Review: Ninjatown

Malek Yala — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 04:06:15 +0000

I love ninjas, you love ninjas, everyone (except pirates) loves ninjas. But the question is, do you love ninja strategy? Can you prepare yourself for oncoming relentless waves of blood thirsty demons? Can you organize your ninja army so that no demon can march down the street without losing some teeth? These are questions every black, green or yellow Ninjatown citizen asks themselves in the morning as they look at themselves in the mirror. Each and every day blood is spilled on the streets of Ninjatown, and the ninjas are not the one’s bleeding.
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Review: Mirror’s Edge

Malek Yala — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 22:21:57 +0000

I look down the list of the games released in 2008 and I see an abundance of platforming games. One of which has me seeing real life platforms in my daily life. Mirrors Edge has taken the proclaimed “dead”, bland genera and made it an gun-slinging, color red-loving, parkour professional zombie. Forget the babbling cartoon characters that you know from other platformers, because you’ll be climbing real obstacles that you’ll find out on the street of a realistic city. You don’t need any mysterious mushrooms anymore to get vertical, what you need is to take a leap of faith into the large genre smoothie that is first-person platformer – also known as the Mirrors Edge.
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Quake Live (BETA)

Malek Yala — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:13:56 +0000

Just because its free doesn’t mean that it can go without criticism, but because Its a beta, you shouldn’t take me too seriously. I’ve have been excited for Quake Live ever since its been announced. The Idea that It can run on older PCs via a web browser had exited me because there was a potential that I could begin playing games with “that: group of people who wouldn’t buy $600 worth of PC parts and were reluctant to even open their dust infested Dell computer. Quake games have always been a fast paced games, but when I played threw the Q-Live tutorial for the first time I experienced a moment of video game motion sickness for the first time in my life. Your running and jumping so fast that its terrifying. I swallowed my nausea and got into a few games where I fraged and got fraged a many, many times, It turns out that I highly enjoyed myself because I was correctly matched with players that had smiler noob’ish skill as me. I had a choice to to play with players of higher skill for a challenge but it was too soon for me so I chose the server that was closes to me and of my player skill.

At first I was certain that the speed and bunny hopping was the core reason for my mass enjoyment but that wasn’t true, its the fact that the whole game is launched and runs in a web browser where I still have access to my IM clients and iTunes library. For me, it takes less then 10 seconds for a game to load, and that’s fucking awesome because some of my other loading experiences have reached 7 up to 10 minuets (!*cough Battlefield 2*!). Then by the time I join, the match is over and then next map is loading, frustrating right?. With Quake Live its so easy to jump in and out of a game that I’ve been able to play a whole 30 frag match while I wait for my ride to school to arrive

Before my beta acceptance email arrived I was satisfying my Quake boner with Warsow which is a free game that is very similar to Quake in the sense that it has rocket jumps and important reliance on bunny hops. essentially the more bunny hop you preform the faster you get and because your running so freaking fast your going to run into walls which isn’t an issue because you have a dash button that can bounce you off walls or acts as a strafe in a specific direction meaning that you can build up speed and maintain this super speed while you hunt down other players. What I’m wishing for in Q-Live is that integration of the dash from Warsow so I wouldn’t be stuck face against a wall because I couldn’t change my direction fast enough when faced with a curving hallway.

Warsow in action

No money was expended for my experience with this game. Instead of paying, I’m looking at advertisements which I can tolerate. Ad’s are usually displayed as still images on holographic billboards within the game or during the 10 seconds of load time. On occasion you jump on a launch pad and your flung on to the other end of the map where you jump threw the translucent billboard as a way to be forced to look at the advertisements, which is really interesting because then advertisers would know that players, when they used that specific launch pad will never miss there ad’s. That idea I could see would really interest advertisers and ensure that Q-Live stays around.

Overall I really am enjoying this beta, and I know I will enjoy the final game. Contact me for an invite. You should really try it.

Broken Fun

Review: Ninjatown

Review: Mirror’s Edge

Quake Live (BETA)