Dark Souls: Boot Stamping on a Hollow Face – Forever

Previously on Dark Souls: Morgan fought a bunch of giant statue-men with varying degrees of success, and broke a really expensive-looking chandelier.

Flipping the massive lever at the base of the spinny tower again, I stood and waited until it had rumbled into position, completing the bridge from the terrace at the entrance of Anor Londo to the massive castle on the opposite side. I scaled the spiral staircase up to the bridge and was ambushed by another gargoyle, which I dispatched quickly.

Things were going swimmingly, and my head was beginning to swell with confidence.

On the other end of the bridge was a massive staircase leading up to the castle entrance. The castle, of course, was locked up tight, and there was a sentinel standing on either side of the enormous door. Being so excited to have reached the castle, I accidentally alerted them both at the same time, and, well, things happen. You Died.

To get back to the castle from the lower bonfire, I had to spin the tower twice. It was a little annoying.

The doorway sentinels were a huge pain, as it was very hard to get their attention one at a time, and then I was forced to fight them on the staircase. The uneven ground made a difficult enemy even harder, until I learned that I could use the lower ground to make evading some att acks easier. It wasn’t that’s much easier though. You Died.

Spin once to bring the tower down, spin it again to make it go back up.

It took me a few more tries to defeat both sentinels, and I always started with the one on the left. For no specific reason; it just felt natural. It was truly disheartening to learn that all that was behind that guy was a locked door. To make progress, I really only had to fight the one on the right. Even then, if I was able to just sneak past him, the gate I needed to go through was much too small for him, so I could have avoided all those fights and deaths entirely if I’d simply been more observant.

Taunting the sentinel from the other side of the gate was not a good idea though, as he was still able to spear me with his weapon through it. You Died.

Spin once to bring the tower down, spin it again to make it go back up.

Little did I know that the sentinels were really the least of my problems. On the other side of the gate was a balcony where a bunch of winged demons were hanging out. They were the same kind of demons that had flown me into Anor Londo, but these ones were much less benevolent. They each carried a spear that coursed with the power of lightning, which cost me a bit of health even when I blocked their strikes. The only saving grace here was that it was easy to bait the demons over to me one at a time. Fighting them all at once would have been suicidal.

From that balcony, I had to cross over another buttress to a small tower. I didn’t see anything at the other end, so I let my guard down and dashed across without hesitation. As soon as I stepped onto the tower though, two winged demons jumped out at me and started stabbing at me with their lightning spears. I turned tail and tried to run back across the buttress, but then they started throwing lightning spears at me, and a person can only take so many lightning spear to the back before they expire. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons.

The demons on the small tower had a weakness: they could not cross the buttress back up to the balcony because the railings on either side made the path too narrow for them. I could simply stay slighty out of their range on the buttress, and quickly go in for an attack  It felt like I was really getting away with something, but then I discovered that the spaces between the railings were not too narrow fro me to slip through if I wasn’t careful. And off into the blackness I fell… You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons.

The process of getting back to the stupid buttress was beginning to weigh on me. But this time, I killed those stupid winged demons, and I triumphantly began crossing yet another buttress that lead up to the wall of the castle. Then I heard a strange thwip noise, and another right after it. Then a massive javelin pierced my torso, knocking me onto the ground. The second javelin ran through me and everything went black. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons. Kill the tower demons.

I hid behind a corner of the tower and took a look to see where those javelins had come from. Off in the distance, I could see a pair of silver knights standing on either side of the ledge lining the castle wall that I was aiming to get to. I crept around the corner to better assess the situation when I saw them both draw their huge bows. I tucked back behind the wall as they loosed their “arrows” and I heard the crash of steel piercing stone as the arrows hit the other side of the wall.

But the archers did not stop just because I was behind cover. I heard pair after pair of arrows collide with the wall, and decided that I’d have to just run for it. Probably shoudl have waited a bit longer though, as I only made it halfway across the buttress before one of the giant arrows hit me and the force of the impact sent me flailing into the abyss. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons. Kill the tower demons.

I tried to cross over to the castle wall again, hoping that if I began my run before the archers noticed me, the head start would be the edge I needed to make it across. I did almost make it, but took an arrow to the thigh and went plummeting to my doom again. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons. Kill the tower demons. Get killed by the archers. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons. Kill the tower demons. Get killed by the archers. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons. Kill the tower demons. Get killed by the archers. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons. Kill the tower demons. Get killed by the archers. You Died.

Spin the tower down, spin the tower up. Pass the sentinel, kill the balcony demons. Kill the tower demons. Get killed by the archers. You Died.

*Sigh*

Tune in next week for Part 21: A Different Approach

The Easter Candy Parade 2014

Let’s not shilly-shally around today. I like doing three-paragraph intros to my articles, but this one is the shallowest, most originality-free thing I’ve written in forever, so it doesn’t deserve an intro like that. Today, we’re talking about Easter.

Specifically, the absolute truckload of Easter-type goodies that my parents and in-laws gave us. Being creaky, old, mortgage-paying adults, we’re not really the kind of people you’d think would get so many Easter goodies, but our parents spoil the crap out of us and I’m thankful for that every day. Hooray!

You know, now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure that the last two Easters, when I’ve been moved out of my parents’ house, have been the most lucrative Easters since I turned 18. I can’t recall the Easters between then and marriage at all, so they must have been pretty tame.

See? Two bags full of chocolate and candy. We (and by “we” I mean “I” because I’m a big fatty) don’t need this many sweets at all, but we certainly won’t turn away a bunch of free candy. That would be stupid. If properly rationed, this could last us halfway through summer. It likely won’t, but it could.

Continue reading The Easter Candy Parade 2014

Commercial break

Your regularly scheduled Dark Souls programming is going to be taking a break this week, because I didn’t write it. I know this is going to really upset the 7 imaginary readers who’ve been following the series with vigor, but you’ll all have to sit tight until next Thursday for your fix.

I was going to type some other stuff in here instead, but then I forgot what I wanted to write about. So all you get is this filler post.

Phlegm and stuff

I’ve been suffering from a rather debilitating bout with a common cold for almost a week now. It’s been nothing but snot and stuffiness for me lately, and also it’s a Man Cold so it’s much worse than a cold really should be.

The “upside” to this whole business is that I took Monday and Tuesday afternoon off work to recover. I don’t like taking sick days, and I always feel guilty about them, but they do have a sort of weird appeal to them. Maybe it’s because of all the fake sick days I took in school (which I don’t feel bad about in the least), but a sick day to me is a day where I can do anything at all and not feel like I’ve frittered away a day off.

I know that maybe that’s hard to understand, but I can’t really explain it any clearer. It’s weird, and I’m weird. We all know this, so let’s just move on.

While I was feeling like a horrible pile of yuck, Monday was a pretty great day. I slept in, watched cartoons with breakfast, and drank litres upon litres of hot lemon tea. I also watched a couple movies, which is not something that I’d ever currently do with my free time. At least, not without a handheld video game dividing my attention.

In an effort to pare down my Netflix queue a little, the first movie I watched was Devil’s Pass. Unlike video games, I don’t usually read movie reviews before I watch them. If I had, I might have assumed that Devil’s Pass was garbage and skipped it. I thought it was alright, though. It’s a found footage movie, which is already something I’m not a fan of, but I’ve seen a lot worse than this one. The movie’s plot boils down to a group of stupid college kids who go out on an expedition into some Russian mountain range, where nine hikers mysteriously died in the 50s. The fun part is that the movie’s lore actually happened. Read up on it here. I love when I get a fun little history lesson mixed into my movies, so I found that part of the flick really appealing.

The less fun part is pretty much the rest of the movie. The kids are dumb (obvi), the actors aren’t great, the special effects are amateurish, and the whole found footage business is handled as stupidly as usual. Also the story ends up being really awful and totally winds in on itself in a way that makes the idea that anyone actually found the footage literally impossible. Huge plot hole there. So huge that I have no idea how it wasn’t addressed at all.

Also, since you don’t how who/what the antagonist is until the last 15 minutes, you’re constantly wondering just how supernatural it’s going to end up being. At one point in the film, a couple of bodies scurry past in the background while the characters ramble on, and I thought that it was a dead giveaway that the bad guys would be abominable snowmen. This was not the case. So if you’ve been eyeing up Devil’s Pass on Netflix or whatever and hoping that it’s a movie with yetis in it, it’s not. That was probably my biggest disappointment.

The other movie I watched was Guillermo del Toro’s classic monster movie, Mimic. I’d never seen it before, but the promise of a movie about giant man-eating bugs was more than enough to interest me. The fact that it’s a movie about giant man-eating bugs that has no reservations about murdering children on-screen? Well that’s something that I just have to watch.

Mimic was awesome, and that’s coming from someone who only half-watched it because for the first half of the movie I was engaged in a Google search for pictures of Gemma Atkinson‘s boobs (she was in Devil’s Pass).

Anyway, it was a pretty typical monster-slasher, but that’s exactly the kind of movie I love to watch, so how could I complain? It had a pretty lead, really cool bug monsters, and a sassy black cop. What else do people even want from a movie? No, I’m serious. I don’t understand why you’d want to watch anything that doesn’t have at least one of those elements. Or Muppets.

Tuesday afternoon, on the other hand, was a huge bust. I basically just went home early and slept the rest of the day’s working hours away. I might have felt at my worst that day, since I got up and tried to soldier my way through a work day instead of just getting the rest I needed. The good news is that all the extra rest I got that afternoon seems to have worked a small miracle and I’m feeling so much better than I did yesterday. Still like crap, but functional crap, at least.

Or maybe it’s because I started shotgunning Buckely’s that night. I guess that could have made a difference too.

Also I played a lot of Doom on my Xbox over the last few days. It’s… Just as great as I remember it being. Modern FPS games really are just crap when you put them side-to-side with the classics.

Good Charlotte: A Retrospective?

2001 was a pretty huge year for me. It was the year that Undergrads, one of my favourite TV shows, debuted and it was the year that the GameCube was released. Technically I also got my Game Boy Advance that year, but that’s not really relevant to the story.

Anyhow, the Undergrads theme song is “The Click” by Good Charlotte. It’s a pretty good intro theme, and not a bad song in its own right. I can’t verify the veracity of this assumption, but I’m pretty sure that I wasted no time in searching it out over LimeWire or BearShare or whatever spyware-infested P2P program I was getting my music from at that time.

I want to be a bit anal here though, and note that the word “click” is spelled wrong in this context.

One of the GameCube launch titles was NHL Hitz 2002, which I rented multiple times, because it’s frankly the only modern hockey game that I can enjoy. Among the myriad songs on the game’s soundtrack (none other that I can remember) was Good Charlotte’s “Festival Song.” I’m going to go on record right now and say that it might be the only actual good Good Charlotte song.

One song is one thing, but if I’ve heard two songs from the same band in my consumed media, then I know it’s time to dig a little deeper. Or something like that. Whatever. The point is that I got into Good Charlotte and those are the sources that I credit for introducing me to the band. I went out and bought their self-titled debut CD and listened to it obsessively for like a month or two.

They were good times. I had found yet another band that nobody new a damn thing about and that I could just enjoy for myself. Good Charlottle was never a great band, but I was young, and I thought that they were what punk was all about. Though in retrospect, I should have known better, as I was already listening to more “legitimate” entry-level punk stuff like The Ataris and The Vandals at that point. But for a while there, I had my bliss.

But then 2002 came around and The Young & The Hopeless happened. Good Charlotte hit the mainstream. Everybody knew who they were. My little brother bought that album. “Lifestyles of the Rich & the Famous” was played everywere. The video for “The Anthem” had the band dressed up like thugs. People who knew about music slandered them left and right. I called them sell-outs and renounced my fandom.

I abandoned them, but never got rid of my copy of Good Charlotte.

Years later -2008, to be specific- I decided to give the disc a spin again to see what it was all about. In the many years between, I’d expanded my musical tastes greatly, and learned so much about music and what I did and didn’t like. I remember distinctly being utterly disgusted that I had ever liked this band in the first place. It was almost physically painful for me to sit through the entirety of the album.

I can’t remember what posessed me to listen to it in the first place, but when it was over, I gingerly set the disc back into its jewel case and slid it back into its spot in the CD tower. Under G, as it was arranged alphabetically by band.

Not a month ago, I was sitting at home alone on a Saturday afternoon, the wife out at work, and mulled over what to listen to while I was playing Lightning Returns. Nothing loaded onto my iPhone struck me, so I went over to the CD towers and started browsing them. Eventually my sight landed on Good Charlotte, and I figured that it’d be good for a laugh. Get to rekindle my young self’s lesser taste in music. It also made for a fun coincidence.

I’ll admit, that after six more years, I didn’t hate the album nearly as much as I did back in 2008. No, I don’t think it’s good at all, but the things that really got under my skin back then didn’t phase me. They’re products of the time, of a group of kids trying to put together some music that meant something to them but was also marketable.

Good Charlotte is not a good CD. Now that I’ve come to terms with it, I’ll probably never listen to it again (but check back in 2020). And really, aside from having yourself a blast from the past, I don’t think it’s really a thing that anyone should be listening to. It’s just so fiercely 2001 that I can’t imagine that anyone but an awkward teenager in that that time could forge a connection to it.

I won’t go into detail about the things I think it does wrong, or the elements that really don’t belong in any time that is not the early 2000s, or why I think “Festival Song” stands out. I just wanted to tell a story, not write a review. It’s not a compelling (or even interesting) story, but it’s a story about how a small part of me has grown and changed over time. It’s a sequence of events that’s burned into my soul like so many others, even though they aren’t necessarily treasured memories. I felt like I’d share it.

That CD is still in its spot on the tower. I doubt it’ll ever leave.

For you, it’s really just “Watch Gallery”

I uploaded this video of me rambling on while playing the modern version of Octopus on Game & Watch Gallery what seems like ages ago, and I’ve had it as my unsubscribed user trailer on my YouTube channel for just as long. So maybe you’ve seen it already. I don’t know. But I have to post it anyway.

Why? Well, because I haven’t made a bloggety thing about it yet. Duh.

Also because I uploaded the video showcasing the rest of Game & Watch Gallery yesterday (horning its way in-between Kirby Super Star episodes, which resume today), and I feel like it would be wrong to blog about part two if I’d never mentioned the first one.

Anyway, enough of my stupid typing. Here’s some of my stupid talking!

Dark Souls: A Twisty Bridge Too Far

Previously on Dark Souls: Morgan ascended the gauntlet of traps and snake-men known as Sen’s Fortress, met a ghost, and prepared to fight another boss.

Tarkus and I stepped through the fog wall at the top of Sen’s Fortess, and braced ourselves for the worst. Towering in front of us was an enormous golem made of iron armor. We immediately rushed the giant, and it readied its massive axe. Tarkus drew the golem’s attention as I slipped behind it, where I began to hack away at its calves.

I continued to whittle away at the golem’s health as it tried to keep on top of Tarkus, but the monster couldn’t manage to land more than a couple of hits on my ally before it finally succumbed to its wounds. As the golem crashed to the ground, Tarkus vanished in a flash of light. Where he once stood was now a floating ring that emitted a gentle glow.

Approaching the ring, I heard a flapping of wings coming towards me from above. A trio of wiry demons descended upon me, grabbing my arms, and flew me into the air. Unable to free myself or attack, I had no choice but to let the demons do their thing, and they carried me towards the peak of the massive mountain that Sen’s Fortress was built into. As we crested the top of the mountain, I saw a majestic, sprawling city, bathed in a clody sunlight. This was the legendary city, Anor Londo.

The demons dropped me off on a plateau at the top of a long stone staircase. I followed the path downward, where I came to the entrance to a huge building, with a massive stone sentry standing before it. As I approacehd the doorway, the sentinel came to life and brought his halberd down on me, giving me barely enough time to recat and roll away. The impact of the giant’s weapon shook the ground, and I weighed my options. Running away seemd like the best survival strategy.

I booked it out of there, but inside the building were another two sentinels, so I turned and dashed out the opposite doorway. It led onto a large open area where I could see out over the city, the central castle in perfect focus dead ahead. I ducked into a small door to my left and descended another staircase. At the bottom was a small room that cointained a bonfire and an undead woman in brass armor who called herself the Lady of the Darklling. As a fire keeper, she could upgrade my estus flask, but didn’t have much else to say.

I turned back to the building housing the two sentinels and slowly crept in along the wall, with the intent of only drawing the attention of one of them. My plan worked, and I lured it far enough away from its partner so that I could fight it one-on-one. Everything was going smoothly until I learned that despite their massive stature, the sentinels were perfectly capable of quick jumping attacks. I cursed the sky as the giant’s massive halberd crushed me into the floor tiles. You Died.

The second time around, I messed up and they both attacked me at the same time. You Died.

It took a while, but I finally leaned the sentinels’ attack patterns, bested them, and took the treasure that they were guarding. Across the way was an identical building, only behind this buildings pair of sentinels were two treasure chests. The sentinels in here assured me that I was not quite a master at fighting them yet. You Died.

Awakening at the bonfire, I steeled myself and fought my way past the second set of sentinels. I greedily dashed towards one of the treasure chests, which sprang open, baring a horrifying set of razor teeth, and clamped shut mere inches from my head. I ran with all the quickness as far as I could, but as I turned to see if I’d eluded the Mimic, I saw that it was still chasing after me. Rolling underneath its spinning kicks and evading its fearsome jaws, I fought the beast and won. No treasure was worth these creatures made of pure fear.

Opposite the bonfire room stood a bell tower at the end of a ledge, and in that bell tower was a simple lift that brought me down to a massive bridge leading straight to the Anor Londo castle. Before I could assess my surroundings, a gargoyle swooped out of the sky, nearly impaling me on its spear. The monster was reminiscent of th gargoyles I’d fought against on top of the Undead Parish, and I was able to fight this one without much trouble, as he lacked the benefit of an ally.

The bridge, however, caused me much more of a headache. The center of the bridge was at the top of a pillar: a pillar that appeared to rotate, as the section of bridge attached to it was set in the wrong direction, leaving a gap that I couldn’t possibly hope to cross. Scannig the surrounding area, I noted that a lower section of the tower connected to a cathedral running parralel to the bridge. I inched my way across a conveniently-placed buttress and broke through a window leading onto a balcony high above the cathedral floor.

Of course, there were no stairs leading down from this balcony. I was forced to make my way across the cathedral’s rafters to the opposite end, where the staircase was. This trip was made even more perilous by the half-dozen weirdoes dressed all in white that were hanging around up there. They’d be throwing knives at me as I was trying to carefully make my way across, and I wasn’t exactly the most graceful while taking them out; during the fray I accidentally severed the chain holding a giant chandelier and sent it crashing to the ground. Oops.

I came out the opposite end of the cathedral onto the bottom section of the twisty bridge tower. I flipped a huge lever, which spun the tower around, and granted me access to a small room containing nothing but some inanimate statues and a bonfire. Not that I’d complain about a bonfire.

Tune in next week for Part 20: Boot Stamping on a Hollow Face – Forever

Haven’t done this in a while

I started a new video LP series yesterday. It’s a game very near and dear to my heart, and I’ll be unlocking a new episode each day until it’s done. Enjoy.

Oh and also I made up a fun thumbnail for each episode, which is a thing I’m going to be doing for all of my videos from now on. It gives the illusion of a professional production, until you actually start watching the video and realize that it’s the same amateurish crap it’s always been. Hooray for deception!

Pokémon Battle Trozei

It’s been many years, and many generations of Pokémon now, that I’ve said that all I want from the franchise is one Pokémon game where you can catch them all. Of course, by that, I mean where every single monster lives in that game, and you don’t have to worry about trading up from previous games or Nintendo’s event hullabaloo to get them all.

Well, I got what I wished for, though it’s not exactly the way I imagined it would be.

Pokémon Battle Trozei is a Pokémon game where you can, in fact, catch every existing species of Pokémon without having to jump through a bunch of silly hoops. But also it’s not really a Pokémon game in the traditional sense. It’s a block-matching game in the vein of Puzzle & Dragons or Puzzlecraft.

Unlike other popular mobile block-matching games, PBT is pretty simplistic. Other games have crafting and town-building and monster-fusing and all sorts of other fancy features that serve mostly to keep you addicted. PBT whittles it down to the basic puzzle game, where you drag the little Pokémon-shaped blocks around to match them up and clear them from the field. Outside of that, the only thing you’re doing is filling up your pokédex.

It’s not just a simple Bejeweled-alike though. Granted, it does seem to be when you first start playing, but gradually, more features will open up that make Pokémon Battle Trozei stand out in the sea of samey block-matchers.

Throughout the game’s many, many levels, your goal is to catch the Pokémon that inhabit each of them. Doing this is accomplished by matching blocks, which will deal damage to the target Pokémon’s HP. Combos of successive matches with add up more damage onto an attack, and when the target’s HP is depleted, they’re caught and added to your roster.

The Pokémon don’t just sit back and take it though. They will launch an attack of their own every once in a while, depleting your HP. Stronger Pokémon can even break through into your playfield, and they’ll zoom around in there, decreasing the space that you have to play in, and knocking out any blocks that they come in contact with. When you battle a strong Pokémon, or play a level that features a larg number of the creatures, things get frantic quickly and can really come down to the wire.

Being a Pokémon game, there are a few familiar gameplay features that make their way into this puzzle game. Type-matching is still a thing that happens, and you can score super-effective hits against your foes if you use the right type. If you use a type that isn’t very effective though, damage will be decreased. Once you progress a few stages into the game, it’ll let you choose a helper Pokémon from your roster of captured monsters to bring into a stage with you. Normally, the Pokémon blocks that appear in a stage are a random selection, but the ‘mon you choose as your helper is guaranteed to show up.

Some Pokémon also have a special ability that will activate when you match them, but these seem to be very few and far between so far. About a dozen stages in, I’ve only caught three: Serperior, Emboar, and Samurott; all of which have the same ability to deal more damage when your HP is low. The tutorial also shows that matching Chanseys will heal you instead of attacking, but I haven’t seen Chansey in regular play yet.

Ditto is a special block, in that it doesn’t invoke an ability, but you can use it as a wild card. It can be matched with any other block, and even multiple different blocks at once, but they only drop in under special conditions. What those conditions are, I’m not totally certain. All I can say for sure is that they seem to show up exactly when you need them.

To keep you playing even after you’ve caught every Pokémon in a stage, your performance is ranked by how many points you earn. Getting the elusive S Rank is deceptively tough, requiring some really top-notch skills to earn. To even dream of S Ranks, you’re going to have to get good at Trozei Chance, which is activated when you match 4 blocks, and then 3 other blocks right afterward. When you’re in Trozei Chance mode, the screen gets all flashy and you only need two like blocks to get a match. If you’re good, you can clear out the entire playfield, and earn big points as well as continue your combo chain.

The game world is divided into zones, with a handful of stages within each. Burning through each stage as quickly as possible isn’t the best way to proceed though, as extra stages with special Pokémon in them will open up if you complete certain requirements. So far, those requirements seem to be exclusively “catch all the Pokémon in the previous stages,” but they might grow more diverse later on.

Early on, you unlock a special zone known as the Safari Jungle. The Pokémon in these stages change daily, and they’re much longer than any of the regular stages. Simply getting to the end of these stages before the wild Pokémon deplete your HP can be a trial in itself, but it’s a quick way to fill out your Pokémon roster.

Pokémon Battle Trozei falls into the same trap that any block puzzle game does: it’s very repetitive and can get really boring if you’re just playing to get to the end. If you’re in it more to hone your skills and earn higher scores and better ranks, it can be just as addictive as any good puzzler. What’s even nicer is that it doesn’t have all the weird features of a mobile puzzle game that distract your from the core game. Also there’s no arbitrary play limit built in to soak more cash out of you. Once you pony up the $8 to download the game, Nintendo isn’t going to hit you up for a cent more.