The Wolf Among Us Review

Reviewed on Xbox One

Getting this ball rolling with another review, how about that?

Today's game review is....

The Wolf Among Us

The Wolf Among Us was first released on the Xbox 360 on October 11, 2013 by Telltale Games, now if you don't Telltale games and the kind of games they make the quick run down is that they make; story driven, almost "choose your own adventure" type games with minimal game play.

The Wolf Among Us is based off the comic series 'Fables' by Bill Willingham and published by Vertigo,
The comic series started in 2002 and as far as I know finished in 2015, there's countless spin-offs and after playing this game I'm awfully tempted to dive into it, anyway

The game focuses on Bigby Wolf who you guide through his investigation into the murder of a person in the community known as 'Fabletown'. This is where the hook is, so to speak. Fabletown houses fables from legend and stories throughout history, including many classical ones such as the character you play as, Bigby aka, the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast. Just to spice it up though, Wolf Among Us does not limit itself to classical fables, it also includes American legends as well which I won't dive into ( little spoilery I suppose)

They all live in New York and this provides the perfect backdrop for some noir type cinematography,
Enough about the specifics lets get on to the review portion.


Presentation

The game starts off with a pink/purple filigree type background with some neonish type colours
and is pretty bare but that is completely okay, the main draw here is the TV like format that this game follows,

The games gives you a few extra things to keep you engaged like giving you the option to review your choices you've made through the game, this is heightened by telling you how you stack up against the online community by showing you the percentage of people that made the same choice of you, this makes you feel like a unique little snowflake or super basic. This sort of information it feeds you is nice reminder of the kind of person you are, A very unique part of the Telltale games experience

There's another section that describes all the characters you've met and catalogs them, yes, nice, thanks. Always good.

The menus don't perform really well though kinda slow, kinda sluggish, you do wish it was faster.

A lot of the presentation is also part of the game play so I'll end this section here

7/10

Sound

So yeah this game, sound is its thing. Its excellent story is only aided by its fantastic sound design, Every voice actor is completely on point, putting on a convincing performance, even in the case of a talking pig. 

Environmental sounds are good and supplement the scenes well, but the true combo here is the voice acting and the music, its everything you would expect out of a top notch TV show, gives me a Stranger Things feeling, I'm not sure if its supposed to be set in the 80's but everything in this game leads me to believe that its set in that time period, cool ambient synthy music introduces the game and totally sets the style 

I am a fan

10/10

Graphics

In the case of The Wolf Among Us, it's like most Telltale games, simple graphics, much like a comic (like its source material). It uses hard tone differences to set up it's distinct style, using a lot of yellows, purples, pinks, and blues, again giving it a dated feel

The character designs are very unique, you will certainly not forget these characters, supported by their voices and distinct looks, the art of this game is truly its own.

Still in this day and age its hard not to desire something more detailed, it'll be nice to see a Telltale game with some triple A visuals one day, 

Although I know this game uses its style to determine its look, and I do appreciate all styles of art I feel that in terms of graphics, this is on of The Wolf Among Us' lower points (sorry)

7/10

Game Play

Discussing game play in a Telltale game is tough thing to discuss, since it is such a different style of game I've got to be fair.

The Wolf Among Us is not so much a game but more of a graphical choose your own adventure book so game play options are kind of limited, most of your interactions are limited to selecting responses to dialog spoken by NPC's and and Quick Time Events during 'action' sequences, this is a common thing through Telltale games, so nothing is different here if you played any other title from the developer.

Though the way the story gets conveyed in a very satisfying way, after playing a few other Telltale titles the game play is starting to feel a little stale,

7/10

In Closing...

I had really good time following the story of Bigby Wolf and part of me really want's to delve into the comic book story line (be sure to let me know if you've read them). The game play is exactly what I expected out of a Telltale game so if you go in knowing their style and have liked it in the past you will be pleasantly surprised with this game. 

If this is your first time playing a Telltale title, you've picked a good one.

So the weighted score came to another 7.7 which is a good score but I liked it more than that and since its my little review I'm going to adjust that to an 8.

Thanks for reading!

FINAL SCORE: 8

Blamethrower - Home and Heartbreak

Hi all,

Today I'd like to take a moment out to promote my bands latest tune called Home and Heartbreak,
We wrote this song for a dear friend and former band mate Kyle Homen who sadly passed away, he rocked hard so we tried to do right by him with this song, thanks for checking it out.

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition Review

Reviewed on Xbox one

Well this has been a while. This is my first game review in years and looking back my last review was sort of bare bones.  So this review is kind of a reboot of sorts and so is the game I'm reviewing today; Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition on Xbox One

I'll start by saying that I cant guarantee constant content mostly because I'm a lazy fuck and I have not played the original version of this game (despite having a copy for the Xbox 360) so I cannot compare the two. Regardless it probably isn't relevant to the review anyway, moving on.

This is actually my first time playing a Tomb Raider game all the way through and is probably a testament to this games many strengths.  In my last review I broke it down by rating separate aspects of the games design on a scale from 1 out of ten and then averaged those scores. However the format may change over time. This is only second review and first video review on a video game I've done.

Without further ado lets continue on with this SPOILER free review

Presentation

I like to start with presentation first because its as luck would have it you are presented (omg) with your first taste of the game; the menus and the interface in which the game will grant you control.

I've always been pretty fascinated by menu design and I think that its a key aspect to game design, seamless menus keep you invested in the game and bad menus can take you right out of it.

That said I was impressed with the menu design in Tomb Raider, it was dark and ominous in all the right ways and got you prepared for the perilous journey ahead. It was filled with extra information about trinkets you find in the game and it served to expand the world around you, from historical treasures to journals that gave you more information about the characters you interact with in the game.

It's not all good news however, I did experience occasional slow downs when bringing the menu up and switching between different kinds of interfaces.

8/10

Sound 

The sound in Tomb Raider is really defined by the fine voice acting in the game, I really felt like these characters were fully realized people, they stayed the same throughout and it really is one of the highlights of the game, another thing this game nails is the atmospheric sounds, the wind blowing, the rain, the wolves howling, it is all really nice.

As for the soundtrack, thinking back. It wasn't too memorable but definitely nailed tension. Is that enough though? All the best games have music that you want to hear again and sadly Tomb Raider doesn't have that.

The weapon sounds, while nice are your standard affair, not bad but they don't stand out either.

7/10

Graphics

For a remastered game this game is really nice to look at and I really can't complain about it too much, everything is extremely polished, the trees sway in the wind, Lara's hair moves with her, when she gets in the water she comes out soaked then she dries off, just really good attention to detail.

Though sometimes graphical glitches like this do happen and it's funny to see in such a serious game

Dat hand doe
(This part was actually kind of frustrating)

This game really did the graphics to deliver it's cinematic experience and overall they did a really good job.

9/10

Game play

Running around as Lara is for the most part really smooth and natural feeling, the controls are very much in the style of Assassins Creed meets Gears of War, although I did find myself fumbling a lot and is probably one of the weakest parts of the game, I hope in the sequels (which I may play sometime) that they alleviate some of these issues. 

I found myself picking the wrong weapons, firing them instead of doing a different action. I would occasionally fumble with my jumping and climbing and just simply falling to my death, this is really the worst part of the game in my opinion, hey maybe I'm just really bad at the game, who knows. 

The game does offer many incentives to go back to previous sections  to unlock new upgrades and collectibles, I finished the game with an 85% completion rate which is a testament to it's many strengths, and for a guy like me that doesn't have too much time to devote to gaming, I felt like I wasn't wasting my time going back to discover more in the game and isn't that what tomb raiding all about?

7/10

In Closing...

Should you play this game? Yes. Is this a good reboot of an old franchise? I would say so. This game didn't leave me in silence after it was done (which is a sign of a 9 or 10/10 game for me). In the end this games weighted score came to 7.7, and I certainly agree with that.

FINAL SCORE: 7.7

Sleep When You're Dead - ALIVE, AWAKE, FOREVER Album Review

Sleep When You're Dead - ALIVE, AWAKE, FOREVER

Album art from their Bandcamp page,

Sleep When You're Dead is/was a hardcore band from Oshawa, Ontario.The topic of today's review ALIVE, AWAKE, FOREVER is the third release from this band.

Sleep When You're Dead does hardcore and they do it well. Southern twang  guitars and aggressive guitars fill the eardrums on each of their releases. This album shows a band completely enveloped with their defined sound, now this can be either a bad thing or a good thing depending on your tastes and what you expect from this band.

That being said, what we have here is expertly crafted, finely tuned, engaging music. My time listening to this album made me happy to be listening to something with grit, easing my way back to aggressive music (I've been listening to 70's and 80's albums non-stop for a long while now).

The album is peppered with moments of slowdown and brooding tones that lead up into driving beats that lock you into their grooves and get your head bobbing. The moments of quiet don't last long or bog down the flow of the album, everything comes to a high then to a carefully broken up beat with high accents like harmonics and solos diversifying the frequency pool nicely. There is a nice balance between the drums and the distorted bass that really keeps everything in check and lets the guitars and vocals breathe leading up to those grooves I mentioned earlier. 

As much as I like this album a review wouldn't be a review without discussing points I feel could have been improved on. Firstly, I feel as though this album plays it too safe by sticking to the formula. almost like everything sits in the same pocket. They give us what we want but they don't give us something we didn't know we wanted. In comparison to their last release, we're left feeling a little disenchanted.

All in all, this is a really solid release from a great band and I'm truly saddened to hear this will be their last release. Do yourself a solid and pick up this album, you have nothing to lose anyway because its been given away for free (link at the bottom). Thanks for all the great times and tunes guys it's been a blast. 

7/10

SLEEP WHEN YOU'RE DEAD - ALIVE, AWAKE, FOREVER

Notable songs: Only Grey, Moving Through It, Folded Hearts, 

BLAMETHROWER

Blamethrower is another musical endeavor I'm involved in.We play rockin' music and prefer to have a good time. Below are our 3 demo tracks, thanks for taking the time out to listen.

Free Mcboot acquisition woes, pstwo.co.uk :(

These days I'm quite busy, comes with being an adult I guess. That being said I was looking for an online retailer that sells Free Mcboot memory cards for PS2 pre-loaded with the data.
I came across a site, http://www.pstwo.co.uk that sells and ships them anywhere. I purchased two memory cards, one for my brother and one for myself.
The process was simple enough I went though Paypal and payed more than they are worth because I thought I was saving myself time. Now I'm here typing away trying to save you time. All I can say is BUYER BEWARE. I never received my purchases, it's been almost half a year, and even though the retailer and I were talking about this situation he has since removed me from Facebook and has ceased communications in an attempt to get me to forget what happened.

I just hope you read this before you venture further.

Thanks for reading

Destry LP gaming videos

My friend and colleague Destry loves making gameplay videos. If you're here, please do him a solid and check out his page.Check out a sweet H4 clip below

and this gif of him for good measure