My Personal Blog

With the sights of Mass Effect: Andromeda looming on the horizon, I patiently wait the days until I can get my hands on the game and revel in all that is Mass Effect. If anyone knows me well, they know that I am a HUGE Mass Effect fan, and have played the series more times than an average person would find reasonable. Mass Effect's main draw to me is its emphasis on narrative, world-building, and player choice. The developers created such a compelling and interactive world to explore. The multitude of choices provides players with a sense of control of how  they  would want act in certain situations. After completing the game for the first time, I remember just sitting there during the killer end credits song, and thinking to myself, "Wow, that was freaking awesome. I cannot wait to play this again and go full Renegade". Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission is hands down the best level I've ever played in a video game Until then, I rarely played narra...

I was taking a look at my Steam friends list a few days ago and was surprised to see three separate people all playing Banished. Seeing as how I have not fired up that game in what seems like years, I decided to give it another go. I remember when the game was first announced I was so excited that I was literally counting the days waiting for its release. I remember pouring hours into the game, testing out all the different settings, creating my village and watching all the little characters running around going about their business. Coming back to the game, I took a look at the workshop and saw the hundreds of new mods that were now out and felt a bit overwhelmed. Sticking to my usual method of searching and adding the mods from the "Top Rated of all Time" filter, I fired up the game and went on my way to start up my new town Kruger. Since I had a decent amount of experience with the game, I had no trouble setting up my village with all the necessities, and l...

So after years of starting, forgetting about it, and restarting, decided to finally finish playing Uncharted 3, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. The game itself was great, don't get me wrong, but it just seems that it was lacking that same quality that was present in Uncharted 1 and 2. The game starts out with Nathan and Sully on their way to make a deal in a sleazy looking bar in London to sell Drake's ring, which, to no one's surprise, goes south. After an epic cinematic sequence that seamlessly transitions to a tavern- wide all out brawl, Nathan and Sully end up getting "shot" and left for dead in dreary back-alley. Obviously, the game can't end here, but it was quite a surprise, I couldn't wait to see how Nathan and Sully were going to get out of this dire situation. Riding on the coattails of such a great opening sequence, the game drops us in Cartagena, Colombia where we get to play as Drake as a child. We finally get to...

Edit 11/21/17: Was taking a look back at my first post and realized that the "Introduction article" doesn't really introduce  anything. So this should fix that. Hey everyone, my name is Daniel Aparicio, a lifelong gamer and current master's student in game design at Full Sail University where I work in the Orlando UX lab as a game user researcher. I got a degree in Psychology from Christopher Newport University where I worked in a couple of research labs (dealing with evolutionary and social psychology) where I discovered my love for conducting research. I originally had the intention of pursuing a master's and PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology but luckily for me, I got rejected from all 15 schools I applied to (I think I would've hated it to be honest). During the "oh shit what the hell do I do now" period I discovered the field of User Experience and immediately became enraptured by it, especially when discovering a lot of video gam...