Category Archives: gaming

Can you seriously scrutinize Call of Duty’s campaigns? NC-G can.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais has been responsible for some landmark critiques of video games that focus on the gameplay and story-telling aspects of the game in a nearly dispassionate manner. There’s something to his way of thinking and analysis that I greatly appreciate and since he upgraded his equipment around last year, he’s been producing videos every month for a growing YouTube audience instead of two videos a year. (Note to self: I need to contribute to that Patreon campaign he’s running.)

This month’s video is about collection of single player campaigns featured in the Call of Duty franchise, a series of games with humble-enough intentions that turned into a formulaic, yet incontestable, genre-defining standard-bearer. It’s a fascinating two-hour-long look into the installments released for the PC.

I never knew the Bad Juju got buffed this hard.

I know the real strength of the Bad Juju is its String of Curses exotic upgrade and I had heard that pulse rifles got a base damage buff in update 1.1.1, but I wasn’t prepared for how effectively it was dispatching Atheon’s adds.

If I had known, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep whenever I paused to think during the all-nighter I pulled when Xûr was doing his weekly Tower visit. Sheesh.

I became a stoner this week… a Hearthstoner, that is.

Screenshot 2015-03-02 17.25.34

I’m not entirely sure how it came up in the mm1 Slack, but between whatever we were discussing and the fact that World of Warcraft will be adopting a PLEX-lke currency for game-time in the coming months, I figured I would go ahead and give the Battle.net client an install.

Hearthstone appealed to me on a time-waster level, but not as something I could just sit there and play for hours on end. I mean, if I did, I’d probably have to be multitasking. Since I don’t think that Blizzard will allow multi-tabling to come to Hearthstone, I would imagine that I’d probably end up playing poker or something at the same time if I really wanted to commit time to the game. However, if I’m not taking the game super seriously and I treat it expressly as a time-waster, I think I’d get the most out of it at that point.

It’s the same sort of attitude that I’ve been giving a couple of other casual mobile games from a certain developer called Supercell. Clash of Clans and Boom Beach are freemium timer-based-tactics titles. The’s a timer for nearly every aspect of the game. Want to upgrade a type of unit in Clash of Clans? Pay thousands upon thousands of Elixir and then be prepared to wait two days for your upgrade to finish. Want to expand your Radar coverage in Boom Beach? Get ready to wait for days to gather the stone needed, and then wait twelve hours to perform the upgrade. The way to escape this particular cycle is to use the gem/diamond currency that can only be used to speed up production/timers.

However, being able to play these games without giving into the need to spend real currency to skip a timer just a handful of times isn’t worth it to me. It’s not that I expect to eventually turn into a pro gamer at either game, but I just don’t want to feel beholden to the game going forward. I want the fun that I’ll have fighting other bases with my armies to be genuine and not something I feel like I just have to get used to—like the feeling I get sometimes when it comes to Destiny and paying for that season pass.

And in that way I could definitely see myself passing random bits of time playing Hearthstone and trying to make as many coins so that I could unlock all of the cards without spending money. However, Xûr’s in the bar near the hangar, and I have some strange coins to earn, then spend.