Fortnite: Or How I Learned to Stop Building and Love the Shenanigans – Video Game Review

TL;DR – After years of frustration with this game, the no-build mode finally coalesces the game for me.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Disclosure – This is a Free-to-Play with microtransactions, and I paid for the Battle Pass.

A crew shot as things explode in the background.

Fortnite Review –

Back in 2017, there was this odd game that exploded onto the video game scene, it was not the first Battle Royale style game on the market, but its free-to-play model and big marketing push made it the example all others wanted to copy. I tried the game when it first came out, and my biggest feeling at the time was that ‘this was not for me’. I just did not have the time in my life to learn how to work the building side of things. However, with the announcement that there would be a build-free mode, I decided to give the game another look and discovered just what people have been talking about for all these years.

So to set the scene, Fortnite is a Third-Person Shooter Battle Royale game. This means that it is a shooter where the perspective is positioned from behind the character, over the shoulder, rather than as if you were peering out of their eyes. As well as this, there is a barrier slowly shrinking the map to a central point forcing all the players together. What this means is at the start of the game, all 100 players jump out of a flying bus landing across the map and have to scavenge weapons and ammo, all trying to be the last one standing while some dude in a banana costume snipes you … banana costumes … raises a fist to the clouds.    

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Article – The Oligopolization of the Video Game Industry

TL;DR – We explore the increasing Oligopolization of the Video Game Industry

The Oligopolization of the Video Game Industry

Overnight on the 22 of September (at time of writing) we were greeted to the news that Microsoft had purchased video game publisher ZeniMax. While the name ZeniMax might be unfamiliar to many, they own some of the most popular game development studios in the business. This includes Bethesda Softworks the home of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout and one of the original grand studios of the industry Id Software creators of Quake and Wolfenstein [1]. While the focus will likely be on the alleged $7.5 billion price tag for the publisher, this is also a chance to explore a troubling trend within global media and specifically the video games industry.

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