Tag Archives: gaming

December 9, 2022 · 22:04

Slapping Fortnite

Yup, it happens and I have with some expectation of entertainment slapped them in the past myself. But this is different and I am not in agreement. The article (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-63911176) gives us ‘Children stopped sleeping and eating to play Fortnite – lawsuit’, as I personally see it, a debatable article and the BBC knows this, because there is no journo name here. You see, there are a few elements missing and anyone with half a bran knows this. When we see “One of the children cited in the lawsuit played over 7,700 hours of the game in less than two years. The legal action claims the game was deliberately developed to be “highly addictive”.” The first question I have is “How do you program a game to be additive?” It is a serious question. Every game designer would like to know. The second question is that the equation gives us that this child had to play over 10 hours EVERY day to get past that point for two years. So where were the parents? You want to hand this to Epic and not hand any responsibility to the parents? And the one element they all ignore (even the lame journalist) is the fact that peer pressure is a real thing and that is set in stone. More importantly, the parents have to shield these kids from peer pressure. I see nothing of that here either. 

Now I am all for slapping greed driven Epic Games, but lets do that for the right reasons, and lets give some responsibility to the parents in this equation. And the clear stage of “their children would forgo sleeping, eating and showering because they were hooked on the game.” Hands a portion of that blame and the issues surrounding them to the parents, where are the parents in this equation? Anyone with half a brain will miss them too.

Lets be clear, I am not claiming Epic is innocent, but I believe that there are a massive amount of questions and as such Epic is entitled to some support and I am happy to give it, even as I mostly dislike Epic Games with a passion. But I do believe that fair is fair and we need to start with that in mind. I reckon that the legal team and its fearless leader (CLO of Epic Games) will take a serious look at both the parents and peer pressure, two elements that are clearly in the top-line of the equation and the BBC made sure it never got mentioned. I will leave it to you to wonder why.

Enjoy the day wherever you are. 

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December 8, 2022 · 23:30

Shortcut gaming ends

Yes, this is actually a setting that was a while in the making. To be honest, I had no idea what I saw in my dreams. Things did not make sense to me at that point, but the afternoon changed things for me. You see, streaming consoles are the solution to shortcut gaming like we see on the tablets and mobiles. A shortcut to funny money and advertisement dollars. Consider the games you played last week, how many had an advertisement every 90 seconds? Every level? Streaming ends that, you see streaming is paid for, and as such like console gaming no advertisements. The larger issue with streaming solutions that they can hold much larger gaming needs, gaming needs that is not solved in a few hours. Games to bring achievement, real achievement and real joy. Like in the old days. Games like Railroad tycoon, Theme hospital, Theme park. Games that we can play a long time and show off as what we created. That was in the back of my mind, but I ignored it. It all starts with the image below

A simple grid, but one with a difference. You can create a maze, an intricate path but every point is significant. It can connect to a path below and there are in total three levels. And it is not one grid, there are four. Green, Red, Blue and Purple, each a different area. And it does not start easy, it does not start at all. Places like the Efteling (Netherlands), Phantasialand (Germany) and so many others, they all needed time and that is what you will need. You draw the plans, you make the place and perhaps a little basic at the beginning. Yet the game allows for so much more. Graphic files to be uploaded to your solution, the personalisation of a theme world like Anton Pieck did for the Efteling. This is not a simple game and it is not a short game. This brings fulfilment and it takes time, but that is the challenge. Not to make some short term gaming experience, but one that lasts a long time. My mind saw it, but the brain never communicated it to me (in a way I understood). The pursuit of shortcut gaming needs to end and lets be clear, this game is not for everyone. And the nice part with streaming games, you can try them all. And when you have 4 of these sot of games, you end up with 4 times the populations than these short cut game makers have. Perhaps Idle games is the only one with a real population, but that is because they have 20 variations on the same theme, and after an hour they all feel the same and unrewarding. A game like Dungeon Master (FTL games 1988) broke the mould and became the forefather for 3d gaming everywhere. Why? They did not offer a shortcut and in those days 40,000 games sold was a big thing, because it was. We need to change the way we see gaming, not how we see games (that I an art issue). You see the BI manager that push short term gaming are at the end of their feed, they end up pushing and nagging some mobile game, and with every streamer that enter a household the lifecycle of these games end. And whilst we create a new fantasy theme park with mazes, rooms and challenges, some will take the option to create in something like Adobe illustrator a new kind of door, and export it to their game, and soon that place will take on a new life. A personalised life where we create the new challenge and let the NPC’s wander around. A machine learning battleground where it is about the art, not the shortcut. Yes, we can add the usual gimmicks, but the ability to truly personalise a game is coming because streaming makes that possible. A cauldron in the making and Google tapped out of that equation, now it becomes the gaming field of Amazon (and that other wannabe) before Tencent drops in. 

Do we not owe it to ourselves to create the best gaming environment we could ever have? We can look at the games that were and remaster them, or see them as the groundbreaking tools they were and see if we can do that one more time and truly create something new?

I believe that the second one will create more followers. Don’t get me wrong, to see the Witcher 3, a 2007 game getting renewed in 2022 for PS5 is awesome. It could be seen as evidence just how groundbreaking that game was that it can till inspire gamers right next to Horizon Forbidden West (2022), 15 years and Witcher 3 can till hold grounds, that is amazing gaming. That shows you what a 90%+ game is capable of and that is what too many game makers have forgotten. 

I believe and I hope that the next generation games will push maximisation on streamers because that I where we are heading. Do not get me wrong, I will never leave my PS5, but there can be more and the Amazon Luna is in a much better position to prove that at present. 

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December 7, 2022 · 15:03

Poking the monstrous

Yup, my life (as it is) revolved around Pokemon Violet and Scarlet (Scarlet first). I am having a ball, the game is open, looks awesome, even on a Switch lite and there are all kinds of new Pokemon’s. Yet it is more than that. The graphics, the storyline and the open approach is just fun. I is havening a blast and it is a nice way to pass the time. I am definitely short a few Pokemon’s as the journey is more than just get the mile markers. And this game delivers in a few ways. It is one of these games that as made for the young and the mature are getting more than their fair share.

I saw the messages of bugs, but I never experienced them. I have seen a few glitches yet more than one is only debatable a glitch. I am willing to accept that the game has bugs, because it is bog, really big. As such bugs will appear, I just did not encounter one at present. 

Am I missing things? Well personally yes and I will follow on that shortly. The game is just so much fun, there are a few sides that have yet to be explored and I am not yet sure how to explore them. Perhaps it depends on getting to certain places, it is exciting to see these moments where you see a shield of poisonous purple in a wall and you have no idea how to open it yet. And with the three lines to follow (gym badges, star bases and herbs) you get to choose where to go next and that makes it a lot more fun. In addition there is a special Pokemon that sets the stage of where you can go next and that I equally fun, and therefor the old way of the Water Pokemon with Surf and Waterfall is a think of the past. Yay! New challenges. 

I like the new Pokedex, but I seem to be unable to filter by kind, as such finding how much of a kind I have (Steel, Ground, Dark) is a little harder. The map is cool and as it can zoom you can now see a lot more than ever before. So what am I missing? Well, I like my Evee collection and I have them all, but it would have been nice to get an additional flying, ground and poison Evee. Perhaps next time. There is also the call to have the Pokemon additions. For example if you have a Sableeye (a personal favourite) AND you have another like a Dark/Fire Pokemon, the Pokemon gets additional options. The first is 5% more happy, the second Dark/Water, or Dark/Grass would make Sableeye 10% stronger. Now this is one hell of a challenge, but the Switch is powerful enough to make it work. As such it isn’t merely about having 6 strong Pokemon’s, but the idea that the right team could make the overall team 10% stronger. It was just a thought to play with.

This game is a lot more open than the previous games and I believe that there is more to see (I only have 7 badges, 2 bases and 2 herbs) so I have plenty to explore and plenty to see. But the larger story is clear, this game is another champion game and a reason to get a Nintendo Switch. 

Still the game brings the punch, it brings the challenge and that funny feeling when you have 100+  of these little critters wondering where some of the others are. What is clear is that in the week I have played it, I did not once feel bored or unchallenged. Yes, some were a little expected, but the new parts overshadowed that rather quickly. So far I am still trying to find a Ditto (people who played the game know why) and there is a lot more to the game that I have not tested to my knowledge previous to Scarlet and Violet. When you considered that this game started in 1996 and merely grew over time through technology and gaming evolution, we see a game that has been round for 16 years, perhaps one of the most important games in the Nintendo arsenal. And the fact that it still calls the gamers to play is quite the achievement. Oh and there is every chance that there are parts of the game I haven’t even seen yet, quite the achievement indeed. 

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November 30, 2022 · 11:06

The Kay Pea equation

There is a setting I have skated on a few times. This is not the first time I raise it, but I feel strongly about certain options. A first was a puzzle I enjoyed. It came with a book. The story was a murder mystery, but there was no solution in the book. The added part was a jigsaw, the image would reveal the actual culprit. I had 6-8 of them and they were fun. But it was something someone (I do not remember who) made on the Commodore 64. They were Kinetic Puzzles. To explain that is simple. A jigsaw is the puzzle made from an image or photograph, I still enjoy jigsaws with some regularity. A Kinetic puzzle is not based on an image, but on a film clip, hence every puzzle piece is always showing you part of the clip and it makes for a somewhat ore challenging puzzle. The weird part is that this should have been on the eyelids of Netflix from the start. Movies are their bread and butter, what better that a puzzle that represents a clip from an upcoming movie? The solution tends to be the same, edges first, then you work your way in and when the image on EVERY piece is in motion, the challenge is soon felt and endured. Marketing through a game, it would be the cornerstone of Netflix and even as the puzzle part is not the hardest part, putting this all in a puzzle is still a challenge. But they did it on a Commodore 64 with a mere 38Kb of RAM. As such evolving towards 4K puzzles is not a leap of technology. And this came to my mind again as I was crossing the ‘i’ and dotting the ’t’ in the equation that is coming. Inversion is in part the name of any game and it helps when you are your own devils advocate. So when they consider this and add the simple Jigsaw part, Netflix will have a whole score of puzzles and the fans of movies will enjoy a game that reflects their passions. Streamers had this option from day one and some did not go in this direction for all kinds of reasons, but were some of the valid? They might think so and I am not debating that part, but what about the audience you are addressing? Did you think of them? Are they not your consumer core? 

Did you think that a Netflix customer might not like a puzzle regarding the Batman (who looks a lot like some famous Hufflepuff student), or any league of other heroes or villains? I wonder what these bosses were thinking when they pushed people out stating they needed super cool games, was a better question not ‘A game that could appeal to our core clients’ The KP or Jigsaw will not do it alone, but people will always return to something they enjoy, especially when they are fighting the hours, at that point they will revert so something simple like Chess, Checkers or Puzzles. And with an additional mode that is not seen anywhere, this might be an Initial solution all might fancy. Perhaps the idea of adding books to the jigsaw equation should have been on Amazon’s mind. There is not a soul who does not know what a Jigsaw is (aka puzzle) and they go back to 1760, a very long time before the house of Pong made its entry. Did anyone even consider to cater to puzzles to create awareness? Netflix has been in a prime position for the longest time and they never acted on it. They have the largest arsenal and they left it untouched, weird, is it not?

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November 20, 2022 · 19:43

Euphemism for the sake of reporting

It happens, there is no fault, at least often enough there isn’t one. In this case I have issues and it is withe the BBC who gives us (at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-63649695) ‘Gambling: Boy, 16, lost thousands after seeing advert’. In this, did he lose it, or did he steal it? Lets look at the reported facts. In the first we are given “Nick Phillips, from Swansea, said the boy opened an account in his father’s name an hour after a match.” As such the boy committed identity theft. Then we get “after seeing the gambling ad”, here we have a problem. Yes it is an advertisement and we can argue that the advertiser is not at fault, yet the ‘boy’ needed an hour to arrange for the opening of an account. So where were the checks and balances? Why is there no mention of the lack of checks and balances by the banks? Then we get (of course) the reference to loot boxes. I do not agree with these assessments, but I get that some see it different than me and that I fine. Then the BBC gives us the part that is indeed important. With: “Every video game console has a parental or family settings area. One of the things I really like is the ability to say ‘can this account make transactions? can it spend money? Also, how much can it spend?’” That is true, as such safeties can be imposed and I am fine with that, but the stellar amount of non-accountability is not OK. The boy was a thief and it had nothing to do with the advertisement. He took an hour to get an identity and get spending, according to the article thousands. I do not see, or agree with ‘this poor lad’, no it is ‘the degenerate criminal’. OK, the word ‘degenerate’ is optional, but it is a setting that we need to heed. In an hour a family member took the identity of another family member and how was that possible? How was it possible that credit cards, identity papers were so readily available? They mentioned he had a gambling problem, so why were certain blocks not in place? And we still haven’t seen anything on HOW it was done in an hour and what facilities gave rise to this stage? I am assuming that there were bank issues, but that is merely an assumption. I reckon that the credit card, if suddenly a certain amount goes into a non usual place alarms go off, did they? 

So why is there such a lack of information, and we see ‘poor boy’, references to loot boxes and whilst we agree that kids need to be protected, my personal view is that if they were so easily swayed to crime, the problem resides equally somewhere else and in this the parent get the blame. To be honest, I am not entirely sure that this is fair, but when a 16 year old can overcome legal loopholes and enter the field as an identity thief, we can agree that the parents failed to some degree at this point. I am not willing to fully blame them as peer pressure could be massive at that age (I was a teenager once, yes it is true, I was). 

But there is a lot more going on and the BBC (as I personally see it) intentionally decided not to inform you on that. And I wonder why.

I have no issues with euphemism. There is nothing to gain by telling someone that their child was decapitated. It makes sense to phrase it more like ‘He got ahead of himself and was unfortunately a casualty of events’, but when factual parts are misplaced and not reported on, is it still to serve the greater good, or to cater to an agenda? I will let you decide.

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November 19, 2022 · 15:25

Correlating the mode

A weird term to say the least, but it will soon make sense. I was watching the Patriot today (the Mel Gibson version) which I had not seen in over a decade and something came over me. I suddenly wanted to play Assassins Creed 3 again.

One called or the other. I did not think it was a bad game, it had interesting elements and for one, the intro was brilliant. Yet the game had a missing part. It was a lot less AC then the previous ones and that is not bad, the game was not bad. It was merely less great. Yet one called for the other and I needed to recognise that. As such I wondered if BOTH directions work. You see the PS5 and Streamers (soon enough) have an optional additional side. To get there you need to answer a question. Have you ever watched a YouTube with cutscenes? What if there was another mode with more? To keep in the AC line, what if there wasn’t some DNA you were filling, but film reels? Consider any game, you have a main line and side lines (in RPG’s at least). So what happens when we find all the reels, more important when we find them all a new mode opens up that we can see at the end of the game. The movie! Not merely the cutscenes but a complete movie in 4K based on cutscenes with additional footage, footage that tells part of the story, but we never played that part of the story, it merely completes the entire storyline. Now consider that we play a game like Diablo 3, the cutscenes are fabulous, but what if the acts become additions to the movie and we have a wizard edition, a necromancer edition, a barbarian edition and so on. A game, nearly any game giving us a 4K movie to watch. Streamers are better equipped for it, but I am willing to bet that any Horizons Forbidden West gamer will go nuts when they complete the game and are then treated to the HFW movie. What surprises me is that this feature was never part of any game, why not? We can argue that previous editions weren’t ready for this, but these systems (Nintendo Switch gets an exemption) are and this option could be available in the next decent RPG game. 

I wonder who will bring us the most exciting game movie next. 

 

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November 11, 2022 · 19:25

First of two issues

I had a rage attack today, it was right after some stupid set of saggy t*** decided to attack Elon Musk in a Presidential briefing. It feels like she is from Forbes. They have been pushing the Musk envelope. It is my personal belief that they are close friends with Jack Dorsey, a person they seemingly never asked any serious questions from and ‘the national security danger that is Saudi Arabia?’ Oh, I got her number and then some. But there is time for that and I have seen that death is not the worst a person can experience. It will be my delight to introduce that terror to her. But there is time for that and certain plays are not completed. But then something happened. 

A tweet brought Me back to my senses. This lady is totally nuts about Elden Ring. I get that drive, that devotion, optionally that obsession. I do not agree with her, but that I her right. I did not play Elden ring. I could never finish BloodBorne. I still have it as it is one of the most beautiful games I have, next to Dark Souls 3, a game I equally never finished. Both utterly sublime, but in my lifetime I doubt I will ever finish that. Yet it was about her feeling. I thought I had the same with Horizons: Forbidden West. But then God of War: Ragnarok came. I am taking me time as every corner, every sight is a feast for the eyes. I lost a few lives, but that is OK. The game delivers again and again and the story is magnificent, as is the music. I do not believe that Guerrilla software has anything to fear. There is space to love control of both Kratos and Aloy. Two amazing pieces of faming IP, this was a good gaming year and I am not forgetting Gotham Knights. Three Amazing journeys. Yet at present I am knee deep in Asgardian folklore and epic myths and Santa Monica Studios deliver in ways you cannot believe (unless you are playing the game) it is good that in the twilight of my life I can still be amazed by games. I started gaming in 1984 and I never stopped. I might not have the drive I once had (like playing 167 levels of Loderunner on the CBM64 in one sitting). I did take a sickie for that event. It was a time when you could pause a game, but you could not save a game. Still, 38 years later and that gam is still part of me. Games evolved from CBM64 we got the CBM Amiga, then PC, then the PlayStation range one through five and gaming never disappointed. I might not like everything, but that is not required. There is space for the yearners of Elden Ring, the obsession with Quake, Halo and Bethesda games. It is an inclusive group, the more the merrier. 

There is no hindsight, not a new piece of IP (other than the ones I already have). Many forget that gaming is not a business (to some it is), it is the ones that see games as art, those are the games that get the 90%+ reviews and Sony has a basket full of those, no matter how many ‘opponents’ troll rating into the basement. The gamers know what is what and they are driven to success. To achieve the end of the story. Anyone finishing Horizons Zero Dark can tell you about that. There is a need to finish the story and God of War: Ragnarok is no different. Do not worry, no spoilers here. 

Passing that line yourself is so fulfilling it gives value to a game and you will cherish EVERY dollar you spend on it. Today was a great day for gaming. I wonder if that is why I became angry at Forbes with its BS sense towards an owner and a partner who owns a mere 4% of Twitter. Which is interesting as the China hatred in the US does not give rise to the partnership that Microsoft and Tencent have, not even from Forbes, where is their national security interest there?

I am contemplating words I once got from Frank Herbert “He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing”, he published it in 1965, 57 years ago. Words to live by and I am feeling rebellious and frisky, a dangerous combination in someone with my mindset, but Forbes will soon learn that lesson. I’ll give fair warning a day after I have completed the exercise. Only fair, not?

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October 16, 2022 · 22:16

There are many roads leading to Rome

It is an old expression and when I was young I never understood it. It is simple, I grew up in the Netherlands. For us it was take the road that leads to the E35, which takes you to Rome. Those in Belgium and Germany had a similar direction. Of course that is not the explanation of the expression, but I was 7 at the time, there was time to learn. And for the most I learned how to learn, so I ended up with two benefits. One, the road to the best Pizza and two a manifest on how to learn. So when I saw the BBC article ‘Office time is not for video calls, says tech boss’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63217973) I was taken aback a little. You see, there are many roads on how to manage a workforce and some marketing firms learned through Covid, that a home founded workforce is efficient, terribly efficient. It also reduces the bottleneck of networks. It might not be enough, but in some cases it is enough to keep the workforce. Also the corporations with a high turnover saw a turnover reduction, not a big one, but large enough. I myself prefers to work in an office. I prefer my home and work to remain separate. That is easily explained. I am for the mot a workaholic. Work comes first and it has done so for decades. To go home is on one side to take the pressure off, on the other side to see if there I anything else that can relax me. So when I see “But being in the office should be an opportunity to do things that cannot be done at home, argues Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s chief executive. Sitting at a desk with headphones on is not one of them, he says.” But sitting in your office with a headset (or plugs) listening to music as you work is? I am not opposing his view, because there is merit in his view, but for a lot of companies so is the homework or hybrid setting. I am not one of those, but plenty are. He is a friend of “He champions Amazon’s idea, introduced by Jeff Bezos, where each attendee reads a six-page memo at the start of a meeting as a briefing note, rather than sitting through PowerPoint presentations.” OK, fair enough but not unlike Google, they too left $500 million a month on the floor, so there is improvement available all over the field. I do like the approach as I have an active dislike of meeting PowerPoints. There are plenty of times when this works, but the size of the group where it does not is steadily rising. 

There is a growing need to adjust the workforce. I see a weird traverse of approaches on an international level to find workers and I see the flood on LinkedIn on how great they are instead of properly informing who they are and what they do. A social approach on steroids and they fail to see the point, but it is equally possible that I fail to see their point. I get that, but it is the workaholic in me that take that point of view. And when you filter out the fortune cookie marketing in LinkedIn, how much value do you get? I see offices where video calls are not merely the workforce, it is also the office meetings. Instead of 8 people vacating to a big office, they sit in their offices, at their desks listening to meetings and that is the weird part. It seems that in these meetings people are more intent on listening, the responses are seemingly more clever, but I could be wrong. And this was part of the settings whilst I was contemplating a few new versions of older games, I contemplated what could be possible to take that into a game. Yet I was cautious. You see that as the narrated stage of a game called System Shock. A great game that is (as far as I know) still upgraded to todays gameplay. The game (through videos, messages and voice) give us the backstories on several floors between all kinds of people giving us a setting of what was going on when things were going wrong. I miss that game, it was so close to perfect and its successor (System Shock 2) was equally overwhelmingly as addictive. This too gave me pause to consider. You see when you think back on the original planet of the apes (with Charlton Heston), the idea of a survival game in that setting is interesting, but a game that follows the movie, without copying it is equally appealing. Having a new IP is intriguing, although a week before Gotham Knights not the most illuminating one. And these issues all strike back to the office. All these thoughts take a backseat to office work. In the office it is about work and at home (or anywhere else) the other thoughts come to the foreground, they always do and a hybrid setting is caging off those thoughts, or allowing them to be everywhere and that is how blunders are made. I get that and I was young once (nudge nudge wink wink). We all have things that occupy the brain and it happens. Consider working next to a bakery with fresh cheese rolls being baked every other hour. It doesn’t happen too often, but it happens and now you are working at home metres away from the warm stove making muffins, rolls and all other goods. How long until the homework is driven by rolls, hotdogs and icy cold beer? What we separated for decades (some merely years) does not stop the brain. We still have a load of lessons to learn and until we can shut off work or shut off the home in the brain, we will get issues, we all will. So I have issues with the BBC article, but nothing wrong is stated or presumed. We are all individuals and I believe that I where Stewart Butterfield failed. He had his point of view, which I consider valid, but there are many roads that lead to Rome and there are solutions there too we all need to realise that part of the equation.

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October 11, 2022 · 21:27

Advertisement led the way

I started the day fine, but then I started to play some game and the irritation began. ?Not the game mind you, but there is a game called last fortress and the advertisements do not reflect the game, not in the slightest. But there was an upside. You see, they dug themselves a treasure and they use it for ads. How silly is that. Consider a game like Dungeon keeper and combine that with Fallout Shelter and you have the beginning of a new stage of gaming. 

You start in a house. As you secure with traps the rooms become available, the better the defence of that room, the better your chances. In the first room (the bathroom) you gain the option of water. As you proceed (via ducts) to scout the rooms you will get the kitchen (food), and that is when you get your first addition, a cook. So there you are growing as a scout, a fighter or an engineer, you will gain skills. But one touch from a zombie and it is lights out, forever. 

So as you complete a house, the added people become in-crowd but only for a while. The more they grow, the more they are inclined to stay, so the cook needs to cook, As such you grow your crew with an electrician a trap maker, a plumber, a fighter and so on. And as you go to the second house you get an additional room to create, a little like Dungeon Keeper, but the setting is more like Fallout shelter, although isometric in view. And the ads show that there is interest, so the makers are looking at a whole lot of revenue coming their way. What surprises me is that no one figured that out, it wasn’t that much of a leap. The larger issue is to find an option for microtransactions without making it mandatory, that gives the greatest boost and the longest time of revenue.

So as the game progresses from houses to apartment buildings, warehouses, shopping centres and all with their own challenge. I reckon that the hardest level (location 25) leads to a stage where we get more of the same, but now the risk of breach becomes larger, so it will be about a tactical approach much more than before. That didn’t take long did it? So when the others catch up, you might optionally be making the next addiction on mobile, tablet, PC and console. 

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October 9, 2022 · 11:14

As nightmares go

Yup, we all have them and I am no different. Yet this one was not that scary. I was walking and avoiding some big guy lobbing at me with a baseball bat, spiked no less, the size of an outdoor lamp post. And soon thereafter I got the upper hand and won, so I was facing not a real nightmare. It took a minute to realise that I was in some boss fight, but that is when The game changed for me, the second fight was the same guy, the same area and the bat seemed more menacing. But that was before I realised that he hat hit one of the potted plants and when I passed the plant, I slipped. I got up in time to avoid the bat on the head event and I took to running to keep my distance and my mind started to scream ‘This didn’t happen the last time’ and suddenly I realised that this wasn’t really a nightmare, it was a point of revelation. You see I fought and killed so many bosses in so many games, the mind realised that the boss fights are close to identical every time you face that person and that was the weird setting. What happens when bosses have an added edge? When you face them again added difficulties are faced making this a real boos fight? Environmental elements, weapon facings and challenges. The boss gets to be stronger, to be quicker to be smarter and there the environment works for him, not for you. Count the games that offered this, I cannot come up with one version where this is an option. There is no ‘New Game +’ or another setting where the people we face have added skills. Adding this could prevent grinding from becoming actual grinds, where boss fights to get more and more powerful rewards to be given that at a cost. It is a setting no game offered, why not? It is not the most of novel ideas and over the decades of gaming I never saw that brought to life. In all this no one is asking the question why. I believe that streaming games offer more and could offer more still, although this implementation could be an option in console games too. So whilst my previous IP is now at 3.0 with two additional products, I took a gander and added something to gaming as well. So whilst Google is leaving the area and we are left with the nobody Microsoft and Amazon and its moonshine, it is the Amazon device that has the option to gain 50 million subscriptions and make the Microsoft show how irrelevant they have become, and I merely added a new side to boss fights to games and make the Microsoft solution even more irrelevant. I believe it is time for my morning coffee and I do believe that I earned a muffin to boot. 

Blog more later readers.

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