Some things about video-games
It’s an eclectic lineup, but it’s also one that includes some of the developer’s more influential games. San Andreas is the biggest of the trio and arguably is the most beloved game in the GTA series. It introduced the world to the fictional version of California that would also be the setting for the best-selling Grand Theft Auto V. Midnight Club: Los Angeles, meanwhile, is a racer that came out in 2008, and at present, it’s the last title in the series to be released, while Table Tennis is a shockingly in-depth look at the sport from a developer best-known for violent action games.
Half-Life 2 and Flight Simulator
That’s setting a very high bar, and, for now, I’m not sure Alyx clears it. The game is fighting VR’s inherent hardware limits, a pandemic-related headset shortage, and the difficulty of building a game for a new platform. While it’s about as long as the landmark Half-Life 2, with my game clocking in at 15 hours, it doesn’t feel as big or as narratively and mechanically fresh. It advances the series’s main plot, but it doesn’t come close to resolving it.
When the latest instalment in Microsoft’s decades-old Flight Simulator series was first shown at the E3 video game event last year, it drew gasps from the audience. Using two petabytes of geographic data culled from Bing Maps, together with cutting-edge, machine learning algorithms running on the company’s Azure cloud computing network, the game presents a near-photorealistic depiction of the entire planet.
Minecraft
Students from Boston University to UCLA, from South Louisiana Community College to Northwestern University, have recently created or resurrected Minecraft servers and shared their creations on Discord chats, in Facebook meme groups, and on Reddit threads. The boom of college Minecraft servers has begun. These servers have the express purpose of bringing students together and building, oftentimes focused on recreating their college campuses. Searches for Minecraft server hosting have peaked to unprecedented levels in the last few weeks, and thousands of students are discussing college servers, most notably on the Facebook group "Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens."
EA continues to do something
EA will start releasing games on Steam again, after it moved away from the popular PC game marketplace in 2011 in favor of its Origin store and launcher. It’ll start with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, making it the first new EA game released on Steam since 2011. Additionally, EA announced plans to bring its EA Access subscription service to Steam starting next year, allowing players to pay a monthly price for access to a collection of EA games through Steam.