Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – June 2015

This is getting a little bit out of hand here. I’m going to stop listing the games that I play every month without fail. Because you can pretty much assume that in any given month, I’ve spent a good chunk of my time playing the following:

Monster Hunter 4, Super Smash Bros for Wii U/3DS, and Pokémon Shuffle.

I love them all dearly, but there’s no point to reiterating that I’m playing them every month unless there’s some sort of reason to mention it.

Oh, I guess I don’t really love Pokémon Shuffle. That’s more of an addiction than anything.

~ Game Over ~

Shipwreck (PC) – A cute little top-down adventure that’s very reminiscent of Link’s Awakening. It’s not as deep, and it doesn’t have as much heart, but it’s still pretty good. Oh hey I even wrote a thing about it.

Psyscrolr (WiiU) – I decided to give it another shot. After the horrifying ordeal that was stage 3, I was ready to give up on it forever. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the game was over! For now… That was apparently only “Chapter 1” but I doubt if I’ll go back for more. As this game is trash.

A Dark Room (PC) – Starts as a pretty basic idle game. Then it aggravates you by occasionally setting you back (taking supplies, destroying buildings, etc). Then it grows an RPG mode. Then it becomes a vertical bullet hell thing. If you can bother to work through the annoyances, it’s actually really cool.

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It’s happening again

Don’t remember much, just know that I woke up and some old fella was tellin’ me about how he plucked all the bullet shards out of my head and stapled my face back together. Apparently some sort of cowboy robot dug me out of a shallow grave? I don’t know, it all seems a little far-fetched.

But now I’m wandering around the Mojave Wasteland, aimless, but free. And alive, I guess. We’ll see how long that lasts. Suppose I’ll head out West and see what I can see.

 

 

 

(I’m playing Fallout: New Vegas now)

Ryan’s Spelling Tips For The Internet: Would’ve

Okay, I’ve been seeing this one a lot lately, and it’s really starting to get to me.

People: “Would of” is not a thing. Don’t type that.

The correct phrasing is “would have.” The contraction is “would’ve” and when you say it out lot, it does sound a little like “would of,” but that’s so, so wrong. And it makes me think that you are incredibly stupid because when you type “would of” instead of one of the proper forms, technically, your sentence no longer means anything. Or, it means something that doesn’t make any sense.

See, “have” and “of” have very different meanings. “Have” is possessive in favour of the subject, most often describing a missed opportunity of some description. “Of” in this case, would make it to mean that the “would” belongs to the object. See the following improper sentence:

Paul would of eaten the cake.

You can sort of make this sentence meaningful by adding a comma, turning “would” into a title, and making “eaten the cake” the name of a place.

Paul, Would of Eatenthecake.

And now it’s stupid. See what you did? Stop being stupid! Write it this way:

Paul would have eaten the cake.

Or this way:

Paul would’ve eaten the cake.

And it will be correct. And you will no longer be stupid. I feel like I shouldn’t have to add this, but the same rule goes for “should have” and “could have.” Stop putting “of” where it doesn’t belong! ARGH!

Fun fact: The “would have [verb]” construction is, in the English language, known as the Conditional Perfect. This is mostly irrelevant to everything.

In the wake of a Pepsi addiction

Over five months have passed now since my life sort of unravelled, and I’m still trying to stitch it up as best I can. It hasn’t been easy, and there’s still the looming threat of the financial and legal burdens (it’s complicated) hanging just over my head. But! I’ve been doing fairly well, and have made a few little changes to my lifestyle for the better.

All of them revolve around simply being healthier. The first -and this is a big one- is that I’ve cut out soda almost entirely. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a heavy soda drinker. Like, we’re talking a can a day during the worst parts. I know that’s not quite as bad as it could be, but it was still pretty bad (I’m honestly not sure how people who drink multiple cans a day stay alive). There were days when I would sit at work and daydream about getting home to a sweet can of ice cold, delicious Pepsi.

The really fun part of it, is that it wasn’t a struggle at all! Despite my previously unquenchable thirst for fizzy pop, it turns out all I had to do to quit was to say “No, I’m not drinking that.” That’s not to say that I haven’t had any soda over the last few months, but the numbers have gone way, way down. Maybe one can a month? I suppose that I can’t in good conscience say that I had a soda addiction, since my mind made absolutely no effort to stop me quitting.

I’ve had half a case of Pepsi in my fridge since February. I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon. I tried drinking one a couple of weeks ago, and it was awful. I did enjoy the taste and fizziness, but as soon as the fluid touched down, my teeth felt as if they wanted to jump out of my face, and the entire inside of my mouth felt gross as soon as I swallowed it down (and remained gross-feeling all night, even after brush/floss/Listerine). It took the whole evening to finish that can of Pepsi. Previously, I’d have polished it off in minutes.

These days, my beverage of choice is coffee. Usually free of sugar (I do indulge occasionally). At the office, it’s pretty much all I drink. At home, coffee is more of a Sunday morning treat, and my go-to drinks are tea and water. Sometimes I mix it up with a big glass of milk. At a restaurant, it’s just water (a nice bonus is that water is free!). And you know what? I have no cravings whatsoever for soda. It’s really great!

The only caveat to this change is the Slurpee. The Goddamned Slurpee. This is one thing that I cannot part with, as hard as I may try. I’m still on the Slurpee, but I’ve got it down to one a week, at the most. Sometimes I’m able to ignore it, but more often than not I give in to the urge. But I will defeat this foe as well! I’m done with soda, and I can cut out Slurpees too! I just need to find a suitable substitute.

Anyway, I’m not entirely sure what kind of health benefits this change will incur. I haven’t really read up on the technical aspects, but I know for damn sure that soda is a terrible, terrible thing for the human body. I think that I’m probably less fat than I was a few months ago, but I don’t know how much that has to do with the lack of soda, as I’ve also been making it a point to eat better in general and get significantly more exercise. My teeth are infinitely grateful for the change, at least.

Shipwreck: Nameless Protagonist’s Awakening

Shipwreck is a strange little game. To be specific, I mean that it’s strange that it’s a pretty by-the-book Zelda wannabe that doesn’t really do anything to stand out. It’s kind of cute, I guess, but that doesn’t really make an impression on someone who almost exclusively plays cute games.

That’s me, BTW. I play a lot of cute games. Nuts to grizzled shootmans. I’ll take the doofy platforming animals and colourful block-matchers instead.

Anyhow, Shipwreck. From the outset, it just screams Link’s Awakening. You wake up on a beach in the middle of a torrential storm, your ship ostensibly wrecked, and there you find a sword and hack your way to the nearest town. Stay at the inn, and in the morning the mayor tells you that a ghost has been terrorizing the island and you’re quickly recruited to stop it.

Stopping the ghost, of course, requires you to traverse an overworld, searching for dungeons wherein your will find a collection of macguffins that unlock the last place. Along the way, you will collect tools and weapons, increase the number of hearts in your life bar, and maybe play a few simple mini-games. Sound familiar?

Shipwreck is just a little indie game though, so there are only four main dungeons (five if you include the little baby intro dungeon), one town, and a fairly small, barren overworld. Indeed, the overworld is nothing but space in between town and dungeons. It contains little other than trees to block your path and shrubs to chop down. Occasionally a house where mini-games are found. But there are no enemies, no hidden caves, no treasures, no non-tree obstacles. Fortunately, since it’s small, it’s not much of a bother.

Tools are used in exactly the same way as in Link’s Awakening: each one acquired goes into your inventory, and you can equip any two at the same time. Some are a little redundant (apples and bread, sword and pickaxe), but you get the usual adventuring kit like a shield, (cross)bow, and lantern. None of the tools combine to do something neat, à la bomb arrows or rooster boomerang.

Dungeons are where 95% of the game is spent, and thank goodness, because there are actual things to do in them. They don’t have a lot of depth to them, however. The general idea is that you wander forward until you find a) a locked door or b) a key. After you find one, you then wander in the opposite direction until you’ve found the other. Sometimes a treasure chest will contain a map or small amount of coins instead of a key. There is exactly one heart container in each dungeon, noted quite visibly on the map.

Each dungeon has a theme, none very unique. The tree dungeon is a very basic first dungeon. The mine dungeon is dark and requires that you have a lantern on your person at most times. The swamp dungeon doesn’t have any real gimmicks besides making you backtrack a whole lot. The desert dungeon is actually pretty great, having the closest approximation to puzzles in the game, and featuring all sorts of traps. The lighthouse is alright too, but not quite as great as the desert.

Obviously these dungeons aren’t going to be as complex as, say, Eagle’s Tower. But honestly, they feel more like Zelda 1 dungeons than anything. They’re a little more complex because there are switches and holes that you can sometimes fall to lower floors through, but really nothing that required much thought to get past.

Bosses are a pain in the butt. They don’t really require finesse or thought. You just run up and whack ’em until they die. If you don’t have a supply of healing items, you might have to dodge their attacks. The boss of the mines can only be hit with the pickaxe, which I guess is unique, and you’ve got to shoot the swamp boss with arrows. The tree and desert bosses are just jokes.

You may think by this review that I did not like Shipwreck. That’s only a half-truth. I did enjoy playing it, but I was admittedly underwhelmed. I feel like Brushfire Games had a good thing going here, but didn’t really put their all into it. Some sort of justification for the overworld would have been nice, and they could have made the dungeons a little more complex, considering that’s where the meat of the game is. I’m not saying they did a bad job, I’m saying I don’t think they realized their full potential.

Yeah, I realize that’s just about as damning as saying the game is outright bad. It’s like when someone says “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.” Sorry, Brushfire Games. But hey, it was your first go. It’s pretty darn solid for a first game! I’m sure Shipwreck 2 will set the world on fire.

Shipwreck is available on PC via Steam/Humble, and also on Xbox Live Indie Games.

A blast from the past

I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this on the ol’ blog before, but a co-worker of mine e-mailed this drawring to me the other day.

I drew this way, way back in 2011. I guess it’s not that far back, but it seems like forever ago to me. Anyway, it’s the cover for a comic that another co-worker had written and asked me to draw as a gift from the team for the previously mentioned co-worker’s birthday. I’d post the whole thing, but it’s terribly in-jokey and the inside art is a far cry from the quality of the cover.

While it wasn’t my best work, I remain proud of it to this day because it’s a thing that made at least a couple of people very happy. The entire thing has been on my personal drive at work ever since, and I tend to look back at it every once in a while. It’s nice to know that the person I drew it for still looks at it now and then, too.

Makes me feel like I have at least some worth as a human being.

Monster Hunter Drawer

I don’t post drawings here all that often. Possibly because I don’t draw as much as I did in… high school. Geez, for someone who claims “drawing” as an interest, hobby, and talent, I sure don’t spend enough time actually doing it.

I did start an initiative to keep myself drawing more often a couple months ago. The aim was to draw something every day, whether big or small, complicated or simple, good or bad. For a while I kept up pretty well, but I feel like I’ve been breaking the chain pretty callously over the last couple weeks. What can I say? I’m a huge flake.

Anyway, what I was going to get around to is that I spent some time working on a semi-serious drawing yesterday. Less than an hour, so it still qualifies as a doodle, but at least I like the results enough to share it with the internet.

mhjennadx

A simple sketch of my Monster Hunter 4 character, Jenna, sporting an armour set (very loosely) based on the Duramboros X set. I didn’t want to make it accurate because it was a little more fun to take the base idea and do my own thing with it. Her weapon is a Rathalos-brand switch axe. Not a specific model, since they all look more or less the same, but I suppose it’d be Rathlagration, as that what’s she’s currently rocking in-game.

Honestly, it’s rare that I like the fruits of my labour, and this is the kind of thing that I might actually bring into Flash to trace and colour digitally. I have a bunch of criticisms in my head for it, but I’ll keep those to myself because I kind of like actually liking the work, and writing them out might make me get into that bad headspace and trash it.

There’s another piece I’ve been working on on-and-off for a long time now, which I’m pretty excited to finish up and share, but that’s for another day. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make it really good, so hopefully it comes out meeting my expectations.