Category Archives: Gaming

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December 6, 2015

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fun, Gaming, Life

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Party time!

So, you may have noticed that I’ve already missed a day in my daily writing commitment. I’m not one to get hung up on things like that, though. It won’t be the last time this will happen, so why worry, right? I’ll just do two posts today to make up for it!

Anyhow, my reason for missing it is a good one. I’ve recently gotten back into a pastime I used to enjoy years and years ago: LAN parties!

In case you don’t know what that is, a LAN party is when a bunch of normally introverted PC gamers drag most of their computer setups across town to set up in the same room so that we can all play games together on them with each other. It sounds silly on the surface of it, since now-a-days it’s absurdly easy to just connect over the internet, but there’s something extra added to the gaming mix when you’re all in the same room.

It’s actually a big thing, too. There are huge LAN party tournaments many times a year throughout the country. Hundreds of gamers will get together and compete, playing all kinds of games. It’s even spawned a professional league of gamers.

I’m certainly no professional gamer, but I do have a lot of fun at these things. I hadn’t realized how much fun they could be until I joined a local group. There’s five or six of us that show up every month now, and we play all kinds of games, from zombie-blasting shooters to creative games like Minecraft. Good times!

 

 

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December 3, 2015

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Atompunk

I’ve really gotten into a new game on my PC called Fallout 4. It’s a hoot! I’m very much into story-driven games, and Fallout 4 delivers that fairly well. It’s been getting panned, however, because it’s not as much of a role-playing game as its previous incarnations were. It’s more of a first-person shooter with branching story elements, than anything else.

The story is pretty much set on rails that you have to follow, and although you can take several paths to get to the end, it’s basically the same no matter what you do. This is what has many fans expressing disappointment in the game. They expected a much more customizable experience and story than what they got, namely, an action movie where they get to participate in the action and that’s pretty much it.

I can overlook that for a really good story, however, even though I am very much in the RPG camp. This one has a terrific world that it’s set in, and that’s the part I really enjoy. Being a world-builder myself, like the worlds I’ve created for my novels, makes me appreciate it all the more when it’s done well by someone else, or in different media.

This one is what they call atompunk. It’s a world where the 1950’s-imagined future of nuclear-powered everything came true, with huge finned cars filling up on nuclear coolant instead of gas at the corner station, nuclear-powered monorails soaring overhead and even nuclear fusion powered robots serving mankind. Then a huge war happens and you find yourself in that world 200 years afterwards, the sole survivor of a cryogenics facility that froze you right before everything went to hell.

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All in all, it’s a fun game and a fun world to explore, as the developers put in plenty of details and references to other fantasy worlds and even things in our world, such as the bar Cheers! from the sitcom of the same name. It’s a hoot finding all those Easter eggs!

If you’re looking for something fun with a decent story and not too difficult a gameplay challenge, give it a whirl. It’s a bit pricey right now as it just came out, but give it a month or two or three and it will be cheap enough to pick up.

 

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