Foz's video game blog (an 8 bit mind in an 8 GB World)

[SirFozzie]

We are through part 1 of the Hard West Campaign. So far, only six or seven deaths. I mean my deaths, not theirs.

edit: 10:15 PM. switched away from Hard West to Rocket League

Twitch

Stop in and say hi!

edit: 12/31. I've decided to turn this into my thread for updates from the blog. Hope you guys don't mind, I'll try to keep it to one update per day.

[SirFozzie]

Taking a break from Hard West, moving on to Rocket League!

[PilotMan]

Rocket League is so damn fun.

[SirFozzie]

Agreed. Especially when you can get a crew together,

[sovereignstar v2]

I would love to kick some of your asses at Rocket League sometime.*

*PS I suck

[sovereignstar v2]

Are you torrenting pr0n? I can't get quality for shit on your stream.

[SirFozzie]

Nope! THat's strange, but then again I can't currently connect to twitch.. next week I will run it again, let me know when you guys are available and I'll do a FOFC 8bitmind twitch stream.

BTW, I hope this is not violating any board rules (if so, let me know, and I'll remove it), but I set up a Patreon to support the blog and the twitch stream (one of the goals is to get upgraded router for better streaming)

Support David Yellope creating an8bitmind.com, a Video Game Blog

[PilotMan]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

Agreed. Especially when you can get a crew together,

I just got my 3 boys to get it on Steam. We are going to have some great 2v2 battles.

[SirFozzie]

Oh, here's some posts that will be going up (as well as all the news I can get my grubby little paws on)

I won't link the post here this time, but I have a number of things that are going up in the next week:

A series of posts chronicling the history of Star Wars games, all the way from the 1983 arcade game, to the recent release of Star Wars Battlefront. (I expect this to be several posts, there are a LOT of Star Wars games to cover)

Keeping with the Star Wars theme, we will have our first “Blast from the Past” review, BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic!

As a special bonus, we will have a truly OLD SCHOOL Blast from the Past, a retrospective of 80’s game designer Strategic Simulations, Incorporated (SSI), a company I spent about 1,000,000 hours playing their games growing up. (Sword of Aragon, AD&D Gold Box Series, Roadwar 2000, the list goes on and on)

A review of Hard West (those of you who were on for the Twitch stream got to watch, and there was much death.. especially at the beginning where I had trouble figuring out how to set up ambushes in setup mode)

As well as the second Twitch stream.

[Peregrine]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

As a special bonus, we will have a truly OLD SCHOOL Blast from the Past, a retrospective of 80’s game designer Strategic Simulations, Incorporated (SSI), a company I spent about 1,000,000 hours playing their games growing up. (Sword of Aragon, AD&D Gold Box Series, Roadwar 2000, the list goes on and on)

I bought most of the Gold Box series when it came out recently on gog.com - surprisingly still fun even though they are very dated.

[SirFozzie]

Yes. A lot of the gold box stuff was very well crafted (it's a shame that the series was looking dated when they did Unlimited Adventures.. it would have been a mlot better in the early days of the internet where you could share files)

[SirFozzie]

A new Wot I'm Playing (DDS: Pro Football 2016, full review to come early next week) and a long form article on how this time, the digital download market will probably stick (and what that means for Gamestop and other such retailers. Hint: It's time to diversify)

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...al_revolution/

[SirFozzie]

Here's the Weekend News for the first weekend of 2016. we have a couple items on the Oculus Rift, Steam details of account exposure, a couple companies reversing recent trends back into the gaming market, and FF IX coming to phones/PC.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...kend_news_1-1/

[SirFozzie]

Soverignstar's joined me for Rocket League, so far we're 5-2 on Snow Day games! If there was ranked Snow Day, we would TOTALLY rock our rankings.


Twitch

[SirFozzie]

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...f-aragon-1989/

The first "Blast from the Past" article, featuring 1989's "Sword of Aragon" by Strageic Simulations, Incorporated.

[SirFozzie]

Our first full fledged review, is Wolverine Studios Draft Day Sports: Pro Football 16. And that infamous quote from the Wire comes to mind. DDS:PF16 came at the king (FOF7) did it miss?

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...football-2016/

[SirFozzie]

Part one of the Star Wars video games retrospective is up. Do you know how hard it was to find some of these games, even screenshots were hard to find! And yet, I want to play a lot of them (ok, not Jedi Arena. Seriously, if you showed me a screenshot and said it was one of those poorly made porn games for the Atari 2600, I would have believed you.)

Also, anyone find any games I missed? (I didn't cover all the arcade conversions to home consoles)

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...e-early-years/

[Peregrine]

Wow Sword of Aragon - haven't thought of that in a long time - great game though.

[SirFozzie]

Actually, something interesting was just brought to my attention regarding the early days of Star Wars games. There was ANOTHER Atari 2600 game, entitled Return of the Jedi: Game I, that had you play a hang-gliding ewok who could drop rocks on enemies (and commandeer their vehicles to use it) However, Parker Brothers deemed the controls too difficult and cancelled the game before release. The designer of the game held onto it and gave the prototype copy to his son, who then sold it years later. Now you can play it online!

Star Wars: Ewok Adventure (Prototype) for the Atari 2600 - YouTube

[SirFozzie]

Study indicating nearly 40 million VR Users by the end of 2016? Don't believe the hype, but I don't need to, to understand why they're calling 2016 the Year of VR. (also, check out the previous article on the Oculus Rift pre-orders opening and blowing up the Oculus website! )

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...by-end-of-2016

[Subby]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

Our first full fledged review, is Wolverine Studios Draft Day Sports: Pro Football 16. And that infamous quote from the Wire comes to mind. DDS:PF16 came at the king (FOF7) did it miss?

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...football-2016/

That seriously looks like someone took a massive shit on a computer screen and then used congealed hobo blood to try and get it off.

/review

[SirFozzie]

Ouch.

Well, as I said to Gary when I gave him my impressions, the UI doesn't yet mesh well with the game (way too dry, cluttered, etcetera) and he indicated that they were looking into making it look more like the other DDS series games, and as I said, there is a decent core here.

For folks who love the FOF7 type game, this will be a problem as FOF7 does things well that DDS:PF does not, but I think there are some decent things in DDS:PF that indicates room for growth (the 2d gameplay is nice, and the flexibility of league creation as well).

I still prefer FOF7 for most reasons, but it's gone through seven iterations, plus the College games. DDS:PF is really in its first iteration, so we'll see how and if the game improves.

[Groundhog]

I think your comment re: splitting the stats into categories could be extended to just about every area of the sim (based on your screenshots in the review). Shrink the size of ratings/stats display screen to give it less of an excel spreadsheet look, and bust each view up into categories that you navigate with tabs/pushbuttons etc.

[SirFozzie]

Definitely. Some work with a face creator would help give it some personality as well. As I said in the Bottom Line of the review, there is stat overload and some glazing of the eyes going on here.

[SirFozzie]

The Weekend News update, featuring a mouse that brings back memories of the Dreamcast, Steam news, and the booby prize for "First major release of 2016 to be delayed until 2017!"

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...d-news-update/

[SirFozzie]

A new Wot I'm Playing. I've described before how many hours I've played the Football Manager series (thousands), but I go into a bit more detail about why I spend so many hours on this one game series.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...-manager-2016/

[SirFozzie]

Part Two of the Star Wars Retrospective is up! Featuring X-Wing, and it's various sequels. Instead of writing about all these games, I should be playing them (they're available and updated to play on modern machines too!)

(and I wonder if I was the only one who decided to pay full price for the CD-ROM edition of X-wing, rather then send in my game disc and wait for them to send me the special edition)

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...ective-part-2/

[sovereignstar v2]

You telling me I could play TIE Fighter on a modern PC?

[SirFozzie]

apparently, Sov doesn't read the articles

But yes, a ton of the games have been released through GOG.com, with tweaks to play them on modern computers:

For example.. http://www.gog.com/game/star_wars_ti...pecial_edition

[SirFozzie]

Interesting news out today, as Electronic Arts announced they are bringing their EA Access model over to PC in the form of Origin Access, which offers access to 15 or so games for $5 a month, as well as early looks at upcoming releases.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...ption-service/

[SirFozzie]

A new feature makes its debut tonight, as Josh (SackAttack here on FOFC) of GameNikkiInExile.com joins me for a round up of gaming news, with some gratuitous Foz-bashing on the side!

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...-january-2016/

[SirFozzie]

Just think, you'd have to hit the most recent Powerball 15 times or so to buy this company. Not bad, Blizzard.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...at-20-billion/

[SirFozzie]

Between the Pats game, and learning a new dice game with Eric and Chris (which will be covered in a Wot I'm Playing in the near future), didn't get much done today, but I did come across the best thing ever, a full choir version of Still Alive.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...ot-done-today/

[SirFozzie]

Had to share this. The good thing about tabletop skirmishing games (like Warhammer) is that it doesn't lead to this, generally being a 1 v 1 game, but I know say, Diplomacy has ended groups that have been running for decades.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...-it-bites-you/

[SirFozzie]

A Late night edition of Wot I'm playing, featuring Reiner Kinizia's Age of War.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...as-age-of-war/

[SirFozzie]

(hums in Peyton Manning voice) Mass Effect you play so good...

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...mass-effect-1/

[SirFozzie]

Thanks to the fine folks @Strexm, I now have an overlay! We're in the middle of the 0-100 WoW Tanking Challenge! twitch.tv/sirfozzie !

[SirFozzie]

Couple new posts up, breaking down the Atari Vault (including classic arcade games), and breaking down Game Informer's Top 50 of the year, and some of the statistics will surprise you!

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...-of-2015-list/

(also in blog news, we will be running streams at least 6 days a week, starting around 8 PM Eastern daily)

[SirFozzie]

There are reasons I will add non-video game stories to the blog. Like this one about a security flaw with Lenovo software (yes, again). Why? Because it allows me to sneak in a gratuitous Spaceballs reference.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...es-about-apps/

[SirFozzie]

Happy Hump Day! Hopefully, you're getting it, but if you're not, at least get OVER the hump with a Wednesday Night Twitch Stream! Gotta build up a schedule for the Fifteen in February! Twitch

(also we have a new couple article on problems with Super Mario Maker problems, and yet another delay for Mighty No 9)

[SirFozzie]

I can't play one of the hottest selling games on Steam. I want to, but you know, the fact I can't read Korean or Chinese is a slight issue (and also: A Ninety buck game is one of the hottest new games on Steam? Talk about a rabid fanbase!)

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...ames-on-steam/

[mckerney]

From what I have read some people might have an easier time playing a game in Chinese than finishing all of the puzzles in The Witness.

[SirFozzie]

It's an early stream tonight! Finally breaking through WotLK, into Cataclysm dungeons. The 0-100 Tanking Challenge Continues! Twitch

[Neuqua]

I checked out your twitch stream for a few minutes, is that comment section commonly found on twitch? Jeez, talk about common denominator insults.

You're a better man than I for putting up with it.

[SirFozzie]

Thanks Neuq: That's.. not usual (that's the first "troll raid" I've had to deal with), but some of the bigger streams like Hafu have to have several mods on duty watching chat because there are people out there trolling.

[SirFozzie]

Wasn't a long stream tonight, kept having connection issues to warcraft, but here's the weekend news update! https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...ws-update-129/

[SirFozzie]

A new edition of Wot I'm Playing, as my gaming group has decided they're in the mood for BIG GIANT STOMPY ROBOT gameplay, and you don't get much bigger, gianter, or.. (um.. stompier? Is that a word?) then Battletech, a game three decades strong and getting stronger!

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...-1-battletech/

Oh, and I've started the Fifteen for February, and will have a report on the first game in the Core Four, Darkest Dungeon later today!

[SirFozzie]

Darkest Dungeon.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...rkest-dungeon/

A game about flawed heroes, a dungeon into the mouth of hell itself. And despite the heroes being flawed, spending their time they're NOT fighting the minions of darkness.. drinking and gambling, and whoring.. being even more heroic because they're so flawed. And because there's no phoenix downs, no 1ups here. They die, they're gone forever (especially because the game frequently autosaves to prevent savescumming).

So, you get more invested when that character you spent hours and hours building up that came through for you time and time again dies because you thought he could pull it out one more time, and you asked for that one step over the line.

It's great. I love it.

And it's the first game in my Fifteen for February attempt.

[Mota]

If I could finish ONE game in February I'd be delighted!

I started Disgaea 5 and Final Fantasy V. I'm also working on Witcher 3, Atelier Rorona, Tales of Graces F.

[SirFozzie]

Please, all of you, do not tell me you are playing X-Com 2 before Friday. This game is getting the hottest reviews I've sen, and it's unusual for any February release to be called a shoe-in for game of the year consideration, but.. yeah, we're there. I'll have a full review of it up on release.

https://www.an8bitmind.com/index.php...are-coming-in/