Tea Talk – The Daily SPUF

Tea Talk: Accessible depth for the solo player

June 12, 2018June 9, 2018 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments complexity, Depth, overwatch, paladins, Tea Talk, Team Fortress 2

This topic came into my mind some time ago. As someone who primarily plays alone, even in multiplayer games, this is actually something that should really have occurred to me considering how much it affects me. But I never really though about it until I saw someone talking about the merits of Overwatch over Fortnite. That person claimed that the depth of gameplay in Overwatch comes from the team’s hero composition, the maps being played and the whether you’re playing on offense or defense. Leaving aside the issue that every other team-based, class-based games have all of that and Overwatch… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: Movement Ability on Cooldowns, in FPS Games

May 22, 2018May 21, 2018 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments movement, Tea Talk

I am starting to really, really despise that particular sort of movement abilities in FPS games. You know, like in Overwatch, where you press one button to do a dodge roll as McCree, then walk around and wait until your 8 second cooldown expires before you get to do it again. Or the “press one button to launch into the air” as Pharah. It’s just really painful for me nowadays. Recently, I tried PWND, which has a rather unique movement system. Pressing jump will shoot a projectile towards where your crosshair is pointing at, be it the floor or a nearby wall, and… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: Games and experiences

March 13, 2018March 9, 2018 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments experience, Tea Talk

Some time ago, I talked about how I felt uncomfortable with judging An Aspie Life as a game. Today however, I want to look more into its premise. An Aspie Life is a game where you play as someone with Asperger’s Syndrome. In this game, all the visuals, sound, mechanics and interactions are reflective of what the author, who himself has Asperger’s, goes through on a daily basis. The idea that a game can serve as a documentary of someone’s life is an interesting concept. And certainly, video games are extremely suitable for conveying what a person goes through because… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: Experimental Games

February 13, 2018February 11, 2018 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments experiment, indie games, Tea Talk

I saw this game called An Aspie Life on Steam, which is stated to be “an experimental adventure game that deals with the topic of Asperger’s Syndrome”. Naturally, I want to try it. It’s an extremely unusual pitch and it’s for a rather good cause, since it raises awareness for Asperger’s and let people understand it more. And I got stuck about five minutes in. I have no idea what I did wrong. Since it is in Early Access, I would normally assume that it’s a bug, or just a mistake by the creator. However, the line “as every element… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: Random Achievements

January 18, 2018January 15, 2018 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments achievements, Tea Talk

I’ve been playing one particular mobile game recently. It’s not really that good of a game, and it’s not unique or interesting enough to warrant any discussion on the game itself. But there is one particular issue I have with the game that really irritates me. In that game, you can collect tokens to earn extra points. And there are a whole series of achievements based on collecting a specific number of tokens. Thing is, the token spawns are random and you can’t completely control whether you collect the tokens or not. Thus, whether you collect the specific amount of… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: Representation

December 14, 2017December 9, 2017 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments representation, Tea Talk

I really cannot fathom what does having representation in a game’s cast have to do with anything. The reason why I raised this up is because I have seen many people asking for more representation in games. Whether it be representation for females, LGBT, minorities, or any demographic that isn’t a straight white guy, their reason is always: “Those people should be represented in video games.” If the game’s lore implies that the cast should feature characters that aren’t straight white guys, then sure, they should be there. If not, then there is no reason for that to be the case.… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: “Lootboxes are OK because they’re only cosmetic!”

November 23, 2017November 22, 2017 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments loot box, overwatch, paladins, Tea Talk, Team Fortress 2

The recent Star Wars Battlefront II fiasco that was being reported and discussed both within and without the gaming community increases people’s scrutiny towards lootboxes. And during this time, a particular group of players started coming out and claiming they have a game which implements lootboxes the right way. The Overwatch community have been vocal about how well OW’s lootboxes are implemented as compared to SWBF2. The common sentiment among those cheering for OW’s lootboxes is that OW does it right since it’s cosmetics only, so you can’t gain a gameplay advantage from the loot. Some among them also think that the microtransactions… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: “Only pirate AAA games, and never pirate indies.”

November 13, 2017November 8, 2017 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments AAA, indie games, piracy, Tea Talk

“Only pirate AAA games, and never pirate indies.” This is the one rule to pirating that I got from my friends when I first started gaming. Throughout my time as a gamer, this is the one golden rule that almost everyone I met follows. In fact, the one time I met a person who doesn’t follow that rule and pirates indie games, everyone around him responded negatively almost immediately, myself included. Pirating indie games is just repulsive to me. After all, indie games are made by small studios and sometimes individual developers. They normally poured a fair bit of their… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: The mortality of emulation

October 29, 2017October 29, 2017 Medicinal Warlock 0 Comments emulation, Tea Talk

No, I didn’t misspell “morality”. Some people are probably wondering why this is a topic. After all, since emulation is just running a bunch of code, wouldn’t that just be an issue of storing the code somewhere? As long as one copy of the code survives in this world, it’ll be good right? Games are immortal since as long as there’s one copy left, the game lives. However, having one copy surviving is an issue. If there is really only one copy left, if anything happens to that hard drive that stores the game, that game is dead. Gone. Nothing… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Tea Talk: Valve’s flat company structure

October 26, 2017October 29, 2017 Medicinal Warlock 1 Comment developer, Tea Talk, valve

Valve’s flat company structure is rather well-known among gamers, devs and business people alike. It sounds like a game dev paradise: a salary model based on effort, no man being another man’s boss, ideas allowed to grow and flourish, and you get to pick what you want to work on. It sounds almost like Andrew Ryan’s vision of Rapture. And just like Rapture, things do go wrong. Valve’s customer support is legendarily bad. That isn’t surprising if you think about it. Who in the world will volunteer to do a thankless job answering the mob? For finance-related issues, potential lawsuits… [Continue Reading]

← Previous