Garry's Mod - The 'Immortal' Game?

So if you're familiar with Steam, the online games distribution service, you probably know what Garry's Mod  (GMod) is. It's a game that uses assets from most Source engine games, such as Counter Strike Source and Half Life 2, to allow you to essentially mess around and create maps, vehicles, more assets and even gamemodes. Sounds pretty dumb/cool right? Well i've put almost 80 hours in over the last few years and that's nothing compared to most GMod players.

GMod is constantly adapting and changing with new user-created assets and gamemodes. Even the base game, in which you use other Source game's assets to create things such as vehicles or just fun mini-games, has kept people entertained for waaaay too many hours. The highest amount of total time i've seen one person have in the game is 18,000 hours.

GMod is pretty unique in that regard. Not many games can boast the amount of content that it has, which is clearly backed up by how much time people spend in the game. Combined with the fact that the game's creator, Garry Newman, continuously updates the game with upgraded features (such as the semi-recent Steam Workshop integration), I feel like the question needs to be asked; Is Garry's Mod an immortal game? Will it last forever, being constantly updated, or will the creator eventually have to make a sequel to accommodate for newer versions of the Source engine?

Personally I'd say the game still has a lot of life in it! Perhaps not 'immortal' but it could easily last another 4 or 5 years. I think it's inevitable that the game will either stop being updated, or receive a sequel for newer engines, but until then Garry and his small team will continue to update alongside the heaps of fan-created content such as the 'Deathrun' and 'Trouble In Terrorist Town' gamemodes that have become increasingly popular over the last few years. I for one, will be along for the ride, but what do you guys think? Drop me a tweet over on my twitter or leave a comment on this post!

Twitch Plays Pokémon - The First Adventure Afterthoughts

Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) is a social experiment/livestream in which the audience participate by entering commands into the chat. I use the term 'social experiment' loosely, considering it's mostly just 90,000 fellow nerds furiously typing commands at the same time as each other, debating the course of action and creating a hugely enjoyable community.  The stream's host is running a script that picks up commands from the chat and inputs them into the game (a ROM of Pokémon Red), allowing the audience to control Red, the game's protagonist. Brilliant in theory, hectic in reality and fun regardless of this.

It can't be denied that TPP is great fun to follow. From the early moments of our adventure as we trained ABBY the Charmander, the rise of 'Bird Jesus' the Pidgeot, the evolution and eventual release of 'The False Prophet' Flareon, the slow progression from gym to gym, to the final moments when AA-Jay the Zapdos landed that killing blow on Blastoise. And of course, who could forget about the omniscient, omnipotent Lord Helix and our entire day spent stuck in the Team Rocket hideout?

As people who were there in the first adventure's final moments say, "You always remember where you were when Blastoise fell". The finale was truly epic; many members of the 80,000+ audience admitted to crying tears of joy at the game's completion. Me, being the cold hearted Onix that I am, even let out a tear or two. I couldn't help it, we'd come so far and I'd grown so attached to our team. To see us win that final match and land that killing blow after 16 days felt like we'd accomplished something far greater.

As I type we're almost a day into Adventure 2. This time it's the world of Pokémon Crystal, with our custom-named trainer 'AJDNNW', or AJ for short. Will this adventure be as epic as our first, or will it suffer from the classic "Never-As-Good-As-The-First-Time" trope? (that was a mouthful!). Join the rest of us and find out! You can check out the last adventure's team and progress in this Bulbapedia page, alongside information on our current progress. Hope to see you guys in the stream!

Honourable mention to 'AATTVVV', (All-Terrain Venomoth) for being the ultimate Dragon Slayer AND coincidentally my favourite member of Red's team. YOU'S MY HOMIE ATV!

Rant: Gaming's Update Obsession

If you follow me on twitter, you'll know I recently got a PS4. While I haven't had much time to play it what with being at Uni, I went home for the weekend and decided to boot up the system. When the system loaded up it told me I couldn't log in and needed a firmware update. "Fair enough" I thought, and waited 30 minutes for the update to download and install. Ok good, that's all out of the way. My console restarted and I was informed that there were updates ranging from 300mb to 2gb for every game in my collection. 6 hours later, all the updates were FINALLY done.

The past few years have seen big changes in the way developers maintain their games, but this culture of buying a game and then having huge updates to fix them post-release is really starting to annoy me. It's great that developers try to fix bugs in their games, but these bugs shouldn't even happen. If games weren't churned out like episodes of a TV Soap, they'd be ironed out and bugs will be fixed.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag had the biggest update of 2gb (and probably had the most problems in the first place, including an annoying uplay glitch that stopped me from doing ANY of the online/multiplayer activities in the game - I still don't know if this is fixed as of writing this) and also happened to be the one game I wanted to play. I ended up compromising with a console, as if it's an actual human being, and decided to waste some time on Battlefield 4...
or at least I would've, if it didn't have a 350mb update that I also had to wait on. Of course, everything else updating alongside it didn't help either.

So yeah, I don't understand the huge focus developers have on patching their games after release, unless it adds new content. I totally understand why it's done considering the way games are released these days, but I can't help but wish we lived in a time like the retro days of what you buying at the store being the full package - how can someone say a game is released if it's a broken mess in need of constant patching and updates?

Jazzpunk - An Early Access Review

Jazzpunk successfully creates a comedic world that is still believable enough to make the player really want to get immersed in it: later puzzles include such silly events as changing the time on a clock so everyone in a building suddenly thinks it's lunch time, or shooting down carrier pigeons with secret messages attached to them. Yet these silly puzzle aspects and ridiculous character dialogues are the charm of Jazzpunk. The game even manages to break the 4th wall with comedic dialogue such as a conversation I heard between two NPCs that ended with "ah well, the player won't notice anyway". Combined with the uniquely colourful art style and character design, Jazzpunk is a really unique gem hidden amongst a sea of cheap and simple indie games. Games like this are always refreshing to find, and I can't wait to see the full release and other's opinions on February 7th. And of course, the game has a much deeper and slightly confusing plot and meaning that i'm mentioning in this post... but I'm not going to spoil that for anyone.

The trailer alone already sets a strange setting of an alternate reality of espionage and secrecy.

I also really like the way the characters are designed. They're VERY simplistic, but that really does benefit the gamefeel. Everything suits the overall style. Similarly, the sound effects (not soundtrack) is also simple - no fancy explosions with over-the-top noises here, everything is kept minimal to avoid overdoing it and taking away from the comedic situation that is the entire game.

I'm not going to score games or give them ratings, because you should be able to work out my opinions from what i've written. (Clue for this one: I feel very positively about this game!)

You can check out Jazzpunk on the game's website, or buy it on its Steam page

Jazzpunk - An Early Access Preview

Recently I was contacted on Twitter by Adult Swim Games, publishers of Necrophone Game's upcoming title. The guys at ASG already followed my twitter account, and after the exchange of a few direct messages, offered me an early access key for a review copy of Jazzpunk, to be released on February 7th. That's the kind of offer I can't turn down! So I added it to my Steam library, booted up the game, and with zero expectations, I was thrown into the comedic cold war reality of Jazzpunk.

There will be spoilers for the first area of the game in this post, you've been warned.

After launching the game you're given a lengthy intro cutscene in which the player 'sneaks' through airport security in a human-shaped suitcase, which then suddenly flips into an 80s colour scheme-filled sequence of drug trip-esque scenarios culminating in the player being stood in front of the suitcase in a long corridor. So far we've had 2 minutes of trippy cut-scenes, and we're still no wiser on the plot of this game - but does that really matter? Personally, I was gripped immediately after that 'wacky' intro. Walking down the corridor and into a waiting room causes an NPC to ask you to wait until her boss is ready to see you, and the game directs you to a chair. By sitting down you can read the covers of such magazines as "Reader's Digestive Organs", a parody of a real life publication.

After being called into the office, you're given a mission: to infiltrate the Soviet Consulate and obtain some data they've taken. Your boss then 'goes to the wine cellar' and leaves you to take your "Missionoyl". Missionoyl seems to be some kind of medicine that augments your ability to do a mission, however from what i've played thus far i'm not sure if that's all. I take the missionoyl and a countdown appears. 'Starting mission in

5.

4.

3.

2.

1...'

Screen fades to black.

 

You can check out Jazzpunk on the game's website, or buy it on its Steam page

Obligatory Introduction

Hey, hi, 'sup.

Alright now that formality is out of the way, let's get down to the damn brass tacks, the informalities. My name is Rowan Brocklesby, I go by Valkenhyne in most nooks and crannies of this internet place, Twitter being where I'm most active.
You can find me on Twitter @Valkenhyne, or even on my considerably less active facebook page. I also spent a few years of my life making YouTube videos, which I plan to return to eventually. They won't be "let's play" style videos like I used to make though - I'm considering moving into a more ProJared or Caddicarus-esque format

I'm pretty vocal about almost everything, but I'm most passionate about video games - hence this blog I guess. I plan to write about topics new, old, and just gaming industry things that are on my mind. I'll probably throw in a bit of internet culture here and there too, for flavour. As of right now, the frequency of updates depends on my University workload (at the time of writing this I'm procrastinating a 1500 word assignment, go figure).

SO YEAH I hope you like other people's opinions because that's what all this is about. Also I'm pretty sarcastic and cynical. That MIGHT show through. Maybe.

-Rowan

P.S. I really like Sonic The Hedgehog games and I guarantee at some point there'll be a post about that, calling it right here and now.

P.P.S. follow me on social networks for updates to this blog, unless you don't care in which case HOW COULD YOU LEAVE ME HOW WILL I FEED OUR CHILDREN