Author: A.K.H.

Halo Infinite will turn 3 years old later this year. And the game’s core audience seems…happy. The multiplayer section of the game, which is what players keep coming back for, has been receiving steady updates that have kept the loyal playerbase satisfied, if not extremely happy. However, it is fair to say that Halo as a brand is not as strong as it once was, and is struggling to attract new players. And it’s not as if we can blame only the newer games like Apex Legends or Fortnite for this; even Call of Duty – a brand that is almost as old as Halo (show 2001 vs 2003) has managed to reinvent itself to attract newer audiences and is now arguably coasting on its success by releasing half-baked annual games. The irony is that Microsoft now owns both Halo and Call of Duty, so I wonder how much longer the Halo brand can go on at this rate. Won’t it make more sense for Microsoft to simply retire the brand and focus on making more Call of Duty games? Only time will tell.

After four years in development, Brocula is finally here. This video is an early review, sort of my first impressions, after playing for around 4 hours. The developer has said that finishing the game will take quite long, more than 40 hours, so I wanted to take my time to play it instead of rushing it for a review, which I used to do with my game reviews last year. That was very hectic, so this time, I’m putting out this early review first, and will post a full review after I finish the game. There will be minor spoilers ahead.

AAA – what does this term even mean? Well, history indicates that the this term was borrowed from the financial industry, where AAA bonds are considered to be one of the safest investments, followed by AA, A and so on, all the way till C. Similarly, in video games, the tag AAA was attached to games that were considered to offer the lowest risk to publishers. All they had to do was advertise the game heavily, and the publishers could be assured of high returns. Since no one formally defined this term, over time, its definition began to change from “low-risk games” to “games made on a high budget by a large team”.
These days, AAA games are expected to offer best-in-class graphics, several dozens of hours of gameplay and much more, in order to justify their selling price of $70. In a lot of cases, they also have several higher-priced editions that offer extra content, most of which is considered unnecessary by the community.

But let us go back a bit to look at the originally intended definition of AAA games. Games that are considered to be safe investments by the publisher. That is certainly no longer the case these days, and in fact, it is quite the opposite. Making AAA games is a high-risk endeavour that requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, with almost no guarantee that you will break even, let alone make a decent profit.

Talking about Redfall almost feels bad. It’s like kicking someone when they’re down. A lot has been said about how Redfall had a terrible launch, how it became a joke for having a $70 price tag and how Arkane Studios essentially went radio silent after releasing the game. But this is not another Redfall bashing video. It’s more of a “looking back at the game after a year” sort of video. Yes, it’s already been a year since the game came out, and unless the developers announce something between the time this video is recorded and it is published, there doesn’t seem to be anything planned for the one year anniversary. Not that anyone is expecting some kind of celebration, but some people are waiting for Arkane to release the content that they promised in the more expensive Bite Back edition. That’s the bare minimum that the community is expecting – just to get the two characters that they were promised. Beyond that, I don’t think anyone expects to get any more support for this game.

We are living in the age of overflowing video content. Movies, TV shows, web series, satisfy the demand for long-form content, and we also have an endless stream of short-form content on social media apps. In this ocean of content is a niche that appeals to people who want to stay closer to reality – and that is the niche of Documentaries. There are documentaries available on nearly every subject these days, and video games are no exception. In this video, let us take a look at some of the well-known documentaries that cover the video game industry.

Warner Bros. Games is in a strange position. Last year, they published a game that managed to outsell Call of Duty, and this year, they published a game that is on track to becoming the biggest flops of the year. Yes, this video is going to discuss Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. This is not a review, because no one seems that interested to play this game anyway. This is more of a brief analysis at what happened with this game, and what we can learn from its mistakes. Heavy spoilers ahead, but if you haven’t already seen them, you probably don’t care at this point.

If you use a device that is connected to the Internet on a daily basis, you consume news on a daily basis as well. That’s not really surprising, is it? But where exactly is your news coming from, and is it important that you should care about these sources?

On March 28, 2024, Diablo IV was added to the Xbox Game Pass catalogue. It became the first game to join the catalogue after Activision-Blizzard’s acquisition by Microsoft was legally completed. Naturally, I was interested to give it a try. Since I have never really been invested in the Diablo franchise, I had no idea what to expect. All I wanted to do was to try out the campaign once and then never think about the game again. And I’m guessing there are a few other people out there who are of the same mindset. You have never really played any Diablo games, but you are a Game Pass subscriber, so you are curious to check out this big-ticket title. Well, this video is exactly for people like us, who want to know if the game is worth playing just for the campaign. There will be spoilers along the way, but as you will see, it may not really matter.

This video talks about User Generated Content or UGC, in video games. And while I have done a fair amount of research before making this video, I’d like to point out right at the start that I have almost zero experience in interacting with user generated content in games. I’m the kind of guy who goes from one game to another, so as soon as I finish the core experience that the developers have built, I move on to another game. So I won’t be able to offer any first-hand experience of what UGC feels like. Instead, all I am doing here is sharing what I have learned during my research on this topic.

What can we say about Starfield seven months after its launch? If you simply go by critic reviews, you might assume that it’s great. On both Metacritic and Opencritic, it currently features scores above 80, which is excellent. But critic scores aren’t that useful for a game like Starfield. Critics are constantly going after their next review deadlines, so they hardly spend enough time with a game after its launch. And games like Starfield usually show their true depth only after you put in several hundreds of hours in it.