Travel Writing, Thomas The sun shone dimly through the branches as I walked through the forest, hearing a creek gently flowing to one side. Trees towered over me, reaching for the heavens as if monoliths from a time long ago forgotten. “Thomas come here for a moment.” I hear from upstairs. I slip my headset off and trudge up the stairs. I don’t physically travel a lot, but with a good game and my headset on I can effectively go anywhere I want. Video games host an astonishing array of stunning locales that you can traverse and explore in your own home. All you need is a quiet place to play and become immersed in the world of the game and in your mind these landscapes, these dreamscapes can be 251658240reality for you. Lots of people would say that this isn’t really travelling and in a sense they’re right, however as games progress the environments become more and more accurate, and eventually will become photorealistic. I mean sure I haven’t been to Europe or South America, but I have been to space, underwater utopias, and even entirely different dimensions, just in a different way.
Essentially what I’m saying is that there is no replacement for real world travel, but if you don’t have the time or money for it, and you do have the imagination, video games can help you explore anywhere you could imagine or even places that you’ve never dreamed of.
A review by Thomas
I have been playing video games since I was a young lad of three. This gave me a lot of time to see the gaming industry through it’s more prominent endeavors and years of immense progress. I’ve experienced the excitement of many games in their pre-release stages. One of the most interesting things about the gaming community is that everyone has differing opinions on games before and after release. All of that being said I have never seen any game so universally anticipated and even praised before release as Bethesda Studio’s epic fantasy RPG, Skyrim. Skyrim is a game so vast that it seems impossible to actually pick a place to begin. The game begins with you taking a ride on the back of an imperial prison wagon. After some plot build up you are taken to the small settlement of Helgen where you and the other prisoners are to be executed. Thanks to the convenient fact that the imperials don’t have any information on you, you get to customize your character’s skills and appearance. Upon finishing character creation you’re taken over to the chopping block to be executed. The hooded executioner raises his axe,
about to end the game before it even starts, when all of a sudden a dragon crashes down on top of a nearby building and starts destroying the village. All the calamity that ensues from the dragon’s arrival allows you to escape the city, and after a brief tutorial dungeon you are set free to do whatever you want in the world of Skyrim. When I say whatever you want I truly mean anything at all, nothing is off limits. See that mountain way over there in the distance? Just keep walking and eventually you’ll get there. Do you want to explore that cave over there? Jump on in. 251658240
With the combination of stunning high resolution graphics and the
freedom to do whatever you please Skyrim throws into your hands an entire world to explore and enjoy and easily earns 5/5 stars in my books.
A memoir When I was a child my parents both had to work late nights; it was because of this I spent almost every night at my grandma and grandpas house. I remember when I was around 6 or 7 years old and I would sit and wait, trying to be patient, for my uncle to get home. With a small rush, I would hear the door swing open to let him enter, “Hello, I’m home.”
My uncle coming home was my favourite part of the day and it helped me become interested in one of my favourite hobbies, video games. Sure my family always had a Nintendo for as long as I could remember and I played it at home, but the real thing I loved was playing games with my uncle. After he got home from work, he and I would go play an old computer game called Baldur’s Gate, which led me to love fantasy games above all. Over the years we played more and more games together. Some of them were other fantasy games like Morrowind, and The Legend Of Zelda. Some were sci-fi like Robotech Battlecry, shooters like Halo, and even music games like Guitar Hero. Mainly when I think of gaming I wonder if I would love games, particularly the ones listed above (which to this day are some of my favourites), the same way if it weren’t for the time my uncle spent teaching me about them and how to play them.
Feature Article
Gaming technology has been getting more and more advanced over the years. Originally when video games were just getting off the ground people could play short repetitive games with chunky unrealistic graphics. Today we can create longer, more open ended games with stunning high quality graphics and more enjoyable content. Even the way we play games has moved from controller based gameplay to, in some cases, gameplay using motion detection like the Wii or Xbox Kinect. If this level of progress is made in the future we could be playing photorealistic games with little or no movement based input.
The concept of virtual reality has been floating around since the 1970’s and since then virtual reality has even been attempted (although in most cases rather poorly). Virtual reality is basically described in its name, it is a virtual (virtual meaning that which is not real) world or reality that can be interacted with. Some noteworthy examples of virtual reality in popular culture are The Matrix, the .Hack universe and Tron. Having any experience with those examples already gives you an idea of what this technology could mean for gaming. Imagine if you will being able to explore the world of your favourite novel or movie. Someday in the future, and maybe not as long as people expect, the technology to make that possible will exist. 251658240
The first working virtual reality technology was the Virtual Boy
released in August 1995 by Nintendo. The Virtual Boy 251658752allowed you to look into a headset that would put you in a world of 3D graphics, using the same format as the red/blue 3D movies. Although the Virtual Boy was a working virtual reality, it was viewed as crude because the graphics were rather weak and the device was extremely hard on the users eyes, giving users headaches and sore eyes. Looking past Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, many modern attempts at virtual reality have been working much more sufficiently albeit not necessarily in gaming. Military forces are, in some situations, training with the aid of virtual reality simulations. A good example of this is parachute training or flight simulations, and now virtual reality is even being used therapeutically to help treat sufferers of PTSD.
Should virtual reality turn out as many gamers would hope then people will one day have the ability to connect, play, and enjoy interacting with each other in a virtual world.