Live Action Role Playing

Live Action Role Playing

Work in quotes? Yes, because it isn’t actually work in the common sense. If LARP is your hobby, it can soon become a passion. And then you spend a lot of time, money and love in creating clothes, weapons and accessories. Everything has to fit to your character and if you don’t want to buy it at all, there’s only one alternative: doing it yourself! Make your own drafts and ideas come true and build material things in addition to a personality.

The equipment should not only be functional, but has to reflect the species, homeland and skills of your character. The building of LARP-weapons is quite difficult for example. It doesn’t matter, if you want a sword, halberd or small dagger. First you need core, made of a glass fiber. After that, a few layers of foam material, which you cut in the form your weapon should have. The last step is varnishing it with latex in a color of your choice. Et voilà, a harmless but hopefully good-looking LARP-accessory is finished and ready for battle!

 Pictures by: Hübner, M. 2012; Epulum e.V.

Live Action Role Playing

The inside story will continue next week… Stay tuned!

For our German-speaking readers, here’s a little video and movie-suggestion on this topic:

Basecamp Games

Nicalis, Inc.

To religious hard liners, who believe in the biblical interpretation of the Sacrifice of Isaac, it would be a good thing to say to God that they want to kill their own child and then go for it. In the Bible, this sacrifice is prevented at the last minute. In Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Isaac himself finds out about his fanatic mother’s intention of committing a murder and runs away.

You won’t find a thrilling introduction for an exaggerated story – this is everything the story has to give. And it’s totally okay, because Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is a diverting action adventure not needing a plot. Nevertheless, the scriptural background is good enough to give all kinds of objects, enemies and levels divine and diabolic characteristics.

Randomization is the important fun factor.

Isaac has to fight tons of random enemies and collects random passive and active objects in various levels. You see – randomization is the important fun factor. But this also means that Isaacs death defines the end of the game. A restart generates everything anew so you never play the same game two times, but you have to start from scratch.

If at first you had a weapon with four-bullet shots and aiming device, you may now get an all-pervasive laser and an independent shooting buddy on your side after starting a new round. You see, there is a large variety of enemies and possibilities to kill them. There are more than 170 achievements to unlock new characters, bosses, alternative endings, weapons, equipment and challenges.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is one of those successful indie games from the past years. It was developed without a big publisher. The game principle of randomization and permadeath usually is assigned to rougelike genres. But because of the possibility to unlock extra content, the game needs to be counted to so-called rougelites.

It is available on Steam, PS4 and PS Vita.

Sucker Punch Productions / Sony Computer Entertainment

Before I say anything about the gameplay… I love this colours!!! Infamous First Light is really, really beautiful with all the pink and purple effects all the time. I love both colours and it’s a lot of fun just to watch the lights.

Okay… Let’s get serious again. Infamous First Light is the side story for Second Son, so there is not much explanation about the story. You just have to play. The character you are playing is a girl called Abigail “Fetch” Walker and she has special skills. When she absorbes enough neon, she can run as hell and also shoot neon at her enemies.

Fetch moves freely in Seattle and in every part of the city there are mini games. It’s a lot of fun to catch neon lumen and Fetch can also paint really beautiful graffiti. There is not much time to learn how to shoot, but you can visit arenas for extra training. The story is dangerous and Fetch has to fight a lot without having much health.

I streamed my first steps and I need some more training, for sure. Infamous First Light is not easy, maybe it is if you already played Second Son. But for the beginning, the missions can be tricky!

Radical Entertainment / Activision

Since it was released on PS Plus, I am really addicted to Prototype 2. The story is about a soldier who lost his wife and daughter because of the Mercer virus and than faces Mercer, the protagonist of Prototype 1. They fight and Mercer gives him a virus to evolve. From than on, the soldier called Heller gets stronger and stronger.

Throughout the game, Heller evolves more and more and gets new weapons. You can destroy everything and run on walls, so houses can’t stop him. Later you can also use helicopters and the world you can move in gets bigger. Beside the main and side quests, you can search for blackboxes, which contain secret stories, fight special forces and destroy holes in which the researches do illegal jobs.

For I like simple games, Prototype 2 is perfect for me. The story is straight, the controls easy to handle and it’s a lot of fun to use all the skills Heller learns. The story is not a deep one but you notice that Heller wants revenge for his family and stop his enemies from spreading the virus.

NetherRealm Studios / High Voltage Software / Warner Bros.

Interactive Entertainment

You might have noticed, that we have a fable for comics, especially for Marvel. Injustice – Gods among us is perfect for me for a beat’em up game. I loved PlayStation Allstars Battle Royal and I have to say that handling is a little more difficult in Injustice. I played tutorial first and pushed the buttons it told me to, but the attack didn’t work.

Nevertheless, it’s great fun to play the story and to see all the Marvel heroes together. Starting with Batman, you play many of them during the story and you can choose a former fight to do it again. It’s also possible to play mini, mini, mini games between the fights.

For now, I just played story mode, but you can also play against other gamers and play single fights. I’ll go on playing and streaming, so let’s discover this game together!