Author: Joe Keep

By Jesse Young Ori and the Blind Forest is a game that repeatedly defies initial expectations in the best possible way. You might have seen some of the game’s art and screenshots and noted that Ori is a good-looking game. Indeed, the game looks stunning, more so than it has any business being. Even so, looking at screenshots of Ori is nothing compared to seeing it in motion, and the game’s ten-minute prologue sells it more than anything a review can say. The creators at Moon Studios took inspiration from Disney and Studio Ghibli, and it shows. The prologue is…

Have you become bored of Facebook and seeing all these photos of people’s holidays as you’re trapped in the library valiantly trying to complete your essay or report? Are you crying out for gossip on your social media that no one is willing to put up fearing the repercussions coming back to them or maybe you are the one that wants to say something and can’t. Well, I have the solution for you, Yik Yak. The service offers anonymity to the degree that you don’t even register so there is no screen names to even track. It utilities a Reddit…

As my time at Bangor draws to a close, I’d like to share with you some of the free internet games I have used to whittle away the hours as I avoided that essay or didn’t have to money to pick up that game I really wanted despite it being 75% off in the Steam sale. Google Dinosaur jump game           This one doesn’t have an official title but it has still had its fair share of hours put into it. A simple side scrolling jump over obstacles game has been a point of pride as you try to…

By Jesse Young The past year has been a weird one for PC gamers. In many ways, it’s been a weird year for gaming in general, with countless PR and QA gaffes attached to major releases. None of these gaffes, however, are more confounding than certain studios’ slipshod approach to PC ports. Let’s be clear: PC ports are, in general, becoming more polished and complete products. Controller support has become almost universally integrated. Online distribution services like Steam are booming. Even games such as the well-loved yet obscure Valkyria Chronicles are seeing new life, ported to the PC years after…

By Jesse Young It is no secret that in this modern economy, franchises are often necessary to the ultimate profit of larger developers. More and more, when a new intellectual property is introduced, it is done so with the understanding that it is the first in a series – unless, it flops, in which case the studio responsible will likely close its doors. A grim picture of AAA publishing, to say the least, but one that has been supported many times over in recent years. It is unsurprising, then, that even giants of the gaming industry such as Ubisoft,…

Recent releases of games, especially in the current generation of consoles, have seen games getting shorter in playable length. A prime example of this can be found in The Order 1886 which reportedly has around 2.5 hours of actual gameplay with a campaign run through of about 5.5 hours. Maybe it’s the RPG or strategy player in me that is used to games taking much longer to get through, but this seems incredibly short. However, this choice has been protected by the company saying they were aiming for quality over quantity, to paraphrase. This shouldn’t be something gamers should endure…

By Jesse Young Final Fantasy: Type-0 HD is an absolute mess, but it’s also a great deal more fun than most games in recent years that have held the Final Fantasy name. Of course, this particular brand has been used in some strange ways over the years, to the point where the term “main franchise” has almost lost meaning. Type-0, however, is certainly a very different game to any of the numbered entries in the series. For one thing, it’s a fully real-time action RPG. There’s an open world, but also a very mission-based structure to the main storyline.…

Naoto Kan, ex-President of Japan, has travelled to Anglesey to campaign against the Wylfa power plant construction. Kan, who was President of Japan at the time of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster, spoke at a meeting on Thursday, 5March, voicing his concerns regarding the safety of the plant. The meeting also outlined Anglesey council’s £12 billion energy island programme, a bid to utilise renewable energy sources as research into the best ways to harness them. The plant is an £8 billion project that is believed to address power consumption, as well as enrich Anglesey’s economy with the plant creating 6,000 new…

Let me introduce to you the Philips voice tracer, more specifically the DVT6000 model. After only playing with the Dictaphone for a couple of minutes, I had managed to grasp how to use it. The audio quality, especially in a one to one interview, is superb. However, I ran into a little more trouble when trying to record from further away. As the product attempts to focus in on the source of speech, you have to be extremely careful about when you hit the record button so it actually focuses on the lecturer, not the guy two seats over…

Those who have been browsing the annals of Twitter over the past few months have likely come into a recurring hashtag: Gamergate. Many are touting this hashtag as part of what they see as a movement in the gaming industry. Often it is claimed that Gamergate is about journalistic integrity and the protection of gaming as a hobby. The -gate suffix, with its history, evokes the notion that a great scandal has occurred, and dramatic action must be taken to prevent such scandals in the future. But what is this supposed scandal? What is Gamergate? To answer these questions,…

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor is a greater game than it has any right to be. Ponder a moment on the premise: you play as Talion, whose wife and son are killed right in front of him before he is possessed, in a sense, by a wraith. As a result, he’s “banished from death” (as the game puts it) and gets a bunch of wraith powers. He proceeds to put his powers to use in terrorizing an open-world Mordor, killing a whole lot of orcs (or rather, uruks) along the way, seeking revenge and an end to his curse. The…

With every passing year we see the next iteration of the phone we love, or are expected to upgrade a piece of software or hardware to remain at the cutting edge of technology. But are these prices getting so fantastically high that the average student can’t afford to be on that edge? For – Joe Keep These upgrades aren’t all that pricey. With the speed that they are coming out, it creates only small incremental price increases, especially in the area of TVs. TV prices are so incredibly cheap for what you get, a 40 inch LED, HD ready TV…

For a long time now, the most common method of getting into a crown cap bottle has been to crank the lid off with a traditional bottle opener. While these metal contraptions do the job, I’ve never been able to get the hang of them; I would end up struggling with the bottle for far too long, spilling half of my drink out onto the table in the process. Fortunately there is a solution for this issue, the Sentol Bottle Opener. It’s a cylindrical device which has been specifically designed to ease the bottle opening process. To use the Sentol,…

As another year comes to a close, a period of reflection begins. Be that remembering the first A you got, being put as the head of your club or society, or even just surviving the year, you all deserve a pat on the back. I can associate with the first years a lot, moving from home to somewhere completely new, not knowing anyone or what the general feeling of an area is. Those bonds forged through circumstance that grow and flourish into some of the best friendships you’ve had, coupled with those crazy stories that could only happen at university,…

The Pontio Company have bought a Bangor high street shop to support their presence within Bangor. This follows the start of the construction of the Pontio project at the bottom of Glanrafon Hill, next to the Main Arts building of the university, with a completion date of May 2014, and the opening time to be sometime within September 2014. The shop has no set usage yet, rather than to showcase Pontios events. So far it houses images of key events in the Pontio story, such as the laying of the foundation stone, the opening of the shop itself and the…

The PS4 has finally been announced, marking the first of the next gen consoles to step out into the spotlight. The hugely anticipated next gen consoles have achieved an almost dream like status; especially with the massive leap in visual/audio quality linked with gameplay that was witnessed with the birth of the PS3 and the Xbox 360. However, will their birth be as good as anticipated by the gaming community? The short answer is ‘Yes’, the PS4 announcement did nothing to bring it down, if anything, it only heightened expectations. With a lengthy announcement, going into depth on the various…