Tag: video games

This “gamers as athletes” is going a bit too far now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The guy on the left is Shin-Soo Choo.  Shin-Soo Choo is a Major League Baseball player, and an extremely talented one at that.  Aside from that, Shin-Soo Choo is something of an international hero, as he has been a chief member of the Korean National Baseball team that enjoyed moderate successes in tournaments such as the World Baseball Classic as well as the Asian Games.  Shin-Soo Choo is considered a genuine five-tool player; he hits very well, he hits with power (read: home runs), plays excellent defense, has a great throwing arm, and runs very effectively.  It is safe to say that Shin-Soo Choo is the most talented and successful Korean-born Major League Baseball player in history.

The guy on the right is Dong-Hwan Kim.  Dong-Hwan Kim plays Starcraft for a living.  He sits at a computer for a living, staring into a monitor, playing a video game.  The only physical thing he really demonstrates is dexterity with his fingers, or as those in such a scene like to refer to as “Actions per minute (APM)” which is basically just how good a guy is at repeatedly clicking a mouse and a few keys on the keyboard.

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EA Sports presents eSPORTS ’14

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s right. A video game about people playing video games. And why the hell not? As long as eSports are being recognized as professional sport, why shouldn’t they be able to have a game made out of it?

Think about that for a second. Imagine creating a character that plays video games, but not just any video games, but other EA sports video games. There’s a repeating image kind of redundancy about it, but that’s what professional gamers do for a living sometimes; why shouldn’t EA try and capitalize on that, and make the players in the game play other EA video games? In fact, they should make the capability to make their players play other EA titles as egregiously priced downloadable content, so that they can make even moar moneys!

But back to eSPORTS14. There’s so many directions that a game like this could be developed. Like FIFA, you could choose a nationality; the Koreans and the Chinese would be stupidly overpowered in talent and capability, but have single digits in charisma, marketability and personality. Europeans would score high in charisma, marketability and arrogance, and South American nations would have a 99 in trolling ability, and nothing else except maybe FIFA. And since North America is pretty much EA’s stomping ground, they would be given a fairly balanced kit to work with.

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Video game health restoration, in general

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

After I finished writing about herbs and health restoration in Resident Evil in a previous post, my mind drifted off like “yeah, herbs are so unorthodox and illogical, unlike health items in other video games wait”

And so I began to think about health items in varying other games, and then inappropriately applying them with real world logic. Doing such basically takes a lot of fun and imagination out of them in one regard, but in another regard, creates a whole lot of funny theoreticals and imagery.

Like take for example, food. Food is pretty much one of the most commonly used things designated as a health restoration item in a wide expanse of video game genres. It’s mostly because food is awesome, and for all living creatures, a necessary staple for living. But apply some real world logic to how food is presented in video games, and then it makes absolutely no sense at all. If anything, eating food amidst the throes of combat should probably be considered detrimental in the big picture.

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How to break Final Fantasy Tactics

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The following was accomplished on Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions for iPad, but is capable of working for all other iterations and platforms of FFT.

Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty much one my favorite games ever. It’s challenging, has a fantastic story to those invested into the game enough to decipher it all out, and is a long, rewarding journey of a role-player. When they released it for the iOS, I purchased it immediately, and it has been my go-to way of killing time on my iPad when I don’t have wifi, and don’t feel like/ are out of books to read on Kindle. I would be Tom Cruise on Oprah or Nintendo 64-kid levels of ecstatic if Square would go on and re-release FFT Advance and FFT Advance A2 for the iOS in the future as well.

Anyway, the game mechanics allow for the player to grind levels from the very start of the game. Due to the fact that all enemies scale with you throughout the duration of the game, there’s never the disparity of exceeding your opposition and being incapable of efficiently leveling. A popular belief is that if you grind yourself to way too high of levels too early in the game, you basically screw yourself, because some of the boss characters become unbeatably overpowered once their levels and abilities are scaled to match your own.

Such is true to some degree, but in the end, no enemy with a finite amount of hit points is unbeatable, and as long as they’re controlled by a fairly predictable AI, they’re still dog food on legs. Personally, aside from my very first foray in playing FFT, I have never had any difficulty in overcoming the game, no matter how much I have maxed out my characters as early as the first chapter.

Once you break FFT, the rest of the game is a breeze. No boss or any particular fight is necessarily difficult once you create at least three or four completely maxed out characters, because you will be able to run roughshod through anyone if you play your cards right.

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Sexism hypocrisy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I can’t say that in spite of my enjoyment of League of Legends, I’m not an active member of the LoL community in the least bit.  I don’t participate in forums, and I don’t take “the sport” the least bit seriously.  However, I admit that I’m more aware of LoL-happenings on a somewhat regular basis, because I do find enjoyment in LoL-related memes, and I frequent a couple sites that update fairly regularly and frequently, providing me some sometimes ok LoL-related content.  However, amidst the funny pictures is the occasional nod to current events in the League community.  Usually it’s something involving a professional player and their non-League activities.

But recently, there’s been a lot of buzz about a “pro-team” that consists of nothing but female members and is boasting that they’re the first all-female League of Legends professional team.  But most importantly, they made this overly-produced promotional video of themselves, that the community has apparently taken a great amount of relish in ripping apart and making fun of.

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Is commitment the key to greatness?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Generally, when I think about myself and what I’m doing with my life, I like to think of myself as a pretty versatile person.  My interests are pretty varied, and I like to think that having versatility in my knowledge, talents and things I like to do is a good thing, and I still do think such holds to be true.

But at the same time, I don’t particularly think I’m necessarily the greatest at any one thing I do on a fairly regularly basis.  I work out every day, but I’m not massively muscular, chiseled or have unlimited stamina.  I play League of Legends on a fairly regular basis, but I’m not going really reach a level where I could become a professional or anything.  I make stuff for a living, but aside from the attempts to be humble about it, I know I’m not the greatest graphic designer on the planet.  I’m a pretty involved baseball fan, and still do a decent bit of baseball-related writing on a regular basis, but I’m not really going to get to a point where I could brog about baseball for a living, or make my own publications.

Long story short, I’m involved with several things, dabble in many, but I don’t necessarily think I’m truly great at anything in particular.  And sometimes I wonder if I want to be great at something, I need to fully commit to it, and give it my primary and majority attention and effort.

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RPG logic lol

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For some reason, I was thinking about the original Final Fantasy, the super difficult original one on the NES when you didn’t recruit four black belts and spam your way through the game. The game was so difficult, that while trying to grind out levels and gold in one of the many ogre/creep forests, I got to a point where I was LITRALLY. Going back to town and using the inn after every single battle.

By this logic, at least three years worth of in-game days were consumed just so I could buy Steel Armor and CUR3 and FIR3, while Garland was probably getting tired of waiting for the Warriors of Light to just fucking show up already so he could begin his time cycle of destrucity.

RPG logic is funny like that; your characters are already supposedly the “chosen ones” or “destined soldiers” or at least the most skilled and qualified persons to be going on all these world-saving quests. You’d think that they should kind of _come_ with all the experience and gear they needed to do their job, but instead we as the players have to spend endless hours and countless in-game days to develop our characters as if they were newborn babies. Figure that.

Yes, this was an update to my facebook at one point, but I liked it enough to brog it.  Deal.