10 Things You Can Do To Get The Most Out of Your Profile

Posted By: Melissa - October 13, 2015

Many of us hate writing about ourselves; we’ve all seen those profiles that simply say, “I don’t like doing this so just ask me something”. The problem is, those profiles have a much lower chance of attracting someone who will be interested enough to want to ask further questions. Writing about ourselves is all part of the territory of online dating, and you can greatly increase the likelihood of somebody taking notice and

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Halo 5 Goes Gold, Gets "Gameplay" Trailer

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - October 12, 2015

Halo 5: Guardians went gold last week so 343 Industries and Microsoft celebrated by releasing a trailer today. It is nearly 3 minutes and listed as a “gameplay trailer” but mostly includes in-game cut scenes - notably a confrontation between Master Chief and Spartan Locke. No spoilers in the trailer - but watch out, Eurogamer is reporting that they are out there already. Oddly, the most talked about part of the trailer in

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Fallout 4 Release Date and System Requirements

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - October 08, 2015

Bethesda announced today that Fallout 4 is almost here! On November 10 at 12:01 EST in North America and 12:01 local time in Europe we will all finally be able to feast our eyes on the new wasteland. The screenshots look fantastic! PC Systems Requirements (Requires Internet Connection and Free Steam Account to Activate) Minimum Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required) Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz/AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz or equ

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Heart of the Swarm 3.0 Patch

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - October 07, 2015

Blizzard released three prologue missions that tie together StarCraft2’s expansion Heart of the Swarm to the newest installment (available November 10), Legacy of the Void - for free.  Patch 3.0 gives players access to “Whispers of Oblivion,” “the beginning of the end through the eyes of Zeratul as he searches the galaxy in an effort to prevent impending doom.” To play these, go to battle.net and install the

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Tips for Writing a Great 'About Me' Section

Posted By: Melissa - October 06, 2015

You’ve made the first step on your quest for love and joined GamerDating. You’ve uploaded a picture and added some of your favorite games to your library, now it is time to fill in your profile information. Your ‘About Me’ section is one of the most important, and sometimes intimidating, pieces of an online dating profile.   It is difficult to sum ourselves up in a hundred or so words. We’ve ga

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Grand Ages: Medieval Now Available Bundled With Gold Membership

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - October 06, 2015

We’ve added another Gold Membership Bundle! Gaming Minds Studios released Grand Ages: Medieval about a week ago and anyone who knows our team personally has been surprised that we are still working.  We sort of have a thing for strategy games - and by sort of I mean put one in front of any of us and watch as we put up blinders for hours while conquering. Gamers, we need your help.   We have a big update coming for GamerDa

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Super Mario Maker Hits 1M in Sales

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 30, 2015

Today, Nintendo announced via the Nintendo America Twitter account that Super Mario Maker has sold over one million units.   The game has been on sale for just under three weeks.  Already there are more than 2.2 million created and these combined have been played over 75 million times. Great timing as Super Smash Bros. added a Super Mario Maker stage to their DLC today (3DS: $2.49, Wii U: $2.49: 3DS/W

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WildStar is Now Free to Play

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 29, 2015

WildStar: Reloaded launched today making the MMORPG free to play.  There are also some changes and improvements made to the game; as described by Team WildStar on their site: WildStar: Reloaded includes BIG changes to core game systems; a new character creation and intro experience; improvements to dungeons, itemization, tradeskills, world bosses and group content; a class stat revamp; new quality of life features, bonus events, the Cos

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Total War: Attila Now Available With Gold Subscription

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 28, 2015

Although we haven’t been together for all of it, the GamerDating team has been playing the Total War series for the entire 15 years.  We love the combination of strategy and history, merged with ever evolving gameplay and increasingly great graphics. The Total War series has been one of our favorites. We are excited to be able to offer you the latest title, Total War: Attila, as a Gold Member package.   In 2016 we are gettin

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Announcements from TwitchCon Keynote

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 25, 2015

During today’s TwitchCon keynote, CEO Emmett Shear announced a major change to the platform: soon users will be able to upload pre-edited video to their channels.  We are looking forward to watching the war between them and YouTube. Also announced was a viewing app coming for PlayStation 4 next month and Playstation 3 and Vita soon to follow.  The app, which gives PlayStation users the ability to watch any stream

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Minecraft Coming to Oculus Rift

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 24, 2015

At today’s Oculus Connect 2, Palmer Luckey announced that the Windows 10 version of Minecraft will be compatible with the Oculus Rift headset.  There aren’t many details as yet - the deal was apparently only confirmed early this morning.  What we have been told is that the game will be available some time in spring 2016.  The consumer version of the Rift hits retail shelves at some point in 'Q1' but no official

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Horror Game Iron Fish Gets New Release Date

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 23, 2015

Iron Fish is a horror-action game for those of us who grew up with the vision of an angler fish swimming in their back of their minds whenever they approached an ocean.  The player takes on the roll of Cerys, a deep sea investigator for an elite British Naval group who has access to all sorts of great technology that was made for the exploration of the 5% of the ocean we have seen.  Iron Fish will be released for PC via Steam some

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Mega Man Legends Being Rereleased

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 23, 2015

Today Capcom announced that Mega Man Legends, the classic PS1 game, will be available in the PlayStation store next Tuesday, September 29th.  This rerelease will be playable on PlayStation 3 and Vita.

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Episode 5 Release Date Announced

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 21, 2015

In the spirit of Max’s birthday, Dontnod Entertainment decided to announce the projected release date for Life is Strange: Episode 5, Polarized.  They are “aiming to release” on October 20th.  This is a little longer than players have been waiting in between previous episodes - there is extra care being taken with the finale. Life is Strange follows Max, an 18 year old photography student who has gained the ability

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New Rocket League DLC Announced

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 18, 2015

Only a week after the first big patch for Rocket League, developer Psyonix has announced plans for the second DLC release.  Looking back fondly on their previous “football-game-without-feet,” Supersonic Actrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars, the team put together the Revenge of the Battle-Cars DLC that will be available in October.  No exact date as yet. From their Steam announcement: Revenge of the Battle-Cars has a

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The Witness Finally Gets a Release Date

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 17, 2015

In 2009 after the success of his first game, Braid, Jonathan Blow announced that his next game, The Witness, would be released ‘Christmas 2011’. Blow told Polygon: "I thought it was going to be a much smaller game at the time, so when I announced it.  Of course, the reaction on the internet was, ‘Oh my god, that's so far in the future. Why are they even bothering announcing it two years ahead of time?' Now

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Meet the New League of Legends Champion: Kindred

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 15, 2015

Riot Games, makers of League of Legends, announced their newest champion today - Kindred, the Eternal Hunters.  These marksmen are are fragile but powerful and designed for life in the jungle.   From Riot Games:  Kindred prowls through camps, marking enemy champions for death and permanently growing in strength if they’re able to carry out the promised sentence. But just as Kindred brings death, so can they delay it.

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Legacy of the Void Release Date Announced

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 14, 2015

StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void, the standalone expansion pack that is the third and final part of the StarCraft II trilogy got a release date and cinematic trailer yesterday at the WCS Season 3 finals in Krakow.  Legacy of the Void will be available on November 10th. The StarCraft II trilogy revolves around three species: the Terrans, human exiles; the Zerg, a super-species of assimilated life forms; and the Protoss, an advanced spec

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No 9 Day Wait For Items

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 11, 2015

Super Mario Maker released today with a patch available to remove the item-unlock delay. There has been a lot of commentary on the nine day, five minutes a day regimen required to unlock all of the items and it seems that Nintendo listened.  There aren’t any details on exactly what the requirements are to unlock everything.  Players say the unlocked content becomes available if you wait between fifteen minutes and two hours.&nb

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80 Days is Coming to Desktop

Posted By: The GamerDating Team - September 10, 2015

Inkle Studios announced today that 80 Days, their award winning interactive fiction game previously only available on mobile devices, has been rebuilt “from the ground up” in collaboration with Cambridge-based studio Cape Guy.  The game will be available on September 29th on Steam, GoG and Humble. 80 Days is loosely based on Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days.  The player controls Phileas Fogg&rsquo

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Ori and the Will of the Wisps Review

Posted By: Ryan - March 20, 2020

Game

It has beauty, it has grace, it will punch you in the face.

 

Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a charming, if mildly unforgiving, follow-up to Ori and the Blind Forest. I never played the first game much, metroidvanias aren’t usually my thing, but I continued to be intrigued by the art style and that intrigue led me to try out the sequel at launch on the Xbox One X, here is our Ori and the Will of the Wisps review.

Vibrant colours and a clearly defined palette help to distinguish all of the game's many areas from each other, as well as distinguishing a unique art style. The almost complete lack of spot colouring (specifically white) meant that it was a rare occasion indeed when I lost track of Ori among everything else on screen. Speaking of such, there were instances where foreground elements obscured my view of what was going on for few moments and only a handful where all of the on-screen particle effects taxed my ability to keep up with what was going on, although I do admit to having a problem with being easily overstimulated visually.

The UI, such as it is, is a minimalist wonder. Health and energy are displayed at the bottom of the screen in an easy to read manner, the abilities assigned to shortcuts are displayed between the two, and your money-equivalent flashes up when you collect it but fades from view when not needed, allowing you to fully lose yourself in the aforementioned painting-like backgrounds. All of this is set to a wonderful, extremely emotive score. Seriously, this is a game where the OST is better than the moment-to-moment gameplay and you owe it to yourself to check out the music if nothing else.

 

I kept getting lost in the background art. Hopefully, you can see why.

 

Obviously, graphics and audio aren’t everything when it comes to gaming and no review is complete without actually mentioning the gameplay itself. As I opened with, Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a metroidvania-style game with all that that entails: platforming, backtracking, puzzle-solving and combat. The map itself felt big without being too big and easily the standout feature for me was the ease of movement. I’m a sucker for games which just feel good to move around in and, even from the start, Ori was fluid and responsive to control.

I should re-iterate I was playing with a controller but there is enough care put into the rest of the game that I imagine keyboard controls to feel equally as fluid.

For this entry into the series, Ori is no longer alone. A large cast of supporting characters have been added, each one lovingly designed and animated. Whilst most belong to a cat-like species called the Moki, there is enough variety that remembering who wants which item for a side-quest doesn’t become a problem. There are a decent amount of side-quests, from rebuilding a village to a game-long trade-quest, each of which brings a different part of the world to life in the two or three text boxes that scroll through the start and the end of the quest. At their core though, all of these quests boil down to ‘ go and find something for me’, albeit pointing you in shadowed corners of the gorgeous map.

 

They aren’t asking for much, are they?

 

On top of the amazing movement, the game boasts an impressive amount of customisation in the form of many upgradable ‘shards’ which can be equipped through one of the game’s three (gorgeous) menus. You start out being able to equip only three, but can increase this capacity through optional combat arenas, and each modifies your playstyle in some way: for example, one offers reduced damage whilst another (which feels almost mandatory) offers a triple jump. At no point did I feel like I was forced into a certain loadout though.

 

This brings me onto combat and puzzle-solving. I played through on Easy for the first time. I’m not familiar with the genre and I wanted to complete the entire game without getting frustrated, but I did go back and play the opening hours on Normal and I’ll tell you now, after the halfway point Easy is VERY easy. If you’ve found many of the health and energy upgrades you’ll be able to tank boss fights (all of which are pleasantly varied) easily and the only real dangers will be instant-kill areas (although the game does tell you when your timer is running out and it is about to kill you). Normal is a nice challenge requiring some thought about in-combat movement and attack choices (sword, hammer, bow etc.) and is how I will play the game for any future playthroughs.

 

A beautiful game for this Ori sequel

 

The puzzles themselves were… okay. At no point did I feel like I couldn’t complete one, but several times it seemed possible to solve a puzzle in a variety of ways only to realise that I had been overthinking it because the game hadn’t taught me, or wasn’t even hinting at, the actual solution. Several times the breakable wall textures changed, or I was called upon to use one specific ability to interact with objects with no real clue as to which ability it was short of trying everything.

It was during some of the platforming puzzles where I got most frustrated as the fluid controls proved themselves to be too loose and led to me having to complete the lengthy puzzle set-up over and over again. Also, be warned that the latter half of the game has many, MANY spike pits that it is VERY difficult to leave if you happen to end up in them.

 

Some of the early game puzzles, like this one, are classics. Later ones are not.



These two things, long reset times for puzzles and inescapable spike pits, are my main niggles. Sure, I encountered some bugs and glitches, but what game launches without them these days? Nothing I encountered was game breaking, mostly confined to visual problems with animations and, on one occasion, an extended hitbox on a climbable object, with the most annoying thing being the lag when opening the map after I’d filled in a lot of it. Nothing here is problematic though and those things I did find were mild annoyances at worst and nothing really to complain about.

You can even get a plushie now

What I did like, in terms of polish, was the option to leave the escape sequences that Ori and the Blind Forest was famous for. These are prolonged chase segments of tight platforming that, if you slow down too much, will kill you and send you back to the start. I never felt the need to abandon the challenge, but I appreciated the option to back out and return later after exploring the map a bit more.

That’s really the nub of the problem here for me. I think the game is pretty well priced at £24.99 on Windows and Xbox One, and there is enough content to bring me back for more (mostly to try out different shard combinations) but I would dearly hope that by the time I come back to it those minor annoyances are ironed out because taken as a whole they did detract from the game.

 

You can also grab this beautiful art on Xbox Pass if you are that way inclined.

 

This is a game where the art style, soundtrack and (largely) well-written narrative set-up an atmosphere of wistful melancholy but where the puzzles/environmental design, challenging combat (on Normal and with nothing at the start of the game, at least) and brutal escape sequences yank you out of that and replace it with a teeth-grinding frustration.

If you want a largely enjoyable, 10–15-hour game that is both a visual and auditory treat, I would say check this out; but be wary of the obscure/missing environmental clues and tedious puzzle design.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps release date was 11 March 2020, so you can get playing now on Switch, Steam or Xbox.

 

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