Category: Video Games

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – October 2016

Every October (and even in late September), I get so excited about Halloween, and intend to play a bunch of spooky games to celebrate. And that… doesn’t usually pan out. Was 2016 any different? Read on to find out!

~ Game Over ~

FNAF: Sister Location (PC) – If you don’t count the RPG spinoff, this is the first FNAF game I’ve really gotten into. And it’s spectacular. While it is not quite as terrifying as its older brothers, Sister Location is still Spooky As Heck.

Year Walk (WiiU) – I’ve been itching to replay this for months, telling myself “wait for Halloween” and finally the time came! It’s a really great adventure with clever puzzles and a neat twist halfway through. Turns out that you can clear it in well under an hour, but still, it’s Pretty Darn Spooky.

Pokémon Pearl (DS) – While I have a team that’s half spooky-looking Pokémon (Misdreavus, Crobat, and Luxray), and the bad guys want to basically destroy the universe, Pokémon is simply Not Spooky.

Metroid Prime: Federation Force (3DS) – A regular Metroid game could definitely be considered spooky, but with Federation Force’s focus on action and teamwork, it falls just short of the bar. Not Spooky, but a very solid game otherwise.

Picross 3D Round 2 (3DS) – Decidedly Not Spooky. In fact, it may be the least spooky game on the list, with its relaxing atmosphere and lack of any sort of conflict.

Final Fantasy VIII (PC) – There are a number of creepy monsters and witches in this game, but overall, I’d have to say that it’s Not Spooky. The hammy characters and colourful graphics just don’t lend themselves well to creating a frightful atmosphere.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – October 2016

Half-hearted-oween

Halloween may be my favourite holiday. Not to the extent that Dinosaur Dracula and The Sexy Armpit love it, but it’s definitely the annual occasion that plays to the most of my interests. You’ve got candy, you’ve got monsters, you’ve got pumpkins. All the best things that modern life has to offer. Also, it takes place in autumn, the best season of all.

And yet, I feel like in 2016, I’ve really pooped the bed in regards to celebrating Halloween properly. The fact that my house remains undecorated is more of a by-product of me not knowing if I’d still be living there come October 31st, but I could certainly be dabbling in other ways of showing my appreciation for the best season of all. That said, it’s time for a play-by-play of all the Halloweeny things I’ve done so far.

Foodstuffs

  • I’ve eaten more Oreos over the last six weeks than throughout the rest of the year, and while most of them were Pumpkin Spice flavoured, which is only mildly Halloweeny, there was a pack of actual Halloween Oreos in there. You know, the ones that are just plain Oreos, but with the amazing neon orange filling? Pretty great.
  • I bought a pack of Pillsbury ready-to-bake Pumpkin Spice cookies. While they were maybe not quite appropriate for the holiday, they were the amazing.
  • There are two packs of Pillsbury ready-to-bake sugar cookies in my fridge, and they are in the spirit of the season. One has pumpkins, and the other black cats. I intend to make them next weekend.
  • I bought a box of Coffin Crisp to keep at my desk at work, but that’s been it for Halloween-themed candy. It seems like interesting ‘Ween editions of established candy is getting harder an harder to find. At least here in stupid Canada, where fun junk food is illegal.
  • While at a craft show, I purchased a pack of skull-shaped cookies. They were frosted in an assortment of neon colours, and they were delicious. Not really $1-per cookie delicious, but as a one-time thing, not a bad buy.
  • There is a box of Spookylicious Pop-Tarts in my cupboard that I have yet to break into. I am under the impression that they are regular chocolate fudge Pop-Tarts, but with orange frosting and fun bat-shaped sprinkles.
  • My mom bought me a single box of Franken Berry, which I appreciated greatly. But during all of my travels, I haven’t been able to find another box, or any of the other monster cereals. What awful luck I have.

Media

  • I have played exactly one good horror-themed video game so far this season, and that is Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location. And really, if you’re only going to play one scary game, it’s… decent enough. Like, I think it’s a great game, but there are many more substantial options.
  • I also played one terrible scary game, and it’s called Haunted Hotel. It was garbage.
  • There’s still time to pop in a couple quick horror games, though. I do intend to make a run at the first Silent Hill, as I can reliably finish it in a single sitting. Really, I should have put Paper Mario: Color Splash on the back-burner this month and focused on one of the many horror-themed Steam games I’ve not played.
  • The Shallows and Black Mirror: White Christmas are dramas that lie somewhere on the ‘frightening’ scale, but don’t really fit the spirit of Halloween. But I don’t think I’d feel quite right watching the latter as a Christmas movie either.
  • Emelie and The Invitation are a little closer to the right kind of spooky, as they don’t take place on a beach or during Christmastime, but they still aren’t overly Halloweeny. Definitely a disturbing pair of films, however.
  • I did watch Creepshow and Creepshow 2 back in late September, which are A+ as far as Halloween spirit goes, but honestly, I wasn’t crazy about them. A couple of the stories were really good, but others bored me to tears. I’d recommend looking up “Something to Tide You Over” and “Old Chief Wood’nhead” independently, rather than watching the entirety of both anthologies.
  • The VVitch was really great! So good that I wrote a number of words about it!
  • I really, really watch to watch The Babadook, but just the Google image results have been giving me nightmares for weeks. I don’t think I can hack it.
  • Other movies on the docket, that I probably won’t find time to watch: Hausu, Alien, Burying the Ex, Zombeavers, etc, etc…

Other?

  • I suppose it falls under media, but I choose to note that I’ve been following the Purple Stuff Podcast in this section because it’s a little empty otherwise. Anyway, Matt and Jay have put out a couple Halloween-themed episodes this year, but not nearly as many as they did in 2015. Maybe I’ll just have to listen to those old ones again.
  • My house is so sparsely decorated this year. It’s sad. There’s a weird aluminum pumpkin by the door, and a lights-and-sounds door knocker… on the wall downstairs. That’s it. By the time I knew I’d still be living in the house for Halloween, I had already given up on decorating.
  • I do have a candy corn-scented candle that has been out and lit. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a very strong scent, so it’s more about mood lighting than anything else.
  • My search for better Halloween candles has come up empty-handed. Of course, I haven’t been looking especially hard, but you would think that this kind of thing would just be jumping off the shelves at you during this time of year.
  • I don’t have a costume or plan for Halloween night. I’ll probably spend it the same way I do every other Monday night: at my parents’ house, watching The Bachelorette Canada. Which, you know, is totally fine by me.
  • I haven’t even been to the Spirit store this year. I am the worst Halloween fan ever.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – September 2016

Birthday month! Also, month of all the games. My 3DS was already in constant use since July thanks to Monster Hunter, but now it’s just flooded with huge, awesome games that tickle all of my fancies.

~ Game Over ~

KickBeat (PS3) – A game about punching endless waves of goons to the rhythm of angry nu-rock. Surprisingly, I really liked it!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (GBA) – I’m going through a TMNT thing right now, okay? Replayed this for the first time since like 2004, and I am convinced that the Shredder fight is literally impossible without cheating.

Jotun: Valhalla Edition (WiiU) – Wherein you play as a Viking warrior who must earn her place in Valhalla after suffering an inglorious death. This is done by finding and slaying a number of elemental giants. It’s a really great game!

NEO-NOW! (PC) – A pretty boring Early Access game. Maybe it’ll get better in time? I don’t really care and am just calling it a wash. To the “Done Forever” pile with you!

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – September 2016

Not worth the bytes

Last month, I bought a bundle of games from IndieGala, as I am wont to do. I purchased it for less than four Canadian dollars, and it contained exactly one game that I was actually interested in: Dragon Fin Soup. I still have not played this game.

However, I did install and play Apartment 666 right away. I had a pretty strong feeling of what it would be from the name, and I was partially correct; it was in fact a barely interactive scare-em-up. What I did not anticipate was that it is also a junky PT clone. That is to say, it’s a game where you keep walking through the same hallway over and over as progressively spookier things happen each time.

It was a pretty crappy game, with exactly one moving object and a record number of typos. If I have to say something nice about it, it’s that the developer at least tried to give it a unique story. I think. I’m not entirely clear on what PT’s plot is.

Also, since I’m a huge baby that gets scared by his own shadow, it did spook me well and good enough that I Alt+Tabbed out of the game while chanting “nope nope nope nope” on at least two occasions. So there’s that.

In addition to Apartment 666, I installed and played NEO-NOW! on a whim, and was similarly disinterested. To be fair, though, at least this one is an Early Access game, while the former is considered to be a complete experience (if that’s actually something you can call a video game these days).

NEO-NOW! is a very odd game. You begin by selecting a character model from a group of about five, and then a woman appears in the background, and suddenly your motorcycle is crashed at what looks like a gas station.

It’s a top-down action-type game reminiscent of old Zeldas or maybe Gauntlet? You waddle around shooting/stabbing enemies and collecting the odd power-up. They start out with a sewer level right out of the gate, which is never a good sign, and then once you finish the sewer, you’re immediately swarmed by guys who blow up once they get close enough. This kills you immediately, of course.

There was no hook for me in this game, so I got bored after about ten minutes, when I had exhausted my small supply of bullets and got repeatedly blown up while trying to stab the kamikaze guys to death. I couldn’t find a path forward on that screen, so my adventure was as good as over anyway.

I don’t know if I’m going to go back to it. Probably not. It’s not like it’s a notably terrible game or anything. I’ve played (and paid more money for) far worse. It’s just that NEO-NOW! presents nothing that makes me want to keep playing. Like I said, it’s got no hook. Also, there aren’t enough bullets and trying to stab your way to victory is no fun.

So there we are. Two more games down, neither of them worth my time, but fortunately I can write them off as having essentially been free with the purchase of another game I was more interested in. I’m going to try to get through the rest of the bundle by the end of the month, but no promises. There be many more interesting games on my plate right now.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – August 2016

In August, I started organizing all my Steam games. To that end, I decided to actually start playing a few of those indie games I have hundreds of from cheap bundles. I also decided that it’s time to let go of truly “finishing” games and just call them done once I’m bored. For Steam games, that is. If I spend $80 on a console game, I’m damn well still going to try to wring every bit of content out of it.

~ Game Over ~

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii) – It is finished. Click here to read my long, rambling, final impressions, if you haven’t already.

Monster Hunter Generations (3DS) – Cleared both the solo and multiplayer campaigns. And by “cleared”, I mean “I did all the key quests to get to the final bosses and unlock stuff.” There is still a ton of content to play through! I haven’t even seen all the monsters yet. And the Deviants. Oh Lord, the Deviants!

Bonk’s Adventure (TG16) – I was really into Super Bonk on SNES as a child, and was so awed by the ads for Bonk games that appeared in comics, but I’d never played a “classic” Bonk before. Turns out, ehhhhh, not so hot. The framework of a decent game is there, but the levels are uninspired and Bonk’s got really strange momentum.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – August 2016

Cloudbuilt is way too hard for me

I don’t think that Cloudbuilt is really the right game for me. Which is disheartening, because it’s built from a lot of pieces that I like independent of one another. It’s cool, fast, and action-packed. It’s got a beautiful graphical style. The levels are like something out of a really intense version of Super Mario Galaxy. And yet, I find the gameplay to be overly difficult and frustrating. I can see my younger self falling head over heels in love with Cloudbuilt 15 years ago, but Crotchety Old Ryan just can’t handle these lumps.

The game opens with you playing as a hologram/ghost girl navigating through some sort of ruins. Things already get troubled here: the girl moves about twice as fast as my reflexes can handle. I thought that maybe I could get used to it, and by the end of this tutorial level, I did feel like I mostly had a handle on it. Enough that I could move forward confidently, anyway.

Then the first level happened, and things got way more complicated and way faster. You get put into a real body, and that body has jet boosters and guns, in addition to the jumping and wall-running that you’re taught in the tutorial. The jet boosters are basically my death knell, as they move the game from very fast to Way Past Sonic fast. You need to use the boost very often, and I found myself blasting off into space over and over and over again. And this is on the first stage. With a difficulty rating of One. When I beat the stage, I went ahead and tried the hardest stage that unlocked (rated Three), and lost all my lives before I could even make it past the “intro” part of the stage.

Continue reading Cloudbuilt is way too hard for me

I probably won’t play Inside

Inside. It’s a video game. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Made by the same guys what did Limbo, and it’s a pretty similar game on a superficial level. It certainly looks neat, and after replaying Limbo, I got really excited to give it a go.

However, it wasn’t available on PS4 at the time, and I had no idea that it would finally go live on PSN last week. I was a little too anxious to wait, so I just watched the Game Grumps playthrough instead.

Now, this hasn’t deterred me from buying games before (see Bloodborne), but the enjoyment from a game like Inside comes less from the gameplay than the experience of the journey. Watching an LP is experience enough, in this case.

And so that, my friends, is my story of why I won’t play Inside. Sorry, Playdead. Your game is really cool, but you won’t be getting my $25. We’ll talk when it goes on sale for $5.

A real-life Crab Puncher

Nintendo has been drip-feeding us new Pokémon for what seems like ages now, but they really knocked it out of the park with the latest reveal: Crabrawler

It’s a boxing coconut crab! This is perfect! Seriously! Look at his surly face!

I’m sort of torn on the fact that it’s a pure fighting-type. On one hand, I want it to be dual fighting/water. But on the other hand, the lack of a water secondary type means that I won’t have two water-types with me (because Popplio).

Generation Seven is already loaded with amazing new Pokémon, and there are still probably a whole bunch still to come. Is it November yet???