Articles – Page 8

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

You’re going to have to bear with me, internet. I want to talk about Monster Hunter again.

Let’s begin with the basics. The Monster Hunter series is all about fighting giant beasts, and is pretty much a game built around hectic, exciting boss battles. Yes, it includes some smaller enemies too, but they’re like the basil on the tomato soup that is the rest of the game: they add a little flavour, but aren’t what you came for. You’re there to bring down huge, fearsome beasts and then turn them into pants. It’s even more fun when you’re doing it with your friends, so much so that it’s the only video game that I actually have a desire to play with people online.

Victory in Monster Hunter requires what I call the Three P’s: preparation, patience, and practice. It’s not a game for people who can’t be arsed to earn their victory. There is no coasting in Monster Hunter, and there is no easy mode. If you’re going to win, you need to make sure you know what you’re doing. Triple-checking your supplies before you head out on a hunt isn’t just helpful, it’s nearly required. You need to study your enemy’s movement and attack patterns to find weaknesses and openings. Familiarity with the terrain in each map is just as important as being familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen weapon. Long story short: Monster Hunter requires a huge investment of time and effort on the player’s part, and that’s what I love most about it.

Most games, especially those of the current generation, you can just turn on and play if you’ve got even a basic knowledge of video games. Monster Hunter is not at all like that. If you boot up a Monster Hunter game and expect to get just another action game, you’ll be eating a healthy serving of humble pie in no time. These are complicated games, and you need to take the time to learn them before you’ll get anywhere. Each game starts with a rather lengthy tutorial in your basic survival skills like item gathering, meat cooking, and small monster slaughter before you even get a whiff of a real hunt. While these might seem like boring little subsystems that aren’t so important that they need to be forced on you, it turns out that they are absolutely essential.

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4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

I guess it’s a Canadian thing, so if you’re a foreign reader you may not have heard of it, but Lay’s currently has a contest running. It is, unsurprisingly, a contest to create a new flavour of chips for them to produce. At current, we’re about a month away from the end of the contest, and the four finalist flavours have been in stores for a while now. Since July, I guess?

Fact of the matter is that since I shun any social media that doesn’t involve me and I don’t spend any time in the chips aisle anymore, I didn’t notice these new flavours until a couple weeks ago. I just happened to randomly stumble upon one of them while out with the wife getting faux Slurpees. I used to be really crazy about trying each and every new potato chip flavour, and since that compulsion still exists deep inside of me, I went absolutely nuts just seeing the first one sitting there by its lonesome.

Now after all that embellishment, try to imagine how I felt when I looked at the back of the bag and saw that there were three more new flavours to hunt down. Suffice to say, I needed a change of pants. It’s not often that I get to enjoy the thrill of the junk food hunt like I used to, and knowing that those flavours were out there somewhere made me feel like my life had a real purpose At the very least, it took me back to a time when hunting down article fodder was half the fun.

So I guess you’re all writhing in your seat there, wondering which of the new flavours I found first. You don’t care for the anecdotes; you just want the cold, hard, facts. Well tough. The anecdotes are important to my process and to the total word count. They’re never going to go away, so you might as well just learn to enjoy them.

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Tonight Alive – The Other Side

(Fair warning: this is less a “review” than “ramblings of an excited fanboy.” But I suppose you could say that about most of the things I write.)

If you read the “articles” I posted back in January about the music I listened to the most in 2012, you may recall that last year I got myself really into a band called Tonight Alive. What Are You So Scared Of? was -by a very wide margin- my most listened-to and favourite album of the year, and I still spin it (figuratively, I’ve only used the disc to rip the songs to my PC and 360) fairly often. I’d absolutely consider the Australian band to be one of my recent favourites.

Over the last few months, I’ve been absolutely frothing with demand for their second album, The Other Side. It finally dropped on September 10th, and I couldn’t have asked for a better belated birthday present. I was on vacation last week, and it’s the only music I bothered to listen to the entire time (radio during car times notwithstanding).

Seriously, I listened to that thing like six times last Friday. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve gotten myself so worked up about an album. A new album anyway. I listened the crap out of Queen’s The Miracle when my years-long search for a copy came to a close last year.

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The Amazing Spider-Man Mega Egg

I’m going to start on a tangent and hope that it decreases how many more crop up later on in this article. Holy crap, it has been forever since I did any actual work in MS Paint. That banner up there? No Photoshop involved. Not that it’s hard to tell. I think it turned out pretty nice though, in an ironic lo-fi sort of way. It took me like half an hour to put that border around the blue text. I miss my “stroke” layer style.

There. Now that that’s out of my system, let’s move on the actual intro.

You may remember that in the spring of last year, I wrote an article about a Star Wars Mega Egg. If you don’t, maybe go check that one out first, and then come back and read this one. We’ll wait for you. I don’t know if it’s really compulsory reading, but I’m considering this article a sequel to it, so you might as well bone up on the TE canon. Or something. I totally forgot what I was trying to get at with this paragraph.

Oh, right. I was initialy trying to lead into something about how the SWME (I pronounce it “swum-ee”) brang about an article renaissance here on TE. How it heralded a new age of me sometimes writing articles about things that are not video games. But that’s boring and not really relevant, so maybe I’ll just start trying to get to the point.

Back in July, when I was in Lac du Bonnet for the annual Canada Day celebrations, I made the yearly pit stop into The Bargain Shop to check out their wares, procure a buttload of candy to eat while waiting for the fireworks to start, and maybe find something interesting enough to write about. Of course, this might sound like a somewhat familiar story to you. If you’ve been reading TE for a while, it really should. I do this every year, and I write about it almost every year, whether or not I actually find anything.

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Diamonds in the rough – Picross e2

When Picross e came out back in June, I was absolutely ecstatic. I didn’t even know that the game existed, so when I saw it in the weekly 3DS eShop release list, I was pretty blown away. Being at work, I had to wait an absolutely grueling six or seven hours before I was able to get home to purchase the thing in a frenzy of picross fandom. At least, as much of a frenzy as one can get into when downloading a picross video game.

Having burned through the game’s 150-ish puzzles by the time the weekend was up, I would have been severely disappointed if I’d bought anything but a picross game. I’ll forgive picross all of its shortcomings because it’s picross and I am hopelessly in love with picross. As it is, I was only slightly perturbed that my joy had been cut short just as it was reaching a fever pitch. It didn’t last long, but I’d say I got my eight bucks’ worth.

And then at the end of July, I was blindsided again by the launch of Picross e2. Though I did know it existed and that it was on the way, I had no idea that it would show up so soon. Again, I was forced to sit at my desk for hours, running down the clock until I could get home and download me a whole new batch of puzzles. There really need to be more unsecured wifi networks around here.

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2013 Surprise Bag Article

You may not know this, but it is a real challenge to find a surprise bag interesting enough to warrant review. I’ve long considered the surprise bag review to be one of TE’s Things, but lately it seems all my efforts to find a half-decent one are coming up dry. Did you know that I haven’t posted a surprise bag article since 2006? Yeah, seems like I probably should have staggered them out a little better. But how was I to know I’d still be doing this seven years later?

I have picked up a few surprise bags over the last few years, even made special trips out of the city just to hunt for the things. But alas, I haven’t found one that’s even been worth a blog post, nevermind a full-fledged article. It’s killing me too, because for the last year or so I’ve really wanted to do one up proper. It just seems like all the surprise bags out there are filled with garbage so bland that I can’t make up reasons to make fun of, or they’re licensed and actually a pretty decent way to spend a dollar. I suppose that in hard times I could write up something about a good surprise bag, but what’s the fun in that? I don’t think anything will ever live up to that one that was like 20 years old. I’m beginning to worry that I’ll never see Dubu gum or Baby trading cards again.

My search endures, however, because I refuse to give up on the idea that surprise bags can be truly surprising and contain more than a couple generic suckers and maybe a Dubble Bubble. Also, nostalgia. The thought of a certain nearby city is inexorably linked with a certain notorious surprise bag in my mind, and I cannot think about one without the other crossing my mind. The memories of the fun I had opening and reviewing those other surprise bags lingers as well, even though I know that it likely won’t ever be as exciting as it was back when I was truly devoted to this craft.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is… wait… what?… What is that?

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Canada Day 2013

Canada Day is a pretty important day for me. Not because I’m some sort of super-patriot or anything, but rather just because I thrive on traditions and nostalgia. Seriously, I’m fairly dependent on doing the same things over and over forever because they’re safe and comfortable. I’m fully aware of this, and I wouldn’t ever want to change it about me. Who needs excitement and variety when you can just enjoy the things you already know that you love?

That said, anyone who knows me will have a pretty good idea of where I am and what I’m doing at any given time during the Canada Day weekend. Or, at least one day of the Canada Day weekend. It rolls out a little differently each year, but all the pieces are usually the same. That said, I still feel compelled to write about my Canada Day adventure because it’s one of my favourite days of the year. It even beats out my birthday now that I’m old and don’t get presents any more.

This year was the biggest Canada Day change-up in, oh, probably the last six years or so. The obvious change, of course, being 2008 when my wife and I started dating. That was also the year that my grandparents sold their cottage and moved to the city, which may have changed Canada Day more than anything. Important because that was the year my family stopped doing the usual Canada Day stuff, but luckily the tradition lives on because my wife’s family has always attended the same festivities that mine used to.

Oh, and the images are clickable if you want to see bigger versions. Though why you’d want to see a super-sized version of the crack through my windshield or crappy pictures of fireworks is beyond me.

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Ranking the Queen Album Covers

I’ll start off with a rather painful admission: I don’t know anything about music. I know about bands and a little about the industry and how to tell a hack from a real artist, but that’s about as far as my “expertise” goes. And yet I love to pass myself off as someone who truly understands music. I suppose it comes from my inner hipster’s need to have superior taste to everyone else.

The problem this presents is that I still long to talk about music as if I know anything about it. Look back through the archives for posts tagged “BOTM” and you’ll see some of my finest attempts to pass as a connoisseur. I think the fact that My Chemical Romance was the first or second Band of the Month put that dream to bed before it even really got going.

So, in the spirit of talking about music without actually talking about music, I’ve come up with a brilliant plan. Actually, I didn’t come up with the idea. It’s stolen wholesale from Dinosaur Dracula, and I won’t even bother trying to pretend it was my own stroke of genius. I may be a hack, but at least I’m honest about it.

More to the point, I’m going to review and rank all of Queen’s studio albums. Well, the album covers, anyway. Just in case the article’s title didn’t tip you off. I don’t really know a lot about art design either, but I’m certainly more qualified (at least in my own mind) to talk about that than the actual music contained within.

I think this intro has gone on more than long enough now, so let’s maybe get down to business, yes?

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My 10 Favourite Things About Kirby Super Star

One of my most favoritest games, and indeed the Super Nintendo game I’ve gone back to the most often (with Super Mario World coming in close second), is Kirby Super Star. If you aren’t from North America, you may know it as “Kirby’s Fun Pak” or maybe even “Hoshi no Kirby Super Deluxe”, but it’s always been Kirby Super Star to me.

Released in 1996, I absorbed as much of the game as possible through Nintendo Power, and made damn sure that my parents knew that I had to own this game. It was featured in the August ’96 issue (#87), and I’m pretty sure that was the most excruciating month of my parents’ lives, because I was nothing short of obsessed with the game and the idea of getting it for my birthday. Unfortunately, being nine years old, I probably didn’t understand the concept of release dates, and it actually released almost two weeks after my birthday. I don’t recall exactly how or when I finally obtained it, but I’ll assume that I saved all the birthday money I got that year for it.

Anyway, I have a frothing love for this game that will never be quelled, and even though I have the updated DS port, Kirby Super Star Ultra, I’ve only ever played through it once and always go back to the SNES original to get my fix. Why? I don’t know. The remake is absolutely better, and even more jam-packed with Kirby goodness, but the original has a strange, nostalgic appeal that I simply cannot deny.

The greatest tragedy of this website here is that in the 10+ years I’ve been running it, I’ve never played proper tribute to the game. So that’s what I intend to do. I could simply go the modern route and do a video Let’s Play of it, but I’m kind of tired of doing those at the moment. Also I’ve lent my PS2 controller to a friend and would have to play with the keyboard. And you don’t want to hear me bangin’ on the keys throughout a whole video series, now do you? (I’ll probably do it one day but that day is not today.)

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One slice is not enough! – Picross e

Picross e is Nintendo doing a very good job of teasing me and the scores of other picross fans out there.

Released on the 3DS eShop (explaining the lowercase “e” in the title) just over a week ago, Picross e is easy bait for us picross fans. It’s only $6, and having a digital Picross game on my 3DS is like a most wonderful dream come true. It’s even more appealing than DSiWare’s Brain Age Express: Sudoku.

There are two things I need to get out of the way before I talk about the game proper, and the first of those is that I am an absolute picross maniac. This is very important for you to know, so that you can balance this review against my unstoppable bias. I love picross, and have spent many,many hours playing the various Nintendo-produced picross video games into the ground It is my first true love, and the one truism you can apply to me is that I will always buy the new picross game.

The second thing you should probably know is what exactly a picross is. Picross is a puzzle game where you’ve got a grid of squares with a bunch of numbers around the edge, and your goal is to chisel out the correct squares to make a picture. The numbers are indicative of how many target squares are in each row and column, but don’t say exactly where they are. So you have to use the powers of logic to deduce which squares you need to chisel. I’ve probably explained this somewhere on this website before, but it’s probably best to make sure; picross isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it should be.

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