Happy new year to you all, we’re back after our little break. Hope you all had a great time and did lots of Geeking out.
For the new year we’ve decided to change the Geekly Review slightly. Instead of rounding up the last few days of our geekly activities we’re going to be talking about the past weeks goings on, but not just ours. If we’ve spotted an awesome video, we’re going to share it. If we’ve seen some awesome artwork, we want you to see it too. If we’ve been playing some cool games, we’ll let you know, or if you’ve been playing something cool then let us know. We’re going to feature anything geeky from anywhere on the internet because we think you’ll like it!
To kick things off, I’m going to share two videos that IGN recently posted. They’re showing off some of the hottest looking games coming in the next 12 months. So get hyped people and start making a wishlist now, it’s going to be a good year!
Games of 2016
Refuge
Every now and then I will take a look on Kickstarter to see what interesting projects are in the works. I stumbled across Refuge created by Fox Rogers over the Christmas period and was very intrigued.
Refuge is a 2 player hide + seek survival game set on a mysterious settlement named ‘The Ark’. Will you hunt your opponent or attempt to out-survive them? The choice is yours.
The aim of the game is simple: to eliminate the other player. This is achievable in many ways – such as directly hunting them down or alternatively by out-surviving them…
You will need to battle against the elements, search for gear to help with your survival and most importantly outlast your opponent.
It’s obviously still early in its development but I think it looks like a really good concept. If you’re interested in backing the game then head to the kickstarter page and get backing!
– Will
I’ve not actually been online much over the festive period, so cannot recall seeing anything worth showing to you all, but in terms of geeky stuff I’ve partaken in there’s a few things.
During the break over Christmas and New Year I got to play the awesome table top game Zombicide for the first time.
As you’re probably aware we’ve been covering board games as of late. One of our readers ‘2 Kills Kelso’ is into his table top and board games too and insisted he show me this game especially after we played Ghostbusters together.
It’s very similar to Ghostbusters which was reviewed before Christmas, in that you’re part of a co-operative team that has to complete certain tasks on the board before heading to an exist area of the map avoiding death. Each turn you get 3 actions but you really have to think hard about what you do as more noise can attract hordes of zombies your way. Each end go sees potentially more and more zombies enter the area as your players level progresses. We didn’t actually win the game with all our characters getting killed with just one more objective to collect. An awesome game that I’m really want to play again soon.
With regards to TV shows, I managed an incredible marathon session on New Year’s day with my wife as we watched 9 hours solid of Marvel’s Jessica Jones on Netflix.
Initially it took me a while to get invested in the show, but I had the same criticism with Daredevil to begin with, then all of a sudden one event in an episode mid season just kicked off a session of not being able to stop watching. We tried, we suggested watching something else and taking a break, but we couldn’t we were hooked to the drama unfolding with Jessica, Luke Cage, KillGrave, Trish & Simpson. There were a lot of twists that genuinely I didn’t see. There were also a few things that while a brief explanation was given, some more detail could have been given (the red pills & Simpson?). But some of the most brutal and graphic scenes from a show I’ve seen in a long time (1000 cuts to kill you…geez). Highly anticipating Luke Cage’s own show now and of course can’t wait for DareDevil season 2 in March.
And lastly for my geeky activities of interest I ordered Uncharted Collection and it arrived on New Year’s day too. As I couldn’t drag myself away from Jessica Jones I played it on Sunday in an epic marathon session. Starting with Uncharted 1 (naturally) I started it at 11am and completing the first game by 9pm with just a short food break and catching up with an old friend between sessions.
While I did love the game, I had 2 small annoyances with the game while completing it. The sheer number of bad guys and how they escalated was frustrating. You would clear one area out and a noise indicates that the area is clear. You’d move forward about 5 steps then the intense music kicks in again and the enemies start appearing from behind you and infront of you again,. You never really had a moments rest other than the first few levels. And this was a frustration.
The 2nd part is that it’s sort of semi realistic in that it’s a real person against human enemies. Sure the treasure hunting aspect of it and the way Nathan Drake survives things he shouldn’t is crazy, but it stick to a fairly realistic setting….. until the final 4-5 chapters where some sort of mutant deformed humanoid creatures appear. That’s again another point in the game that I was like… “really?…” if it’s not millions of human enemies, then it’s hordes of these mutated fucks and it killed the realism of the game (again as real as game like that can be, it didn’t need mutated people, if they required another enemy type, then some aboriginal tribe people would have been more suited for the location and story). But based on those final levels creeping around avoiding those monsters, it really reminded me of Last of us so can see where that inspiration came from. And the whole of Uncharted itself was clearly where Crystal Dynamics got their inspiration for the Tomb Raider reboot. But I still enjoyed it and anticipate parts 2 and 3 (never played an Uncharted game before, I’m terrible).
So 2016 is underway and I’m already 1 game completed and 1 TV show finished for the good! Wrestle Kingdom 10 is next up tonight!
– Murr
