News, Reviews, Other Stuff Probably

[Uni Asssignment - scroll on if you're here for games. :)] We’re all connected, for better or worse. In today’s world, broadcasting what you’re doing at this very moment to millions of people around the world is as easy as a few taps on a screen. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have brought a whole new level of openness and digital communication in our society. While this is undeniably beneficial in many ways, these platforms have also caused a new wave of social pressure. In this world of connectivity, to what degree has social media affected our mental health? Today’s social media platforms all share some of the same qualities. You can like, you can share, and you can create. You can compare yourself to others, you can worry about the reaction your innocent message might generate, and you can stress about the number of likes your profile picture might get. Perhaps these are some of the reasons “rates of anxiety and depression in young people have risen 70%...

Here's a Uni assignment I submitted today - an audio feature about eSports. Definitely could've been better in some regards, but it's decent enough to share. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The rise of the eSports phenomenon has turned competitive gaming from a group of friends playing in one room into millions of people watching professionals compete. How did eSports get to this point? Where will it go from here? And should it even be considered a sport? This audio piece explores these questions, eSports on local and national levels, and more.

[Video version of this post: https://bit.ly/2t3MoZT ] Day two of E3 2018’s major conferences has come and gone, and with it, our second conference. The first of the big three to have their show this year is Xbox, and the Xbox conference was full of big first-party reveals, indies, and more utterances of the words ‘Exclusive’ and ‘Premiere’ than you can shake a stick at. 50 games were shown over the course of the show, in what was a much faster-paced display than EA’s conference. Let’s get into details. Halo Infinite First off, was a biggun. As is typical for this franchise, the first trailer shown at the conference was a whole lot of “what could this be?” until finally, “oh sweet, it’s Halo”. Yep, the next Halo game is Halo Infinite, and while not much in the way of info was shared during the show, Halo Infinite appears to be essentially Halo 6. Though, note that the footage shown here was confirmed after the show to be simply engine footage showing off the new Slipspace ...

[Video version of this post: https://bit.ly/2HBM7Ss ] Welcome to what I plan and hope to be the first in a number of posts summarising the major game conferences of E3 2018.  Yes, E3 has arrived once again and in turn so have all the publishers out of the shadows, looking to excite you into giving them your money. It is my intent with these posts to show you everything that went down at these conferences, including all the game trailers, demos, and all of the…other stuff, but in a bit more of a quick and timely fashion, in the case that you want to know everything that went down, but watching them in full isn’t your cup of tea.  Naturally, we’ll be starting with the first conference: EA Play, (yes, not technically part of E3, but as close as you can get). Battlefield V EA started their conference with one of their biggest hitters, Battlefield V , and just in case the 30 minutes of talking about it event they held a couple weeks ago wasn’t enough, here the...

Let me just preface this by saying that if you're a Marvel fan, and you haven't yet gone to see Infinity War, then you need to change that. Straight after you finish reading this, that is. Alright, on to the professional stuff. 10 years after Iron Man hit the silver screen and introduced us to what has become the MCU, or the 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' if you hate initialisms, Avengers: Infinity War is here. It's t he first part of a two-part story (even if no longer in name), concluding in Avengers 4 next year. Truly the culmination of everything that's come before it, Infinity War takes everything the MCU has built, smashes it together, and the result is one of the best films in the franchise, and no doubt the most expensive. After 18 films, five Infinity Stones, and God-knows-how-many superheroes, Thanos (Josh Brolin) is here. One of the franchise's infamous flaws is with its villains, with the majority of the films failing to offer any that are ov...

If there's one vice I spend too much of my time consuming other than video games, it's music. Those who know me know I spend almost all of my waking hours "plugged in" (as my Gran puts it) to a pair of earphones. Something that's made me severely aware of this fact recently is Spotify's 'Year Wrapped' feature. If you're not familiar, it tells you how many minutes of music you've listened to on Spotify in the last year, as well as the artists you listened to most. Here's mine: I am unashamed of my affinity for a bit of Coldplay That adds up to 984 hours, or 41 days. Evidently, I will be deaf before I hit 30. You might notice the fifth of my 'Top Artists', Miracle of Sound, one of the musicians I listen to who represents a great combination of gaming and music. You're probably familiar with their type. After all, there's been loads of gaming-inspired musicians who've popped up on YouTube over the last decade or ...

[Uni assignment, scroll on if you're here for games. :)] I made a playlist recently. This playlist contained all the music I have on my phone that was released by, or artists represented by, the independent label Hurt Records . It comes up to 1,240 minutes, or just under 21 hours. That's no small amount of music. Hurt was founded in 2014, though the music you can find there stretches back to 2007. Amongst its archive, you can find nine albums, 11 EPs, and a wide variety of singles, from artists including Two Down, Quiet One, and Portraits. Again, no small amount, and even more impressive considering six of the seven acts represented by Hurt are bands/projects created or partially created by the same person who founded the label. That person is Ben Slack (more commonly known on the internet as Benn, or Benn Down). I recently e-mailed Benn and sent him a mass variety of questions relating to Hurt, his music, and his other ventures. The oldest project in Hurt’s r...

22 years after the much-loved Jumanji, its sequel, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has released in theatres. Despite attracting controversy with its announcement, and many (myself included) doubting that the film would be much to behold, Welcome to the Jungle proves itself to be a worthy successor that lives up to the fun and excitement of the original. Welcome to the Jungle is also quite a different film to the original. Instead of exotic animals from another world invading ours, people from our world (unintentionally) journey into theirs, and instead of a Jumanji being a board game, it's now a video game. Things like this make up one of the film's greatest strengths; rather than a re-hash, Welcome to the Jungle is its own thing, in major ways a complete reversal. Yet, it still incorporates plot and style elements from the original in entertaining and touching ways. This time around, Jumanji's "adventurers" are four high-school kids. There's the ner...

Thanks to a Metal Gear marathon I embarked upon in 2015, I missed many of 2016's games as they came out. Even now, as 2017's just ended, I'm still playing catch-up. The fact of the matter is, there's just too many games to play, and not nearly enough time to play them (at least, not if I want to not fail Uni, and cling on to what little of a social life I have left). I've made good progress in the last few months. In my endeavour to play through everything I've missed, I've been buying and playing those I'm interested in, in release order. I just finished Titanfall 2 yesterday (great campaign, albeit short), and now I'm playing Dishonored 2, so I'm firmly in November of 2016. Massive shout-out to Wikipedia's ' in video gaming ' lists, by the way; big help. While I've made exceptions to my release order strategy for certain games I've been very excited for (e.g. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Zelda, and Mario Odyssey), most of...