inFamous Second Son vs. Mass Effect

Happy first post of 2015! and with it being the first post of the new year, I am going to absolutely do the same content as always! Surprise! Well here's a breakdown of inFamous for no real reason.

InFamous Second Son was the game that Playstation had managed to release exclusively early in the release of the PS4 that really displayed the power of the PS4 and the extent of exclusives PlayStation had at the time. And this game was pretty darn good. The graphics are high fidelity and you can pull off huge amounts of damage and explosions in game that all look brilliant. The game play is solid with all of the abilities and upgrades making the game diverse. But with that all, I want to talk about one of the staples of inFamous games which is the Hero/inFamous choice decisions. This is because one of my other favourite games, Mass Effect 2, also had this system, being the Paragon/Renegade system. The difference being, the two games handled the system very differently. 

In both games, you play the game normally, but in several plot moments you choose to do something good or do something bad and this will affect your character’s morale alignment. Doing a lot of bad things like kicking babies will make you evil and doing a bunch of helping granny’s cross the street will make you good. This varies the game play in both Mass Effect and inFamous Second Son, but in much different ways. In Mass Effect, Commander Shepard would be more of an A-hole or hero in dialogue with other characters, allowing him to make decisions he could not have made if he was neutral. In InFamous, not only does your character change, but you can then unlock new abilities in game play that give you more options in combat (such as more AoE damage as evil and more precision damage as hero) which I would argue makes the game significantly different compared to Mass Effect. 

This is a great example of narrative storytelling vs. game play story telling. The hero/villain aspects in Mass Effect only affect the narrative of the game, whereas the hero/villain aspects of inFamous affects the game play. This tells me that the experiences made in inFamous are much more valuable to establishing your character than the narrative. This is because you can show a player who he is or let him be who he wants to be, and the second option is much more effective at establishing a character. This needs to be implemented in more games and I feel although this was a short post I’ve left at least one person thinking about this topic.

Minecraft: The Breakdown

So I would have reviewed another game if I had not been sucked into playing this game. So I'm doing something a little different. This is still a review, but breaks down the game a little more, telling you what to expect from it.

Made by Mojang, which is lead and founded by the very famous Markus Persson, also known as Notch, Minecraft is a surprising indie sandbox game that is now one of the top three highest selling games in history. So this game has some serious stats backing it up.

I'm going to explain Minecraft like the readers if this article haven't heard of it. Which I'm pretty sure is statistically impossible because last I heard it is the highest selling game that will ever exist. I'm joking of course, but this game is huge. Even the graphics of Minecraft are very influential, although a very simple voxel based graphics system that uses cubes and randomly generated worlds to create a new world for each player that loads the game up. The graphics and a lot of the base numbers in the game are 64. The graphics are 64 bit and a "stack" of items  in the player's inventory is measured in 64's, so it is a recurring theme. As far as actual statistics go, for the PC version of the game at least, there is no clear framerate as the game's settings and different computers will vary the performance. On a regular machine with medium settings you can get 60fps so that's the standard. The actual pixel graphics are clean and look good, even in bulky cobblestone structures and wooden walls, and they blend in well with each other 

One of the really amazing things about Minecraft is resource packs. Resource packs are community made skins for the blocks and creatures in the game that can vary the style of graphics in the game. Resource packs can vary from standard 64 bit and up to 512 bit realistic graphics. Resource packs can really spice up the game.

Minecraft is the game that put sandbox voxel based games into the mainstream. In being a sandbox game, there is no objectives. Like at all. None. There is no narrator, there are no characters, and there is nothing telling you what to do. This is the beauty of Minecraft. You create your own objectives. You can choose to build vast cities on your own or play online with a friend to survive the night. There are three main worlds, which is the normal overworld, the Nether, which is the game's version of hell that has lava lakes and dark red stone, and all the enemies shoot fire. The final world is the End, which is used to fight one of the game's bosses. Yes, there are bosses, and yes I said there was no story but to prove my point, the game never tells you about them, you have to find them. You can choose to fight the Wither or the Ender Dragon, the Wither being a very hard normal boss with a special way to summon it, but only considered a mini boss by the rules of RPG's. The Ender Dragon is considered the final boss of the game by these same rules. You have to collect items to open a portal to The End, where you destroy towers to damage and kill the dragon. After beating the dragon, some very cryptic, drug induced credits roll and you are put back into the world like nothing happened. This is the only story to the game and it leaves a lot to be interpreted. 

The way Minecraft plays is very simple to start, but can become overwhelmingly complex if you invest in the game. You can play one of three game modes. Survival is a game mode where you simply create a world with a health and food bar, and you have to survive the night against zombies and spiders and other enemies, all while staying fed and having to make a house and mine for iron and gold and diamond to survive. You break blocks with your hands at first, collecting them in your inventory, which has room for items as well as special slots for armor and crafting. You start off collecting wood and basic materials, but you can use the materials like wood and such to craft items, which involves placing materials in a crafting table or the crafting section of your inventory to create new items. These items can be blocks, utility items like chests to store things and furnaces to cook or smelt things, or you can craft tools and weapons, tools like shovels and axes being able to destroy certain types of blocks faster and weapons to deal more damage to creatures. With these tools you can mine for better materials to improve your weapons, all of which have durability and will break. You can also gain experience through mining or killing enemies. Experience gives you levels which can be used in an enchanting table to enchant wepaons, tools, and armor to have special attributes. The mobs of the game can be broken down into three classes. There is hostiles, which are enemies like zombies and giant spiders that spawn in dark places and at night and try and hurt the player. There are NPC's which are things like pigs and cows and chickens which can be harvested for food. There are also villagers, which live in randomly spawned  and generated villages, and you can trade with them for their currency, which is the very rare emeralds. There are also pets like wolves and cats and horses, which can be tamed with certain items to fight for you or for you to ride on. With all of these aspects, the surviving aspect of Survival mode can quickly dissipate and be replaced by building better houses or getting the best armor. One other mode is Creative mode, where you are immortal and can fly, and instead of having to survive, you can infinitely build massive structures and cities. The final mode is adventure mode, where you can play community made story driven maps where you cannot break blocks and have to play the way the creator meant you to play, which adds a story to the game, but not made by the devs, made by the community, adding a lot of variety. Some other cool features are redstone, which acts as electricity and can be combined with pistons and repeaters to make circuits and very cool wiring feats. There is also a completely different aspect of the game which is multiplayer. You can simply choose to play with a friend over LAN or you can play or create a server to play with a friend online, but some of the group made servers have things like mini games and currency systems, which are really cool and well made.

Although most people that play this game will say it, this game is good. It is currently about 30$ on Mojang's website, PSN, Xbox Live and Apple's App Store and anyone who is creative should at least check it out.