What is life like, if not a hurricane?

If you’re into video games at all, it’s very important that you go and buy yourself some DuckTales Remastered as soon as possible. It’s currently available on something you own (Wii U, PC, PS3), so you’ve got no excuses. Do it.

Okay, so you need a little more convincing? Let’s start with the first thing you’ll notice: the spectacular soundtrack. I’m not even exaggerating here; the DuckTales R soundtrack needs to be on iTunes yesterday so that I can be listening to it at all time. Made up mostly of remixes of the original game’s soundtrack, DuckTales R’s music puts pretty much every other retro release’s tunes to shame. It certainly helps that the original soundtrack was pretty damn amazing to begin with, but the arrangements take it to a whole new level.

The title screen music, an instrumental arrangement of the DuckTales theme, is so good that I left the game sitting on the title screen, plugged my headphones into the Wii U gamepad, and just listened to it over and over while I played Animal Crossing: New Leaf for a while. Sound crazy? You won’t think so once you’ve listened to it. Don’t even get me started on the Moon remix. Ducktales R’s soundtrack goes all the way past “memorable” into “infectious.”

The visual style is interesting, and the best thing I can say about it is that it features Wayforward’s beautiful spritework galore. Unfortunately, those sprites live in a 3D world, which is a mish-mash that I’ve never really cared for. I’d much prefer 2D stages as well, but whatever. It looks good, and that’s all that matters.

It’s probably important for me to note that the game is kinda tough. Like, not unbearably tough, but probably enough that you’re going to see the game over screen a few times. Of course, you could always just do like me and play on the Easy Mode For Babies difficulty, and just soak up all the goodness that the game has to offer. I’ll move up to tougher levels eventually, but on my first run, the goal was just to experience the game.

I also chose easy because I’ve never really played the original games on the NES, so I was going in more or less blind. I knew what the game would be like, because I’ve watched at least one video LP of the original, but that was ages ago and this is a pretty different game. The core mechanics of using Scrooge’s cane as a pogo-stick and golf club are the exact same and super fun, but I’m,fairly sure that the levels have been slightly reorganized, with new “modern video game” events speckled throughout each one. Like a fight atop a biplane, and a treasure hunt for a bunch of coins that function as an overcomplicated key. They’re all pretty well in the spirit of the game, so none of the additions feel clumsily shoehorned in. They’re integrated so well, in fact, that if I hadn’t done any research I wouldn’t know which parts are new.

Ducktales Remastered is not universally praised, however. It’s kind of a shame, but I think a lot of people were just expecting too much, or something completely different. There is a pretty vocal group of critics complaining that it’s too hard, but those people are just Stupid Whiny Babies. And then there are the people who are complaining about the cutscenes.

Yes, Ducktales Remastered has cutscenes. And they are glorious. They are fully-voiced by the original actors from DuckTales, and they are pretty darn funny. They make each level of the game seem more like an episode of the cartoon. Yet people are dercying them, and how hard it is to skip them. Wait, what? Yeah. You need to press two buttons to skip cutscenes, and this is a real thing that real people are complaining about. I love the interent as a tool for information and communication, but damn has it made people into whiny, entitled… well, tools. Or maybe they were like that before and you just didn’t ahve to hear ’em.

Anyway, DuckTales Remastered = Good Times, and is totally worth the slightly-higher-than-I-had-expected price tag. Honestly though, $15 is pretty good. If they’d put this in a box you know it’d be double that at least. I’d call that a bargain. Maybe not the best I ever had though.

The Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg

I’m going to start on a tangent and hope that it decreases how many more crop up later on in this article. Holy crap, it has been forever since I did any actual work in MS Paint. That banner up there? No Photoshop involved. Not that it’s hard to tell. I think it turned out pretty nice though, in an ironic lo-fi sort of way. It took me like half an hour to put that border around the blue text. I miss my “stroke” layer style.

There. Now that that’s out of my system, let’s move on the actual intro.

You may remember that in the spring of last year, I wrote an article about a Star Wars Mega Egg. If you don’t, maybe go check that one out first, and then come back and read this one. We’ll wait for you. I don’t know if it’s really compulsory reading, but I’m considering this article a sequel to it, so you might as well bone up on the TE canon. Or something. I totally forgot what I was trying to get at with this paragraph.

Oh, right. I was initialy trying to lead into something about how the SWME (I pronounce it “swum-ee”) brang about an article renaissance here on TE. How it heralded a new age of me sometimes writing articles about things that are not video games. But that’s boring and not really relevant, so maybe I’ll just start trying to get to the point.

Back in July, when I was in Lac du Bonnet for the annual Canada Day celebrations, I made the yearly pit stop into The Bargain Shop to check out their wares, procure a buttload of candy to eat while waiting for the fireworks to start, and maybe find something interesting enough to write about. Of course, this might sound like a somewhat familiar story to you. If you’ve been reading TE for a while, it really should. I do this every year, and I write about it almost every year, whether or not I actually find anything.

Continue reading The Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg

Delicious recipe for disaster

You know what I don’t talk about often enough? TV. Seriously, look up everything under the “idiot box” category and… seventy entries? Okay, well I guess I do TV more often than I thought. Well, now my intro hook is dead. Way to go, facts.

The fact of the matter is that I really don’t watch that much TV anymore. At least not in the traditional sense. I usually have Netflix playing American Dad! in the background while I play handheld video games, but other than that it’s generally just watching the same serieses that I have on DVD/Blu-ray over and over again. I know “serieses” isn’t a word. That’s the point. It’s supposed to be cute.

We have maybe twelve channels of cable, and Wife has been making increased use of them lately, mostly in the way of Two and A Half Men and Two Broke Girls, both shows that I absolutely can’t stand. But! There’s this new game show on that she really likes called Hollywood Game Night, and it seems to be pretty darn good! I haven’t bothered to sit down and watch a whole episode myself, but what I have seen, I liked.

The premise is that there are two teams, made up of one Regular Joe captain and three celebrities. Already, we’re jumping into fairly Ryan-unfriendly territory. I am not a fan of celebrities as a selling point. I’m just not into the whole celebrity-mania business at all. Seriously, there are better things to talk and read about than actors and whatnot. Also, the show is hosted by Jane Lynch. Big red flag there.

Now, I’m not anti-Jane Lynch. In fact, I really like her as Reid’s schizophrenic mom on Criminal Minds. I just can’t separate her from Glee in my mind, and I hate Glee SO MUCH. Fact is though, that’s she’s pretty great as the host of Hollywood Game Night, so that’s good!

Anyway, the show has a bunch of wacky challenges like guessing what movie a screengrab comes from, but with the actors replaced with cats. Also one where kids draw pictures of celebrites and then the team has to guess which celebrity it is. There’s nothing really over-the-top, and I’m okay with that. The show has just the right level of silliness to be pretty darn funny without being overbearing. I don’t know if I’m articulating that thought well enough. Maybe… It’s funny just by virtue of being silly, which is something I will almost always get behind.

I guess the major draw for common folk would be the celebrities, but like I said, that’s just not really my bag. I was pretty floored when Jason Alexander showed up with a full head of hair though. I’ve seen the guy in a wig before, but he looks younger now than he did on Seinfeld. It’s more than a little shocking.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot else to say about the show yet. It’s only been on for a few weeks, but so far so good. Here’s hoping that they’re able to keep it fresh and that maybe I’ll take the time to sit down and actually watch the damn thing.

The end is NIER

If this image is familiar to you, it likely means that you’ve played and completed NIER. Hats off to you, friend. If you haven’t, I recommend that you head out to your local used games store and get your bad self a copy of this gem. I just wish my phone could take a better picture of the TV screen, because the title is super blurry and there’s supposed to be a flower in that spotlight.

NIER, for the uninitiated, is an action RPG released way, way back in 2010. And it is magnificent. It’s not a long game, but I’ve now spent roughly 60 hours with it, and a good many of those were well spent. I’ve done everything there is to do in the game, and only have a single achievement left to earn, which is for beating it in under 15 hours. Should be a piece of cake, since I can do the entire second half of it in under two.

Anyway, what makes NIER such a great game is not necessarily the gameplay, but everything that is wrapped around it. The basic story is that of a father searching for a cure for his daughter’s mortal illness. Right there you’ve got a story that I care to see through to the end. But there are many twists and turns along the way. There are no less than half a dozen story events that will leave you stunned, staring slack-jawed at the screen wondering if what you saw really just happened. It’s the only game in recent memory where events in a cutscene have made me sit up straight and shout in disbelief and/or terror.

I won’t mince words, NIER isn’t afraid to be cruel. The main characters are pretty great and have terrific voice actors, and you will grow to like them. Which adds so much more emotional weight when awful things start to happen to them.  And that may shy you away, but think about how many video games elicit a true emotional response from you. How many have actually made you hurt for their characters? Not many, I’m guessing. It gets downright depressing, but it’s absolutely a story worth seeing through. You can go read a plot summary if you’re lazy, but nothing even compares to witnessing the events play out firsthand.

What’s really great is that there are four endings to the game, and unlike most games with alternate endings, each one builds onto the last, giving more details and slightly changing the final outcome. There are also a ton of additional little scenes added throughout the game once you’ve gotten ending A which will shatter every preconception you’ve had about what’s going on in its world. When you boot up NIER, you’re starting down one of the absolute best video game stories that you’ll ever experience.

That’s not to say that the gameplay should be overlooked! By all means, it’s a pretty competent game. NIER was developed by Cavia Inc, who have a reputation for filling their games with bullcrap and trollign players to no end, but an average playthrough of NIER is kind enough to the player. It’s only when you go off the rails and decide to earn 100% that it gets to the point of unbearable garbage. So much so, in fact, that I learned how to hack Xbox 360 game saves just to save myself hours days of grinding for rare drops.

If you just play through to experience to core game though, it’s pretty delightful. It’s a third-person action game, and feels a little like a looser Zelda with no Z-targeting system. And then there are a few rather dramatic gameplay shifts here and there just to throw you off. One early part of the quest requires you to play the fishing mini-game, which is actually pretty fun, and another portion is presented entirely as a… well, I don’t really want to spoil too much. It’s not as refined as it could be, but I certainly had no complaints about the actual playing part of the game.

My introduction to Nier was a Let’s Play, and I quit reading less than a third of the way through because I knew that I needed to experience the rest for myself. It was definitely the right thing to do. While my time with NIER is almost over, it’s been a great run and now my job is to get other people to play it and see the light for themsleves. This is one that’s going to stay in my collection and most likely see frequent replays.

Oh, and the soundtrack is The Balls. I bought it on iTunes, but feel bad because it’s so great that I feel like I should have a physical copy.

Another note, NIER doesn’t stop with mature subject matter in the story. There is so much blood, and also constant cussing from a certain character who walks around in some very skimpy lingerie. So, maybe keep it away from the kids. If that’s an issue for you.

Diamonds in the rough – Picross e2

When Picross e came out back in June, I was absolutely ecstatic. I didn’t even know that the game existed, so when I saw it in the weekly 3DS eShop release list, I was pretty blown away. Being at work, I had to wait an absolutely grueling six or seven hours before I was able to get home to purchase the thing in a frenzy of picross fandom. At least, as much of a frenzy as one can get into when downloading a picross video game.

Having burned through the game’s 150-ish puzzles by the time the weekend was up, I would have been severely disappointed if I’d bought anything but a picross game. I’ll forgive picross all of its shortcomings because it’s picross and I am hopelessly in love with picross. As it is, I was only slightly perturbed that my joy had been cut short just as it was reaching a fever pitch. It didn’t last long, but I’d say I got my eight bucks’ worth.

And then at the end of July, I was blindsided again by the launch of Picross e2. Though I did know it existed and that it was on the way, I had no idea that it would show up so soon. Again, I was forced to sit at my desk for hours, running down the clock until I could get home and download me a whole new batch of puzzles. There really need to be more unsecured wifi networks around here.

Continue reading Diamonds in the rough – Picross e2

Because that totally happens

An excerpt from the Zoo Rules page on the website of the city zoo:

  • The following items are NOT PERMITTED and should be left at home:
    • Pets *
    • Roller blades, roller skates, heelies, skateboards, child scooters
    • Bicycles, tricycles, and unicycles
    • Balloons of any kind
    • Straws
    • Balls, Frisbees, flying discs, etc.

And now I’m imagining a gang of punks on unicycles causing all sorts of mischief in the zoo.

A fishy situation

I’ve been trying to focus on writing articles lately, and I think it’s been working out well enough. I published five of the things in just under a month, and I don’t feel like quality even took a hit for the increased pace. Not that I’d set the quality bar very high to begin with.

That said, I think that the article blitz is over. There are still a few in the works, in various states of completion, but I don’t have any sort of set time frame for finishing and launching them. I’ll probably write a thing about Picross e2 next week, since that’ll likely be what I do this weekend. Will there be enough material for a whole second article? Who knows? Not I.

Anyway, the reason I logged into WordPress is mostly to put into words my bewilderment at my own incompetence. What incompetence, you ask? My total inability to fish in Animal Crossing: New Leaf with the sound turned off. Weird, I know. As someone who has endlessly talked up how much time he spends fishing in that game, it’s striking to me how bad I am at it without the audio cue.

If you’ve never played Animal Crossing, here’s how it works: You equip a fishing rod, walk up to the water, and press the A button to cast. If there’s a fish swimming around (represented by a black shadow), it may notice your lure and start nibbling at it. It’ll swim up to the lure up to five times, making little “tick” sound effects, each time with a random chance of actually biting. When a fish does bite, your bobber is pulled underwater and a big “bloop” sound effect plays. Depending on the rarity of the fish, you have about second or less to press the A button again to land the fish.

Sounds really easy, but you’ve gotta have a pretty good reflex, especially with the rarer fish. The problem, it seems, is that while I can generally land fish pretty well while the sound is turned on, I just can’t do it without the audio cue. I was playing on the bus this morning while listening to Retronauts and couldn’t catch a fish to save my life. Compounding the issue were the facts that it was early in the morning and raining, which are both conditions that rarer fish will appear under. So not only was I unable to catch anything more than a few worthless barbel steed, but I was most likely missing out on some rare catches too (rare fish usually sell for lots of cash).

Oh well. It’s mostly just interesting (to me) that I respond faster to aural than visual cues. I would never have thought this, because my hearing isn’t exactly great to begin with. And that ends my little ramble for today.

2013 Surprise Bag Article

You may not know this, but it is a real challenge to find a surprise bag interesting enough to warrant review. I’ve long considered the surprise bag review to be one of TE’s Things, but lately it seems all my efforts to find a half-decent one are coming up dry. Did you know that I haven’t posted a surprise bag article since 2006? Yeah, seems like I probably should have staggered them out a little better. But how was I to know I’d still be doing this seven years later?

I have picked up a few surprise bags over the last few years, even made special trips out of the city just to hunt for the things. But alas, I haven’t found one that’s even been worth a blog post, nevermind a full-fledged article. It’s killing me too, because for the last year or so I’ve really wanted to do one up proper. It just seems like all the surprise bags out there are filled with garbage so bland that I can’t make up reasons to make fun of, or they’re licensed and actually a pretty decent way to spend a dollar. I suppose that in hard times I could write up something about a good surprise bag, but what’s the fun in that? I don’t think anything will ever live up to that one that was like 20 years old. I’m beginning to worry that I’ll never see Dubu gum or Baby trading cards again.

My search endures, however, because I refuse to give up on the idea that surprise bags can be truly surprising and contain more than a couple generic suckers and maybe a Dubble Bubble. Also, nostalgia. The thought of a certain nearby city is inexorably linked with a certain notorious surprise bag in my mind, and I cannot think about one without the other crossing my mind. The memories of the fun I had opening and reviewing those other surprise bags lingers as well, even though I know that it likely won’t ever be as exciting as it was back when I was truly devoted to this craft.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is… wait… what?… What is that?

Continue reading 2013 Surprise Bag Article

The more things change

Show of hands, who remembers Video & Arcade Top 10? Hm?

Yeah, so there’s exactly two YouTube channels dedicated to uploading episodes of the old game show, with 15 and 9 episodes available. The second one seems to be a copy though, as it’s only got one episode that the other doesn’t. But that’s besides the point.

I’ve been watching these episodes because reliving my childhood is what I do best. It’s kind of funny the sense of wonder and excitement that I feel while watching the show. It’s like I can recall how the world used to seem so amazing, and how I’d get so excited just to watch a game show with maby a minute worth of clips from a video game I’d like to play. Now I’m a grumpy old man, and nothing is quite as wonderful as it used to be, but man oh man, is there a lot to love about V&A Top 10.

If for some reason you don’t know what V&A Top 10 is, it’s a game show that ran back in the nineties (fom ’91 to… 2006! Holy crap!) that featured a quartet of kids playing video games in hopes of winning said video games. Of course, only the first place kid would win a copy of the game (as well as some other swag, like a watch). Places two to four would get comparatively crappy consolation prizes, like the Donkey Kong shampoo and bubble bath pictured above.

The stakes had never been higher.

One of the most entertaining parts of the show is watching the kids’ faces as they pay the games. Sure, you can get that same picture-in-picture feature on youTube let’s play videos, but it’s so different on V&A. These kids are focused. They are driven. This is the most important thing they will ever do with their lives, and if they fail, they will forever be shamed. They just look so serious when they’re playing; it’s totally adorbs. And then when one of ’em loses a life? You can feel the agony.

Winners are usually decided by how many points or items each player has, but one episode in particular caught my attention. In this episode, the kids were playing Donkey Kong Country 3, and the winning condition was to have the most bananas when time runs out. What? If you’re not familiar, bananas are to Donkey Kong Country as coins are to Super Mario: collecting 100 will give you an extra life and cycle the counter. So, the savvy player would collect 99 bananas and then just sit there until time runs out and he wins. Your average kid will go for that 100th banana, though, and his life will be thoroughly ruined when his counter cycles back to zero.

I guess maybe there are other factors playing into how the winner is decided, but you’ll notice that it’s unlikely if you’re paying attention. The hosts have little to no actual knowledge of the video games they’re going on about. All their story synopses and protips are coming right off of Nintendo-branded cue cards. Hell, the hosts make huge mistakes that no gamer worth his or her salt would ever make. Like calling ROB 64 (from Star Fox 64) R-O-8-6-4, or pronouncing the “chaos” in Chaos Emerald as “kay-oh.” Aceptable pronounciation errors to the common man, but “Oh my God what a poseur” moments for gamer nerds like me.

On that same episode, a new group of kids were wrangled in to play some Kirby Super Star, and maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention, but I didn’t hear any winning conditions announced at all. Doesn’t help that A) KSS has no point system, and B) the kids were playing different games; there was at least one playing The Great Cave Offensive while the rest were on Spring Breeze or possibly Dyna Blade.

Of course I didn’t give two craps about all that back when I was a kid. No, I was content just to watch a TV show about Nintendo games. And that was probably the real intent of the show. Back in the pre-internet era, it was the only way to see any game footage outside of actually playing a video game. I know that it sold at leat a couple games to me that I wouldn’t have been overly interested in otherwise. So good on you, Video & Arcade Top 10.

I really have no idea what the whole “Top 10” bit was all about, as there was never a Top 10 anything on the show. They did do a few countdowns, but the Top 5 was for what the most popular laserdiscs (!) were at the time, and then a Top 3 of video games. And I have no idea how the games were selected either. Who would rank Turok: Dinosaur Hunter second on any list? And how in God’s name did it beat out A Link to the Past? Man, the nineties were strange times indeed.

And that about concludes everything I wanted to say about that. I was considering padding this out and calling it a full article, but then decided against it. Why? I’m lazy. That’s literally it.

Canada Day 2013

Canada Day is a pretty important day for me. Not because I’m some sort of super-patriot or anything, but rather just because I thrive on traditions and nostalgia. Seriously, I’m fairly dependent on doing the same things over and over forever because they’re safe and comfortable. I’m fully aware of this, and I wouldn’t ever want to change it about me. Who needs excitement and variety when you can just enjoy the things you already know that you love?

That said, anyone who knows me will have a pretty good idea of where I am and what I’m doing at any given time during the Canada Day weekend. Or, at least one day of the Canada Day weekend. It rolls out a little differently each year, but all the pieces are usually the same. That said, I still feel compelled to write about my Canada Day adventure because it’s one of my favourite days of the year. It even beats out my birthday now that I’m old and don’t get presents any more.

This year was the biggest Canada Day change-up in, oh, probably the last six years or so. The obvious change, of course, being 2008 when my wife and I started dating. That was also the year that my grandparents sold their cottage and moved to the city, which may have changed Canada Day more than anything. Important because that was the year my family stopped doing the usual Canada Day stuff, but luckily the tradition lives on because my wife’s family has always attended the same festivities that mine used to.

Oh, and the images are clickable if you want to see bigger versions. Though why you’d want to see a super-sized version of the crack through my windshield or crappy pictures of fireworks is beyond me.

Continue reading Canada Day 2013