This summer, I finally pulled the trigger and picked up a Nintendo Switch, so that I could play “Breath of the Wild”. (A friend was kind enough to lend me his copy so that I didn’t need to pay $60 out of pocket.) I know I’m well over a year late to the game, but I still wanted to briefly share my thoughts. TL;DR skip to the conclusion already! Warning: Very minor spoilers below, unless you skip the conclusion. ...

• video-games

Around February, a friend told me that the extremely popular (and award-winning) “Overwatch” video game was on sale for Chinese New Years. It was available at something like half off, so I picked it up and decided to try it out. This is essentially my first purchase of a video game that could be considered an FPS, a shooter, and a “Team Fortress” style objective-based unique character-driven map. Here are my thoughts on it in brief. ...

• video-games

Over the holidays I picked up the iPad version of XCOM: Enemy Within, the previous iteration in the XCOM franchise. For those unfamiliar with XCOM, it’s a brilliant (but extremely challenging) series of turn-based tiled-map strategy games. Although I ended up wiping close to 2/3 of the way through my play through, I found Enemy Within compelling enough to try out XCOM 2, with some encouragement from friends and family. After having just beaten the game, here are my thoughts. ...

• video-games

I suppose I’ve been playing freemium video games for a few years now. (For those who haven’t heard of the “freemium” business model, it’s the strategy of selling a good or service which is free to access but costs money for premium features. Freemium software, especially video games, are popular because the barrier to entry is made as low as possible to hook people. I highly recommend the South Park episode on the subject, “Freemium Isn’t Free”. ...

• video-games
• economics