Coffee at Leblanc

  Cosmic Star Heroine  It's been a long time coming but I've finally played Cosmic Star Heroine . I was around for this game before it released and even got to talk to one of the developers on ResetEra back in 2017. Cosmic Star Heroine is developed by Zeboyd Games. This indie JRPG pits you in the role of Alyssa, a space secret agent as she uncovers that her agency has created an unethical mind control device. Cosmic Star Heroine is inspired by the SNES/Sega era of JRPGs like Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star IV, and Lunar: Eternal Blue. For the genre this is a relatively short game. I ran over just 14 and a half hours in my playthrough, but it might just be me and where I am currently but it felt like a full game length like a Final Fantasy and it took me about three weeks to finish it just like a FF.   Cosmic Star Heroine is also fast paced in correspondence to its length. The story moves about quickly, you are getting new party members quite often and seeing new locations...

  I came across this book one late night as I was scouring YouTube. I was looking on Amerie's channel and saw she had a review about this book and watched it. The story of this novel revolved around gaming and game developers intrigued me since I am a game developer myself and I decided to purchase this book some time later. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow   hereby referred to as TTT was written by Gabrielle Zevin and published by Penguin Random House. Gabrielle Zevin is best known by her book The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry , but this is my first novel from her. As I previously stated TTT is a story of gamers and game developers. There is no plot to TTT. This is a character driven story. We learn about the lives of Sam Masur, Sadie Green, and Marx Watanabe coming together to create video games. Though the paths that lead these characters together were video games this story is also very much a story about the relationship of three friends. Some might argue that Sam and Sadi...

  So EVO was this past weekend and along with the intense competition came some news for upcoming fighting games. After the Tekken 7 grand finals Harada came on stage to present a new trailer. This trailer showed off clips of Kazuya from the original Tekken all the way to Tekken 7 , but at the end of this teaser trailer there was a brief clip of a modern Kazuya with an entirely new model looking smug at the camera. There is no official confirmation as Harada didn't say anything, but the excitement from the crowd indicated this is a lead to the reveal of a new Tekken . Tekken 8 may very well be on the way.     That's not all we got Sunday night as Capcom also came with some important news after the Street Fighter V grand finals. The commentator voices for Street Fighter 6 came on stage and presented new footage. We were introduced to Kimberly and Juri in Street Fighter 6 . Kimberly was leaked via images a couple months ago, but this is the first official footage the ...

Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my favorite games of 2019 so I was eager to get my hands on Forbidden West and scooped it up on release day. It unnaturally took me over five months to beat it, but I finally have. So I played Horizon Forbidden West on the base PS4. I heard the PlayStation 5 version is ideal, but since I still don't own one and I was really pressed about getting this game on release I chose to get the PS4 version. In the years since Zero Dawn's release I noticed a graphical upgrade. The textures in the environments in Forbidden West have a higher res and one thing that bothered me in particular with Zero Dawn is how waxy the skin looked on black characters aside from Sylens. This isn't an issue anymore in Forbidden West . Every black character's skin texture looks believable as skin. I wish the hair looked as believable, but I already discussed that in my 4C Pixels article. There are also more textures in the skin as well. Aloy's freckles are more...

  So Sonic Origins finally releases today. This title is a compilation package of the 16-bit Sonic games, Sonic the Hedgehog , Sonic the Hedgehog 2 , Sonic CD , and Sonic 3 & Knuckles . For those who never played these titles before or have lost them over the decades this is an ideal package to purchase, but their is a caveat. Some of the music from Sonic 3 has been omitted in this release. Back in the 1990s it was rumored that legendary pop artist Michael Jackson along with keyboardist and musical director Brad Buxer worked on the Sonic 3 soundtrack. It was said that Michael Jackson didn't like how the Sega sound chip sounded and how his tracks were integrated. Subsequent releases of Sonic 3 have replaced some tracks with a prototype version. It's been long speculated by fans that it was because Michael Jackson composed those songs and up until now it was just speculation. Today, Yuji Naka, a former Sonic team lead and the lead programmer for Sonic 3 posted the followi...

Yesterday, Sony held a livestream of their State of Play presentation for PlayStation. For those who are unfamiliar State of Play is a video presentation Sony puts out periodically to advertise upcoming games similar to how Nintendo has directs every few months. These presentations are always virtual and usually livestreamed. I caught the presentation as soon as I went home and got up to date on the news. I say this was definitely one of the better presentations they've had over the years. There were substantial announcements and not everything contained cgi cutscenes. Still, there wasn't anything that really stood out as amazing or a surprise announcement.  One of the first thing viewers saw was the jungles of the Horizon series. I was a bit surprised at first and then just thought "Oh, this must be a DLC announcement." It wasn't however, as the trailer continued and the game transitioned from dialogue to gameplay and I saw disembodied hands it was evident that t...

  I've been playing video games for a very very long time now and one of the things that has been bugging me in my adulthood is the lack of afro-centric hairstyles in video games. I play a lot of RPGs and these games often have character creation and customization. As a creative I love any game that gives me freedom to express myself. I love designing the look and the playstyle of my characters. It's just frustrating that my options are so limited when it comes to making a character that looks black and the most egregious part is the lack of hair options. If the title does possess any black hairstyles it's going to be a Party City looking-ass afro, cornrows with no hangtime, and maybe some locs. I would count the low cut, but it's really just a buzz cut. The Grand Theft Auto games is one of the few games I recall that had a good amount, specifically San Andreas since most of Franklin's options in V were just variations of fades and Cesars, but it really shouldn...