In the pipe

I hope you like Dark Souls, because I sure do. Also I’ve already written out enough weekly “journal entries” to get us through the month, so you’re going to be reading about it at least for the rest of the year. It’s funny, because I didn’t really like it at first, but now I’m totally enthralled with it and it’s pretty much on my mind all the time. Kind of like what happened with Shadow of the Colossus, only Dark Souls is not a game I can just casually clear in a weekend.

So that’s happening. I’ve also had an article ready to post for like a full month now, but I keep neglecting to do a banner for it so it continues wallow in Draft status.

Also I’ll be doing a Top X Video Games 2013 type of feature soon (probably in January), because I know those are what people come here for.

That’s all. Just a status update today. I have nothing else to say.

Grayish Souls

Dark Souls, maybe you’ve heard of it? People seem to be absolutely nuts about this game, but I opted not to buy into it when it first swept the gaming world. I did buy it once it hit $20 though, because it’s just so beloved that I felt like I needed to know what was up.

And, well, I wasn’t so crazy about it. It was at least a few weeks after purchase before I put the disc in my 360 for the first time, and that first play session was the only Dark Souls play session for me until months later. What can I say? It just wasn’t really what I was expecting to play.

My first brush with Dark Souls was probably much like most people’s first brush with Dark Souls. I watched the opening cutscene, which left me more confused than anything, and then I made my character. Or maybe it was the other way around? Whatever, doesn’t matter. I rolled a lady thief named Morgan, and then I was told that she was actually a zombie of sorts. Huzzah.

I bumbled my way through the tutorial stage, which is some sort of purgatory for zombies. It’s probably the first time in a video game where the tutorial level posed a significant level of difficulty. I don’t remember how many times I died there, but the important thing to take away from this is that I died in the tutorial. And that’s the kind of game Dark Souls is.

After somehow managing to best the Asylum Demon, who looks to me like a gritty version of a monster out of Dragon Quest, I made it up into the actual game world, and marked a new checkpoint at the Firelink Shrine.

I was led to understand that Dark Souls is an open-world sort of game, and there were two immediate ways to go from the Firelink Shrine. I figured that heading in the graveyard-looking direction seemed more like the intended way forward, and after a very short bit of travel, I ran into a couple of skeletons. Two minutes out of the tutorial and I had my first You Died screen of the real game.

Dying in Dark Souls strips you of all your souls (which function as experience points and currency) and Humanity, which has a few different uses that I’ll get into later. Handily, these are all left in the spot you died in a glowy orb that you can grab to regain everything. If you die again before you collect it though, it’s gone forever and all those points are lost.

Knowing this, I headed back toward the skeleton area, figuring that it would be best to recollect the small amount of souls I had on my person at the time. I also thought I’d try my hand at fighting the skeletons again; maybe I wasn’t playing carefully enough before. I had just been running forward without much of a care, after all. I was able to retrieve my lost souls, but the second fight with the skeletons did not go any better than the first. You Died.

Maybe it was time to take a look at what the other path had to offer.

Tune in next week for Part 2: Road to the Undead Parish

Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: November 2013

The good news is that winter is here and I no longer have to feel bad about spending all my time inside playing video games. The bad news is that… well, there isn’t any bad news at the moment. It’s December that’s got all that holiday business to it; November is fairly smooth sailing as far as having free time goes.

That said, real life tried its best to get in the way, but November was still a fairly productive month for gaming. This month, I continued my recent trend of finding games that I could finish in an afternoon, and I think I’ll be keeping that up for a while. It’s fun to dive into epic games that take the better part of a year to finish, but sometimes the thing that really hits the spot is a game that I can start and finish in one sitting.

I don’t have any new categories for this feature this month, so that’s good. I figured that my tendency to obsessively categorize things would have me introducing a new one each month. But that doesn’t seem to be the case… yet.

~ Now Playing ~

Adventure Time: Explore The Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW! (Wii U) – It was a small pain in the butt to actually secure a copy, but it was worth it. Between the abundance of Adventure Time charm and having another game that The Wife will play with me, I’m pretty happy with this game. It’s also a lot of fun too, being a dungeon crawler that hearkens back to old-school fare like Gauntlet. Games like this aren’t really made any more, which is too bad because I quite enjoy them. We’re currently 50 floors down.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: November 2013

One of my favourite things

The Christmas season is approaching much faster than I’m ready for it to, and I am starting to feel a little overwhelmed as a result.

Normally, I’d just go out and buy whatever I think would make good gifts for the people on my list, but this year the crushing costs of living as independent adults is making it very hard to do Christmas shopping my way. It’s really too bad too, because Christmas is the one time of year that I’m not a selfish prick, and I used to truly enjoy going all out on gifts. Especially for Wifey, though I have been squirreling away money to make sure that I can get her lots of nice things..

On the flip side, budget-conscious shopping means I’ll probably have to spend more time shopping (bargain hunting an whatnot), which makes me incredibly happy. See, while those few years I spent working at Toys R Us during the season rent my love of holiday shopping asunder, it’s finally grown back and man oh man, am I excited to soak up the festive…ness.

I haven’t ever really written about Christmas at length, but that’s because I just enjoy absorbing the season more than I do trying to put words to the feelings it evokes. Christmas shopping is one of my favourite parts of it. Despite the time I spent working in retail, I love the atmosphere of the malls when November rolls around.

Everything about it is just so wonderful to me. I love seeing all the kiosks pop up or change over to something more thematically appropriate. I love walking into stores that are suddenly overflowing with merchandise. I love the decorations, from the wintry banners to the red bow to the huge Santa Claus photo stage. Hell, I even have a bit of a soft spot for the silly music, now that I don’t have to listen to it for eight hours a day.

But my favourite part of all are the lights. There’s just something about all those extraneous strings of lights that suddenly spring forth from mall ceilings that make me feel comfortable and happy. Especially when they’re paired with a glass ceiling, as looking at all the lights with the backdrop of the night sky is just my favourite. I don’t even have words to properly describe how it makes me feel or why I like it, but it’s something I just couldn’t do without.

I’m not the kind of person who enjoys the mall normally. I like to go every once in a while to walk around a bit, and I’ll hit it up occasionally for shopping, but it’s not a place I choose to linger just for the sake of being there. When a mall is all gussied up to draw in holiday shoppers though, you can bet that I’d be happy just to walk around and enjoy the atmosphere. And it’s weird, because I’m not too crazy about going out to any other kind of holiday display. It’s all about the malls for some reason.

Well, I think that was enough disjointed rambling for one day. Tune in next time for maybe something I’m able to express a little more clearly. Or maybe not. Who knows!

Not your daddy’s Dark World

The new Legend of Zelda game, A Link Between Worlds, came out on Friday. The craziest thing is, I wasn’t really all that excited about it. Normally Zelda games are the things I go the most crazy for, but there was no hype inside me this time around. I simply worked all day as usual, went home and had a nap wile waiting for my wife to get home from work, and then proceeded to the store to pick it up.

I didn’t even start playing in earnest until Sunday.

No, nothing is wrong with me. I’m not gravely ill. It was just a weird coincidence, because now that I have spent some time in the game world, I am finding it incredibly hard to put down. This is because A Link Between Worlds is quite possibly the best Zelda game.

If you weren’t already aware, A Link Between Worlds is a direct sequel to 1991’s A Link To The Past, which is considered by most of my peers to be the very best Zelda game. While it is a sequel, it’s also a first for the series, as it uses the same overworld map that you know and love from LttP. Well, a very similar world map anyway. It’s not a 1:1 reproduction, but that’s quite alright.

Worlds also steals its story pacing from its older brother: you go through a short introduction, then three dungeons to earn your Master Sword, then Hyrule Castle to the alternate world, in which there are seven dungeons and then a final showdown. It’s cut-and-pasted wholesale, but I’d say it’s a good enough structure that it’s worth repeating.

You may have noticed that I said “alternate world” up there instead of Dark World. That’s because in LBW, you don’t visit the Dark World again; you visit Lorule instead. That may be giving it too much credit though, because Lorule is totally the Dark World, just with a different map and a castle instead of a pyramid. The scenery is the same, the enemies are the same, and the dungeons are all even in the same places. Well, the dungeon locations are the same anyway. Somehow Turtle Rock is now in the lake where the Ice Palace used to be.

Speaking of Turtle Rock, all the dungeon interiors are completely different, too. Because you wouldn’t want to climb the old Tower of Hera when you could play around in the completely awesome new Tower of Hera, right? Right. Re-using a world map creates continuity, but re-using dungeons would just be lazy. And, like I said, the new Tower of Hera was a really great dungeon.

All the dungeons are great, in fact! I think it helps that all of the ones I’ve played have been fairly compact, and that it’s more about solving the dungeon as a whole than solving each room for the next key. But there are still locked doors and keys. I’m not really smart enough to explain exactly what it is that makes me enjoy these dungeons so much, but I can tell you that they are very fulfilling the solve, and I really appreciate that they aren’t huge and more complicated than they need to be.

And this kind of ties in with LBW’s main gimmick: having access to most of Link’s inventory after completing the first dungeon. Of course, you aren’t just given all the stuff: you have to pay to rent each item. But they come fairly cheap and I had more than enough cash to rent out everything as soon as Ravio opened his item shop. Later on, you’re able to purchase them permanently for a much higher cost, but owning an item allows you to upgrade it and means you won’t have to pay to rent it again if you die.

What the item rental shop does for the game is allow you to take it at your own pace. Like I said, I rented everything out at once and then immediately went off to explore as much of the overworld as I could, because normally that’s something you have to do incrementally as you get new items. Of course, not everything opens up to you right away; the game still hands out a few power-ups at predetermined points, like the flippers, power gloves and pegasus boots. An important note is that at no point in the game are you given or tasked to find a shield: you have to go out and buy one all by yourself.

What makes the item rental system stand out to most people is that it lets you play through the Lorule dungeons in any order you choose. Dungeons are still built around a single item, but you no longer have to get halfway through to earn that item. Now the big dungeon treasure is a permanent power-up, like a new tunic or an upgraded shield, which is helpful but not necessary to complete the game. Since you don’t have to muck around finding the dungeon item first, you could conceivably head straight for the boss if you know the way, meaning LBW will likely be a big hit with the speedrunning crowd.

The freedom of being able to explore the world right away is a wonderful change for the Zelda series, and stirs things up just enough to make it feel fresh again. The dungeons are great fun, and there isn’t even a hit of the traditional handholding that had soured many gamers on the Zelda series. I’m still only about halfway through, but I am looking forward to that second half like nobody’s business. A Link Between Worlds is the renaissance that the series needed, and I can only hope that the next game is as fresh and fun as this one.

Is this the world we created?

I took this picture at some point last year, and I don’t think I ever got around to actually putting it into a blog post. Time doesn’t really dull the pain of knowing that I live in a world where not only do Fruit Ninja plush toys exists, but said toys cost twelve bucks (after taxes).

Twelve bucks. For a plush fruit. That (presumably) splits in half.

It’s not quite stupid enough that I need to call for another divine flood or muse about why suicide booths don’t exist yet, but man, Fruit Ninja toys. I guess that good ideas really were an exhaustible resource.

That sinking feeling

I went out and bought a Wii Fit Meter the other day. I know, you’re thinking that’s pretty nuts. Just hear me out: There’s a Wii Fit U demo on the eShop, which is the full game, but it’s only good for 30 days. After that, I’d have to pony up $50 for the full version of the game. BUT! Buying the silly little trinket on its own for $20 and syncing it up with said demo actually unlocks the game for unlimited use. And we all know that I was going to buy Wii Fit U at some point anyway, so I actually saved $30 by buying the Fit Meter. Score!

Also I bought it with a gift card so I didn’t actually spend any money.

Not that I know anyone who owns a Wii U (heathens), but this deal is only good until January 31st, so if you’re at all interested, now would be the time to take the plunge. Of course it’s not a great deal if you don’t also already own a Balance Board, but them’s the breaks.

wii-fit-u-meter-376x380

Anyway, the Fit Meter is basically a repurposed and repainted Pokéwalker. Actually, I think it’s exactly a repurposed and repainted Pokéwalker. The two gadgets are identical, as both are just glorified pedometers. The Fit Meter has some extra features tucked into though, those being an altimeter and a thermometer. It’s also apparently smart enough to know when you’re driving, so as not to count false steps.

You cannot, however, use it to catch Pokémon. Which is a missed opportunity, but I’ll let it slide..

The pedometer and thermometer seem to be pretty on the level, as those have maintained pretty accurate numbers as far as I can tell. The clock is a few minutes ahead and I can’t change it, which bothers me but I guess I’ll just have to live with it. It’s the altimeter that I question.

The altimeter is there to measure your change in elevation as you move around, which will affect how many burned calories it’s calculating. Thing is, the altimeter is set right now at -135m, even though the city’s general elevation is roughly 235m, but that one can be written off as a poor initial calibration.

What really troubles me is that the altitude graph showed a steady decrease on my ride to work this morning, and continued to decrease even while I was at work, despite the fact that I climbed three stories to get to my desk. Looking back even farther, the altitude graph is showing that the Fit Meter thought it was descending overnight, while it was sitting still on my nightstand.

So either the thing is buggy or my entire city is rather quickly sinking into the Earth. I don’t hear any panic in the streets outside, so I’m inclined to believe it’s not the latter.

On the other hand, having even a piece of Wii Fit tagging along in my pocket all day seems like it’s going to be a pretty good incentive to keep using the actual software. At least I’m hoping that’s the case, as I do want to drop a belt size or two, but can’t be bothered to keep myself motivated enough to actually keep exercising. Also that whole “eating right” business, but that’s a totally different beast that I’m going to tackle once I’ve got this regular exercise thing down.

Oh lately it’s so quiet

I learned the hard way this morning, that my body will no longer tolerate me eating like a young man. Back in the day, I used to pack away as much of whatever I wanted, and all would be good. I might get full after a while, but hey, full is good.

Last night, I ate two polish sausage hot dogs, half a thing of fries, a few peanut butter cookies, and a big ol’ root beer. This sounds like a standard meal for me, and I figured it would be as much. But this morning I woke up with the absolute worst feeling in the pit of my stomach. Also I was still burping out the smell of hot dogs. It was a horrible, disgusting morning.

I look back now, and shudder to think of the disaster I averted by opting to not get that third hot dog.

All this to say… there’s not a lot going on. Who would have thought that my entire schtick was buying silly crap and then writing about it? Turns out that I don’t actually do anything interesting, I just used to make the “most” of my disposable income. I’m sitting here, racking my brain for something I’m interested enough to write about at length, but I’m at a total loss. So stories about hot dog burps are the best you’re gonna get right now.

I suppose I could start playing Fallout: New Vegas and regale you with tall tales about my further adventures in post-apocalyptic America, but there are just so many other games I’d rather be playing right now (and honestly I think I’d rather go back to Skyrim before starting New Vegas). Also, I feel like I’m falling back into the habit of only writing about video games, and I really want to pull back away from that. Yes, video games are pretty much all I do, but I’d sure like to be able to at least pretend for a while that I have other interests.

It’s filler, but not

Hey I haven’t posted anything in a while. I guess I have a thing in the works but ehhhh. Between Cookie Clicker and IRL problems (re: being sick), I really haven’t been all over the writing business as of late.

So here’s a thing I did a while back:

 

Yeah, it’s just an Avatar version of QWOP. It’s not even a very good one. I have this other game that I sort of want to record, which has a similar premise, but a much better execution. Will it happen? I don’t know. It’s a multiplayer thing, and I am terrified of the prospect of trying to record something with another person. Don’t know why. Just am.