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During the early 90’s, many of us were involved in, as coined by James Rolfe, the "bit wars," the point where competing systems developed a brand loyalty with the consumers. It was a Genesis/SNES world and the market intended for you to pick a side. But those of us who were first exposed to video games during this time didn’t originally intend to side with either Sega or Nintendo. While there were certain characteristics of each console that we preferred, our focus was never on what games were better. The first big step for any future gamer is one devoid of partisanship in the gaming community; when you first enter the gaming world, you aren’t involved in the console wars. In fact, they did not exist to you back then. I personally chose Sonic the Hedgehog as my "gateway game" simply because I liked who he was as a character. I liked his cool blue color, his tough-guy stare, and the acrobatic nature of how he moved. Level design, physics, replay value, music, even the buzz term "blast processing" meant absolutely nothing to me. It was Sonic himself that captivated me to join the gaming world.
Minecraft: Story Mode has managed to surprise fans of episodic games with every episode released. While the second episode might not have proven that, both Episode 1, Episode 3 and now Episode 4 have not disappointed. Probably the best episode yet in both content and character development, Minecraft: Story Mode - Episode 4: A Block and a Hard Place will leave you emotionally defeated. Lasting a little bit over two hours, the episode gives closure to the events that Jessie and his friends are facing in saving the world from the Witherstorm. It begins right where you left off last, either Ellegard or Magnus having died (according to the decision that you make) and Gabriel having been rescued but with no recollection of what has happened (a side effect from having Wither Sickness). You all run from the storm only to find safety in a cave, still within the storm's range.
Many other gamers in my age group were hooked during the Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis era, while the older crowd are likely to have the original NES in their hearts. Some might even cite the original Atari 2600 as their first step into the world of gaming, with their reverence for the medium enduring even the colossal gaming crash of the 1980’s. On the other side of things, we have younger gamers who are being raised on Playstation consoles as new as the Playstation 4 and even Microsoft’s Xbox line, which didn’t appear until the new millennium. We also mustn’t forget those of us who played PC games during our childhood, even the consistently ridiculed edutainment games like Oregon Trail II . We’re all given so much history and so many options to choose from as fans within this medium, but those of us who call ourselves gamers find something truly fascinating with games as a whole.
Ellegard (for me) and Gabriel begin conversing in hopes that he would regain his memory and in doing so, mentions something about Lukas' jacket, saying that he has seen others wearing it inside of the Witherstorm. With this comes Jessie's first big decision, either allowing Lukas to leave in hopes of finding his friends or make him stay to help in your fight. This is only the first of many heartrending decisions that need to be made throughout the entirety of this episode. While most of these decisions are among the toughest in any of the episodes, they help dictate how the game will end and who will be standing next to Jessie when it does. This episode lets you customize your decisions a little bit more, allowing you to decide which weapon you want to create for the final battle, which armor you would like to wear, and even in what manner you will enter the Witherstorm. It isn't much, but that's far more customization than most Telltale games allow. While it is important to be careful with your decisions, it's more important to learn who your real allies are and dictate how you want your destiny to unfold in your fight towards saving this blocky humanity.
This has been gone over in many other articles, but the short version is that what the player sees in VR is strong enough to trigger an instinctual expectation of motion that, when the body doesn't feel it, causes a nausea reaction. You're seeing something that the brain knows is wrong based on physical feedback; the most likely cause based on data from the last several million years of evolution is some kind of ingested toxin, so systems get purged to remove the poisons from the body as fast as possible. Personally I just get a nasty headach and woozy feeling, but other people need an emergency bucket available. The cost/benefit ratio to FPS VR is completely off, no matter how Many wood types in minecraft cool it seems before the reaction kicks in. At this point I've learned the best thing to do with a VR FPS is to poke in for no more than two to three minutes to get a sense of the environment, and then switch back to the monitor and never use the headset for it again.