Fortnite vs. PUBG

Fortnite and PUBG have brought back the gaming fad as over as over 3 million users play each game according to Metro Gaming. Tweens are often the target crowd of video games, but these two apps have high schoolers wrapped around their finger. As amateur gamers, we decided to play for a week and be the judge of whether these games deserved the hype.

The games are set up similar to the Hunger Games — each game starts with 100 players parachuting onto an island. The “storm” shrinks the playing field, forcing people to face each other. Players have to scavenge for guns, protect themselves from other players and the last standing is the winner.

FORTNITE: By Sarah Wilcox

I am essentially a video game virgin. The only game I’ve played for more than five minutes is Mario Kart, and I’m not sure that counts as a video game compared to others like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

Fortnite: Battle Royale has become a huge sensation, actually an obsession in the video game world. The mobile app, released in March, allows gamers to play on the go instead of waiting until school is out to spend hours in the basement on their Xboxes. I’ve seen the fingers of my classmates furiously tapping on iPhone screens during passing period and after a Psychology test.

After asking friends what all the hubbub around such a violent game was, I was challenged to play. I gave myself a week to become a Fornite master, and I think I’ve cracked the game.

The game didn’t give any instructions how to play and with my extensive experience in gaming, I was at a loss. In my seventh game I found a gun so at least then I didn’t have to fight with an axe. By the ninth game I had my first kill and at the end of the week I learned how to open chests. I still haven’t figured out how to build a fortress because I’m nervous I’ll get shot while I’m distracted. I normally would have given up after placing in the 70’s for three days straight but I kept playing in the name of journalism.

Games are normally a 15-minute time investment but Fortnite is truly worth the experience. My adrenaline rushed as the stakes increased with the drop of players from 87 to 43 to 20. After “bush camping,” or hiding in a bush, for ten minutes, there was no way I was going to let some little dweeb-gamer get my well-deserved victory. I was hooked with the incentive of placing first; I played my newfound pastime in the car, during lunch and when I should have been doing homework.  

On day four I had the hang of it — the game isn’t about skill. The most important part of Fortnite is to get a good gun. For example, I’m going to get destroyed if I’m trying to kill my enemy with a mere pistol while he’s shooting at me with an assault rifle. It became apparent that my aim was atrocious, so naturally my strategy was to hide behind a door with a gun ready for any intruder.

Unless I was on the move, sprinting away from the storm, my idea was foolproof. I was able to make it all the way to second place by using my super-special purple gun (also known as a semi-automatic sniper rifle, as I’m told) that could kill someone with one shot. I started regularly placing in the teens and occasionally got a kill during the game. The person with the most kills won’t always win; it’ll be the player who is one step ahead of you.

The app has a few structural flaws, like killing battery by 15 percent after one game, but besides that, I found the game thrilling. I was surprised that I came to like the game after having such a rough start and I have a feeling I won’t be ending my career just yet. The Fortnite frenzy has claimed yet another victim.

PUBG: By Abby Walker

I felt like I was “taking one for the team” when I agreed to play PlayerUnknown’s Battleground (PUBG) while Sarah played Fortnite. Sarah laughed at me as our gaming teachers, Robbie Veglahn and Mac Newman told me PUBG was way less fun and way more boring than Fortnite.

The app first opens to your player who you can design to look how you want, but the app doesn’t provide clothes, so I was fighting in the PUBG wilderness in my underwear until I was awarded a shirt for signing in two days in a row. After Googling how to get clothes in PUBG — something I quickly wanted to erase from my search history — I learned you can buy clothes strategically to help you win. Keyword being buy, but I was unwilling to spend anything more than time on this little experiment.

The controls took me a day to learn, which was helpful since I only had a week to get the hang of it and the extent of my gaming ends at Wii Tennis. The map is simple and the “red zone” or moving bomb area, akin to the storm in Fortnite, is easy to avoid with the help of cars and motorcycles — I felt like I had fully grasped the game in the first day with a fourth place finish with one kill.

I lost my beginner’s luck by day three when I played my shortest game of the week — a minute and 11 seconds. The other 29 minutes on that day were no better and I couldn’t do any better the next day when I didn’t finish above 60th place.

The final three days went better and I averaged 20th place, but I was tired of having to carve out 30 minutes of game time each time I wanted to play. Because the map is so massive, it took sometimes 20 minutes to get down to the final 20 players. I felt like I had to settle in on my couch and put my dogs away so they wouldn’t disrupt me by wanting attention. I didn’t seem to have the luxury of playing a short game during lunch like Sarah did.

On two separate occasions I was so tired of running around trying to find people that I purposely blew myself up with a grenade in the middle of a game. But during the games that I wanted to be playing, seeking people out and strategically moving to be in the center of the game was actually fun. I grew to like searching houses for guns and seeking out other players to kill, but still got bored and left my character crouching behind a tree while I checked my Twitter feed.

I can’t say I will continue my 30-minute-a-day ritual from now on, and I can’t argue that PUBG is SO much better than Fortnite. But its simplicity makes it easy to do well in if you have 20 percent battery to spare can stick it out through a 30-minute game.