Free PS+ Games

I started to write a post on recent awesome free games that I'd recommend trophy hunting, when I had a stab of guilt, followed by wonder:

What do developers get out of cheap or free games on PSN (or XBLA)?

Free game, ladies and germs!

My friend ventured a guess that the free title might be a company's chance at getting their name known. Ideally, they would follow up with a larger title after having established a fan base. Word of mouth is a huge force, and I would stake this blog on it! Marketing is expensive, and if you browse the Playstation Store, there are likely hundreds of titles you've never heard of. You'll also see quite a few indie games that don't even have videos or screenshots. Even worse, games that do have videos, but don't even show gameplay. This lacking piece in the marketing puzzle is a waste for everyone because it couldn't possibly be complicated to upload some in-game footage/screens to help sell unknown titles. While I believe in my friends' recommendations, I also say it would behoove The Big Three (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo) to make sure that any titles sold on their stores require previews, as pretty much only larger studios can get away with selling a title on sheer star power *cough NaughtyDog, I love you cough*

After that, I did a bit of research. Similarly to above method is the free to play model, where the devs give you all or most of the game, and the studio makes its money off microtransactions and/or expansions. Blizzard's MOBA, Heroes of the Storm is a perfect model of this, and is still releasing both free and paid content and updates 3 years later. A great example for PS4 is the puzzle game Gems of War. I played it for over half a year, so an added bonus is that I got to see it evolve with massive overhauls and updates, while the game remained free. I really like the idea of this scheme, but it gets abused too often. For example, the basic version of a particular game is extremely crippled to the point of being frustrating. Lots of mobile games follow this toxic pattern, where you can basically play 30 minutes per day, or you can only build your town to a certain size until you slowly gather resources or spend time to speed the process. Give me a fully-functional game, and I'll judge your programming prowess from there!

The last obvious case for some of these deals is that the games are old, and it's a last hurrah for revenue. Through minimal effort, Capcom can get another $5 for Resident Evil V, or the 2 remaining people on planet earth who haven't done so can nab Final Fantasy VII for dat $7.49 PSN flash sale.

Lookout for these bad boys

The PSN store's search method is abysmal, but there's also an overwhelming amount of content there. The final point I want to make about devs' benefits of releasing cheap or free games is that if you're like me and never want to pay full price, one of these sales will also call your attention to a selection, out of the thousands of games currently available to download. A drawback of this is that if too many cheapskates like me wait until a game is free, or heavily discounted, poor ol game makers aren't going to fare well. We have to step aside and let Baller Brians and Impatient Irenes fork over full price and get those developers their pay dirt at release!

However, just cause these games are free doesn't mean the hardworking devs don't get their duck's butter. Kris Graft at Gamasutra found that each game is negotiated with The Big Three and some devs actually get some cash for their efforts.

So, there we are. While you could all easily argue that the PS+ and XBLA games aren't truly free since you're paying for the subscription, I guess you could call me phony. Well, both Heroes of the Storm and Gems of War are Free without need to register anything, so getchu started on that, and let me know if you find some other awesome free titles out there! I'm itching to write about how productive my January was, but that will be in the next post, mein freunds!

Welcome to 2017: New Horizons

It's been a while since I wrote about my frugal ways, and I wanted to assure readers that I'm still cheap. What's more: I survived Christmas and actually gave gifts this year.

Let me remind everyone here of certain conditions: For all of 2016, I made $12/hr, working full time. I took off 6 weeks between jobs, and still earned just over $17k last year. I've lived in my own one-bedroom apartment and currently pay rent of just under $800, plus power and internet. Financial vices: I order pizza or go out to eat once a week (I still give tips!), I spend about $20 per month on coffee beans, and there are some video game releases that I just can't wait for.

So with no packaging, and the
console store directly selling it
...why isn't it 25% cheaper?

I still make impulse purchases and have a sweet tooth just like everyone else. However, (my girlfriend and) I cook, I don't own a car, my phone plan is $2.50 per month, I don't order coffee, I shop at thrift stores to furnish my apartment, and I look at investing and frugality as exciting challenges, a little like trophy hunting in video games. I also don't have children, and my partner doesn't expect lavish gifts (poor girl, hang in there :) ) Almost all of my friends drive, so I still get a social life. Also, we all have PS4s, which means we don't have to individually buy every single hot title. Side note, don't buy digital game releases! No one can borrow them, and they're still stupidly priced the same (or more expensive) than a disc that took material to produce. For the most part, Amazon sells hard copies of new releases for $48 + tax, where the digital versions will cost $60 + tax. Why?

Again, my 2016 income was $17,000, which is certainly above the federal poverty level, but also 1/3rd of the US median income. I have managed to sock away $3000, or 17% of it. I'm bragging about this because I think it was hard-earned, but it's also a reminder of all of my readers and their friends to go over their finances every once in a while, and really think about where your income is going. I even made a spreadsheet of all my paychecks and investments (into Vanguard ETFs), and subtracted stock bought with money I already had invested. Just imagine how well I could do when minimum wage jumps to $15/hr, or if I land a better-paying job!?

If you stopped reading and saying, "I can't do this!" or "He's full of shit!" at me having no children, or you just can't give up your daily coffee trip, that's fine. But don't quit before you start! You can still get on the path to being financially fit by reducing some of your vices rather than cutting them altogether. Maybe some of the other suggestions can help you create savings to invest, or limit your spending. Either way, next time you hear someone who makes $40k or more griping about their finances, you send em on over to this here blog post.

Why is this such a big deal? Post your thoughts, or chat me up next time you see me. I'll let you know in a future post why I'm sold on saving.

Games in December: 2016's last update

Last week, I guest starred on my friends Zack and Damon's 100th episode of their podcast, Videogames and Sushi. During the show, we talked about memorable gaming moments in 2016. At the time of this post, the episode is still in editing, but it will come any day, now! That means I can spill the beans. My favorite titles of the year were Doom, Overwatch and Final Fantasy XV. Doom scratched an itch that was building over the years. If Halo is too corny, Destiny is too boringly desolate, and Battlefield is set too far back in history, then Doom's gritty setting, fast-paced gunplay, and minimal story exposition worked to make it stand out among the flood of FPS games on the modern systems.

♪Movin with the payload♪

Blizzard doesn't make bad games, and Overwatch is no exception. My passionate gripes have simmered down a bit since November. An overhaul to the still-kinda-sucky loot system upped the frequency of treasure boxes to unlock content faster. I still feel that some characters need some reductions (Mei and Junkrat), and the game is old enough now that everyone you play against is a master at playing it. That's not a technical issue; it just makes the game harder, and less enjoyable for me, personally.

Final Fantasy XV was such a fantastic experience, and I really felt like the product met its ambitious plan. I would have liked to see more diversity in humans and even some other races, and there were some questionable gaps in storytelling, but the positives so completely outweigh the negatives that this was one of my most enjoyable parts in a great year for gaming.

My 2 games in, 1 game out policy came out to a shameful 1.4 games completed for games bought. This should of course be as close to 2 as possible. A few things influenced this: completed is only counting games I can confidently sell, as I've finished storylines and extra accomplishments to get the platinum trophy or 100%; and the flash sales where I just couldn't resist buying indie titles that were $3-7. In reality, for the 1000 hours I spent gaming this year, I played more like 50 games and spent about $300 total.



I would also like to thank my readers for taking me to 3,000 views at the beginning of the year, all the way to almost 6,500! In terms of blogging 2016 was gaming-centric because there really weren't many positive things to say about the year. Next year has a promising video game lineup, but I also hope to find other things that make me happy to write about, and make you happy to read about. Peace out yall!

FFXV: Expectations met PLUS

Final Fantasy XV is a masterpiece. The battle system is fun, if simple, the music is some of the best, and the characters are the most thoroughly developed of any game in the Final Fantasy legacy.

Prince Noctis warping around the battlefield

Battles: Random encounters, which I never minded, are completely gone, and your conflicts seamlessly transition into a hack and slash fest, with some dodging and weaving. While you only ever control one character, the AI characters are battle-competent. However, there's always a weakling in the bunch, and, while not as frustrating as Edge from FFIV, Prompto is 99% why I ever used items. The camera proved to be a pain because trees and bushes block your camera view, and setting the distance to far just loses so much of the battle intensity. Luckily, you get treated to at least 5 different battle themes that do a lot for fighting in FFXV.


Even though you unlock popular tracks from past games in the series to jam to as you explore, FFXV's own soundtrack is gorgeous and quite operatic. I thought the series took a massive dive in memorable music tracks after Nobuo Uematsu left after FF IX, and composer Yoko Shimomura has brought the quality back with a vengeance, after almost 10 games.

food looks hella real, and this is one of Noct's favorites

Despite having "fantasy" in the title, this game has details of everyday life almost on par with GTA V. You can fish, cook, take photos, go on pleasure drives, and listen to old FF game music as you do so. The 4 friends banter spontaneously, and you get a great sense of their personality in some of the most natural character development I've ever seen in gaming. I truly cared about all the peril my characters were in during the story, and a particular scene at the end of the game brought on the man tears.


Aside from the quips and quotes in and out of battle, the smaller details are the random amount of actions your bros take during car rides: Prompto (the wisecracking photographer) will turn around and stand up in the car, waving his arms while telling a story, Ignis (the level-headed nerd) will drink his favorite coffee, Ebony, and hand it back to one of the passengers before placing it in the cup holder, and Gladio (the warrior who centers the party's emotions) will whip out a book and read. Although you can teleport between points on the HUGE map, watching these very varied interactions make the game feel very organic.

The other thing to down vote about this story is the dreadful relationship between Prince Noctis and Princess Lunafreya. Not only do the two never meet up, but they are completely unromantic and don't even seem like good friends. It was the worst-written part of the experience, and the Kingsglaive movie that came out didn't really shed much light on their relationship beyond establishing that they were childhood friends. During the game, you get even less of that, as you two basically write dry letters to one another. Who signed off on that?

However, besides the occasional battle camera flaw and the poorly-done man-woman relationship, there are plenty of other things to gush about and enjoy from one of the top games in the series. This game is a must for people who want something for a new console that isn't an FPS. I'd recommend Final Fantasy XV to anybody.

October-November gameSlog

Boy, it's been an interesting bunch of weeks, with the election, legendary Dave Chappelle hosting SNL, my new job at an animal hospital, and of course, being frugal and beating games! The first update I want to share is how I've been doing on my 2-in, 1-out policy with games. This year, I bought 12 games. Checking my trophy list, I have completed 21 games, so I'm almost on schedule for 2016.

October: Overwatch, The Swapper (FREE PS+), Peggle 2 (FREE PS+), Saint's Row: Gat out of Hell (FREE PS+).

The Swapper is a space puzzle platform game, where you make clones of yourself and transport between them to collect glowy disco-balls. Space games always make me feel pretty lonely, and this game is no exception. After collecting a certain amount of balls, you can progress to the next area, and the are sentient rock-aliens that fill in the story. I completed about half of the puzzles without much stress, and never felt like there were any cheap tricks. Strangely, the trophies have nothing to do with completing the game - instead you find 10 secret rooms throughout the large map. With a walkthrough by my side, this was an enjoyable 90-minute venture to the 100%.

The girl on the left is normally creepier...

Peggle 2 has really tight physics - a necessity for a pachinko-style game. The game was originally a mobile game, and was actually made by a Seattle studio (woot-woot!). While there are 200+ levels containing various arrangements of blue and orange pegs, you can choose from 7 different characters with different special abilities to help clear them. I have to give the game proper respect for its sound design. The score has public domain music like Symphony No 9 and In the Hall of the Mountain King, but remixed so cleverly that you'll barely recognize it. To top it off, the sound effects for bouncing balls and special abilities match the characters and their themes very well.

Ohh, and you can fly in Hell, too!

Saint's Row: Gat out of Hell was a pleasant surprise. GTA games are massive productions, and certainly have their funny parts; Saint's Row games just don't take themselves seriously at all. There are several comedy songs (which I generally abhor), and the main characters are full of hilarious comments. I thought that making hell into a futuristic downtown was a super-cool idea, and the platnium trophy can be done in co-op!

November: Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Bioshock 1 remastered, Bioshock Infinite DLC (PS3), Resogun (PS Flash sale $4).

I wrote about CoD: IW in another post, and just want to add that after finishing the awesome single player campaign, I am plagued by the final 20% of trophies in Zombies in Spaceland. The mode is generally pretty hard - in later rounds, despite hordes of zombies, one or two hits will put you down. The problem is that the trophies have you completing so many steps that I'll just end up boosting it, and probably having each player responsible for one of the many convoluted tasks.

The bees!!!

The remastered Bioshock 1 was a familiarly fun experience of a game with superior storytelling and world-building. A lot of alternate-dimension or futuristic stories take place, and don't analyze how they got there as well as Bioshock does, and that's a large part of the appeal of this game. On top of that, it's a very well-made FPS game that every gamer needs to experience.

The Bioshock DLCs really help stress the alternate-dimension theory that I never thought about until the end of Bioshock Infinite, since I am pretty dense when it comes to putting together game storylines.

Resogun is a very-pretty 3d-on-single-plane twinstick shooter. The developer Housemarque has a knack for making super-flashy games like this, as they also did Super Stardust HD for the PS3. Both games are super pretty, with simple mechanics, fun gameplay, and awesome soundtracks. "Super" is just the best word for all of this.

Now that I've reflected on 6 weeks of games, I can now focus on Final Fantasy XV, my most anticipated release this year, which should be arriving in just a few hours!

Well, I thought it was cool...

Disclaimer: I will not spoil the story more than what you find out in the first 15 minutes of playing. I beat the newest Call of Duty, Infinite Warfare, over its release weekend. The single player campaign is short and pretty damn cool. I really don't understand the online hate for this game; the game is fun, the controls are tight, and the graphics are very very good.

I just can't take this guy seriously...

The setting is a few hundred years in the future, when we have colonized a few of the planets in our solar system. The force you fight has a really cool-looking military, but its "ruthless" leader is a bit of a wuss. I say that because I never found Kit Harrington (John Snow from Game of Thrones) particularly threatening with a giant sword, he's even less so in this game. He just looks like an Ewok: beady-eyed, soft-faced, fuzzy and slightly-confused-looking. That aside, I liked the other characters' soldier-talk, camaraderie, and even some of the corny military values. And your ro-bro, Ethan, is totally awesome.

I played Battlefield 1 two weeks before this came out, which was also quite a spectacle, but the aiming feels swimmy, as it always has with the series. Infinite Warfare has really responsive snap targeting that give your assaults a special pop for each kill. As with all shooters, I can barely distinguish the weapons, but the bullet-alternative energy weapons make shredding robots to bits a lot of fun. Toss in wall running and double jumps, and this game feels like playing pilots in Titanfall, which is not a bad thing at all. And space combat is an absolute pleasure.

This game has a graphic or two...

The game will eat a large section of your harddrive to install, but the loading time is minimal, and I didn't see any re-used faces among the hundred or so soldiers you interact with throughout the campaign. My PS4 also doesn't get as noisy as playing Doom or Wolfenstein, so this AAA title was also put together well.

Zombies in Spaceland is my least favorite
mode, but it's not bad!

I really like CoD: Infinite Warfare, and I have a suspicion that all the hate for this game is related to the $50 season pass they're selling at launch, that gives you access to the next 4 expansions, making suckers shell out over $100 to play everything. The game is divided into 3 parts: the single-player campaign, the predictably classic multiplayer, and the co-op Zombies mode. The devs did trophy hunters a favor here: the only collectibles are to find every weapon in the campaign, which are outlined in yellow as you come across them. For multiplayer, you only have to win 5 matches. I think the co-op Zombies mode is pretty hard, but I think I can have the platinum trophy without too much grief before FFXV comes out at the end of the month, my only other huge release left in 2016. I'll let you know how that goes!

What do you think about the game's modes? What do you love or hate about this game or series? Do you think zombie modes are as played out as I do?

October TV brown-out!

My media consumption was at an absolute maximum this month, as I had the pleasure of watching Luke Cage, and starting The Get Down, two very different shows with a whole lotta brothas and sistas and chicas. There are no blatant spoilers here, and any info is revealed in the first episode of either show.

Love the cast of Luke Cage.

The first season of Luke Cage was a great pro-black experience, and you see that first and foremost in the language and music. While The Wire (HBO) still holds the crown for most authentic dialogue, Cage has some points. There's street talk for sure--they are in Harlem--but that's not the only kind of voice you hear. Luke actively discourages the use of the n-word by calling it out every time, and is very less-than-smooth with the ladies. You have to look pretty hard to find an uneducated thug or smooth-talking archetype in this show.



Another favorite thing about the show is the music. One of the main locations is a nightclub, and most of the episodes give us a chance to see some really great funk, jazz and hiphop artists perform as we get into the mind or a witness a key conversation of the antagonist, who owns the nightclub.

My last point is about how strong the women are in Luke Cage. While Cage himself can certainly punch through walls, the strongest and most vicious characters are all female, and they're very convincing. Mariah Dillard has a dark side that's quite scary. This strikes me because I've never seen the actress Alfre Woodard in anything but lighthearted comedies and dramas, but I certainly believe her. In Luke Cage, she's trying to make Harlem a better place through politics, has to shed her family's gangster image. The Dillards run shit in Harlem, but outsiders wouldn't see that as something to respect.

If you're also familiar with the show Jessica Jones (Netflix), or at least know the actress Krysten Ritter, it's hard to make her punching through walls and flipping over men twice her size look good; and it doesn't. I really enjoyed that show, but some of her "strong" moments were entirely unconvincing to me. To bring it back to Luke Cage, though, the most violent moments and the coldest, sharpest words were delivered by women.

The Get Down also takes place in Harlem, but is centered around music. The main character is a young lyricist who is about to change his life by forming a rap crew, and you'll have to excuse me if that summary is wildly inaccurate. I've seen 2 episodes of the first season, and that's what I've deduced. I like the show for the REALLY good rhymes, the gorgeous actresses and its coherence, which I'd like to expand on.

I barely made it through one episode of Mozart in the Jungle (Amazon), and didn't really like Treme (HBO). Both shows were about the life of musicians, but I think they were written for people who live like that because they were laden with idiosyncrasies that were lost on me. I think the world of musicians has a lot of eccentric people, and the crazy maestro in Mozart was just frustrating to watch. I suffered through 3 hours of Treme because I figured the same writers of The Wire could get me again. I know the marching bands in New Orleans was well-researched and performed, but I couldn't find any semblance of a narrative, and it felt like I was just watching a bunch of people do stuff. I totally missed the point of that show.



The Get Down's narrative is tighter, and has so far focused on 2 main groups of friends. I see their relationships and motivations for what they want to do with their musical talents, and that makes it easier for me to follow, and it doesn't hurt that the actresses are fine as hell.



Last note: I'm glad neither show spends too much time whining about blacks versus whites. Luke Cage has a theme about injustice in general, but the message is more about communities helping themselves instead of pointing the finger. Racism only takes a minor part in the background, but neither show is out to blame white people for black problems, and I think that makes both shows more appealing.