September 1st, 2017 by Vega Montanez
#VegaLovesVR, plus Nintendo Nintendo Nintendo.
Oh my, oh my, what a time to be alive! It’s another week to be thankful we are all some lucky gamers. Especially those of us who love Nintendo. And those of us who own a Nintendo Switch. Or those of us who just love playing video games in general. So know this, although McGregor took a loss over the weekend, the luck of the Irish has still been bestowed upon us. Yea luck points.
1. The Virtual Reality price drops are totally a part of reality.
Sony has unveiled a brand new PSVR bundle that is cheaper than the current bundles available. It even packages in the legendary and elusive Playstation Camera. This makes it the most bundled bundle of all VR bundles to have ever bundled. Alongside the announcement of the bunduru, Sony also announced a $50 price drop across all current PSVR bundles, as well as release dates for to major PSVR games. Game 1 is “The Inpatient, a psychological horror game based in the until dawn universe, releases on November 21st. Game 2 is Bravo Team, a first person shooter based around a military mission gone wrong, will be available on December 5th. Bonus point for Bravo Team being a single player or Co-Op experience. Now that right there is something to get excited about.
2. PS Plus games for September have been announced!
Let’s keep this one short and full of links. Thats right, stop being lazy and do some research. In the month of September lucky Playstation Plus gamers will be able to download and play: Infamous: Second Son and Strike Vector on PS4, Truck Racer and Handball 2016 on PS3, and We Are Doomed and Hatoful Boyfriend on Vita (and technically on PS4 as well). Enjoy. Moving on.
3. The Hedgehog is hogging the spotlight in 2017! Or at least trying to.
Who would have thought Sonic Mania, which our very own Captain Chet reviewed [forthcoming], would start the return of the blue speedster. Given how fast he moves, we should have all known he wouldn’t be held down for very long. Sonic Forces will be racing to a system near you, and yes that includes the Switch, on November 7th. What’s the most exciting part? The game will include some pretty dope nods to other incredible Sega IP’s like Jet Set Radio, Super Monkey Ball, and Persona 5! Call me foolish, but I am totally down to play almost any game if I get to play as the lead from Persona 5. Persona!
4. BioMutant: A wholly new original action RPG!
A team of former Just Cause developers have announced a brand new action RPG called “BioMutant”. Under their new independent dev group, Experiment 101, the team has gotten THQ Nordic to publish the game which will let you take advantage of “mutations, bionic prosthetics, and weapons” to make your character cool. Oh and because no current gen game can exist with game impacting choices, everything you augment will impact the way your hero plays. Doesn’t that sound insane and exciting. It’s coming at some undetermined time next year. Fun over.
5. It’s time for the Switch to bring back the Heroes!
Fair warning, the majority of news that follows will be Nintendo Switch related. This week Nintendo went into full show off mode and announced a slew of games coming to its new favorite toy. No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Again was announced as a Nintendo Switch exclusive coming to the system in 2018. If you never played a No More Heroes game, <DJ Khaled voice> congratulations you played yourself. No More Heroes is an action game series that originally started on the Nintendo Wii and to see it’s return is pretty exciting. What makes it more exciting is that bosses in the game will be from other indie games, like Hotline Miami (yes, I almost typed Hotline Bling). Man I would love it if Drake were a boss in No More Heroes.
6. More Nintendo Announcements!
I really like No More Heroes, so it got its own little announcement box, however there were many other awesome Switch titles announced this week. Of the 17 title announced, these made my pants the tightest. Fire Emblem Warriors was given an official release date of October 20th and a collector edition which will include 3 CD’s, a poster, and 25 art cards. Gear Club Unlimited, a Switch exclusive racing sim, will act as Nintendo’s answer to Forza and Gran Turismo and will be available on December 1st. and last but not least, ok maybe a little, Harmonix announced Super Beat Sports, a collection of musical mini games. So despite the lack of gun related games, I’d say Nintendo showed up with the big ones.
7. eSports at the Olympics?
On the topic of Guns, the co-president of the Paris olympics bid committee announced that eSports could be considered for a medal event at the 2024 Games. However, he also believes that the olympics promote non-violence and world peace so violent games are immediately out of the picture. It’s a small step in the right direction for eSports, but what competitive games could we picture that are nonviolent? Also does this mean that boxing, martial arts, and wrestling are all nonviolent sports? I’m not the answer man, but I would love to get the community opinion on this one. Should Violent eSports be allowed at the Olympics?
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Posted in Articles Tagged with: conor mcgregor, consoles, esports, ewan mcgregor, mcgregor, nintendo, nintendo 64, nintendo switch, no more heroes, olympics, playstation, PS plus, ps4, sega, sonic, sonic mania, Sony, vr
June 26th, 2017 by Stefan Adrian "AdminMas7er" Robu
What do you think of the Xbox One X?
So, it’s June 26th, which is a special day for me for reasons, one of these reasons is that it is the day when I got an Xbox One. 3 years ago, I moved from the 7th generation of consoles with the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One, getting a Titanfall bundle. Initially, the Xbox One was the future, holding a lot of good features such as capturing gameplay, Kinect, Skype and many other nice things, while it was a near perfect console at the time, my opinion changed over the years, as I will outline in this article.
DESIGN
The Xbox One was bulky, large, similar to a VCR box (hence why a lot of people joked about this), it only came in black, with only a few exceptions in limited editions, but sometime later, white consoles were sold in bundles. Its size and looks did change with the reveal of the S version, which was smaller and better in performance, and now with the new Xbox One X, which is promoted to be “The Most Powerful console” being also the smallest out of the three versions. Anyway, back to the first one, it had a non-physical power button (which sometimes accidentally turns on and off if you touch it even with a wire), a Blu-Ray drive (got upgraded to a 4K one in the S), a large fan which manages cooling, 3 USB 3.0 ports (1 to the side, 2 to the back, 2 HDMI (one for TV Box input), optical audio, Kinect port and Ethernet port. To be honest, apart from size and weight, I don’t have many problems with it (the glossy top is prone to scratching if anyone has experienced that).
PERFORMANCE
Inside, it was powered by an AMD custom 8-core APU clocked at 1,75GHZ for the CPU and 853 MHZ GPU with 8GB of DDR3 memory, 8GB of flash storage and 32MB of eSRAM. One of the downsides at launch is that it had only 500 GBs of storage but it was upgradable with external drives. Compared with its competitor, the Playstation 4, it was slightly weaker, most of the games being outputted at a resolution of 720p, 900p with a few exceptions, including first parties, at 1080p. For framerates, both systems held most linear games at 60 FPS, while open world games were at 30 FPS with rare exceptions. Overall, it held strong, even if it was beaten by the PS4. A major upgrade will be had with the new Xbox One X with its promised 4K and 60 FPS, will it manage that target? Only time will tell.
GAMES
On the games is where I have to say that the Xbox One sucks. After 2015, with the release of Halo 5, Microsoft decided to change the way their games were released with the new “Play Anywhere” system. Because of this, games were released on both Xbox One and Windows 10, which, theoretically, it means that the Xbox One does not have a lot of “True” exclusives, since they are on PC as well, otherwise, there weren’t any exclusives which have drawn my eye, neither Halo, or Forza, or Gears, or anything in-between, well, apart from one, ScreamRide, and maybe #IDARB, sadly, they aren’t that known or as popular.
CONTROLLER
Obviously, I couldn’t talk about the Xbox One without mentioning the controller. Honestly, this is the best controller for gaming, it’s big, perfect for my hands, sturdy and easy to use, the triggers and bumpers are way bigger than on the 360, though the bumpers are a bur stiff (not on the new controllers). And the joysticks are really easy to use, albeit they could have been taller. The high-end controller, the Elite, is very expensive but offers some degree of customization. The only downside of the first controllers is the proprietary connector for the mic, which required an adapter if you wanted to use it, the new controllers do have a 3.5 mm headphone jack which makes life easier.
CONCLUSION
The Xbox One had problems with its launch, some problems over the years and now it does still have some, but it continues to be a fun, easy to use console from Microsoft, looking forward to its future and a solution to the exclusive problem.
Posted in Articles Tagged with: consoles, glourious pc gaming master race, info, Microsoft, pc gaming, pricing, project scorpio, Sony, specs, xbox, xbox 360, xbox one s, xbox one x