The Lumberjack



Students Serving The Cal Poly Humboldt Campus and Community Since 1929

Tag: game review

  • Half-Life: Alyx Makes VR Worthwhile

    Half-Life: Alyx Makes VR Worthwhile

    Half-Life: Alyx is the first properly high budget virtual reality effort from a major studio

    The previous game in the Half-Life series ended on a cliffhanger, and since then, the franchise sat in limbo for over a decade. By the time Half-Life: Alyx was announced, most had given up hope of a sequel. The inflated expectations for a new Half Life game made constructing a sequel too daunting a task for developer Valve to ever release anything, but now they have. Does it live up to the hype?

    For the most part, yes.

    With the majority of people currently stuck inside, virtual reality is one of the best ways to pretend you’re not. The problem is the high price point. Currently the barrier for entry for a VR headset is a minimum of $400, and that doesn’t include a gaming PC that meets the hefty requirements of VR. Those PCs generally start at $600. Up to this point, small-scale games made up the majority of the VR catalog. VR lacked a system seller to justify the high price point.

    The game’s story is excellent, but can feel sparse at times. Some chapters should have more dialogue than they do, but the writing and performances that are there are excellent.

    Luckily, Half-Life: Alyx is an incredible game. It takes what made the older Half-Life games great on a 2D screen and translates them to the 3D space with an incredible amount of polish.

    In Half-Life 2, your main method of interacting with the world was the gravity gun, the weapon that could pick up and manipulate nearly any object in the world around you. In Half-Life: Alyx you have gravity gloves.

    These gloves let you aim your hands at nearly any object, press the grab button and flick your wrist to bring that item towards you. It’s an action so simple and satisfying to perform that since playing I have on several occasions found myself with the urge to perform it in my day-to-day life.

    The game’s story is excellent, but can feel sparse at times. Some chapters should have more dialogue than they do, but the writing and performances that are there are excellent.

    During those few encounters with human characters I was in awe at how life-like they were. If there’s anything about the game that is a disappointment, it would have to be the lack of melee weapons. You can pick up almost anything in the environment, but none of it can actually harm enemies. Half-Life is known for having the crowbar as a weapon, so it’s weird to not have that in this game.

    These are all nitpicks though. Half-Life: Alyx is proof that VR as a medium can work. It’s proof that virtual reality can be its own storytelling medium, with its own stories and experiences and that gets me excited for the future of gaming.

  • 6 Modern Board Games You’ve Never Heard Of

    6 Modern Board Games You’ve Never Heard Of

    Board games don’t have to be boring if you find the right fit

    When you hear “board game,” you might think of games like “Monopoly,” “Scrabble,” “Clue” or “Sorry.” Those games are classics, but they can suck.

    Luckily, an explosion of new board game designs in recent years has created a thriving modern board game scene.

    Many of these games are crap, immensely complicated or so dry they would bore even your grandparents. But some are actually fun.

    I’ve been playing board games for years. Here are some of my most accessible favorites for various crowds.

    For the actor:

    “Monikers” is charades, but with a reliable set of cards to act out. To make things better, Monikers offers three rounds of increasing difficulty.

    In the first round, you can do anything and say anything but the title of your card to try to get your friends to guess what’s on the card. In the second round, you get one word. In the third, you get only your miming ability. Monikers makes you laugh.

    Monikers. | Photo by James Wilde

    For the detective:

    “Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective” hands you a pamphlet for a crime mystery and tells you to go solve it. You and your friends work together, going to locations on a map to find clues or reading from facsimile newspapers to find leads.

    The goal is to use as few clues as possible to solve the case. The game is reading-intensive and the cases often involve illogical jumps, but if you’ve ever wanted to be a detective this is probably the closest you can get without actually becoming one.

    Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. | Photo by James Wilde

    For the artist:

    “A Fake Artist Goes to New York” begins with everyone secretly receiving the same object to draw. However, one player, the fake artist, has no idea what they’re supposed to be drawing.

    Everyone goes around in a circle adding one line to the same drawing, and the players must then suss out who the fake artist is, before the fake artist successfully guesses what the object is. Bonus points to this game for coming in a tiny box.

    A Fake Artist Goes to New York. | Photo by James Wilde

    For the talker:

    “Funemployed” is like a riff on “Monikers.” You get a hand of cards with varying words on them. When it’s your turn, you have to “apply” for a a job determined by a card drawn from a deck. Essentially, you’re giving your pitch in front of your friends.

    The catch is that in your pitch, you have to include the terms from all of the cards in your hand. Good luck fitting “Fifty Cats” or “Scientology” into your pitch for that internship. Another game that’s guaranteed to make you laugh, so long as you play with people comfortable ad-libbing and talking a lot.

    Funemployed. | Photo by James Wilde

    For the gambler:

    “Lords of Vegas” makes you into a prospective businessperson setting out to build Las Vegas. Compete with your friends to buy lots, build casinos, and talk your way into questionable trades to win the game.

    It’s also very probable that at some point you’ll gamble your money at another player’s casino and lose everything. This game is basically what Monopoly should be. It’s also a little more complex than other games on this list.

    Lords of Vegas. | Photo by James Wilde

    For the storyteller:

    “Tales of the Arabian Nights” is a choose-your-own-adventure book on steroids. You and your friends traverse around a map while reading from a booklet of stories and choosing your reaction to said stories.

    There’s not much of a game here. Mostly, there are lots of laughs as your character gets captured by fire worshippers, turned into an elephant or has some other bizarre encounter. I recommend using the app to streamline the choose-your-own-adventure part.

    Tales of the Arabian Nights. | Photo by James Wilde