…AAAAAAAAAAND AUGUST! 

So here it is, the month that I turn a year older and as such get incrementally worse at online FPS games. No that I’ve played much Apex Legends recently, but age certainly is a factor… that and never being quite sure if I want to tweak my mouse accuracy up or down.

Our vague midweek conglomeration has actually returned to World War Z, which has seen a few useful tweaks since we first checked it out. For one you can now match-make with friends only which has ruled out the unruly random element… not that we had bad experiences, but if you’re playing with a group, or want to start a game knowing that someone might show up later and join it’s much better to be able to have a private lobby. The other major addition is a final stage of the Tokyo chapter which takes place on a cruise ship … a cruise ship with a shocking amount of convenient open areas suitable to be mobbed by packs of Zeek…. but a cruise ship nonetheless. The nice thing about WWZ is that it does seem to be very accommodating; the classes and difficulty settings seem to be tweakable to give a balanced experience that everyone in the group enjoys regardless of account level. I’ve certainly player multiplayer games before where the lower account levels are at a disadvantage, but here it’s much less of an issue.

In single player news I’ve been undertaking my self-imposed Resident Evil 2 Challenge: I’m Having Tofu Tonight! It got off to a flying start with the first Leon A/ClaireB run (of three) complete including a nail biting no-save run of ClaireB to unlock the gattling gun… not that I’m going to be able to use it as it’ll drop my rankings for the remaining runs, but the unlock challenge was really what it’s all about. Besides, despite being the trickiest weapon unlock in the game, it’s really not that practical with its long spin-up… I have also picked up Outbreak File #2 following my recent(ish) exploration of the original, but I’m saving that for after this challenge is complete.

July Wrap Up

I kicked the month off with an opinion piece about the upcoming game streaming platform Google Stadia… actually the term game streaming is kind of ambiguous, but heck you know what I mean. It’s a post that I wasn’t really expecting to be controversial… but I was wrong. It turns out from the comments that people’s feelings on this run deep and I’m grateful to everyone who chipped in on the discussion; it gave me a lot to think about. Actually to the point that I thought about reworking my original post, but I stand by what I wrote. The important take home is that I’m not in favour of this being ‘the’ new way to game, I don’t like it personally… but… and this needs to be take with the caveat that I’m setting aside the controversial ideas about ‘ownership’, infrastructure limitations, and technical hurdles… I shouldn’t oppose something that might genuinely allow more people to play so long as it only makes up part of the gaming landscape – progress, choice, and diversity are, in general, good things.

… and after tackling that hard hitting and controversial topic I decided to ramble on about my latest obsession: the CRT monitors in Sonic the Hedgehog. As anyone who follows me on Twitter will have noticed, these are my latest gaming obsession to that point that I’m making a bit of a name for myself as a web-comic artist… no?…

Finally I reminisced about the glorious 8-bit stylings of the Sega Game Gear… because… I can’t seem to work out where I’ve put mine!

…must be around here somewhere…