Trusted gaming reviews

Gran Turismo 7: a Gran Masterpiece

From making games for the PS1 to all the way for making games for the PS4, Polyphony Studios have made banger after banger of video games, and this years title just take the cake.

Imagine yourself sitting in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution V, speeding past the winding corners and the iconic tunnel, overlooking the deep, forested valley down below. Imagine the other racers speeding next to you, trying to overtake you at the next turn, while also admiring the scenery to you. This is what Gran Turismo is about: a masterpiece of visual fidelity and hyper-active racing.

This cautious blend of imagery and action is where Gran Turismo shines, its where the base of the series comes from. Its not meant to be purely racing, like iRacing or RaceRoom, its meant to a showroom full of the technical advances that mankind has taken within the console. If you compare the first Gran Turismo through to Gran Turismo 7, you can see how much the series has developed.

Even if we take the latest release before Gran Turismo 7, Gran Turismo Sport, you can already see a plethora of small and big changes. For example, Gran Turismo 7 has an island in the middle to act as a selection menu, while Gran Turismo Sport has the menu on the top, and the middle space is left for a nice slideshow of cars. On top of that, Gran Turismo 7 has Ray-tracing enabled within replays and scenes where response time is not important (i.e. not in-game)

Furthermore, the visual aspects of the game within races and within the replays and scenes are just gorgeous. Even without Raytracing enabled while you’re racing, the game’s shaders are built to perfection to complement the hyper-realistic car-models to make it look like real life. The games meticulously crafted physics engine paired with the immersive vibrations of the new PS5 controller make it feel like real life.

To conclude, if you want to play this, i highly recommend playing it on the PS5 rather than the PS4, as the DualSense controllers only work with the PS5, which is only if you can afford the hefty £70 price tag of course.

Asphalt 9: an amazing piece of mobile gaming

Asphalt 9 strikes most as another clunky mobile racing game, but in fact it’s not, it’s far from that.

You go to school and at lunch, you hear some people chat about a brand new game they’ve all been playing, intrigued you turn on your phone, go to the App Store and download it for yourself.

You instantly are hooked with the fast action gameplay and the cartoonish, yet detailed graphics. Because that’s how the game spread, you got told about the game from someone else, tested it and got hooked. And the game is surprisingly easy to run. My old Motorola G4 play managed to run it at around 30 fps, which baffled most players as to how it runs well on most phones.

An image from what looks like it’s trailer

Asphalt 9 is a mobile arcade racing game released back in 2020, and was and still is quite popular. The game, published by Gameloft, was more polished yet still similar to its predecessor, asphalt 8.

Asphalt 9 was vastly different to asphalt 8, with more polished visuals and more content to play through. Although it is a primarily mobile game, it still feels polished, with visuals competing with another popular arcade racing game, Need for Speed No Limits.

The game series, which was started 2004 on the Nintendo DS with the release Asphalt Urban GT, was and will always be unique.

A photo taken from Google play store of the game

How is it unique? Well the game studio managed to pull off one of the most important aspects of the game almost to perfection, and that is the low requirements for the game to run smoothly while still being amazing to look at.

The studio managed to do this by using low resolution textures in conjunction with amazingly executed graphical effects to create a masterpiece of engineering.

Although you may think that this is a perfect game, there are a few cracks that appear within the game, the slow turning speed while in the air creates frustrating gameplay, as well as the old outdated nitro bar making the game seem almost identical to its predecessor, and feels clunky to play.

In conclusion, the game is very well engineered but it isn’t the best that Gameloft could have created at the time of release.

Why Hypixel CTF failed

Hypixel is a well-known Minecraft server with multiple successfull modes erected in the past, so why did hypixel CTF fail?

Hypixel is known for its subjectively good modes: Bedwars, Skywars, Skyblock and Bridge, so its not really common for a gamemode to flop as hard as CTF.

Shortly before the launch of ctf, Bridge was updated to include new and updated maps, 3v3 bridge and a whole new duels lobby. This resulted in a spike in playercount, in which time a new mode was released: Birdge CTF 3v3. This new gamemode managed to garner a respectable and consistent 300 players around that time.

This playercount decreased slowly but surely overtime as the hypixel smp was released near the same time as Bridge CTF. HYpixel SMP was a resounding hit amongst Hypixel skyblock players and Minecraft survival players, but this didnt come without a cost., as the servers struggled to keep up with the demand that came with SMP as new worlds had to be generated and loaded in constantly. This lead to a sharp increase in the instability of almost all player’s ping, with my ping going from a stable 100ms to around 5000ms (5 seconds). This tremendous amount of lag lead many people to stop playing the new modes or to stop playing Hypixel in general. This was apparent in the decrease of the amount of player playing Bridge CTF.

On top of that, Bridge CTF was not without it’s flaws, with lacklustre effort put into the single available game mode, it made people bored of bridge CTF. CTF only had three new maps, and mainly consisted of the old maps, with the goal blocked off so that you could actually score. Furthermore, the game mode was janky and was overall not polished, with bugs like placing the flag down even though you are not supposed to, in conjunction with the aforementioned lag, escalated the unplayability to its limits, which resumed in toasts player count hovering at around 8-30 players.

To escalate things further, the game mode only has one mode, 3v3, which meant that communication and teamwork was important, something which the average hypixel players did not posses unless in a party with friends.

I would say that bridge CTF has, and still has, a lot of potential, with the right steps in the right direction. For example, if bridge CTF had more than just 3v3 and a plethora of new maps, then the game mode will definitely have a decent chance at becoming successful, shown at the launch of the game mode, when around 300 people tested it.

So, to conclude, if the launch of Bridge CTF was better timed and better handled, with a better quality gamemode, CTF would have definitely have been more successful

Minecraft: a retrospective

You boot up your old pc with a pentium and a radeon ati graphics card, load up internet explorer to find out a certain game is released, you jump with joy. what game you may ask? Minecraft.

You rush to the Minecraft website to buy yourself a copy of the game and you go through the lengthy process to install it. You load up the game. You press ‘load world’ and your greeted by a blocky world, filled with trees and wildlife. Although the world doesn’t have much grass nor flowers, your encapsulated by the endless possibilities awaiting your adventure.

Menu from Minecraft 1.0.0 (Minecraft fandom)

This is what made the game a skyrocketing success. From personal experience playing the game at launch and in modern times, you feel how much the game had progressed, with more variety in blocks and loads more wildlife, more caves and just more… everything. Nearly everyone who first played the game was in awe at the amazing graphics. You may not say that it’s rather amazing graphics wise, but remember. This is 2011

Everyone who was playing the first release of Minecraft was still playing counter strike source. When you compare both games, you start to understand how much the game was different to the 4 million people in 2011.

The game was simple yet complicated, it was easy yet hard at the same time. It was unique. This blend of risk and reward and simplicity is what attracted so many people to the game at first. On top of that, the low minimum requirements for the game allowed anyone to run it.

It still is one of the most played games today, with 141 million players since launch and it’s only been that way with YouTubers such as Pewdiepie launching an insanely popular survival series back in 2019 that saw a resurgence of people playing Minecraft again.

Many people still play this game, including me, and will probably keep that way for a long time, but, like with everything, it will at sometime come to an end.

Produced by a 16 year old btw 🙂