Category: /b/

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.)

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.

 

Remembrances

I randomly clicked into the oldest archived posts on Nintendo World Report yesterday, only to find… Silly little bloggy-type posts. Just like you’ll find if you go back to the beginning of my own archive. I mean, yeah, I’ll still post something silly and irrelevant every once in a while, but it definitely hit me in the nostalgia for blogging all those many years ago.

And… I actually really miss the old “Page of Death” look, with all its poor design decisions, gaudy article backgrounds, and text of every colour on a single page. Actually I think a lot of it is that I miss designing everything from the ground up. Whether it looked good or not was irrelevant; I put thought into every aspect it! Now it’s just mash text into a box and hit the “schedule” button.

Well that went in a completely different direction than I’d intended… Oh well. Happy Wednesday!

So long, Best Social Media

Miiverse is dead, long live… well, I guess that’s just the end of it.

Today, Nintendo shut down Miiverse forever. It was a wonderful little social media experiment that let Wii U and 3DS users share thoughts, drawings, and screenshots of games. Nintendo also used it for special promotional events, and it was a valuable avenue for communicating with smaller game developers.

Of course, Twitter does all that, and from your phone, so.

Miiverse wasn’t perfect, but it did add a lot to Nintendo and video games culture. It gave rise to many memes, like “Y Can’t Metroid Crawl?” It provided us with one of the best Twitter accounts ever, @BadMiivesePost. And of course, there were the completely mind-boggling things on there like the always delightful Miiverse Water Guy.

If you were so inclined,  Nintendo offered a download of all your Miiverse posts up until last night, but I didn’t opt in. I felt it was better to just let it all go, rather than have another meaningless file to stick in a folder somewhere and forget about. It’s not like I had any especially insightful or funny posts, anyhow.

Honestly, I think the memories of how exciting Miiverse was at first are more important than the actual posts. It was a cool new feature to a cool new game console (which ended up being a dud for most), and I’m sure that I’ve spent much more time scrolling through Miivese posts than I ever will spend with the Twitter app. Oh well! It was a fun ride, but nothing lasts forever.

I think most of all, I’ll miss all the dick drawings that pop up after a game in Nintendo Land.

A problem from the first world

October is the worst time to be taking a course. It’s the only time of the year where doing season-related stuff really feels important, but all my free time is being sapped up by class and assignments and studying. That time is supposed to be wasted on spooky video games and cheesy horror movies that I’ve already seen seventeen times!

Jeez!

(Blogging is also falling way behind, I have like 46 draft posts that I have no time to finish.)

Game of Numbers

I ran some numbers today, and came out with the following information:

I have acquired 100 video games so far this year.

Now, this includes freemium games, free PS+ games, games purchased in bundles, so on and so forth. So it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Still, the point remains that I really need to stop getting new games, because I don’t have anywhere near enough time to play all this garbage.

Anyway, that’s just a tease. I have a massive spreadsheet from which I plan to come up with all sorts of irrelevant data come yearend. The one thing I haven’t ever kept track of is dollar value spent. Because, quite frankly, I really don’t want to know.

Ribs tickled? Check.

I was reviewing my bank account the other day and nearly died laughing when I saw this credit card payment entry:

(If you’re not aware, a merkin is a wig for your genitals.)

This came about because you aren’t allowed a ton of characters in a transaction description, so I often truncate it… this payment happened to be for Borderlands: The Handsome Collection and my ticket to The Merkin Sisters.

On pube wigs

A couple days ago, I went to see my very first Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival show. It was called The Merkin Sisters and I have no idea where to even start.

While my immediate reaction upon being asked to go to the show was “ugh, not some hipster amateur-hour bulls**t,” I took a few minutes to think it over, and decided that it would be something new and different to do. If nothing else it would likely be something vaguely interesting to talk about, if by some chance another human were to engage me in conversation.

Then I learned that it was a comedy show, and I was 100% on board.

Now, comedy is… not an entirely accurate descriptor. There were many laughs during the show, for sure, but it was more like a series of weird performance art pieces that just happened to elicit laughter from the audience. This was a bizzare show, a strange combination of interpretive dance, puppets, giant wigs, and some sort of weird menstruation bit involving a pink sweater and a red scarf. It was like a cross between sketch comedy and a hallucinogenic drug trip.

A show more about physical comedy and just being weird, the actresses (is that the right word?) were weirdly robotic throughout the show, often moving in quick, stilted motions and barking out lines emotionlessly in that weird way that performance artists do on TV. It was somehow even weirder after the show when they dropped their stage personas and acted like regular human beings as they thanked the audience, recommended other shows, and presented their merch.

I think that the nicest way to sum up my feelings about the experience is that I’m not smart enough to have really “gotten it.” It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. I just felt confused and bewildered more than anything. I was acutely aware that I wasn’t laughing as much as the rest of the audience, which makes me a little sad. I wanted to like it more than I did, but what can you do? I’d definitely recommend seeing The Merkin Sisters though, as it is absolutely unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. Maybe I didn’t get all the lulz, but I’m still glad that I went.