Category: Spooky

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – June 2017

It seems like I’m in one of those phases where I spend a little bit of time with lot of different games. This usually happens when I don’t have a “major” game to focus my time on. Though Ever Oasis was nearly the only thing I played for the final week of the month…

~ Game Over ~

Life is Strange (PS4) – The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. But that doesn’t make the choice any easier. Sorry, Chloe 🙁

Zoo Rampage (PC) – Barf.

ArcaniA (PS4) – By the end, I’d gotten so accustomed to the game’s jankiness that I think I was genuinely enjoying it. But man, is it ever broken. Almost Bethesda-like, to be honest.

Spooky Cats (PC) – It’s a thing, alright.

Mighty Gunvolt Burst (Switch) – A very good Mega Man successor.

Chrono Trigger (SNES) – I usually have trouble with Lavos on a NG playthrough of Chrono Trigger, but I won pretty handily this time around, despite feeling like I was ill-prepared for it.

Team Kirby Clash Deluxe (3DS) – I’ve rolled the credits, but there’s still so much more to accomplish. Is it worth the time and effort, though? I’m not really smart enough to say.

Anna: Extended Edition (PS3) – A free PS+ spook-em-up that sounded great on paper, but was more than a little lacking in practice. And yet it still lingers in my mind… how apropos.

Ape Escape 2 (PS4) – Finally completed the slog of a replay to earn the final trophy. I don’t know why I did this to myself, to be perfectly honest. Ape Escape is NO FUN.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – June 2017

A weekend of games and stuff

I hate to admit it, because I’ve been trying to diversify the ways I waste time lately, but I spent pretty much the whole weekend playing video games. Well, the time during the weekend that I was conscious. I spent way too much time sleeping in and napping, but I slept terribly last week, so I suppose that I needed it. Anyway, for some reason I feel the need to write about all the nothing I did over the weekend. Really Live Journal it.

Friday night was a blur. Because it’s already so far away, you see. But I do recall that after a long Friday at work, I decided that it was in my best interest to get some physical activity, I opted to take a short walk. Partly because I wanted to do something good for my body, and partly because I wanted to listen to the Talk Nintendo podcast special on Ever Oasis. And by golly, did Casey and Neal ever do a good job of selling that game. I was planning on skipping it, but their gushing praise started to make me reconsider my stance…

Upon returning home, I finally set aside a little time to play ARMS, which I am desperately in love with in theory, but I need a lot more practice because I am awful at it. I managed to get through the easiest level of the single-player mode, but not without some struggles. Also I need to get online and get in on that party mode. Once I was done with that, I cracked and bought Ever Oasis. In retrospect, I should have played the demo first to make sure, but in the end it wouldn’t have dissuaded me anyhow. Although the game was surprisingly small (just over 6200 blocks), the download was slow and would not finish until early the next morning.

Finally, I began playing what might be the only free PS+ game that I’ve been at all interested in since I’ve had the service: Anna: Extended Edition. It is pitched on the store as a psychological horror game wherein you explore an abandoned sawmill to discover its spooky secrets. Late Friday night is like the only good time I get to play horror games, so I was pumped. And then the game turns out to be something of a janky mess. I was so befuddled by the odd control scheme and got stuck on a stupid(ly simple) puzzle that I only played up through the first “stage” before calling it quits and turning in for the night.

The next morning, I woke up late because I had opted not to set any alarms. Then I chose to relive a ritual of Saturday mornings from last summer: watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003 series) while playing Tap My Katamari. I had four episodes left to watch from season four’s “lost episodes” (not on DVD) and burned through those right quick. Afterwards, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do and curled up in bed for a quick nap.

It was after I woke that I realized that Ever Oasis was probably done downloading, and then most of my afternoon just vanished into it. Ever Oasis is a really good game. What Casey and Neal neglected to mention is that it is very slow to start because holy crap does it ever like to take its time explaining everything to you. Also, it is just as hand-holdy as the Zelda series is infamous for being. At least for the first few hours. Eventually it gives you a little more freedom, but the beginning of the game is a slow, unskippable slog. This will undoubtedly discourage replays.

I then decided that it was my mission for the rest of the afternoon to finish Anna, and so I booted the ol’ PS3 back up and jumped back into that mess. The game does have its charms once you let yourself get into it, but I maintain that it could have used a lot more polish. At least have a few of the rougher edges sanded down. Case in point: I was not interested in the game enough to care about solving its obtuse puzzles, and it didn’t take me long to pull up a walkthrough for consultation whenever I felt stuck. I cleared the game, and am weakly considering a quick second playthrough to round up the leftover trophies. On one hand, it’ll be a very easy task that should take no more than half an hour. On the other hand, I don’t really care about this game and should probably just delete it and forget it forever.

Saturday night was the usual board games party. The major difference is that when my brother and I made a trip to the liquor store, we found something highly unexpected: Freedom 35 lager! It’s the Trailer Park Boys branded beer! We were so excited that we each filled up an 8-can carrier and merrily went on our way. The checkout guy must have thought we were nuts.

Many beers led to a hearty sleep-in on Sunday morning. Sort of. I got up at 8:30, had breakfast, watched an episode of Bob’s Burgers, and played some Mighty Gunvolt Burst to grab a few screenshots for the article I wrote on it. Then I passed out again and slept until after noon.

To round out my activities, I went out for an extra-long walk/run after waking up. I was out for two and a half hours, which I think is my longest journey on record so far. Especially since it was only my second outing that included running this year. And yet it was still not long enough to listen to the regular weekly episode of the Talk Nintendo. When I got back, my legs were so done that I showered off and flopped onto bed to nap for an hour, then watched several more episodes of Bob’s Burgers. And then I ate a metric ton of food for dinner and way too much in the way of ice cream treats, completely invalidating all the exercise I’d done earlier.

Finally, I ended the evening the same way that every Sunday evening ends: laundry. In between throwing dirty clothes in the machines and putting away the clean laundry, I tacked a few more hours onto Ever Oasis. Turns out that it’s quite difficult! Monsters hit really, really hard and you can’t dodge-cancel out of attack animations, so you’ve got to be careful. It’s still limiting how far off-course I can explore, but at least it’s not pushing me along the intended route quite as sternly any more.

Alas, eventually the laundry was all done, and that’s my cue to stop whatever fun I’m having and go to bed. I think that’s probably why I hate doing laundry so much. It heralds the end of the freedom of the weekend, and the return of the dreadful work week. Ugh. So disheartening. At least I had a lot of fun over the weekend. And when put into words, it almost seems like I accomplished much more than I actually did. Hurray!

Frightening Felines

Time to scratch another Indie Gala Trash Game off the good ol’ Steam backlog – I’ve played and finished Spooky Cats.

Spooky Cats is a very basic platformer, and it looks and sounds like it’s a Flash game from 1998. Hell, it probably is, but I’m not about to go and do the research. That’s against my policy. I much prefer to just talk out of my butt and sound like a complete moron.

Anyhow, the game is like, I dunno, 22 levels long, and many of them are just barely larger than a single screen. So it’s a brief game. There are a few longer stages, and one or two of them do have some semblance of a challenge. It’s not enough to save the game, however, because it’s really not very fun. In fact, I only powered through to the end because I realized almost right away that it was going to be an investment of less than an hour of my time. An easy write-off.

The levels are very basic, mostly just about getting to the end while avoiding monsters and spikes. Some require you to grab a key to unlock the exit door, and others task you with finding a little girl’s body and then reuniting it with her disembodied spirit. Yeah, it’s a little weird. You will also collect pennies throughout your travels, and a certain number are required to unlock the final stage. I don’t remember how many you need, exactly, but it’s low enough that if you grab pennies very diligently, you’ll have way more than necessary by the time you get there.

Only one thing really stood out about Spooky Cats, and that’s the aforementioned final stage. It’s a boss battle of sorts, against a witch-cat sitting in a toilet. Said witch is invincible while on its throne, and will periodically fire off magic blasts that become monsters if they hit the floor. The objective is to get to the little girl body behind a locked door, but I had no idea how exactly you get the key. After getting killed four or five times, it seemed to spawn completely at random, finally allowing me to finish the stage. Once you put the girl’s body and soul back together, the witch starts flying around, and you just have to dash into it a couple times. After that, the screen jump-cuts to an ending card that says “you finished the greatest game ever made!” or something to that effect. And that’s it. So it goes.

Would I recommend Spooky Cats? Not at all. If you want to throw away an hour on a no-budget platformer about a little pink blob, stylized to look like a cat, in a haunted mansion, then I guess this is for you. But for the rest of the world, there’s absolutely no reason to bother. Spooky Cats is not fun, it’s not engaging, it’s not especially nice to look at, and it has no plot. It is entirely pointless and I’m glad that I can consider it to be a free “bonus” that came packed in with other, (hopefully) more worthwhile games.

*NB: This game costs $2.99 USD on Steam. I paid $5 CAD for the 10-game Indie Gala bundle it came in. That’s a hot deal if I ever saw one.

Let’s talk about VR, baby

I spent last Sunday afternoon playing with an HTC Vive again, and much to my chagrin, I am now sold on VR.

Well, not literally sold, as VR is still way too expensive for me. But I’m willing to accept it as a legitimate thing that is cool, rather than just another silly flash in the pan.

I played a whole bunch of different games, so let’s take a brief look at each of them. Or at least the more notable ones. I should note that I think nearly everything I played was just a demo, and that I didn’t spend more than about 15 minutes with any one piece of software.

Continue reading Let’s talk about VR, baby

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – February 2017

Sometimes I wonder why I even bother to do these introductory blurbs for the Monthend posts. I guess they’re more traditional than anything at this point.

Anyway, thank Zeus that February is finally over. Two more days to Switch!

~ Game Over ~

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PS4) – This may be my new jam. Like back in the day when I got really into Silent Hill and then Resident Evil DS, and beat them like a hundred times each. That’s what’s happening here. I’ve beaten it three times now. Currently working on hard mode and DLC.

Drakengard 3 (PS3) – Cleared branches A, B, and C. Played some of the DLC chapters, and got stuck on the intensely hard final boss of branch D.

Citadale (WiiU) – A slightly above-par Castlevania clone that is packed with just enough little annoyances that it comes out looking shoddier than it should. I intend to review it in full.

The Perplexing Orb (WiiU) – Booted it up because I thought it would be good for this article, but then I ended up really enjoying it. Kind of a cheap Monkey Ball wannabe.

Ninja Senki DX (PS4) – Free PS+ game. Lured me in by looking like a Game Boy Color game, but I only got to level 4 before I said “Eff it, I hate this” and deleted it.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – February 2017

Six terrible Wii U eShop games!

The Wii U is dead and I’m the only person who liked it.

Okay, maybe not the only person, but some days it sure feels like it. Wii U lived a short and underwhelming life, but it was home to some of the best games that I’ve ever played. Super Mario Maker, Splatoon, Yoshi’s Woolly World, Xenoblade Chronicles X, et cetera, et cetera. It’s also host to some absolute stinkers. Games so bad that no person should ever have to suffer their existence.

Fortunately, these games are squirreled away in the depths of the eShop, where they can be forgotten and die without harming too many with their terribleness. It’s very much opposite the Wii, where there were rows and rows of awful shovelware populating store shelves, tricking naïve parents into buying the absolute worst games for their kids.

As a bit of a last hurrah before the Switch’s launch in a few days, here is a short list of six Wii U eShop games that nobody should ever play. Not that you would. Because you don’t own a Wii U. Jerk.

So why did I buy them, you ask? Either because I thought they may have some legitimate merit to them, or they were on sale for a dollar (give or take) and I figured they’d be good for a laugh. Your job is to figure out which is which!

Continue reading Six terrible Wii U eShop games!

Two halves for the price of one

I just realized that I never did my weekend movie review for this week! This is what happens when you give me a Monday off!

First, I watched The Darkness. It was a pretty bad Poltergeist rip-off with Kevin Bacon. I mean, I don’t think it was intentionally trying to be like Poltergeist, but all the story beats fell somewhere between “suspiciously similar” and “bang on.” I guess the big difference is that it tried to touch on each individual family member’s personal issue(s). The most disturbing of the bunch was the teenage daughter, who was suffering from bulimia. Alone, that’s not so bad. I’ve dealt with bulimia IRL before. What took it to the next level was that she was barfing into containers and keeping them all under her bed. Bleeeecch.

I was so disappointed with The Darkness that I also went ahead and watched The Great Muppet Caper immediately afterward. Which was much better! The songs were fun, the gags were hilarious, and the fourth wall was thoroughly destroyed. I quite enjoyed -and was somewhat shocked by- how far they cranked up Gonzo’s “daredevil” personality, which was to the point where every second line was him fetishizing pain in some way or another. If I had one gripe, it’s that Miss Piggy’s synchronized swimming scene/song seemed to drag on for way longer than it needed to. Otherwise, a stellar follow-up to The Muppet Movie. Bravo, Jim Henson! Bravo!

And that’s it for this week’s rushed and generally thoughtless movie reviews. Until next time!

The First Skunk Bundle

I don’t know if I’ve ever really gotten into it here, but I am endlessly fascinated by bad video games. I like bad movies, too, but terrible video games are even more delicious. And they’ve got to be real bad. If a game is just mediocre, that’s boring and no fun to dissect. But when you have a game that is consistently making you wonder what the heck the developers were thinking, that’s the real good stuff.

To put it simply, the more of a “complete garbage fire” a game is, the better.

And that’s where The First Skunk Bundle comes in. A $25 eShop game that for some reason went on sale for free a while back, this is a pack of five games that range in quality from passable to, well, complete garbage fire. Let’s have a look-see and break down the contents.

No, wait. First, I feel obliged to mention that the music on the game select screen is a piss-poor piano rendition of Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)”. So poor, in fact, that I thought that it was a piss-poor rendition of the Friends theme at first. In retrospect, they do have seem to have a similar melody. Maybe? Am I crazy?

Continue reading The First Skunk Bundle

It’s a Madhouse

True to my word, I’ve still been deep into Resident Evil 7. I have beaten it three (3) times now, and have started up a fourth run. This run is what I’ve been dreading since the start… the Madhouse run.

“Madhouse” difficulty is RE7’s hard mode. Unlike standard hard modes, it doesn’t just increase the health of monsters and the damage you take. It does those things and more, like shuffling around key items to slightly change how you progress through the game. It locks certain items behind collectibles. It removes almost all checkpoints, and makes you use consumable items to save, just like the REs of yore. There’s probably even more to it, but I’m still stuck on the boss of the first chapter. I spent nearly half an hour last night being killed by her over and over again, each time inching ever closer to victory.

Needless to say, Madhouse is really, really hard. I am terrified of how bad the rest is going to be.

I also began playing some of the “Banned Footage Vol.1” DLC pack. The first “tape” is called Nightmare, and it’s a mini-game that tasks you with surviving several waves of enemies. And it plays out in hours from midnight until dawn, so it kind of feels like RE7’s take on the Five Nights at Freddy’s formula. I ran it twice, and made it to about 4:30 on the second try before I accidentally got backed into a corner and torn to shreds.

The game takes place in the basement of the Baker house, and you have to craft items and weapons from scrap. Scrap is collected from several machines around the area, which will constantly be filling up throughout the run. The game kind of forces you to mix it up too, as every time you craft something, the cost in scrap goes up a little. So you can really only fall back on that shotgun for so long. You can also place turrets and traps throughout the basement, which I definitely need to fit into my strategy better.

The cool thing about it is that even failure moves you closer to getting through the night. You score at the end of every run is added to a running total, and once you hit certain thresholds you’ll unlock some helpful feature. Sometimes it’s an increase to the scrap you start with, sometimes its new things to craft. The final reward, infinite ammo, is placed at a cumulative score of ten million points. By the time you earn that sucker, you’ll probably have gotten good enough to clear the game without it anyway. Probably helpful for the harder Night Terror mode.

I did not play the “Bedroom” mini-game at all. I have no idea what it’s about.

The last bit of DLC is the “Ethan Must Die” mini-game, wherein you’re plopped down in a super-hard remix of the Baker house, with the goal of unlocking the greenhouse and killing the boss there. You start with nothing, and you only find items in crates, which are randomized. When you die, you leave behind a statue that lets you reclaim one (random) item you had been holding. I tried playing once, and found two chem fluids, which left me with only the knife to battle through a gauntlet of Molded. As one might expect, it didn’t go so well.

I think that there’s definitely some appeal here, but it’s going to be a long road. People are finishing the mini-game, but they’re probably people more dedicated than I. If it allowed you to earn upgrades through failure like Nightmare, I may be more inclined to keep playing. However, it’s more like Dark Souls where the upgrades you earn are knowledge of the layout of the house and where all the monsters are placed. From that point on, you’re just hoping that the crates work out in your favour.

Anyway, I think the point here is that I’ve cleared all of the easy stuff in RE7. It’s all expert-level content from here on out. I might have to dial it back to easy mode and complete the 4-hour speedrun to unlock… a thing… that might help the Madhouse run. It’s the only unlockable item that I don’t have yet, so it’s my last chance to soften than extreme difficulty even a bit.

But enough of the blah blah blah. Time to get back to dying playing!

(Usually) Weekly Movie Post

Last weekend, as has become something of a tradition, I watched a movie. This time around, it was a pull from my way-too-long Netflix queue (and people complain that there isn’t enough on Netflix). It was called As Above, So Below and was sold to me as a spooky adventure into the tunnels of Hell. Or something like that. Here’s the Netflix synopsis:

A beautiful tomb raider and her crew hunt for treasure in the catacombs of Paris and find themselves in a hellish underworld.

First off: the “tomb raider” isn’t beautiful. She’s cute, sure, but not like, stop-and-stare gorgeous.

Secondly, the movie was kinda boring. It was one of those movies where the main character keeps doing stuff while people are constantly telling her not to, because it’s either illegal or everyone else who has tried has either disappeared or wound up dead. Which is fine in an adventure movie or a comedy, but in a horror film like this, you just don’t sympathize when horrible things start to happen. It’s impossible to feel bad for over-entitled millennials.

It’s also a POV film. Not “found footage” necessarily, because (spoiler) several characters survive. But it’s still all shot from a combination of a handicam and GoPros. The question of how the footage was recovered from some of said GoPros when they were visibly destroyed, we’ll just have to handwave away. Regardless, I’m not really into the whole POV thing. Sometimes it works, and sometimes (like this time) it’s just annoying.

The plot follows Ms Not-Lara Croft in search of the Philosopher’s Stone. Yes. Despite having like seventeen degrees, she’s a firm believer in alchemy. So she assembles a rag-tag group of friends and French spelunkers, and they begin their journey down into the catacombs of France. On the way, they pass a cult of topless women chanting what are surely completely innocent incantations. You might think that this is an important plot point while viewing the film, but these busty ladies never make another appearance.

One thing the film did very well was evoke a sense of claustrophobia. It does this well in general by being set in tight underground tunnels, but there is one very long and very excruciating scene where a character is briefly stuck in a tight passage and starts freaking out. It was very difficult to watch, and had me squirming in my seat the whole time. I’m not exactly claustrophobic myself, but I definitely have some degree of cleithrophobia, as I have had nightmares of getting trapped in tight places for as long as I can remember.

So, what do we watch horror movies for? The kills, of course. They’re… kinda blah here. The first girl to go gets her face bashed in by a possessed mole-man. Another guy falls down a well and goes splat. Then the head French-guy gets sucked into a burning car which promptly implodes and somehow leaves him buried underground with just his feet sticking out. And that was it. The other three characters survive. Though one of them gets his jugular torn out by a gargoyle demon, he is saved by the healing powers of a magic kiss.

What did I tell you already? This movie isn’t very good.

And that’s really too bad, because it seems like a decent premise and the build-up is interesting enough. But in the end it was a bit of a let down. Not “Gah! I’ve wasted my time!” bad, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. If you want to see some good spelunking-gone-wrong movies, try The Descent or… I can’t think of any others. What about Sanctum? Was Sanctum good? I can’t remember anything about it, so probably not.