One Year Later...

This has been a long year. Twenty-two posts later, here we are. At the beginning of the year, I had no idea that I would write a blog about video games. I would've thought that was a stupid idea. Nevertheless, I had fun doing it, and, despite it being kinda weird, I would do it again.
At the beginning of the year, I was kind of jumping around different games, just explaining the general idea of some of my favorite games that I owned. Sometimes I would throw in a game or two that I disliked, like Dragon Age or something in a game that I didn't like. That part of the year was just trying to get into the swing of things, considering that I had never done it before. Towards the end of third quarter, I started filling my blogs in with League of Legends, doing a kind of champion spotlight for my personal favorites. This was my favorite part about my whole blogging experience. I had a lot of fun retrieving the pictures required for this part. My favorite picture was the first picture on my Blitzcrank review.

Image Courtesy of: Doodle or Die

 At the end of the year, during this quarter, I starting doing the thing I should've done from the beginning. This was reviewing. These posts came easy because I was able to gather a lot of information for each of the two games that I did: Terraria and Minecraft. This was because I had to explain what was available in each game, Terraria having almost too much too completely cover. During the course of the year, I became better at writing. I can write quicker now, which is weird because I thought I could type quickly before. I also realized that for some reason, I swore a lot in my posts at the beginning. Obviously I started cutting out those words because in retrospect, they seemed kind of childish. I still have some kind of slang within my posts, (Slang is slang for slang) just so that it's not monotonous. I have not changed the aesthetic of my blog since the beginning of the year either. I decided that it was a formidable artistic approach to my subject. Just last week I made changes to my "about me" page, because even that seemed a little childish to me as well. I would say that I have matured more as the year went on, but I can't really say that about myself can I? That's something that other people need to decide for me. Anyway, this year, for blogging at least, has been a lot of fun and allowed me to do something that I wouldn't normally do, and that's something that I will be able to remember for a long time.

My Least Favorite Game

Despite mentioning almost everything this game has to offer in my previous post, I'm still going to tell you why this game is not very good, and possible reiterate a few things that I may have said. Minecraft is pretty much the worst game ever for a number of reasons. The first reason is that there is not very many things that you can do within this game. Yes you can get mods for it to make it better, which almost every person does, but there are only a certain amount of things that you can do in the regular version. Since the last time I have ever played it, there was only one way that you could win. This way was finding your way into the End, and defeating a large dragon within it. After this, you obtain a short dialogue from what seems like the creators of the world. That's it. That's all there is to this game. One short little fight, and then it's over. Tell me that's not boring. You can spend a long time preparing for this, which consists of a lot of grinding for items and experience. This process of grinding is in no way, shape, or form fun. It's tedious, and takes up more time than a game like this should. After the battle and dialogue, you're thrown back into the world from where you came with no objective except for building. Building isn't even fun in the normal adventure mode because you have to repeatedly stop and search for more materials. Another reason that Minecraft is the worst game ever, is the graphics. I mean, sure, it may be an artistic statement, but it doesn't mean that it looks good. You can get texture packs that can remedy this, but that shouldn't be a part of a real game. It should appeal to users with the original textures and items. In fact, there is a whole community of people that create texture packs to try and make the game look better. There is one that I use whenever I'm dumb enough to get on this game. It's called Dokucraft and can make the game look quite nice.

Image Courtesy of: Me

Finally, the last reason that makes this game the worst game ever, is the community. It doesn't have the worst community ever, that title was taken by League, but it still consists of a bunch of 8-12 year olds. These kids are only allowed to play this game because their parents fear that real video games will make them "violent". In reality, this game will make them violent and develop a temper because older people that play this game like to take advantage of them and "troll" them. (Trolling is when you single out a person and harass with a series of annoying actions that ultimately cause people to quit the game.) Not only does the community create a bunch of whiny children, it also gives them the opportunity to swear without their parents finding out, causing chats to be constantly overflowing with words that would cause you to audibly gasp. There are many other things that are wrong with this game, including bugs, frame rate, and monsters that explode and ruin your stuff, but I'm not going to get into that. If you come across this game, try it out for yourself. If you like it, cool, but if you don't like it, then welcome to the club.

My Favorite Game

Terraria is my all time favorite game. It came out a long time ago, on the March of 2013. When it came out, a lot of people had trouble accepting it. Everyone saw it and decided that it was a rip off of Minecraft, apparently the best game ever created. It may have some of the same things that Minecraft has, but it's general stuff: mining, fighting off monsters, and building houses. I love Terraria because of the fact that it is more in depth than Minecraft. In Minecraft, there are only five tiers of item sets that you can have: wood, stone, iron, gold, and diamond. Once you reach diamond, the game is basically over. There is not much else that you can do other than build stuff. There isn't even a lasting story to it; it's very minimalistic. While in Terraria, you can progress through the game for five hours, and not even reach the second stage of the "story". This stage is called hardmode. You have access to at least five bosses in the first part, including the Eye of Cthulhu, the Eater of Worlds, the Slime King, the Dungeon Guardian, and the Wall of Flesh. With hardmode, which is unlocked by winning the fight against the Wall of Flesh, your world not only receives a difficult metallic counterpart to the first bosses, it also has multiple bosses added in addition to these terrifyingly powerful bosses. Tons of new items are added to hardmode. New ores are added, allowing you to create more useful items, such as pickaxes, swords, and axes. On your character, you have the decision to outfit your character, you can make them look like a ninja, wizard, or even Link from the Legend of Zelda. Some of this vanity gives you cool effects as well. For example, the wizard hat gives you a trail of sparkles that lights up the surrounding area.

Image Courtesy of: Terraria Wiki

Pre-hardmode there are eight biomes that you can visit. These biomes are as follows: Corruption, Forest, Jungle, Underworld, Snow, Ocean, and Mushroom. In hardmode there are a few more biomes including the Hallow, which has unicorns prancing around with faeries buzzing nearby. There are some events that happen if you have met certain prerequisites. For example, the Goblin Army can invade if you have more than 200 health and you have smashed a shadow orb within the corruption. All in all, there are many things that this game has to offer that make it my favorite. There is even an update that adds a lot of new stuff. If you don't own this game yet, I suggest buying it because it's tons of fun and you can play it for hours.

The Rebirth of Rebirth

Recently I have gone back to playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, and I've had a lot of fun with it. My friend managed to get a run that lets you win without much effort. In Rebirth, you can have certain seeds for runs. This allows you to play the same runs over and over if you wish, and it also allows you to race your friends. You can use this to "cheat" essentially because you can use a strong run over and over again. You can potentially unlock everything the game has to offer with this. When I'm bored, or losing a lot, I just type the seed of my friend's run and we're good. The run that my friend got was insanely strong because you receive the item: Mutant Spider.

Image Courtesy of: TBOI Wiki

 Mutant spider is a special item, which there are only fourteen of in the game. When you receive a special item, it causes the probability of you getting another special item to go down by quite a bit. Mutant Spider is powerful because lets you fire four tears at once, which will naturally push enemies back with four times the amount of potency. Later in the game, you receive Polyphemus, which gives you four additional damage and then doubles your damage afterwards.

Image Courtesy of: The Steam Community

This is also a special item, making the run very lucky. Polyphemus gives you at least eight damage, and that's only if you start the run with zero damage, which is literally impossible. In this case, you do have a lot of damage so you're able to have your damage to increase exponentially. Paired with your Mutant Spider, you have four highly damaging tears. Not only this, but when you kill an enemy with damage left over, your tears travel through the target, dealing damage to enemies behind them. After you get this combination, you obtain a lot of damage output so you can run through the levels quickly and with ease. Throughout the entire run, the game decides that you need more damage, so it keeps giving you things like a pentagram, obviously because this run is satanic. It can be a nice game sometimes. Anyway, towards the end of the game, when you fight mom's heart, you can get the potential to win in one shot. There are levels after the one where you fight mom's heart, but I haven't unlocked them yet. I would like to try and unlock them so that I can play this seed on them, and see what can happen. I have only played this seed against mom's heart, but I plan on getting farther so that I can unlock everything that the game has to offer.