Medium Mashup

Author: Ross Miller

  • Unknown Hosts 8/5/2015

    Welcome to another episode of Unknown Hosts! This week, we talk news alongside some of the biggest announcements at Gamescom!

    Timecodes below:

    0:00 – Intro, Who’s Playing What?
    9:34 – Windows 10

    The Good, The Bad, The Kappa
    16:40 – FFVII Remake Will Have a New Combat System
    21:37 – Bungie Replacing All of Peter Dinklage’s Lines in Destiny with Nolan North
    26:14 – Microsoft Moving Away from Third-Party Exclusives

    Game Review:
    34:13 – Portal Stories: Mel

    Gamescom Coverage:
    45:55 – Halo Wars 2
    47:36 – Directx 12
    55:30 – Full-feature DVR
    58:06 – Halo 5 eSports Features
    1:00:20 – First Gameplay for Scalebound (http://www.ign.com/videos/2015/08/04/scalebound-gameplay-reveal-gamescom-2015)
    1:03:38 – Quantum Break Cross-Media Details
    1:08:33 – Need for Speed
    1:09:55 – Mirror’s Edge
    1:11:06 – Star Wars: The Old Republic
    1:11:33 – Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2
    1:13:15 – Old Republic and MMO’s
    1:14:10 – Sims 4
    1:16:13 – Star Wars: Battlefront
    1:18:13 – FIFA 16 FUT mode
    1:20:15 – Smaller Gamescom Games

    1:22:40 – Plugs

  • Rocket League, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Mandatory Subscription Services

    rocket league

    When Sony moved to make Playstation Plus mandatory for Playstation 4 online play, they knew it was going to be an unpopular move. The way they broke the information in the middle of their legendary 2013 E3 presentation was pure industry slight of hand. Playstation fans were too excited about Sony’s big announcements, including the PS4 price point and Sony’s commitment to physical game trading, to pay much attention to a single bullet-point listing “Online Play” as a benefit of Playstation Plus. But after a few days, the fanbase began to catch on, and not everybody was happy that the Playstation Network was now modeling itself off of Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

    However, as Microsoft started giving free games to its Xbox Live Gold subscribers and Sony made their free-game service an online subscription, a funny thing happened to both platforms: their communities became stronger. On the Playstation 3, the Plus members were a small subset of the community, and many of the games that were given away for free had been available for years before. But on PS4, where most owners were subscribers out of necessity and the titles given away each month were new, many players found themselves playing the same new games on a monthly basis.

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  • Her Story Review

    her story

    Her Story isn’t like other games. Hell, it’s hard to even classify it as a game, really. As soon as you begin, you’re shown a 90s-era CRT monitor with a search engine open for the word “MURDER.” Some notes on the desktop indicate that you can search other terms and find videos (actual taped videos, like the infamous 90s-era FMV games) from a police database regarding a murder case.. This experience makes up the entirety of the game: you watch videos of the same actress testifying in the case, take note of potential keywords, search for them, watch “new” videos, and try to put together what happened for yourself. As you dig deeper, it becomes clear that the murder itself is just a jumping off point for a much more complicated story about this woman’s past.

    The thing that is going to make or break the game for a lot of people is whether or not this non-linear player-guided storytelling approach is enough to warrant the experience. In a way, there is no real goal or ending here. After watching a certain percentage of the in-game videos, a text-chat window will pop up asking if you’ve seen enough to know what happened. If you answer yes and quit out, the credits roll, but it’s largely arbitrary. I had a pretty complete concept of what happened long before the chat prompt, and players are free to keep searching for more videos long after the game “ends.” The story (which is quite interesting, albeit far-fetched) is definitely the draw here, not the gameplay itself or the satisfaction of completion.

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  • Unknown Hosts 7/29/2015

    Welcome to another episode of Unknown Hosts! This week, we’ve got LOTS of great coverage for you!

    Feel free to jump around using the handy timecodes below!

    0:00 – Intro
    4:09 – Win a Ticket to TwitchCon
    8:00 – Ark “Survival of the Fittest” Team Deathmatch Challenge
    10:24 – Choice Chamber: Games Designed Specifically for Twitch

    The Good, The Bad, The Kappa
    15:25 – Electronic Sports League Introducing Drug Testing
    23:50 – Razer Buys Ouya
    36:48 – Dragon Quest X and XI Confirmed for the Nintendo NX
    43:10 – Microsoft considering Windows 10-to-Xbox-One gaming compatibility
    48:00 – Rise of the Tomb Raider coming to PS4 1 year after Xbox One’s release
    56:23 – Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro still want to work on a project together
    1:01:46 – Final Witcher 3 Free DLC: New Game + Mode
    1:07:35 – The Flock

    1:20:45 – Plugs

  • It Follows Review

    it-follows

    Horror is often dismissed by “serious” filmgoers as a base genre, full of cliches and rarely engaging with the audience beyond making them jump. However, like with any film genre, a movie is only as low brow as its creators decide to make it. When a filmmaker wants to say more with their work, genre constraints are simply a small hurdle to overcome. In some cases, genre conventions can even be strengths, ways to further explore a particular topic. The latter is very much true in recent indie horror film It Follows, which uses an 80s horror framework to examine the subject of sexual promiscuity.

    The look and feel of the movie places us right at home within this genre. Many scenes take place within a suburban neighborhood, not unlike slasher film classics like Halloween, while the synth-heavy score tells us exactly what to expect. The central premise too, regarding an entity that follows victims based on sexual activity, is taking the subtext of the slasher genre and making it text.

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