Real Quick: No Man's Sky's Trading System

Real Quick posts are going to be a series where I give my inputs on video games, or just gaming in general, where I feel that reviewers/people have skimmed over some points or topics, whether they be good or bad.

So a write in my 'Welcome!!' post that I wouldn't bring up No Man's Sky since there's already been so many people bashing it and as such, I wouldn't really bring anything new to the discussion by giving my opinion. So for the sake of consistency, I'm not going to address the game as a whole, but instead touch upon a topic that I feel like alot of people just seem to ignore.

The Trading System's Biggest WTF

In order for you to catch up to speed on No Man's Sky, I'd recommend watching Angry Joe's review of it.

So with that out of the way, I'm surprised how basically no-one has mentioned how incoherent the trading system is to the lore and universe of the game. I simply can't fathom how they considered it to be completely understandable to have these fuckin' huge space stations, that alot of traders visit, and still have a shortage of the most common elements. E.g, let's say you have to sacrifice a stack of Plutonium or Thamium9 in order to have a couple of Neutrino modules, so you go to the space station to sell of those modules to which the previous sacrificed slots those modules inhabited become vacant, and for the sake of this argument you are a little short on Thamium9 because you were too lazy to mine the asteroids on your way to the space station.

You look at what the Intergalactic Network (or something along those lines) have for sale to which you see Thamium9, "Oh joy!!", but wait, there's only 48... pieces (??)... for sale. To give you a reference, shooting an asteroid yields almost the same. So let me get this right; the INTERGALACTIC motherfucking NETWORK, there's only 48 pieces of a common element for sale !!?? Look, I get that things like Emeril, Chrysonite or Omegon are limited given the fact that they are harder to come by, but basic elements are limited in this fashion!? This is just flat out fucking stupid...

So that's basically all I wanted to ventilate. Keep in mind that I used only Thamium9 here as an example, you probably wouldn't buy an element that's so incredibly accessible and the fact that you can stack 500 pieces of it in one stack in your ship and 250 in your exosuit, but you get the idea. Oh, and the fact that you can't stack items like the aforementioned Neutrino modules is also stupid beyond all hell...

Remember to stay awesome, TAG signing out! :)

Looking Back At: Blizzard and Nostalrius

Looking Back At is going to be a sort of "series" of topics that I never got to give my input on since I did not have a blog at that given time, keep that in mind when you read this series' posts.

I'm just gonna put it out there right now, this post is gonna revolve around the "beating of a dead horse" subject. If you've already heard/read enough about this subject, then go ahead and ignore this post.

My reason for making this post is that I wanted to share my own two cents on the subject and the thing that made me wanna share these two cents was JonTron's video (so forgive me now if I unintentionally quote him by mistake), also the fact that I used to be a huge Blizzard fanboy back in the day (no, I'm not talking about what went down between Blizzard and Nostalrius, I stopped being a fanboy when I found out that Blizzard stopped giving a crap about ever making a WarCraft VI). Now I would have made this post earlier if not for the fact that this went down way before I even created this blog - by about 4 months, give or take - so that's why I'm "beating the dead horse here".

So without further ado:

Before reading on, keep in mind that I've never really been that much into World of Warcraft and I'm blogging about this situation from a purely business related standpoint.

World of Warcraft and Blizzard

To start with, here's a quick little rundown of all World of Warcraft's expansions plus the original (vanilla):

• Vanilla (November 23, 2004)
• The Burning Crusade (January 16, 2007)
• Wrath of the Lich King (November 13, 2008)
• Cataclysm (December, 2010)
• Mists of Pandaria (September 25, 2012)
• Warlords of Draenor (November 13. 2014)
• Legion (August 30, 2016)

From what I've gathered, things have started going south ever since the inclusion of Cataclysm as shown by this graph over WoW's subscriber count (take it with a grain of salt as far as the absolute numbers go, but it shows atleast a clear trend):

Supposedly, Blizzard doesn't even report their subscriber count anymore...

So now that we know what Blizzard and World of Warcraft are about, let's talk about Nostalrius.

Nostalrius and World of Warcraft

Nostalrius was the name of a server and community that hosted the original Vanilla version of the game, it was a "private" server which - as far as my knowledge goes - wasn't in any way regulated or endorsed by Blizzard. As such, this (and several - if not all - private servers) are seen as illegal to a certain degree. Either way you look at this, from a legal standpoint, keep in mind that I'm not a lawyer, Nostalrius clearly broke certain paragraphs of copyright law. This means that whichever way you try to look at this, from that standpoint, Blizzard are in their full rights to do whatever they want with their IP (here having the meaning of Intellectual Property) i.e shutting down Nostalrius for infringement of copyright law, among other things.

Blizzards dickmove

The thing that alot of people and myself doesn't really understand is why Blizzard would be such a bitch about this, considering that they weren't accepting any form of donations, they didn't have any form of a subscription based system, they were sacrificing their own time to host a server for those who would've liked WoW to stay in its Vanilla form, of course, this doesn't excuse its illegal nature. Personally, I thought they did this because they were putting up a legacy server with Vanilla for people who would've liked to play that version... but if you look at JonTron's video, there's one section where he puts a video on where there's one fan who straight out asks that from one of Blizzards staff from a con, or something of the likes, where the guy that answers straight out says "No, and you don't want that either..." (plus alot of stammer)..........

Small personal rant

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME BLIZZARD!!!???

You fucking thickheaded pompous shitstains!! These are your fans, your fucking core goddamn demoraphic telling you what they want!! And you're gonna completely disregard that fact and be all like "You think you want that, but you really don't, you want to play our new expansion because we put alot of time into it without listening to our fans and as such, we can feel that we actually did something worthwhile with our time.."-shit!?

Personal thoughts

Alright... time to cool my tits... look, I can sorta guess why they dismissed this question, probably because the time, staff and money needed to keep up several servers with several different versions of the game would be huge, okay yes I get that, but I would therefore like to ask the question: why aren't you directly supervising e.g this server or just straight up buying the server and it's staff for your own? Personally, this seems as such a huge waste of potential, these people mange to script together everything from Vanilla and I can only imagine what a huge undertaking that must've been, so these people probably know what they're doing.

Conclusion

I would just like to end this by clarifying a few things, of course I understand that Blizzard is a huge company and WoW is their own IP, ergo, they're in their full legal right and they can do whatever they want with it, but what I don't get is why they neglect seeing the bigger picture here... there's clearly a big demand for legacy servers and as I stated above, I've full understanding that even though Blizzard are a huge company they still don't have the resources to keep that many servers up and running in order to please everyone. But it was just unnecessary to issue a formal letter to a bunch of people who had a non-profit, love-of-the-game server running and were capable of maintaining it, as they could've outright bought the already finished scripted server and all of it's staff. (The following are pure speculation) While maybe not all of the people who were playing on Nostalrius would migrate over to a subscription based system - and many would probably bitch about it - many would still accept it sooner or later and any and all cost of that merger/purchase would be covered in probably a year.

This has been the ramblings of an average gamer.

Remember to stay awesome, TAG signing out!

Game Developers, Then Vs. Now

When looking back at how developers behaved back in the day vs. now, the clear parallel line between  these things is that before, the developers were incompetent and nowadays (I'm mostly referring to AAA developers) they are mostly liars, but before you all start pouring the hate on me, let me explain...

Then (Incompetence)

Game developers back in the day didn't really know how to develop games to cater towards a certain audience. Not to mention the fact that they didn't really have any data for reference in terms of what genres were popular or not, essentially, they were - no shit - the pioneers of game development. So when I say that they were incompetent, I don't mean that in a derogatory way. What's even more incredible, in my opinion, is the fact that in many cases they used the limitations of the hardware itself to their advantage. A prime example of this is Castelvania for NES but with the risk of me rambling on to the point where I accidentally rip off Arin Hanson a.k.a Egoraptor, I'd rather recommend that you watch his Sequelitis episode on Castelvania.

Now (Lies)

The disturbing trend nowadays is the fact that all these developers have all the data they could ever need... yet they still manage to fuck things up for themselves. Now, before I continue, I wanna clarify that I'm aware of the fact that game development as a whole is a "living thing", developers see what the consumers enjoy the most and therefore meets the demands and create more games that are in line with the most/more popular genre/genres, if your really think about it, to do anything else would be stupid as seen from a business standpoint. However, that doesn't excuse the fact that every so often developers promise all these awesome features, mechanics, graphics, etc. which hypes up their demographic for the release of a certain game. A couple of the more infamous ones are Spore, Alien: Colonial Marines, and the most recent one, No Man's Sky. I'm not gonna go into detail about how the developers lied to us with these games as there are so many reviewers and overall gamers alike who have already given their thoughts on these things and I would probably just end up unintentionally quoting these people even if I tried to give my own thoughts and opinions on the matter.

Even though I might rag a little bit on today's developers I'm not saying that there aren't any good video games nowadays and/or only retro-games are worth your time... no!! But if you're looking for unbroken and actually finished and innovative games today, your best bet is to look for them in the Indie section. Indies, otherwise known as independent developers, doesn't have the pressure of previous owned fans in the same way as AAA developers have. I mean, why do you think that Activision always release a new Call of Duty game every year without really changing too much of it's formula?? From what I've seen and read, it's most likely due to the fact that their fanbase doesn't want too much change. Now compare this to something of the likes of - what probably will go down in history as the biggest game changer in game development history - Undertale. Toby Fox didn't have a huge fanbase before Undertale, granted that he did have a certain fanbase due to his Earthbound mod, but there weren't any real backlash when he released Undertale, it was the complete opposite.

Why am I being this unoriginal and bringing up Undertale?? Because it's the finest example of what I mean (NOT the finest overall game)... For those of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about, here's a quick little rundown of what I'm trying to refer to: It's a mix between RPG/action/top-down-shooter/platform (and probably several more that I can't think of as of writing this) genres and it switches between these in a great, almost seamless, way. Not to mention the fact that it doesn't simply break the 4th wall... It completely fucking obliterates it!! I'm not gonna say anymore because if I would, it would ruin the experience for those of you who wind up playing it.

There's many more examples of great games from this generation but I think this post has dragged on long enough so I'll leave that list out for the time being. I only hope that AAA developers would try something different every once in a while, not just adding in something like jetpacks, or something along those lines, and instead try to put in some type of completely new mechanics - yes, the fact that you have a jetpack and can fly is in itself a mechanic, but what I'm talking about is to try some new genre all together. But, only time will tell...

Remember to stay awesome, TAG signing out!! :)

Hidden Gem; Hangover Edition

Hidden Gem is the name of a "series" of posts where I will share some of the games mostly from, but not limited to, the older days of gaming. These titles aren't necessarily going to be that hidden, but whenever I talk about these titles... no-one really seems to know these games.

Disclaimer: These ARE NOT "underrated" games by any means, I just wanna bring some of these games into the light so others can - if they want - go back and relive some of my personal favourites.

So while I just sit here waiting for the hangover to pass... I might as well share a little hidden gem with you:

The Battle of Olympus

NES

(September 26, 1991)

This is a guilty pleasure for me, reason being is that this was the first adventure game I played as a kid and I can tell you that at the time... I didn't know what the actual fuck was going on :P

As most of you "retro-gamers" probably already noticed, yes, this is a Zelda II clone (for better or worse). The same physics are here, the combat system is slightly broken compared to Zelda II in the sense that there are no pause frames between attacks so the only thing holding you back from completely spamming the attack button the the small wind up time (1 frame I think) before you actually attack, BUT there's so much more to do in this compared to Zelda II. There are more upgrades than it's "predecessor", the world is more structured, no more bullshit overhead random battle shit, but there's a fairly huge down side to all of this... grinding. Now I know that Zelda II also had it's grinding in terms of levels, but you sort of gained those levels "automatically" as you played, atleast compared to this game.

The grinding needed in this game is collecting olives that you need in order to gain the favour of some gods, what I mean by that is that you trade these olives for items and weapons. Granted that there aren't too many instances where whatever item/weapon you get from the gods are crucial to your progress, personally I think that it's the biggest thing holding this game back from being a really excellent game.

Just to give you a quick rundown of the story; it's a "spin-off" of the story of Orpheus and his quest to retrieve his love Eurydice from the underworld... except that the canon name of his love is this game is Helene... don't ask, I don't know. Either way, you start in Arcadia with no direct instructions whatsoever (real quick, the first thing you have to do is find and visit Zeus) and so you're left to find your own path to success. As you go along your way, you'll fight a bunch of monsters from Greek mythology and just to name a few: Cyclops, Cerberus, the Sisters of Fate, Hydra and many more. Along the way you find materialised love from Helene in the form of hearts (I think ??) which serve as letters from her to you and these hearts are needed in order to enter the underworld.

The biggest problem I have with this game is the same as almost everyone has with Castlevania II, although is a lot more forgiving in this game. If and when you die, you get a choice of either continuing or retrying, if you choose 'Continue' you'll respawn at the door where you enter your current area, but you lose half of your olives and this really sucks once you get to the mountains of Phthia. If you choose 'Retry' you'll be sent back to the last place you saved a.k.a visited a god (speaking of saving, this game doesn't have a save function in the same way as Zelda II, it uses the goddamn password system and holy flippin' hell it's one the longest password system I've ever seen!!) BUT you'll keep all of your olives so it's this sort of risk vs. reward thing. Do you either continue and press on with the hope of finding olives along the way and in that way compensating the ones you've lost, or do you keep choosing retry and possibly getting stuck at a place where you continuously keep fucking up and dying because your health is always too low for the damage boost you need ??

When all's said and done, it's a very satisfying game. When you get stuck at a boss and finally beat it, you feel as though you truly overcame the challenge. Do yourself a favour, get this game if you find it on e-bay or somewhere, shove it into your NES and have the love-hate journey of your life .

Remember to stay awesome, TAG signing out! :)

Overworlds

So let's talk a little bit about overworlds.

What are overworlds??

Overworlds (in the gaming sense) are basically a hub area where you travel from level to level and in some/most cases discover secrets and other hidden shit.

Why would this be important??

Well... to be completely honest they really aren't all that important when all is said and done, but I would argue that they serve as a way for both developers and players to access levels in a structured manner. Not only can you as a player get a fairly decent grip on where levels are located, but it also gives you a sort of little relaxation moment between levels.

Does every game have overworlds??

Not by any means. If you're talking about platform games then, yes and no... most of them usually have some sort of overworld (especially the older titles) but some of them skip them all together. If we're talking about shooters then... no... I've yet to see a shooter game with a true overworld (this goes without saying... but keep in mind that I've not played EVERY single game out there).

Alright, alright, enough with all the nitty gritty definition crap! How about some examples??

You're right, I suppose the easiest way to try and explain what I'm talking about is to give you some examples.

Super Mario 64

Princess Peach's Castle

Psychonauts

Psychic Summer Camp

Banjo-Kazooie

Gruntilda's Lair & Spiral Mountain

(Keep in mind that Gruntilda's Lair is indeed fuckin' HUGE which means that it's hard to show it all in terms of pictures without smacking in 50 - 100 pictures, so I'd recommend you play it for yourself in order to get a sense of how huge it is)

Now, these are only three overworlds and there are tons I left out, because this is not "That time when a Blogger smacked his post full of pictures worth an entire novel" post and most of you are probably gonna blame me for being unoriginal and naming and posting the same goddamn overworlds others already have posted... yup... but these hold a very personal place in my biased-nostalgic heart.

Why are you bringing this up??

Well... it's because games nowadays seems to either be completely linear or it's all about huge open world games. Some might argue that games with open worlds which have mission icons that you travel to in order to start the mission, a'la Far Cry 3 or Assassin's Creed 2 and forward, serve as an overworld and to be honest, I see what these people mean and I understand where they're coming from, but it's not a true overworld. Yes, the same basic ideas are there, you run around, do (/shot) shit, find other shit, grab some collectibles, get to the mission marker and go on the mission... with that structure, I'd call that a "modern-spiritual-successor overworld" since you go to the briefing and then do the mission on the same map as the "overworld"... you know??

The overworld structure I'm talking about is that of the ones mentioned above, the fact that yes, you find shit, do shit, collect shit, but the major difference being that you travel to a level from the overworld that has it's own separate world with it's own separate vibe, music, theme and so on. I mean, if you've played anyone of the ones above, say Super Mario 64, remember the first time you walked into the castle, how the soothing music kicked in? You probably walked and looked around, tried alot of doors which told you to GTFO because you didn't have enough stars. Then you find the one door that doesn't require any stars and as such, you enter the door. You are then greeted with a painting of some Bob-Ombs, so you look at it thinking for yourself "What the fuck!? Where's the fucking level!?" and then walk up to it and touch it, because there really isn't any other option than that, to which you see some ripples forming on the painting. So the natural response is to try and jump towards it and lo and behold, you go through it and are greeted with the first level (which mind you is a battlefield)... WHEN THE LAST TIME YOU SAW SOMETHING LIKE THAT IN NEWER TITLES!!!???

So... that's it... I just wanted to get that off my chest... -.-"

Before I end this post I would just like to put a little "disclaimer" here: I do NOT think that because of reasons above that any and all newer titles are shit, I do NOT insinuate that only older games are worth playing solely because of the reasons above, I'm NOT going to argue your own opinion on this matter and trying to convince you that what I've said above are the complete absolute truth.

Feel free to comment and discuss about what your favourite overworlds were and how wrong, biased and nostalgia-blind I am for what I've written above :)

Remember to stay awesome, TAG signing out!

Welcome!!

For those who happened to wander right into this blog... Welcome :3

This is just a form of an outlet for me, since there aren't really that many people in the city where I live that gives too many craps about video games (other than CS:GO) I decided to create this blog to ventilate my own opinions and/or frustration as far as new releases, trends, hype trains, etc. go...

Feel free to discuss, whether you agree or disagree, I would appreciate if you would not result to personal insults or such :) ... with regards to profanity, go nuts as far as I'm concerned xD

As of writing this, I've still to figure out something to actually touch upon... No Man's Sky is at the moment the really hot topic, but anything I could say has already been said, therefore, I feel that there's really no reason for me to give my opinion on the subject.

List of mini-series (will be updated as I figure out new ones)

• Looking Back At -- a series of topics that transpired before the creation of this blog that I want to give my input on and/or simply ventilate. 

• Hidden Gem -- games which I feel have been (more or less) lost to history, or just went by unnoticed, that I want to bring forth.  

• Real Quick -- a series of small posts where I give my input in certain things in games and what not where i feel that reviewers/people have skimmed over a topic, whether it's a positive input or a negative one.

That's all for this (extremely) small post :)