Opinion: The Perks of Being an Average Gamer

I've been gaming since I was a child, and like most things in life I was never gifted at it. I'm one of those people who isn't stupid enough to be happy and not smart enough to be successful.
The only way I learn and 'get good' at anything is through repetition. That's why I'm so good breathing, I'm doing it right now and not even thinking about it, okay, NOW I'm thinking about it.... And breathe!
My tastes in games changed as I got older, from classic platformers, beat 'em ups, RPG's and now predominantly shooters of the first person variety.
I still enjoy story driven action games like The Last of Us or Uncharted and still dabble in the occasional RPG but mainly I just like to shoot things... Other players mostly!
The first game I played online was actually on my Xbox 360, I had a PS2 and an original Xbox but never took them online. The first game I ever played online was Saints Row 1 and it was a revelation. Not good by any standard but playing with and against other people is just fun on another level.
This was also back when nearly everyone used their headsets, I made many friends and sunk countless hours in to the online portion of games. I'm not sure the exact moment in which it switched for me to favour the multiplayer to the single player but it did, the buzz you get from taking out another player is unparalleled in my opinion, single player is fun, but I get less of a buzz out of it. A lot of the time it feels like a warm up for the real thing and unfortunately in some games it is.
The shooter that gripped me most and held me the longest was Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from EA's top studio DICE!
The sights, the sounds, the gunplay, the mayhem. I'm not sure I'll ever truly replicate that feeling no matter how I try.
Back then I wasn't the best shot, so I played the medic class so I could come out on top simply by healing and reviving team mates.
As I mentioned earlier, practice makes perfect or in most cases: practice makes slightly better.
I'm a much better shot these days, not bad with a sniper, better with a PDW or assault rifle, after literally hundreds of hours of play my muscle memory is better than ever. I still get shit on of course, but I usually find my kills to death (K/D) to be positive, especially in the Battlefield games. I couldn't understand why until I listened to  a great YouTuber called BDobbinsFTW (you should really check out his channel, and mine too, search 'The Unashamed Gamers') what Mr Dobbins?! Described is 'skill gap compression' which many major shooters have adopted to close a noticeable skill gap between better players and weaker players. For me the bubble has been burst and I can't unsee it now that I know(yee know too much!) and gaming online will never be the same for me.
I always wondered why I didn't understand why people loved Call of Duty so much(after World at War)  yet I found it so frustrating but he explained it all so well.
I'm going to try and summarise but remember, I'm average at most things...
The main tenant is that for a player to be having a good time in shooters they need to be killing someone but if you're a skilled gamer you're going to get more kills which in turn means someone has to die and as anyone who's played just about any game there's rarely fun in losing.
Games are a business so if a lot of players are losing, getting constantly stomped on by better players, they're likely to stop playing or go play something else but you're a business and you want them to stick around to keep the servers populated and hopefully to buy more content e.g. map packs and weapons.
So what's the best way to do that? How do you keep an arguably 'bad player' to keep playing?! You make it harder for the skilled players - by adding RNG(random number generator) something that doesn't account for skill and will in turn give players either direct kills or an advantage in a gun fight without the need for skill.
Big games that have done this recently have been the last 4 or so Call of Duty's, Battlefront and Battlefield Hardline.
This can be achieved many ways but the most common is random spawns so that chances are you're going to come across another enemy player in a very short time and likely one of you will be behind or to the side of the other giving you a slight advantage and 9 times out of 10 you'll get the the kill.
Of course this doesn't mean a noob will win the game but it will give them enough kills to keep playing.
Another skill gap compressor is kill streaks, especially of the autonomous variety such as auto firing turrets or attack dogs or helicopters. These will give you kills for a single button press and you still get the buzz of a bunch of kills even though there's little skill involved.
Also map design, if you design a map with so many lanes and angles that you can never cover more than 2-3 at a time then you're going to die a lot even if you're a 2.0 k/d player.
Like I've said, I'm a pretty average gamer and when I do well I want to enjoy it like the rarity it is and these compressors partly ruin the fun as they bring the gap between kills and deaths closer for a lot of undeserved deaths. I've played a round on Battlefront where nobody actually killed me with a gun, it was in overpowered vehicles and autonomous turrets and that's just not fun for me, it cheapens it for me. Someone will undoubtedly say or think 'just get better' but if you're on a 10 kill streak and a helicopter kills you, not a player, the computer, tell me that doesn't fill you with rage and you can have a cookie and a medal as the only calm child on Xbox Live.
I understand why companies do it, people love a quick fix and I myself don't have as much time to game as I did when I was younger but I'd still rather slog away to get better than get an empty kill by pressing a button to deploy a 'Cerberus' or 'R.A.P.S' on Call of Duty: Black Ops 3.
I think I just need to get a gaming PC and play CounterStrike while eating Cheetos... Not really, I'm not that good!

Rōblox: Less is more

I logged on to my Xbox One the other day to see my good friend Paul playing a game called 'Rōblox' 9 times out of 10 me and Paul game together so it wasn't long after logging on I received a party chat invite. Interest piqued I enquired about the game and he described it like LEGO people in a LEGO world but not LEGO and really low resolution. I wasn't immediately sold I'll be honest, he then told me it was free to play and at that point I nearly turned off my console...
I said 'why are you playing that, it sounds rubbish?!' And oh how wrong I was!
The game isn't just a game, it's many, I'm not sure to be exact but a couple of hundred games, easy.
Launched on PC first, players on PC can actually create any type of game they want using the 'not LEGO' tools for their fancy then said games can be played by anyone on PC or Xbox One, as such Paul had heard there was a DayZ rip off in this pseudo LEGO/Minecraft mismatch.
We loaded up the game named 'Unturned(DayZ)' I'm still not sure  how they get away with copyright infringement but the game was what it said on the tin. It was a DayZ clone, sprawling map, sparse zombies and PVP survival et al.
Of course the graphics are awful, but the gameplay was just as fun, we finally have a MMO zombie survival sim on console and I personally enjoyed it more than 7 Days to Die which says it all.
I couldn't believe how much time we sank in to the game over the next few days, it makes me clamour for the real DayZ even more but this is surprisingly fun.
There's more to Rōblox than just this one game though, there's literally every game imaginable, a rip off of pretty much every huge franchise, some more blatant than others. 'Call of Roblox' and 'Phantom Forces' are genuinely great first person shooters, with guns, attachments, knives and grenades, there's no kill streaks which make it strictly gun on gun and honestly, I've had more fun than I have on more recent AAA shooters, especially with the sniper rifles, getting 3 headshots with one bullet made me do a girlish squeal. One game 'Sniper Strike' is a shameless copy of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, using the in game music, double jumps and guns but it's in game map recreations are where it shines and their knock off Nuketown map was as fun as the Black Ops 1 original!
Other worthy mentions are The Elevator in which the goal is to well, ride an elevator but you have no idea what's going to be on each floor, on one floor, a scene from Jurassic Park a giant T-Rex head plunging into the lift, the next you step off and to find yourself being used as a Pokémon in a battle, it's as ridiculous as it sounds and heaps of fun. There's also a great Slender Man game where one player controls the faceless ghoul and must hunt the other players armed with their wits and a torch alone, even with juvenile graphics the tension was there and many laughs to be had. I guess I learned not to judge a game by its cover and that maybe graphics aren't so important. Sometimes less really is more, no matter how much my girlfriend disagrees...

Opinion: Uncharted The Nathan Drake Collection

I had no luck with the ‘last gen’ consoles; the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. I had 3 Xbox’s over the past 10 years suffering the well known ‘Red Ring of Death’ both occurred on launch days of 2 huge Rockstar games; first with Grand Theft Auto 4 then again with Red Dead Redemption!
You’ll never know the pain of missing that first month of GTA4, I wasn’t letting that happen with RDR and promptly went out and bought another console the same weekend. It was worth being poor for a month, I digress.
When I purchased my PlayStation 3 I was unfortunate enough to be in the less than 10% of people with a faulty one. I came home set up and popped in a copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and was horrified when the machine chewed the disc up!
I took it back to shop immediately, the clerk, surely just doing his job proceeded to pop another disc in for the machine to make work of it like one of ‘Cookie Monsters’ well, er, cookies…
Once I was home with my replacement I was very eager to get in to the world of Nathan Drake, male Tomb Raider (I’m not going to make that joke) after about 7 hours of fun puzzles, gorgeous vistas and somewhat janky shooting, my game crashed and kept crashing in the same spot, Google yielded no solution and I wasn’t travelling back to the store. Sadly that was the last time I ever played the series, until I played developer Naughty Dog’s other ace up their sleeve, no not the brilliant Crash Bandicoot but the even more brilliant, 'brillianter?!’ The Last of Us.
Joel and Ellie’s simply beautiful game world and mechanics had me and when mentions of Uncharted 4 reaching similar heights I knew I had to play it.
I can’t play sequels without playing their predecessors, I can’t explain why, it’s just a weird OCD of mine, so when I heard they’d remastered the original trilogy for PS4 I knew I was going to work my way through.
I’m writing this having just completed the trilogy, I have Uncharted 4 unopened, not sure what to expect but not ready to go in before unloading a
clip or two in to the originals.
First off, the games, all 3, are gorgeous, each obviously more so than the last. The mechanics are workable if not a little janky at times but no more so than when Lara Croft or any of the Assassins Creed lot when they decide to jump away from a structure to an untimely death.
The set pieces are what make the series so stand out, cargo planes, crashed trains, Saharan deserts all regularly left me in awe. The story although convoluted at times was fun and felt like I was a living a young Indiana Jones fantasy - you never hear of kids called Indiana! - it was the difficulty that left me most frustrated, the puzzles were fine, the creatures sure but mostly the normal AI and their incessant pinpoint accurate grenade throws that irked me most. As did the boss fights, the first 2 games bosses felt particularly cheap, not fun or challenging, just an unfair slog that somewhat tainted my experience. Uncharted isn’t solely to blame, nearly all third person and most first person shooters don’t know how to make a fun boss fight so they just give you someone with a ridiculous amount of health or spawn a stupid amount of enemies while limiting your own offensive resources.
I loved the snipers though; the Dragon, T-bolt and Tau Sniper were all great to shoot and were sadly underused but then again I was nigh on untouchable using them.
I’m not sure I’m proud or relieved to be done with the trilogy, I feel like I’ve been through the ups and downs with Drake and series stalwart Sully personally, hopefully the fourth and final instalment will finish on an up!

GoldenEye N64

I didn’t get a Nintendo 64 until it had been out for a few years, you could say I was late to the ‘Mario party’ you could, but you wouldn’t… I was a child from a working class family and a console was a Christmas present if you’d been really good, or there was overtime on at your parents’ place of work!
I managed to get my hands on a second hand one a few years post release with some birthday money.
I was bang in to wrestling until I was about 15 so the reasoning of my purchase was for the great grappling based wrestling games the console had; WCW vs NWO: Revenge, WWF Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF No Mercy!
I lived many a spandex clad fantasy on those games, I’m not ashamed to admit.
As the console was second hand, it came with 2 games already; the classic Mario 64 and of course, 007: GoldenEye.
I was never a huge Bond fan, the films just didn’t grab me. I enjoyed them sure, but I wasn’t going to own them or marathon them anytime soon, then or now. It wasn’t until Daniel Craig donned the swarve moniker that I had any interest.
But GoldenEye was and is such a good game that it could have been about any generic agent and still would have been arguably the best game on Nintendo’s titular console.
I was late to the party, but I made up for it for spending many an evening hopping about as ‘Jaws’ throwing knives at friends.
The campaign was great, the controls revolutionary and my first time with a shooter personally, but the real fun, the bit everyone remembers better than it was and I’m not talking about Pierce Brosnan’s cuboid face but the multiplayer of course. Split screen, no online, actually in the same room with other human beings, balls out (not literally) fun!
Not perfect of course, the fun was what you made it, like deciding on certain weapons only before that was even a thing, ‘karate chops only’ being my personal favourite. I will always remember this game as better than it was. Xbox head Phil Spencer said when questioned about why we’ve never seen an updated version, or a remake or even a shoddy port; “GoldenEye has always been a rights issue, not a ‘getting code to run’ issue.” and I’m kinda glad it never did, sure there’s the fan made GoldenEye: Source on PC but you’ll never beat that 4 friends in a room on one console with a tiny TV laughing, shouting and falling out, and no, you can’t use 'Oddjob’, you know he has a tiny hitbox you animal!

The Warriors Remastered PS4

When I heard Rockstar Games were remastering their 2005 classic ‘The Warriors’ I was emotionally, physically and literally ready to bop my way back to the mean streets of 1979 Coney Island.
I was about 13 years old spending the weekend at my Gran’s house, it was about 2am and I was rifling through my Uncle’s VHS collection when I happened upon a black sleeveless tape with a sticker with ‘The Warriers’ [sic] crudely written on it.
I was bored, my phone only had 'Snake 2’ for entertainment, there was no PornHub to occupy an evening… It was a simpler, less chaffed time.
I popped the tape in with no knowledge of what was about to unfold over the next 92 minutes. The brilliant synth soundtrack, the camp outfits, the 70’s hairstyles, it was joyous.
For the uninitiated The Warriors is a tale of gangs of New York, all with ridiculous names, tags and outfits; mimes, brawlers, baseball clad bad-asses and our pseudo heroes The Warriors a small clique from the New York borough of Coney Island. The story centres on the city’s biggest gang The Gramercy Riffs. Their leader Cyrus invites 9 delegates from 100 of the city’s most prominent gangs to discuss banding together so that they may run the city, and they’re on board.
It unfortunately goes awry when a nutjob named Luther from Hell’s Kitchen gang The Rogues shoots Cyrus and places the blame on The Warriors.
It’s then up to them to make their way back to their turf of Coney Island (the other side of New York) and clear their name, and hopefully not get wasted for their troubles along the way.
It’s very '300’; a brave few versus many, and although they’re thugs, you can’t help but hope for the underdogs.
When Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto, Read Dead Redemption, Bully) announced they were making this game, I knew we were in safe hands.
The final product was so much more than the sum of its parts. It was meticulous in imaging the dark, unforgiving, dingy streets of New York depicted in the film.
The game does more than just deliver the story, and it does deliver the story, every iconic scene gets its moment but the stand outs are the details; the cuts and bruises your character gains in every brutal bout. The game is of course a brawler, but 3rd person and semi openworld and a lot of the time there’s upwards and 15 men duking it out; throwing each other through shop windows, slamming heads of car bonnets, a real life royal rumble.
The game also has a back story, you find out how certain members joined the gang, brutal initiations and how the crew made a name for themselves.
The remaster runs smooth but still looks very similar to its PS2/Xbox original predecessor but for £11.99 on the PSN you’d be stupid not to come out to plaaaaaay!
Upon completing the game you unlock an arcade game 'Armies of the Night’ that you can play at your gangs HQ. The meta game is of course a classic side scrolling version of the film and it’s actually better than it should be.
The whole game supports 'couch co-op’ and although a dying breed, it’s a welcome return as its been criminally underused this generation.
So stick on your brown leather cut, lace up your converse and get ready because The Warriors is worth your time whether it’s your first visit or you’re looking for a trip down memory lane.
Rockstar have also remastered the brilliant Bully and Manhunt too. What a time to be alive!

Opinion: Titanfall 2 Pre-Alpha Test Weekend 1

The ‘Titan’ doesn’t fall far from the tree in this 'pre-alpha technical test' from Respawn Entertainment.
Long winded name for ‘beta’ aside I enjoyed my time with Titanfall 2’s online component; its sharp, fun, fast paced and the mechanics were bang on the money. The only bad taste left in my mouth was that I’ve already taken a considerable bite from this particular sandwich already.
A sequel always walks the line between the old and the new and much like the Call of Duty games before it, Titanfall has that same lather, rinse, repeat feel to it despite its grandeur.
For a ‘Pre-Alpha Technical Test’ (can we stop calling it that, it’s a beta, plain and simple) the game runs smooth and the visuals are great on both PS4 and the XBone. I just feel, haven’t we been here already? The improvements to gameplay are many though, such as the simply brilliant grappling hook which makes map traversal an absolute joy and makes for some brilliant and hilarious miscalculated gun battles, but the crux of the game is the ‘quickdraw’ twitch shooting which plays out as you’d expect. It’s easy to take in many a kill and most the guns feel and shoot the same apart from obvious ones like the sniper rifle and rocket launchers.
The big sell for Titanfall is of course the 'Titans’; giant mechanical assault robots that can be piloted by the player or can be sentient and fight for you.
This is the first weekend of 2 betas and the main game modes we were treated to were 'Pilots vs Pilots' your standard player vs player death match and 'Bounty Hunter' a mode in which teams of both real players and AI fight it out… I personally hated the AI in the first game and sadly still do here. I play single player to fight AI, when I’m online I feel they get in the way of the real satisfaction of taking down actual 12 year olds!
I digress, I actually enjoyed the pilots mode more for that fact alone.
A major change is that now, rather than the Titans being earned periodically they must be earned through skill in game.
I’m still unsure how this will balance, if a player or two is doing well, then gets a Titan, surely they will just stomp the opposing team and I felt this was the case on my limited time with the game.
I’m still not sold on TF2 after this weekend, maybe next weekend will change my mind or sink the nail in the coffin of Titanfall’s mechanical graveyard. I’m still holding out hope for the story mode.

Opinion: The Fall of CoD Zombies

I was about 8 years old visiting my aunt and uncle with my parents when my mother said "Why don’t you go sit with Tony in the living room?"
Tony was my older cousin and like all little boys around older family members I thought he was cool and wanted to be his best friend, and like all older boys around younger family members(especially snotty nosed cousins) I was but a nuisance.
Upon entering said living room Tony exclaimed “Shut up Ben! I’m watching a film, okay?! You can watch too, just be quiet!”
I said nothing, sat next to him and looked at the screen, and what I saw was my first glimpse of my favourite film of all time - The original George A. Romero classic ‘Dawn of the Dead’ from 1978.
I sat down just in time to watch a zombie clambering on top of some boxes only to get the top of its head lopped off by the rotating blades of a helicopter, I was hooked.
Since then I’ve consumed every type of zombie lore going; films, TV, comics, toys and of course: video games.
Anyone who’s listened to The Unashamed Gamers Podcast (available on YouTube) will know me and Paul are huge zombie fans, especially Dead Rising and the State of Decay franchises but my journey with Call of Duty’s zombie mode has been a troublesome one.
I loved Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, as did just about every console gamer with eyes and opposable thumbs but it was Treyarch’s follow up ‘Call of Duty: World at War’ that really showed me what CoD could be; visceral, precise, unforgiving and a fuck tonne of fun.
I, like many others was oblivious to the end game easter egg ‘Nacht Der Untoten’ (German for ‘Night of the Undead’) and more commonly referred to as ‘Nazi Zombies!’
There was and still is a beauty in that first maps simplicity; 4 men fending off waves of ever strengthening zombies whilst fruitlessly trying to board up all the windows lest they breach and claw your friends to death with their filthy undead mitts!
I spent countless nights holding doorways and windows with friends, hoping for the perfect gun in the 'mystery box’, a well, mysterious box that randomly chose which gun you would receive to help you fend off the walkers.
When Treyarch’s next Call of Duty arrived; 2010’s Black Ops, you best believe we wanted more Nazi Zombies, and the first map 'Kino Der Toten' AKA 'Theatre of the Dead’ did not disappoint, giving the right amount of variety and challenge. It was around then when I lost interest in the series, the maps became too elaborate, too silly and this is coming from a man who insists on Frank West wearing a dress in Dead Rising. Somewhere along the way, the fun was lost. It may have been our trip to the moon, it may have been my hero George A. Romero being a giant villain, it certainly didn’t help that to get the latest zombies maps you have to buy the multiplayer maps too and there’s a lot of us who just don’t want that. Are we to blame for continuing to purchase them? I think probably so, if you always sell millions why would you think anything is wrong?! If everyone is smiling to your face, you’re not going to presume they’re crying behind your back.
The last map I played had a dragon flying around, burning zombies now and again, it sounds like it should be fun, but alas it was not, I played 2 rounds and will comfortably never touch it again.
My vote will be with my wallet this year, I didn’t want zombies in space and I certainly don’t want zombies in 'spaceland!’

"Ana" Overwatch

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Ana the new healer/sniper character on Blizzard’s MOBA: Overwatch.
I always talk in The Unashamed Gamers Podcast(available on YouTube) about my love for shooters and how I’m always juggling 3-4 at a time and as such I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Overwatch since launch but not hammering it as much as I thought I would, but once I caught word of a new character I was happy to get stuck back in.
A lot of players have a ‘main’, a character which they ‘mainly’ use or play more than others but I’ve not really had anything close to that. I have about 5 mains because well frankly, I’m flaky and greedy.
I love Roadhog for his self healing and devastating shotgun, I enjoy Junkrat for his frag launcher, concussion mine and Aussie swagger! I also play a lot of Mei, for those icicle headshots and Genji’s deflect has brought me countless smiles when eliminating pesky Bastion’s but Ana is nothing like them.
I’ve always leaned towards healers, whether it be a daisy in Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare or choosing a medic in pretty much any Battlefield game. When I was younger it felt good to get a lot of points even if I wasn’t the best shot. I’m marginally better at games now due to years of practice but still lean towards healers. For some reason that never happened for me in Overwatch, it seemed like a natural fit but non of the characters have taken me like the other classes have. Lord have ‘Mercy’ on me because she may be my least used character, what’s the opposite of a main?!
When I first read about Ana, mother of Pharah, a woman armed with a ‘biotic healing rifle’ I thought ‘only in Overwatch’ but from my first play through to my most recent I’ve never been more enamoured with a character in the game. I’ve always been a decent shot but to be able to shoot my teammates and not only not annoy them but them be thankful, is quite frankly a miracle, especially on a platform like Xbox where there is an abundance of whiny players, I was surprised how many times I had most heals in game and the whole team voted my card.
The beauty of the rifle is there's no switching between heal mode or assault, if you shoot a friendly they regain health, shoot an enemy they lose it. It’s beautiful in its simplicity and reinvigorates the thrill of shooting for me.
She has other abilities such as a handy sleeping dart for temporarily pressing snooze on a troublesome Torbjörn and making a quick exit. She also has a healing grenade and her special lets her buff one character to temporarily let them hulk out and deal more damage and take less damage. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of sniping an allied Reinhardt to keep him and his shield pushing forward then, buffing him when he’s in the capture zone and watching him clean up.
I think I’ve found my main!