Super Smash Bros Ultimate Review 

Super Smash Bros Ultimate is a fighting game, for the Nintendo Switch, based around popular and well known characters across Nintendo and other games.

Now, today, the game is even more popular than before with more characters added to it. At the start, it only had eight playable characters, but now has 72 playable characters and is still growing. Super Smash Bros Ultimate is the 5th title of the Smash series. 

The main game mode “Fight” is what most people play online where it is multiplayer with other people that also play Super Smash Bros Ultimate. In “Fight” game mode it can involve up to eight players, or computer programmed players (CP’s), to fight each other.

The fighters in Smash Bros Ultimate need to be balanced for competitive players and causal players. Nintendo has learned over time to make these fighters balanced so they won’t be unfair. Most characters are hard to master and takes time to learn how to play them effectively. This is very crucial for the game’s success.

For more information, please visit: www.denofgeek.com/us/games/super-smash-bros/241515/super-smash-bros-nintendo-history

I’d like to talk about an app that has taught me, and other kids, about the world we live in and how our society works in real life. The app is called Simcity Build It.

In this app, you can start on a blank land. With each level you increase your population. To do that, you have to build their homes. To do that, you also have to collect the materials for building the homes.

When you get to a certain level you have to provide safety (police, fire people, etc.) and health care. If you don’t have the money to build the fire stations, police stations, water pumping stations, sewage disposals and government buildings your population will go down, and people will abandon their homes.

This game has taught me and many others how cities work. 

Many of my friends play this game as well. I asked them questions so I could see how much they have invested in this game, and how much they have learned from this game. I also asked them about how their cities are doing.

The first person I interviewed was my good friend Ella Ramirez. When I asked how much time she had invested she said, “Two hours a day.” She also mentioned how she has been on the app for 5 months in total.

I also asked her things she has learned about the game and she said, “When not enough is provided for the people they get upset and leave.” She also added, “The bigger the city the more the pollution, and the quality of the city goes down.”

A more personal question I asked was “How was your city doing?” and she said “It’s doing really well. I’m really happy with the way it is functioning. I’m also really happy with the design it is in at the moment. It is formatted into different sections of areas of more calmness and more business giving the Sims different options based on the building they are living in. They are also arranged based on the height, the taller and fancier buildings are in the more busy area while the smaller and more tranquil buildings are in the calmer area.”

That concludes my interview with Ella Ramirez.

I also asked my teacher Mrs. Kallestad, about the game and what she thinks about students using the game.

When I asked her about her opinions, it seemed like she was very curious about it. She was curious about how the cities work and also seemed to be very interested in the people behind the game and how they managed their cities.

She was also very interested about the names of people’s cities, as some are not appropriate for kids.

Another topic that Mrs. Kallestad was sort of heated up on was the fact that a big city was equal to a successful city, another player and I were telling her that that was the whole point.

That concludes my interview with Mrs. Kallestad. 

Overall, most people seem to be interested in the game but have very different opinions because Mrs. Kallestad doesn’t seem to like the game very much. This is probably because it distracts her students, but Ella, as a player, sees the game in a different perspective in an educational point of view.

RPG Maker MV is a game making software that allows you to make a game from a template that has already been set down for you. Inside the software there is some more software for making animations. These animations can range from attacking, healing, and cut-scenes, or maybe blending it all together.

This app features scaling which makes it so you can make animations larger or smaller even if you have already completed the animation set.

Overall, this is a great start for animation for games. I would use it for many other things mainly because I haven’t had a chance to experience that part, and I don’t know what other easier softwares are out there.

Link’s Awakening, is yet another remake of a Zelda game, since Nintendo isn’t in the business of producing anything original. Originally released on the Game Boy, sometime in the 90’s, it was one of the first Zelda games ever, meaning that it is in turn, one of the most influential.

The remake of this game came out last year, and I got it for Christmas. The Legend of Zelda franchise is my favorite game franchise of all time, so I was excited to play this for the first time. But, I can firmly say that after playing it for just a few hours, this is a forgettable entry in the Zelda series.

Link’s Awakening should be a fun game, and for the most part it is, but it never really captivated me like other Zelda titles have. For starters, it’s a lot more linear, up to the point where once you leave every dungeon a talking owl just tells you where the next one is. It’s still up to you to find out where they are and how to get there, and that’s my main problem with this game.

There is absolutely no sense of direction. After every dungeon, it’s implied that you need to go back to areas you couldn’t before with whatever item you got, but the map is so big, it’s hard to figure out where you are supposed to go. Also, there’s a bunch of forced side quests in between that make you travel across the map several times over for no real reason. This gets confusing very quickly, and even though it takes the mystery out of it, I would just look up a guide.

One thing this game has going for it is its looks. It has a toy style of artwork that makes everyone in the game look like, well, a toy. The top down perspective of the game makes you feel like you are in a plastic diorama moving characters around.

The game plays well enough, like most top down Zelda games. The sword swinging animation is satisfying enough, and once you get Roc’s feather, which lets you jump and battle in 3D, the combat really shines. But like most things in the game, it has an underlying flaw. 

To use almost any item in the game that is not the sword or the dash boots, you have to select it to one of two item spots. This was understandable in the original game, because the Gameboy had a lot less buttons than the Switch does, but now that we have so many buttons, why should we be limited to using two items at a time? I wasted a lot of time switching items in the menu because of this.

So yeah, those are my thoughts on Link’s Awakening. Did I like it? Yeah, it was fun enough, but I have a hard time recommending it to anyone who is not a diehard Zelda fan or a 12-year-old. I mean that seriously, my little brother loved this game. It was one of the only Switch games he’s ever beaten before me.

My final rating for this game is 7/10.

By Toby Groves

Phones are crucial to all of our lives. They provide many great features that we all use every day. However, recently there has been an increase of prices from all major phone and tech companies, such as Apple or Samsung. Phones have gone from being $200-300 back in 2010 to being closer to $1,000 now. Many people have a problem with the price increase, so why are phones so expensive now?

There are a few reasons as to why phone prices have been skyrocketing over the past few years. The first reason is that in the US, flagship phones used to cost $200 as part of a mobile phone contract, while the majority of the providers, like AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. made most of their money through monthly fees. Now that those contracts are dead, phone prices are all stated outright. That explains why, several years ago, the iPhone’s price suddenly jumped up to $649.

Another big reason phones are so expensive is because they’re a lot harder to sell than they were back in 2010. Nowadays, almost everyone in America has a smartphone, or has made a conscious decision not to have one. There are very few people who have never heard of a smartphone, so the market to sell smartphones to new users is very scarce. 

Most often, the only reason someone would get a smartphone is to upgrade from their old phone to a newer model. Because of this, tech companies have made newer models stand out with great new features, rather than small bug fixes and minor hardware improvements. Making newer models is also an attempt to alienate older models, further pressuring users to upgrade to a more expensive phone. Even with all of these pressures on users, it is harder to sell an upgraded phone to a returning customer than to sell a phone to a new user.

The cost of building a phone has increased as well. New phones are expected to run at a certain speed, have a decent camera, and have a good user interface. The time and cost of these parts is large, and since companies need to make a profit, they sell the phone for more.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was released on October 26th, of 2018. It was in the top 5 best games of the year, and has a huge fan base.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is an open world, old western game that takes place in the year 1899 and is a prequel to the original game. You play as a character by the name of Arthur Morgan, a big and tough outlaw who runs with the Van Der Linde gang. The Van Der Linde gang is run by a man by the name of Dutch Van Der Linde, a charming and like able man whose goal is to have the gang live free and avoid any government officials. The game starts with the gang in the snowy mountains, just barely escaping with their lives from a bank robbery that went wrong. 

Over time, they go out to rescue one of their teammates by the name of John Marston, the man you play as in the original game.

After a while, the characters in the gang you start to like begin getting killed off.

Eventually, the whole gang starts turning on each other and Arthur and John Marston start taking each other’s side against Dutch and Dutch becomes more crazy. By the end of Arthur’s story, Arthur gets John and his family out and away from the remaining members of the Van Der Linde gang and ends up dying (Arthur can die 4 different ways depending on the choices you make).

The epilogue in the game bridges it to the story of the first Red Dead Redemption game, bringing everything full circle.

This game’s story is what honestly made the game series a lot better. The original game is good but since this game is a prequel, it added a lot more color to the first game’s story, and overall the whole series.

The characters are well written and Arthur Morgan is a very good character; he is almost as good as the original character, John Marston. The choices you make in the game depend whether or not Arthur is a good person in the end, which makes it a lot better for you to not just go around and do bad things because there are consequences.

Dutch Van Der Linde in this game is as good as the original game and he changes a lot over time from a good man to an evil person. This helps to better explain his actions in the first game.

The gameplay in this is a lot better than the first because it’s not constant horse riding. When you are riding around on your horse there are a lot of random occurrences, or side missions, that make the game realistic or just plane entertaining to play for a while.

The graphics in this game are far better than most of the graphics in video games these days and it makes the game a lot more exciting.

The soundtrack is as well made as the original game, it’s very cinematic and the music is sad at a lot of points which makes it better. The music’s lyrics are highly based on the game’s story and often the music is different depending on the choices you make.

Overall, I give this game a solid 10/10