Update: YouTuber Desmond "Etika" Amofah has been reported as deceased by the NYPD, shortly after a body was discovered in the Manhattan East River. Police identified the body as that of Etika. Our deepest condolences go out to his family and friends in this troubling time. For those going through hardships, troubles, or having thoughts of suicide, South Africa's Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) is here to help, listen, and offer support. Call on 0800 567 567. We regret to inform that Desmond Amofah aka Etika has been found deceased. https://t.co/sedwZZxglw— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) June 25, 2019 Original story: YouTube star and prominent streamer, Etika (full name Desmond Amofah), was reported as missing since last week. The content creator, best known for his various Nintendo-themed videos, was last seen on Wednesday, July 19, 2019, in Manhattan. Belongings of the star were found on the Manhattan Bridge, which included his mobile phone, Nintendo Switch and a laptop. Before going missing, Etika uploaded an eight-minute video in which he expressed suicidal thoughts. Notably, he also had a history of mental health problems. The video was taken down, but reuploaded by various members in his community. In a recent update, police had discovered an unidentified body in the Manhattan East River on Monday. While the body remains unidentified, police have stated that "the medical examiner will confirm identification." This all comes in light of Etika's search, which had been going on since his disappearance last Wednesday. Etika has amassed over 321,000 followers on Twitter, and 252,000 on Instagram. His Twitch account, however, was deleted following him going missing.

A perpetual fog obscures my vision, obscures too the derelict town before me. Broken and shattered, with muck coloured water turning most of the city into a decrepit Venice while a constant rain pelts down - the coastal town of Oakmont, Massachusetts looks like a victim of both the Great War and the Depression. If I’m here to save this city, then I’m afraid I’m too late. Oakmont, mostly sunken beneath danger infested waters, looks well past saving. I button up my coat, pull my hat harder down on my head and trudge forward through the dirt and blood. I’ve got my work cut out for me. The Sinking City is the latest detective-themed game from Frogwares, the developers behind a number of Sherlock Holmes games since 2002, including one in which Sherlock Holmes confronted the Cthulhu Mythos, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. Now, Frogwares have combined their Sherlock Holmes style of sleuthing with the Cthulhu Mythos for this original Lovecraft-country open world adventure romp. Make no mistake, The Sinking City is Cthulhu Mythos through and through. Multi-dimension beings stalk the shattered homes and vacant, sinking abodes that litter the city. The Sinking City throws many adaptations of Lovecraft’s seminal Cthulhu Mythos tales into the game, along with some less, well-known stories. The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth are the driving adaptations behind the stories narrative, but lesser known stories such as Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn And His Family, take centre stage as well. Beyond that, the game is chock full of easter eggs for other classic Lovecraft, and his contemporaries, Mythos stories and characters. As Private Investigator Charles W. Reed, a veteran of the Great War, you make your way to Oakmont searching for people who have disappeared from across the country while trying to find the source of the terrible visions you are having. Fresh off the boat, you’re dumped into the broken cities class and race wars, hatred for outsiders and murders - both mortal and supernatural - that the local constabulary are either ill-equipped or no longer care to deal with. At first glance, The Sinking City is overwhelming in its no hand holding approach to gameplay. Oakmont is quite large to explore and what connections you’re supposed to make in the cases aren’t spelled out for you. Once you’ve completed the games first hour, which acts as a tutorial, you’re mostly left to your own devices to figure the clues out and where you have to go next. Much has been said about Frogwares desire to make you use the old grey matter to work through the game, but it seems some concessions have been made to gaming convenience by giving gamers six difficulty settings; three for the detective work and three for the combat. Combat speaks for itself when it comes to encounters, dealing with enemy damage but the detective difficulty settings are a little nebulous. On easy you’re given more hints on when you’ve discovered all the evidence in a location and when you have to make case connections to further the plot, while medium and hard simply remove the notifications at various levels. Either way, you still have to make the connections yourself and find your own way around the city. The truth is that, the detective side of the game, which is completely enthralling, isn’t really all that hard to work out. Everything works logically, with all the hints you need to take you around Oakmont given to you in the clues you hear or the conversations you have. Need to find a criminal who has no address but does have a history of similar crimes? Then search the police archives until you find the addresses for known associates, and so on. The system tests you’re cognitive thinking abilities more than forcing you to figure out obscure puzzles to open a door locked with mistletoe. Reed has his own psychic abilities, which help when solving cases. Visiting crime scenes can let you see visions of the past, setting up a diorama of images you have to solve in the correct order of events. These “detective mode” moments are cool, but far too easy. Clues are logged in your casebook and when you have enough you can visit Reed’s Mind Palace, a screen where you put the major clues together to form your conclusions. This is where it gets even more interesting as, while it’s difficult to find the wrong culprit, you can, however, come to the wrong conclusion behind the crimes driving force. Like Dontnods’s Vampyr, nothing is ever so black and white... It gets even more interesting as the bulk of the games narrative is choice driven. You can choose to turn people in, lie about who committed the crimes and, at seminal points, choose who to help which leads you down a murkier, thoroughly questionable path about the ends justifying the means. Like Dontnods’s Vampyr, nothing is ever so black and white, and while it doesn’t go into as much detail about some of the games characters, there’s enough information about the people whose lives you’re affecting to make you stop and think about you’re decisions. Do you throw that guard who was supposed to be patrolling a burgled warehouse under the bus even though you know he was crafting good quality toys to give away to the local orphanage upstairs at the time? Cases, at first, seem harder to find, as does finding your way around. Get used to using a map screen to plot your locations because you’re going to be in it a lot. A little bit of exploration though, and you’ll be sorted on picking up extra work outside of the main plotline. There’s a lot of back and forth here, as befitting a gumshoes job, which makes unlocking the fast travel points a must. It may seem tiresome running between multiple locations per case, but it fits Reed's vocation. Solving cases also unlocks extra outfits for Reed. Getting around Oakmont is primarily on foot or by boat. The bulk of the cities streets are waterlogged and, between the abrupt endings to streets and the perpetual fog, I was reminded of Silent Hill as I traversed the games various districts. You can swim if you want to, but the waters are infested with creatures that will chow down on you and affect your sanity. Visually the game looks better after its delay, though the frame rate is fairly choppy. Character models look great for the main ones and the voice acting is mostly good. Some areas definitely look better than others and the sense of a city on the edge of collapse is palpable. Detritus lines the streets, along with rotting fish and octopi, and the mangled remains of sharks and whales that have become snacks for much larger, ocean dwelling leviathans. Mostly, Oakmont looks like a bomb has hit it. Citizens fight over scraps, cultists walk around proudly, some get shot or stabbed in side alleys and public suicide doesn’t bat an eye. Watching an NPC proclaim “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!” just before blowing his brains out was both unsettling and morbidly humorous. One of the games major issues in city design is that Frogwares have built the city using a procedural generation tool, so while the architecture looks great and era appropriate, you will find repeating buildings and internal areas, which makes it a little harder to navigate when a lot of it actually looks the same. Watching an NPC proclaim “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!” just before blowing his brains out was both unsettling and morbidly humorous. Combat is, by far, the weakest part of the game. It’s basic, at best, even with some extra additions like the ability to lay traps. The system could have used some more refinement than simply point and shoot. While the enemies, which are nicely grotesque in design, aren’t particularly smart, they do a pretty good job of dodging your attacks. I often found it best to lure them into chokepoints, such as through a door, and plug them from the relative safety of the other side. Even set to easy, they can tear you up pretty good with some of the larger enemies capable of one-shotting you. Resources, at first glance, seem pretty generous. Bullets are the new cash here and you’ll find plenty of crates and locations to scour various parts to make medikits, traps and ammo from, along with gaining them as quest rewards, but once you start to explore the abandoned buildings, or enemy infested areas of the city, they dwindle pretty quickly. It’s not a survival horror game, but you want to manage your resources and make sure each shot counts. You’ll also earn XP to spend on enhancing Reed's skills, such as more health, more salvage carrying capacity and for critical hits. You only need a thousand XP points per attribute point. One of the major points in the Mythos is how encounters with the Beyond affect humans. Reed has a sanity meter which drops as you use his psychic skills, stare at gruesome scenes too long or are around monsters too much. The screen warps with a fish eye lens perspective, making combat harder and the edges of Reed's vision swim with various monster overlays. It’s not as effective as it could have been as, while Reed will occasionally swat the air pointlessly, I never truly got him to lose control. But then it wasn’t in my best interest to let his sanity meter bottom out either. Having his vision go for an ocean dive while in an enclosed area though, did create a nice sense of claustrophobia. Like 2018’s Call of Cthulhu videogame, The Sinking City will most likely prove to be pretty divisive. It feels like it was designed with Mythos fans in mind, especially those who love the detective aspects of the boardgames. And like Call of Cthulhu, which feels like the other half of this coin, is not only one of the better Mythos games since Dark Corners of The Earth, but also a fantastic groundwork upon which to lay a universe of Mythos games. The Sinking City took a while to get its hooks into me and, once I got past some of it’s issues, especially the combat, I found myself thoroughly enthralled by its compelling narrative, exploration and puzzle solving gameplay. I became invested in seeing Reed's journey through to the end, wondering how the choices I’d made had affected it, and what I would see in a different playthrough with a different set of choices. Ancient underwater ruins, sleeping gods, people turning into monsters, there’s Mythos magic at work here so answer Cthulhu’s call and get cracking.

For those of you that were safely hiding in your bunkers, two big announcements rocked the geek nostalgia tree this year at E3: one was the Battletoads remake I covered last week; and the other was the squeee-inducing news that Final Fantasy VIII was being remastered. I’m pretty sure that if 20+ years old is the qualifying benchmark for remakes and remasters going forward, there should be a betting pool for which games the design studios decide to resurrect for profit. An added bonus should be that should you guess the game correctly, you get a copy free... free - a word so foreign to the AAA industry I literally felt their sphincters tighten at the mere mention of that word. Free has become a concept so frightening its probably bolted to the boardroom wall under the heading: ‘Things That Must Not Be Named.’ Also, this week’s NostalgiaView is a first... in that I’ve never played Final Fantasy VIII… Easy there, calm down and use your inhaler! It’s true. I haven’t played any of the Final Fantasy games at all. Oh good grief, can someone call an ambulance for those currently foaming at the mouth? This situation left me in a quandary: I want to cover the remakes currently popping up like so many rabbits at the trampoline park because I enjoy documenting the Ghosts of Gaming Past. At the same time, I don’t have the time to play everything. Not that FFVIII isn’t worth the effort. Oh, no. It is an epic game, in every sense of the word. But with a completion time ranging between 11 and 112 hours, I needed a Plan B. After researching FFVIII’s history and quizzing some friends on their experiences, I felt the the whoops of joy the remaster’s announcement caused were fully justified. The story is an amazing and layered tale, sprawling across multiple timelines, with several versions of characters interacting with their past, present and future selves. Basically, there are mercenaries (called SeeDs) that take on a sorceresses attempt at world domination. What follows is a winding road paved with betrayals, dream sequences that are actually echoes of the past, time travel, reality shifts, gun blades, heroes that look like boy band members, and about 70,000 words or 140 pages of scripted dialogue to read. The soundtrack is, in a word, phenomenal, and could easily be considered for an Oscar nod. The theme “Eyes on Me” sold 400,000 copies and was the first video game song to win Song of the Year (Western Music) at the Japanese Golden Disc Awards in 1999. It was the first game to use anatomically accurate CG-rendered characters in its cutscenes. This was the infancy of the 3D animation that would be used for the crop of game tie-in films that would follow, from the Resident Evil franchise to the first fully CG theatrical release of Final Fantasy: Spirits Within and Advent Children. This was, and still is, a big deal because up until FFVIII’s release, characters had hair big enough to land a jet on and stupidly oversized weapons that made me wonder, “How are you slapping that person to the ground when they have the upper body strength to swing a small bungalow as a weapon?” The game’s plot draws you in and does it so well that it has left entire estates and floating cities of wonder forever gliding in the paradise of fans’ imaginations. It made players empathiZe with characters to such a degree that, 20 years later, there are still debates as to the merits of the many fan theories surrounding the game. Look up the ‘Squall is Dead’ theory if you don’t know what I mean. Briefly, the theory states that when Squall battles the Sorceress Edea, he sustains a little whoopsie when she survives an assassination attempt and responds by firing what the wiki page calls “an ice shard” through his shoulder. I had a look at the scene and I can tell you that IT'S NOT A DAMN SHARD! Its a metre-long, 15 centimetre wide shaft of frozen agony that does not pierce his shoulder, nay, nay! It punctures and passes through his right lung! From that point on, the theory goes that Squall is actually dead and what you’re playing is the longest ‘life flashes before your eyes’ moment in the history of death scenes. Shakespeare didn’t write death throes this verbose. Recently, the game’s director Yoshinori Kitase put an end to the theory by laughing at the notion, saying, “No, that is not true.” Then he upped the ante, adding, “But that is a very interesting idea, so if we ever do make a remake of Final Fantasy VIII, I might go along with that story in mind.” You may commence your squeeing. An interesting story I was told (thank you Chris) was that the source code for the game is gone. After a little digging, I learned that not only is that true, but that the same thing happened with FFVII. A year after it’s release, Square had either lost or deliberately thrown away the source code for these games. FFVII was reverse-engineered using the PC version which in itself was based off a version of the game, but not the final version of the game. This is why FFVIII wasn’t in the collection when Final Fantasy VI, VII and IX were re-released. That, and they’d spent more time marketing Cloud than Squall and FFVII as a whole. This might explain why Squall’s so emo in the game. That is one thing I will say about the characters: everyone always feels like they’re five minutes away from a mental meltdown. Irvine Kinneas, the horny cowboy sharpshooter, is a prime example. He gets brought on the sniper mission to Kill the Sorceress Edea because he’s the best marksman the SeeDs have. Then when it comes down to taking the shot, he freezes up and has a panic attack. Why? Did he see the sorceresses valley of plenty and have a nosebleed? Possession is also major MacGuffin in the game, with some characters being possessed and repossessed so many times you’d think they were an old Ford in a white-trash neighbourhood. There is a ton more I could say about Final Fantasy VIII and the series as a whole, however, I will close with this. Your childhood memories are more precious than you know and there are always going to be those that want to take advantage of them for profit. As a fan, your main responsibility is to hold those groups to the highest standard. Make sure they do your memories justice. It’s the respect your nostalgia deserves, for what are we without our imagination? Without our dreams, how would we reach the stars?

With Pokemon: Detective Pikachu out in cinemas at the moment and the upcoming release of Pokémon Sword and Shield, one Reddit user decided to post a question. Mamamia1001 (fantastic name), had no idea just how popular his/her question would be that turned out to be a full on detailed survey with over 52,000 votes. The survey was called “every Pokémon is someone’s favourite” that had included all 800 plus Pokémon - and the results were very interesting. The Top 10 Most Popular 1. Charizard - 1,107 votes 2. Gengar - 1,056 votes 3. Arcanine – 923 votes 4. Bulbasaur – 710 votes 5. Blaziken – 613 votes 6. Umbreon – 607 votes 7. Lucario – 604 votes 8. Gardevoir – 585 votes 9. Eevee – 581 votes 10. Dragonite – 551 votes Interestingly, no Pikachu (not even in top 20) or significant emphasis on any legendary Pokémon but rather ones who are either good unlikely starter Pokémon or final companions, though still a surprising list. A personal favourite of mine “the OG angry bird” Blaziken, comes in the Top 5. Oh, and anyone remember the epic fight between Blaziken and Charizard in the picture above? Pokémon With Only A Single Vote • Exeggcute • Baltoy • Skorupi • Patrat • Sewaddle • Alomomola • Trumbeak • Cosmoem At least they got votes... The next list consists of those who had no votes. Pokémon Who Got No Love Silcoon Gothita Eelektrik Yungoos Turns out not everyone Pokémon is someone's favourite, cue the sad music. It was definitely a very interesting survey which you can find here. The survey has more details than the above mentioned such as most popular according to generation, evolution and so on. My all-time favourite Pokémon has got to be Lugia. Who is your favourite? Let us know in the comments below!