It’s been a while since there was a post that doesn’t fall under the “you-know-what” category, so here, have a review of a Tim Horton’s donut that I speculated had become a permanent menu item, but in reality was pulled from the menu like the day after I filmed the review.
The worst part about it, is that since the donut in question was removed from the menu, I wasn’t able to find a clean promotional image of the thing for the thumbnail. And so my big, dumb face had to be plastered in there, instead of the usual cartoon Ryan that I like to have in the thumbnails. It bothers me so.
Over the last few days, I’ve been completely obsessed with Subnautica. This is a video game that released in 2018 and completely missed my radar. I’m playing it now because I got it for free thanks to Sony’s “Play at Home” initiative, when they just gave out a bunch of free games back in March.
The plot of Subnautica is simple: your spaceship crashed on an uncharted planet and you now have three objectives. One: survive. Two: find other survivors. Three: find a way off this rock. Nothing too unique here.
The twist here is that the world of Subnautica, if you hadn’t guessed by the title, is (almost) completely underwater. Given that most people loathe the underwater levels in video games, this may seem like an odd choice, but it absolutely works here. The massive world beneath the waves is pure joy to explore, and taking the action underwater provides a much appreciated change from the usual landlubbin’ action of open-world games.
For the last few years, I’ve been doing the same sort of thing for most of Nintendo’s digital presentations: listing each game that is shown and typing my knee-jerk reactions to them. For the E3 presentation that they did today, it’s going to be a lot simpler:
I want to buy all of the games.
But in all seriousness, the three games that I was most impressed by are curiously all strongly connected to the Game Boy Advance.
I’d had White Day: A Labyrinth Named School downloaded on my PS5 for a while, waiting for the “right” time to start playing it. That time came around the middle of last week, when I said to myself, “Ryan, you ought to play that spooky ghost game that you bought a few months ago.” And so I took my own advice and started playing it.
At first blush, White Day is exactly the kind of video game that I long for: a Korean horror adventure, where you explore a haunted school while solving obtuse puzzles in an attempt to find out what is going on and also escape with your life. There are nine(?) different endings, tons of collectibles, and even a little pokédex for all of the ghosts that you encounter during your night of terror. And all of these things, I greatly appreciate about this game. It’s kind of why I bought it, after all.
But there are two things that made me say “No more. This is no fun and I quit.” about halfway through.
Okay, uh, what happened last month? It was all such a blur.
Oh, right. Twilight Princess HD happened. Very slowly. I can’t quite place why. Something about werewolves, and… the letter Y is really standing out in my mind of some reason?
Yeah, so… I still really like Twilight Princess. I think that actively commentating on it as I played helped the cracks to show a little bit more, but it’s still very solid as far as I’m aware. The HD remaster’s few little quality-of-life changes go a heck of a long way, too. And I actually didn’t completely detest the forced-wolf sections this time. That’s new.
Life is weird these days. I’m at home nearly 100% of the time now. I don’t see other human beings, except from the safety of my balcony. McDonald’s brought bagels back from beyond the grave.
And so, I play along by cooking weird things. The other night, I fancied grilled chicken and mango skewers.
Now, the typical thing to have done would have been chicken and pineapple kebabs. But the fact is that I don’t plan these things ahead of time. And also the other fact is that I almost never have pineapple on hand. However, I do always have at least one mango kicking around.
I can’t say that this was exactly a huge success. The mango was a little too ripe and got much too drippy and fall-aparty for my liking. Otherwise? Not half bad. I think that with a sturdier, more youthful mango, it would have been ratcheted all the way up to “pretty good.” Also I think a slightly under-ripened mango’s blend of sweet and sour would have complemented the chicken better than the overripe mango’s overwhelming sweetness.
Would I have it again? Yeah, but I think I’d have to think it through a little more. Add some onion, maybe red pepper. Oh, yeah, that sounds real good. Probably should learn how to marinate my chicken properly. And also get some fresher ingredients for said marinade. Both my olive oil and spices were a little… very old. And I had to throw out the lemon juice I was going to use because it had turned completely black. Such is the life of a bachelor who is just now teaching himself to cook things more complicated than Kraft Dinner.
First off, apropos of nothing, I’d like to vent a little bit about how friggin’ difficult it is to get a Wii U pro controller to sync up to a PC. I get it, I do. Nintendo sells their controllers to be used with their video game machines. But, it’s nice to play PC games with a high-quality controller too, you know?
Anyway! Ys II Chronicles+: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ The Final Chapter is another title that maybe in retrospect could have been simplified a little. Calling it “The Final Chapter” is overselling it just a bit when it’s part of a two-chapter series. Don’t even get me started on how it’s not actually the final chapter.
Title woes aside, however, Ys II is a very excellent video game! It’s just like the first one! Except it’s a whole lot bigger, and all of the issues I had with the first game have been addressed! Which is not really saying a lot, because I had like, two issues with the first game.
Resident Evil Village (PS5) – Beat this one three times. And also played a lot of The Mercenaries. Because it’s super good. I’ll probably write down lots of words about it in the near future. Or maybe not, who knows?
