Ys Seven (PC) – I wrote about how I was struggling a bit near the halfway point, but the difficulty of Nightmare mode kind of cleared up after that. At least until the final bosses, which required a heck of a lot of grinding to beat. Still a very good game, just not one you should play on the hardest difficulty setting.
The Room (PC) – Having no relation to the infamous movie of the same name, this is a game about solving a series of puzzle boxes. It was a lot of fun, though the puzzles were maybe a little bit on the easy side. Took less than two hours to complete all five chapters, and I look forward to playing the sequels.
It seems like there was a very long time where VR was just something I’d never be able to have for myself. It needs a huge room, an expensive headset, an even more expensive computer… There were just so many barriers to entry that I just ignored VR as a thing that existed.
Then Facebook started bombarding me with Oculus Quest 2 ads, and at some point I decided to see what it was all about. Now here we are a year later, and I’m enjoying a… fairly limited library of VR games. There just aren’t all that many games available for Quest 2. But that actually doesn’t matter, because it has the best game of them all: Resident Evil 4.
Full disclosure: this feature has been a lot harder than I expected it to be. I’m a very contented person, and I really don’t want for much. So while I had a good dozen ideas right out of the box, I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for the back half.
And so here we are, and I’m port-begging for Xenoblade Chronicles X to get released on Switch.
Well, that is to say, a very specific arcade. An arcade that has the “holy trinity” of 90’s brawlers: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Captain America and the Avengers, and The Simpsons. Though honestly, I’d gladly accept even one of the three.
Growing up, our Chuck E Cheese restaurant had those three cabinets, all nicely aligned back-to-back-to-back, and they were where I spent the vast majority of my tokens. Those and Cruis’n USA, but I’m less nostalgic about that one. While we do have a few modern establishments that include arcade games as part of their schtick, none of them have any of the three I listed. It’s all skee-balls and coin pushers ’round these parts.
So that’s really it. My list of demands is short. Not cheap, mind you, but short. I feel like I’m putting out a reasonable ask, but I think the fact is that those arcade cabinets have left the city and are never coming back. I did see (and play!) TMNT once, but it was at a bar that has long since been replaced by a spa or something that I care equally little about.
Remember that big indie game fad from like six years ago? Five Nights at Freddy’s? Well, it’s still alive and kicking, and while the newest game in the series isn’t due to release for another two weeks, all of the previous titles have now made their way out of the PC market and onto consoles.
Last December I got a lot of extra money from sources I will not mention, and since I was planning to start creating more video content for my YouTube channel, I decided to spend a bunch of said money on a new computer. In this sense, it was a complete success! The new machine was more than capable of taking on the heavy video processing load that was making my old PC wheeze worse than me after 20 seconds of light jogging.
However! When I selected my new computer, I did not put any consideration into VR capabilities. Any why would I? I bought an Oculus Quest 2 specifically for the fact that it doesn’t need to be tethered to a PC. Fast forward to summer 2021 when I bought an (off-brand) Oculus link cable for reasons I can’t remember, and through some sequence of events ended up trying to play some PC VR games. It did not go well.
Castlevania: Bloodlines (Genesis) – Much faster than the ‘Vanias on Nintendo consoles, but still feels slow because so many enemies are tanky. It brings back the “whip gets powered down when you get hit” mechanic, which suuuuucks. There are a lot of cool graphical things happening in this one, and I like that it has two fairly different playable characters (of course I played through with both).
Resident Evil 4 VR (Oculus) – Played to record for YouTube. (Twice!)
Alisa (PC) – You can see my full impressions in this YouTube playlist. TLDW? It’s a 90’s survival horror throwback that really nails the presentation and stumbles just a little with the gameplay. Also it’s a Kickstarter project that is not quite finished.
Continuing my quest through the series of Ys video games, I am nearing the end of the road with Ys Seven. Considering that it has a very similar gameplay style to Ys: Memories of Celceta (my favourite so far), I was quite excited to start it. However! Since Ys Seven came first… it’s a little bit rougher around the edges.
The first problem is my own: I liked Memories of Celceta enough to play through it twice in a row and collect all the achievements. So I figured that I might as well check the achievements for Seven ahead of time and try to get them all in one run. Unfortunately, there’s an achievement for completing the game on Nightmare mode, and despite knowing that Ys games are actually pretty tough, I took the bait.
A couple months ago, I made a terrible mistake: I purchased Power Wash Simulator.
Maybe you’ve heard of it? It had been all over the internet recently, or so I’ve heard. This is a game that is exactly what it says on the tin: you’re given a pressure washer and a series of things that need washing and… then you just get to it.
Buying this video game was not a mistake due to quality concerns. No, in fact, for a Steam Early Access game, it’s very stable and fully-featured. It’s also a lot of fun, calling back pleasant memories of cleaning all the goop off of Isle Delfino in Super Mario Sunshine.
Power Wash Simulator, however, was a mistake because it’s far too addictive. I spent no less than nine hours playing it on the day I bought it, and then devoted all of my free time over the next two days to it. I didn’t think it was going to be so long. I kept telling myself I’d put it down after “just one more job” or “once I finish this side of the building” or some such nonsense. But I didn’t put it down. Not until every last speck of dirt was washed away.
I just finished up a replay of Kirby: Planet Robobot for 3DS, and I’m thinking that it’s a strong contender for second-best Kirby game of all time. First place will always be Kirby Super Star, of course. Robobot is just so much fun, has so much fan service, and of course, allows you to ride around in giant mech suits that can absorb enemies’ powers just like Kirby does. It’s a heck of a game!
It also got me thinking about how after the first time I finished it, I decided to write an article ranking all of the different mech suit variations. I wanted to read it over and then contrast it with my thoughts from this current playthough, to see if and how my opinions had changed over the years.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that I never actually finished writing that article!
Alas, it was sitting there, the text maybe a quarter finished. There are no images uploaded. Presumably, the looming threat of having to find screenshots is what dissuaded me from continuing to write. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last.
Or it could be that I just lost my muse partway through. That happens too. It may very well be that I felt like I was embarking on a journey to write sixteen or so vaguely similar paragraphs, and decided that there was no point in continuing on that path. Who knows!?
The point is, I didn’t finish writing my Kirby: Planet Robobot mech suit ranking list back then, and I sure as heck am not going to do it now. I’m just a little bit sad that I wasn’t able to relive that little bit of nostalgia.
Besides, it’s obvious that the Jet and Mike mechs are far and away the best of the bunch. Like, it’s not even a contest.
