance to participate in guided demonstrations. There will also beThe Legend of Zelda trivia for a chance for fans to win fun prizes.”
So if you are in or near New York at the time, go try you luck out!

Play with passion!
auburn.geek

Videogame Movies, Yay or Nay??

Movie adaptations of videogames have always sparked up controversy among gamers. Most adaptations manage to offend every fan in existence (Resident Evil comes to mind), while a select few actually look really good (the Warcraft film, can’t wait to see that!). So the movie industry is still and will always keep making them in hopes of convincing gamers to watch more movies.

However, recent adaptation announcements/ releases are worrying this blogger.

We Look At ‘Batman – Return to Arkham’

The Arkham series, hands down the best series of superhero games ever created. This series first began in 2011 with Arkham Asylum and then was followed in 2013 by Arkham City with Arkham Knight being its swan song. This game is certainly a game that all Batman fans should delve into.

Now Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are last gen games and they needed a little work. But the re release of these games as Return to Arkham is spectacular. They really have gone all out to make the games look beautiful.

Having all of these games on on one system is definitely a good thing. Plus the fact that this is a remaster means they actually went through the work of upgrading the game and making it as crisp as can be. Honestly I remember showing my mother Arkham City and her asking if it was a movie, so it proves that remaking the game with Unreal 4 will highly advance an already beautiful game. Looking at these images, it is clear that this new engine has done wonders for a game that already looked so realistic.

The added bonus is of course the DLC which did cost a pretty penny when the game was released.You get all of the DLC for these two awesome games in one package without any downloading. I actually don’t know if I picked up the DLC  If you loved the games earlier it will definitely be something worth picking up.

If you have for some reason passed this game up before I highly recommend picking it up! It is truly a game worth playing simply because it is the definitive Batman video game series. The series really does get better as you continue to play the games and delve deeper into the world that is so artfully created. Plus, Mark Hamill’s portrayal of the Joker is sublime and even though he is crazy, you end up feeling for him. His energy flows through the game and really affects Batman in interesting ways.

I honestly think that this is a good way to introduce to a newer fan to the world of Batman, as it really is a fantastic open world game. As the crew grew more bold, they made more and more explorable areas and besides who doesn’t want to be Batman!

Return to Arkham comes out on July 26, for the Xbox One and PS4. Get ready to come back to the Asylum and the City. The Joker is waiting. You can check out the trailer below.

REVIEW: Dark Souls 3

Review: This article goes in depth about a game and opens a dialogue about the positive and negative aspects that compose that game. At the end of the review, the author notes whether he or she feels this game was worth playing. Keep in mind that this review reflects the author’s opinion; you may have a different experience with this game!

Time Spent: About 65 hours. Extra time was spent testing the patch changes.

Version Played: PC and Xbox One

Loneliness. It’s a theme that writers and musicians have often detailed and described to the best of their ability. We all experience it; from time to time we all feel the incalculable feeling that despite our best efforts, the journey we have embarked upon remains solitary. Yes we may have passing encounters with colorful and dynamic men and women. Yes we may feel the sting of bitter defeat. Yes there will be those who seek to destroy everything we desire and everything we have accomplished. Ultimately though, these instances are fleeting and serve to remind us of our bitter mortality and the inescapable fate we all must endure.

Few games have embodied this like Dark Souls. Created by From Software as the third (and supposedly last) installation in their series of games, Dark Souls 3 returns the player to the Kingdom of Lothric and breathes life into familiar locales such as the Firelink Shrine and the dismal catacombs but also introduces countless new enemies and locations as well as a refined combat system. There’s a great deal to discuss about the final addition to the series, so let’s begin with how it stacks up with the previous games.

I don’t think anything can ever replace the experience I had with the first Dark Souls. It was intense, traumatic, and utterly breathtaking. I had never played a game that wanted to make me quit so badly, yet constantly dangled the idea of success in front of my face. The story never really became clear and while a great deal could be gleaned from character and item backstories and flavor text, a majority of it remained up to the player to simply guess. While this isn’t a terrible way to tell a story and certainly encourages dutiful research into the world, it felt as though the first Dark Souls took a “hands off” approach and left a great deal unanswered. The characters had personality and while a few of them stuck (SOLAIRE!!!), others seemed forgettable.

Dark Souls 3 completely changes that. It certainly doesn’t have the same impact that the first game did (like I said, I don’t think anything will), but the story is slightly more compelling, the flavor text behind items seems to be more in-depth, and the characters…Oh the characters! Dark Souls 3 has added a massive cast to the game and each character has a motivation as well as a questline. Some of the characters make a fantastic return (such as Andre, Patches, and Siegward) and Dark Souls 3 adds plenty of nods to the first two games. Those of you who have played 1 and 2 will immediately recognize some of the equipment or flavor text that exists in Lothric. These returning characters add to the engaging cast of new ones; from the noble Astoran knight Anri to the hopeful Irina to the very cunning Yoel of Londor, Dark Souls 3 eclipses the other games in terms of character development and personality by leaps and bounds. Save for Lucatiel, I barely remember most of the characters from Dark Souls 2 and I often did not feel compelled to find out more about them. For Dark Souls 3, I went out of my way to research their quests and work to complete as many of them as I could. The story is the standard Dark Souls affair: You, the enkindled, must join the other enkindled souls and reunite the Lords of the First Flame (by killing them) in order to relight the First Flame, the source of power (and in some sense, the recurring darkness) that resides in the Dark Souls universe. You find out more about the bosses and the characters throughout the game, but the story doesn’t really evolve from there.

The first Dark Souls had some truly wonderful boss fights and thankfully, Dark Souls 3 seems to respect its ancestor’s heritage by adding some horribly difficult and utterly awe inspiring bosses to the latest iteration in Hidetaka Miyazaki’s masterpiece. One of the most cinematic and flavorful bosses to fight? The Abyss Watchers. One of the bosses that had me shivering in fear and nearly frothing in rage? Dancer of the Boreal Valley. I felt a wide gamut of emotions from the bosses of Dark Souls 3 and while all of them aren’t exactly memorable, I still find myself marveling at some of the designs or mechanics implemented into their combat styles.

I got goosebumps from this fight.

Truly, many people play Dark Souls and its kin Bloodborne, for the opportunity to cut down their opponents with sword, axe, or spear or even launch powerful spells to split their foes in twain. Dark Souls 2, while certainly not as spectacular as the first game, greatly improved upon the first game’s mechanics and refined some of the combat. We got to experience dual-wielding weapons for the first time and while some were opposed to how From Software revamped the magic system, the Dark Souls series desperately needed something to balance out the power of magic. Clearly taking inspiration from the success of Bloodborne, From Software and Hidetaka Miyazaki have refined the combat system to an even greater degree; while not as fast paced as its sister game, Dark Souls 3 has a more rapid flow to its combat than the previous installations and every single weapon has a “combat style” that allows the player to truly revamp the way he or she uses that weapon. In addition to their HP and stamina bars, players now have a new bar called the “FP bar.” This bar drains when you cast spells as well as when you use your weapon’s combat style. For example, I normally use a Lightning Claymore +10. Swinging it normally drains stamina and I go through the weapon’s normal attack patterns. Should I desire, however, I can two-hand the weapon and hold my left trigger on my controller. This will cause my character to assume a high guard with the sword pointed directly at my opponent. From here, I can thrust forward or go into a sweeping lunge. Some weapons can even combo off your original special attack! This greatly changes the way Dark Souls plays and lets players truly customize a play style all to him or herself!

You can refill this FP bar using some of your Estus Flask uses, thus enabling someone who wants to build a character based on spellcasting or special attacks a completely viable option! This is easily the most customizable of the three games and From Software made a phenomenal choice incorporating some of the positive elements of Bloodborne into Dark Souls 3.

Despite my adoration for this game, not all remains well. As I’ve previously mentioned, Dark Souls games rarely go into detail about their stories and while Dark Souls 3 certainly provides a great deal of lore and certainly provides a significantly improved cast of characters, it still leaves the player with countless questions. Rarely do the cast of NPCs ever have any true resolution; yes you can complete their quests but ultimately, their fate remains the same and you discover very little in the way about who they could have become. I love Dark Souls‘ inherent loneliness and fatalism (it’s easily the top reason I play this game), but for once I would like to go significantly more into a particular NPC’s story. The entire plot about reuniting the First Flame doesn’t drive me forward; fighting bosses and experiencing the challenge is what makes me constantly come back to this game. The story simply feels like filler.

Speaking of challenges…The Nameless King was an intense fight.

Multiplayer has always been both a highlight and a stumbling point for the Dark Souls franchise. Summoning friends has never felt easier as From Software incorporated a password protected summoning option for people who want to play together (another thing they adapted from Bloodborne)! You can even join a friend’s game regardless of how high of a level you may be. You’ll suffer a reduction of your stats down to your friend’s level, but the removal of the “summoning cap” was a spectacular move on From’s part. Unfortunately, every Dark Souls game has suffered from a cheating problem and Dark Souls 3 is not exempt. Countless times did I experience the wrath of invincible invaders or players who had incomprehensibly powerful spells. Countless times did I perish at their hands. From Software released many patches stating that they had helped mitigate the cheating problem, resolved crashing issues, and added “balance changes”, but the company still remains incredibly vague on exactly everything they have accomplished with these patches. As far as mechanical issues, some of them certainly helped as my PC version of Dark Souls 3 rarely crashed. Others, such as the weapon balance changes and the multiplayer work, didn’t seem as effective. This can be frustrating for players, especially those who were outright banned from using multiplayer with the general population for accidentally accepting “illegal items” (items that were obtained using an exploit or were modded) or for those who were banned for no reason at all. These activities by From Software diminish the overall experience of the game.

While easily the best PC version of the entire Dark Souls series, both the PC and Xbox One versions still suffer from notable framerate drops, with the Xbox One version being more notable. When Dark Souls 3 ran well on my PC, it looked and handled spectacularly and while nothing will ever beat the gargantuan slow downs of Blight Town from the first game, Dark Souls 3 has its moments of FPS dips that can elicit frustration.

Beyond all of this, however, Dark Souls 3 manages to shine. I had a blast completing the main story with two of my friends and I plan on constantly replaying the game in the future. Despite some hiccups along the road, Dark Souls 3 stands as a fitting conclusion to the series and offers plenty of subtle and blatant nods to its predecessors. I greatly await From Software’s further patches and additions to this game. Hopefully the expansions are just as good!

Praise the sun!

-Valiant

Museum World Meets Gaming World In 2017

What racing video games did you grow up with? The racing games you would find in our house growing up in the early years you would find ‘Final Lap‘, ‘Pol Position‘, ‘Grand Prix‘ and as we got older we had, ‘Formula One‘, ‘Daytona‘, ‘Sega Rally Championship‘, ‘GTA‘, ‘Need For Speed‘ and ‘Gran Turismo‘ which I still played up to a few years ago, but unfortunately I had to retire from gaming due to an Illness that has affected my hands so very reluctantly I had to hang up my controller. Video games in our family had definitely forged a bond between my little Brother who is 10 younger than me, it gave us something in common which we would not of had without video games. I was 17 baby bro was 7 when I introduced him to video games. Video games have had such a huge influence over the years and it doesn’t look like it’s about to slow down anytime soon especially as the gaming technology and graphics become so much more advanced.

I was recently sent an email about an awesome new project that has been given the go ahead that is really quite exciting for all gamers young and old a like. A South Australian Museum is working on developing an exhibition to look into the influence of motor culture of video gaming, the National Motor Museum in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia were awarded $125, 000 grant this month from the Australian government to create “REVolution: where pixels meet motors – an interactive history of video gaming and motor culture“.

The museum’s director Paul Rees first had the idea for the exhibition while watching his 15-year-old son playing motor racing video games, and thought “This is part of motoring history – how people interact with motoring culture through video games, there is an exhibition in this”. Rees said they are looking at the early days of racing in our modern culture and the influence on video games from motorbikes to motorcars, they have also looked at the dashboard of modern-day cars and want to explore how video gaming has informed the modern car and the modern driving experience. The museum is working with an Adelaide-based tech company Novus Res, they will develop a program to allow visitors and schools to create simple motor racing games based on basic coding techniques.
Rees says “The idea is to introduce people to basic computer programming by saying ‘you can whip up a game here in five minutes ‘ then allowing them to take home the game they created somehow”

The National Motor Museum in Birdwood, South Australia is Run by History SA and attracts about 60,000 visitors a year to its extensive collection of cars and automobile collectables. The museum has started to integrate the video games with setting up racing games on the consoles as apart of their school holiday programs, however the up coming exhibition would be on a much greater scale and would be more of a fun history lesson. The museum hopes to have the interactive exhibition open in December 2017, the exhibition would also give the museum’s traditional visitors a better understanding and perhaps a new appreciation of video games. Rees said the exhibition is going to be for anyone who remembers the earliest games, but he hopes it will come into its own as an educational program for students. Science technology, engineering and maths could be taught through video gaming and it could become a stepping stone for people who want to move into the creative industries.

Who knows what the future may bring but with technology and gaming advancing rapidly this platform could possibly be used to teach people how to drive, like a simulator of sorts? This is definitely an exhibition you won’t want to miss. For more information head over to the National Motor Museum website.

 

National Motor Museum (South Australia) 

http://www.nationalmotormuseum.com.au

What’s Obsidian been up to?

The famous rpg developer Obsidian is known to us for games like Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Fallout New Vegas, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Pillars of Eternity, among others. Obsidian has been working on a new RPG called Tyranny, which will be released this year. Tyranny’s idea in short is that the world has already been overrun by the bad guys, and the player(“Fatebinder”) is working for the overlord, wandering around the world delivering justice(or something like that) however he sees fit and the world should react to the player’s choices(especially near the beginning) in abundance.

I also heard that there will be no classes in this game, so that the players can build up their characters more freely, much like in Skyrim for instance. Tyranny being an Obsidian game, there will of course be different factions with which the player can either become friends or enemies with, and I for one am interested in how well they will succeed in making the factions and their reactions to the player function. One thing that sounded really fun to me was that the player gets some sort of special attacks depending on which factions they are siding with. The player will also get so called combo attacks that are done with their companions. The stronger the relationship, be it good or bad, the stronger the combo. But enough for the details, you can read more on Kotaku, from where I first read most of this info! In conclusion Tyranny has an interesting setup, decidedly different from the regular fantasy game’s good vs. evil setting, where the player is usually assuming the good guy-role. Of course the idea is not sensationaly unique but it’s nevertheless intriguing and I’m sure Obsidian will use this to the best of their abilities to make us an awesome game.

Obsidian has also been told to have started their work on Pillars of Eternity 2, but that project is still quite new and thus there is not a whole lot to say about it yet, but if anything, Pillars of Eternity 2 should be at least as epic and time consuming as the first one. While researching information about Obsidian’s latest movements I also stumbled upon Gamepressure’s interview with Obsidian’s CEO Feargus Urquhart, and he stated that: “there’s a small group of people within the studio that’s working on something completely new, but he didn’t want to share any details yet. What’s worth noting, though, is that the names of Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky came up while talking about this project. Feargus didn’t say that directly, but he pointed out that it might have something to do with the prototype based on the Unreal Engine”. Now this is definitely interesting and I for one can’t wait to hear more from this new, so far secret project! I won’t engage in writing more details about the games mentioned just now, because I don’t want to give out any flaky information. We’ll just have to patiently wait for more news from Obsidian. Nevertheless these are certainly exciting times to be an RPG fan!

Play with Passion!

auburn.geek

‘Tetris’ A Surprise Of A Movie

Videogames always had epic storylines that Hollywood loves to adapt into movies. And more often than not, those movies are hated by the hard-core gamers. Cause let’s face it, how on earth do you expect to give an average 20+ hours of gameplay justice in a 2 hour movie.

However there are still some game movies that are building up quite a good rep (Warcraft comes to mind). Added to that, a somewhat recent announcement captured our interest.

A Look At The Game ‘Heavy Rain’

*insert explosion noise*

That was the sound of my mind exploding after playing Heavy Rain, a highly underrated game produced by the developers of Beyond: Two Souls.

Heavy Rain is an intense emotional rollercoaster full of puzzles, quick time events and ethical decisions.

Play as several characters trying to solve the mystery of the Origami Killer – a psychopath who kidnaps boys and drowns them with…rain. Yeah, trust me, it’s cooler than it sounds.

The murderer sets trials for the fathers, claiming it is the only way to save their son.

Of course, you can choose not to do any of the trials. But then, what kind of game would it be if you backed out of everything? I easily swerved down the highway, crawled on shards of broken glass, electrocuted myself and cut off my finger. I had to draw the line at murdering an innocent man, though. It nearly resulted in me losing my own son, but morally speaking, I couldn’t kill a fictional character.

Without spoiling the plot, I was devastated when I learned who the Origami Killer was. Screw you Heavy Rain for making me feel guilty for liking a killer.

I cannot express how much I loved Heavy Rain. My ending upset me, so I went back and ‘fixed’ it to have a happy conclusion. Maybe it’s considered cheating, but no way was I going to end on a bad note.

How far would you go to save someone you love?