So here we are. Another year done and a new one beginning.I failed abysmally at most of last year’s plans, so I’m not going to make any for this year.
I hope things work out for you all this next year. There will obviously be ups and downs, but let’s hope at the end of the year everything lands on the up side.
Not too late I hope to wish everybody ~ A Happy New Year!
One of the world’s most popular video games, Minecraft, is also one of the world’s largest video games.
Each Minecraft world that the game generates is 60 million one-meter blocks by 6o million one-meter blocks, to say nothing of the blocks going up and down on the z-axis.
If you were to walk straight and keep walking from the moment you started a new Minecraft world, it’d take several days (in real time) to reach the edge of the world.
If that sounds huge, that’s because it IS huge. But a new game is way, way bigger: No Man’s Sky.
And that’s because No Man’s Sky, is a PlayStation 4 and PC title, is a space exploration game that contains its own universe. And that universe is full of planets, the vast majority of which are full of alien life. How many planets? So, 18 quintillion is the number thrown around by the game’s creators at Hello Games.
You can hop in your spaceship and jet from planet to planet is an incredible achievement for a game so large. Incredibly, No Man’s Sky was built by a team of just 15 game developers working out of Guildford, England.
This, of course, begs the question, “How in the world did a small team of game developers create the biggest game ever made?”
The simple answer is algorithms, which of course explains very little.No Man’s Sky is like Minecraft, is a procedurally generated game. In so many words, that means that instead of hand crafting each planet, which would be literally impossible the team created a handful of base elements (animals, plants, etc.) that algorithms can divide into quintillions of derivations.
But it also produced the world’s largest game, and for that we’re infinitely thankful.
So I realized I’ve been actually slacking off when it comes to anime. Honestly speaking, I don’t watch a whole lot of TV anymore, so whatever anime that has been brought over (well, what that makes it on TV these days) has generally gone past me. So I have decided to start watching several anime from this year of different kinds. I will admit, I’m a wee bit biased towards the shounen genre, which limited the last anime I had seen prior to this year being Dragon Ball ,One Piece and Bleach. However, I decided on doing something different this time around by checking out several different series’, both old and new, of different genres. Here’s the lowdown:
Recently Finished
Cowboy Bebop
Bleach
CODE GEASS Lelouch of the Rebellion
CODE GEASS Lelouch of the Rebellion R2
Fruits Basket
Samurai Champloo (Only the first season)
Assassination Classroom ( Will never get tired of rewatching this series)
Dragon Ball Z
Shakugan no Shana
Superl Rumble: Third Semester (Contains only two episodes)
Deadman Wondeland
liar of Zero (All three seasons)
Soul eater
Vampire + Rosario
Currently Watching
Dragon Ball Super
Shingeki no Kyojin (Attack on Titan)
Haven’t you heard I’m Sakamoto
Naruto Shippuden
Beelzebub
Planning to Watch
K-On
Darker than Black
Eureka Seven (Want to rewatch the series)
Mob Psycho 100
Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood
One Punch Man (Only the last part)
Death Note
Tokyo Ghoul
That’s all I can come up with for the time being. If you have any suggestions, feel free to throw me a reply here or on Instagram. Taking all kinds of suggestions to, well, I guess expand my tastes. Oh, and I haven’t listed One Piece because I’ve fallen so behind on the anime, that I’ve been sticking to just the manga.
If you aren’t big into video games, you may think that playing video games is a waste of time. But gamers would disagree with you totally.
Most often, it seems that people engage with video games because it is their chosen medium of entertainment. Many games are accompanied by a storyline or game challenges that engage a gamer’s mental and emotional buttons. This may be what keeps them coming back. Or it might be that explosions, gun fire and eliminating opponents attract and hold people’s attention.Either way, gaming can become a way of life. Video gaming culture can become a way of relating to the world in either an ideal way or as a way to escape the responsibilities and disappointments of real life.However, many gamers feel compelled to continue playing, and here are their reasons why.
Top 10 reasons people play video games
Taken from forum discussions about video gaming, here’s a basic primer on what motivates people to play video games and why people like to play video games.
Red Barrels Studio decided to suddenly release a demo for its upcoming survival-horror game Outlast 2 yesterday. It’s available now, for free, via Steam and the Xbox One and PlayStation Stores . And it’s scary as 💩.Outlast 2 as you might have guessed by the name is the sequel to the relatively successful Outlast (2013). It puts you in the role of Blake Langermann, a cameraman who, after wrecking with his wife Lynn in the Arizona desert, finds himself frantically evading a twisted religious cult. This sequel is set in the same universe as the first game, and still keeps its found footage-style of presentation (i.e. you’re peeking through a camera to see in the dark), but wisely loses the mental asylum setting.
THINGS THERE ARE JUST AWFUL
The demo drops you into what is presumably the beginning of the game, having you explore a dilapidated town, discovering quickly that things there are just awful. Like, simply the worst.
Mutilated corpses of children, religious iconography, and a seemingly never-ending cornfield await those brave enough to play Outlast 2 . I, to be honest with you, was not brave enough, asking my brother to sit with me while I played the game, only to much to his delight scream in front of him after finding myself face to face with a monster. While Outlast 2 certainly achieves what it sets out to do terrify and I commend it for that, I have no plans of ever playing that game again.
Acting as a demo for Silent Hills , P.T. could be described as a psychological survival horror game. You awaken in what at first seems to be a normal suburban home – yet this is no ordinary house: it consists solely of a continuously looping L-shaped corridor, a bathroom and some stairs leading to a door.Every time you pass through that door, little things change, becoming stranger and eerier.There are no objectives; you are left to your own devices and your own curiosity will lead you to investigate what has happened in this house.With walking and zooming as the only available actions at your disposal, discover hidden secrets,while listening to news broadcasts about a gruesome murder.
This is what is so ingenious about P.T. – it puts you right in the heart of the horror. You have no weapons and there are no trope zombies attacking you. Kojima wanted to give players a taste of what the atmosphere in Silent Hills would feel like, which makes the fact that we will never get to see his collaboration with Del Toro even harder to take. The supernatural element of P.T. had me trembling with fear. The game is interspersed with unnerving sounds which had me constantly on edge. Every now and then you might hear a horrible raspy breathing, a baby crying or laughing. There are multiple instances where you will see a spectral figure out of the corner of your eye; it’ll be there one moment, gone the next.
Kojima understands horror brilliantly – its randomness, its strangeness. He understands the fear of the unknown, and there are a lot of unexplained elements to P.T . He’s obviously a man who knows his horror well, with many nods to directors such as David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Stanley Kubrick. There is something of the Overlook Hotel about this suburban home.
Towards the end of the game things become creepier and crazier: the house becomes more haunted; the spectral being goes from being on the outskirts of your vision to being in full view. Yet this doesn’t make P.T. any less disturbing. It still succeeds in making your skin crawl, as well as delivering a few good jump scares. I can’t remember ever playing a game that left me feeling so shell-shocked, overwhelmed, almost as if it had scared me too much. This was just a demo – imagine what the full game would have done.
Completing P.T. is a huge challenge and deliberately unclear in its storytelling. I’m not ashamed to admit that I had to search for clues on how to get to the end credits. Kojima wanted to make something totally new, to reinvent the Silent Hill franchise and in turn the video game horror genre. He has incorporated the very best elements of cinematic horror and created a terrifying, fully immersive first-person experience. The potential for its use on the upcoming Oculus Rift or PlayStation VR would have been staggering.
P.T. started. Accomplished as it is, it may have ruined the Silent Hill franchise; we know what it could have been, but now we know what it will never become.
Both parts of the phrase “survival horror” are supposed to be equally important. There is no dead weight in it. But today, more often than not, what we have is “action horror,” which offers multiplayer in place of solitude and emphasizes gunning down mass enemies rather than building tension through hopelessness.
IT’S EASY TO BE SKEPTICAL.
Outlast is different, but it’s easy to be skeptical. Its biggest PR story is about someone fainting at E3, which is the same kind of hype Paranormal Activity used to sell its brand of fear. But this is real, not sensational. Red Barrel’s new first-person survival-horror game for PC focuses on the root meaning of the genre: the fight to survive in the presence of overwhelming horror. It’s only five hours long—or at least, that’s how long journalist Miles Upshur rolls his camera while inside the haunted Mount Massive Asylum—which leads to more intensity and less filler.
In theory, at least. Survival horror is easy to get wrong and just as easy to mishandle. Even when the scares are good, the controls are often bad, indicating failure in design while also feeding into the idea that survival is about a loss of mechanical control. Outlast ditches that cliché. The only clumsiness about its controls is that you need to hold down the key to crouch, and there’s an option to toggle that.
Make no mistake: Outlast is still about a loss of power, but because the physical controls aren’t pointlessly obtuse, little distracts players from the horror surrounding them. Rather, survival becomes a matter of instinct and gut response—not how well players can move in their environment but how they use it. Where they can hide, where to flee. With a pair of headphones on, it’s easy to forget about the keyboard or controller separating them from the events onscreen.
THEY OFFER A FALSE SENSE OF PROTECTION: THE SCREENS WON’T SAVE YOU IN THE DARK
Layers do remain, however: the glass of Miles’s camcorder, like the glass of the computer monitor. These are the lenses through which both Miles and the player view the asylum in order to discover and record the secret, terrible truth of what happened (and still happens) there. They offer a false sense of protection: the screens won’t save you in the dark, and neither will your role as a journalist. You, player, are no longer a neutral observer; you’re dragged in. The camera lends a sense of voyeurism and creates the sickening feeling that whatever horrors you’re about to witness, you invited upon yourself by seeking them out.
That’s the curse of the entire game. Less than an hour in, Miles wants nothing but to escape, but he can’t resist his curiosity. By pushing the investigation, you flirt with death, which creates a rare sense of involvement.
The trip through the asylum is pared down to essentials—no exposition, no weapons, only legs to carry you and places to hide. The wind howls through dry leaves and floorboards creak loud enough for the entire asylum to hear. You read daming internal documents, but Miles’s hand-scrawled notes eventually reflect a psychological degradation of their own. The camera’s night vision mode illuminates areas of pitch darkness, but the batteries drain quickly, and they’re in short supply. The impotence is absolute. There isn’t even a map, which, in a weapon-less game, leads to countless chase scenes through unfamiliar environments.
This can be confusing to the point of frustration, but then, running aimlessly is part of the horror, more well-executed than careless. To regain your bearings and see through the blur of night vision, you must stop running, quiet your movements, and improvise in your environment. Isn’t that what conquering our fears is about—learning how to not panic?
THIS, I REALIZED, WAS NOT FUN. IT WAS SOMETHING ELSE.
Still, Miles shows signs of duress. His breath will grow ragged; his heartbeat will quicken when enemies are near. We make him sprint wildly from room to room, hall to hall, without a plan or hope—and yet we stay alive. At one point, I stepped into the black of night outside the asylum and watched lightning flash through my night vision, terrifyingly beautiful as it revealed an evil worse than anything in the asylum. I was powerless and lost. This, I realized, was not fun. It was something else.
But then, maybe we’re not looking for fun. No matter how scared we are of the dark, our need to conquer it—to triumph over it—drives us forward. We want to say we got through it. That we were strong. Swallowing this fear is a bigger, more primal experience than other games can bring us. This is why survival horror, and so Outlast, are important. Outliving the nightmare allows us to hang on to the hope that maybe we’d be so brave in real life.
The scariest game that I’ve ever played is the original Dead Space. No other game has made me creep around every single corner, anticipating sudden death.Dead Space takes place exactly where the title hints, in space. You play as Isaac Clarke, who has traveled to a mining ship that has sent out a distress signal for help. Once you reach the USG Ishimura it looks as though everyone has decided to abandon the ship for some odd reason.
Withing minutes, you being to realize that no one has left the ship and instead everyone on it has been killed by these strange zombie/alien hybrids called Necropmorphs.
What made Dead Space scary for me was the fact that it was a survival horror game. This means that ammo is very scarce and you must rely on finding health kits to replenish your health. But the thing about Dead Space is that they decided to amplify the ‘survival’ part by added a neat feature that held a lot of consequences if it wasn’t performed correctly.
This feature is called dismemberment. With dismemberment, you couldn’t just fire shots at a Necromorph and expect it to die because quite frankly the things were too fast so you wouldn’t have a chance to fire enough bullets at it in order to kill it. Instead, you had to be smart about it and shoot off one of its legs to slow it down and then start gunning for the head. Take both legs off and next thing you know it’s slowly crawling towards you.
Because of dismemberment, you basically had to make each and every bullet count, especially since ammo was scarce. Miss a couple of shots and you’d find yourself running from a Necromporh searching the darkest corners of the ship to find a couple of bullets to finish the job.
What also gave me nightmares about Dead Space was the blood-thirsty Necromorphs themselves. They were creepy looking, fast, and damn were they smart. You’d think you were slick and run and hide inside of a room from a Necromorph, and next thing you know, the sucker would be crawling through the vents to get inside the room where you are. The first time I found this out I pretty much had to take a break from the game for an hour or so.
All this being said, what truly makes a scary game ‘scary’ is the atmosphere along with pacing. You can have jumpscares all day long but if you don’t find the perfect atmosphere to represent the game then the game will fail in just about every way.
Dead Space, to me, epitomizes the horror genre atmosphere. I’ve never felt so alone and vulnerable in a game before. Something about knowing that you’re the only living person on the ship and you’re on a ship full of deranged creatures is what really sends the chills down my spine. This feeling along with the Necromorphs being able to hide and scare you from just about any direction will keep you at the edge of your seat.
Unfortunately, EA made two more Dead Space games that ended up being horror-action games that killed the atmosphere that the first gave. The original is a gold standard when it comes to survival horror games that I still try to get my friends that have never experienced it before to play it. Speaking of which, you should do the same.
Since I was a child, I was really fond of sketching anything. Its maybe because of my zodiac sign, that’s why I love arts. As I can recall, the very first drawing I made when I was in elementary was Goku and Gohan of Dragon Ball Z riding in Kintoun Cloud. Since then, my passion for drawing anime character grew. I spend some of my free time holding a pencil and a paper and then draw. Up until now that I’m a grown-up, I still do some drawing when I don’t have any work.
👆This was one of my drawing I made few months back. Its from an anime Bleach (which I’m really a fan of ). This is a hobby that I wont give up until I grow old. I’m happy when I finished the whole drawing. I feel proud of my artwork (oopppssss, I didn’t meant to brag about it ).
I wish I could pass this passion to my children and grandchildren (soon! coz I dont have kids now).
That’s all!
I was lying on the bed when all of a sudden an earthquake upturned
Doars. Our room was in the second floor, with low ceilings and makeshift partitions. At first I just thought my own balance was off, so i went outside and after 5 – 6 seconds we herd a loud rumbling noise from the ground. The hotel began to shake madly, across perhaps a foot of air or more, like a drunkard. All of us started running. I wanted to pick up my tab but someone grabbed me from back and started pulling me.
The lobby was empty. Every object had been thrown around. We rushed out of the hotel gate. The lady and attendant, fortunately, were behind me. We looked at one another. There was of course nothing to say. I grabbed the mobile to call my grandmother who was in Kalimpong but the phone was as dead as the weather. My dad’s friend appeared, many long minutes later, his face looked surprise and his steps were wobble. The aftershocks tremble through nature as well as human nature. On Wednesday afternoon everyone was terrified as we sat outside, as ordered, for the next two hours, cold but comparatively secure. All the people and children were very scared especially the children .The children were crying. There were lots of people trying to reach their loved ones. Some take refuge in bursts of controlled reaction: loud voices others console themselves with the thought that the worst might be over. There were many people who had similar reactions to our own and are also, thankfully, safe. We’ve had two additional aftershocks since then, each time with a rush into the open air, waiting for it to pass, and then slowly getting back to our work. We’ve set up shop in the hotel courtyard with our tab and phones, after few hours we had our dinner and thankfully went to bed. 
shalomlepcha 