Category: Video Games

Closing the gap

I was looking over my 2011 backlog list yesterday and was a little surprised to see that I had the goal of replaying Luigi’s Mansion on there. I actually did that recently! Yay! That’s another one to stroke off, and one I didn’t actually expect to get around to.

I was originally looking at the list to try to formulate a game plan for the weekend, but then I remembered that my youngest bro had asked to come over and play Spelunky, so that’s probably all I’ll be doing for the bulk of today. It’s nice that I’ve managed to hook someone else on Spelunky, because I love it, and it’s a big exception in that I actually much prefer to play multiplayer. I find the game a lot harder with a second person (especially in the very rare case where both people are wielding shotguns), but it’s a game that’s still pretty fun even when you’re dying repeatedly. I find the process of dying over and over to learn the game a lot more fun in action-platformer form than RPG. Probably because a winning Spelunky run takes an average of 15 minutes, whereas finishing the main dungeon in Shiren the Wanderer will generally take a lot longer. I love the idea behind roguelikes, but find it difficult to make the time investment required to learn them well enough to win.

Sunday will likely be devoted to The Last Story, but I’m thinking that if I really dedicate myself I could rush through what’s left of Master Quest in Ocarina of Time 3D. I christened my 3DS XL by getting up to the Master Sword, so I’ve really only got the best parts of the game in front of me. Well, except for the Fire Temple. It’s kind of dull, but at least the MQ version will mix it up a bit so it doesn’t just feel like I’m going through the motions.

I’ve also been doing a really poor job of wrangling up the last few ‘mons I need to fill out the Unova Dex in Pokémon White. I want it done before Black 2 and White 2 hit, so that leaves me…two weeks. The dumb thing about this is that it’s mostly just evolving that needs to be done, and it seems like the Unova Pokémn have a considerably higher average evolution level than monsters of previous generations. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t know as much about Pokémon as I used to. It’s a lot harder to keep track of the 600+ creatures than it was when there were only 151. In any case, a lot of Audinos are going to be beaten upon over the next two weeks. I need to fill that Pokédex!

So notice how there isn’t even a passing mention of maybe drawing a comic or going outside there? I think my hobby may have crossed the line into full-on addiction at this point. I probably won’t even take the time to blog anymore once I get Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. Especially since saves are transferrable between the Wii U and 3DS versions! Yay obsession!

Genre mashup

A few creative-types at Talking Time have gone and decided that it’s time to forge an expansion pack for Super Talking Time Bros 2. Because I’m always happy to be a part of awesome things, as soon as I was able I went about painstakingly crafting a new stage for the “Super Squad Goes to SPACE” expansion.

Because I have no good original ideas however, I decided just to take another game and stick it into Mario.

I’m not the only one who did that! But so far I think I’m the only one who’s stuck Mario in a falling-block puzzle game. Of course, this is just the beginning of the stage. It gets a lot more complex once you leave the Tetris tube, and while I kind of hated it when I first completed it, it’s really grown on me and I’m pretty darn proud of it now!

If you want to check in on development and play-test some stages before the game is finished, come on over to the STTB2 thread. Sign up and give your feedback! The more people testing and helping to smooth these stages out, the better the end game will be! STTB2 was incredibly well-received, so the bar is set fairly high here. Otherwise, here are some more links.

Download STTB 1+2

STTB2 expansion wiki

Some jerk Let’s Playing STTB2

Countdown to U-Day

What have I had, three posts about Wii U so far? Definitely out of character for me. I guess I must be growing up, because a younger me would have themed the blog here with all sorts of Wii U stuff. Woulda made up a Wii U banner anyway. Oh, wait. The blog has been Wii themed since… 2007? Wow, past me really was good at that future planning stuff!

As it is, I’m barely excited enough about having gotten my pre-order last weekend. And that’s with only two months left to go! I should be bouncing off the walls and yakking everyone’s ear off about how excited I am for my new console. Alas, I am much more subdued this time around. It’s probably because I can’t afford to buy any games to play on the stupid thing. Gone are the Wii days where I could just throw my paychecks away on as many vidja games as I could handle.

It’s too bad too, because it suddenly seems that I want them all. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement, but I’m certainly a lot more confliced about which Day One title I’m going to bring home with me on launch day than I was just a week ago. Since these megaposts are kind of what I do these days, let’s have a look-see…

Darksiders II – This was my original choice, and it had no competition, save perhaps Pikmin 3, but that’s been pushed back so it’s out of the running. I had a great time with the original Darksiders and little interest in any other Wii U launch day games, but now I’m having to think about it. Also, I’ve heard rumblings that maybe Darksiders II isn’t as good as the original, so that’s causing some hesitation. It’s still number one, but two months from now anything could happen.

New Super Mario Bros U – Since finances are tight, I have to consider that maybe The Wife would like to play with my our new toy too. Considering that NSMBU is probably the only launch title she’ll get any mileage out of. It’s not that I don’t think I’d like it, it’s just that I’m smack in the middle of New Super Mario Bros 2 on 3DS right now, and I don’t feel like I need another Mario game yet. We also had an absolute blast with the original Wii game, and that’s certainly helping this one’s case along. The real issue here is that I don’t find the New Mario games quite as fun to replay as say, Super Mario World.

ZombiU – You’d think this would be right up my alley, what with the zombies ‘n all. Truth is, I wasn’t really taken with it until I started reading impressions from last week’s Nintendo event in New York. Now I’m very much leaning towards the idea of picking ZombiU over Darksiders. If nothing else, I’d like to have a game that really makes use of the gamepad, and doesn’t just delegate maps and inventory management to it. I mean, ZombiU does that, but in a more interesting way. Or so it seems. I’ll need to keep reading up on this one. I can’t help but remember the mediocrity of Dead Island though.

Rayman Legends – I wasn’t sold on Rayman Origins until last Friday, despite the fact that everyone and their dog has been raving about it since it came out. But then I played a few stages with my youngest bro, including the unbeleivably difficult Secret Final Level, and had an absolute blast. I’d played the demo, but I guess I did it wrong by playing solo. So now the question of the sequel comes up. Do I pick this one up at launch, or do I satisfy my newfound interest with the cheaper original?

Assassin’s Creed III – I haven’t played a singe other game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and I didn’t ever plan to. However, I’m very much into the American Revolution setting of this one. That is all.

Scribblenauts Unlimited – I couldn’t get into the first Scribblenauts game no matter how hard I tried. But the promise of a game with better controls, huge environments to explore, and the ability to creat things has stuck the Scribblenauts hooks right back into me. I can’t see myself actually buying it, but stranger things have happened.

Tank! Tank! Tank! – I haven’t read anything about this since E3, but damn does it look like fun! I’m also a big supporter of the odd-duck games that come out when a new game system is released. Admittedly this doesn’t seem quite as gimmicky or odd as, say, Feel The Magic XY/XX or Rayman Raving Rabbids. Another one that I’m really going to have to look into before taking the plunge.

Okay, so there are only seven launch titles I’m interested in. But it’s still really hard when you can only choose one! Luckily, most of the other games (Pikmin 3, The Wonderful 101, Runner 2) I want are looking like they’re going to come out around March, so that’s time to sock away a little cash. The fact of the matter is though, that Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate is slated for March, so at that point I won’t need any other games. It would be really rad if that had been a launch title, but what can you do?

Nostalgia trippin’

Hey, so does it mean you’re old when just the air can cause waves of nostalgia to wash over you? Because I’m totally getting that right now. It’s been a beautiful fall day, and the first real one as far as I’m concerned, because it’s just got that feeling to it. I love this weather, and it brings back memories of everything I’ve ever associated it with. I have no way to properly convey these feelings in words, but I can feel them in my heart and I need to get them out somehow, so I kept a running list of every memory that came back to me today because of the cool autumn air. Here’s what I got:

  • Trick-or-treating in general
  • Beating Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes for Nintendo 64 one Halloween night
  • Playing Silent Hill for the first time
  • Daily visits to the Heath Sciences Center
  • Watching Criminal Minds on Stephanie’s laptop in my car
  • Guitar Hero 5
  • Visiting a small corner store downtown that smelled like curry, and buying Pepsis at said store which also smelled of curry
  • Treehouse of Horror
  • YTV’s Dark Night specials
  • McDonald’s Halloween McNugget toys
  • Driving around with the family to look at Halloween houses
  • That old McDonald’s Halloween cassette tape. “Spooky Sounds” or something of the like?
  • Pokémon Silver Version
  • The beginning of Christmas madness at Toys ‘R’ Us
  • Donkey Konga
  • Traipsing through yards covered in crunchy, fallen leaves
  • Finally earning my driver’s license
  • Purchasing my first car (I still love you, Spirit)
  • The beginning of hockey season, and all those dreadful practise sessions
  • Carving jack-o-lanterns
  • The last family trip to Fargo
  • Chasing a bunch of egg-chucking hooligans down the street while dressed as the red Angry Bird
  • Playing Rock Band 2 at a Halloween party, and my sister-in-law commenting at how intense I looked while I was playing
  • Creating the alias “Tito Sanchez” for reasons I cannot recall
  • Going to a corn maze and haunted house with a group of friends, and being thought of as a goofball (not in a good way) by the females of the bunch.
  • Playing Magical Starsign in the upstairs storeroom of Toys ‘R’ Us instead of working
  • My brother’s friend Brent dressing as a woman for Halloween, and being called “Brenta” for many years afterwards
  • Not giving out free cookies to trick-or-treaters at Tim Hortons
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, for some reason. I don’t know why, because I never played that at Halloween time
  • Pillsbury cookie rolls, with pumpkins coloured into them!
  • Enjoying those cold, foggy mornings where nobody’s around and silence abounds
  • The many times I said I’d participate in (or at least check out) a zombie walk, but never did
  • Pumpkin pie
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas
  • Specifically, “This is Halloween”

You’ve finally made a monkey out of me

Well guys, that’s it. I’ve finally completed Xenoblade Chronicles. And by “completed” I mean I’ve finished the story. I still have a few dozen incomplete quests in my logbook, my affinity chart isn’t all filled out yet, and four of the five superbosses have gone undefeated, but I decided it was time to put a cap on this one and move on with my life. What I did take the time to do, however, was max out my party affinity, so now all my playable characters are hopelessly in love with one another. And after sitting in Tephra Cave slaughtering millions of spiders, you’d probably want to just put it to bed too.

But my opinion on Xenoblade remains the same as it was after my first week with it; I still think it’s the best game available on the Wii. It’s certainly the most robust. Yeah, maybe pound-for-pound the graphics look a little dated, but the environments as a whole are more astounding than anything I’ve seen on a competing console. The second half of the game quickly spiraled out of control and went from a fairly solid plot to anime/JRPG cliche madness, but it certainly didn’t ruin the game for me. In fact, I thought that the lead up to the final boss was one of the coolest parts of the game. Especially since the locations were given proper names and the mind-boggling reveal at the end was something I totally did not see coming. And, uh, if you’re a Simpsons fan, the post title should ruin that reveal fairly efficiently. Not that the screenshot doesn’t spoil enough for anyone who isn’t at least three-quarters of the way through.

Clocking in at slightly under 150 hours is… well, I’ll probably take longer to finish Skyrim, but man, is that ever a beefy game. I think I probably could have stuck another 10 on there if I’d bothered to mop up the rest of the available quests and take down those superbosses. As it is, I’m satisfied with my clear file. Colony 6 is 100%, and that’s the only percentage counter in the game, so it’s enough for me,

Again, this is my favourite game available on Wii. I’ve dipped my toes into The Last Story, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far, but I don’t think it’s going to hit the same sweet spots for me. Monolithsoft didn’t give us a sequel hook as everything wrapped up quite nicely, but they did arguably leave the wide door open for a potential sequel. I suppose it kind of depends on how you interpret the ending, but I for one would embrace the opportunity to spend another 150 hours in this world if the Wii U ends up with a Xenoblade 2.

So laaazy

You know, I’ve had a new movie review sitting around for over a month now, but I have no idea how long it will be until I post it. It was originally supposed to go live in July. And it’s pretty much done, too! The bulk of the writing is done; I still have to go back over it to do a little spellchecking and other fine-tuning, but the words are essentially done. The thing that I’m stuck at it getting some screengrabs.

Normally, that’s the part I’d do first. I’d watch a movie/show, and then go back and take a few shots of important part, and then write the article around those. This time I did all the writing first, and the way that I wrote it calls for a lot of images. And not just the basic screengrabs either! No, I worked myself into a corner full of photoshops and collages. I suppose I could go over the article and edit the parts that call out images I don’t want to take/create, but at that point I’m cheating the reader of a fuller experience. Oh, what a world.

It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s just that taking screenshots o a movie is dull and tedious. Making sure I printscreen jsut the right moments, making sure everything is sized and named properly… It’s boring.

This is sort of similar to the reason why my Monster Hunter Let’s Play is stalling. Playing Monster Hunter is one of my favourite pastimes, and talking about Monster Hunter comes in at a close second, so in that case I’m mostly blaming Camtasia. With sprite-based games, I can set it to record and then just have at it as long as I need, then stop when I feel like the session is done and do a little chopping to make everything nice and neat before I produce it. Monster Hunter, being a PS2 game, I guess eats a ton of memory while being recorded. If I go over about 15 minutes of footage, it stops recording sound and just replaces my narration and the game’s audio with a horrible extra-loud static track. So I have to time myself to make sure I don’t record too long, find a suitable spot to pause, and then wait while to video is processed, then wait twice as long while the video is saved to a file. The processing/saving part eats up all my PC’s resources too, so I can’t do anything else with it while I wait. Then I have to do the usual editing, which is not terrible, but annoying after all the other hoops I’ve had to jump through to get that far. Especially if I screwed up the timing and have to fix the sound problems. And then, then I have to hope that while it was paused for Camtasia to do all its things, that my PS2 emulator hasn’t crashed. That’s happened twice now, and it’s even worse than when the audio breaks, because not just footage is lost, but actual game progress. This was the worst project I’ve ever started.

But that movie review? It’ll be done… maybe this weekend. I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I’ll do with my Friday night.

The numbers game

So one of the fellas over at Game|Life posted a story today about how Nintendo product sales make up roughly 70% of the Japanese video game market. Whether these numbers are skewed or not, this makes me very happy, being a big fat Nintendo fanboy and all.

Now we just need to find a way to make those numbers happen over here, and all will be right in the world again. Also then we might get Dragon Quest X, the first traditional MMO I actually want to play.

It also makes me happy that New Super Mario Bros 2 is selling really well, and that people are enjoying it. If you hadn’t been keeping up, the internet didn’t seem to be looking forward to it. To put it nicely.

One of the things that stood out to me is that Nintendo platforms make up roughly 75% of console sales in Japan, and Sony has approximately 23 of the other percents. I’m going to go ahead and assume that the Xbox 360 has the other 2%, and all the other lesser consoles combined account for less than a percent. Also of note is that the only 360 game whose sales are worth mentioning is Monster Hunter Frontier.

So let’s have a look-see at the facts here. MH Frontier is the most popular Xbox game in Japan. Xbox is the most popular console in North America. So why, Capcom, do you not bring Frontier to North America? I don’t have a lot of disposable income, but I would gladly fork over a little bit of what I have each month to have the opportunity to play a big, fancy, HD version of Monster Hunter. I know there’s more to it that that, but seriously. Capcom’s got peanut butter and chocolate here, but they refuse to mash them together.

I kind of hate Capcom right now. Or I would if Dragon’s Dogma wasn’t so rad.

The story so far

Let’s get this straight right away: I don’t always have the best judgement of when something’s a good idea, and when it not. But neither do you, so shut up.

Over the last couple weeks, Talking Time has been all abuzz about rougelikes. For any that might not know, roguelikes are games that are like a really old game called Rogue. Distilled down to their base elements, they are games that feature randomly-generated dungeons and make you start back from zero every time you’re killed. Most are on the PC, with Nethack being the big fish in that pool, and Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon series has carved out a pretty well-renowned name for itself as far as console editions go. Spelunky is a side-scrolling action variant on the normally turn-based RPG nature of the genre.

The kids at TT have always been into roguelikes, because Parish (our fearless leader) told them to. Lately, the mania has resurfaced because of a ROM hack, of all things.

Continue reading The story so far

Pour one out

A delicious, ice-cold Pepsi, that is.

Yesterday, Brickroad’s YouTube account was terminated without cause or warning. This is sad for many, many reasons. The most obvious being that Brick was one of the very few video Let’s Players that I could stand to watch for a whole video*. The other big one being that despite the fact that I own the game, I will probably never see the end of Shantae: Risky’s Revenge now because he hadn’t finished uploading that particular LP series before his account was banned. Now I’m actually going to have to go back and play the game. Who even does that anymore?

It should be noted that his current Shiren The Wanderer LP was pretty damn entertaining too. Made me buy a used copy of the game just so I could get in on the action.

But this is a real shame because Brickroad was good at what he did. He was a font of knowledge about most of the games he played, and I am incredibly envious of just how much he knows about some games. I don’t know nearly as much about any one game as he did about several of the games he had LPs of. I wish that there was just one game I could rattle off trivia about throughout a whole playthrough, or that I knew one game well enough to play through at 150% speed. Of course, even if I had the knowledge or skill for that kind of LP, I still wouldn’t be funny enough to keep people hooked. I think I’ve got the reactive humour down, but I’m not nearly as witty as I’d like to be.

I like to think that Brickroad’s influence shines through fairly obviously in my Let’s Plays. Both in style and substance. Just look at my video descriptions: a total ripoff of the Brickroad three-bullet-point system. I dressed it up a bit, but it’s unmistakable.

I’m still not really into reading or watching LPs in general, but there’s no doubt that I’ll pay attention to any new Brickroad projects. That is, assuming they happen. Hopefully this YouTube debacle doesn’t stop him from playing video games for the amusement of others.

The last thing I want is for this post to double as an eulogy.

*As it turns out, most of the Talking Tyrants who do video LPs are pretty decent too. Better than me, at any rate. You’d do well to check them out.