JoeG_LTE Gaming

7-3-17 I will keep this story up as an archived account of what was once wrong with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe's item system, but it is worth noting that this problem has been substantially fixed via a patch.  Thanks, Nintendo! So I have found something out the hard way.  Winning in Mario Kart 8 can many times feel like a completed toss up.  You might find yourself thinking "It depends on what items I get.", or "I have no control of how the next race is going to go!".  I think that I have found the way to get to the top half of the leaderboard consistently. This isn't going to be some cheat or mind blowing hack, but rather a strategy that you keep at the forefront of your mind while playing.  So before I just come out and say it, let me hit you up with some foreplay and explain my reasoning into getting to this train of thought. Mario Kart may look like a racing game because it is.  It is also more than just that.  It is also a fighting game.  Gett...

Update 7/11/2017: With the online update going up yesterday, I think the game deserves another look.  Normally I only review games at launch and don't go back to games, but it seems that Nintendo obstructed the updating process.  Because of this, I'm going to give the developers the benefit of the doubt and the check the game out for the second time for the record.  Well, that was deflating .  I'm sure that a more sport conscious person could put in some sort of basketball deflating situational joke but that isn't me. I don't play or follow sports but I grew up on sports video games.  I got lucky and my dad unknowingly had a knack for picking out the good ones.  MLB 2007 The Show(great soundtrack by the way), NBA Shootout 2001, TriplePlay Baseball 2001.  All of these games are better than this one.  I don't think that is unfair to say.  This game is obviously not finished.  What brought me to the conclusion that I was beta t...

YouTube is in a state of crisis right now when it comes to placing ads on the correct places.  Innocent content creators are getting their incomes slashed to a small percentage of what it used to be based on the newest algorithm change and way in which videos are flagged to fit into different categories.  Big creators like Boogie2998 and H3H3 Productions are getting hit where it hurts as their channels are based on contemporary issues and satire, a category that seems to be particularly targeted in this recent round of YouTube changes.   If you read my post a couple days ago about the declining state of YouTube, you will know that this may be the closest that the platform has ever come to actually collapsing in on itself.  After dozens of instances where the "chicken littles" of the website claimed that the sky was falling and the hashtag "#TheYoutubePartyIsOver" saw a rise in usage, this might actually be the one time where those outlandish claims of the end...

I have been playing Mario Kart 8 extensively over the weekend and I have come to a conclusion.  Mario Kart 8 is in the middle of puberty and Nintendo has no idea what they want to do with the series. Where did this stunning revelation come from?  I'm glad that you asked.  It was a subtle little change at the end of each race that tipped me off.  The points you get at the end of an online race. At first glance, the ranking system of Mario Kart 8 looks like a basic one.  At the end of each race, you are given an amount of points based off of your placement in the race.  I thought that placement and the total number of racers were the only contributing factors but apparently, I was wrong.  I felt a little bummed when I found out that you got the same amount of points after each race.  I thought that anyone, no matter how unskilled, could get a high total if they just sat through enough races.  I wanted there to be something different. I...

Lego City is a fun romp through a well thought out world.  Lots of hidden charm and personality make this game somewhat of a hidden gem from the Wii U.  Although it is now running on better hardware, the game suffers from many performance issues that prevent it from being the true masterpiece that it could have been. If you have played any Lego Games in the past, you know what to expect when it comes from gameplay.  Tons of collectibles litter the environment.  Lots of hidden challenges in each scripted and linear level.  The last Lego Game that I played was the Lego Star Wars Trilogy for the Nintendo DS.  I was wondering if anything had changed since then and I was correct in assuming that it had not.  The lego formula for video games seems to be one the developers consider timeless based on their approach to game development.  While this game offers something that no other Lego game I have played has in an open world sandbox environment, it...

I have heard a lot of people saying that YouTube is totally screwed right now.  Lots of very popular channels that I love to watch are getting little to no ad revenue after the latest ad boycott disaster.  Vidme is trying to capitalize on the problem by trying to get more and more big-name content creators on their site but will it work? YouTube is a place where many people go to get videos for just about anything that you could think of.  Not only is it a social media platform but rather a search engine of step by step tutorials for just about anything that you could think of.  A visual way of learning even the most complex of subjects.  While the name and brand do carry a lot of weight, does it get free passes for all of these screw-ups?  From the unsubscriber glitch to the filtering all LGBT+ content from the resitricted mode to artificially promoting certain creators over others in the trending tab, or to the final most severe transgression ...

Some of you guys (but not many based on analytics), might be wondering where my content on YouTube has gone.  And the answer is, it's just taking more energy to make a YouTube channel than I thought.  I think that this is my third or fourth time trying to make one and with a full-time job, I don't have time to do anything once I get home.  I work with computers all day at work, so the thought of having to tinker with one to get things edited and setup and also being creative at the same time makes me pretty nauseous.  This blog is meant to help flll the gap in my soul that YoutTube was supposed to.  I have so much knowledge about niche things that no one around me really cares enough to read or listen to, so I hope someone is reading this at some point.  Thanks if you are. Tweet me: twitter.com/JoeG_LTE

I don't think I will ever forget the moment that the concept of the switch really hit me.  I had played it in both dock and handheld mode before.  I knew what it could do technically but the inspiration that pushed this hardware never really struck me within the first day or two that I had the system for my own.  That all changed one night whenever I had to take my girlfriend to her car outside.  I was in the middle of a shrine and even worse, the middle of a train of thought so I told her that I would follow her into the other room but, honestly, i was not very happy at the thought of leaving breath of the wild behind.  All of a sudden it clicked.  I didn't want to leave that games behind and I didn't have to.  I popped it out of the dock and the game immediately jumped to the handheld screen without the slightest hint of performance issues.  It just worked.  I walked into the other room, put on my shoes, went outside and then back in. ...