The Count Douchebag

I did a lot of things on the weekend, like baking muffins, getting my hair cut for the first time in at least seven months, and watching roughly seven thousand episodes of Steven Universe. However, since this is me we’re talking about, I’m going to write about a video game I played instead of any of those other things.

The game in question this week is The Count Lucanor. A spoopy, retro-styled adventure game that is available on several platforms, I of course chose to play it on Switch. Not that it made much of a difference, because I finished the game in a single three-hour sitting. Thimbleweed Park, this ain’t.

The game opens on the tenth birthday of our main character, Hans. He’s a spoiled little brat who leaves home to be a treasure hunter because his mom could’t afford ingredients for a birthday cake. Right off the bat, Hans is a dick. Sure, he’s a kid, and kids typically are dicks, but you’re supposed to be endearing me to my main character, not making me want to let bad things happen to him.

Continue reading The Count Douchebag

Last Month in Movies – March 2018

Arrival – A science fiction movie about aliens but also not about aliens. It’s really about the main character, who just happens to stumble into a situation that involves aliens.

We open up to linguistics expert Louise, who has apparently recently lost a child to cancer or something, and then she is scooped up by the feds when alien ships start appearing around the world. Her job is to find a way to communicate with the extra-terrestrials, who look kinda like massive squids. Over the course of the film, she is teamed up with Jeremy Renner as they race against the clock to discover what the aliens want before other countries decide to declare war on the alleged “invaders.”

I want to say that this movie blew my mind -and it sort of did- but I couldn’t help feel that I’d seen this story before. And then I realized that it’s more or less the same story as… you know what, I can’t tell you what novel it rips off without giving everything away. Obviously it has plenty of unique plot elements, but there is an undeniably strong similarity to a very well-known novel. Regardless of this, I really enjoyed Arrival. It poses a number of interesting moral questions, and Amy Adams is just excellent. It made me think and feel, and that’s really enough to get a passing score from me.

Lovesick – My family nearly always gets together on Saturday nights to have dinner and play board games together. One week, my brothers abandoned ship, and my parents and I were left to find something to do. My mom decided we would watch a movie together, and this happened.

Lovesick is a story about how Matt LeBlanc ruins any meaningful relationship he has by getting super jealous and creating wild fantasies about how his girlfriends must be cheating on him. Otherwise, he is a perfectly well-adjusted adult and a highly respected member of the community. So his jealously is written off as him literally being insane. I don’t know if this jealousy psychosis is a real thing or a terrible plot device, but it made for a very by-the-numbers rom-com. The most unexpected thing that happened is that they cast Chevy Chase as the perverted old neighbour. Come to think of it, maybe that’s not so unexpected after all. Anyway, this movie is terrible. Obviously. Don’t watch it.

Justice League – I honestly had no idea what to think about this one going in. I mean, I’m going to watch all the superhero movies with my dad, for better or for worse. But the pedigree is so mixed. Batman v. Superman was pretty bad, but Wonder Woman was fantastic, so.

It seems like in this case, at least, it turned out pretty well. Justice League isn’t exactly on par with Wonder Woman, but it’s definitely moving in the right direction. And that direction, I’d like to point out, is levity. While DC has mostly put all their money on grimdark serious superhero movies up to this point, Justice League is pretty funny. Ezra Miller as the Flash was hilarious, and Gal Gadot is as charming as ever. The constant pokes at how useless Batman is against bigger threats than your average super-criminal were a nice touch, too. Not because I dislike Batman, but because I can’t wait for them to retire crappy ol’ Ben Affleck.

One thing that drove me nuts is that I’m pretty sure the whole movie was in CG except for the actors, like 300 or Sky Captain. But in a way that everything had to be wildly exaggerated, rather than just doing it for the sake of artistry. It was like, at some points I wasn’t even sure if some of the characters’ costumes were real or CG’d on in post. At the very least, it was a resplendent film for the most part, filled with so much colour and vibrance that I really couldn’t be that put off that it was all fake. Regardless, after watching Justice League, I’m more interested in the DC cinematic universe’s future than I have ever been.

Tomb Raider – My experience with Tomb Raider to this point is minimal. I’ve played the first few hours of the original game and Tomb Raider: Legacy. Never seen the previous movies. In fact, I don’t even know how many there are. Two? Seven?

This new movie, I didn’t even know existed until several days before it released. I don’t know if it’s just me who is totally out of touch (likely), or if there was a severe lack of marketing for it (also likely). It’s based on the 2013 reboot of the game series, which I’ve never played, despite having owned the game for like four years now. So I knew very little about it. And guess what, I think that made me like the movie more than I would have otherwise! That’s not to say that I thought it was especially great, but it’s absolutely on the short list of Good Video Game Movies.

I was a little confused when they spent the first 40 minutes or whatever in London, establishing that Lara Croft is a poor bike courier. Except that she is actually rich, she just doesn’t want to accept her inheritance because it means she’s accepting her father’s death. But then she sailed off to a mystical island and met a bunch of bad guys and then they all raided a tomb. Like you do. The one thing I strongly disliked about this film is that it builds up a potential for magic all along and then completely deflates it. And that makes me sad because if magic doesn’t exist in this world, then the potential for tyrannosaurs is significantly lowered.

Listen to me whine -or- An essay on video game rentals

I miss Blockbuster and/or Rogers Video.

Why? Isn’t it obvious? I could go there with $6 in hand, and get access to virtually any video game (provided it was in stock) I want, and play it all weekend. Big games, little games, role-playing games, puzzle games. Whatever I wanted. Probably the biggest downside to renting games was that Blockbuster never had anything for handhelds, and Rogers only kept a very limited selection for the Nintendo DS.

But you know what really stings about not being able to rent games? It’s that excitement of getting to try something new every weekend.

There was a nice little period in between the demise of rental stores and the rise of indie developers where you could get top-tier indie games and Virtual Console titles for between five and ten bucks. Those days are gone, however, between indie devs assigning their games higher values and the crappy Canadian dollar driving prices way the frig up (the average AAA game is $60 USD and $90 Canadian).

Now, it’s a matter of forking over at least $20 for those same kinds of indie games. Sure, I get to keep them forever (and a lot of them are worth the extra money, TBH), but a lot of these games I don’t need more than three days with anyhow. And since I really don’t have that much disposable income, I can’t very well buy a $20 game every week. I mean, I could, but then I’d have no money for the bigger games. Maybe I could have survived without Kirby: Star Allies, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world where I don’t have Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Plus, like 90% of video games don’t even get physical releases anymore, so it’s not like I’d even get access to most of the games I’d actually like to try out. Golf Story, for example, seems like a game I’d get a ton of value from over a weekend, then forget about it forever. But it costs a whopping $28.

One could say that demos are a good place to meet halfway, but really, there are shockingly few demos out there. I think most developers/publishers don’t see that extra work as worth it. It seems like there was a demo for nearly every game back in the 360 days, but the Switch and PS4 really don’t have all that many relative to the size of their game libraries.

So in conclusion, it’s an impossible situation that can only be rectified by going back in time. Suck it up and get with the times, Old Man Ryan.

(Please note that this isn’t a rant about how video games are too expensive. AAA games especially are actually a steal when you consider how much they cost to make these days and that inflation hasn’t really affected game prices over the years. I strongly believe that all game developers have every right to charge what they feel is a fair price for their hard work. This is just a rant about how I miss being able to rent games.)

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2018

No foolin’! I played games in March!

~ Game Over ~

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES) – Done and dusted. Always a great time, and even that danged Ice Palace wasn’t nearly as bad as I remember it.

Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (N64) – I can’t think of anything meaningful to say about this game in two lines. How about you go read this much bigger thing I wrote about it?

Kirby: Star Allies (Switch) – I might not have played this if not for a change to the My Nintendo program right before release that allowed a nice big discount on the purchase.

Knack (PS4) – I tried to be positive about it for a long time, but by Chapter Nine I was fully willing to admit that I hate it. Yet I powered through to the end anyway. What is wrong with me?

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2018

Hypnosis: Negative

Last weekend, I was watching the new episodes of Game Theory and Film Theory, because apparently I’m that kind of person now. This week’s Film Theory was on the neuralyzers from Men in Black, and whether or not they are plausible devices. What interested me more than the actual video, though, was when MatPat briefly mentioned the website Unspoil Me.

Unspoil Me, as I am now aware, is a weird marketing tactic for Samsung’s OLED TVs. It’s a site that claims to host a video that can hypnotize you into forgetting any TV series you choose so that you can watch it again as if it’s the first time. I thought it was highly dubious, but MatPat claimed that it actually worked for one of their behind-the-scenes guys, so I figured there wouldn’t be any harm in just checking it out. Good for a story, if nothing else.

Of course, me being me, I decided to go a bit of a different way with it. I’ve always wished that I could just flush my knowledge of certain video games away so that I could play them again with fresh eyes. So I opted to try to seal away my memories of Kirby’s Adventure for NES. I’ve played it roughly a billion times, and it’s not like it’s an especially complex game, but there are a few wild moments that I’d like to see again for the first time, and I’d love to not know where all the secrets are.

First problem: The Unspoil Me website is completely in English, but the video is all… Swedish. It’s not very helpful for someone who doesn’t know a word of the language (outside of key phrases like “poot da chicky een da poot” and “bork bork bork”). So after wrestling with it for a while across multiple devices and having no luck, it finally occurred to me what I should have done from the very beginning: look it up on YouTube (I’m not especially intelligent).

So I queued up the video, plugged my headphones into the Dualshock 4, and laid down real comfy on the couch. I started it up, and took it in. It was kind of a wild ride, just laying there, eyes closed, while a soothing voice alternates between talking nonsense about trees and asking you to think about and visualize different things. The video is 23 minutes long, but it flew by in what felt like no time. Regardless of whether the memory-blocking part of the hypnosis worked or not, it was  thoroughly relaxing. I might look into other things like this just to de-stress every once in a while.

The voice in the video made it clear that this wouldn’t have immediate effects, and that I would need to get an overnight sleep before it would really take hold in my brain. So I went the rest of the day not thinking about hypnosis or Kirby’s Adventure and went to bed at night as normal. The next morning I woke up and immediately recalled every boss fight in the game. Put the music to every stage. Recalled that the stupidly hard cannon to get into in that one Rainbow Resort stage only leads to a few 1-ups. I could probably tell you every stage which holds a secret switch.

So the experiment was a grand failure. I didn’t even need to boot up the game to know that I hadn’t forgotten a darn thing about it. But it’s not as if I actually expected the hypnosis to work. But then, maybe it was something on my end. Maybe I should’ve stuck to a TV series. Maybe it didn’t take because I didn’t get a good night’s sleep. Maybe I nodded off a little during the video. Or maybe it really is just some silly hippy-dippy garbage. There’s no way to know for sure.

UNLESS I TRY AGAIN.

Which… I may do at some point. I do want to go in with a TV series in mind just to see if it would actually work, but I have no idea which TV series to choose. Gilmore Girls seems like the lock, but it’s seven seasons of 45-minute episodes. That’s a huge commitment. Undergrads would be a nice, short re-watch, but it’s so deeply ingrained in my mind that I don’t think it could be hypnotized out of there. Like, I quote Undergrads all the time; I wonder if the hypnosis would stop that, or if I just wouldn’t know I’m quoting something? Actually, now I really want to find out!

I mean… not that I believe this hypnosis this is going to work. I just… it’s an interesting thought that I wish I could test somehow.

Anyway, I guess I’ll write another thing if I ever do actually try to hypnotize a TV show out of my mind. I have this feeling that it’s not going to happen because I won’t care enough to make time for it again. Like most things.

 

Revisiting Hyrule

As a sort of celebration of the Switch’s first birthday, I’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild again. As a preface, I would like to note that despite the probably 100+ hours that I sank into the game last year, I came nowhere close to finishing it. Sure, I defeated Ganon and saw the ending, but I didn’t find all the shrines or complete all the side quests. I didn’t even reclaim all four Divine Beasts. I never got around to exploring any of the DLC, either.

This time around, I’ve invoked the DLC Master Mode, which is this game’s version of Hero Mode, which is Zelda’s version of Hard Mode. Hero Mode, in most cases, makes Link take double damage and removes heart drops, so you have to heal with potions. I don’t know if the double damage thing is true here because I didn’t bother to do any testing, but Master Mode does make a few more noticeable changes. For one, it levels up every monster that works on a scale. So red bokoblins/mobilns and green lizalfos are gone forever. This alone makes the Great Plateau the most dangeous place in the game. Tree branches are basically useless against blue bokoblins, and Hylia help you if you accidentally run into a black one. It’s basically one-hit kills all the way, so the best strat until you get off the Plateau is to stay far, far away from all monsters. Apparently there is also a new “gold” enemy class, but I haven’t seen any yet. And considering that the silver ones are already extremely difficult to defeat, I expect the gold ones to be impossible.

Continue reading Revisiting Hyrule

March 2018 Nindies Showcase: Live reactions!

The last Nintendo Direct is still fresh on all of our minds, having left the world dreaming about the next Super Smash Bros and waiting impatiently for the Wario Ware Gold. And already, this morning, we get another presentation: this time a Nindies Showcase. While it is an unusually short gap between Nintendo commercials, I guess it does make sense because the Direct only showed games from major franchises or by the biggest publishers.

Anyway, while I took a day to let my thoughts on the last Nintendo Direct marinate, today I’m going to be typing them out au naturel, in time with the show. It technically still won’t be “live” blogging, because, you know, it would be annoying for me to hit the Update button after every sentence I type and then wait for the page to reload. But they will still be raw, knee-jerk impressions of games I either won’t care about at all of ignore because I can’t afford them.

Well, the show’s starting now, so let’s a go!

Continue reading March 2018 Nindies Showcase: Live reactions!

Talking Smash Bros: 2018 Edition

Super Smash Bros for Switch was just announced last week, but it’s never too early for Smash Speculation! (I’m so happy to get to use that post category again.)

Actually, I’m even a little late to this particular topic. The biggest debate on the internet right now is whether the new Super Smash Bros game for Switch will be a new game or a port of the 3DS/Wii U games with some new bells and whistles. Me, I’m firmly on the side of this game being Smash 5. It’s a new game, it has to be. Or, it doesn’t have to be, but give me some time to explain my way of thinking.

Firstly, and I feel like this is the most salient point: Nintendo did not specify that this is a port. In my opinion, if they’re going to be porting over the WiiU version, they would make that clear. It’s okay not to say anything specific if it’s a new game, but you would definitely want to make note of when you’re re-releasing something for a new machine. That’s the kind of thing you need to tell people up front. I get that the hype around Smash is maybe even more important than Smash itself, but people are going to be pissed if you only reveal that it’s a port once the hype has already gotten out of control. Be honest and rip that band-aid off ASAP.

Following that, we also need to take a look at the game’s title. It would have been called “Super Smash Bros for Switch” or something like that if it were a port of the WiiU game. But rather, it’s just “Super Smash Bros (working title)” and nobody ever uses (working title) for ports. It’s never happened in the history of mankind. (Working title) only happens when a game in development doesn’t have a final name yet, and ports already have a name built in. You just paste a DX or Complete Edition or some other meaningless qualifier on the end. There’s no way they wouldn’t have already decided on what that qualifier would be if that was what was happening.

Look at the logos, too. And you know, they are pretty similar. Yes, they use the same typeface, but every Smash since Melee has had a very similar typeface. What makes them all unique is how it’s stylized. The Switch logo is very plain. Sleek, simple. This is unheard of. There is always a border effect, with a coloured gradient inside the letters. Maybe this is a placeholder logo? Well, that’s possible, but it wouldn’t make sense for a port when they have a perfectly good logo already. Nintendo doesn’t appreciably change their games’ logos for ports. From Wind Waker HD to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, they retain the original logo and tack on the qualifier. Besides the completely different design style, the Smash Switch logo has one completely unique feature: the “Smash Cross” is cut through the lettering itself. That’s never happened in a Smash logo before. Someone added that in on purpose. Someone put that there to make it unique. Someone put thought into designing this version of the logo. Sure, it’s simple, but that’s sort of the whole design philosophy behind the Switch in general. Minimalist design all over the place.

It’s worth noting that despite having many different features, the Smash 3DS and Smash Wii U logos are the exact same, with the only difference being the colour scheme. It stands to reason that if the same game were being retooled for Switch, they would stick with that trend.

Probably the biggest question I had after seeing the teaser is this: Will Masahiro Sakurai be involved in this project? Considering how burned out he was said to be after Smash WiiU/3DS, I was skeptical that he’d be on board if it were a port of those games. But he has confirmed that he is the lead on this project. It doesn’t really mean anything either way, but I feel like having him at the helm is a good sign of a new installment. He also confirmed that his next project was decided and underway once all the DLC for Smash WiiU/3DS was out, so this has been in the works since at least February 2016. That’s a lot of time to dedicate to a port.

The only bigger reveal than Super Smash Bros actually coming to Switch (it was always just a matter of when) is that the Inklings from Splatoon would be joining the roster. Yeah, they could be added in as some extra incentive to buy the Wii U version again on Switch (they were also the added characters for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe). I don’t think it’s as simple as that, though. Link has been shown to be appearing in his Breath of the Wild incarnation, which is potentially huge. BotW strayed so far from the regular Zelda formula that Link’s traditional move set would make no sense for BotW Link. He wouldn’t need to be rebuilt from the ground up, but there would need to be some radical changes. And at that point, why not just make him a wholly new character? That then, begs the question of how “classic” Link fits in. Will there be three Links now? Will Toon Link be cut to prevent an over-saturation of Links? There is so much mystery surrounding what seems to be a simple costume change!

While the addition of the Inklings and Link’s new look don’t offer a lot of insight into Smash Switch’s uniqueness, it’s the other character reveals that say a lot more about this being a new game. Or rather, the lack thereof. All we know for sure are the Inklings, Mario, and Link. There was a silhouette of roughly a dozen other characters shown, but it’s hard to place exactly which guys are in or not. It’s easy enough to pick out well-defined shapes like Donkey Kong, Bowser, and Kirby, but there are plenty that are much more difficult to identify.

But the “who’s in/who’s out?” question is secondary to the fact that they are playing this game again in the first case. A massive part of the Smash Hype Cycle is where a dozen or so guys are revealed along with the game, and then more are slowly revealed as the release date draws closer. So here’s my question: why go through this process for a port? Again, I know that the hype cycle is very important to Smash, but it seems silly to do it for a roster that is already defined. I could see some third-party characters losing their spots, but I really don’t expect that the roster would change in any meaningful way for a port. Yeah, we’ll get Inklings and Ice Climbers will return and maybe one or two new guys (calling it: Spring Man and Rabbid Peach), but there’s no reason to drip-feed all of the returning fighters if it’s just going to be a port.

Obviously, all of this is just speculation, and I’m sure there are already many more smartly-written dissertations on why Smash Switch is a port. But it’s fun to theorize, and I really do believe we’re looking at a new game. It’s also important to distinguish just how different a new game and a port will likely be (read: less different than you may think), but that’s an essay for… let’s say next weekend. Yeah, there are going to be a lot of Smash Speculation posts throughout the rest of the year. Let’s all get on board that hype train!

RE: Crystal Shards

You know, it’s funny. Despite my affinity for both the Nintendo 64 and Kirby games, I’ve never really written at length about Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards.

I like to think the direction we’re going from here is obvious.

In anticipation of the release of Kirby: Star Allies today, I have been doing a replay of Kirby 64. And it’s going by pretty quick, almost speedrun fast. Though speed is actually the first thing I want to talk about: Kirby 64 is kinda slow. Not quite as slow as Kirby’s Dream Land 3 (which is why my attempted replays of that game never go far), but nearly every action cuts Kirby’s forward momentum, if not stopping him dead in his tracks. While this a common among most Kirby games, Kirby’s dash seems slower than usual here, and so many other games at least provide dash attacks for a lot of powers, where this one does not.

Continue reading RE: Crystal Shards

Designer Diary: Episode 3: The Shootening

I took last week off of working on my GameMaker project because of the way that a lot of other events lined up. This isn’t to say that I was too busy to do any work on it, but rather that I made the decision to put it off in favour of other ways to pass my evenings.

This may have been a huge mistake. I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s like, taking that one week off set a precedent for me ignoring the project, and now that I’ve broken the chain, so I don’t have to feel that obligation for follow-through. And on week three! Look how quickly I’ve fallen off the wagon! Sad face.

But I hopped back on this week and sat down to absorb tutorial #3: giving my guy a gun. So now he can run and jump and shoot in every direction. There was even a little extra bit on the end to give the gun a little recoil animation. It doesn’t really make sense because I drew my gun as a stereotypical cartoon raygun, but there’s recoil!

This particular tutorial was a fun learning exercise, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t want to make a shooting game, so it’s only somewhat relevant. Even if I did, I would never use mouse aiming. Obviously there may end up being some way in which I incorporate some of what I learned into other things, but the guy’s not going to have a gun in the end. At least not for the game I have in my head. Though at this point I’ve actually been entertaining the idea of making a shoot-em-up, just because it would be a moderately simpler project. Way fewer animation frames necessary :p

You know, now that I think about it, I’m like halfway to the point where I could create my own ripoff of Deep Space Waifu. That certainly would be a thing! I think next week’s lesson is on making enemies, so that’s pretty much all I would need to know. That, power-ups, and menus.