Risk of rain 2 has recently had a DLC content update, and since I bought it, I have been loving every second of it. This update has added a couple of new things to the game, all of them being interesting and fun. There have been new items, new survivors, new a new game mode, and a new boss, among other small changes. Each new item is unique and some even have synergy with both other new and previously existing items. There is even a new class of items that "corrupts" all versions of that item you hold. I think this change is really interesting and adds a new dynamic to how you play, having to make choices about what items you want to convert and what items you want to keep. The new survivors are also pretty cool, having unique mechanics and synergies with certain items. Firing speed affects the Railgunner differently, and the new item tier (void items) as well as healing items affect the Void Fiend. The new game mode is pretty weird and I only tried it once. I don't really play the alternate game modes, so I'm not going to talk about them. The biggest part of the update was the addition of time moving while in the void fields and the addition of a new boss that can be accessed from there (among other places). The void fields change makes it no longer a no-brainer, so you have to choose when you want to enter and how long you'll stay. There is an interesting change where it now counts as a stage, so you can get scavengers on stage 5, but that's more in-depth tech I don't feel the need to talk about. Overall, I have loved this update and have been playing it to death. The new boss is pretty hard, but me and my friend really only do command runs, so we are overpowered by the time we get there. That being said, it's still difficult and still enjoyable. This was a really good update and well worth the money. I would totally recommend getting this update, as well as the base game if you don't have it already.
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The Intel World Open was an exciting prospect when it was announced pre-covid. E-sports alongside the Olympics? Getting to watch the best from different countries battle it out? Finally proving which region is the best? It was too good to be true, of course. Everybody knows covid came in and swept everything, including the Olympics itself, under the rug. It was all very sad and dissapointing, but there's nothing anybody can do about that. Now, a year later, the IWO has announced how it will go about it's event. People did not like what they heard.
Due to the pandemic, the IWO would be held online, region-locked. This means no LAN, no countries in other regions playing each other, etc. That was the entire point of the IWO in the first place, let alone the Olympics. Players have stated a loss of motivation due to this, since the oversaturation of a single region with no new teams has been stagnating and hard, especially for those who have confirmed top six, like Vitality. You can tell that they aren't really trying because they're bored and know that they'll be in the next major anyways. I think people would rather wait a while and get a LAN than have online competition now. Saying that, I think the IWO resurfacing this early was a poor decision. I think they could've waited until people could come to a LAN and then announced that they were coming back. This way, no one would have false expectations and be let down. Overall, this whole situation is a mess and I hope it gets better, especially for the sake of the players. In Summary:
TF2 is currently in an awkward limbo when it comes to it's current casual situation. Due to the rampant bots despite the large community, Faceit, a major esports company, has stepped in and offered their own solution. For the people who have played Faceit Matchmaking before, it is almost identical. For those that haven't, what happens is you que up on the faceit browser or plugin, wait for a match to be found (which doesn't take long at all), and then either click a button that opens your steam client bootstrapper and takes you into the server, or paste the ip in your console yourself. A lot of people were very hopeful about this whole endeavor. People would finally be able to play casual matches without autobalance, bots, or joining mid game. But there are a lot of things that people are making notice of now that are conflicting. Thankfully, though, TF2's casual matchmaking on Faceit is currently in beta, and the team behind it is (at least claiming to be) listening to community suggestions and problems and trying to fix them. The largest issue people have reported about the casual matchmaking is that it doesn't feel "casual". This would make sense, given that Faceit is an esports company, but there is more to it than that. The main things people are pointing out are that there are penalties for leaving, payload cap timers, and incentives to win. These factors make the experience feel more like a "pug" (pick up game, usually at the very least semi-competitive) than a "pub" (a public lobby, what casual is normally). People are rewarded for tryharding in games, which a lot of people claim is "against the spirit of TF2 casual". Personally, I don't mind it much, but I do understand the frustration for some people who just want to run gimmicky loadouts and prey on oblivious snipers in the enemy battlements. You will rarely see anybody using weapons that aren't "meta" like the classic or the rocket jumper. One major benefit, though, is that there is a larger variety in the classes that people are playing. Granted, this plays into the "tryhard" argument, making games feel more like highlander. Overall, though, I'd say it's an improvement over the valve servers we have now. Is it an improvement over casual pre-bot crisis, though? At the moment, at least in my opinion, not quite yet.
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Over the break, Payday 2 went on sale. I decided to buy it and immediately fell in love. Payday 2 is a heist/contract fps that lets you do missions however you want. You can go in loud, quiet, or a get in quiet and then cause a ruckus. You can do the bare minimum or you can overachieve. You get rewarded for exploring levels and doing more than you have to, like opening non-required safes getting out unnoticed. The gameplay is also dynamic; guard locations and routes change, item locations change, camera/security room locations change, even entire vault locations can change. There are also a multitude of different builds you can go for. There are perks (which eventually, if you play enough, you will get all of) that in the beginning, you can format to support a multitude of things like stealth, health, utility, guns, etc. There are also decks that give you special abilities. You can only use one of these decks at a time, so it's good to plan out what weapons and perks (if you don't have all the perks) to use around your deck. There is suck a large variety in how to play missions and how to equip yourself that I rarely ever find myself getting bored. The mechanics are so satisfying that even if there is an easier way to do something, I will continue to try and pull off whatever I was trying to go for before instead, just to say that I can do it that way. There is also a host of DLCs that aren't required but do add a lot like weapons, missions (if you are hosting them; you don't need DLCs to join DLC missions), cosmetics, characters, and perk decks. Overall, there is so much to do and so many ways to do it that this game never gets old and is a blast all the time.
Over these past few weeks, I have getting back into playing Team Fortress Two. What I came back to was a bot infested mess that needed attention from it's neglectful parents. The game is still very enjoyable, but the amount of Onetricks, Myg0ts, Royalhacks, and other wastes of space are found in 9 out of 10 servers. and on 2 of those 9 they either are or already have taken over the server. The only real thing that can fix it is valve taking more than 10 minutes to put out an update for the game, instead of slapping an anti-F2P band on all game modes and restricting the free to play community. This epidemic has seen a rise in popularity of custom and community servers, where the bots have little to no power. This has also led to a massive drop in player count (barring the summer cosmetics update that was thrown at the community like a dirty pillow). Don't get me wrong, the cosmetics and new unusuals are nice, but I think what everybody else was expecting was a heavy update, let alone a fix for the abysmal anti-cheat. Overall, though, people are handling it quite well. Besides the few times where a bot calls to kick somebody, people usually deal with them quickly. The only pain is that they keep coming back and you have to repeat the process like 3 times. I would say that's about it but that would be completely disregarding the whole Tacobot.tf thing, which I don't even want to talk about. The amount of whiney basement dwellers that grind MvM and get salty when someone wants to have fun and go off meta is staggering. It's even worse that someone took time out of their day to program a bot that would retry spam servers with people the cronies disliked. If you can look past the steaming hot pile of garbage, you can see a community that is still pretty strong and having a good time. But until Valve decides to do something, the garbage will keep piling up.
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Halo CE was released in the Master chief collection recently and I want to talk about my experience with it so far. I have heard a lot of complaints about the game but that's what you're going to get when you port an old Xbox game to PC. I have enjoyed it a lot. the game definitely was not meant to be played in anything higher than 60 fps. The cut scenes were very jumpy and not very smooth, which is honestly not that big of a deal. The game play works fine frame wise. A good job was done making the game playable in higher fps modes. There is a lot of charm in the old style, too. I'm glad they didn't change it drastically just so it would fit in to the newer standard of triple A campaign games. The controls are still a little bit weird, but again, it's ported from a controller based system, so I'm not really complaining. The game runs smooth (for how old it is) it plays well enough that have to go out of my way yo look for inconveniences, and overall I am very happy with my decision to purchase the entire collection and not just Reach. Let's hope that it continues to get better from here.
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Recently, the Master Chief Collection was released on steam. I, never having fully played through a Halo game before, decided to buy the whole collection. Despite Reach being the only game from the collection that has been released at the moment, I have still had a lot of fun with it. I definitely am happy with my purchase of the whole collection and hopefully will not be let down by further additions. That being said, there still are some issues. Because the game was ported, controls on keyboard in comparison to controller were not really taken into account. The game doesn't let you crouch and move at the same time (you have to stop, then crouch, then continue moving), although the developers have acknowledged this issue and are most likely going to fix it in a later update. Another weird control issue is that you can't use your strafe keys to move vehicles, you can only use the mouse to dictate what direction you want to go. This means you can't really look around while driving a vehicle, you can only look ahead of you. This issue isn't as big a problem as the other, though; it doesn't impact game play in any major ways, I'm just not used to that sort of vehicle control for a keyboard and mouse. Other than control issues, I don't have any big complaints. Other people have experienced bugs in which they cannot load the first level, or things along those lines, but I haven't run into that issue myself. The game play is really fun and satisfying. The game's menus/HUDs are also relatively convenient to navigate, the only minor nitpicks that I have being that you can't select/ban any maps you may prefer or dislike, and that the multiplayer player overlay is too close to where you select your presets (meaning you run into it a lot, which can be annoying). I have never had the full console Halo experience, only bits and pieces at friends houses and the like. I personally think that The game was ported over well, but I don't have the experience to give a full opinion of that. I still am happy with my purchase, and I hope to enjoy the other halo titles as they get ported as well.
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As someone who likes to use school computers for their intended purpose, that is, playing flash games, it's hard to stay ahead of what is blocked and what you can get away with. One discovery out of absolute thin air is that of a game known as Leaders Strike 3D, a first person shooter that lets you gun brawl as an assortment of world leaders, past and present. These leaders include Abraham Lincoln, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Angela Merkel, Kim Jong Un, and Hillary Clinton. It's a very basic game, with a small amount of basic mechanics (like shooting jumping, ADSing, crouching, etc.), but they come together to make a coherent experience that is more than you could ask for in any free online game. The discovery of this game has led to a search for more, a larger craving for interesting free experiences untamed by the schools lackluster firewall. Its a real journey searching for unblocked websites, but it is a fruitful endeavor in the end. What you find is a cascade of unheard of gems, in which you can fight your friends in blocky worlds with mediocre online, or fight massive spiders with rocket launchers. It is an amazing felling to discover games like these, even by accident, like in the case of Leaders Strike 3D, where we came across it on complete accident. However you discover something in this vain, it's always a pleasure.
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