Spooky – Page 10

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: March 2021

~ Game Over ~

Control (PS4) – 100% trophies for main game and DLC expansions. Super great game. Strongly recommend, would play again. Probably should continue playing, because there are still incomplete missions…

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D (3DS) – I was enjoying the original so much that I decided to revisit the remake that I’d never finished. Good call, me! MM3D is an incredible remake and I want so badly for a Switch port to free it from the teeny-tiny confines of 3DS Jail. I even went for the 100% clear, which I never do for MM. Too many mini-games; it’s really my only major complaint with this one.

One Step Forward…

I’ve typed a heck of a lot of words about Five Nights at Freddy’s VR over the last few months, and to date, most of those words have been very positive. Unfortunately, today I have to put some words to page that veer just a wee bit in the other direction.

I think it was late December when FNAF VR’s expansion, The Curse of Dreadbear was released for Oculus. Right around Xmastime. For a Halloween-themed DLC pack. Maybe not the most timely of releases, but holding it back for another year to release around Halloween would have been silly. Might as well make those bucks. It’s not as if there’s a whole lot else to for people to buy in the Oculus store. (Zoom!)

But Dreadbear’s issues only begin with the late release. Having been totally obsessed with FNAF VR at the time, I was keeping a close eye on news of when that DLC would drop. Then it did, and the bad reviews piled up quickly. Well, maybe not bad reviews per se, but a lot of complaints in the reviews section about how buying and installing the DLC would wipe your save data. Having a completed save file, I opted to wait it out until there was a patch that would stop the save deletion.

January rolled around, and I checked in from time to time until finally I saw that comment I was looking for: Steel Wool Games had released a patch, and downloading Dreadbear would no longer delete your existing save file! I immediately purchased and installed the Dreadbear DLC and… my save file was gone. All progress: vanished, never to return. I’d have to somehow survive that impossibly hard Funtime Foxy minigame again. So much for the patch.

But worse things could happen. After all, FNAF VR is a heck of a lot of fun, so having a reason to play through it again was actually kind of welcome… is how I looked at it after forcing myself to take an optimistic point of view. When I actually started playing, though, something was off. It didn’t quite hit me until I won my first “food” prize, though, and I was barely able to make out what the item was: after installing the DLC, most of the textures in the game -the entire game, not just the DLC parts- had gone to absolute crap.

While FNAF VR was never going to look as good on Oculus as it did on PC-powered VR systems, it was certainly passable. Things were a bit smudgy here and there, but none of it was outright bad. Now, though? Now it looks awful. And this is coming from me, a guy who really doesn’t care all that much about graphical fidelity. But the downgrade has had a major effect on my enjoyment of this video game, since all I can think about now is how much worse it looks. Suddenly that Funtime Foxy level doesn’t seem so bad, because it’s all pitch-black most of the time.

I don’t think that the grossly deteriorated textures will be a long-term problem during main gameplay, as I’m sure I’ll just get used to them. But it’s a really weird thing that happened, and I can’t fathom why Steel Wool Games would have changed them in the first place. Maybe they needed to scale down the texture resolution to keep the file size under some arbitrary limit? The game didn’t have any major performance issues before the DLC, so I doubt it has anything to do with that. It’s mind-boggling.

All that said, I’m going to continue playing FNAF VR. I mean, I haven’t even started on that DLC that I paid for yet. I’ve just been playing the main game again to restore my completion percentage to 100. It’s still a lot of fun, and I still can’t play for more than like 10 minutes at a time for fear of my heart exploding. It’s just too bad that the experience had to be soured a bit.

The Banana Splits Movie

I don’t know about you, but I’d never heard of The Banana Splits until recently. I guess maybe, for once, I’m too young.

For the uninitiated, it was a live-action variety show produced by Hanna-Barbera in the late 1960’s that starred four large, costumed animal characters. It lasted two seasons but stayed in syndication until the 80s. Last year, somebody turned it into a horror-comedy movie. This movie (and the franchise in general) was only brought to my attention about two months ago, when I watched a YouTube video comparing it to Willy’s Wonderland and how the latter looked like it would avoid a lot of the problems that The Banana Splits Movie suffered from.

Thank goodness I watched that video, though, because my soul would be so much emptier without having ever seen The Banana Splits Movie.

Bad Movie Nights

I may have over-done it during the ‘Ween and ‘Mas seasons, as for all of January and half of February, I did not watch a single film. I watched a couple speedruns that were longer than films, but that’s totally different.

However, a couple of movies recently came out that I’ve been really excited for, so I’m sort of getting back into the world of movies. Also, I was pretty sure that both of them would be terrible before watching them, but one is based on a video game franchise that I adore, and one of them is a plot strangely reminiscent of a video game franchise that I adore. Were they actually bad? Let’s find out!

~ Willy’s Wonderland ~

I had no idea that Willy’s Wonderland existed until I saw a Tweet with the trailer roughly a month before release. I don’t remember why I even watched the trailer, but once I realized what I was seeing, I knew then and there that I needed to watch this movie.

See, a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has been “in the works” for years now, and keeps getting delayed and scrapped and restarted for various reasons, and I’m at the point where I don’t actually believe that it’s real or will ever happen. But I still desperately want to see a FNAF movie, no matter how terrible it might be, so I was elated that someone else decided to step up and make their own legally distinct film about possessed animatronics. And to have it starring Nicolas Cage is just gravy.

There are two important takeaways here: Willy’s Wonderland isn’t a good movie. It’s clearly a tongue-in-cheek, low-budget cheese-fest, but that doesn’t necessarily excuse it for being kind of bad. Knowing you’re making a bad movie doesn’t absolve your movie of it’s badness. That said, I think it’s still an entertaining movie. At least, I had a lot of fun watching it. Though I can’t confidently say how much of that was genuine, and how much was due to my desperation for a FNAF movie.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: January 2021

NEW YEAR, NEW YOU!

Except not. Still addicted to video games. I don’t expect that to change.

~ Game Over ~

Mega Man X (SNES) – It’s become tradition for me to play this on the morning of New Year’s Day. Still trying to clear it in under an hour. Still always choke on at least one of the final bosses. This time I got killed by Sigma and then also Wolf Sigma. Choked twice! I’m getting rusty!

Picross S4 (Switch) – I solved every damn puzzle. Sometimes twice because the Mega puzzles are still hard-mode repeats of the standard puzzles.

Runner 3 (Switch) – Incredible music, weird and wild art direction, and abusively hard gameplay. Even with the difficulty options at the absolute minimum, I was not able to clear every stage. In my defense, the ones I couldn’t beat are labelled “Impossible.” Enjoyed it for the most part, but some of the stage mechanics are just mean-spirited.

Wherein 2021 is Productive

At least, in the sense that I have been creating a lot of product in 2021. It’s only halfway through January and I have already scheduled two videos to go live each week on the TE YouTube channel until the end of February. That probably amounts to more videos than I posted through the entirety of 2020. Not that I’m going to bother counting.

TE’s Top Games of 2020

2020, as I’m sure you’ve heard many times, was a heck of a strange year. And to cap it off, I’ve got a heck of a strange Top 10 Video Games list for you.

Longtime readers might know that I don’t always play by the same rules for this annual listicle. The rule for candidacy this time around is simple: It must be a game that I played for the first time in 2020. That is it. That is the one and only criteria that I’m using to decide which titles are eligible. I’ve also decided to do away with the “must have beaten it” rule, because it seems unnecessary.

My selection process was this: I made a big spreadsheet of every game I played in 2020 (total of 118), removed any that didn’t meet my specification (47), and then narrowed it down to 28 frontrunners. From there, I simply looked at the list and picked the ones that I had the most positive emotional reactions to while reading their titles. By some wonderful coincidence, that left me with a clean list of 10 games. Neat!

And here are my selections, presented in the order that I played them:

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: December 2020

~ Game Over ~

Paratopic (Switch) – I honestly have no idea what happened here. It’s roughly an hour of what I imagine a really low-key drug trip must be like. That said… I liked it. I played it a second time to see if there were different story paths, and you can diverge a bit to find some neat stuff, but it’s a really slow game, which made the replay very tedious.

Spec Ops: The Line (PC) – Pew-pew shootmans game wherein I recorded my playthrough. You can watch it here. (tldw: Game is v good, my recording framerate was v bad.)

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Switch) – I think that this is an overall better game than the original Hyrule Warriors, though it just didn’t quite click with me in the same way. I liked it, I really did, but mostly it just made me want to play Breath of the Wild again.

A Knight’s Quest (Switch) – An adventure that was clearly inspired by Zelda, but also had a little Mario thrown in for flavour. Buggy as all heck, but still playable and mostly fun. Combat made a hard transition from mindless button mashing to intensely frustrating near the end, and between that and one atrocious boss fight, I just about gave up on the game. The soundtrack is way better than it has any right to be.

The Final Fantasy Legend (GB) – Retro RPG where nothing works the way you expect it to. It’s that way by design, though, because this is a spiritual successor to FF2 and the first game in the SaGa series, known mostly for its obtuse mechanics and punishing difficulty. Still fun, once you figure out how all the systems work. Little bit too grindy, though.

~ Progress Notes ~

DOOM Eternal (PS4) – On stage 6.

Fitness Boxing 2 (Switch) – Achievement collection at 26%.

Witch Hunt (PC) – Defeated the second “boss”.

Picross S4 (Switch) – Mostly done with the regular puzzles.

Robo Recall: Unplugged (Oculus) – Half-done Chapter 2.

SINoALICE (iOS) – Mostly grinding the Xmas event.

24 Days of Quarantine Fun – Day 19: Gremlins

Here, we have another classic Christmas-adjacent film. The really great part is that given the horror theme and Christmas setting, it’s completely appropriate to watch during either the Halloween or Holiday seasons.

Also, it’s friggin’ Gremlins, so it’s appropriate to watch during any season.

If you haven’t seen it, this is the classic feel-good holiday tale of a boy that receives a pet for Christmas. Only, this pet is a strange creature called a mogwai, which will inexplicably spawn more mogwai if it comes in contact with water. And also they will transform into monsters if fed after midnight. Of course, both of those things happen and the monsters go on a spree of mayhem and murder around the town.

Listen, I know that the mogwai rules don’t make any goddamn sense. How does a creature keep clean without getting wet? If it drinks something, are its insides exempt from the wet rule? And how does it know if it’s being fed after midnight? What about time zones? What about daylight savings time? At what time in the morning does the transformation rule no longer apply?

Please, don’t think about it so hard. Gremlins is such a fun, silly movie, that you’re really missing the point if you try to apply logic to it. That said, it also has a surprisingly dark side, what with all the murdering and such. Most of the time the tone is fairly well-balanced, with the gremlins being a mix of evil and goofy, which takes the edge of and makes it sliiiiiiightly more family-friendly. There’s one particular scene, though, where a character’s backstory is revealed, and it’s just straight-up horrifying.

Here’s a fun little trivia tidbit that I’ve pulled from the Wikipedia page: originally, the plan was to dress up moneys to play the gremlins. The plan fell through because the test monkey freaked out when the cast strapped the gremlin head to it. Fun! I think it worked out for the best, but I may be biased because I’m a big fan of puppets.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: November 2020

~ Game Over ~

The Void (PC) – Artsy horror-ish game that I may have liked if not for three factors: 1. Gesture-based commands that don’t work very well. 2. Overcomplicated gameplay systems that make no sense. 3. Your character moves slower than molasses – at running speed. Into the bin with ye!

Stories Untold (Switch) – A text-based adventure game anthology that takes place over four separate mini-episodes. Each one introduces some new gameplay element and a new scenario. While the gameplay can be a little tedious, the stories are great and go off in wildly unexpected directions. I bought this on sale for $7 and I kind of want to give the developer the difference because it was fantastic. Likely to be on my 2020 GOTY list.