Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: April 2021

~ Game Over ~

Super Mario 3D Land (3DS) – I did all the Special worlds. As if that’s a surprise. But I’m not playing the entire game again as Luigi. Probably.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD (WiiU) – You know what’s weird? Nintendo put a lot of work into refining Wind Waker for this remake, but they didn’t add in any of the dungeons that were apparently cut to get the original game out the door faster. I wonder why. Were said dungeons completely incomplete? Were they maybe just not very good? I guess us regular folk will never really know.

Hitman (2016) (Stadia) – Very cool game that does a lot to make stealth-based gameplay fun. Janky in a lot of ways, but never so much that it ruins the experience. Also, holy cow are there a lot of things to do. The extra missions and challenges really at a ton of value to a game that would be very short if you were to just mainline the story.

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(Un)boxing Day

The tldr of it is: I don’t buy collector’s editions of video games, on the grounds that I don’t need the extra clutter. But NieR Replicant Ver.1.2247448713 is a remake an upgrade to one of my favourite games ever, and I really, really wanted that special pair of music CDs that came with the ridiculously pricey White Snow Edition.

One thing that I forgot to mention in the video is specifically about the name “White Snow Edition”. It sounds kind of cute or whatever, at least to the layman. But if you’ve played NieR, or at least know the lore behind it… suddenly that name becomes a little more sinister.

Consider that little nugget of intrigue to be my way to try to get you interested in reading more about NieR Replicant. Or to, you know, play the game. The upgrade looks pretty spiffy for a eleven-year-old game, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what else has changed. Hopefully rare drop rates.

Cultural Appropriation

I’ve yet to really write anything about Monster Hunter Rise, and that’s mostly because I’ve been keeping myself so busy playing Monster Hunter Rise. But there’s one thing about the newest entry in the MH series that I feel like I absolutely need to do a little spiel about.

An important part of every Monster Hunter game is eating before you go on a quest. You select a few ingredients, and a meal is whipped up that provides an increase to your stats and maybe some special buffs. Typically the meal is a cartoonishly huge plate of meat, fish, and veggies. MH Rise, being very strongly ninja-themed, replaces that “normal” meal with dango: a traditional Japanese rice snack.

While I’m sure I’ve seen dango somewhere else during the course my life (probably a different video game), I’ve never really known what it was called or what it was made of until MH Rise came along and made a huge deal out of it. Learning more about the snack from the game, and partially being persuaded by how every character is obsessed with the stuff, I felt like it was something that I had to try for myself.

Of course, I don’t live in Japan, so… I think you see where this is going.

Yes, that’s right. I made my own dango. And while they look just about perfect in the image above, rest assured that this was my third batch, and the first two didn’t come out anywhere near as well.

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99 Yellow Pac-Mans

Namco shadow-dropped Pac-Man 99 onto the Switch last week, and I’ve been playing it. That is probably the most to-the-point introductory sentence I’ve ever written.

A Nintendo Switch Online exclusive, Pac-Man 99 is a battle royale game where 99 people start playing parallel games of Pac-Man, and the last Pac alive is declared the winner. It’s the exact same formula as 2018’s Tetris 99, and the late Super Mario Bros 35. Which is to say that it’s a fun as heck spin on a classic video game, and I will never ever be able to claim a first place victory.

I didn’t watch the release trailer or read about it or anything before diving into the actual game, so I had a lot of questions about how exactly Pac-Man would work in this context. It’s a little weird! No longer do you progress through stages as you clear the maze: now, the objective is to simply eat enough dots to make a fruit spawn, which will in turn replenish the dots and power pellets. This results in a mutation of Pac-Man that can theoretically go on forever.

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The 15-Year Reconciliation

Do you remember way, way back in the “early” days of this website, when I used to get really excited about finding and reviewing surprise bags? Honestly, the only reason I don’t still do it is because I haven’t seen a good surprise bag in ages. But that’s besides the point.

One of the most memorable things I’ve written (at least to me), was a review of a nondescript surprise bag that I found in a local dollar store in a nearby city. The variety of items contained in that bag was wild and shocking. Well-aged Spanish Tic-Tac knockoffs. Dubious “Dubu” gum. Some trading cards and stickers from a movie called Baby that I’d never heard of.

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PZ35/21 – April check-in

So things slowed down in March. I only got through one Zelda game (Majora’s Mask), but also I played it twice, so… Do I get extra credit? The Wind Waker is chugging along at a nice clip, and as long as I make it to the end before April is over, I’m still on schedule. But the games are getting longer, and we’re in Monster Hunter Rise season now, which is probably going to be the focus of most of my video game hours.

Next on the list is Four Swords Adventures, and I’m thinking about cutting it out. It’s just not very fun to play alone. And getting a group together that is actually going to commit to completing the game seems like an impossible task. Plus… it wouldn’t be recorded anyway. So I could just write a story about how I got a bunch of people together to play it off-camera, and you’d never know if it were true or not anyway.

Also, skipping FSA will get me to The Minish Cap faster, which I actually do want to play.

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Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: March 2021

~ Game Over ~

Control (PS4) – 100% trophies for main game and DLC expansions. Super great game. Strongly recommend, would play again. Probably should continue playing, because there are still incomplete missions…

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D (3DS) – I was enjoying the original so much that I decided to revisit the remake that I’d never finished. Good call, me! MM3D is an incredible remake and I want so badly for a Switch port to free it from the teeny-tiny confines of 3DS Jail. I even went for the 100% clear, which I never do for MM. Too many mini-games; it’s really my only major complaint with this one.

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One Step Forward…

I’ve typed a heck of a lot of words about Five Nights at Freddy’s VR over the last few months, and to date, most of those words have been very positive. Unfortunately, today I have to put some words to page that veer just a wee bit in the other direction.

I think it was late December when FNAF VR’s expansion, The Curse of Dreadbear was released for Oculus. Right around Xmastime. For a Halloween-themed DLC pack. Maybe not the most timely of releases, but holding it back for another year to release around Halloween would have been silly. Might as well make those bucks. It’s not as if there’s a whole lot else to for people to buy in the Oculus store. (Zoom!)

But Dreadbear’s issues only begin with the late release. Having been totally obsessed with FNAF VR at the time, I was keeping a close eye on news of when that DLC would drop. Then it did, and the bad reviews piled up quickly. Well, maybe not bad reviews per se, but a lot of complaints in the reviews section about how buying and installing the DLC would wipe your save data. Having a completed save file, I opted to wait it out until there was a patch that would stop the save deletion.

January rolled around, and I checked in from time to time until finally I saw that comment I was looking for: Steel Wool Games had released a patch, and downloading Dreadbear would no longer delete your existing save file! I immediately purchased and installed the Dreadbear DLC and… my save file was gone. All progress: vanished, never to return. I’d have to somehow survive that impossibly hard Funtime Foxy minigame again. So much for the patch.

But worse things could happen. After all, FNAF VR is a heck of a lot of fun, so having a reason to play through it again was actually kind of welcome… is how I looked at it after forcing myself to take an optimistic point of view. When I actually started playing, though, something was off. It didn’t quite hit me until I won my first “food” prize, though, and I was barely able to make out what the item was: after installing the DLC, most of the textures in the game -the entire game, not just the DLC parts- had gone to absolute crap.

While FNAF VR was never going to look as good on Oculus as it did on PC-powered VR systems, it was certainly passable. Things were a bit smudgy here and there, but none of it was outright bad. Now, though? Now it looks awful. And this is coming from me, a guy who really doesn’t care all that much about graphical fidelity. But the downgrade has had a major effect on my enjoyment of this video game, since all I can think about now is how much worse it looks. Suddenly that Funtime Foxy level doesn’t seem so bad, because it’s all pitch-black most of the time.

I don’t think that the grossly deteriorated textures will be a long-term problem during main gameplay, as I’m sure I’ll just get used to them. But it’s a really weird thing that happened, and I can’t fathom why Steel Wool Games would have changed them in the first place. Maybe they needed to scale down the texture resolution to keep the file size under some arbitrary limit? The game didn’t have any major performance issues before the DLC, so I doubt it has anything to do with that. It’s mind-boggling.

All that said, I’m going to continue playing FNAF VR. I mean, I haven’t even started on that DLC that I paid for yet. I’ve just been playing the main game again to restore my completion percentage to 100. It’s still a lot of fun, and I still can’t play for more than like 10 minutes at a time for fear of my heart exploding. It’s just too bad that the experience had to be soured a bit.

New-ish Territory

Did you know that hamburgers are probably my favourite food? There’s so much delicious food out there, it’s hard to really narrow it down to one absolute favourite. If nothing else though, I eat hamburgers more than anything else. Lately it’s become something of a Friday night ritual for me to scour my food delivery apps and order a burger from a restaurant that I haven’t tried before. Or just BK. It’s quite often BK.

Despite this, I’d never actually made my own hamburgers until last week. And of course, that was the perfect opportunity to try doing something totally new for my YouTube channel. Did it work? Ehhh, not really. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a better way to spend fifteen minutes. But at least I’m trying new things! Both in the kitchen and on the interweb. So that’s like a twofer right there.