Jason from downstab.com and my brother Randy @playertwostart on Twitch join me for our quasi-regular Overwatch session! We have our hot and cold streaks, speculate on The Game Awards reveals, and a Y.O.L.O. Dragon saves the day! Also, we joined the hottest trend by playing ASMR Overwatch!
If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, check out a few of the highlights!
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Leader of the Deadlock Gang, Ashe enters the world of Overwatch as the latest playable character. Packing an assortment of guns, explosives, and a large weaponized robot on speed dial, she’s looking to get her hands dirty on the battlefield. The initial trailer piqued my interest in her, but having played her for the past few weeks has been really eye-opening.
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!
While in the process of squashing a new audio de-sync issue that’s been going on with my stream of late, I give the latest hero in Overwatch Ashe a try! I really like what I’ve played so far to the point where I’ll heavily consider making her my main someday!
Buy Overwatch: Origins Edition Now On Amazon.com
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!
Buy Overwatch: Origins Edition Now On Amazon.com
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!
[NOTE: I did not play the game in VR at the time of writing, so I don’t touch on it or factor it into my current opinion of the game]
Tetris is the closest thing we have to gaming perfection. Universal appeal, easy to learn, difficult to master, and inherently designed in such a way that you’ll never win, but you can always do better. Feel free to make a case for any other game, but Tetris being the highest selling game of all-time with no signs of slowing down decades into its never-ending lifespan is a testament to its greatness.
How do you reinvent gaming’s equivalent of the wheel? If you’re Tetsuya Mizuguchi – most famous for his work on trippy games such as Rez and Lumines – you change the context of what the Tetris experience is through flashy visuals, modern electronic music, and VR support. I can’t speak to the VR side of the game, but the sheer act of playing the block-staking action in Tetris Effect becomes less about exercising your brain and more about being absorbed in the feeling that the entire experience creates.
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!
In Third Person 