Three E3 "gems" to Watch, June 12, 2014

Three E3 "Gems" to Watch For

(Literally the same post on my gaming blog)

Each year at E3 we get some trailers of new games, and for the last couple of years we've gotten some really good surprises.  Not all of them are indie, but I think it would be hard to deny they are indie influenced games.  Last year we got to see Transistor for the first time, and Child of Light.  This year has the next crop of games to watch and keep interest about.  These are not the blockbusters that get put on billboards and have a mountain dew sponsorship.  These are the little gems that sometimes get lost in the cracks.

DISCLAIMER!
Unlike images, I can not download and host youtube videos to ensure that they last a long time.  If you come and read this many years after I post it, you may not see a trailer or video present.  It existed at one time and I'm sure you can find the video on Youtube or whatever neural network our new robot overlords have created to pacify our synapses while they siphon our energy into their Malto-regeno-cores.

Valiant Hearts

Child of Light was an unexpected jewel from such a large studio as Ubisoft.  This year they surprise us again with a team that uses Child of Light's game engine to spin a tale about soldiers and civilians during The Great War, known in the US as World War 1.  They are writing a pretty large check for this one; not financially, but emotionally.  Let's hope it lives up to what it could be.  It will be released on many platforms.

Ori and the Blind Forest

The makers of Ori: The Blind Forest each site the 16-bit era as their favorite.  One of the biggest influences from that time is Super Metroid.  Lots of western indie devs look to Super Metroid for inspiration(in Japan the games are not nearly as well liked and that's why we get actual Metroids made by non-Nintendo people).  In Ori, the team wanted to make a Super Metroid that had more challenge.  The emphasis on exploration is there, but they wanted to ramp things up to "Super Meatboy" like levels of difficulty.  The game also looks beautiful.  I'm all for Metroid clones as I believe Castlevania did not hit its peak until it became "Metroidvania" as they call it.  It will be released on PC and Xbox.

Titan Souls

While Legend of Zelda did not start the "boss as a puzzle" craze, it was the introduction of that gameplay for a lot of us.  So what if you bring the concepts of Shadow of the Colossus back home to 2D, overhead, Zelda-esque gameplay?  You might get Titan Souls.  Every Titan can be killed with just 1 well placed arrow shot, but figuring out how to make the Titan expose this spot is the whole trick to it.  Each Titan is a different challenge with unique movement, unique attacks, and unique surroundings.  Right now you can pretty much say "Take Shadow of the Colossus and (insert genre here" and I'll be a sucker for it.  Titan Souls was originally a game created in 72 hours at Ludum Dare Game Jam, and they continued working on it to make a commercial release with much more content.  It is coming to PS4, Vita, and PC.

June 12th, 2014

I was ready to get on blogger and tell you all what an amazing album "Blow up your Video" by ACDC was.  If the first 3 songs were any indication I was going to come across a lost gem of rock albums, and I was already getting my blog post composed in my head.  These first 3 songs were ACDC with some "swing" to it.  Its like how Pantera added "swing" and "groove" into heavy metal and became icons.  The first three songs on Blow Up Your Video were like Robert Palmer and ZZ Top of the late 80's were co-opted by the rock and roll side of things.  It reminded me of the best of Clutch in recent years.  But that was about it.  After those 3 songs they started their repeitition and "safe" beats and riffs that had pushed them through after Back in Black.  Heatseeker was the first song, which is featured on ACDC "Live", and so I already knew I liked it.  "That's the Way I want to rock and roll" is the second song, and its very catchy and good too.  The 3rd is probably my favorite of the album, "Meanstreak" is very "modern" bar blues, and the one that most reminds me of Clutch.  I really really wish they could've kept it up through the whole album.

Open Source releases can be about freedom and sharing.  But sometimes they are huge "FUCK YOU" messages from their owners to someone trying to keep them down.  For example, Nvidia and AMD really do dislike each other, it is not a friendly rivalry.  Nvidia is banking on cornering the market with active sync devices, so AMD decided to make its version open source and free to use without licensing.  Recently Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla motors, is getting royally screwed by the established car industry.  Not just by the industry but by the American government being financed by the industry and establishing protectionist laws.  So Elon has decided today that Tesla Motors is too easy a target, that the industry and focus on them too much.  Mr. Musk decided this week to make ALL HIS PATENTS OPEN SOURCE AND FREE.  Every innovation they have fought with, every step they've taken to get electrical cars into your hands is now free to use because he hopes 100 electric car manufacturers will be harder for the government to squash than 1 primary one.  Kudos to you Elon, I hope you make history as the man that broke Detroit's back.

Adblock has been a thing I have used for a long time.  Generally I take off sites that I don't mind ads for.  I watch ads in Youtube, and I allow ads for a number of things I use freely, but I will not stop using Adblock just because some host tells me they never use it.  Its the advertiser's fault, and the advertisees responsibility to fix things that go wrong.  I generally allow double.click because they enable a lot of low budget people to have websites, and I allow Google because I've accepted my overlords.  Anyway, Ghostery is my new one I've added that doesn't seem to hamper performance.  It is a anti-tracking plug in that lets you see who exactly is doing what.  It has already confirmed the slow down at certain places like Proboards and Pandora is a ridiculous amount of tracking and ad services.  Proboards had 7 ads, that's starting to be a concern, but I've seen much worse, but it had 32 trackers!  by far, well over double what the next highest I"ve seen have.  Pandora was the worst with ads and shows why it eats up your ram, they had 22 ads, 3x the amount of the next highest, and 12 trackers.  I got Ghostery because Facebook is starting to keep browsing history to give to ad servers, something Google has done for a while, but I'm much less trusting of Facebook.