Video Games – Page 23

Ys: A Video Game Review

I’ve played a lot of video games with stupid names. Boktai, Tactics Ogre, Irritating Stick, Dissidia: Final Fantasy. The list could go on, but I think we have a new champion here. Ys Chronicles+: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen is one heck of a mouthful and basically says nothing at all about the game. Well, it sort of does, but do you think that someone who’s never heard of the Ys series before will have a hot clue how to parse it?

I mean, Average Joe wouldn’t even realize that the word “Ys” is pronounced “ease.” And even I only know that because I’ve been hearing people say it on podcasts for years now.

But that’s all besides the point. Ys is a video game. The first in its line, in fact! Well, not the one I played, though. I played the remade version of Ys. But I also watched a speedrun of the original version, and it’s actually surprisingly faithful to the original, while adding a bunch of extra stuff and making some little tweaks here and there. Not unlike the remake of the original Resident Evil. So I guess what I’m saying is, it’s more or less the “ideal” kind of remake.

Game Boy Advance: A Collectro-spective

I was poking through my chest of forgotten video games, systems, and accessories the other day, just looking around at things. No practical reason or whatever. Just the semi-annual “maybe I’ll find my lost GBA SP this time” rooting around. During this particular adventure, I pulled out the Ziploc baggie that holds all of my GBA cartridges. Wanting to look at the beautiful collection, I spilled them out onto the floor and lined them up. What I found was nothing short of shocking.

Somehow, I only own nineteen Game Boy Advance games. As someone whose GBA was as good as attached to his hands, I find this very hard to believe. I know that those were days when I was poor, rentals existed, and far fewer video games were actually being made, but it still seems unreasonably light. At some point I could have sold some to lighten the load, but… these are GBA cartridges. They take up virtually no space, so there’s no big incentive to sell, other than desperation for cash.

First day in the village

Hey I bought Resident Evil Village. Surprise!

Also I recorded my initial play session of the game, which lasted roughly 45 minutes. I stopped upon my first death, both because I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go to avoid said death, and because it was past my bedtime. Damn these video games that launch at 11PM on Thursday nights!

Aaaanyway, first impressions are… I like it. I’m not entirely blown away yet, but it’s very early and there are a few little nuggets here that suggest very good things to come. First of all, it’s clearly a direct sequel to RE7, what with Ethan still being the protagonist, the first person perspective, et cetera, et cetera. But then you get through the prologue and into the real gameplay, and when you open your inventory… it’s more or less Leon’s attaché case from RE4. Yes! The return of the best inventory system ever! Also the first major setpiece traps you in a medium-small area flooding with never-ending monsters until a bell sounds and summons them all away. Sound familiar?

Yes, it looks like RE8 is going to be a fusion of RE4 and RE7. In other words: the perfect game for your good pal, Ryan.

PZ35/21 – May check-in

The Wind Waker is done, so we’re still on schedule. Ahead of schedule, in fact, because despite my trepidation about how it wouldn’t be very fun to play alone, I did play through Four Swords Adventures as well. And it was pretty fun. Like, it’s a legit good Zelda game, but definitely requires at least two players to get the most out of it. Being able to carry only one tool at a time is not ideal, but doesn’t ruin the experience.

FSA, in fact, was enjoyable (and short) enough that I burned through it in scarcely a week’s time. With that out of the way, I was able to dig into and complete The Minish Cap without regret. I haven’t ever revisited Minish Cap since it was released, and it might have turned out be the single best reason to have done this Zelda series revisit. Minish Cap is super fun! I remember it being really good, but I would say that I had a wonderful time playing it again. Might have to add this one into the regular rotation.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: April 2021

~ Game Over ~

Super Mario 3D Land (3DS) – I did all the Special worlds. As if that’s a surprise. But I’m not playing the entire game again as Luigi. Probably.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD (WiiU) – You know what’s weird? Nintendo put a lot of work into refining Wind Waker for this remake, but they didn’t add in any of the dungeons that were apparently cut to get the original game out the door faster. I wonder why. Were said dungeons completely incomplete? Were they maybe just not very good? I guess us regular folk will never really know.

Hitman (2016) (Stadia) – Very cool game that does a lot to make stealth-based gameplay fun. Janky in a lot of ways, but never so much that it ruins the experience. Also, holy cow are there a lot of things to do. The extra missions and challenges really at a ton of value to a game that would be very short if you were to just mainline the story.

(Un)boxing Day

The tldr of it is: I don’t buy collector’s editions of video games, on the grounds that I don’t need the extra clutter. But NieR Replicant Ver.1.2247448713 is ~~a remake~~ an upgrade to one of my favourite games ever, and I really, really wanted that special pair of music CDs that came with the ridiculously pricey White Snow Edition.

One thing that I forgot to mention in the video is specifically about the name “White Snow Edition”. It sounds kind of cute or whatever, at least to the layman. But if you’ve played NieR, or at least know the lore behind it… suddenly that name becomes a little more sinister.

Consider that little nugget of intrigue to be my way to try to get you interested in reading more about NieR Replicant. Or to, you know, play the game. The upgrade looks pretty spiffy for a eleven-year-old game, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what else has changed. Hopefully rare drop rates.

99 Yellow Pac-Mans

Namco shadow-dropped Pac-Man 99 onto the Switch last week, and I’ve been playing it. That is probably the most to-the-point introductory sentence I’ve ever written.

A Nintendo Switch Online exclusive, Pac-Man 99 is a battle royale game where 99 people start playing parallel games of Pac-Man, and the last Pac alive is declared the winner. It’s the exact same formula as 2018’s Tetris 99, and the late Super Mario Bros 35. Which is to say that it’s a fun as heck spin on a classic video game, and I will never ever be able to claim a first place victory.

I didn’t watch the release trailer or read about it or anything before diving into the actual game, so I had a lot of questions about how exactly Pac-Man would work in this context. It’s a little weird! No longer do you progress through stages as you clear the maze: now, the objective is to simply eat enough dots to make a fruit spawn, which will in turn replenish the dots and power pellets. This results in a mutation of Pac-Man that can theoretically go on forever.

PZ35/21 – April check-in

So things slowed down in March. I only got through one Zelda game (Majora’s Mask), but also I played it twice, so… Do I get extra credit? The Wind Waker is chugging along at a nice clip, and as long as I make it to the end before April is over, I’m still on schedule. But the games are getting longer, and we’re in Monster Hunter Rise season now, which is probably going to be the focus of most of my video game hours.

Next on the list is Four Swords Adventures, and I’m thinking about cutting it out. It’s just not very fun to play alone. And getting a group together that is actually going to commit to completing the game seems like an impossible task. Plus… it wouldn’t be recorded anyway. So I could just write a story about how I got a bunch of people together to play it off-camera, and you’d never know if it were true or not anyway.

Also, skipping FSA will get me to The Minish Cap faster, which I actually do want to play.

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.