I stayed up all night pounding sodas and playing Overwatch. Overwatch is a multiplayer online battle arena in the form of a first person shooter. Characters have all manner of magical abilities which give them edges in combat. Having a cohesive team is everything in a game like this, and you’re forced to grind away until level 25 before you can take your profile into ranked competition. You play the same game, but you are not able to be cast into a series of tier qualifying matches until this somewhat lofty goal.

When you get even a good team, not a great team, but people stick together and use what minimal in game communication they can. Having people on headsets is a serious edge, almost assured the key to victory in “quick match.” Even eleven year olds can make articulate relevant information, and even have high ranking accounts. I like that Overwatch is a game for the ages. Its a good feeling when your good work gets recognized by the group, which Overwatch presents plenty of opportunities to do so. Ranging from graffiti, top players fighting for “likes” at the end of the round, the end of the round “Play of the Game,” which feels amazing, and good old fashioned chat. Call of Duty does not have the community Overwatch does. Nobody call my mother anything derogatory during my playtime, I didn’t hear any ethnic slurs, and when I wasn’t doing well as a certain character, they broke it to me softly, “Hey we were doing a lot better with your Lucio.” No need to be rude. I read the chat rooms at professional Overwatch League, and it is so often so toxic.

I played for six hours straight, with 36 wins. That is a win rate I am very comfortable with as a beginner, and I suspect my entire ride won’t be so posh. I faced tough players on my better characters who clearly just understand the levels and the strengths and weaknesses of characters on a level I’m nowhere near yet.

I was drawn to the healers, and then also the offensive characters. Not the tanks, who are intended to draw the aggravation of the other team. If I am playing the damage dealer, I like to sneak in like a ninja and wreak havoc. Or draw foes into battles of attrition with one of the healer classes. Fight like Napoleon in Overwatch, the most people at a position of you choosing.

 

 

 

I loved Watch Dogs 1. I loved it so much i picked it up on sale some time after retiring my physical copy, which I did after initially completing the game. I’m glad I kept playing, because there was certainly more. I also snagged the downloadable content, expanding the game significantly with a new story, new gear, and new challenges.

I played the trial for Watch Dogs 2 before receiving it as a Christmas present from my parents. I was very excited to play, although apprehensive. My trepidation comes from my familiarity with the way to play the first game. With the silenced machine gun, hacks, and intuitive traps, you could terrorize a force of people without them ever knowing where you are fighting. Playing Watch Dogs 2 for the first several hours felt like riding someone else’s bike. Someone who just isn’t built the way you are. The ergonomics don’t feel intuitive. Instead of carefully deploying traps, I found myself more often than not being surprised by enemies, and resorting to using guns even to take out low level, private security employees. I eventually realized this to be a style of playing the game, but this senseless killing over every little thing I want on the map was just not the approach to violence that the first game took, in which it is a last resort in many cases.

The Watch Dogs 2 skill tree favors three playing styles, Hacker, Ghost, and Aggressor. Individual skills purchasable by gaining “followers,” (XP,) will be labeled as favoring a mix of these styles. Since everything turns into a gunfight for me, I favor Aggressor heavily. I have played likely about twenty to thirty hours, and this is the only play style I have ever needed besides the introduction. I’m still not accustomed to the new hacking menus, so most of the hacking I do is to get away from pursuers, or control vehicles and equipment.

Aside from being a vicious mass murderer, Watch Dogs 2 has much campier, friendlier, more humorous atmosphere. Whether you’re getting photobombed while taking a selfie, or working with any of the cast of comics involved in your gang. The first game was very serious. And while this game just might not have dropped a bomb on me yet, it seems like it is all geared to be more true to the new protagonist, Marcus, aka “Retro.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re a gamer, by now I hope at some point you’ve picked up Borderlands. Whether you played it once because someone lent it to you, or you got the Handsome Collection one of the many times it has been on sale. I have some very great memories playing this game with friends, and hundreds of hours solo. I likely match this hourly total playing cooperatively. When the game first came out, I was living with a friend and his mother in California. We spent every hour not spent working, or in my case, looking for work, for countless hours. After moving back to Cedar Rapids, failing to find gainful employment, I fell out with a friend of a friend. Us both addicts in our own right, but Borderlands between us became a drug whose insatiability knows no bounds. The learned skills of how to cooperate with someone different than you. Adapting to their strengths and weaknesses. Through downloadable content, it remained a part of our lives through our separate recoveries. He even got a full leg tattoo sleeve of art from the game which meant so much to us. I merely have a small Borderlands tattoo, but it matches part of his. He apparently had his own endgame-level character from a coop session with an older friend as well. Indeed, my Borderlands experience spanned several playthroughs, with several people. This is before the sequels, which I don’t know if I have put in the raw time I did on the first game, solo hours are at least equal.

The algorithms powering the game are very sophisticated, and make repeat playthroughs unique. There are a number of characters to sample. It flawlessly blends a RPG experience with the gameplay mechanics of a first-person shooter. The art style is unique, and engaging. One of the characters in the first game has an ability in which you can kill enemies simply by running next to them. Nobody in the second or third games has a power quite this impressive, but they are almost all enjoyable to me.

Borderlands is about a “vault hunter,” (you,) in search of a fabled ancient alien vault. Supposedly filled with untold riches, the fables of the vault have torn apart the planet of Pandora with bandits, and vicious creatures. Up to four players can play together, and the game gets harder the more players there are playing.

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton