The Nerd Next Door

When I was a wee lad  Naruto was the hottest anime on the air, Linkin Park had just dropped their Minutes to Midnight album, Michael Bay was breaking the box office with Transformers , and Halo 3 was one of the hottest games released. This was actually the game that got my parents to set us up with Xbox Live, my brother, father, and I all got accounts to play Halo 3 .  A lot of things from Halo 3 are nostalgic for me, but what has recently come back to my mind is its lobby system, a system so good that even Call of Duty copied it. In this era of gaming, when you start playing matchmaking you get taken to a pre-game lobby where you can mingle with other players, vote on map and modes, and listen to slurs dropped by 12-year-olds. Outside of those slurs this system was great, it let you get a feel for who you were playing with or against, and let players choose which maps they actually want to play. After the match you got to choose whether to stick with those people or bail. ...

I've been thinking lately about Call of Duty's  "advanced movement" phase.  When from 2014 to 2016 Call of Duty gave everyone jet thrusters in an attempt at advanced mobility. This era is generally regarded fairly poorly by the COD fandom. Most of the issues behind it have been talked into the ground, about how weapon balance got thrown off, how map design got ruined, and how futuristic movement doesn't belong in a series like COD . But I think this era is vital, as it can teach people about why momentum in a game is so important. Now, for those not in the know; Momentum is what allows the player to carry movement energy from one action to the next. If I'm running and jumping my movement doesn't dead stop when I hit the ground, I'll keep going a little more than expected. The best games with speed usually allow the player to carry their momentum from action to action using the resources the game has given them. For example, in Classic Sonic the Hedgeh...

   Retro Shooters seem to be on the rise lately haven't they? Retro Shooters being fast paced shooters where if you either don't kill everything in the room or blaze out of there at 420mph you failed your ancestors. Six years ago the Retro Shooter was dead and buried; consigned to the dustbin of the 90's along with Jnco's and Vanilla Ice's career. But unlike those things Retro Shooters are back with a steel barreled vengeance. So what changed? Well to understand how the Retro Shooters came back, we have to understand their rise and fall. In 1992 id software released Wolfenstien 3D , the first mass market First Person Shooter; here the objective was to shoot your way out of a Nazi lair because fuck Nazi's. This however was less shooter and more maze game, you had about three types of enemy who did the same thing at varying speeds and your real concern was escaping their lairs, all 60 of them. This would change with id's follow up, Wolfenstien Spear of Desti- ...

When one stays away from a game for a long time the feelings one has towards it may soften or even fade away. This may lead one to wonder, " what was so bad or great about that game? " I was a teenager when I played Battlefield 3 and while I felt (and still feel) the multiplayer is a good time I remembered hating the single-player for BF3. But it had been almost 10 years since I last played through BF3's campaign and I could hardly remember why I hated it. On top of this I've been seeing people demand a remaster of this game, which made me feel like I had been too harsh towards this game seeing as how other folks obviously loved it. So after playing Fire Emblem 7, I decided to use BF3 as a palette cleanser. Taking the words of LateNightGaming into mind when talking about Call of Duty, "Think of it like being an actor in an action movie." It didn't help and to understand why, it's best that I go through step by painful step. Suffer with me. ...

Apex Legends, it's the game everyone and their grandmother is playing these day's it seems. EA and Respawn Entetainment's newest Battle Royale shooter has come to take the world by storm and take on Fortnite while Tetris 99 sits in the background, waiting. Personally I like Apex, play it once a day; I like the emphasis on teamwork, the colorful cast (I'm a Gibraltar main, how about you?), the solid movement mechanics, and the gunplay. Now I won't go into how Apex tapped into a cultural zeitgeist to go at Fortnite's jugular. But I wanna go over how we got to Apex, what lead to it, and how rich Apex's legacy truly is. Now, many people know that Apex is a semi-sequel/spinoff to Titanfall but what some might not know is the legacy goes even further than two bitchin mecha shooters from 2014 and 2016. Indeed Apex inherited a rich legacy from all the way back in 90's. Around that time, the people who would go onto found Respawn, Jason West and Vince Zamp...