Author - Ripper71

Lust for Darkness Review

2018/06/30

News, Reviews, Windows PC News, Windows PC Review

I have been looking forward to Lust For Darkness for a bit with its trailer presenting an adult-themed puzzle game. I have been playing puzzle games for a really long time, including such famous older ones like Myst from 1993 with its breathtaking graphics. In recent years there has been a surge in video games with adult or explicit themes. Games like Grand Theft Auto V and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt have very mature storylines. Movie Games new Lust for Darkness is a puzzle game aimed at a mature audience, bringing us a dark, sexual world that feels like a combination between Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, but in a sort of Lovecraftian setting. When you consider how wide of a berth those three descriptions are you get an idea of where Lust for Darkness treads.

Lust for Darkness starts out with a woman in a sealed room with a note waiting for her telling her someone has spirited her away and locked her in, but it only takes looking at the other item on the desk to get a key and leave the room. You are in a basement, first person point of view, and everything is lit by little tea candles on the floor. There are a couple little puzzles to do then you find yourself in a room with sex machines, artificial male genitals, a ball gag and masks. Masks tend to be an important theme in the game much like in Eyes Wide Shut. If you are a fan of Lovecraftian worlds, this game really brings the atmosphere of a Cthulhu setting home as the robed people aren’t just in it for the sex (though they certainly don’t shy away from it either). Idolatry is really the moving purpose of the game and it becomes fairly self evident by the bronze statues and elements throughout the game. Yes, you have puzzles to solve but most serve a purpose to drive the story forward rather than just having a random puzzle to be solved and increase the play time of the game. There are actually not that many puzzles to solve if you just want to finish the game’s main story. However, if you want a richer experience by doing the side stories your game experience will be much longer.

A few days ago the developers put out a note to the community addressing concerns brought up by players who review the game for Steam and the chief concern was the length of the game. However, the playtime stats referenced by the devs showed that most players hadn’t done the side missions. If you search around for side stories the game length gets longer really quick and the motivations of some of the characters come into light. If a player wants to just see how fast they can blow through it, they should realize that they aren’t getting the full game experience.

The game has both really nice graphics as well as musical score, both of which help create the Lovecraftian horror as well as the adult/sexual situations. Lots of detail work has been done on the idols, masks, and horror elements but a little less detail in the sexual participants – though it is always quite obvious what sex act is being performed (and any “toys” used are detailed as well).

The biggest drawback to the game I saw was that there were no manual player save points, the only game saves are when the game loads a new section. After it loads and you hit continue that will be your save spot until the next continue. This can be a little frustrating to discover if you play pretty far past the save spot and go to quit game you will lose all the progress you gained. Basically each time a continue comes up you need to be sure you can either play until the next one or can leave the game open on your desktop while you do whatever life throws at you.

The subject does come up of whether the sexual situations seemed gratuitous or an important part of the storyline. It could be argued either way but I think when it comes to the plot it makes sense to have these adult elements just as much as it made sense in the previously-mentioned Eyes Wide Shut. Without these elements, the story wouldn’t be the same and Lust for Darkness should be commended for how well it weaves them into the story. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone either since it was funded on Kickstarter and was the last ever Steam Project Green Light. Also, in the game’s description it lets you know it is adult themed and even their gameplay examples made it really obvious. I think the only surprise to me was that one of the platforms it is coming out on is the Nintendo Switch, which is in general considered the family, kid-friendly system.

Lust for Darkness is a fun game that you really should play in darkness with a headset on so you can get the full effect of its dark world. The game can be fairly short but the price is also fairly inexpensive and the developers have already been talking about putting out possible additions on it to explain the mysterious ending more and well as explaining some of the mystery in the harder side missions. Lust for Darkness is an adult-themed Lovecraftian horror story told in a puzzling mystery style that will keep you guessing even after the game is over…

Memories of Mars Early Access Preview

2018/06/26

Ripper71

News, Previews, Windows PC News, Windows PC Preview

When I saw Memories of Mars coming down the pipe, I was hoping I would get the opportunity to play it. Memories of Mars looked like a combination of a FPS and a building survival game that borrowed its feel and graphic styles from games like Halo and Mass Effect Andromeda, both of which I have played like crazy. Luckily I got my hands on the game’s Early Access build so that I could get a true feel for the game without having to wait until official drop.

When you first show up on Mars though you are running around picking up ore and raiding any buildings you can find for ore, parts and schematics. You start with an empty gun and though you really don’t have to worry about players killing you to start off you do have to worry about robot spiders, robotic sand worms and other such AI creatures. Until you get some ammo you can fist punch but that is not much of a comfort. The moment you can make bullets you’ll want to, but first you must find the 3D printer and that machine is the cornerstone of early survival. If you pay attention before exiting the cloning center you can find a portable 3D printer and more can be found through out the world which is nice since if you die everything including what you are wearing and what you are wielding is left on the corpse, there is a good chance that whatever killed you is there protecting your corpse from being recovered. Or if you are as unlucky as I was another player watched me die at the shots and mechanical claws of spiders then waltzed right in and took all my loot, lots of minerals, med kits, 3D printers and a gun with bullets. That is quite a bit to recover from especially considering that the buildings you raid don’t repopulate their loot just because you die. If you lose your corpse you just lose those resources.

Once you get the ability to make an ore drill you can start mining all the giant rock piles you see around the world instead of just picking up little rocks here and there. Scavenging both on the Mars surface and in the abandoned (?) buildings gets a kind of grind feel to it as you collect more and more ore to survive but the more bullets you have and the nicer the gun you upgrade to the happier you will be when a whole bunch of mechanical spiders set their glowing eyes on you. The problem is the game doesn’t have any training lessons so I had no idea at first I could just use the 3D printer in my inventory to make a gun. I thought that was something I had to discover the schematics for then go to a 3D printer in a building instead of the one in my inventory. I happened to ask someone passing by in the world about guns and he said to just make one and the bullets. All you need are simple resources which is nice since you need a resource for the drill which is harder to come by. Building at first is also confusing since there seems to be limitations on what you can make and how but it isn’t clearly spelled out. The game banks on the fact that the player has played open sand box style survival games like Mass Effect Andromeda but have the skills of a FPS like Halo or Destiny, which isn’t an unreasonable assumption but it has its own style of making and building things which could use a little tutorial. Figuring out how to get aluminum, a key element in crafting, took me quite some time.

“Flops” are what you are looking for above all though. Flops (or floppy discs) can be found on the corpses of mechanical spiders and other rogue machines as well as found on counters and in storage locations. The Flops are used to level up skills through out different skill trees that tend to mirror how a player prioritizes their style of play, so one might concentrate on gathering, another might concentrate on healing or another on guns or armor. Your Flops kinda act as leveling up though how many you get depends on random drops from mechanized corpses as well as finding them in abandoned buildings so they are rewards for scavenging and fighting rather than leveling. You can even take them off a fellow player’s corpse which happened to me when I was saving up for a really expensive upgrade and died… only to find myself with nothing to show for it after someone raided my corpse along with everything else.

One last note I highly suggest that one of your first unlocks and builds using your Flops is the Excavator which allows you to break down big rocks for nitrate and iron, the key elements in bullets. Aluminum plays an important part in the game too when it comes to making items but the first thing you want to do is make sure you have a pistol and lots of ammo because the ammo is sub-par and will have you burning through half a clip just taking down one mechanical spider. There was a misfire element too but they have suspended it at this time of writing since players are having a hard enough time with low damage from it.

Things will no doubt change in Memories of Mars, how it is every day there is a downtime for the server so that bugs, stuck points (of which I found two) and other changes can be made to maximize the experience. If you are looking forward to a polished, little to no bugs game you probably want to wait for the game to leave Early Access and start going into its persistent world world then you will want to wait for the official release. If you like to enjoy low populations while you are getting a feel for the game and help the developers know where there are holes in the world or stuck points the time to strike is now. I actually have had a hard time tearing myself away from the game long enough to write this. Hope to see you there!

MyCharge Home and Go Pride Limited Edition Review

2018/06/26

Ripper71

Mobile News, News, Reviews, Special Interest News, Tech Review

MyCharge products are everywhere these days – you probably pass people carrying them and haven’t even noticed. They are in airports and technology vending machines, they are in all kinds of stores. Pretty much anywhere you might think to stop to buy a phone charger they are there, dominating pretty much all other name brands in the market these days. They already make great products, but their latest limited edition takes it one step further by not just taking care of your cell phone but possibly a teenager/young adult in crisis.

The MyCharge Home and Go has two built-in wall outlet prongs which allow it to charge without a cable or wall adapter but will also charge any device through it by using their SmartSense Technology which is able to identify the device and charge through it, a USB plug cable is required to do this part. This is incredibly handy during travel since you don’t have to bring one of those clunky wall USB adapters and you just need one cable for the whole weekend.

It then charges up to 25 times faster than the average battery charger getting you back on your device about as fast as you can. I have walked around conventions before with a MyCharge battery in my bag running out to my iPhone 6+ and while taking pictures and video the phone still charged up faster than I was using it making it so that at the end of the day I still have a full charge. The Pride Limited Edition is a 4000 amp battery which means you will have a nice charge from it that could charge a dead phone up to 2 times. Also, the entire MyCharge family of chargers all have great shelf lives so you can have it sit for months then just pick it up and go without worrying about whether or not it is dead. This is so true that the other day I came across some MyCharge batteries that had been left in one of my wife’s travel purses since last October and one still held a full charge, the other a half charge which might have been from use. Its slim form also makes it easy to slip into a pocket, backpack or small purse. The pocket might need to be a little deep for it to stay in safe but it is definitely slim enough for skinny jeans or jean shorts.

My only wish would be for it to have two short charging cables built into it too like some of the MyCharge models. You can charge a greater variety of devices this way which is a definite plus but when at conventions the less the number of cables you have to corral the better.

The Pride Limited Edition involves a bit extra and it isn’t just the art. The art is special, with the word LOVE in gold letters and in the middle of the O is a rainbow heart in honor of the LGBTQ community. This isn’t where it stops though, just the beginning since 5% of all sales from the limited edition charger goes to the Trevor’s Project.

Trevor’s Project is one of the leading national organizations providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning young people between ages 13-24.

Named after an Academy Award winning short film Trevor’s Project where a young man is questioning who he is while faking suicides in front of his parents in an attempt to get their attention. The night it aired on HBO The Trevor Lifeline, 24 hour crisis help was launched and over the years came to include twitter, website and workshops as well. There have been hundreds of thousands who have called upon Trevor’s Project for help.

Even if you don’t have the time to volunteer for this organization you can help them and help yourself by purchasing the MyCharge Home And Go Pride Limited Edition so you can help yourself stay charged, show your support for the LGBTQ community and help make a 5% donation to Trevor’s Project, money will literally be going to help save lives.

Vidar the Vampire Movie Review

2018/06/24

Ripper71

Film Review, Movie News, News, Reviews

I love horror movies and it doesn’t matter if they are subtitled, only if they are good or cheesy good – I like either way. One of my all time favorite movies is Let the Right One In which was remade in an American version as Let Me In and I prefer the subtitled original since it just felt like it had more heart. It wasn’t as polished but the acting was very believable and touching, which is not something you hear about in a vampire movie usually. It is something that can be said to a degree about Vidar the Vampire, a coming of age late story that tackles religion as well as affairs of the heart.

We first see Vidar as a teenager, doing farm chores from dawn until dusk literally being woken up by the morning rooster and not too happy about it. He’s a good boy though and it is what is needed with the only other family member being an invalid mother. The local girls call him out supposedly to go steady but in fact just to get a reason to make fun of him. It’s a dull life that doesn’t promise much of a future as we see him going into his 30s, still a virgin and still just working the farm. He prays to God and Jesus for him to have a sampling of women “twenty plus.” Antsy afterwards and unable to sleep he sits on the back porch only to see bright light appearing from all of the windows of their barn. He goes inside and that is when this movie, a rather bizarre tale, actually starts up.

The movie is told kind of like Interview with a Vampire only, instead of being interviewed by a journalist, Vidar is talking to a psychologist instead – knowing his story and life in general are messed up. It is mostly told in flashbacks with cuts to the present to discuss the questions of sanity and theology that come up throughout the tale, it really is loaded with both. Unlike in Interview with a Vampire, Vidar’s powers are limited and so it is hard to show the psychologist the truth about him and leaves you at times wondering if you have a faulty narrator, one that believes his story is true when it might just be delusional. Thankfully they don’t leave that question hanging when the movie ends.

The budget was obviously low but so was the budget for Let the Right One In which shows that a movie can have heart even if it doesn’t have a budget. The music is particularly interesting too since it sounds like a Norwegian Tom Waits or Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds with folksy tunes filled with deep meaning lyrics.

Vidar the Vampire is not just a dark comedy – it is pretty much a black comedy with much of the humor coming at poor Vidar’s expense and also reminds you about moments in your own life that mirror what Vidar goes through. It shows that life never turns out quite the way you want it to, even when you get your prayers answered. Vidar the Vampire was directed by Thomas Berg and Fredrik Waldeland and is available now.

They Are Billions Early Access Preview

2018/06/24

Ripper71

News, Previews, Windows PC News, Windows PC Preview

Games in Steam Early Access always have to be considered previews because Early Access on Steam is a term that just means the game is not in a beta/soft-launch state. It’s sort if vague and I have played games where early access meant playing two weeks before the final release and I have played others that have been in that category for years. There are some games I previewed three years ago that are sill in Early Access. Luckily, Numantian Games’ They Are Billions they have set a target window of Spring to launch, and they look to keep it!

The game has three parts to it, Survival, Community and Campaign modes. Survival mode is good to go, all polished up and ready to punish players. You have a base very similar to StarCraft where you start with the Command Center and build new buildings and unlocking more so that you can create a large town that you then can defend against an outbreak of zombies. You build walls, hire mercenaries and unlock and build tower defense style buildings that help keep the undead horde at bay. The whole game is based off of steampunk both in visuals and in gameplay so the play often feels very Protoss in style. You have to put out energy towers that act just like the pylons do in StarCraft giving power to an area around it allowing you to build. Every tower needs to be built in the area of a previous tower and if the previous tower loses power so does any that are daisy chained from it. As a result, if zombies make it through to pylons near the town all your out stretched connections lose power suddenly leaving you with less power, less active buildings including resource gathering ones and defensive towers. This can lead to a “Game Over Man, Game Over!” situation quickly.

The most dangerous though is if they get to your tents which each tent holding four workers suddenly they turn the workers into zombies so not only do you lose your workers but you now have four more zombies to worry about. Pretty soon they take out all your tents, have an extra horde and have completely cut off your ability to build, collect resources or make more troops. As a result one of the first things I get going it a saw mill to get wood and start building a wooden wall around the tents, because if they fall, unlike any other building, it is really hard to recover.

Since Survival is a single player mode right now (things can change during Early Access) players are able to pause the game and take a look at the map, decide and start what buildings you want to build and figure out a strategy and implement it depending on how the map looks. This is really helpful in case a player isn’t a professional level player but still enjoys strategy games. If there were the option to slow down and speed up gameplay I think it would make the game more accessible to wider group of players so that those who are really good can speed it up or those who aren’t as good but still like playing these kind of games can have a chance to survive. Also players are sometimes just waiting for an action or build to happen before they move forward and speeding up play can help that. Pausing the game helps a lot but when you consider you are dealing with thousands of zombies who will eventually swarm over your town every little bit of extra help can be satisfying.

The other way this game could be a little more user friendly would being able to save. The game saves itself when certain situations in it’s programming happen (it just seems to randomly pop up a message that it is saving) but the player doesn’t have the same option. Having a couple of save files, even if it is only two, would be handy so that if you realize you made a bit of a mistake and the town gets overrun because of it it would be nice to not lose hours of gameplay because you weren’t able to save. I understand why they have it this way just like I can understand why they wouldn’t want to make it so you can change the speed of the game, they aren’t trying to make this game accessible to lots of people by making it easy, they are trying to challenge players by making it hard. The idea being that once you lose you have lost and need to start from scratch with the game putting you on a new random spot on the map so you can figure out how to survive in a different setup. There is a way to save but it is kinda sly and I wouldn’t be surprised if they change it. If you leave the game you can save and exit to the main screen. This creates a single save point. If the game decides to save sometime when you come back it will save over the spot you did but otherwise you have a spot of saved progression that will be there even after you lose under “Continue”. If you or the game save too close to when you got overrun it becomes a pretty useless save but otherwise it might give you a second chance at the game.

Community mode is interesting and nice for players who like a competitive challenge. All players are placed on the same map and in the same place to see how well they do at surviving. Players only get one shot at it and they are scored and ranked against all other players who take the challenge. The plan is to have new Community maps over time so players can get a bit of a PvP feel from it.

A fun way to make each game an unique twist is the addition of a mayor where you pick between candidates for the additional aspect that you feel will best help your community. One mayor might give you the ability to make snipers (a HUGE game changer) but his competitor might be able to upgrade all your tents greatly increasing the number of workers you have without having to build anything (sometimes not enough workers means no more mercs to help your defenses). The choice is difficult because one gives you better quality of mercs the other gives you more. Decisions, decisions…

There is supposed to be a Campaign mode as well and players haven’t yet been given access to it. Personally that is my favorite aspect of a game so I can’t wait to give it a try. Usually playing through a campaign helps players become better for Survival mode but it is usually the most time consuming to create so it makes sense it would take a longer amount of time to prepare. Since it is Early Access I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on it even if it was only a few levels or likely to change.

The game has difficulty levels but they are done in a different setup than most games. No matter how hard the difficulty the zombies don’t change. The difficulty levels consist how many days of gameplay and how high the population is. So you can set the population to be at it’s easiest and that would be “Just A Few Infested (Easiest)” and the hardest is “High Population (Brutal)”. The other part is how long before the zombie horde collapse onto you, the hardest being 80 days and the easiest 150. So at it’s easiest it is Just A Few Infested and 150 days of play. It seems odd that that the shortest games is the hardest but if you are building and not a StarCraft ranked level of player you want all the time you can get to build up all the defenses you can.

When the horde comes it is crazy brutal, not just on your town but on your computer. Even gaming rigs have a hard time handling the thousands of zombies piling up on your defenses. I don’t think there are billions, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were when they started but now there are plenty enough to give lag spikes to even hardcore gamers.

They Are Billions is a really fun game already as is, the addition of Campaign mode will make it that much better. There are a few changes that would be cool to see but if they weren’t made the game is still a blast to play. Just don’t be surprised if the first few, or several, times you play you get mowed down. It is Survival or Community mode and both are designed to be hard as heck by their nature. Once the Campaign mode comes along it should be a little more playable by a wider audience and I know I will be among them.

Overload Review

2018/06/20

Ripper71

Geek News, News, Reviews, Windows PC News, Windows PC Review

Overload is brought to us by the same creators as Descent and Descent 2 and is meant as a spiritual sequel. The game was kind of before its time back then but now a 6-degree-of freedom shooter is very much a welcome play style.

You are in a little, one man ship bristling with weapons and you are hunting down automatons. These robots that were meant to make our lives easier have instead turned against their human hosts and started a killing spree. Luckily your ship is armored and can spin in any direction needed to take the robots down. Because they are robots there is no blood or gore but there are lots of satisfying explosions and power ups to be found which change how your weapons look as you blow them away.

I tried really hard to get used to playing on such a dizzying axis with the keyboard and mouse but it didn’t take long for me to realize I didn’t stand a chance of having any control of the ship unless I used a gamepad or joystick. Once I got the hang of that I was able to move around all over the place just using the map to find my way or launching a holo-guide out that will lead you to your next objective. Sometimes I would get a bit turned around on the map because it was a little hard to tell if you are upside down or not in some places but usually there would be some debris from a destroyed automaton to point out if you had been there before. After a while I didn’t care if I was upside down or not going through a door, all that mattered was that I could start getting shots off and strafe if there were too many and I needed to break for shelter.

The graphics are nice with a lot of detail in the environments, the automatons, and explosions. The music is actually made by the people who made the music for Descent and Descent 2. All you have to do is look at who is doing the game and music creation and you get the deja vu of the Descent while playing Overload. It was easy to gauge whether or not the game would be welcome because it was crowdfunded through kickstarter clearing the $300,000 target by getting $306,537 from 4,896 backers. With that built-in automatic play numbers it was going to have population from the start, that’s nice since the game has a multiplayer part that gives you a chance to test your growing skills against other players. I think you probably should play through the single player campaign before going at the other players who are for the most part very seasoned. I got my butt handed to me when I tried to play multiplayer midway through the levels and I promised myself I wouldn’t try it again until I had a lot more practice under my belt.

Overload has 15 levels, 16 types of weapons, multiple upgrade choices, 20+ types of robots with 3 bosses, Survival and Efficiency challenge modes, and level challenges such as lava, force fields, enemy turrets, and countless secret rooms. There are so many secret rooms and hidden objects that if a person is a completionist they will want to go back and find everything they missed so they will have multiple replays of levels. I tried really hard to find everything in the levels on the first run through and I failed miserably, when I got to the end and saw I had missed 2/3rds of the hidden parts I knew I would have to got back again.

To top it all off if you have an HTC Vive or Oculus you can play Overload VR which supports all the major controls such as keyboards and gamepads. Overload is tons of fun with great graphics even if you don’t have VR equipment, though if I ever get Hive or Oculus this game will be at the top of my list of games to play.

Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn Review

2018/06/20

Ripper71

Geek News, News, PlayStation 4 News, PlayStation 4 Review, Reviews

Shaq Fu came out on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1994 and celebrated the hugely popular 1993 NBA Rookie of the year, Shaquille O’Neal. However the game that celebrated him was met with mixed reviews. Despite these reviews, the cult status of the game increased over the years. Mad Dog Games and Big Deez Productions have brought the game back in a way with Shaq Fu: A Legend Rebord. Hailing from a successful crowdfunding campaign, Shaq Fu: The Legend Reborn promised better gameplay, visual quality, and more. But, does it deliver?

The original Shaq Fu was mostly about its tournament play, very much in the style of Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, but Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is a side-scrolling brawler in the vein of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Bad Dudes. The graphics lend themselves to this feel too since they are somewhat cartoony and the first indication this game doesn’t take itself too seriously. The dialogue can be downright hilarious and tends to poke fun at the characters, the 4th wall, and even their crowd funding campaign. The jokes will not for everyone since some are pretty much anything but PC. The voice acting is well done (Shaquille O’Neal performs his own lines), the graphics are pretty good even if they get a little stagnant at times and sometimes it is fun to have a game that takes nothing serious. Even the health potions are “ICYHOT”, which is a reference to a product Shaq has endorsed for years.

Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn starts with baby Shaq being abandoned into a stream where eventually a woman finds him. She names him and takes him back to the village where he was subsequently bullied. An old Kung Fu master took him in, trained him in the arts and becomes a sort of father to him. When the game starts we find out that the old man has been ordained to be a protector of mankind and he plans to pass the mantle on to Shaq. Unfortunately, the old Kung Fu master is killed which sends Shaq on a mission of revenge.

The fighting action is fairly standard for side-scrolling fighter: You walk forward, beating up all enemies, and breaking items to find health and power-ups. There are special attacks which I hear are easier to master on some platforms like the Nintendo Switch but is just a wee bit harder to get used to on Steam. Using the keyboard isn’t too bad but it really feels built for a gamepad so I highly recommend you use one if you play. Breaking all the breakables is important because some fights, particularly boss ones can be tricky and being as high health and power you can before fighting is important. The game auto-saves progress at certain points so you don’t have to worry about that.

The bosses are all interesting in design. They are all demonic celebrities based on real celebrities. Sometimes you will fight one that is based on Justin Bieber and its one that looks a lot like Mel Gibson in Braveheart. You find out that these demon celebrities were actually put on Earth to brainwash people into moronic subservience. For some reason this plot point felt fairly believable.

Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is a fun game if you don’t take it serious and you have a bit of a crude, non-PC sense of humor. It isn’t very long but the digital copy is only about $20 on most platforms, the retail version is twice as much (the Switch retail version is $47!) so I highly recommend the digital download. If you per-ordered NBA Playgrounds and had to deal with the delayed arrival you might have a free copy of Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn in your game store as an apology gift. There were also some collector’s editions with extra goodies and a few SNES copies made as well but unless you are a hardcore Shaq fan stick to the download and look forward to the Barrack Fu DLC coming up where you will fight a thinly veiled… Kanye West. For some that might be worth the game price right there.

Starship Corporation Review

2018/05/10

Ripper71

Geek News, News, Reviews, Windows PC News, Windows PC Review

Starship Corporation from Iceberg Interactive and Coronado Games is a rather in-depth game that takes players from on the journey of becoming the head of, as the name suggests, a starship-building corporation. You begin at the near bottom, picking your business partners and how you want your ships designed. Because they are very similar attributes it reminds me of ocean sailing games I have played in the past where you had to start by deciding if you wanted to build galleons which could hold more cargo or a frigate that has stronger defenses, but less cargo capacity. Starship Corporation goes beyond this by asking where you see the galaxy heading – to a more violent or peaceful state, as well as how much cash your company starts with. It’s a clever way of selecting difficulty level.

Your goal is to build bigger and nicer looking ships with quality crew members to sell off to others – or use to travel to new locations with your partners to find new technology blueprints. How you invest in the technologies are the first steps in your long game. You can make changes later on but it will work best if you stick with a plan.

Being aimed at simulating the construction of starships, Starship Corporation features over 200 various pieces of equipment to select (should they unlock everything). Of course, you decide where the equipment gets installed – all the equipment: Ship engines, cargo bays, weapons – heck there is no cockpit unless you build it! To make things even more varied, you also have over 20 different fuselages to work with, some containing multiple decks! Your design work will dictate how long the ship might survive in hostile space. You’ll spend a lot of time in the design of your starships but then you actually get to put the ships through various tests and drills to gain points and crew experience. These kinds of drills and tests help you once it comes to running real missions.

Starship Corporation’s visuals and audio elements are “fine”, with lots of 2D art elements and ambient noises. The game won’t be winning any awards in either category but the gameplay is fun enough to look past this. Crew management is somewhat so-so, having to pedantically select crew members and click rooms to command them to go places. A little clunky to say the least but, again, the game’s overall fun allows the player to look past this.

When I first started playing the game, I thought it was just a giant sandbox game with no real ending. I was a bit surprised when I loaded up the game and saw that there was a campaign mode too! I started playing the sandbox aspect because I figured the campaign was pretty new and might have a couple of patches to make sure it was all ready for prime time and, as I understood it, the sand box mode was the initial plan for the game. Looking back, I wish I had started with the campaign mode because there is no better way to learn a sand box game than by training missions or even more a campaign. The campaign is great because, while it is not very lengthy, it contains just about every kind of mission and every kind of vehicle build possible. As a result, you know all the best and worst of every build of vehicle when it comes time to use them in sand box play.

Starship Corporation is a fun sim game that retails for a reasonable $19.99 on the Steam marketplace. Starship Corporation is available now.

Pinball FX3: Star Wars The Last Jedi DLC Review

2018/05/05

Ripper71

Geek News, News, Reviews, Xbox One News, Xbox One Review

Being a huge pinball player, I was very excited to try out the new Star Wars The Last Jedi pinball table DLC for Zen Studios amazing Pinball FX3 on the Xbox One. First thing to note is that there are only two tables in this DLC offering: Star Wars: The Last Jedi Pinball and Star Wars: Ach-to Island Pinball. This has become fairly common place in the the electronic pinball tables and makes a decent amount of sense as there is a lot more programming that goes into a virtual pinball machine. There are animations and even mini side-stories all told by what you hit or miss on the table. These two tables will cost you $6.99 which some may feel is a lot, but I found that with the action involved in the games and how quickly I lost myself into them, that price was more than fair.

I started off the Pinball FX3 Star Wars The Last Jedi DLC with the table seemingly-designed to be most like a real pinball machine: Star Wars: Ach-to Island Pinball. The main story of the board is based around Luke training (ed. note: Or not) Rey on the island and the ball starts with her handing him his old lightsaber. Unlike the film, he does not toss it over his shoulder and the table goes on to depict different events that take place on the island. I won’t spoil anything but the animated figures that walk around the board are great and truly worth of the Pinball FX series, which concentrates on two things: realistic ball mechanics and very cool animated 3D actions above and on the table. The little Porgs are cute as to be expected and there are so many great moments to uncover.

The next table in the two-pack is Star Wars: The Last Jedi Pinball and it ended up being the table I kept losing time on. There was a particular mini game that I fell in love with and tried to trigger every chance I could. The table is open in the middle with beautiful artwork, but it really is the action that keeps you coming back. I don’t want to spoil it so I won’t go into all the bonus games available, but I was really impressed with how many there were and how good they were!. It is one of my favorite pinball game ever because of them.

There are a few interesting styles of play. You have single, co-op style, and the one I most liked: The hour-long play. During hour play you just keep playing for an hour, no ball limits. So if you really want to play through all the bonus games more than trying to get high scores, this is for you. With this mode, you can just keep playing over and over until the time runs out or you feel like taking a break. It was with this and the full movie table that has all the mini games that I lost complete track of time and between playing the real thing the day before and playing that the two tables for hours my flipper button fingers were worn and the muscles sore halfway to the elbow.

Even though I wish they had had included one more table in the DLC pack, the ones we got were great. One of the tables is easily one of the most realistic Pinball Fx has put out and in the other, while not very realistic, is a lot of fun and loaded with a ton of mini-games. Star Wars: The Last Jedi Pinball is available now for $6.99.

Razer Goliathus Chroma Soft Gaming Mouse Mat Review

2018/04/26

Ripper71

Geek News, News, Peripheral Review, Peripherals News, Reviews

The Razer Goliathus Chroma soft gaming mouse mat is really interesting because it is the first time I have ever seen a soft mouse pad with lighting elements – Chroma lighting at that. We here at GamingShogun.com spend a lot of time in front of our computers. So when it comes to our equipment we like products that perform how we need them to and have a sense of style. With these criteria, you might not be surprised to find out I have fallen in love with Razer’s Goliathus Chroma soft mouse surface.

Cutting Edge Style:

The first thing once notices when looking at the Razer Goliathus Chroma soft gaming mouse mat is that it has an perimeter line of Razer Chroma lighting that allows for 16.8 million color combinations. This is literally an insane amount of color choices and is mainly just for looks. However, if you’re like me and play in the dark a lot you can smartly use the outer light edge of the Goliathus Chroma to know where the edges of your mouse pad are. Sounds strange, I know, but in the dark this border is very important for situational awareness of where your mouse is on the mat.

The next thing one notices about the Razer Goliathus Chroma soft mat is that it feels almost like a felt material. The surface doesn’t have a lot of “give”, but the cloth is micro-textured to help make it responsive with any kind of settings or sensors your mouse happens to have. Many gaming mice allow you to change sensitivity on the fly and the cloth surface on this pad will make it respond with whatever you settle on. The surface is extremely versatile and worked great with the few mice I tried on it. This versatility means that you won’t have to worry about getting some specialized mousing surface every time you buy a new mouse.

The bottom of the Razer Goliathus Chroma has non-slip rubber material which means your mouse pad won’t go sliding around your desktop. On the top edge of the pad, there is a cable minder so you can run your mouse cord through it and not worry about extra mouse cord slack getting in the way.

One of the last benefits is that the pad has inter-device color synchronization between all your Chroma-enabled Razer devices. This means that you can have all of them change colors at the same time. Furthermore, if you have it set to change lighting schemes when a certain events happen in games like StarCraft II, it can help you increase your situational awareness by color and intensity alone. Is your base under attack? Have the peripherals all flash red, etc.

The only single complaint I think I have is it would be nice if it came with some Razer trademarks or designs on the mat’s surface. While that might be totally unnecessary on a performance level, the “Cult Of Razer” is made up of a proud bunch of gamers that like to show their branding.

More Than Another Mouse Pad:

The Razer Goliathus Chroma soft gaming mouse mat is one of the most well-constructed mousing surfaces I have ever worked with both physically and aesthetically. It could have shown off its Razer brand a little more but when it is changing colors in-sync with the rest of the Chroma Razer gear, it will be obvious it belongs. Also, the Goliathus Chroma retails for a very reasonable $39.99 at most online retailers, which makes it super affordable given its capabilities.