My Favorite Video Games: Kingdom Hearts

Welcome to the special edition of my Favorite Things series that is all about video games for this week. This should run through Friday since I will be leaving for PAX (and recapping that experience) early on Saturday. Enjoy!

Kingdom Hearts

 

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I absolutely love this game as it combines fluid gameplay with my beloved Disney characters (it is basically Final Fantasy + Disney). For some reason this game really connected with me even though it wasn't technically completely new with the FF aspect unlike Jak and Daxter or Sly Cooper, it still had a really great premise that worked for me. I first discovered this game while watching TV and I saw an ad for it and it looked amazing. Me and my sister would play this game for hours defeating Heartless and leveling up Donald and Goofy.

 

The story is basically about a young boy named Sora living an idyllic life on Destiny Islands with his friends. On a night where the islands are destroyed by creatures named the Heartless, Sora receives the Keyblade, which is an effective weapon against them. Sora ends up in a completely new world (Traverse Town) after the destruction of his own and befriends Donald and Goofy, who are on their own quest to find their missing King, Mickey Mouse. The residents of Traverse Town (Leon, Yuffie, Aerith and other FF characters) aid Sora in gaining knowledge about his Keyblade and the Heartless, while also encouraging him to find more clues.

 

The trio travel from world to world with their Gummi Ship, aiding those Disney characters in need with their Heartless problem. Sora uses his Keyblade to lock the Keyholes to the heart of those respective worlds, which prevents the Heartless from consuming that world. We also slowly learn that a slew of Disney villians, led by Maleficient are the reason for the flood of heartless, which are destroying worlds. The protagonists travel to worlds like Wonderland, Tarzan's Jungle, Olympus, Agrabah, Neverland, and much more. Sora travels to these places hoping to reunite with his friends Riku and Kairi, who appeared to be taken by malevolent forces.

 

This game has a strong voice cast and many of the original actors that voiced their original theatrical character. It also has Haley Joel Osment in the role of Sora, which I believe serves him very well.

What I really enjoy about KH is that the stories resemble their original Disney film, but obviously have a twist with the Heartless. One example would be that Jafar uses the Heartless to take over/destroy Agrabah while also having a different plot to capture Princess Jasmine for Maleficient. All of these stories have similar endings to the original, so the overal story doesn't change that much. It's also great because Sora make friends that he can call upon in battle to offer a special attack to aid him. We don't get to go to all of these worlds in this game (later in the sequel we do go to Pride Rock and the Beast's Castle) but it is still cool to experience such an expansive Disney catalogue in one game. It has some cool mini-games like finding all 101 Dalmations and helping Winnie the Pooh in his book adventures .

 

I feel that the animations are top-notch and still age really well despite all of the advances in technology. The cut scenes actually feel more like a movie and look really well done. Of course the background music is another great addition as it puts a nice addition on Disney themes that we alread know. Plus the opening theme "Simple and Clean" is such a great way to open the game into a music video type of setting, which really sets it a part from only similar games and gives it a nice Japanese feel to it.

 

Overall, the game has great themes of friendship and courage plus it has everything you love about Disney. I choose to play this game for my Psychology of Video Games class (haha, yes thats real) weekly gaming assignment and soon became immersed and obsessed with leveling up and defeating Heartless. Plus Goofy and Donald truly make up a great team and provide countless entertainment in the journey. I highly recommend this game if you haven't played it yet (its been out for 12 years), especially since the highly anticipated KH3 is coming in the next few years. All of the nuances make it a very memorable game and one that you can always go back to.

 

Video Game Madness

Welcom back to another week of Video Game Madness, where I discuss breaking/interesting news from the industry and also discuss my personal experiences with video games.

Oculus Rift- Huge news dropped a few days ago when it was announced that Facebook would be buying the Oculus Rift technology for 2 billion dollars. This is great news for the creators, but I;m not sure its as great of news for those who have used it as Facebook doesn't seem like the right company for it. The fallout has been pretty bad against Oculus and it was even announced that the Minecraft creator, Markus Persson, was pulling making Minecraft for the system, due to not liking the Facebook deal. Time will tell if more developers/creators will also pull out of potential business deals to avoid becoming apart of or associating with Facebook. I honestly don't see why Facebook feels like they have to buy a video game company since they are social media. I understand they want to change the way communication is done, but it still doesn't make me comfortable with the deal. I fully believe that Oculus/Facebooks loss would be Project Morpheus' gain, since Playstation is starting to break into the virtual reality world.

The Last of Us/Sony- According to Sercan Sulun, the Playstation Eurasian Software Market Manger, the 2013 Game of the Year, will be released on PS4 with added graphics a la Tomb Raider: Definitive edition. IGN.com translated the speech, but Sony still hasn't confirmed or denied the highly plausible rumor but if it is true, it will be another huge seller for Sony. I'm also hearing reports that sales of the PS4 have gone up tremendously in the UK since the release of the PS4 exclusive and highly anticpated sequel, Infamous: Second Son. This is good news for the system as we are still in the first few months of the release of the PS4 and hopefully the sales will be enough to keep things afloat as we are soon going into a lull of no new releases for either system (XBoxOne). I would assume that with E3 (gaming conference) coming this early summer, we should be hearing more concrete release dates for games.



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Candy Crush-  Despite having an IPO worth over $7 Billion dollars, Candy Crush shares dropped over 15% in the first day alone, which doesn't bode well for the company. It seems like investors are worried that King Digital is a one-trick pony with the crazy success of the game as it is being compared to Zynga (creator of Farmville), which suffered a 5% drop and was considered to to be a semi-failure as the company has trouble coming up with the next popular game so their stock hasn't been doing great. Personally I'm still obsessed with Candy Crush and probably won't stop until I've beaten most of the levels, which is probably crazy, but I can't stop.

Since Sony has been in the news lately, I've been thinking back on my childhood where I spent most of my days either playing or watching my sister play our original Playstation/Playstation 2 that we had. My favorites were Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon. I played hours of both games and would get into the game to the point where i would have to stop if I died too much in a level (which I did a ton with Crash. The most fun I remember having is with Crash Team Racing on the Playstation 2., which was basically Mario Cart with Dr. Cortex so I was hooked. I played hours of the game and mastered the driving skills with my sister to the point that we were always 1, 2 in the rounds. Pretty much I love everything that Naughty Dog puts out except I haven't played (yet) the Uncharted Series or The Last of Us (which I hope to rectify soon) but I would still consider them my favorite studio (the second being Square Enix). I also loved Spyro because the graphics in the second game were more advanced (at the time) and I would just spend most of my time in the autumn level in the second game because it was perfect graphically (to me in my younger age). Despite my love of Nintendo, I feel like I will always have a soft spot for Playstation because of all of the incredible games like Jak and Daxter and Kingdom Hearts.

Video Game Madness

News for the week:



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Project Morpheus: at GDC (Game Developer's Conference) this year, Sony announced their own version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality device code-named Project Morpheus. I am really excited for this because I feel like this is the next step in gaming. I hope this technology will bring other companies into the fold to give us the best VR games/experiences. I would love to really feel like I'm apart of a game. Imagine if they did that with games like Call of Duty or Amnesia (the scariest video game), it would create more immersive experiences that will bring us into the future.

Two Assassin's Creed games announced: there were a couple of leaks yesterday that hint towards a new game set during the French Revolution for next gen (XBox One & PS4) and another for the previous gen that's codenames Comet. I have seen some hours of game play of Assassin's Creed 4 and I was blown away by the graphics and the game play (I saw it on PS4). I have a slight obsession with European history so I would love to be able to play a game during these crucial times in the period.



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This week the highly anticipated third addition to the Infamous series gets released on Friday. From the podcasts I've listened (Podcast Beyond, Game Scoop) to, this game will be really cool and will have a close feel to actually being in the streets of Seattle. SuckerPunch even got permission to use the Space Needle for the game, which is pretty cool since most games have to use different names for replica cities. I've been watching gameplay for the first game and it does remind me at times of Sly Cooper (same company), which is amazing that they can have pieces/concepts from that game and turn it into something amazing and realistic in this series.

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Gone Home is a game that I have played in the last few months that have really resonated with me. You play a girl coming home from a year aboard to find your family (moved into a new home) and gone from the house (really, a mansion) and you have to search clues that trigger memories to find out what happened to them and in the year that you were gone. It has a really creepy feel to it that left me on edge, but the story was fascinating and I couldn't wait to discover more. It has great 90s nostalgia and the individual stories feel so real and honest that they keep you thinking about the game a long time after it's done. I fully recommend this, but keep in mind it's more of a point and click adventure type than a regular game, but that doesn't diminish from the amazing story.

Video Game Madness

Sorry for the delay of VG Madness and just posting today in general. I finally finished my book and really wanted to get my review out while it was still fresh, plus I felt that 4 posts would be a lot for one day. Today, I had jury duty and had issues with our Internet, but everything is back to normal. I will post my part two of my Ecuador trip tomorrow along with my bio on Margaery Tyrell (Month of Thrones) and FanGirl Friday so keep checking in! Now onto games.

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Titanfall came out on Tuesday and it was all over my newsfeed. For those of you that don't know Titanfall is a multiplayer only first-person shooter game that is supposed to be the Call of Duty killer. I thought it was interesting that at least 3 people that I knew posted a picture of their Titanfall/Xbox One Bundle. I do wonder that if it is going to be the big seller that Microsoft is hoping it will be. I feel like they may have sold themselves short by offering the game on PC and XBOX 360 as well. I feel like the priority for the first few months of a new console should be to drive up sales and entice people to stop using last-gen technology. Despite all of this it looks like a really fun game that spices up the genre a bit. Plus who wouldn't love to take down a Titan? We'll see how successful this ends up being, especially with COD being an annual game to compete against.

In other news, it was announced that there is going to be a Last of Us movie with Neil Druckmann as the writer and co-producer with Sam Raimi (Spiderman). It is going to be an adaptation of the story, which I think is kind of odd since Joel and Ellie's story has been told basically movie style. Plus there's the stigma of mediocre video game movies that have come out. Hopefully they can do the story justice and also grab a larger audience that possibly doesn't play video games that are zombie fans. Since Neil co-created TLOU, so I have hope that it will at least have a solid story.


I started playing Crusader Kings last night (ha, I originally spelled this knight) and I will always be hooked on this game. Basically, this is a game where you can play as a ruler (Lord Paramount) and control all aspects of your land from marriage alliances, to taxes, and keeping vassals in line (plus you can assassinate people). Interwoven in this are random events that can pop up that can change the game like the spread of disease. I use the Game of Thrones mod to play this game, so it is one of the ways I learn a lot of character names and houses. You can go to many points of time in Westeros and play as  Torrhen Stark, the king of the North 300 years before the start of the story/show. Another awesome thing about this game is that sometimes events don't happen like they do in the book/history (or you can make the change happen) and it can completely change how you play the game. Personally, I just have my character have a bunch of kids and then marry them off to create awesome alliances and increase the potential of growing the Stark rule (because of course I play as House Stark). The goal of the game is to gain the most money, prestige and piety to become the best House through the generations.