Page 20 – Burning the midnight oil at noon

24 Days of Desire (8): FNAF Core Collection

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.

24 Days of Desire (7): LEGO Millennium Falcon

While it’s not something I do very often, I find very few activities as satisfying as building something. Be it a piece of furniture, a jigsaww puzzle, or a complex spreadsheet, I just really like putting things together. There’s nothing like the feeling of taking a step back from a completed project and thinking “I made that.” That said, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I really liked LEGO as a kid.

24 Days of Desire (6): Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide

I like a lot of things. I like Mega Man, reading, and video game lore, to name a few. And it just so happens that today’s entry is an items that checks all three of those boxes.

Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide is, as I understand it, something of a character bible for the Mega Man X series. Contained within are complete bios for (probably) each and every character that has ever appeared in one of the games. And that’s a lot, because it includes all of the boss robots, of which there are at least eight new ones in each sequel.

24 Days of Desire (5): The Always Pan

I’m not much of a cook. I try sometimes, but for the most part I’m just too lazy to be making anything that requires more effort than turning the oven/microwave/air fryer on. That said, my frying pan is more or less my best friend in the kitchen, and I use it all the damn time.

I’m a sentimental fool, so the idea of parting with my frying pan after nearly a decade together seems unthinkable. But the old girl is getting on in age; she’s developed a pretty severe tilt which ensures that oil and eggs always pool over to one side, and more than a few permanent battle scars. It’s time to move onward and upward, and the solution to my problems came to me in an unexpectedly helpful YouTube ads.

I say that because YouTube ads are typically for trash products that I would never even consider buying into. (Especially YouTube Premium.)

24 Days of Desire (4): Rock Jocks

So there’s this board game café downtown that I went to a couple weekends ago, and they have so many board games. Like, walls and walls and walls just crammed with board games. I would suggest that they have all the board games, but I know that is not the truth of the matter.

There are at least two board games absent from their collection. One is It From the Pit, which I have written about at length before. The other is Rock Jocks. Behold!

24 Days of Desire (3): Star Wars sequels box set

I have a really nice box set of the first six Star Wars movies on Blu-ray.

Sorry, I have to stop here to make an aside about how I very much dislike the fact that Blu-ray is a proper name and requires capitalization.

*ahem* It would be nice if I could slide in another little box that housed the sequel trilogy right next to it. Alas, there is currently no such thing! And probably never will be! The proliferation of digital media has absolutely crushed the market for movies printed on physical media. And also Disney is absolutely not going to sell you three movies in a box when they can make you buy all three separately.

24 Days of Desire (2): A better GPU

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.

24 Days of Desire (1): Television

If you’ve been following this website for a while, you probably know that sometimes I will do an advent calendar-like daily feature from December 1st to 20-somethingth. It started as the 23 Days of Materialism, in which I highlighted something that I thought was cool each day. It was both a way to show off things I liked and also sort of a stealthy way to give people gift ideas for the holidays. In later years, I would try to spice up the formula with different themes.

This year, I’ve decided to turn the feature on its ear, and so I introduce to you the 24 Days of Desire. This time around I’ll be listing a bunch of things that I would like to have, as opposed to things I already own. It’s… not really that much of a difference, but I feel like it’ll allow me a little more space for creativity. That, and it guarantees I don’t have to go out and buy a bunch of things to write about. Woop woop!

Now that the stage is set, I’d like to start off with something fairly easy:

Television.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up: November 2021

~ Game Over ~

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.

Ys Seven and the Case of the Belligerent Bird

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.