You will not find a more biased list of awards. This is because I am the only voter, and I can only consume so much stuff. Please excuse any egregious omissions.
Weeks after most major media outlets have released their end-of-year awards lists, it is time for the most important list of all. These are the Dougies, where most of the awards are made up and the points definitely do not matter.
You will not find a more biased list of awards. This is because I am the only voter, and I can only consume so much stuff. Please excuse any egregious omissions.
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(UPDATE 12/19) This game continues to grow on me. The campaign and zombies, while not perfect in execution, are given a huge boost in deployability by the new progression systems. The same goes for the multiplayer, which is deeper and more balanced than I thought at first glance. My only real complaint is the selection of maps. Each map seems to have the same basic 3-lane design, and although this serves the gameplay style well, I wish there were a few outliers to make things more interesting. Treyarch has always delivered excellent map packs, so the upcoming DLC should really help boost the game's longevity and diversity.
Time to talk COD! For context, here’s my old rankings of the games from 2007-2013, and here’s my thoughts on last year’s Advanced Warfare. Black Ops 3 shipped with a truly unbelievable amount of content, a welcome sight in the age of incomplete games, microtransactions and excessive DLC. Here’s what developer Treyarch packed onto the disc: A lengthy campaign, with four player co-op and a full progression system And in addition to that, a fully realized top-down arcade shooter (Dead Ops Arcade 2, it's called) and a reskinned second campaign that swaps out the military enemies with zombies. Treyarch, given three years of development time instead of the usual two, put their extra time to good use. Links!
What is it like to be a Brooklyn Nets fan, rooting for the most miserable franchise in American professional sports? I am one of these people, and it is sad. I picked up Halo 5, and it has been a bit of a disappointment. There is room to grow with post-release support, but the game does not live up to the series name right now. I saw her face, now I’m a Belieber. The Canadian pop star’s new album is an unquestioned success. The North continues to dominate music, although Adele’s sales are going to be tough to beat. Star Wars season approaching. Here are bunch of links to pieces from this past month.
I wrote a pair of album reviews: Mac Miller’s GO:OD AM, and Demi Lovato’s Confident. The Lovato one was an interesting challenge. Kathy Griffin came to Storrs. I went to watch, and as she frequently pointed out, “straight white men” may not have been the target audience. Does your fantasy football team suck? Do you want it to suck more? Take my advice! This is a total Matthew Berry rip-off, but without the 14,843-word introduction about how he’s famous or some s**t. I LOVE potato chips. Lay’s annual ‘Do Us a Flavor’ contest lets normal Americans make their own weird flavors for lunatics like me to eat. I tried all four of the 2015 flavors. That’s all for links, but I have a bunch of random thoughts on various subjects to share after the break. They need to get out. Sweeping a forgettable movie review under the rug, the first thing that I wrote for this site was a piece ranking the blockbuster entries in gaming’s $600 million elephant in the room, the Call of Duty series.
(Before we begin, I want to participate in an American tradition and do some revisionist history. I ranked Ghosts over Modern Warfare 3 for the sixth spot on that list, and that wasn’t correct. Yes, MW3 is profoundly bland, but I was on too much of a Ghosts kick while writing that to realize that it deserved that bottom spot. The multiplayer is rather sloppy and doesn’t bring anything new to the table. Also, f**k that ending.) I hold these games very close to my heart, in large part for nostalgic reasons but also because, well, they’re pretty damn good. Check the Metacritic database. Each game in the series hits all the bullet points for quality gaming: tight controls, beautiful graphics, exciting gameplay, and a high fun-factor. The annual releases have attempted to tweak and change mechanics to keep things fresh, but the groundwork was laid expertly. Well, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare came into existence in 2014 as the new kid in school. The developer, Sledgehammer Games, was making its first Call of Duty as the lead studio, and had big ideas in mind. The innovation: exosuits, which allow players to leap around the map with boost packs and provide special futuristic abilities. Also, they nabbed Kevin Spacey to anchor the single-player campaign as the leader of a private military corporation. After neglecting to purchase the game at launch for logistical reasons, I finally got my hands on it recently to take it for a spin. Where will it rank? Is the multiplayer well-designed? Is Spacey’s motion-captured character more of a Frank Underwood or a Keyser Soze? Was that a spoiler? No. It’s Kevin Spacey. |
AuthorT. Swift Archives
December 2016
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