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When we consider the power of gaming one of the things we don’t consider often is its ability to be extremely inclusive and allow for a wide swath of people from the full spectrum of socioeconomic statuses to enter into a video gaming career. Due to the nonstandard approach and ease of entry into the streaming space and just playing, becoming a professional eSports player is “easier” than ever. “Easier” of course being in quotations because it’s not “easy” as in you can just start day one and begin as a professional eSports player. No, the “easy” part is the materials for getting started. The rest of it is up to the skills of a player. You, your child or your young adult may be interested in being an eSports professional. Wearing a jersey, being on stage in front of a large crowd (or viewers at home) and basking in…

Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) has gotten a wave of folks to take up the $1 offer for Microsoft Game Pass today. The question is, outside of MSFS what else is there to play? Here’s seven suggestions focused mostly around recent releases. Game Pass no longer has a “free trial” but does have new user bonuses. The following games have been reviewed for 2024 and remain awesome games to play on game pass. Touhou: Luna Nights An amazing Metroidvania game that is based on a popular bulletheck arcade style game. Very fun time control mechanic. Great for those new to Touhou and aren’t into bulletheck style games. Crusader Kings III A game that someone you know probably talks about so you should play it to find out what it’s about. You can delete it afterwards, no biggie, it’s only about 7 gigabytes. Fun to play with no intention to win and…

Murder by Numbers is a “nonogram,” “griddler” or “pixel puzzle” game mixed with a bit of visual novel style detective work. You can sum the entire game up by saying take a healthy dose of Picross and mix it with some Phoenix Wright and you now have an entirely new game. The comparison with Phoenix Wright starts and stops in the visual novel category, though. There is no in-depth investigation periods like in the Nonary Games or in Phoenix Wright. No courtroom trials like in Danganronpa or Phoenix Wright. There is pixel puzzles and a story and in a lot of ways, that’s fine. The gameplay loop is simple. There is a mystery to solve. You investigate by scanning a scene (you have a radar type mechanism to tell you where to go). When you’ve found something you’re thrown into a pixel puzzle which you solve and then obtain the…

GameStop is the last vestige of brick and mortar electronic gaming stores. It is a business of acquisitions, claiming most other large competitors and merging them into the fold and is on every YouTube and blog’s “Top 10 Companies Soon to Pull a Blockbuster” for the last six months to a year or so. Are they right? Is GameStop about to go under? I honestly am not some kind of market wizard, I can’t say if their current plans will save them or not, but we can talk about what’s gotten them to this point, in context of video game sales (not the whole who bought who what when and where, lots of that is already out there). So this chart pretty much tells a very, very interesting story. The company went public in 2002 at around $10 USD a share. In 2002, we were still in the world of…

Modern day VR started back in 2013 with the Oculus Dev Kit 1 (Oculus DK1), which was then updated and re-released in 2014 to backers as the DK2. In 2014 the retail Oculus was released and the Vive and the “Windows Mixed Reality” headsets soon followed. Originally, headsets were plagued by slow refresh screens or a myriad of issues that caused motion sickness in games and skeptical developers who didn’t want to develop for a platform that required $399 or more for a user to play, plus have a beefy PC gaming rig on top of that. So where are we in 2020? Well, in sort of an interesting and weird spot. VR is more alive than ever before, with VR experiences in real life being the “new arcades” and consumer VR headsets reaching mass adoption, but it’s not exactly a success down the line. Consumer VR Headsets (Oculus &…

Over the recent holidays I enjoyed playing through and finishing Devil May Cry 5, which was a nice change from the previous Devil May Cry game that was a revamp of the series (DMC: Devil May Cry). The interesting thing about DMC5 though, both plot and stage wise, is that it felt like they had sort of wrote themselves in a corner. It felt just, sort of like, a roller coaster ride versus an actual sequel to the series. Nothing much was settled in the game outside of some larger plot points from DMC4 that weren’t fully resolved. What’s even odder about DMC5 is that to understand the character Nico you have to read the prequel novel which explains why she’s there and what she’s doing. You also kind of have to play DMC4 to know who Nero is and why losing his arm at the very very start of…

When I had cable as a young lad I would rush home and get to the television, a small heap of plastic, glass and clunky noises that was a combination VHS and TV. It was programmed to record DragonBall Z, Sailor Moon and ReBoot so that I wouldn’t have to worry about missing them when I got home from school. Both DBZ and ReBoot would often be on hiatus, meaning that there was nothing to watch and even when finished, there was still a lot of boring TV on at the time, yet there was sort of a nifty solution: TechTV Starting in 1998 I had a chance to watch something really neat – ZDTV, which would evolve later into TechTV. TechTV was a dedicated channel to everything the Internet, gaming and technology. It was like a tech magazine turned into a real life TV show. It’s where you could…

Don’t Die, Minerva! (Steam / Xbox) has an early access release date: December 5, 2019. This is really cool for a myriad of reasons, the first being that it’s being developed and published by Xaviant, a gaming studio in Dawsonville, GA a short hop / skip / jump (and 3 exits) away from Dot Matrix Media. They’re known for the The Culling series, if you’ve ever heard of it and for being one of the few studios here in Georgia. The other cool thing about the game is that it’s a rouge-lite that takes Luigi’s Mansion and throws it into the spooky adventure horror genre that it belongs. You’ve got procedural generated dungeons, loot and enemies along with difficulty ranging from “I just want to see the pretty graphics and story” to “typical Dark Souls comment.” I mean, Dark Souls is pretty much a difficulty slider setting at this point.…

Right now I have too many games to play. Here is a list of what I’m trying to actively work through: Apple Arcade games. I’m trying to play them, but I’m so overwhelmed by other games that when I sit down with my Apple TV or my iPhone I’m just thinking I could be playing something else.Luigi’s Mansion 3: The game is wonderful in small bite sized chunks, however, I’m trying to beat it and it does take time.Tales of Vesperia on the PS4: I am almost to the final boss, but so many other games have came out I have to put it on the backburner.Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC: It’s finally on PC and I want to play online with friends, but I’m trying to get through Luigi’s Mansion 2.Pokemon Sword & Shield: As of writing this, the new Pokemon is almost out and I feel like…

The Movies, a business simulator, launched in November 8, 2005 and is still, today, played by an ongoing community who loves not only the fun of building your own movie studio but also the fun things you can do with the movie creation tools. YouTubers Life OMG! is, in so many ways, a modern streamlined version of The Movies, just without the animated movies built in. YouTubers Life takes you into the life of a burgeoning online video star who starts their career with a potato for a PC, mic, webcam and general setup while living with their parents and follows their career house to house as they expand their video making empire. Each video you produce allows you to choose cards to decide outcomes that impact the videos script, acting, editing and sound level. You then go in and edit the video, working in post-production to match scenes together…