Tag Archives: 1001 Video games you must play before you die

One Of The Best Video Games I’ve Experienced Is Undertale.

Posted on by

Austin was recently here with us for a week’s work experience at the library. He is a passionate gamer, and has written a review about a new release PC game, Undertale.  

Undertale

What is Undertale? You may ask, why do I hold it in such high regard? These are just two of the many questions you may be thinking of right now as you read my blog post about this absolutely fantastic video game.

Undertale is a RPG (Role Playing Game) for the PC which is almost entirely made by one person, a guy by the name of Toby Fox. A major selling point of Undertale is its tagline which is ‘The friendly RPG where nobody has to die’.

This is a major selling point of the game, because in most RPGs you strike down enemies with no care whatsoever, as who you are fighting is evil. Undertale on the other hand, gives all of its enemies such fantastic personalities through their dialogue and even their attacks against you.

Speaking of enemies, I’ll briefly talk about the battle system in Undertale. To start with, there’s an Attack menu, an Act menu, an Item menu, and a Mercy menu. I’ll be talking about the Act menu and the Mercy menu.

The Act menu consists of various actions you can do to try to get the monster to not want to fight you; these are different for every monster in the game. The Mercy menu is for when you basically say you don’t want to fight, and most of the time this won’t work unless you use the Act menu to figure out how to convince the monster to not want to fight you anymore.

Where Undertale really shines the brightest is through its story, writing and humour. Undertale is best experienced without knowing much about its story, so I won’t go into details but I will say this so you know what you’re getting into.

A small child enters a cave in the mountains, trips and falls down an enormous hole. The child wakes up on a bed of flowers in a mysterious place.

A word of advice before thinking of purchasing the game would be that from screenshots of the game it can look quite ‘kiddy’ but don’t judge it on its looks – there are times where the game deals with some dark and sad themes.

To conclude, Undertale is an absolutely fantastic video game and I highly recommend you check it out at the very least, if you do not purchase it.

(Undertale is available for purchase on the Internet-based digital distribution platform Steam and undertale.com for $10).

Gamer nostalgia

Posted on by

As a teenage gamer in the 1980’s and 90’s and revisting the sport again of late, I was really excited to see the latest title in the series of ‘1001  [insert appropriate pastime here] to do before you die’ books  –1001 Video games you must play before you die.

This book starts at the very beginning, in the early 70’s with classic titles Pong and the questionably educational The Oregon Trail. It then talks about the main titles from each era and the genre they represent, laden with serious bouts of 8 bit nostalgia.

The 80’s saw classics like Pacman, Gauntlet (Elf needs food badly!), Prince of Persia and Simcity each pushing the cutting edge of technology at the time. 256 colours in VGA graphics on the 386 SX25 was a massive leap in the very early 90’s allowing games like Monkey Island (look behind you a three headed monkey!), Civilization, Lemmings and Doom to become money spinners for their developers. This book also covers the console element including classic Mario Brothers, Outrun and Sonic the Hedgehog.

The major technology changes from the 90’s to the 2000’s is shown in the sharp improvement of graphics, immersion, 3D, gameplay and the ability to play against others via the internet. Modern classics like World of Warcraft, Half Life, Call of Duty are mixed in with console giants like Guitar Hero and Assassin’s Creed.  What an awesome trip down memory lane. Now where’s my C64?