Happy New Year! Not exactly a New Year’s Resolution, but after months of collecting dust on my shelf, let’s get back to Shadow of the Tomb Raider! This time, Lara has discovered a hidden city and must get the box before Trinity does! Also, tune in to watch how badly I suck at Tomb Raider!
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Peter Parker is no stranger to video games. Having starred or appeared in dozens of titles throughout history, most of them have been terrible, as he’s largely been tied to sub-par games made as side products in support of something else. But if there were any character that was most deserving of the Arkham treatment, it’s the web crawler. We’ve seen glimpses of how good he can be through games that fell a bit short of greatness, but the potential has always been there due to the character’s inherent design and the lore around him. Finally, thanks to the good folks at Insomniac Games, Spider-Man was given the time and love needed to fulfill the promise of what a Spidey-centric game could be. The results are fantastic.
Did better than I expected against the hardest mode in Tetris Effect! Let’s try and do even better next time against Master mode!
My Overwatch play is slightly above scrub-tier at best. However, every now and then I’ll have a standout performance or two worth sharing. One is with my current main Hanzo, and the other is with Ashe, who I think might usurp the archer as my go-to character going forward!
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Tetris Effect works brilliantly as one cohesive experience, but if I were to isolate one aspect of it as standing out, it’s the music. Adding Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s taste for electronic ambiance and international rhythms works wonders for creating the synesthesia that occurs when playing the game. As soon as I finished up my first stream with the game, the first thing I did was to find the soundtrack online. I need this in my ears even when I’m not playing the game. The news I found was…disheartening.
Tetris Effect isn’t designed to be the most competitive or eSports ready version of the game. With the way that the game goes out of its way to obstruct your field of view for the sake of looking cool, it’s generally meant to be more about being absorbed into the vibe that the puzzle, music, and visuals create in unison. However, I understand that none of that matters when you’ve failed the final Journey mission for the hundredth time, or you fall well short of your friends on the leaderboards.
Though the core game is decades old, there’s still much to learn about this classic block-stacking game, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the modern Tetris ruleset. Maybe these tips will come in handy with whatever obstacles the game throws at you!
Tetris is a timeless classic, but a new coat of paint by Rez and Lumines visionary Tetsuya Mizuguchi goes a long way towards transforming it from an intense mental exercise to a euphoric trip through time and space. In this set of videos, I complete the main campaign mode, along with an attempt at taking on the endless marathon! Full review forthcoming!
Tetris Effect was not on my radar. I adore Tetris, to the point where I’ll gladly argue the stance that Tetris is the single greatest video game of all-time. However, it didn’t seem hard for me to build a case against me purchasing this particular version. Even with Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s flair for injecting games with hypnotic visuals and moving electronic music, the idea of paying $40 US/$50 CAD on a single-player-only version of Tetris seemed too hard to stomach. Especially when I’ve hemmed and hawed at picking up the cheaper-and-more-feature-complete Puyo Puyo Tetris on the Switch for over a year now.
Then the reviews happened. As of writing, it sits at an 89 on Metacritic, which is a fantastic score. All of a sudden, the game I’ve dismissed for largely rational reasons has flung to the top of my must-buy list. The only thing that’s changed is that a bunch of other people have said nice things about it.
In the world of urban fashion, the term often used for someone who chases trends is “hype beast”. If I really think about it, I am probably the video game equivalent of that. Sure, I’ll still play games and buy what I want based on my own personal motivations, and my final opinions on games are entirely my own, but the games I choose to buy and play can be heavily influenced by the conversations within the greater gaming zeitgeist. This is my story as a gaming hype beast.
The Shocker bookends another session of Spider-Man. In between, I take on a cool side-quest that puts the web-slinger in the role of private eye, and PEOPLE WON’T STOP CALLING ME!
Time for…Peter Parker to solve pipe puzzles? Once I awkwardly get past the mini games, it’s back to cleaning up the streets of New York in Spider-Man on the PS4!
In Third Person 