Another week closer to Christmas and we’re into full swing of silly season for video game releases. Here’s what we’ve been up to the last week.
Stranger Things
So, I’m very late to the party on this occasion. On Friday evening rather than settling down to watch another scary film, I opted to watch Stranger Things for the first time. I know, I should have watched it much sooner, but for some reason never did get round to it. Holy Shit, was I ever missing out. The very first episode had me hooked. It was incredible. The actors, the sound track, everything was just awesome. I ended up watching the first 4 episodes on Friday evening, then the last 4 episodes on Saturday. The 3rd episode where they so say find Will’s body, the ending to that episode was amazing. Had me pretty emotional. The young cast are brilliant and hilarious. It’s another example of a cast of kids that actually are great and don’t annoy like, much like the recent release of IT. Even the cast that were bullies and such were amazing, as they did such a good job, it was immensely satisfying seeing one of them pee their selves in the school gym in front of everyone. Can’t believe it took me so long to finally get round to watching it. Once the season had finished, I jumped straight onto the trailers for season 2. Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Ghostbuster Halloween outfits? I’m so in!
WWE 2K18
This weekend I picked up WWE 2k18, thanks to my colleagues from my previous job who got me a gift card for the mall, this game was a nice bargain price of £18. And for an added bonus, it appears the staff were a little confused when giving me the game. I picked up the standard edition of the game. However when home opening the case, inside I had the DLC codes given to the legacy edition. So I happily received Batista, RVD, additional John Cena models, The Accelerator pack and the DLC. Very happy with that spell of fortune.
Anyways, the game itself is annoyingly already so out of date, but what can you expect in this ever changing WWE environment? So I’ve done my best to build The Shield back together, and have downloaded CAW’s for the Singh Brothers to stick them with Jinder Mahal. This year a new mechanic has been added to pick up and carry your opponent around. As silly as it sounds I’ve been really enjoying such a simple addition. It’s also made it easier to do more moves involving the edge of the ring while outside it. It should also make for some funny moments in Royal Rumble’s with regards to picking opponents up and just throwing them out of the ring. The roster is insanely massive, but the stupid thing is, it’s still missing reasonably key people in the WWE universe right now. Some are due to arrive In DLC packs soon enough, but it doesn’t look like the UK guys will be featuring other than CAW’s till next years game.
I’ve been messing about with the Universe mode, and have set it up to be just one show, Smackdown, with a pretty trim roster. Removed tag teams, and just focussing on single titles and a women’s division. I’m still keeping the US & IC titles going, but did also reintroduce the European Championship, currently occupied by Cesaro fittingly enough. The Cruiser title has seen a nice competitive hot potato between Neville, Tozawa and Finn Balor. So it’s very much of the same as previous years. Visually it looks better this year, the entrances are particularly improved. Nakamura’s entrance at the outdoor Wrestlemania at night is a particular highlight to view. Now the next step for me and friends is to turn our WWE Draft from last month into reality with our own Universe mode based on our drafted rosters.
– Murr
Battlefield 1
Randomly my group of PC friends got back in to BF1 this week, so naturally that means I’ve been playing it too. I haven’t played it for maybe 6 months and I’d actually uninstalled it, so one 50ish GB download later I was ready to roll!
Damn I’d forgotten how good this game looks, but it was also the first time I’d played it on my new monitor so I was even more blown away by how it looked.
Normally I will play a mixture of classes depending on the map and what others in my squad are doing, but the last day or two I’ve been really enjoying the Support class and in particular the BAR. It’s a bit of a funny one I think because with it being in the support class you might think it’s a typical LMG – large magazine, wild handling and a lot of bullet spread, but I think it kind of handles a bit like an AR, plus it only has a small magazine size, but I love the punch that it packs and it really feels super satisfying to use.
Having recently played the COD WW2 beta, going from that to BF1 is a world of difference in my opinion, BF1 feels like a current gen game whist COD WW2 just feels old.
Gloomhaven
I’ve not used Kickstarter much, I’ve browsed on there a lot to check out new and interesting board games but I’ve not really ever felt the need or desire to back projects, that was until Gloomhaven came along. I actually missed the first proper kickstarter campaign for it and it wasn’t until it had shipped and people were reviewing and raving about the game that I started to take notice.
Gloomhaven is based around tactical combat scenarios that are strung together in a persistent, thematic campaign. You build a character – much like in D&D, level them up, go on adventures solo or with a party and over time your world of Gloomhaven will evolve and change. Each character has a personal goal and once they reach them you can retire them and unlock new secret characters.
Back in around April a 2nd campaign launched for it, it was for a 2nd print basically because it was so popular and demand was incredibly high. The campaign hit almost $4 million by the time it ended and this time I was part of it! I did not want to miss out again.
Over the months I’ve been patiently waiting for the game to arrive and in the last couple of weeks it’s started to ship, mostly to mainland Europe right now, but there are a few people in the UK that are getting notifications about delivery being imminent. Needless to say I’m getting pretty excited about it arriving.
To me Gloomhaven feels pretty special, it was the first game I’d ever backed and it looks amazing, so I wanted something special to store everything in – it’s a big old box with lots of components, so I bought an insert for it from The Broken Token. Is it a little extravagant? Maybe, but whatever. This weekend I got around to putting together the organiser and it must have taken me about 5 hours to do. It was a long process but quite a fun one and I’m really happy with the results.
Now I just need to the game to arrive. I’m kind of hoping that by me making this now I’ve somehow encouraged the delivery gods to take action and get the game to me. Kind of like when you’re at home waiting for a delivery and you quickly risk taking a shower or something and then miss the delivery.
-Will
