Hey! How’s it going you July people? All good out there in Someplaceville? If you’re a sunshine-type person then I hope you’re out there enjoying the good weather, or if you’re like me then I hope you’re safely locked indoors away from all that pollen and we can collectively hope to get a few good storms out of the humidity. Either way it’s July already, … Continue reading Editorial: July – Wait?! What Happened to June?
April is upon us and I seem to have continued my run from last month of being a little inconsistent with blogging. I think at least some of this is because I’ve been a little all over the place with gaming recently. I started to month off by revisiting Resident Evil Code Veronica but that playthrough is currently sat at about 50% complete and I would like to settle back in to it before the end of April. My wife and I have also played through (most of) Nine Parchments; a kind of fantasy erm.. isometric shooter? It’s one part Torchlight and another part Magika and, despite being nice to look at and light entertainment, it’s nowhere near as absorbing as I would have liked; essentially it’s walk forward, shoot enemies, repeat. Most of my gaming time has been spent in Apex Legends, it’s meeting that desire for a satisfying play cycle and, despite not being very good at this latest entry in to the battle royale arena, I’m at least not terrible.
Having spent a fair slice of that time on the character select screen, and being faced with the occasional player who kick up a real fuss if you select their favourite class, I began to think about statistics & probability. Anyone who’s been reading for a while will know that I’ve been known to over-analyse games and the numbers involved in battle royale games make them a particularity good target for this as I demonstrated some time ago when I tried to work out the minimum number of players needed to keep Fortnite:BR afloat. The topic of my meandering thoughts this time are that character select screen. Continue reading “Editorial: April – Apex Probability”
Since first dropping in to the world of Apex Legends some time ago, I’ve gradually grown used to the quirks and intricacies of the game. The layout of the island is no longer a mystery and as with all good Battle Royale experiences I’ve begun to single out areas, weapons and tactics that I find to compliment my own jerky and uncoordinated style of play.
As a side note, I’ve also begun to characterise the different specific types of Apex player who joins my three-being squad each round: There is the player who rants and raves that you’ve picked ‘their’ favourite class, the Skull Town fanatic who drops there regardless of the team decision, and that one player who runs off on their own, gets killed then complains that their squad-mates are all terrible players… oh, beneath the veneer of reasonable players there is a vein of douchery running deep.
Along with this, I’ve also gotten to know a few of the classes – after all, this is nominally a class based affair with each ingame character (of which there are now nine) having a passive, tactical, and ultimate ability. To give EA due credit, they’ve actually managed to create a reasonably diverse band of misfits that manage to pack in (albeit fairly unsubtley) some distinctive character traits for each one.
Armed with this experience I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a class guide… but not a class guide outlining good play tactics, or which character has the best hair. No, I’m going to stick to what I know and write a class guide outlining the absolute best ways to screw-up a round. Apex legends is full of opportunities to puncture your own spacehopper, but the true master of fail will be able to utilise each character’s unique abilities to snatch defeat away from the eager jaws of victory. Continue reading “Apex Legends Class Guide: Each Character’s Best Routes to Failure”
… and then a few weeks ago Apex Legends landed without any warning and made lots of people go “Waaahhhh!” – So why was that?
I originally wrote a whole dull paragraph here about my chequered past with PU:BG and Fortnite:BR, but that was far too long and can be summarised by saying:
“I like the concept of Battle Royale games, but I’m just not very good at them”
That’s not to say that skill or ultimate placement correspond to fun, but playing a game that you can’t feel improvement or just generally show up to be an extra notch on someone else’s frag counter is rarely a rewarding experience. I want to feel as though I can at least hold my own, so my infatuation with both of the above titles gradually tarnished until I gave up and uninstalled them. Then Apex Legends showed up (apparently having something to do with Titanfall) and I got sucked back in to that Battle Royale play-loop; firstly out of curiosity but sticking around because it turns out it is actually fun. Continue reading “Apex Legends: A Mythical Geometric Vetrex”
Hundstrasse 