Game Time ID: PlayStation 4

On Friday when I first got my PlayStation 4 I felt like I had to put something up right away. I rushed it out in excitement of my shiny new console. Now that it's been a few days I feel like I can say a lot more about the system as a whole. I've played many hours of Assassin's Creed 4, Lego Marvel Heroes, Need for Speed Rivals, Resogun, and Warframe. All of them have been quite fun. Since all of these games are either for PC and/or the previous generation of consoles the most interesting part about the system right now is the operating system.

I mentioned in my quick impressions that I liked the UI. I still do to a certain extent, but not as much as before. In an attempt to make everything much more simple the operating system lost a lot of basic functionality. For example, every time you put in a game it's added to a list of recently used applications. They show up in a row as fairly large squares. As far as I can tell there's no way to get rid of any of them, and there's absolutely no way to sort them. Right now it's not that big of a deal. but when there are a bunch of downloadable titles it will be a huge pain to find what you're looking for. At least on the PS3 you could sort things into folders. Hopefully some type of sort option will be patched in at a later date.

It doesn't seem like it will be too hard for Sony to patch things in either, which is nice. One major complaint I had has already been fixed. For some reason games won't patch until the first time you open them. As soon as they boot the patch is pulled, which is kind of dumb since you can't play anything online unless the game is up to date. This means that you have to quit the game to install the patch and then boot back into it. This is still an issue. What Sony did fix however is the fact that there was no way to differentiate between a game and a patch. I downloaded Resogun from the store. That was listed in my downloads as Resogun. Then it tried to patch and the patch was in the downloads also as Resogun. Last night Sony pushed the firmware update 1.51, which now lists patches you've downloaded as game updates. Not a huge change on it's own, but it's good to see that they can change things if they need to.

Friends

The PlayStation 3 will only let you have 100 friends on your list. The PlayStation 4 on the other hand will let you have 2,000. Why you would want to do that I don't know, but you totally can. I only have around 30 friends on my list right now and the list is super annoying, so I can only imagine how it must be for people who have more than that. Friends are split into 2 categories of Online and All. Online obviously shows you everyone who's online and what they're playing. All shows every one of your friends. What sucks is that both lists are in alphabetical order and there's absolutely no way to sort them. In the end it's almost easier to search for the username you're looking for with the new search function. I'm sure they'll patch this in the future to change how all of this is displayed.

When you first log in with your PSN account you'll be asked if you want to integrate it with Facebook. If you choose to, which I did, it pulls your real name and profile picture. I chose not to use my profile picture, because I like my PSN icon of Cody from Street Fighter just fine. It is super weird to see my real name all over everything though. Your friends won't be able to see your real name unless you send them a name request. This doesn't really have any bearing on anything, but it's an interesting feature.

What's cool is that you can see what game your friends are playing and what system they're playing it on. Even if they're playing on Vita you can see what they're playing, which is something that you can't see on the PS3. The same profile features from the PS3 carry over as well, so you can see their brief introduction and what languages they speak. Their level and how many trophies they have are displayed prominently on their profile page and you can easily compare if you want to.

Messaging is a little better now, because you can send voice messages. As you may have heard there is also party chat now. These are both things that the Xbox 360 had, so it's nice that the PS4 is at least on par with that now. I chatted it up with a friend today while playing Need for Speed Rivals. It worked quite well. I used the pack in mic, which sounds a whole lot better than I thought it would. I might be able to get away with using it for a while longer.

Trophies

Trophies are now a staple of the PlayStation, so it's good to see that they're integrated into the system and not tacked on and poorly implemented like on the PS3. Once you log in to PSN all of your trophy data comes right down. On a new PS3 I had to wait 20 minutes or more for my trophies to pull down since I have almost 4,000 now. This makes viewing trophies a much more pleasant experience. Apparently it's not too bad on the Vita either, but I don't have one of those yet.

When I first heard that the trophies still had to sync all the time I got a little worried. It's not nearly as bad as I thought, but it's still kind of annoying. Sure it takes hardly any time at all to sync them up, but there's no reason that I should have to go to my trophies in order for them to do so. Achievements show up automatically on the Xbox, so it's a little weird that people can't see what I've gotten since I last synced my trophies manually. Trophies are supposed to sync automatically like they did with PlayStation Plus on the PS3, but they aren't for me. I'm probably supposed to leave the system in standby mode, but I don't.

There are two new things with trophies that I think are really cool. The first is that if you view a game it separates out the trophies from the main game and each different DLC set. This doesn't really matter, but it's cool to see regardless. What's interesting is that all of my PS3 games are separated out in this way and some even have custom art to go along with the DLC packs. It's weird that these games all have the same treatment, but it's only when being viewed on the PS4.

The other feature is actually super awesome. When you view a trophy list there is a rarity next to each and every trophy, which ranges from common to ultra rare. It takes into account how many people have played the game and have gotten that trophy. It even shows what percentage of that games players got that trophy, which is pretty neat. It adds a little more depth to a system that I care less and less about with each passing day.

Internet/Store

I'm happy to report that the PlayStation store doesn't run like garbage on the PS4. As I mentioned in my quick impressions it's the exact same store as the PS3 had with a lot less on it. As the PS4 gets more games I'm sure they'll do away with the huge advertisement like panels in favor of something that's a little less frustrating to navigate just like on the PS3 store. That part doesn't even really matter though, because the download speeds don't totally suck! I was able to download Resogun which is over a GB in a little under ten minutes. Game patches took hardly any time to download as well.

What sucks is the way the PS4 handles downloads. If you're downloading multiple things at once they don't queue up and instead all download at the same exact time. What's worse is that you can't pause the downloads, or at least there was no option that I could find. It's crazy, because the PS3 both allowed you to pause downloads and it only did one at a time. I guess that's the trade-off for reasonable download speeds.

I'm also happy to report that I'm not having stupid connection issues when playing games online either. With the PS3 I couldn't connect with my friends 90% of the time even though I have a NAT 2 connection. I still have hard times finding matches in any online PS3 game as well. With the PS4 I had absolutely no problem finding games and connecting with other players in Assassin's Creed, Warframe, and Need for Speed Rivals. Maybe this means I won't have to try and mess around with my connection every single time I want to play a game with a friend.

Sharing

In the past few years recording video games with commentary has become a big deal. The same goes for streaming video games out live as they're being played. Both Sony and Microsoft realized this and now the PS4 and Xbox One have built in streaming. I myself have wanted to get into the world of streaming and recording video games, but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. My previous laptop wasn't exactly a powerhouse, so it wouldn't have been able to do it very well.

As of right now I'm very disappointed with the PS4's sharing features. Yes they make it very easy to do things that previously weren't, but it could be a lot better off the bat. Some of the things that aren't included make it feel rushed out, which it probably was. The Xbox One won't have it's streaming until 2014. Perhaps the PS4 should have been the same way.

It is very easy to start up a stream. When you push the share button you get three options, which are upload video clip, upload screenshot, and broadcast gameplay. Hitting boradcast will prompt you  to stream on Twitch or Ustream and then you're pretty much ready to go. The quality is relatively high and you can even show some of the chat at the bottom. What makes me upset about it is that you can't archive broadcasts yet, so everything you do will disappear into the ether. This wasn't even apparent until I looked it up and found out on Twitch itself. Archiving will never be available on Ustream. It's kind of weird that this stuff would be omitted at launch. It's even weirder that they'd never say anything about it. Maybe they did, but if so, I never heard about it.

The ability to take an in game screenshot is cool too, but the resolution is so low it's not really worth it. Even then you can only upload it to Twitter or share it on Facebook. Hopefully in the future you can upload the images to Flickr or even Instagram. You know, an image hosting site.

Gameplay videos are also interesting in theory, but right now I have no interest in making them. The system will always record up to 15 minutes of your gameplay, so if you see something awesome you can hit record and grab it. This is good if you're just trying to show off a glitch or a cool sequence of gameplay. What's really lame is that it doesn't pick up any microphone inputs so I can't even talk over videos of my gameplay. If I wanted to do that it would be the most convoluted process ever. First I'd have to upload the video to Facebook, then I'd have to find a way to rip the video from Facebook. Following that I'd have to record my voice and re-encode the video. Finally I would have to re-upload it for everyone to hear. I don't really want to go through all that so I'm just going to wait until archiving is available.

This feature has so much potential and I was looking forward to it so much. That's the reason why I sound so angry about the whole thing. You can't even upload videos to YouTube! What kind of video sharing service can't upload to YouTube! These are all things that I'm sure will be fixed in the future, but right now it's just frustrating.

The Newest Black Box

I don't really like the way the PlayStation 4 itself is shaped. Sure it's flat so I can set things on top of it, but why couldn't it have just been a literal box. Instead it's slanted in the front and back. The slanted front is fine, but the back makes it hard to find where you need to jam all of your cables. Also for some reason the top left of the console is made of that stupid glossy plastic that gets super dirty. I don't get why companies insist on putting that stuff on devices that people are going to touch a lot. With time I'm sure I'll get used to it, but as of right now I like the look of the PS3 a whole lot more. Specifically the slim. The original fat PS3 was a beast, and the new cheap PS3 looks like garbage.

The buttons on the front kind of bother me as well. They're both super tiny and at first I didn't even realize they were buttons at all. Above the disc slot is a super thin power button and below it there's a super thin eject button. They're barely recognizable as buttons unless you're looking for them. The good thing is that theoretically you'd only need to use the power button the first time you turn on the console. After that you could use the controller to turn the system on and off and eject the discs from the system level menu.

While the box itself hasn't impressed me all that much outside of it's internal hardware I've absolutely fallen in love with the DualShock 4. Yes, it looks like a weird version of the DualShock 3, but it's so much more. Almost everything about it is better with the exception of the d-pad. As of right now it seems like the D-pad is worse, because it doesn't give me any feedback on my movement. It barely moves at all. I'll need a fighting game to qualify that statement though. Overall though the whole thing is incredibly comfortable. It has grips on the bottom of both sides and the analog sticks have an indentation to rest your thumbs. The triggers feel excellent compared to the awful ones that were on the Dualshock 3. Perhaps now shooters will use the same controls on both the Xbox and PlayStation.

It's odd to have a touch pad in the center of the controller. It might not be as weird when games utilize it more though. In Assassin's Creed you can use it to navigate the map, but it works super poorly. There's no way to know where your finger is on the pad, so I kept sliding off of it. On top of that the movement speed and accuracy were both much worse than if I was using a controller. That's just a product of the game itself though, so hopefully in the future games will put it to better use.

Greatness is Here

Upon re-reading this post I sound very angry about the PS4, which was not my intent. I'm just being overly critical, because this is a new console generation. When it can't do some of the basic things a PS3 can, or things that were promised it's more than a little frustrating. The sleep mode feature they talked up so much isn't in the system yet, but that's one of the first things they announced. Yes, most of the things I have issues with will be fixed, but that time isn't here yet.

The PlayStation 4 as a gaming machine is excellent. I can put games in, they play, and they look excellent. I can't wait until games like InFamous come out in March so I can see the system at its full power.

The next generation of gaming is finally here and it's very exciting. It's just going to take it a while to get off the ground. With the Xbox One launching this coming Friday I hope it lights a fire under Sony's ass. With any luck we'll be seeing many firmware updates in the months ahead.

March will probably be when these systems finally take off and show us what they can really do. The Xbox One will be getting Titanfall. Both systems will be seeing Destiny in that time frame, and the PS4 will be touting InFamous Second Son. Those are the first true next gen games and I'm super excited to play them.

     -Manny

Quick PS4 Impressions and Thoughts

I received my PlayStation 4 earlier today. I'm busy playing it at the moment, but I thought that I'd share a few things.

The first is that I will probably not be posting any videos of myself playing games any time soon. Turns out that Twitch archiving is something that's going to be patched in. On top of that I can't even record myself talking over 15 minute chunks of gameplay to upload, because the headphone jack on my controller doesn't work right. It will only recognize anything if it's pretty much hanging precariously out of the controller, which totally sucks. I would just exchange the console normally, but since it's from Amazon I can't really do that. It doesn't help that I spend a fortune on games, so I can't really justify spending another $60 on a fully functioning controller at this time.

Edit as of 12:40 AM 11-16-13: Turns out I just suck at life. I had to shove the cord into the jack as hard as I could until I heard a pop. Somehow it wasn't in all the way on any of the headphones I tried. So maybe now I can actually post some videos haha.

Luckily, that's the only thing I have to bitch about here. Everything else has been great. People were bummed to find out that you still need to sync trophies, but it goes super fast and you don't even notice when the console is syncing everything. In fact, everything about the console is very seamless. I did manage to stream to Twitch while trying to get my mic to work. It came through in good quality, so I'm pumped for when I get a working controller and they patch in archiving.

Part of what makes everything seem so quick and seamless is the fact that the UI doesn't totally suck anymore. Everything is categorized so most things are fairly easy to find. Messages, trophies, and everything friend related are right at the surface level. The one thing I haven't gotten a chance to mess with yet is party chat, because of my stupid controller.

Going to the XMB in a PS3 game will often send everything to a grinding halt. That is not the case with the PS4. When you push the PlayStation button you can access everything at the system level and go right back into the game with absolutely no issue. I paused Assassin's Creed 4, went to the PlayStation Store to download Resogun, changed my router settings, and was able to get right back into the game as if I had never left it. It's awesome and it'll be even cooler when they add in the sleep feature.

Everyone can rejoice, because the PlayStation Store doesn't run like total garbage on the PS4. In fact it's the exact same as the PS3 store, which means they were just testing it out before. What does suck right now is navigating the store. There isn't much out yet, so everything seems like a gigantic banner ad, which makes scrolling through everything kind of annoying.

So far I've played a bunch of Assassin's Creed IV, which is incredible. I don't know if the PS3 and 360 versions are super incredible looking, or if the PS4 version has some serious graphical improvements. Everything about it looks beautiful. The rain in the opening scene blew my mind! I also played some Resogun, which was pretty cool as well. At the end of a level everything blows up into thousands of tiny particles, which would have crippled the old consoles.

Oh yeah, the controller itself is very comfortable. It feels great. The triggers are a huge improvement over the Dualshock 3. What's going to take getting used to is the fact that there are no start and select buttons. Instead it's the share and options buttons separated by a rather large touch-pad that doesn't do a lot.

I'm pretty into this thing so far. As I become less infatuated with playing it every waking moment I'll be sure to post more!

     -Manny

Game Time - October 2013

October was just about as awesome as I expected it to be. That is the main reason why it's now November 5th and I'm writing the October edition of game time. I've been pretty late on these the past few months, but that's a good thing. I've been busy playing awesome games.

In terms of awesome games this month was a doozy. On the 8th I picked up Disgaea D2 in store, because I hadn't pre-ordered it yet. For some reason I thought it was coming out at the end of the month, which was when I had planned on making time to play it. Due to my miscalculation I haven't played as much of it as I would have liked. I'm a solid 8 or so hours in and so far it hasn't grabbed me as much as I was hoping it would have. However, there's still plenty of time for that to happen.

The real reason I didn't play much Disgaea is because Pokemon X and Y came out a short four days later. In order to play as much Pokemon as humanly possible I requested off from work on the 12th and 13th. In those two days I played over 24 hours worth of Pokemon X. It was awesome, and the game continues to be awesome after 78 hours of play. I've still got a lot to do and I don't see myself stopping any time soon.

On the 24th the 5th game in the Ace Attorney franchise was released as a downloadable only title on the 3DS. I still wish it would have been a full retail release, but I understand that the franchise hasn't exactly had the most stellar sales in the west. Hopefully this game makes up for that and all future games in the series are localized. I'm up to the 5th and final court case in the game and shit's getting very real. I'll probably end up finishing it tonight or tomorrow. All I know is that Phoenix Wright made his return to the courtroom well worth my time.

I have so much to say about these games, so I better get into it. It's game time!

Disgaea D2: A Brighter Darkness

At some time in my high school career I picked up a copy of Disgaea 2 not really knowing what it was. I played through the first few chapters just as I would any strategy RPG. I still remember the map where everything changed for me. It was in a swamp and for some reason I had to fight Etna. She was level 1,000 or higher and my characters were barely 20. I was decimated, but found out I was supposed to be. It became my new goal to get strong enough to beat her. Little did I know that I would be able to get my characters to level 9,999 multiple times through insane level grinding with exponential experience. I played the living hell out of Disgaea 2 and from that point on I was hooked. Eventually I went back and played the first game, and since then I have played and been horribly addicted to each new iteration.

After going back and playing Disgaea 1 it became my favorite game in the franchise. For some reason I really like the main character Laharl, even though he's an egocentric whiner. Perhaps it's his lack of a shirt and the bad-ass laser sword he uses that make me like him so much. He ends up being my most used character in every game despite not being heavily involved in any of the main stories aside from the original game. With Disgaea D2 he makes his triumphant return as the main character.

Laharl turns into a lady during D2. I really like the character design!

I still love Laharl, but D2 has made me realize how little I like Etna and Flonne. There are only so many times you can joke about not having any boobs before it becomes upsetting. I don't want to be mean, but Flonne is too dumb for me to handle. I realize she's an angel who was kicked out of heaven and she's super innocent and naive, but it's just annoying. I didn't like the part she played in Disgaea 4's story either. In fact, I think she detracted from the overall feel of that story. This is what bugs me about D2 the most. It's a direct sequel to the story of the original game, so it focuses on the original three main characters. In theory that would be awesome, but for some reason the only other story character you get is a little girl who claims to be Laharl's sister. I don't like her at all either, so I'm stuck using the generic characters, Laharl, and the three story characters I find to be annoying. Once I get to the post game I can unlock the characters I liked from Disgaea 4, but I feel like that's a long way to go with a lackluster set of characters.

The story seems weak, which is putting me off a bit. It's a shame though, because everything else seems so well done. It eases you into the combat and teaches you a lot better than previous iterations of the franchise did. I want to beat the game so I can get sucked into the endless grinding and loot progression that I so desperately crave. Hopefully I can get past the characters I don't like and focus on how awesome Laharl is to get me through the game. Now that I'm winding down on Ace Attorney I should be able to play, or at least try to play a bit more.

Ace Attorney 5: Dual Destinies

I don't care what anyone says; Apollo Justice was a great game. Sure, he may not be Phoenix Wright, but that's okay. The original Ace Attorney trilogy ended in such a way that I didn't mind that Apollo had taken his place as the main character. With that said I'm glad that Phoenix is back as a playable character and back in the spotlight. Even though this time he's sharing his spotlight with Apollo and the fresh out of law school Athena Cykes.

Ace Attorney 5 plays just like the previous entries in the series. It's essentially a visual novel, but at certain points you'll need to explore crime scenes for evidence and present said evidence in court at the right time. What's nice is that everything is easier this time. When searching for evidence you control a cursor shaped like a hand pointing with it's index finger. When an area can be investigated a circle will appear over the index finger. To make things easier on the player the circle will turn into an X if you've already searched that area or object. It makes the investigations less frustrating, because you can easily see if you're missing anything. In a similar vane you can travel anywhere at any time. In the previous games you could only move to certain places if you were close to that place, which was terribly annoying. You'd have to backtrack through several screens for no reason whatsoever.

Look at how badass Apollo looks!

All of the character models are now full fledged 3D. You can see Phoenix yelling objection as a glorious 3D model instead of his regular old 2D sprite. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it looks really good and allows for a much wider range of motion. It's only really noticeable with the 3D turned on though. For some reason without it everything looks very flat. Without it the characters look painted on the background. With the 3D on everything looks like it was much more depth. Each background has several layers, and certain objects are accentuated. It reminds me of how I thought Kingdom Hearts 3DS had better graphics with the 3D on. It probably isn't the case, but it sure looks a lot better to me.

If the addition of 3D models isn't enough for you then perhaps you might enjoy some anime cutscenes. They're interspersed throughout the game and add to the story in a way that wasn't previously possible. The part that cuts the anime down for me a bit is the fact that's it's voice acted. It's not exactly the best voice work that I've ever heard. What makes it worse is that it's at odds with the rest of the game, which isn't voice acted at all. They could have easily gotten away with having no voice acting, because the scenes mostly show actions as opposed to conversations. The actors aren't even necessarily bad, they just don't fit the characters very well in my opinion. Since there have been 4 previous games in the franchise where the only spoken words were hold it, take that, and objection the voiced scenes are generally off-putting.

Witness Phoenix in all his 3D majesty!

The good news is that in regular Ace Attorney fashion the new characters are very well done. Athena Cykes is a brand new lawyer that Phoenix hired. I'm in the final case now and I still don't know exactly what her deal is, but she's an interesting character so far. She's easily excitable, but knows when she has to get serious. Just as Phoenix has his magatama, and Apollo has his magic bracelet, Athena has a robotic talking necklace named Widget. Widget will say what Athena is thinking, but he also allows her to sense discord in people's emotions. In the court room this adds a brand new way to cross examine. Occasionally she will sense discord and launch into an emotion detection sequence. As the witness speaks there are four emotions that they can be feeling. You must figure out what emotion doesn't fit with the testimony in order to bring out the truth and enact justice.

As is common with each game there is also a new prosecutor. Prosecutor Blackquill is a prison inmate who for some reason is allowed to work in a court of law. He was convicted of murder seven years prior to Ace Attorney 5. I have yet to find out what he was convicted for, but I'm super pumped to find out. He's generally very calm and collected, but becomes angry when he feels like his time is being wasted. Like the other prosecutors he is fairly hostile towards any opposing lawyer. He often sicks his pet bird on people, and throws knives across the court room. You know, things that are totally legal. He's a great opponent, because it seems that he believes in justice as opposed to only caring about a guilty verdict.

The anime scenes would be so much better without the voice acting.

As I mentioned previously I have just started the final case and I can't wait to see what happens. In the beginning though I wasn't very interested in the story. The first case failed to grab me, but it's importance isn't clear until the third case. I can't tell if it's the way this game is written, or if I'm just not used to the logic of the series anymore, but I keep finding myself not knowing what to do. Generally the series has it's own internal logic, but there have been numerous occasions when  I just have no idea what evidence I'm supposed to present in court. I've found myself getting much more frustrated than I did in previous titles despite the fact that everything is much more streamlined. Part of that may have been due to the fact that the story hadn't picked up yet. So while the experience has been frustrating it's been great to see Phoenix take up being a lawyer again after his supporting role in Apollo Justice. Overall it feels like an Ace Attorney game that's super streamlined, but slightly more frustrating than it used to be.

Pokemon X

Pokemon is and always has been one of my favorite franchises. Even though it doesn't change a whole lot with each iteration, it changes just enough to keep me coming back for more. This time Game Freak changed much more than usual and the result is amazing, which makes this the best generation of Pokemon yet.

To really shake things up Game Freak added in a whole new type. Dragon Pokemon are generally known to be overpowered. They are almost always very strong and have few weaknesses. In order to combat that Fairy type was added in order to take Dragon type down a few notches, because as we all know faeries are a dragon's only true weakness. What's insane is that fairy Pokemon are totally immune to Dragon moves. This addition might sound like a small thing, but it totally changes the entire basis of Pokemon battles. It's going to shake up competitive battling in a major way. I use a fairy Pokemon on my team and it's pretty awesome.

Sylveon is my favorite fairy Pokemon. It's a beastly special defense tank.

As if adding a whole new type wasn't enough Mega evolution is now a thing. Certain Pokemon can now mega evolve by holding a special stone. For example Tyranitar can turn into mega Tyranitar when holding Tyranitarite. When a Pokemon mega evolves it gets better stats and in some cases new typing, and a new ability. There are only around 20 Pokemon that can mega evolve, which means that a lot of people are going to start using those Pokemon. You're only allowed to have one Pokemon go Mega in a battle, so you can't just run a team of all super powered megas and steamroll everyone.

The most mind blowing change in X and Y is that everything is fully polygonal. All the models in the game are 3D and it's incredible. The overworld and characters don't look like anything special, but battles are amazing. The detail in animation of every single Pokemon and attack are unmatched! Since every main line Pokemon game prior to this has been fully sprite based this is a big change and a large step forward for the series. The only tradeoff is that the frame rate doesn't always hold up in battle, especially if you utilize the 3D of the 3DS. More often than not if you have the 3D turned on in battles the frame rate will drop by half during each attack animation. It's disappointing, because it all looks so good! The models still look good though, so it's just as nice to see the models without the 3D cranked all the way up.

The Pokemon models look very good for being on the 3DS.

Everything seems to happen faster in X and Y as well. You can immediately run, which is normally an ability you have to earn. Then after the first gym you gain access to the roller blades, which almost double your movement speed. Battle text scrolls faster by default as well making battles move quicker. It seems to me that leveling up your Pokemon takes less time too. For some reason you still gain Exp even if you capture a wild Pokemon now. The main reason leveling is faster though is due to the Exp. Share. While this has been an item in every single game it now shares the experience between every Pokemon in your party as opposed to just one. To make it even more mind blowing it's not even an item that a Pokemon has to hold anymore. Instead it's a key item that you can turn on or off at your discretion.

All around it seems that the series is trying to become more accessible. You get right into the game much faster than you did before, and it's a whole lot easier to level up and move around. Even the previously intense meta-game of your Pokemon's stats has been made easier. I don't want to get into the intricacies of EVs and IVs here, but I will say that they're now both easier to control. EVs have been completely trivialized, because now you can just play a soccer-like minigame for an hour or so completely max out the EVs you need on a single Pokemon. Breeding for IVs used to be overly complicated and take a good amount of luck, but I was able to breed a Pokemon with perfect stats in just a matter of hours. Sure, I got fairly lucky, but it's still way easier to do now. This all means that more people can get into Pokemon now, and people who previously found the competitive aspect too daunting can now get into it much more easily. This will be the first generation where I have a competitively viable team to use online.

Competitive battles might be much more prominent this generation.

Many people complained that there were only 70 brand new Pokemon, when there has been at least 100 per generation previously. I was upset at first too, especially since most of the designs are kind of poor. Now that I've played the game I no longer have any complaints. With less Pokemon it was much easier for Game Freak to add in all kinds of new features and make the Pokemon we all know and love into something much better than it was before.

I've been playing Pokemon since the original games came out over a decade ago and I've liked each and every iteration of the franchise since then. I can say without a doubt that this generation is the peak of the entire series. Game Freak has hit an all new high and I hope that they can top it with the next iteration. People complain that these games are too similar every year and for the first time this entry is actually very different. I love Pokemon so much. It's one of my favorite franchises and it makes me so happy that it's still so awesome after all these years.

A New Age is Dawning

This console cycle is coming to an end. On November 15th the PS4 will be here and with it an all new era of gaming will begin. While there may not be many exclusive games coming out for the thing it's still very important. The week after the Xbox One will be out and then we're truly into the next generation of console gaming.

I pre-ordered the PS4 and it will be at my door on the 15th. Since I can no longer get Watch Dogs until June of 2014 I am going to have to settle for Assassin's Creed 4 instead. I'll probably type up a whole bunch of stuff about the PS4 as I use it. Also expect me to post some videos of myself playing video games over the next few months. The PS4 allows for direct streaming to Twitch, which I can't wait to try out.

The next edition of Game Time will take place in an entirely new era of gaming!

     -Manny