So I recently contracted the nostalgia virus, and it had me asking: "Why don't I reinstall Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 for a little bit?" They are games we played to death with around 6000 hours playtime. TF2 has left a mark on us personally from the communities in them, and the experiences in playing competitively. That's in the past though, nostalgia trips have always left that feeling of unsatisfied yearning. Usually people are willing to leave things there, assigning the mismatch between feelings past and present to those rose-tinted glasses of memory, but this time I felt like there were more tangible reasons to be explored, and I think I've found out why. Both games have changed plenty over their lifespans. Dota has had so many gameplay changes over the years that a lot of it I forget while playing as someone who thought that adding talents 9 years ago was a bit too much. It's still Dota though. You wait for queue to pop, there's a smurf in the g...
Call of Duty is a game franchise that spans twenty-two mainline games, a few spin-offs, and a lot of Nintendo demakes. In a word, it's immense, each game a six to eight hour campaign that's multiplied in length by the near infinite multiplayer and co-op modes, whether that be Zombies or Extinction. Add on Warzone, the series's new cash cow, and the games hit a player with a barrage of content to chew through. How can anyone write about this? I have a fascination with Call of Duty. It's half nostalgia, the campaign, multiplayer, and Zombies modes of Black Ops II filling a large part of afternoons in middle school- and it's half modern interest. I like to look at art about America, and in part that's what Call of Duty is- games about America, how it sees itself, and how it sees the rest of the world. Not always intentionally, but still important to look at. There's real art buried in these games at times, a level here that's well made, a great feelin...