Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: August 2021

~ Game Over ~

Mr. Driller: Drill Land (Switch) – I honestly can’t believe that Namco decided not to localize this back in 2002. It’s easily the most robust Mr. Driller game I’ve ever played, and the five different game modes add a good amount of variety. Though, I’m still pretty bad at Mr. Driller, so I was only barely able to pass level 2 of each mode :I

The Medium (PC) – Very good spookventure. Clearly influenced by the Silent Hill series, but removes combat altogether to make the gameplay experience a little simpler. The story is a bit opaque, but is definitely more and more interesting as you put the pieces together. Which, I think, is a hallmark of good storytelling.

Stela (Switch) – A “walk forward and solve simple platforming puzzles” game much like LIMBO or Little Nightmares. Only I got no joy out of this one. Mostly because it was completely disjointed, due to every area being totally different from the last. If Stela is telling a story, it’s an impenetrable, convoluted mess. That, and it just never really made an impression otherwise.

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Cannot find memory_lane.html

Hey so Angelfire killed off one of my old websites at some point. Not the main one, but the one that was hosting images and pages for a number of old articles, most notably my memoirs of that time my family went to Disney World. Wuh-oh!

Luckily, I have all that old stuff backed up locally, so none of it it lost forever. But it is a grim reminder that I still have a lot of “content” that needs to be brought over from Angelfire to my current site. I’d really like to get around to it, but I’m just never bored at work any more!

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2

When I played the original Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, I had an absolute blast with it. As a game that called back to Castlevania III, but without the excruciating difficulty, it was something I was really able to sink my teeth into. A retro-styled game executed perfectly.

Then the sequel came along. CotM2 would obviously be similar to the first game, except probably bigger and flashier, if Inti Creates’ history was anything to go by. And that is not an inaccurate assessment! However, this sequel also ramped the difficulty way, way up.

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The Incoherent Dream

Have you ever tried Googling something in a dream? To my recollection, it’s only happened to me once, last night, and it was strange and vivid enough that I feel like it’s worth sharing.

Every Dream Google result that I clicked into was effectively the same: news articles made of paragraphs made of words. But that’s where normalcy ended. The websites were circa the late 1900s: white pages with little more than the text of the article in them. It was like the internet before ad revenue was a thing. The articles themselves were complete nonsense; they included my search terms and some related words, but were otherwise just collections of random words. I think that I actually woke up because my brain was being overloaded by Dream Ryan desperately trying to read and comprehend these gibberish reports.

Now I’m sitting here wondering if there’s an explanation for this, or if it’s just dream weirdness. Could my brain not generate fake articles on the fly? Probably not. So it just filled the dream with words and hoped that I was unconscious enough to notice. But I strongly recall the feeling of frustration that was caused by being unable to actually make sense of what I was reading. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything in a dream before, so maybe that’s something dreams just can’t do?

This is just another reason why Elon Musk needs to get moving on that dream recording technology!

Godzilla Singular Point

I spent a good chunk of time last weekend watching Godzilla Singular Point, Netflix’s new Godzilla anime. While I would say that I was engaged throughout and enjoyed it, I must also confess that… I don’t think I have the hottest of clues as to what actually happened throughout the 13 episodes.

At it’s core, Godzilla SP is exactly what you might expect: a show about gigantic monsters invading and causing rampant destruction, and the people trying to figure out how to stop them. It’s what these monsters are made of and why they exist that gets me more than a little confused. And also all of the of time-travel shenanigans don’t help at all.

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Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: July 2021

~ Game Over ~

Doki Doki Literature Club Plus (Switch) – It loses a little bit of its punch once you know all the twists, but still a “good” time. The additional content was worth the purchase, and the way that it was made to work on console wasn’t nearly as janky as I’d worried it would be, and actually added a lot to the experience.

Robo Recall (Oculus) – Finished this one off at long last. That final stage has been outstanding for months now, but I finally did it. It’s a super fun game, though I don’t know that I’ll go back to complete the extra objectives.

Shutter (PC) – Boop.

Ys: Memories of Celceta (PS4) – One of four versions of Ys IV, and the most modern. While all the Ys games are fast-paced action RPGs, this one might be the ideal fast-paced action RPG. It’s an absolute joy to play, as movement and combat feel great, and there are so many completion percentage trackers. Not to mention that the main gameplay conceit is exploration, which I think is my absolute favourite thing about video games.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: July 2021

Celebrity(?)

One of my brothers has a new girlfriend. She is -in his words- a “Facebook stalker”, and somehow that lead to her having watched all of my Ryan’s Pop-Tarts Reviews videos. Which is lovely. I already like this one.

I know I have a tiny and (questionably) devoted fanbase, but it always feels good to hear that something I made brought joy to someone else. You know, that feeling of validation and whatnot.

Though it always confounds me when I hear that somebody watched one of my Pop-Tarts videos, and then decided to watch all of the other ones. That’s basically the opposite of what I expect to happen.

And it’s the weirdest feeling to meet someone for the first time and learn that they basically know you already. Is this what it’s like to be be famous? Except that it happens all the time instead of once per decade?

More words about Ys

My “theme” for 2021 was playing through all the main games in the Legend of Zelda series. But somewhere along the line I also got completely hooked on the Ys series, and am now through five of the ten games in that franchise.

Most recently was Ys: Memories of Celceta, which, to put it in simpler terms, is a remake of the fourth Ys game. But then I was looking into the original, and… it’s not quite that simple. Apparently, there were two similar but distinct games bearing the mantle of “Ys IV”, one for PC Engine and one for Super Famicom. There was even a third version in the works for the Mega Drive, but that one got canned. And then a PS2 “remake” happened that deviated quite a bit from both of the previous versions. And now we have Memories of Celceta, which goes even farther out from the source material and probably is more of an original game that was inspired by the previous games, rather than an actual remake. Also it’s the canonical version of Ys IV, since it was the only one fully developed by Falcom.

See? It’s a bit messy!

But I have good news for you: Hardcore Gaming 101 has an unbelievably thorough write-up on everything related to Ys IV. It’s a very interesting story, and quite honestly, the whole history of Ys is pretty well worth looking into, if just for the sake of seeing how many console ports each title got and how different they all ended up being.

I don’t know if I’ve ever plugged HG101 before, but it’s an amazing website, and you owe it to yourself to check it out if you have even the slightest interest in video game history and/or localization.