Page 10 – Burning the midnight oil at noon

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: December 2022

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Pokémon Scarlet (Switch) – Paldean Pokédex complete!

Mars Moose: Cosmic Quest: City Sights (PS1) – More of a curio than anything. It’s a 10-minute game for wee bairns, but still, I played it.

Trombone Champ (PC) – A wacky game that I don’t think really lived up to its potential. It’s not exactly the rhythm game it first appears to be, but nor does it go nearly as off the deep end as similar games like Frog Fractions or Inscryption.

Nintendo Stats – 2022 Edition

I’ve grown to really enjoy how Nintendo compiles your play history and presents it in statistical data for the year. And apparently Steam did it this year, too!

Alas, Nintendo’s offering for 2022 was weak, with much less data than the last couple of years. What I got was a list of the 21 Switch games I played the most this year, and how many hours of each. No graphs, no in-depth breakdowns, nothing else. So, here are the top three…

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes the cake for sure, and I still have a ton of game left to play there. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s definitely going to rank high on my 2022 GOTY list. Monster Hunter Rise got second billing because the Sunbreak expansion came out this year and I spent a lot of time grinding away at that with my brother. Lastly, and just squeaking in there at the end of the year, is Pokémon Scarlet, which is even a few hours richer than what it says above, because I’ve played it a bunch since these stats were delivered. Also, the assertion that I only played Pokémon on 10 separate days cannot be right. It just can’t!

Pop-Tarts for Xmas

It’s been a very no-blogging December, and my paper-thin excuse is that I’ve been doing video “content” instead. Here’s the one that’s not video games! (Though it does contain many references to video games, and even some video game footage.)

Lowest bar: Cleared

Remember back in April when I was all like “Holy crap people watched my YouTube garbage for eight whole hours last month!”? Yeah, Spooktober 2022 was good to me, and thanks mostly to that Pokémon video I posted last month, the momentum hasn’t dropped off quite yet.

My official stance is still that I don’t actually give a damn if anybody watches the videos that I post, but man… it feels kinda nice to see those numbers go up.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: November 2022

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Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (GBA) – What? Halloween season is over? Sure, but Castlevania is appropriate at any time of the year. Plus, this is my favourite ‘Vania, so there’s that. Is it still good almost 20 years later? Yeah! A little creaky in some ways, but still solid. Got the good ending and 100% map completion, but I had no interest in grinding for 100% soul completion.

ElecHead (Switch) – A very fun retro-style puzzle-platformer. Charge up platforms with your body and see what happens! Throw your head to charge up far away platforms! Fall and die on spikes many times! You know the type.

The Turing Test (PC) – Sweet first-person-puzzler that is highly reminiscent of Portal and The Talos Principle. Sadly, it’s rather short, and maybe even a wee bit too easy. I suppose it’s a good thing, though, when a game leaves you wanting more.

ActRaiser Renaissance and Why I Shouldn’t Have Played It (So Much)

The Wii’s Virtual Console was a pretty incredible thing, and one of the reasons why: it introduced me to a fair number of classic games that I never would have experienced otherwise. ActRaiser for SNES being one of them, if you hadn’t already sussed that out from the post title. I can vaguely remember reading about ActRaiser (or perhaps its sequel?) in Nintendo Power, very specifically while with my family at the drive-in theatre, waiting for a movie to start. But I never actually played it until many, many years later when it was released on the VC. And you know what? It’s a pretty cool game! Part action-platformer, part SimCity Lite, it’s got surprisingly few imitators to this day despite how well-received it was and how fondly remembered it seems to be.

Square-Enix surprised the world last year by releasing a remake of the game, called ActRaiser Renaissance. I feel a little bad about waiting over a year to play it, but there are simply too many games, you know? But I have played it now, and I thought that it was very good! It’s a very faithful remake, as it brings back literally everything I remember about the original and polishes up the presentation with fancy new graphics and a rearranged soundtrack by the composer of the original, Yuzo Koshiro. And that’s all great! There are also a ton of new features, like being able to level up your character and get power-ups in the action stages, and a new tower-defense mode for the simulation stages. There’s also an absolute buttload of extra dialogue, which, having read it all, is pretty safe to skip entirely.

Where things go wrong, however, are in the trophies (or achievements, if you prefer). While most of the trophies are awarded for beating bosses, at least half of them are awarded for what amounts to grinding levels and farming monsters.

Grand Re-Re-Re-Opening

So, my WordPress theme, “Weaver II”, has been woefully outdated for some time now. I don’t much like the idea of installing a new theme and having to tweak everything to get it back to the way I like it, but such is life.

That said, I have (clearly) installed a new theme, and so things are going to look a little wonky around here for a bit. I’m not the most proactive guy around, so no guarantees that things will improve quickly. You’re just going to have to appreciate “Twenty Fifteen”‘s out-of-the-box look for a while.

Migraine Watch: Nov 14, 2022

I thought I might die yesterday. It seems that all the migraines that I haven’t had over the last two and a half years have joined together to inflict upon me a Super Migraine.

I woke up with a sharp pain behind my right eye. This is kind of the usual post-migraine pain for me, so I assumed that the migraine had come and gone while I was asleep (it’s happened before!) and I just had to put up with the fallout. Not so bad! So I started going about my day as usual.

Around 10:30, though, the pain started to worsen, and I decided to write off the rest of the morning and nap until the afternoon. At noon, my vision began to degrade, and I knew things were only just beginning. A while later, the aura subsided and the true pain began. My brain felt like it was being stabbed repeatedly. My right eye felt like it was trying to pop. My ear felt as though someone had jammed an icepick into it, and I developed a massive toothache on the right side of my mouth. As if all that pain weren’t enough, I had full-body chills and felt like I could throw up at any moment for the rest of the day.

So, I ended up spending almost the entire day trying to sleep on the couch with a mixing bowl by my side. It was so bad, in fact, that I texted my parents to bring me some ibuprofen on their way home from work. Normally, I can get through a migraine without any medication, but this one was like nothing I’ve felt before. I’ve never had one that’s lasted the entire day before, either. It’s usually just a few hours at worst. Like I said, Super Migraine.

I’d wager that this one was likely brought on by stress from the previous day. But I didn’t think I had been that stressed out? I mean, I definitely was, but it was for a short while and easily resolved, and I ended up perfectly content. In any case, it was self-inflicted and royally stupid, so I don’t want to talk about it.

The good news is that I feel completely back to normal today. Hooray!

Hype (Paldean Form)

The new Pokémon games release this Friday! They’re finally here! And to celebrate, I did a thing:

Normally this is the kind of thing that I would write about here on this blog, but… I’ve been wanting to branch out into different kinds of video content, so here we are!

TV in short form

I’ve watched a few new shows this year! But I haven’t ever really found the drive to press any words about them. So today, rather than anything that tries to be insightful or whatever, here are some random thoughts about a few of them. Think of it as a Month End TV Show Wrap-Up, only it’s for all of 2022 so far, and this is probably the only one that’s going to happen.

Midnight Mass

Horror mini-series on Netflix. Midnight Mass opens with a fella returning to his island home after having been in prison for years. Then you meet pretty much everyone who lives on said island (the ensemble cast is huge!) and follow their Christianity-themed adventures. But of course I told you this is a horror series, so certain elements may not be as they initially seem!

And speaking of things that aren’t exactly what they seem… well, I don’t want to spoil anything, but the villain! You’ll spend a long time waffling over who you think the villain is in this one. There are a lot of red herrings, and thankfully they’re all written in ways that make sense. But also… Maybe there are multiple villains! Or maybe I’m just trying to trick you and there are no villains! The only way to find out is to watch the show!

Definitely dug this one, but it doesn’t really get going until the end of episode five, so it’s going to seem like a struggle for a while. The payoff is well worth it, though! The last two episodes are great! I’d actually like to say more about it, but I watched it in April or something, so most of the finer details have slipped my mind. And also, I want to avoid the spoilers. Telling you pretty much anything about this one is a spoiler.