On rapping paper dogs

I was browsing the PSN store about a month back, to see if anything good was on sale. When clicking into the PS+ deals, I noticed that I was able to pre-order a remastered version of PaRappa the Rapper at a discount. I didn’t really stop to think about it, and immediately locked in that preorder. I love the soundtracks to PaRappa and its spin-off, Um Jammer Lammy. Why would I pass up the opportunity to get an HD-quality version of the game?

The game was released this past Tuesday and the answer to that question, my friends, is that PaRappa the Rapper Remastered is almost unfairly difficult, and as a result, is not all that fun to play. It’s a rhythm game that arbitrarily rewards or punishes you for matching the rhythm, despite that ostensibly being the goal of the game. This was the same thing that kept me from ever really getting into the original release.

Now, if you are completely unfamiliar with this game or perhaps the genre at large, it’s actually very simple. Each stage is a song, wherein a character will rap a phrase, and then you have to rap it back at them. This is accomplished by pressing corresponding buttons that appear on a bar at the top of the screen as PaRappa’s icon passes over them. Typically, you want to hit the button right on time, but every other rhythm game will allow a little wiggle room in either direction. You know, because rewarding only perfect timing would be more maddening than fun.

PaRappa… doesn’t follow these rules at all. I spent maybe and hour and a half with the game, and I still have no idea when it actually wants me to press the buttons. It seems completely arbitrary, as even when I hit every note with (as far as I can tell) perfect timing, there’s a 50% chance that the game will see fit to detract points from my score. Sometimes it seems like the game would prefer me to hit the button a little bit ahead of the cue, sometimes a little bit after. This appears to change not even with every song, but with every phrase. It’s literally impossible to suss out what the game really wants from me. At this point, I think it might be actively trying to infuriate me.

Compounding the problem is that PaRappa’s vocals will accompany each button press, and they will totally throw you off. If your timing is imprecise, his raps will be stuttery and incomplete. If your timing is perfect, they’ll flow like a river. But in my experience, the better his rhymes flowed, the more likely the game was to penalize me. For whatever reason, the jumpy stutter-rapping scored better more often. There are options to “Feel the Beat” (enable rumble) and “See the Beat” (I noticed no difference), but they didn’t help at all in figuring out the correct timing.

It’s all really too bad, as the rest of the game is wonderful. The weird paper style of the visuals is a little dated, but I still think the game looks rad. The story that goes along with those visuals is a little formulaic, but it’s cute and usually pretty funny. And like I said before, the music is excellent. These are tracks that I often listen to independent of the game.

If PaRappa was a little more forgiving, I could see myself going back to it to play for trophies and maybe even just for fun, but as it stands, I almost feel like I’ve been swindled on this one. Admittedly, I should have known better, because I’ve been frustrated with PaRappa before on more than one occasion, and I’ve spent countless hours trying to get in the groove with Um Jammer Lammy, which has all the exact same issues. I suppose that I was just hoping that the HD remaster would have a softer touch.

The worst thing about it all, though? I’ll absolutely buy Um Jammer Lammy Remastered as well, if it should ever happen.

Mistakes have been made

You remember when I bought those gross peanut butter Clif bars that didn’t taste at all like peanut butter, and then pledged to but Larabars instead? Well, I did that.

I foolishly tried the peanut butter Larabars, though. While they do taste of peanut butter, the only other ingredient is dates. And peanuts, I guess. The point though, is that peanut butter and dates are not a good combo. Yuck. Better than the Clif bar, but not by a lot.

The good news is that the apple-flavoured Larabars are really delicious! Good thing I bought both!

Foreign Heroics

One of the coolest little features about Nintendo Switch is that is 100% region-free. This is a nice change from 3DS and every Nintendo home console since the Gamecube. Not that I import all that many games, but it’s nice to know that I can, should there ever be something worth the effort. Mark my words, if Nintendo ever releases another Ouendan game, I will be there day one.

The various Switch eShops of the world have been nearly identical in terms of games available, with the occasional discrepancy usually clearing itself up within a week. So I haven’t really had a reason to set up foreign accounts as of yet. But my curiosity had been building up for a whole month, so I finally released the load and created a Japanese Nintendo Account. It was almost unbelievably easy, and took roughly five minutes from start to eShop. Well, aside from the hour I had to wait because I just so happened to get to the eShop part while it was down for scheduled maintenance.

Continue reading Foreign Heroics

Board Games I Never Had

In these glorious days of adulthood, I find myself wanting for things much less often than I did as a child. It’s probably because I make my own money now, and can go out and recklessly buy whatever it is I want, whenever I want. Or perhaps it’s because I have so much less free time than I did as a child, and the things I have are more than enough to fill it.

Regardless, I don’t have a real wishlist these days. Things that I desire never seem out of reach, and there aren’t really that many things that I want. But back when I was a kid? Oh, you’d better believe that I coveted every cool-looking toy that had a commercial aimed at my demographic. Don’t get me wrong, I was spoiled silly and had tons of toys and games and books etc, etc, etc. Being the materialistic monster that I am, of course I always wanted more and more and more.

Some of the things that stick out the most in my memory are less obvious than you might expect: board games. I had plenty of those, but I don’t recall too many of them being the fancy-pants kind with whirring gizmos and electronic kajiggers. I hold some of the board games that I did own in great reverence, but the dreams of what could have been will always linger. So today, we’re going to take a quick look at the ones that got away.

These are not in any particular order, mind you, and the descriptions are mostly cobbled-together half-memories from the commercials and my own imagination. That said, let’s we go, amigos!

Continue reading Board Games I Never Had

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2017

~ Game Over ~

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch) – Amazing game. Still so much content yet undiscovered. I look forward to diving back in after taking a short break from Zelda-mania.

NieR: Automata (PS4) – So far, it’s been a wonderful follow-up to NieR, and a huge step up in quality from Drakengard 3. Boar drifting is still a thing! I’ve completed Branch A, and picked up a handful of the 21 “joke” endings. Really liking how differently Branch B plays.

Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment (Switch) – You should already know that I like this one.

Drakengard 3 (PS3) – Powered through the impossibly difficult final boss rhythm battle, which may be the greatest achievement of my life. Also, played through all of the DLC chapters and got that sweet platinum trophy. It’s finally time to close the book on this one, thank goodness.

Dragon Quest VII (3DS) – IT’S FINALLY OVER.

Shovel Knight (Switch) – Played through yet again to experience Body Swap mode, wherein I flipped the gender of every major character. Mostly to see the Order Knights’ lady-style redesigns.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2017

The way she goes

The new season of Trailer Park Boys comes out tomorrow! I am super excited! Gonna get some liquor and cheeseburgers and binge that f***er!

I’ve also been slowly working my way through a rewatch of the entire series over the last four months, and I’ve got to say that I’m really finding a deeper appreciation for the first seven seasons. Maybe it’s just because I’ve never gone back to those episodes, but it sort of feels like I’m watching them all for the first time. There is so much stuff that I’d forgotten about, and even the plot structures of each season are much more varied than I’d thought.

I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that I burned through the initial run of the show via DVDs, so as to catch up with my brothers, who had seen it all already. I wanted to get in on the references, you know? Fact of the matter is that despite the insanely low budgets -maybe even because of the low budgets- the original seven seasons are really good. I miss old Julian, who is much more likeable back then than he is at current (at least on the TPB Podcast). The fact that Bubbles was just a secondary character until season three still blows my mind.

Will I go back and watch all the supplementary material as well? I’ll probably give the movies and specials a go, but I’m not sure I feel the need to revisit the live specials. Out of the Park: Europe will likely get passed over, because while it has its moments, it just doesn’t really feel like Trailer Park Boys. And those green-screened parts are just so darned distracting. If I were to start diving into all the extra content on Swearnet/YouTube… well, that’s a lot of material to watch. So who knows!?

Swing and a miss

I bought these things because I thought they seemed like a terrible idea and I needed to confirm my suspicions. Yes, in fact, they are terrible. My $4 was well-spent. In a way.

I mean, I may be a little biased because I don’t really like white chocolate to begin with, but mixing it with peanut butter doesn’t do either flavour any favours.

Just stick with what you know, Reese. Make the same old chocolate peanut butter cups, but in different shapes and sizes. Don’t mess with the formula. It will always only end in tears.

NieR-ly a week later…

Having seen the ending of that big explore-’em-up game on that new-fangled games machine that I can play on the toilet, I opted to finally go back to spending time playing games that were not Zelda. The first one on the list is the highly anticipated (by me) NieR: Automata.

You may or may not recall that NieR is one of my favourite video games of all time. I’ve probably mentioned this many times already, but I think it bears repeating, as most people don’t even know that NieR is a thing that exists. Fewer still understand why it is such an outstanding video game. After all, the gameplay is janky, the graphics weren’t anything to write home about even at the time, and it necessitated an inhuman amount of grinding to reach the final ending.

Back to the point, though. I’ve been pretty hype for the sequel. And after dunking nearly an entire week’s worth of evenings into it, I can confidently say that NieR: Automata far exceeds my expectations. It’s very pretty, the story has been 100% bonkers so far, and the combat has been made considerably more enjoyable thanks to Platinum Games’ experience in the field.

The games journalism industry has taken to calling NieR: Automata an open-world game. That’s only somewhat true. It’s actually fairly linear, in the same way that the first game was. You’re given a vast world to explore, but certain areas are only made accessible after certain events. You can’t just go anywhere you please right off the hop like in, say, Fallout 4 or a certain recently-released game from a 31-year-old series that has been getting perfect review scores all over the place. There are plenty of places to go at the beginning, but I didn’t bother exploring too far off the beaten track because I realized how the game worked early on. Also, they dole out game mechanics (like fast-travel) after certain story beats, so that’s another good reason not to stray from the plot for the first few hours.

The game begins with the same factory sequence that was in the demo, but with a few changes. Mostly there’s just an extra shmup sequence at the beginning. I don’t know if anything else had changed, as it all seemed fairly familiar. I think the music changed when you fight the first buzzsaw boss, as I recognized it as a remix of “Song of the Ancients” and I don’t think that was the case in the demo. I feel like it would have been hard to miss for someone who has listened to the NieR soundtrack as much as I have.

What has blown my mind the most is the revelation that NieR: Automata has a whopping twenty-six endings. The Drakengard games and NieR all had four or five each, so this is an unprecedented increase. I have looked at no further spoilers, so I have no idea what kind of criteria is necessary to achieve all these endings, but I am very anxious to find out. I’ll just have to burn through to Ending A (presumably) so that I can even consider digging up a road map to all the endings. But even that seems like it’s probably quite a ways off!

I’m not in that big of a hurry, though, as I’m really enjoying my time with the game. If it’s another 70-hour journey, so be it! The Dark Id has allegedly reached all of the endings already, if his Twitter feed is to be believed, so I’m not too concerned that I’m going be spending several months playing nothing but this. But hey, that really wouldn’t be the worst thing…

Let’s talk about VR, baby

I spent last Sunday afternoon playing with an HTC Vive again, and much to my chagrin, I am now sold on VR.

Well, not literally sold, as VR is still way too expensive for me. But I’m willing to accept it as a legitimate thing that is cool, rather than just another silly flash in the pan.

I played a whole bunch of different games, so let’s take a brief look at each of them. Or at least the more notable ones. I should note that I think nearly everything I played was just a demo, and that I didn’t spend more than about 15 minutes with any one piece of software.

Continue reading Let’s talk about VR, baby