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The Nintendo Switch Needs to Switch up Nintendo.

Matthew Roys Foresight, Opinions, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

When Nintendo first announced the Switch I was excited. This kind of surprised me though since I have never really owned a Nintendo console. Sure, I’ve owned several handhelds from the Gameboy to the 2DS but they have literally just been dedicated Pokemon machines. We also had a household Wii that saw action with Wii Sports Resort and Link’s Crossbow Training but little else.

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The Switch was an interesting concept. A console/handheld hybrid sounded cool and the initial trailer was pleasantly devoid of any gimmicks beyond this portability. They were showing off Skyrim which suggested stronger links with third party developers and most of the actors were young adults instead of children. It looked like they were trying to market the Switch as a more matured console, still fun but aimed at the people closer to my own age who had grown up with Nintendo and still made up a massive portion of sales despite Nintendo’s drive to be a child-oriented company. Their move with the Wii U to add Bayonetta 2 to their exclusive list and include her in Smash Brothers was a step in the right direction so maybe they were learning. Continue reading →

Gwent – Closed Beta First Impressions

Matthew Roys Foresight, Review, Uncategorized , , , , ,

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was by far the best game that I have played in several years. I have put around 200 hours into the game by this point and a good number of those were lost to the addictive mini-game known as Gwent. As somebody that loves collecting things, the whole finding cards to collect them all was something that really drew me in and the card game itself was engaging and fun. When the great CD Projekt Red announced that they were releasing Gwent as its own game I was thrilled. As such, the second that I could I put my name down for the stand alone Gwent game’s closed beta.

So is this new Gwent just more of the same? The game as it was in The Witcher 3 (we’ll refer to this as W3G) was fairly basic and was stacked heavily in the player’s favour once they had collected a few cards. The standalone Gwent shares the same spirit and basic layout as W3G but has been reworked to better suit PvP play and extended deck building.  Continue reading →

Dark Souls 3: Bonfire Journals #1.

Matthew Roys Bonfire Journals, Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

As a writer and gamer, the idea of writing the personal journey of my character through a game is something that I find interesting. Dark Souls is the perfect kind of game for this as your character is a blank slate, the paths are branching and the narrative is non-intrusive. So I am finally giving it a shot. This is the first part of my adventure through DS3. It goes up to the first boss battle of the game. I would have liked to have gone further but in 30 minutes of play I crashed to desktop eight times. Yeah. Enjoy.

Entry 1:

Life. It takes death to understand it. Disjointed memories form together into a vague semblance of the past and create shadowy shapes that is my personal history. But none of it makes sense. I awoke in a craggy graveyard with only fleeting impressions of who I even was. The only thing that I was sure of was that I was clad in leather armour and had a shield and scimitar at my side. They feel natural in my grasp like extensions of my arms. I can only assume that they are mine.

Alone without identity. This is true loneliness, without even your own memories or personality to keep your ragged thoughts company. Who am I? Where am I? Where should I go? These questions settled upon me like crows. Without any clear direction though I could only sit with my shallow mind or move forward and hope. Hope… Continue reading →

The Failures of Fable and how it could have Survived.

Matthew Roys Opinions, Uncategorized , , ,

Since the unfortunate news this month that Lionhead Studios is being closed and Fable Legends has been cancelled, it got me thinking about the Fable series as a whole and where it went wrong. I was a huge fan of the original Fable and even though it under delivered on Peter Molyneux’s promises, (go figure), it is still to this day in my top ten games.

So where did it all go wrong? Fable 1, (and its expansion The Lost Chapters), was a great game but does not hold up so well today in its mechanics. As such I can understand why people who didn’t play it originally would not like it. All the same though, it approached the RPG genre in a refreshing way. It was more of a fairytale setting than the more common high fantasy and relied heavily on its strong sense of British humour. It was also able to create the perfect balance between having a character that players can role-play to their whims while having a strong story, something that even modern games like Fallout 4 struggled with. There was revenge to be had and mysteries about your family to discover while the daunting villain of Jack of Blades always loomed on the horizon. Continue reading →

The Game Awards 2015 Predictions

Matthew Roys Uncategorized , , , ,

It’s getting to that time of year again when award ceremonies pit the best of everything over the past months against each other to decide just what was the best of any given category.

The Game Awards, held on December 3rd, is the biggest award show in video games this year. I will be running through the nominations and offering my thoughts on who will come out on top.

Continue reading →