Author: Callum Gibson

Player Insignificance In Large-Scale Multiplayer FPS

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Planetside 2 soldier confused by chaos
Good luck to this guy lol

Quantity has a quality of its own, but, in the context of player caps in multiplayer first-person shooters, there are limits.

The announcement that Battlefield 2042 would have 128 player servers was met with excitement by many, but almost immediately after release, opinions soured.

This is not to say no one liked the vast increase in player count, nor that it couldn’t have been implemented better. But there are fundamental issues with player counts beyond 64 (the standard cap for ‘large’ multiplayer games) that are not easy for developers to mitigate.

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Top 5 Most Wanted Remasters

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Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction image
Okay, there are actually more than 5 games on this list 🙂

Remasters and remakes have a reputation for being lazy cash grabs. While this may be true of many of them, there have been more good ones than you might think.

Demon’s Souls Remastered, the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Destroy All Humans Remastered, Mafia: Definitive Edition (which is technically a remake), and others do exactly what remasters are supposed to do–make old games playable for new audiences and update them to modern standards while retaining the magic of the originals.

So here’s a question: if you could name old games you’d like to see remastered, and you could somehow know they’d be done well, which one would you name? I’m talking about games made over ten years ago, not games like Skyrim, GTA V, or The Last of Us, which are too recent to receive any notable benefit from remastering.

I asked myself this question and dashed out my top 5 below. Have a look and see what you think.

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Why Is Titanfall 2’s Movement System So Good?

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Titanfall 2 pilot wallhanging
He do be zoomin’ tho

Movement shooters are more common now than they used to be. For about a decade after the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, practically every shooter was what you could call a ‘positional’ shooter.

In positional shooters, players move slowly and die quickly, thus making each player’s position at the start of a firefight a significant factor in the outcome. Players would spot each other, start shooting, and within a couple of seconds one of them would be dead.

The domination of the positional shooter of FPS began to loosen around the release of Titanfall, a game with movement so fast and versatile that Call of Duty soldiers appeared to be wading through invisible mud by comparison.

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What if Horror Games Were Not Advertised as Horror Games?

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A ghost haunting the Gone Home house
Hear me out: Gone Home … but spooky

One of the best ways to scare someone is to catch them off guard. If you let someone know something scary will happen, you give them the chance to mentally prepare for it. Most people will strengthen their mental defences whether intentionally or not; it’s an unconscious response they have no control over.

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The Simpsons: Hit and Run Review – Best GTA Clone Ever

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The Simpsons Hit and Run first mission with Homer
A review? Aww, I wanted a peanut…

Hit and Run is a game about driving cars, smashing things, collecting stuff, buying stuff, and doing outrageously dangerous and illegal errands for people across Springfield because they asked nicely. Not only is it the best Simpsons game ever made, but it’s also one of the best GTA-style games ever made too. The dialogue, the music, the care put into this game’s version of Springfield, and all the things to do and collect come together to form a timeless masterpiece that people of all ages can enjoy. Licensed games don’t often do well, but in Hit and Run’s case, everything came up Milhouse.

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Slither.io Review – The Duality of Snek

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Slither.io gold snake
Just a humble snek making his way in the snekiverse

Slither.io really doesn’t need to be reviewed. You can play it right now on your phone or browser and it’s simple enough to get the gist of it within a minute or two of playing. But you know what? I’m going to review it anyway. It’ll make for good writing practice. So please humour me as I write the most pointless review ever.

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