Author Archives: Stuart Pitchford
Murdered Soul Suspect: Episode 1: Ghostly Investigation Begins
Stuart starts a new play through series with Murdered Soul Suspect.
King’s Quest Chapter Two Release Date Revealed
Sierra announced today that the second chapter of The Odd Gentleman’s King Quest is expected to launch worldwide on Dec. 16. The second chapter is titled King’s Quest Rubble Without a Cause. This latest page in this 5 chapter story takes Graham back to his first test as a ruler of Daventry. A band of goblins has the kingdom and it’s up to the newly crowned king to rescue his people and prove himself the leader they deserve.
The second chapter will be released on Dec. 16 on Xbox 360/One, PC via Steam, and PlayStation 3/4 will be available late afternoon on Dec. 15.
AverMedia Live Gamer Extreme: Unboxing and Review
TLDR: AverMedia’s Live Gamer Extreme isn’t quite there. The hardware is fine but the software crashes or just plain doesn’t open.
Review: Blood Bowl 2
Score: 5 out of 10
Cyanide’s Blood Bowl II is a turn-based fantasy themed sport game. I say sport and not football because there’s only a loose base in American football. There’s a kick-off at the start of the half and after a touchdown and that’s about it, oh and the ball looks like a football with spikes. And the players’ uniforms are based on football uniforms. Other than that it’s completely different.
Bob and Jim
I know if you think about football is turn-based but this isn’t like that. Each half is 8 turns and during each turn you can move each player individually a certain number of invisible spaces on the field. If a player is standing in a space adjacent to and opposed player they can attack the player whether they have the ball or not. When you attack you roll die to see what action you can do. The action could be a simple push but where the fun in that it is called Blood Bowl so the action you really want is to upper cut them in the jaw and possibly KO them or maybe even kill them. If you have fellow teammates around you to ups your strength and can add one or two extra dice to give you a better chance at a favorable roll. That can work against you as well if the opponent has friends or is just plain stronger than you the dice will so up red meaning that the opponent can choose from the die which action happens. Attacks aren’t the only “dice rolls†that happen if you want to pick the ball up off the ground you are given a percentage of success and you hear the sound of dice being rolled, the same happens if you want to take a couple extra steps past your given movement area or if you want to run one space away from an opponent. If you fail any of these and it ends with a one of your players or the ball falling on the ground it’s turnover, which is a forced end turn. There were plenty of time my first action was to attack an opponent and I ended up rolling a player down which is when they uppercut my player and that immediately ends my turn.
There is a campaign with a story. You are the new coach of the once great human team, Reikland Reavers, which is now rank last in the league. 
Much of the first games are tutorials to teach you the rules. In some of those some of the games mechanics are turned off like turnovers. The match when the turnovers are turned on I swear that was when the computer AI started cheating. And I don’t mean cheating as a game mechanic, I mean I started rolling a lot of player downs and both downs. The both down die means that both players attack each other and if neither one has the block ability they both go down. In the previous games most of my players had the block ability then at that game none of them did. I could eventually level up my players to get a chance at getting the blocking ability back. It may have just been training wheels while I learn the game but to suddenly take them away and have every other roll be both down and have every opponent have that ability it a bit bullshit. Then as the campaign goes on after all the rules have been introduced, it ups the difficulty even more by having other objectives other and just winning the game be required to continue. The other objectives could be something like score with a certain player type or make sure this random thing happens, something that you could spend hours just to get to happen. If those were optional things you could do that would have been great but they weren’t.
Throughout the campaign you hear the comedic commentary of Jim the vampire and Bob the ogre. Their funny at first but like all commentaries you after hearing the same joke for 50th time it’s not funny anymore. The sound in general is pretty good. Hearing the player hit each other sounds just as brutal as it looks.
As you could tell earlier in this review I have some issues with the game. The major one is just that when you lose a game you don’t feel like you lose because you’re bad at the game you lose because the computer wanted you to lose. It replaces skill with a RGN (Random Number Generator). I did not play any games online with people but I’ve heard the community is as acidic and League of Legends or Dota 2. Another issue I had with the game was that the game doesn’t explain some of it’s team management mechanics.
I liked the idea of the game but it’s execution leaves something to be desired. I don’t think it’d recommend to anyone but fans of the franchise. This was my first time play a Blood Bowl game and I would have rather played something like a Madden with this art style which I know it not what Blood Bowl is. If you like this type of game then this is your game.
*Code Supplied by Publisher*
Review: Life is Strange (complete game)
Life is Strange is a story-driven, episodic, adventure game from the developers at Dontnod. The game revolves around an 18 year old photography student named Maxine Caulfield. After a vision of a tornado that destroys the town she discovers that she has the ability to reverse time. She uses these new powers to save the life of her childhood friend, Chloe. The two try and figure out what happened to a local girl who’s gone missing.
By the end of episode one I was intrigued by the story and wanted to know what was up with Max’s time reversing powers. By the end of episode two I was hooked and had to find out how this story is going to end. This really was one of the best stories that I’ve played all year. The story is slow-paced but that was done on purpose, to get you to get to know the main characters and side characters better so if a choice comes up that might end badly for someone you have to really think about it. But thanks to the reverse time mechanic you can go back and make a different choice and see how that turns out then decide which one you want to stick with. Sometimes that can makes the decision even harder when you find out that both choices may not be favorable.
The art in the game is pretty damn good too. The characters and setting looks great. Most photographs in the game have this heavy bleed watercolor look (don’t know if that the technical word for it)
and I really liked it. The music in the game wasn’t something I’d listen to but it was defiantly something a hipster like Max would, so it was all good; but, the punk rocker, Chloe’s choice in music didn’t match when you turn on her stereo and they dance on the bed.
Not for things I didn’t like so much about the game. There were a couple times when I knew that a situation could turn out a certain way through a tree of dialogue options. The problem was, I was constantly rewinding so I could get the outcome I desired. If there was no rewinding then I would have just rolled with it but I could and spent way too much time on a conversation. My biggest problem is something that I’ve been seeing on a lot of other reviews. The rest of this paragraph is spoilers for the end of the game please skip ahead if you don’t want to know. You have been warned. Seriously. Stop reading. The final outcome of the game as nothing to do with any choice you have made up until this point. It doesn’t matter if Kate lived or died, or if you saved Alyssa every episode, or if your planet died. Now that doesn’t deter from that choice you have to make. They do a really nice job with the lead up, highlighting all the major points of Max and Chloe’s friendship from the previous episodes. When that choice came up it wasn’t much of a surprise 
cause I had guessed it earlier in the episode, but that didn’t make it any easier. I thought about it for a while. I walked around my apartment for a few minutes thinking about it.
I really enjoyed this game and am looking forward to playing it again with different choices to see how much it changes the story. This game also does make me want to look at Dontnod’s next game Vampyr and check out their previous game Remember Me. I absolutely recommend this game for anyone who likes a good story. I would not recommend it for people who have sensitivity to bullying and suicide and drugs usage.
Review: Beyond Eyes (Xbox One)
Score: 8Â out of 10
Beyond Eyes is a game by Tiger & Squid and published by Team 17. It seems half the smaller games coming out now are published by Team 17. I digress. Tiger & Squid is an one girl game studio founded by Sherida Halatoe, and according to the website, creates short, beautiful games to make people happy, sometimes a little sad and then happy again.
Beyond Eyes is about a little girl names Rae who goes blind from a fireworks accident. After the accident she befriends a wondering cat whom she names Nani. When Winter came around Nani stopped by less and less. By the time Spring came, Nani didn’t come back. Rae decided to try to find her lost friend.
The gameplay is very simple. You only need to move and look around and occasionally press the “A†button to interact with things. There’s not much to interact, though. Since Rae is blind she feels and hears the things that are around to paint her surroundings in her mind. Because of this not much of the world is really shown. What Rae hears and thinks something is may not really be what it actually is. One instance early on Rae thinks she’s walking up to a fountain but it turn out it’s a drainage pipe. Yeah gross.
Like I said as you move around 
the world is painted into under your feet. The art is very beautiful and bright and colorful. When you run into things that scares Rae the world’s colors fade and the music becomes foreboding. The game is not a long game but any means. I finished the game in about 2 hours but I only earned 1 out of the 10 achievements so there was some things that I missed but I don’t think I miss very much. It was most likely I could have pressed A on something and didn’t.
Halatoe’s statement on the website, creates short, beautiful games to make people happy, sometimes a little sad and then happy again, could not have been more wrong. That’s what she set out to do and she did just that. The game is $14.99 on Xbox and Steam and I think that’s a bit much for a game at this length and what you actually do. If the game was $5 it would be perfect. If you need a break from those controller gripping, rage-inducing, river of blood games then this is a nice sweet change of pace.
*Game code supplied by publisher*
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