Ionia Vs. Noxus - It's gotta be League of Legends

Ok so for my last blog, I must, as I'm sure you have become sick of :), focus on League of Legends. The awesome people over at Riot games today have done something I have never seen before with a video game. This evening at around 9pm, they had a LoL match streamed live over the web for all of us curious onlookers to watch. The match was a team of five players combating against another team of five players in a session that would decide the fate of the LoL background story. As I have mentioned, the characters in the game have many different backstories and are all part of a vast world with different city-states disputing with each other through the use of the League of Legends. Each city-state has champions that fight for diplomatic disagreements between one another, and tonight, the players themselves impacted the imaginative world of Valoran. Today, a major city-state Noxus fought the island city of Ionia in an attempt to control its territory. If Noxus is defeated, they will be forced to immediately stop occupying Ionia and Ionia will be free from their clutches.

Before the match commenced, all of my LoL playing friends converged under one roof and hooked up a laptop to their television to watch the match on the big screen. (a nerds dream come true) We all were excited to see some of our favorite characters get picked to combat one another and we so hyped up we even started cheering and shouting at the screen when the battle had its peak moments of combat. It was like the Superbowl for League players. Sadly however, my favorite team lost and Ionia took the battle dominantly.


All story aside, this to me was monumental for video games. A game was broadcast over the Internet for all of its adoring fans to watch. I have never witnessed this before with an online or any game for that matter. It was a moment for us LoL players to watch a story altering game to take place and feel as if we ourselves were watching an arena match from the seats of the Field of Justice itself. It gave us a moment to submerge ourselves in the fantasy realm of LoL together, a feeling that was as astonishing as it sounds. Because of this ingenious idea, we came together and socialized, like if we were to watch a sports game. I have never seen this done by a video game before and thought it was a deserving topic to write about (please excuse my lateness).



I feel more games should do something along the lines of this, having thier players wittness or even be a part of story altering events. It will cause them to feel more involved in the game, and add to the overall gaming experience. I hope to see more of these matches in the future, as do my friends and the 4000+ people who watched the game as well.

Castle Crashers: Light-hearted violence and humor for the child at heart.

During one of our game days (not the most recent, which by the way, my problem was resolved with little problems thankfully) I brought it my Xbox and had some of my classmates play the game Castle Crashers. Castle Crashers is a downloadable game from the Xbox live arcade, it is an old style "beat em' up" side scrolling game. the story is very simple, your king's four daughters and his jewel of power were stolen by an evil wizard, and it is up to the Castle Crashers to rescue the girls and retrieve the stone. You get to play as one of the four Crashers, each with different powers based on the elements, and can play them four different ways (Offense, Defence, Magic, Speed and Archery). The game takes you on an adventure, fighting barbarian hordes laying siege to your castle, exploring through a dark forest filled with bandits and wildmen, treading volatile volcanic lands, facing off with a fearsome dragon and evil warlord, assaulting an enemy wizard's fortress of ice, and eventually challenging the evil wizard himself for the king's gem, saving his daughters, collecting weapons, items, and treasure along the way.



The game allows for up to four people to play at a time, each with a different Crasher (the blue one is my favorite). The game has a great cartoon-esk art style that is reminiscent of older games, but is cleanly drawn and crisply animated. Castle Crashers is very humorous and silly (one villain is thrown into a pit of lava and gives a thumbs up on the way down, similar to the ending of the movie Terminator 2), something that I feel is lost in a large amount of the new, popular games such as God of War and Call of Duty. Due to its 4 player capabilities, Castle Crashers is a good game for cooperative play.

Castle Crashers has become one of, if not is, my favorite downloadable games for Xbox 360. The vivid color and style, as well as the cartoon violence and comic relief make this game something that I have anticipated since its announce and was extremely impressed and delighted to play. I would highly recommend Castle Crashers to anyone looking for a lighthearted, silly, and exciting gameplay experience.

Super Mario Bros.:The Movie- The beginning of a hideous thing

So being that this is a video game class, how better to start this blog by saying it will not be about video games...entirely. This week I chosen a different path to walk (blog) and want to talk about video games and their adaptions into movies. Reason being for this topic is that I was lucky (any normal person would say unlucky but hey normality is not one of my talents) enough to catch this movie on TV...

This marvelous chunk of coal, never destined to be a diamond, is Super Mario Bros. the movie. Now although this movie has one of my favorite actors of all time (Bob Hoskins), the movie is a train wreck. It had no relation to the games other than borrowing names from the video game franchise and dressing the main characters up in Mario and Luigi's usual attire. This however is beside the point. The important factor about this movie is that it is the first of its kind, a video game adapted into a film.

There have been many video games that were adapted to film, ranging from childish, lighthearted games such as Mario Bros., to the dark and dramatic games such as Max Payne. All of these movies have something in common however, they are all terrible! The only video game franchise that has had some success is Resident Evil, which has just had its 4th movie hit theaters. But if you are a fan of the games, and good movies, you would know that the on-screen adaptions are a perversion of what the games are all about, and despite their success, the movies (according to my infallible opinion) are cheesy, poorly written, and overall painful to watch. I shall try to humble myself and learn to appreciate the films for the action scenes they contain, but sadly that will not happen any time soon.

This has sparked the idea in my mind that video games are a dead end medium, what I mean by that is video games are the final frontier for adaptions. Still confused? Don't worry, I will give a less metaphorical definition. Novels, comics, and movies have been adapted into video games with huge success (well maybe not movies so much, but a few do get good reviews, but that is a different story, see JAWS blog) and when video games reverse the role and try to become movies, they crumble like a castle made of sand. So the options that the writers who adapt these games have is to either abandon the concept of video game to movie adaptions, or go back to their respective college and refund their English/Writing degrees for something else, because they are not up to the desired snuff that I, and I'm sure many, many others, wish they were.

Until then, let the bad times roll with masterpieces such as this...

Oh Yea...



Survival Horror- Scary has never been so...well...scary...

Ok this one might turn out to be another one of my rants so bare with me. Personally, I LOVE horror movies. Anything and everything from the supernatural thrillers to hack and slash murder mysteries, I am indeed a fan. Not only am I a fan of horror films, but honestly I think everyone is! Anytime a new horror movie hits the big screen, people flock to the local theaters and eagerly sit and wait to have the bejesus scared of of em. It just seems to me that as much as people enjoy seeing a riveting dramatic film , or feeling good when they watch a romance movie, they equally love to be scared by cinema. And it doesn't end there. I remember my mother telling me when I was a kid watching "The Amityville Horror" that she loved to read horror novels and that one in particular terrified her while she read it (and if you are familiar with the story, it scared her even more when she lost the book midway through).

As with any popular medium of entertainment, horror stories have been adapted to video games. The survival horror video game genre can be traced all the way back to the Atari game system with a game entitled "Haunted House" which was released in 1981. This game expanded on the idea of solving puzzles and evasion tactics as opposed to fighting your enemies. This concept of avoiding conflict in games ands a new element to the game, the element of vulnerability as compared to the in game monsters you face. This vulnerability can then lead to the desired effect, fear. Jumping ahead a little under two decades, we arrive at one of, if not the, most influential and inspiring of all survival horror games ever created, Resident Evil.

In Resident Evil, you play the role of a member of a police task force trapped in a mansion with various nightmarish creatures. As the story unfolds, you uncover the truth behind the mansion and why it is overrun with all these different ghouls, by solving puzzles and defeating enemies. This game was the first to actually receive the moniker "Survival Horror". As I stated earlier before that vulnerability leads to fear, although a large portion of the game consists of killing enemies with various weapons, they are exponentially more durable then you, faster than you, and pack one hell of a punch (zombie bites are not to underestimated). Conserving ammunition is also an important factor, as it is not found everywhere and firing wildly is never a good idea due to the fact that almost every enemy must be shot to death numerous amounts of times (the buggers get back up!), so you must take your shots carefully, little as they may be. So even though you have a weapon, sometimes even a very good weapon (Shotgun > Knife) your are still extremely weak as compared to your enemies, causing you to still have that overwhelming belief that death is soon coming your way.

Now what is worse than death? Fear! When you die in Survival Horror games (Ironic) you at least have a moment of comfort to reflect on what happened and now expect it next time. But in those few moments where impending death is shambling, creeping, or running your way, the tension of turning that corner, looking in that room, or opening that door cause your heart jumps into your throat. And this may seem bad, but the worst part is that when you muster the courage to open that door,  you see nothing is there. It was all in your mind the whole time, so you begin to relax, and then, oh then, that's when the monster strikes, because while you were turning that doorknob, the foul creature was waiting right behind you!

These two elements are key components of a successful Survival Horror game. One where you have a sense of vulnerability, and the other is that feeling of uneasiness with every step you take. A genuinely scary enemy helps too of course, I will talk about that in my next blog when I review a favorite Survival Horror game of mine. But it is truly that fear, that feeling of being naked in a black room with no light, that makes Survival Horror the popular video game genre it is today.

Competition in Video Games A.K.A RAGE!!!!!

In one of my previous posts I mentioned the game League of Legends. Now I am not going to go off on my usual rants about how exciting I think the game is, don't worry, I will spare you this time :). In fact, I will not be blogging about a video game as I normally do. Instead, I thought it would be interesting to talk about a behavior that I found to be very common when playing with my friends and even with people online.

Usually on the weekends and sometimes on Tuesdays, me and my friends would gather together under one roof and have ourselves a good old fashioned "LAN party". We would log onto League of Legends and join a game with other players around the globe for some strategic action. As we start up playing, depending on which team begins to take the advantage, slander, obscenities, and threats would soon fill the screen. The loosing team does not, and probably never will, learn to loose graciously. Even when we are winning and are sometimes unfortunate enough to have a teammate die, we too become venom spitting lunatics. This extreme competitiveness is not just prevalent in LoL, but in any video game.

As with any video game, or I should just say game, people are going to be better than other people. Sorry, its just the way of life. But when two people are usually on even footing, competitiveness shows its sometimes ugly face. With every point, kill, goal or win, the two competitive players don't look at it as that there opponent is very good and that they need to learn to adapt to playing against them, but instead, they have the idea in there head that if someone is doing better than them, then it means they themselves are weak and will never be as good as there opponent.

But this is not true, as I said before, there will always be people who are better at things than other people, but those other people can sure as hell try to hone their skills so that they give the better players a run for there money. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice will help develop ones skills in a game to become a better player and who knows, one that might surpass the skills of a naturally talented competitor.

Competition is a good thing, it is what drives us to do better. But never get sore if you loose, because that only means you will learn from your mistakes and become a better player, even if it is by just a little bit, next time.

Jaws Unleashed: A terrible game that is close to heart

So the general consensus is that games adapted from films are bad. The only exception to this unwritten law is considered to have been Spider man, simply because who the hell doesn't want to swing around building to building in a free roam sandbox game? It has never been done before, and that why people ate it up. But for me however, one game that also breaks this rule is Jaws Unleashed, and boy let me explain.

Ok so Jaws Unleashed was released in 2006  and was licenced from the motion picture from 1975 a.k.a my favorite movie.The game is a free roam sandbox game set on and in the waters of Amity Island. Here comes the best part, you do not play as a boat, trying to find the shark (which you did play as in the original game for Nintendo...we will not get into that now, possibly next week or in the future) but instead you ARE THE SHARK! WOOHOO!!! And let me tell you, nothing can stand in your way, you fly around underwater, destroying docks and boats, terrifying beaches, and eating EVERYTHING!. Other sharks, dolphins, fish, people, dogs, whales, squids, submarines (yes submarines), nothing can stand up against your awe-inspiring sharky powers!

Oh yea..where is your God now, scuba man?

Ok so all my praise aside, the game is not great, it is filled with glitches, sometimes your massive shark body gets the best of you and turning around can be a severely difficult task, and the graphics are meh. The reason I enjoy the game even with its serious downfalls and boring repetition of eat, eat, eat, swim, swim, swim, Is because it is a homage to my favorite movie. I feel like a lot of these "movie video games" are made are solely for the fans, yes they might not be award winning masterpieces, but to those who love the story they coincide with love them because they love the movie. I feel like games like this  let the player "live", for lack of a better term, in the movie, which can give them an experience that goes further than the movie. These games are not enjoyable by everyone, only by those such as me enjoy them because they add to the love and appreciation for the movies that they are adapted from. Us movie fanatics would like to get a game that allows us to step into our favorite movies, and Jaws Unleashed allows me to, be it from the perspective of a twenty foot, bloodthirsty missile with teeth.

Roller Coaster Tycoon... This Blog Would Be Better But I Can't Stop Playing...

So In class this week we spoke about the different types of video games genres. One of the genres that stood out to me was that of Advertising games. Now, because my brain works in the marvelous way it does, I thought what that meant was games where advertising was a goal of the game, as in the player has to advertise for something….I know….how many games would have that as a mechanic? One came to mind, Roller Coaster Tycoon.  So what do I do? I go home that day and reinstall a copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon, which surprised me that it was still able to run on my computer due to the games old age of ten years.

Roller Coaster Tycoon is one of my favorite games and in my eyes, has stood the test of time.  The object of the game is simple, construct theme parks and meet specific requirements to advance to the next park. These simple objectives to meet allow for much creativity and design of your theme park. Finance, advertizing, and hiring employees also are a major part of the game, as some objectives require you to meet a certain monthly income or to have a number of guests in your park by a specific time. Pathways also need to be clean and rides need to be fixed when they break down so employing handymen and engineers is important. The game lets you develop your park anyway you like, allows you much scenery to choose from so if you want to have an overall theme to you park, you can.

It was fun going back in time and playing this game again. It was like reliving an old memory that always stuck with you. I hear there is a new version that came out not too long ago and I am excited to say that I will be gladly picking it up soon.