Hitman: Absolution

                 Hitman: Absolution is the fifth game in the Hitman game series. This game was released is 2012 and was published by Square Enix. This game takes place shortly after the last game and has the same characters and just continues the story line from the last game.

                In this game you play as an elite assassin that just goes by the name of Agent 47. Agent 47 is part of a group of assassins in a group known as the Agency. In this game the Agency gets a new director who gives out missions that 47 doesn’t agree with. 47 goes rogue against the Agency in an attempt to protect a 14 year old girl named Victoria. 47 later finds out that Victoria is genetically modified by the agency to be a new type of super assassin. 47 has to protect Victoria from the many people that want to kidnap her. He is also trying to take out the people in the Agency that are corrupt.

                Hitman: Absolution is a third-person stealth game. The whole idea of this game is to not get seen by enemies. There are many different ways to do that. You can hide behind objects and then just sneak past them if you want. Or you can find a way to turn off the lights and just walk past the guards. Or you can find an outfit that matches the people around you so you can blend in with them. If you put the right outfit on than everyone will just ignore you unless you get too close. You can also activate Instinct Mode which allows you to see enemies through walls and to see where they are going to walk. This is very helpful because it allows you to see enemies that you didn’t know were there. It also lets you see which places are safe to hide in because you know that the guards won’t walk over there.

                This game is actually pretty hard. There will be sometimes when it seems next to impossible to get past the guards without getting caught. Sometimes it will take many tries to get past a room. There will probably be times when you get so frustrated that you give up trying to do it stealthily and just run past the guards. The game also feels very set up at some points. There will be things that are very obviously set up for you to use them. The guards might happen to just look over the edge of a cliff or there might be a guard right next to a trap that you can lure them into.

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Team Fortress 2

               In 2007 the game Team Fortress 2 got released. This game is a sequel to a mod for the game Quake. It was released as part of a group of games compiled into a box called The Orange Box. Other games in the Orange Box include Half Life 2 and Portal. Team Fortress 2 was developed by Valve and was distributed using Steam.

                Team Fortress 2 is a first-person shooter where players are split into two teams, Red and Blu. The two teams then compete for a principal objective. A few examples of this are capture the flag or capture the points where a team has to capture a point and then defend it while the other team tries to capture the point away from them. My favorite game mode is one where you have to push a payload past the other team’s defenses. You push the payload by standing near it. Team Fortress has a very famous multiplayer map. It is called 2Fort. It is many people’s favorite map (including mine) and is a perfect map for capture the flag.

                One of my favorite things about Team Fortress 2 is the art style. The art style is very cartoony and very stylized. There aren’t many games that look like Team Fortress 2 does. This game was originally going to be a lot more realistic looking but the development team changed it to a more cartoon look. This was a really good change. I think that if they stayed with the realistic look than Team Fortress 2 wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is. The cartoony look and kind of humorous parts of the game makes it a lot more fun to play. This game is still very popular now even though it came out 8 years ago. One of the reasons for this is all the items that you can find and use. These items vary in rarity and usefulness. The game has its own economic system with people trading items all the time. There are even websites that tell you how much it should cost to trade a certain item with someone.

                This game doesn’t really have much of a story to it in game. They make up for this by releasing videos that showcase each of the different characters you can play. These videos are called “Meet the Team”. The videos show the characters backstories or showcase their special abilities. These videos are very funny and entertaining to watch. The developers even took some of the stuff from the videos and added gameplay elements from them.

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Minecraft

Minecraft is one of the most popular games out there. One of the interesting things about Minecraft is that it was first created by only guy. He was a Swedish programmer named Markus Persson who gave himself the nickname Notch. He then founded a company called Mojang which worked on Minecraft. He decided to leave Notch after they got bought out by Microsoft.

                Minecraft is a sandbox game that gives its players the ability to build anything that they want. Minecraft is split into two main game modes, survival and creative. Survival mode is what Minecraft was originally created as. In survival mode, players have to collect resources and build items or shelters using the resources that you collect. The first resource that you want to start collecting is wood. You use wood to build the starting tools that you need to collect other resources. You can build a pickaxe to mine stone and then you can use that stone to build a stronger pickaxe that can mine more materials. One thing that is special about survival mode is that at night monsters come out. If you get too close to one of the monsters they will start attacking you. Some examples of these monsters are zombies, skeletons, or the infamous creeper. Creepers come at you and will explode when they get close. This can destroy anything that you happen to be working on.

                Creative mode is a mode where players get an infinite amount of resources and the ability to fly. Creative mode allows the player to focus on building things and gives players the ability to create very large structures in a relatively short amount of time. Players don’t have a health bar so they can’t be damaged by monsters or falling. In survival mode players have a food bar so they have to eat food constantly but in creative mode players don’t need to worry about that. Another mode that you can play is called adventure mode. Adventure mode is used to play custom maps made by other players. Adventure mode is similar to survival mode but restricts some of the other things players can do which lets them play as the mapmaker intended. Another mode is hardcore mode. Hardcore mode is exactly like survival mode except you can’t respawn. In survival mode if you die you come back at the last bed that you slept in. However in hardcore mode you can’t come back and if you die then your world is deleted.

                Minecraft is a very fun game when you first start it out. There is a very steep learning curve to this game. There is no tutorial so you have to just try and figure things out for yourself. There are many times that will surprise you. The first time you meet a creeper will freak you out. Also your first time finding diamond can be very exciting. However after you play for a little while and figure everything out this game can get kind of boring. You pretty much just do the same thing over and over again. Creative mode can continue to be fun though if you are creative enough to build cool structures.

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