After all of my hours playing League of Legends, it is nice to finally be able to sit down and play the original Mega Man on my Nintendo Entertainment System.

After two years and months of being in rage of my lack of skill/Over all ranking. I have had enough.

There was a time when multi-player gaming online ruled my life, and it was the last two years of college... Strangely I look back and I laugh at how I treated my friends and how they treated me when we all had gotten sucked up into the recent fad of competitive gaming.

I have always been competitive in gaming, but not on the internet scale. Through out middle school and high school I was know for being... for the lack of better words Ben Yahtzee's "That Guy" who had mastered games like super smash to a whole new level that my friends never wanted to play against me because they knew the outcome.

Strangely enough I had a lot of pride in being "That Guy" and most of my friends actually respected me for those skills, even though they did not want to admit them.

That all changed when I went to state university after two years of college, not only was I sick of living alone but I was sick of being in the smaller towns. So I moved into a men's hall  that supported only 50 other men there. I had quickly made a really nice group of friends and things were really cool... until we were introduced to League of Legends. At first it was really innocent. Around ten of my friends would play league of legends online and it was really fun, most of us really did not understand the game. ( not coming from a WC3 or SC background ) 

When we joined the community there was no real meta, no real pros, and almost no respect for the game in general.

Things changed once I introduced a close and introverted friend in the hall to the rest of my friends that lived there too. he was a really cool guy, but he was hopelessly addicted to SC2 and was constantly playing it about 30 hours a week at minimum. Slowly we worked him into our social structure and things were getting pretty cool until, we introduced him to League of Legends.

What we did not know is that he had played DOTA for several years competitively, and we had unleashed a great and yet unspeakable power. Soon we were seeing who was the best at the game, and dividing ourselves to specific "roles" and "champions" and making our own in house teams.

As a college student I would love to spend all my time gaming like my other friends that have less demanding degrees than me, but I was taking 22 hours + a foreign language that had 3-4 hours of home work due every night. So I did not have as much time to practice or learn as my other friends.

It felt like we all developed a competitive nature and soon, we were actually treating each other due to their skill. Some how your skill level actually determined your authority on what you talked about in real life.

Slowly but surly I was falling behind my friend's skill level. I tried everything to keep up, but with my schedule it was going to be impossible to keep up. So slowly but surly I was slowly being removed from my own social group.

It was not so bad, until we divided ourselves into two teams.

The A team and the B team. I was still a pretty good player, except the role I liked was the one that the Dota player always wanted to do. So I was moved to the B team. At the time the B team only had 3-4 people on it regularly, so anytime we had a in house game we would always loose.

Worst of all was that the A team ( vast majority of my friends ) would practice as a team and leave me out of games. They sometimes came up with really good excuses on why it would be better to have a random person on the internet play with them, than me. 

I quickly realized that it was my skill level that was why they did not want to play with me.

That sense of needing to be the best really stayed with me, until I had recently gotten to hang out with one of my older friends from high school, and play through the majority of Max Payne 3, Brutal Legend, and Splatter House.

My friend even convinced me to buy one of the games I have always wanted to own on my Nintendo Entertainment System; Mega Man 1.

Playing through those games were refreshing. 
Playing Mega Man 1 was refreshing. 

Gone was the pressure of the the whole internet vs me as there is no need to be the best at Mega Man. I could sit back and enjoy the graphics, music, and the game-play.

That is the best thing about single player games is that there is no pressure to complete the game fast or with a certain amount of skill, and you can simply take the game at your own pace. 

When I was playing League, each game is about an hour commitment. That is a TON of wasted time. You can always quit at any time, but you will be at the mercy of the moderators. So you have to commit to sitting next to your computer for an hour.

Where with Mega Man, My personal skill is always with me, so I can leave at anytime and come back and still be just as good (granted it is no more than a month at a time )

I think that is why I prefer single player games, is that it is not as intrusive to ones life style, and you are always able to set the game down and pick it up later and not worry.

I am glad that I have found this out, and I feel like I am much more happy and have better relationship with my friends.

So I am a huge Star Wars fan and the recent loss of Lucas Arts I was looking at Star Wars: Dark forces the series that became the Jedi Knight series.

As I was watching you-tuber: Mikelat beat the game [spoilers], the end cut scene included their ship ( The Moldy Crow) flying through a bunch of other Star Wars ships. Here is the link if you cannot see the similarities by my murky picture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-nyJOugOAU&feature=youtu.be&t=27m33s







While Both forms of the Normandy share the same body type as the Moldy Crow, it is the SR2 that takes it to the next level by adding the tail fins.

While the scale of the Moldy Crow is much smaller than the Normandy SR2 (the obvious missing cabin space and the ability to hold more 30+ people and the Mako ), They share same basic design and function.

The two swept back cranked arrow wings with some sort of space flow tech engines, the iconic tail fins that have engines on them.

To be that little ship that maneuver well and get to places that larger ships couldn't

While this is not world destroying, I found it inspiring that Bio-ware while being acquisition by EA had time to tip their hat to another Science Fiction Shooter before them.

I recently downloaded Mech Warrior Online Beta, as I use to play countless hours playing Mech Warrior. Instantly I regretted not getting the founders package that was offered for $35. I have a lot of respect for developers that risk their quality games to the ideals of TF2 freemium, as it is a lot to gamble especially when micro transactions don'y immediately come trickling in.

I log in to find that the game does not give you "any" of your own personal mechs. Instead, new members are "treated" to "trial mechs" that are not customizable and have all the weapons and systems pre-made for good or bad.

That would only be a minor set back, as customization has ALWAYS been the staple of main games the series. However, trial mechs have reduced armor than their bought counterparts, and have significantly reduced damage than their counter parts. Since there is no ranking system, every match will include your fiery death with no kills to match it. That would have not been so bad... but you do not get many in-game credits for loosing matches.

So unless you spend $20-30 right off the bat, you might as well be playing a mech death simulator.

Many people argue that "new" people need to grind, because they do not understand "tactics." But as a genera veteran I have played 5-10 matches where no amount of strategy or tactics have even helped me.



So what is the point of going free to play, if you are going to force people to pay to get a "real" gaming experience. Not to say that MWO is a fake game, but when you compare the difference between TF2 and MWO, new players a much better off from the start.

Maybe I am to use to other online games like GW2 where you pay once and you get pretty much everything everyone else gets. Unlike many MMOs I really doubt that the free to play model is appropriate for the style of game that Mech Warrior Online is, or at least the way that they have implemented it.

I have played Blacklight Retribution, and Hawken. While they are very different games, I never really ran into the same level of anti-new player payment mechanics that exist in MWO in-game credits or cash.



While I understand the game is still in beta, it is going to take more than a minor patch to fix the scales. The developers need to rework the economic system, as it is completely self-serving. which, is why the developers have no motivation to fix these problems.

So, anyone else seen these issues?

The PS Vita is the scourge of negative gaming news lately, and rightfully so with some of the recent business moves from Sony. They are probably busy making sure the PS4 launch does better. Most people claim that a price change is the only answer to the marginal sales.








As most people know, Nintendo rebuilt the gaming industry from the 80's with their Nintendo Entertainment System or commonly known as the "NES." Nintendo joined a trend where they would bundle a game with the system. Back in 1985 the new system was very pricy for the market, but they bundled it with one of the most popular Arcade games of that time. That strategy proved to be successful, as their bundle with the game out sold the bundle without a game.

Sony Launched the PS Vita in 2012 and sold their wi-fi system for $250 flat. Later after realizing their mistake they made bundles (Uncharted, Madden, Assasian Creed and Call of Duty) +4GB memory card at $250.








So I think Sony values the hardware of the system to be around $200-190, as the game is about $40-30 and the 4GB card is $20. They should still be making a profit on it.

So my suggestion is to make a "Digital Bundle" and include the PS Vita with a 16GB memory card (supposedly $59-54) and a $10-20 PSN card.

My 16 GB Scan Disk Extreme SD card that reads at 45MB/s costs $20, so I figure that Sony is getting 2-3 times profit off of their prioritized memory. I think that Sony could get profit off of this bundle as their memory cards are ridiculously overpriced.

The great thing about this bundle over the only available one right now ( Call of Duty ) at maximum you could buy a cheep PSP/Vita game or 2 PS one games or movies.

*update: so it turns out they did contact him! :D*

There is a few people in the video game business that I stock, periodically, because they made amazing games that set up gaming as we know it.





The lead designer of Doom who is credited with forcing the creation of Teleporters and other various niceties that we take advantage of in FPS and other forms of gaming right now. For how innovative he was, the industry did not reward him much.

After id he went to make Rise of the Triad. While he did not get as much as he wanted done on the game, he did have larger autonomy on the design of the game.

Ultimately the gaming community wrote it as a Wolfenstine rip off, but he was one of the major designers of Wolfenstine 3D.

I was reading his blog site TomTomTom and I found these comments under his Prometheus Review



I understand that they are making a re-boot, but to not even contact the lead designer for input is like re-booting Star Trek without help from Leonard Nimoy...

The man spent a long time designing this game, and it would be fair to tribute that Rise of the Triads would not exist except that he wanted to make it.

It made me sad that unlike Japanese video game designers, US game designers like Tom do not get much credit. He wrote the entire Doom universe in a single document, that still shows many repercussions in the design of future Doom games, not to mention the plot line of the third one.

It just saddens me that the developers of today would not bother contact him, as he put so much work into it.

So I am currently considering buying a PSP Vita, which is a huge taboo for me as I am usually a dedicated Nintendo consumer.

But with the PS store having all the great classic PS one games, like Mega Man X4, FFVII, Ape Escape, and many other titles. I have started to think that it would be great to get caught up on those good exclusives that I have not had a chance to play yet.

So I have been reading up on the device, and it seems that a lot of the content is provided through transferring data from the PS3.

So can the PSP download and play PS one games by itself?

And if so, can it download and play PSP games by itself?

Well thanks for the help guys, it seems the more I search on the internet the more I get confused.