Geekly Review #50

Just me today as Murr is still on his holidays.

Well, we are truly getting in to the season of games now aren’t we?! It feels almost like there are new games coming out weekly. This week was no exception with both Alien: Isolation and NBA 2k15 releasing. I’d like to get both, but for now I’m content with just NBA.

NBA 2KFACEFAIL

I thought I would take the opportunity to try out the preloading on Xbox One with NBA. This lets you download the game before it is actually released, so that when release day comes along you can play it straight away.

I used the smart glass app to start the download from work, but for some reason my download didn’t automatically start. I don’t know if I didn’t have a setting on or something, but yea it just didn’t start. So I had to start it when I got home. This was a minor annoyance, as I still had over 24 hours until release, so there was still time for the download finish.

When I finally finished work on Friday, the game was ready to go. However, bar the mandatory first game you MUST play, I didn’t really get time to play it much as I headed out for the evening for a few drinks. A few drinks turned in to a lot of drinks and a pretty late night.

Saturday, feeling a little hung over, I decided to try out the new face scanning as I thought it would be pretty cool to see my face in game. Now, I’d heard about and seen some other peoples attempts, needless to say they were nightmare inducing at times. But I was hopeful I would have better results… Oh how wrong I was…

After around ten failed attempts, I just gave up. I wanted to play the game. I ended up create my player with the in game tools available.

My Career is slightly different this time around, you don’t get drafted in to a team at the beginning of the season, and it’s not until 6 months later that you actually get to sign a contract. That contract however is only for 10 days. I had around 10-15 teams I could choose from, each with varying levels of interest and each with varying levels of expectations. After some deliberation – I was tempted by the Houston Rockets, but didn’t see myself being good enough, I settled on the Utah Jazz.

I now had 10 days to impress them, luckily they were only expecting me to get ratings of D+ and up. As I had effectively pre ordered the game, I was given 15,000 vc coins for free as a nice little starter. This year upgrades have changed slightly, you don’t buy individual stats, they are instead grouped together to areas like ‘Athlete’ which will compromise of a number of stats like, speed, quickness, stamina, those sorts of things. With the 15k, I was able to give my player a nice boost of stats, and after reviewing some of my player animations, I was ready to go.

In my first 10 days, I had 5 games to play. They were average at best, but I did just enough to secure another 10 day contract, again I had 5 games, again I was average. I just wasn’t seeing much of the ball, and when I did I was either missing the easy shots, or my team mates were missing not giving me the assists. It was tough going, and I was mainly get B- ratings, so not awful, but not great. But it was good enough for the GM and I was awarded with a year long contract.

That was pretty much all I got to play. I may not be the best basketball player around, but I’m having fun either way.

THE NOT SO IRON BANNER

Naturally I also played some more Destiny. I finally had enough strange coins to be able to buy some gear from Xur and picked up the ‘Lucky Raspberry’ chest plate for my Hunter. As it was also the Iron Banner event this week, I was dabbling in that quite a bit. Needless to say, it’s not as ‘hardcore’ as Bungie were making it out to be.

Players were expecting this to be the game mode where having the best gear really makes the difference, and if you were a low level you’d probably want to stay away or face complete annihilation. Alas, this is not how it played out. We quickly saw players as low as level 4 being able to mix it with the big boys, and even dominate them on occasions. People felt a little cheated, and demanded answers from Bungie. It was up to Bungie Community manager Deej to provide them, and you can read about them here.

Essentially what it says is, yes levels do matter, but only a little bit. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to make it so low level players wouldn’t stand a chance. But that’s not how they marketed it. They made it sound like if you weren’t kitted out with the best stuff you would struggle, in reality, it’s only slightly less difficult than the normal crucible modes. I’m level 26, and have found taking on players higher than me no different. All in all, I’m pretty disappointed by the whole event. I still had fun with it because I’ve had fun with the multiplayer all along, but it wasn’t at all what I’d, and what most of us had expected.

Step it up Bungie!

– Will