Recent reviews by Vac Effron

Punk rock, doped up and no blue hair? Life is Strange: Before the Storm - allows us to indulge in the already familiar surroundings of Arcadia Bay, showing it in all its nostalgic glory, enabling us to be as rude, wild and ruthless as we never could with Max Caulfield.

• -It is not easy to make a fantastic prequel on top of an already well established story a big pat on the back for Decknine for managing to keep up with Dontnod’s vision and really throwing us back into the atmosphere we all know and love, at first it seemed very different in how you play as Chloe and it takes a chapter to really get used to her playstyle. Everything in it is fantastic: the gameplay right through to the art-style, the scenes were perfectly set, the soundtrack being perfectly in sync to what you were feeling while staying true to the originals soul touching tracks, the burden of waiting impatiently for the next episode to release really made you reflect on your decisions and play the episode over a couple of times but still never being completely satisfied with the choices you made.
  
  
• - From the very first minutes, the game shows the utmost focus and attention to details: Chloe is just like Max in the way she comments on every little thing about which one can at least say something, writing amusingly into a diary that allows us to laugh at her weird experiences and grimace at all of her heartbreaking emotions. The other characters are revealed through communication. Chloe really feels like a genuine person so relatable to the point it's almost scary (i mean that in a good way) than the vast majority of female protagonists in most games: she has leads her own, her tastes, and passions, her memories and regrets. All different to the Max that we previously experienced.
  
  
• - With regard to showing everyday stories in games, Life is Strange set a very high standard, one that the two studios maintained throughout developing the game. Again a very big well done to Decknine for making a dreams a reality.

• - The upmost reason the original game was so compelling was the fact it was able to twist our perception of a character in just one cutscene, for example, right up until the very end of the fourth episode the community seemed unanimous on the decision to accept Mark Jefferson as a good character but we all are familiar of what became of him. This certainty can not be replicated within the prequel and everything is seemingly a bit to obvious and does not construct a pathway to the imagination.
  
  
  
• - The focus of the first episode at least is stretched too far on Rachel Amber. There isn't a need to develop her character because we can't create an attachment to a deceased character

• Pros:
  + (Stunning work of artists, directors and sound engineers);
  + (Incredible attention to the detail, replicating the atmosphere of the original);
  + (Pretty much everything that can be inferred from the previous game).
  
  
• Cons:
  - (The game tries to focus on Rachel to much, and it does not work);
  - (The back talking feature is weird and tries to be reminiscent of the rewind ability);
  - (predictable outcomes).

- lf you enjoyed the first game this is a must play. This is one of the few games where the prequel can remain alongside the original, and it is worth appreciation, even only for that.
-On the other hand, don't shy away from this title if you are new to the Life is Strange series it could be a really interesting experience if you played the games in the wrong order. If you're reading this review and have not purchased the original game i urge you too, the gameplay is life changing and you can purchase it for about $5.

If you're an achievement hunter like me make sure to check out my guide on how to find ALL the Optional Graffiti Locations. http://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1125790463

Call of Duty: World at War, also referred to as Call of Duty 5 or simply World at War, and abbreviated as CoD: WaW or WaW, is a first-person shooter game produced by Treyarch, and is the first game in the "Black Ops" timeline. It was released on November 11, 2008 in North America and on November 14, 2008 in Europe. It was announced on December 2, 2007, and on June 6, 2008; the 64th anniversary of D-Day, Treyarch announced it would be named as "World at War" and it would take place in the Pacific theater of war as well as the Eastern Front.

There is one campaign in the game divided into two: the American campaign and the Soviet campaign. The Soviet campaign is returning after having last been present in Call of Duty 2. There is no British campaign in the game, making World at War the only major Call of Duty set in the Second World War not to feature a British Campaign or a British playable character. It features both a solo and co-op campaign, however both are the same except that co-op is played with multiple people and certain missions are absoloutly unplayable.

The American campaign is set in the Pacific theater on the islands of Makin, Peleliu, and Okinawa. The Soviet campaign is set in the Eastern Front, mainly in Nazi Germany. In the American campaign, players take the role of Pvt. C. Miller as he fights alongside Sgt. Tom Sullivan, Cpl. Roebuck (later Sergeant), and Pvt. Polonsky. In the Soviet campaign, players take the role of Pvt. Dimitri Petrenko as he fights alongside the merciless Sgt. Viktor Reznov and the merciful Pvt. Chernov. In the American campaign, players, for the first time in a Call of Duty game, fight against the Japanese Imperial Army. Most combat takes place in jungles, where ambushes are likely. Combat also takes place in small mortar pits, ridges, beach heads, Japanese trenches, and small villages. Bunkers are a common sight in the American campaign, usually causing heavy casualties. In the Soviet Campaign, players fight against the German Wehrmacht during the push towards Berlin. Combat takes place, at first, in the ruins of Stalingrad where the player is mainly a sniper. After that, combat occurs in farmland and forests of the German town of Seelow, and finally Berlin is assaulted and close quarter fighting becomes a common feature. The last mission of the Soviet campaign sees the Red Army capture the Reichstag and the player planting the Soviet Flag on top of the building.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is a first-person shooter video game which is a part of the Counter-Strike series. It was announced to the public on August 12, 2011, and is developed by Valve Corporation and their partner, Hidden Path Entertainment. The game was later released on August 21, 2012 for the Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, and OS X and later Linux as a downloadable title (unfortunatley).

I've held this view of CSGO for quite some time, but have never found the time or motivation to publish my thoughts. I've been playing CS for many, many years - starting in the early 2000's through to present day. This time has seen me enjoy the game as a causual scrubber camping hostages, enjoying leveling my character in WC3 mods, smashing heads in deathmatch, surfing backwards, long-jumping, bhopping, played in quals for WCG, competed in CEVO and flew to different locations to compete competitively with my team in different tournaments. I've enjoyed CS from 1.1 to 1.6, CZ, CSS and also CSGO. No, this does not make me a better player than you, and no this does not mean I know everything, it simply means that I have spent a lot of time playing different titles of Counter-Strike, have played competitively and have experienced the good and the bad aspects of different releases.

There are a handful of things that really upset me with CSGO, and they upset me more so because these issues still exist two years after I have first played the game. These issues I consider to be game-breaking bugs that make it such a waste of time to play. I enjoy CS because there is a skill curve: if you want to be the best at the game, you simply need to practice and spend more time learning the mechanics of the game than your opponent - This was certainly true in all other CS games I have played, but not CSGO. CSGO feels like it is a game of luck and chance.

As the game stands, it is fun to play casually but anything competitively or MM is hampered by issues surrounding core aspects of the game.

Hitboxes are not lag-compensated to follow the model of a player when jumping
Hitboxes are not lag-compensated to follow the model of a player when crouching
Hitboxes do not follow the animation of a player planting the bomb
Aimpunch phyiscally affects recoil and is not lag-compensated
If you are on > 70ms ping in a 64tick Server, this is how most events will play out:

You see an enemy jump, you shoot the enemy and get no hits.
You see an enemy continuing to jump peak a spot, you have to time your shoots to shoot where his head is going to be on the next cycle. You shoot thin air, blood appears and you get a headshot kill
You see an enemy standing there, you shoot his chest, you get no hit and then he crouches instantly.
You see an enemy standing there, you shoot his abdomen and get a headshot (because he was crouching on the server)
You see an enemy, shoot first, die and get no hits. Watch the demo back and apparently how it played out was that he shot you first and your player aimpunched and the bullet actually hit the roof.
You are hiding in a bombsite and see an enemy planting the bomb. You crouch and take your time and shoot his head 12 times, slowly one by one. You get no hits and die.
All of these aspects of the game I consider EXTREMELY game-breaking. The fact that most people reading this will stop and think to themselves, "Yeah, that has happened to me on a number of occasions" just goes to show that the game is fundamentally flawed. In it's current state, the game rewards people for NOT AIMING - aka, "good" players in the game need only aim at the ground, run and shoot and they'll likely get a headshot, because as long as you don't aim AT the model that you see, there is a high likelihood that the server will decide you should have got a hit. The only one of these bugs that existed in Counter-Strike Source (pre-2010 OB update) was the hitboxes on the planting animation.

An example of a bug that I do not consider game-breaking, but extremely frustrating, is the spectator glitch where you are not able to spec another player. For some reason, after the last update this bug was introduced and it has now been 3 weeks and there is still no patch or fix for this? A feature so important to the game such as being able to spectate your team has been inadvertently broken, and after 3 weeks there has still been no patch? That is a huge disappointment.

People standing outside a smoke will be full view to others with no smoke obscuring them, but the player's screen will be completely black. This was an unintentional meta-change when trying to fix one-way smokes, and this new issue has existed for months now? The game has been changed so much due to this introduction such that people holding a site need only throw a smoke at the choke and will get an infinite advantage as anyone pushing through will have seconds delay before they are ever able to see the people that can see them. Throw a smoke down, wait until it starts to fade, teammate resmokes - rinse, repeat and run down the timer. Retaking a site with anything other than a horrid oponent who can't capitalise on the blind-criple wandering through the smoke is now completely impossible. What a horrible meta change. Why has this not been addressed this was introduced some months ago?

3D sound is non-existent in CSGO. It is not possible to tell whether someone is running above or below you, and more often than not difficult to determine whether someone is approaching from the front or behind.

This game has so many core issues wrong with it that completely changes the outcome of the game that it is not funny. I find it extraordinary that so many people are able to accept this game with all these issues, and there are few posts on this reddit about these problems. I see many threads upvoted to the top of terrorists hugging each other, but hardly any threads of people discussing the pressing issues which desperately requires patching to make the game both playable and enjoyable.

It'd be nice if people were able to draw the dev's attention to these issues and press for a resolution.