#never really played console much even though i got a wii and wii mini

[mey-rin-is-fabulous]

Ooh childhood/teen years let's see

Pokemon Platinum. Just Dance. LLSIF. SB69. Pokemon Gold.

Need for Speed Underground, Midnight Club 2, Mercenaries: World in Flames, Black, Quake II.

Honorable Mentions: Mech Warrior, Doom !&II. 

[askroahmmythril]

Smash Universe Experience

So I’ve been in a bit of a bad mental state the last few days, lots of personal stress and such, the tropics won’t shut up, various current year events, etc.  So trying to distract self with various things, and figured I’d try figuring out what my personal history is with the various Smash Bros. franchises.  Note, we’re only counting actual fighters here, not Mii Costume inclusions.  Distraction tactics go! :

Super Mario : I’ve played a lot of Mario games definitely.  I think I missed some of the “New” SMB games, like I never played the one on DS where there were things like the Gold Flower and it was all about getting as many coins as possible.  Also some side games, like I... at least don’t THINK I’ve played any of the “sports” type games like the golf, tennis, baseball, or soccer ones.  Also never really got into the Paper Mario series, only played Super Paper Mario and never finished it.  Also Superstar Saga is the only one of the “Mario & Luigi” RPGs I ever played.  Want to say there are a few Party games I skipped as well.  If we count Luigi’s Mansion under the Mario blanket, I haven’t played 2 (but have a copy) or 3 (want to get a copy).  Still, fairly solid Mario experience under my belt.

Donkey Kong : There are a number of DK games I have played, but probably more that I missed.  I played the original, DK Jr., pretty sure I’ve at least played DK3 on things like Virtual Console or such?  As far as the Country games, I’ve... only really played the first two and part of the third.  I tried DKC3 while I was at Full Sail, but could just never really get into it.  I did play the GBC Donkey Kong game, that one’s good...  I want to try the DKCR games, I’ve heard good things.  Definitely would like to at least get the Switch port of Tropical Freeze and give that a go.

Legend of Zelda : As far as officially sanctioned and remembered Zelda games (we don’t talk about the CDi games, which I never had that system so never played them anyway), I want to say the only mainline Zelda game I never played was Skyward Sword.  I never had a Wii Motion Plus, so couldn’t play that one.  Keep hoping we get a port on Switch so I can try it.  There are some side games I never played though, like never played Crossbow Training, or the Tingle game.   Oh, actually I guess I never played Tri Force Heroes, admittedly not sure how well that one plays as a single-player experience.

Metroid : I’ve played most of the Metroid series I would say.  I think my main gaps are Metroid Prime Pinball, Hunters, haven’t gotten around to playing Prime 3 but I do have the Wii version of Trilogy.  Kinda hoping Trilogy gets a Switch port.  I haven’t played Other M or Federation Force either.  I’m also admittedly a weirdo what preferred the original Metroid to Zero Mission, and probably preferred the original Metroid II to Samus Returns.

Yoshi : I never did finish playing Yoshi’s Story, but I have played Yoshi’s Island to 100% completion, as well as Woolly World.  Also need to finish Crafted World sometime.  I want to say there’s some motion control Yoshi game I know of but never played, but I think I also might be mixing it up with a Kirby game...?

Kirby : I’ve played a lot of Kirby games, though I know I never played Mass Attack, Squeak Squad, Epic Yarn, Canvas Curse, or Rainbow Curse.  I want to say there might have been another one as well...?  Well I know I never played Super Star Deluxe, and there are some of those mini side games on 3DS I never played.  I think there was also one with a clay aesthetic I never played?  Unless that was already one of the ones I mentioned...

Star Fox : The only ones I’ve ever played are the original and 64.  I do have SNES Online, so I can give 2 a try sometime.  I’m... really bad at Star Fox games though, haha.

Pokémon : ......Considering I have an alternate blog for all my Pokémon nicknames, yeah, I think we’re covered here.  I’ve played all main series games and most side games by this point.  I did not play Dash, and there were those three Mystery Dungeon games on Wii eShop that never got released here.  I never played Masters, nor the new Cafe game, and only really played Go long enough to get Meltan and Melmetal.  But yes, pretty solid Pokémon experience.

Mother : Earthbound is the only one I played.  I tried on multiple occasions to really get into it, but just... couldn’t really.  It just never really reeled me in and kept my interest.  I think the furthest I ever made it before quitting was the desert area near Fourside, and I just ran out of steam.

F-Zero : I’ve only played the original and I think maybe the one on GBA a little?  I can’t say it’s a series I’m good at, haha.  And yet the crazy part of me would kinda like to get the infamously difficult Gamecube one.

Ice Climbers : Yep, I’ve played it....  That’s pretty much all we got for that one, just the one game, and yes I’ve played it.

Fire Emblem : The only FE game I’ve played is Fire Emblem Warriors, so... not exactly the real FE experience.  Granted I can’t say I really feel all that interested.  Turn based strategy games like FE, Advance Wars, Wargroove, they don’t tend to keep me interested all that long.  I also have a feeling the permadeath aspect would drive me batty.

Game & Watch : I don’t know if I ever had a legitimate Game & Watch, as in, the actual machines.  However I played the heck out of the Game & Watch Gallery games.  I loved those things.

Kid Icarus : I’ve played the original and Uprising all the way through.  The GB one, Of Myths & Monsters, I’ve only gotten to try that one via an emulation, and it glitched during a boss fight, so I was never able to finish it.

Wario : On the Wario Land side of things, I’ve played most of them I think.  I never played Master of Disguise, not sure if that counts as a “Land” game.  As for WarioWare, that too, I’ve played most of them, though I never played Smooth Moves I think, the Wii one?  I know I’ve played the original, Twisted, Touched, and Gold.

Metal Gear : I haven’t played much of this series.  I played a little of the original NES game, never beat it, and watched my uncle play the original Metal Gear Solid, and..... honestly I think that’s about it.  So not a lot of Metal Gear experience.

Sonic the Hedgehog : I’ve played a lot of Sonics.  I didn’t play 4 or either of the “Storybook” games, haven’t really had access to most of the side games though, like I never played Shuffle, the Game Gear ones, also never played things like the Sega All Stars Racing games, not sure if those count for Sonic or just Sega in general really though to be fair.  I do have a weird choice of favorite Sonic game though, I unironically really enjoyed the 360 version of Unleashed.

Pikmin : Unless you count things like the Gamecube and Wii versions of Pikmin as separate entities, I think I’ve played all Pikmin games : 1-3 and Hey Pikmin.  I have 3 Deluxe pre-ordered as I felt it would be an easier one to record for an eventual project.

ROB : Played one out of the two games he had.  I played Gyromite, never had Stack Up.  Sadly my ROB was stolen long ago from storage.

Animal Crossing : I want to say the only ones I never played were Wild World and Happy Home Designer.  Well, unless you count ones that weren’t released here.

Mega Man : Yeah, kinda think I got this one covered.  I never played the Game Gear one, which.... yeah, looks pretty bad, so I don’t feel I missed out there.  Played 1 - 11 of the Classic series, as well as Powered Up and MM & Bass.  Played X1 - X5, Zero 1 - 3, all the Battle Network games (aside from mobile ones that I don’t think were released here), Starforce 1 and 2 (got 3, just never got around to it, and never quite finished 2), and a small bit of Legends 1 (want to give that another try sometime).  Heck, even played the PC Mega Man 1 and 3.  Think I’m pretty set with this one, haha.

Wii Fit : I.... played Wii Sports, does that actually count?  Probably not.  I never played one of the proper Wii Fit games with the balance board and all that.

Punch-Out!! : I played the NES and Wii games.  I... honestly don’t remember if I ever played Super Punch-Out!! or not...  I know I never beat the Wii game, I stalled out at Soda Popinski.

Pac-Man : I’ve played a lot of Pac-Man games, as well as other retro Namco games.  I had all the Namco Museum games on PS1, loved those.  There were a ton of different Pac-Man games though, so there are likely some I missed along the way.  Probably mostly in the vein of Pac-Man World type games, I don’t think I got to play a lot of those.

Xenoblade : I never played any of the Xenoblade games.  I’m kind of intrigued by maybe wanting to get the Switch port of Xenoblade Chronicles, but RPGs tend to be intimidating for me to get into, the whole time commitment thing.  Still seems like something I might be interested in trying sometime.

Duck Hunt : Indeed, I played it.  I know well the trauma of dog ridicule.  As far as other light-gun games on NES, I did play Hogan’s Alley and Gumshoe.

Street Fighter : I think the only one I ever played was the SNES version of Street Fighter 2 that had the four extra characters, I want to say it added Cammy, Dee Jay, T. Hawk, and Fei Long I want to say?

Final Fantasy : The main ones I played a lot of were 7 and 9.  I did play a bit of the one with Kefka as a kid, but didn’t really get too into it.

Bayonetta : I’ve played both 1 and 2 all the way though, and am interested in hearing more about 3 when we get some new info there.  I can’t say I’m that GOOD at them, but I could at least beat them, haha.  Still find them fun.

Splatoon : I played the original, but can’t play online, so just the single player stuff.  Still need to do that on Splatoon 2, I do have a copy, just haven’t really gotten around to playing it.

Castlevania : I’ve played MOST of the series I want to say?  Mainly some of the 3D ones I missed on, never played the Lord of Shadows games, 64, also notably never had access to the actual Rondo of Blood, only Dracula X.

Persona : The only one I ever played is Persona 4.  I’d be tempted to give 5 a shot if it got a Switch port.  Admittedly I kinda shied away from this series for awhile due to Persona 3 being the main one I’d heard about, and mostly it was hearing about how they invoked their Personas, which was... not something I liked due to personal squick with that sort of thing.  I had the mistaken impression that was how it was in ALL the games as such.

Dragon Quest : I’ve played a bit of some of the NES ones as a kid, but never really could get too into them.  Always liked the monster designs though, so I did like the Dragon Quest Monsters games.  Only got to play the two on GBC though.  I tried the demo for DQ 11... just didn’t really pull me in.  Turn based RPGs are just hard for me to get into admittedly.

Banjo-Kazooie : I played and loved the original and Tooie, as well as the GBA game (don’t remember much about that one though).  I never played Nuts & Bolts.

Fatal Fury : I don’t THINK I’ve ever played a Fatal Fury game.  If so, I have no real memories of doing so.  Still familiar with Terry though, just never really had much SNK / Neo Geo access growing up.

ARMS : I only ever played the demo of the game, not the full one.

Minecraft : I’ve never played it.  From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like my kind of game.  Just total open world sandbox / survival type stuff, not usually something that pulls me in, and admittedly I don’t really like the Minecraft aesthetic too much.  Nothing against anyone that likes it, just not really my thing.

[endwalkr]

this is an ask based thingy but im really in the mood to infodump so im just gonna answer them all under the cut !

Favorite video game?

starting off with the absolute hardest question huh? i can’t possibly name ONE favorite game of mine because i adore my favorites for many different reasons. my overall favorite video game is ffxv or botw. ffxv because it has brought me so much joy for such a long time, and because i have such a connection with the characters. botw because i was actually in the fandom when it first got announced in 2016 so i got to be there when the hype was at an all time high– and finally being able to play the game after waiting for so long was an unforgettable experience. i have more favorite games but ill talk more about them in the ‘’special place in ur heart’’ question.

First console you owned?

my first console wasn’t a console. my friend and i used to play on her nintendo dsi all the time and at one point tiny little me reeeally wanted one of my own so i saved up and got one in [redacted] when i was 7. my first actual console was a wii though, we got that around the same time.

A game that holds a special place in your heart?

ffxv and botw mean the absolute world to me, but super mario galaxy and skyward sword are very important to me too. skyward sword is the game that got me into zelda which got me into anime which got me into final fantasy etc etc etc.  super mario galaxy was the first non-mini game collection and more adventure story-ish game i played. i was so proud when i beat it for the first time and mario was my first ever ‘’fandom’’ :’) 

Favorite video game character?

bro. i cant pick just one so i’ll choose one per game : prompto, ryuji and link. they were all my comfort characters at some point and i projected like crazy onto them. this doesnt mean that i wouldnt absolutely die for noct or zelda. 

Least favorite video game character?

i dont think theres anyone i distinctly dislike? i always talk about hating ardyn but that’s because he’s just a salty bitch. as a character i think he’s a great villain and i rly love him. i honestly always end up liking everyone somehow, maybe there is someone i just forgot about but i cant remember at all. 

Favorite genre?

adventure games, or action rpgs. 

Video game character you’ve had a crush on?

every character ever, but i distinctly remember the moment i fell in love with prompto sjghfkshd i was watching a playthrough of xv in december 2016 because i didnt have a ps4, and the guy got to the scene in galdin quay where the bros learn insomnia fell. i had watched about 6 hours of the game by that time and wasn’t particularly interested in the characters but not uninterested enough to drop it. i hadnt even gotten a good look at the characters faces yet, so when the camera zoomed in on prompto when he said ‘’might not be save for us here!’’ i noticed he had freckles. oh god. oh fuck. oh my god hes fucking cute. oh my god better watch 30 hours of this game now

First video game you remember playing?

wayyy before i got my own gaming systems, my then-best friend had a gamecube in her attic. i was around 5 or 6 at the time. whenever i was over at her house and we didnt know what to do, she’d sometimes propose to play ‘’mario kart’’. important is that we are dutch, and i was a literal child. i thought mario KART meant it was a fucking card game, so i always declined whenever she asked. on one fateful day, i finally gave in and was pleasantly surprised it was in fact not a card game, but a viddy game. so we played mario kart double dash. (…i had never played a video game in my life besides browser flash games and was Very Very bad)

Age you started gaming?

so i played my first video game that i didnt own when i was about 5 or 6. then i got my first supply of games at age 7/8, but i dont really consider that time to be when i started ‘’gaming’’. i’d say that was when i started mario galaxy, so i’ve been playing video games for real (ie. story adventure games with boss battles) for about 6 years now.

Hardest video game you’ve played?

this is gonna sound stupid, but the witcher 3. there’s like 7 difficulties and i played on the EASIEST and still had a hard time, i just couldnt get used to the combat. i had the same problem with assassin’s creed syndicate, but after about 10 hours i actually knew what i was doing, and ive played the witcher longer than that and still am clueless. this is kind of an unpopular opinion but i dont particularly like that game

Video game you’ve spent the most time on?

i guess i am what you’d call a casual gamer; i really like video games but during a normal school week i only game for like 2-6 hours. most of the time i dont play for like 2 weeks if im busy. gaming has kind of taken over my life not because i play so much but because i get so emotionally invested lol i’m currently on summer break and even now im not playing a lot because of exhaustion and executive dysfunction. this derailed slightly but the game i’ve played the most despite my casual gamer status is …. … …. ffxv. surprise, right? the runner up is botw, but xv wins by a landslide. 630+ hours. botw is 350. my main save in ffxv is almost 200 hours i think. damn. i really managed to keep myself entertained with that game… (………i was thinking recently, since the loading screens in xv are so long, how much of this total amount was spent watching screens. i imagine it’s several hours, especially if you fast travel a lot.)

Most embarrassing gaming moment?

many moments in my gaming experience are embarrassing, but a more recent one: i was in xv’s postgame, beating some dungeons on my new save file. i had just finished daurell caverns and hadn’t saved in about 2 hours. (uh oh) i was driving around in the regalia type d and got to the big cliff near lestallum, and remembered someone made a gif of jumping in there so i wanted to try it too. i imagined the game would just put me back on the road, like it does when you crash into something. except it didnt. i got a game over. where was my last save? 2 hours back all the way in hammerhead. yippee.

Scariest video game you’ve played?

i never play horror games, cuz for me games are supposed to be relaxing experiences. no hate towards horror games of course, they just stress me out. the only time ive played horror is when friday the 13th was for free on ps+, and my friends really wanted to play it. (theyre kinda addicted to it now. huh) they had already gotten over the initial fear of having jason chase you, but i was still terrified. i can play the game without getting scared now tho. the horror sound effects just rly freaked me out at first jhsdkghsd

Most memorable gaming moment?

playing breath of the wild for the first time, or beating it for the first time. both experiences were filled to the brim with excitement and nostalgia. seeing botw as a blank slate, a world for you to explore, having no idea where you’re going… that was pretty incredible. now i know every nook and cranny of the map, so i wish i could play it for the first time again. i was so incredibly immersed. beating it was insane. i cried for 30 minutes and the end wasnt even sad, i was just so amazed at the fact that i was really here, playing breath of the wild, it was really real. the fucking main theme in the background (which i cannot for the life of me listen to without crying) didnt help with my emotions sgkdjh

Video game character you wish you could meet in real life?

…………..its prompto again. maybe 2017 me …. was .. kind of a kinnie

PC, Xbox, Playstation, or Nintendo?

i dont care about console wars at all, but i think hardware-wise, pc is the best, because if you have a good pc you can basically do anything. i however do not, so i just play on consoles. ive never particularly liked xbox, so i only play ps4 and nintendo. not the switch though. its kinda petty, but my best friend and i really dont like the switch djghks

Gaming company you’re most loyal to?

none. i used to call myself a nintendo nerd (oh my god…. i m. gonna die) in like 2015 but since the switch came out and since i got a ps4 they kinda lost me. i still like their game series of course, but as a company i don’t care for them. the only reason i see square enix as one of ‘’my’’ gaming companies is because ffxv took up like 70% of my gaming experience, but besides final fantasy i don’t really love them too much either.

If you could only play one video game for the rest of your life, which would you choose?

atm i’m really into ffxiv because theres just so much to do, but that’s just a new, possibly temporary interest. if i had to choose, i’d say botw. maybe i’d say ffxv, but i feel like running around doing nothing in that game isnt very fun, because the world is sorta empty after completing every quest and getting to level 120. in botw, just fucking around on your horse is still really relaxing and nice. 

Do you use strategy guides?

yup. in certain games i try to avoid them but i usually end up stuck or in need of advice. i couldn’t have gotten so many p5 trophies if not for the internet lol

How often do you use cheats?

never, simply because the games i play often do not have cheats. unless im playing the sims and are in need of a motherlode, i dont use them.

Competitive or single player?

single player. im bad at video games and like to do stuff at my own pace. online multiplayer can be fun every now and then in games like mario kart 8 or splatoon, and i also like teamwork stuff like ffxiv or comrades. but ultimately, i prefer playing on my own.

Video game character you want to/have cosplayed?

have never cosplayed, dont have plans to either, but it would be fun to cosplay link. omg. i just remembered i have that fucking chocomoogle shirt… sorry link im gonna slap on some sasuke hair, black jeans and ugly sneakers 

Ever go to a video game convention?

i have not, i have however gone to three (3) video game concerts which is basically the same thing. 

Hardest boss fight you’ve been in?

the hardest bosses for me are usually the ones with a gimmick. you have to use a certain item or tactic to beat them or something. other hard fights for me are when you fight someone with a similar skill set. (in ffxv, this happens twice, once with the iggy-noct sparring match and once against ardyn. somehow, the final boss was easier than getting the prince to eat vegetables.) i don’t know an actual example of THE hardest boss fight ive been in though. at the time, the first bowser battle in mario galaxy was the hardest thing in the universe and i got stuck for like a month. currently, i’m having trouble with the riku-ansem fight in kh1. 

Video game you wish you could burn from your memory?

the zelda cdi games? no, i dont really know. i dont hate a game so much that i’d want to forget about it altogether, but i dont exactly love ocarina of time that much. it hasnt aged well and playing it on the gamecube for the first time in 2015 wasnt a good idea. im sure it was revolutionary at the time, but i cant handle the outdated controls gsdgksjs 

Favorite gaming series?

see, i love ffxv itself more than the entirety of the zelda series, but i dont love ff as a SERIES more than the zelda games. so if were talking series, zelda for sure. i fucking love those games and they mean a lot to me. 

Do you skip tutorials, or find them useful?

i often skip them because i cant pay attention, but then find that i need them anyway. so i usually do skim through them. 

Best online gaming experience?

one really good one happened a few days ago in ffxiv, some guy and i exchanged emotes for like 30 minutes and it ended with us becoming friends on psn :’) ppl dont usually emote back at me in that game so this was really wholesome and nice gjshksdj 

Worst online gaming experience?

i dont really have a worst? theyre more annoying. think try harders in gta online killing you 15 times in a row because they want to show you how good they are or something. magically, online gaming hasnt been too hard on me (mainly because i dont game online that much)

Why do you game?

it brings me joy. it’s a fun way of relaxing, while being stimulated at the same time. games have meant a great deal to me the past 6 years and i wouldnt want to lose them for the world.

[retphienix]

(Random) Game Recommendations

It’s a new year (or a few days prior as I type this and prepare it for new years) and completely unprompted here’s some game recommendations because I want to mention some games.

No rules really, just some random games I’ve either played for the blog or outside of the blog- heck- it’s not even all games I played this year and it’s definitely not games exclusively released this year.

The last one, for reference, was a little over a year ago on 7/29/2017 with this aiming for new years 2018 into 2019. Also I would change a few things about that due to Bamco not knowing how to stop themselves from ruining a game for microtransaction greedy money grabbing, but I digress.

Hamtaro Ham-Ham’s Unite! for the game boy color

This one is a game from my childhood that I’m so glad I completed through this blog.

If I were to sum it up I’d say it’s a game about learning hamster words and solving simple puzzles (usually making use of these words to interact with characters / the environment) to gather up Hamtaro’s friends for a meeting.

It’s too cute for its own good, it made me shout “THIS IS ON A GAME BOY COLOR” many many times because it looks too good in my opinion and is overflowing with adorable animations, and it’s just makes you feel good.

Ham-Ham’s Unite is a really relaxing and uplifting game, and it certainly left me in a better mood throughout my entire playthrough.

I hear Ham-Ham Heartbreak is even better, so I’ll be keeping that in mind the next time I want to revisit Hamtaro and friends.

Clickpocalypse 2 for android/iOS and apparently even in your browser (news to me)

Yes yes, an idle game. And one I haven’t played in months at that- but then again I haven’t played Hamtaro in a long time as well so I don’t see that as discrediting what I saw in it.

I, usually at least, just don’t enjoy phone games. Not for the bull crap “It’s not real games!” rhetoric, but because as time as gone on phone games have gone further and further from what makes a game good and instead have mostly become manipulative Skinner boxes. Even if they don’t SUCCESSFULLY drain your wallet, heck, even if they don’t have direct monetization and only use ads- they always seem to fail to balance the ‘game’ and the ‘greed’ and you’re left with no game.

You turn it on, play it for a little while, and then you realize you’re almost exclusively being used and you’re not actually getting anything out of the game.

This isn’t an incredible example of directly countering that mentality- it’s just one of a few games I’ve found in the previous years that successfully balance the other way for me at least. I’ll mention another arguably more successful- but inarguably more messy example for the next game.

The reason I mention Clickpocalypse 2 is because, well, it’s a good idle game that hit a very specific aesthetic and enjoyment for me. This is a VERY idle game, you did VERY little- you can’t even “click” to increase speed as the name might suggest. Your input is exclusively “Pick the party. Choose when to use potions or spell scrolls. Equip equipment (it’s simpler than that sounds, it auto lists the best found loot and you tap to equip). Tap to level up when you get the xp etc.

It’s really really hands off- but it felt great to me.

The aesthetic it lands on is classic RPG goodness and the party does as you’d expect, clearing out dungeons and grinding while you check in to equip and level them choosing what skills they learn.

It’s a game I enjoyed because it’s, well, a good idle game. It doesn’t bury you in “You should be tapping this non stop or else” gameplay. It carries enough enjoyable mental tricks like stronger gear and leveling up to make it fun, and the monetization is, well, the most optional thing I’ve seen in a long while.

I’ve played so many games that rely on ads and they all feel highly necessary. This has a similar idea- there are optional ads for buffs like double achievement points (used for permanent buffs across multiple adventures) or tempoary allies- and these are helpful as heck, but man.

Because this is SUCH an idle game, they honestly feel like the most optional ads around. I watched plenty because I enjoyed the game and less because I felt like I needed them in any way.

But there’s not much to say that would convince someone this is a great game. I just think it’s a good idle game for messing around on your phone. It gave me that feeling of watching a friend grind through an old FF game- a very specific feeling, but that’s what I got out of it. A chill idle with a nostalgic feel and the balance of “game” vs “phone bull crap” was tilted heavily towards the game side for me.

Buriedbornes for android

Lord that image is larger than I planned for, my mistake.

Buriedbornes was nothing but a surprise to me. I’ve played a few games I enjoyed on the phone in recent times. Idle Apocalypse and Clickpocalpyse 2 being high up there (not sure how Idle is now, but pre-beta was alright). Even fell into Dokkan for a little while. But this?

I downloaded this because I thought “Oh my god it’s trying to pretend it’s dark souls or bloodborne, what on earth is this.”

And you know what it is?

A REALLY good roguelike with traditional turn based combat!

Like a REALLY good one. It has that feature I adore in good roguelikes where things can seem impossibly difficult, but then you get a couple good drops, you tweak your character to emphasize a certain playstyle, and BOOM! You just beat the entire game in one run deep into the endless mode on a character that seems unkillable due to strategies you built from the drops you found.

And it has the foresight to tell you at a certain point “Score stops at this point so you’re just playing to collect things in your beastiary of items so you might as well stop” along with ways to end a run, though my preferred way to end a god run is to keep making deals with various demons until I end up with a curse that is guaranteed to kill me on the next boss that way I feel like I gambled to death.

Look, I know the last game might have seemed a little floaty on merits, but try this game.

It’s simply fantastic. Dive in, die, dive in, die, and then stumble onto a perma stun build or an infinite shield build or a barrier regen build- you can stumble unto so many unique ways to play and I honestly had a lot of fun breaking and being broken by this title.

Wasteland 2 for PS4/Xbone/PC/Switch

Let’s get away from phone games and handhelds in general.

Wasteland 2 is a game I was looking forward to ages before release. I remember stumbling across news of it being kickstarted or something similar- and bookmarking it for future reference and promptly forgot until I saw it in stores and started berating myself for not getting it at release.

Now it took me a long while to get around to Wasteland 2; Long enough to hear from some that it wasn’t as good as they wanted and others that it was too complicated. Long enough to build doubts.

But my god.

This is a game that I highly recommend you come in with a quick start guide of some sort. Seriously. No it’s not impossible or anything- and I’m sure fans of the original will scoff at me for saying as much- but no, really. It’s “Fallout before Fallout” except now it’s well after Fallout (obviously) releasing in 2014, and it takes that oldschool complexity seriously.

Mostly.

Basically, just read up a quickstart guide, I found a wonderful one for my purposes (pretty sure that’s the exact one I used) because character creation at the start pretty much dictates what your first impressions are gonna be- ranging from “Oh, okay, this is pretty neat, I’m hyped to dive into this” to “OH MY GOD THIS IS TERRIBLE AND EVERYONE SUCKS AT EVERYTHING AND I’M NOT A FAN”.

If your reaction is the latter, I recommend restarting and fiddling with your team composition. You can play however you like- but this is a game that kind of expects your first run to be “mostly diverse” before you attempt a less specialized team in the future.

Enough of that. Wasteland 2 is a newschool fallout game. That’s what you need to know. It’s got a ton of post apocalyptic fun, plenty of moral moments ranging in quality from “Oh heck that’s good” to “.... not good enough” but there’s a lot more good than bad.

The first half of the game is simply better put together than the second half, to be honest, due to budget and deadlines or some other dev level nonsense, but that doesn’t make the rest of the game throwaway- it just sorta simplifies towards the end and then culminates in a massive boss encounter, which isn’t terrible by any means.

Combat’s great if you enjoy oldschool fallout and want some nice squad x-com style battles. Death is scary (very scary). And, heck I don’t know, it’s just a fantastic fallout game. Like a REALLY fantastic fallout game.

I made characters I grew attached to and it felt so natural to do as much because (thanks to the quickstart guide) my team was VERY diverse so I began to associate each of them with their skills and the playstyles those skills dictated.

Seriously, with a short read on what skills do what this is a fantastic game that I’m very glad I got to play through. Oh, and if you’re on console the text is stupid small- go into the options and change that. Also, don’t do what I did which made me sad to notice- don’t type up a large Bio for your characters (at least on console) because a bug prevents the Bio box from scrolling, meaning you will forever lose access to your long backstory ;-; Don’t do that.

Wario Land: Shake It! for the Wii

God I love this game. This goes up with Hamtaro as another feel good game and in a similar way it left me feeling in a much more optimistic and generally positive mood as I finished it.

I am a huge fan of the older Wario Land titles, the first one is one of my favorite games on the game boy- but I never really kept up with Wario until recent years. I didn’t play the later games, didn’t try his mini game compilations, and didn’t look at console releases at all until much later.

I heard of this game from a Wario marathon stream setup someone was doing years ago and took note only for one fact “It’s got good graphics”.

Like that was it. I saw this and went “Pretty” so I took note to get it later on.

I had no idea it’d end up being one of my favorite games, but here we are. This game hit like a truck with quality. You can easily coast through the game if you’re struggling with the harder challenges, but my god, there are SO many challenges hidden all around for treasures. The gameplay is FANTASTIC, the motion controls are SMART (come at me) and that aesthetic! MY GOD, that aesthetic! The entire game looks like a fox kids cartoon or something similar and I adore it.

This goes down as one of those games I’d recommend to just about anyone. You have a wii, find a way to play this. Truly, one of, if not my absolute favorite platformers of all time.

Well I’m dropping this a little early because I don’t mind being off season.

12/28/2018.

There are a metric ton of games I could talk about or recommend, but I had some oddballs I wanted to say and a couple feelgood games I wanted shown as well.

Quick bonus titles would be EDF 5 (a ton of quality of life changes and it’s EDF!!! SHOOT BUGS!), Play Yakuza you dinguses, if my whole emotional sputter and that whole side blog I made didn’t give a hint- Doki Doki Literature Club is worth a play, Dragon Warrior Monsters is the best pokemon game, The Fall was very interesting and enjoyable, Nioh is Bloodborne done right, and God Hand is great.

Have a great new year, everyone~

[zeldauniverse]

Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a game that you might have missed. Even if you didn’t skip over the Wii U console generation, it could have easily fallen to the wayside amongst more popular entries such as Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U before it or Splatoon or Super Mario Maker after it. In fact, Captain Toad’s whole existence owes itself to its “predecessor” Super Mario 3D World, which included the very concept of this game as miniature levels or sidequests within it. As a result, if you’ve played the Mario title, you already have a rough idea of what to expect from Captain Toad.

FULL DISCLOSURE Nintendo Australia has graciously provided us with a review copy of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.

Thankfully, Captain Toad offers a little bit more than the experience from the Mario game before it, though admittedly not a great deal more. It naturally had to include boss battles because now there’s a Mario-esque “story” behind it as Captain Toad and co-star Toadette collect Power Stars. It expanded upon its original mini-levels by having a shooter-on-rails mechanic as well as coin-collection levels. And it’s borrowed somewhat heavily from Super Mario 3D World by pulling in the Double Cherries, Dash Panels, Beep Blocks, and more. It’s as much an extension of Super Mario Galaxy as Super Mario Galaxy 2 was… except without the actual Mario jumping and fast platforming.

Captain Toad borrows heavily from Super Mario 3D World with the inclusion of power-ups and items.

Cute and charming puzzle-solving

Captain Toad is a perfect game for the Nintendo Switch. (Though really, what game isn’t?) Captain Toad is all about bite-sized content in tiny stages, and the portable nature of the Switch means you can jump in, play a few levels, and then get back to whatever you were doing.

And the game is a lot cuter than I originally expected. I admit I chuckle a bit whenever I see Captain Toad appear in the various Mario games, from Super Mario Galaxy and onward. Seeing the little cutscenes with the captain is actually cute and endearing, even though his high-pitched squeaks can get a bit old by the game’s end.

The nature of Captain Toad tends to be more pause-and-think rather than hurry-up-and-go.

Where Captain Toad veers distinctively from its Mario origins is the fact that this is more of a puzzle game than a platformer. The game does have platforming involved within it, but the nature of the game tends to be more pause-and-think rather than hurry-up-and-go. That’s par for the course because the level’s objective is usually in plain sight — similar to the one-screen levels found in Super Mario Maker. However, another part of this originates from the fact that you can’t see the entire level in a single glance. You need to rotate your view around as parts of the level will obscure other parts, especially the underground bits. Even then, there are a few secret areas that won’t even be revealed until you actually encounter them, leaving the huge potential for hidden treasures and coins everywhere.

The world will start off seeming so very simple…

…but a simple twist of the stage opens up so many more possibilities.

Despite the general pause-and-think strategy omnipresent in the game, Captain Toad does force you into quick thinking quite often. Enemies such as Goombas and Shy Guys, once they detect you, will give quick chase. And given the captain’s inability to jump, your standard mechanism for clearing out enemies is gone. To replace that, Captain Toad — in a throwback to the American Super Mario Bros. 2 — can hoist turnips out of the ground and chuck them at enemies. However, turnips are far and few between and generally only spawn once, so you either have to be accurate or fast on your feet! The mine cart levels also require quick thinking; while you never have to worry about enemies in these levels, the levels become coin ruins, and you have to shoot targets quickly to maximize your coin count and/or complete your secret missions.

The game itself is divided into multiple episodes — three in total with a set of post-game bonus levels beyond it. It’s important to remember this after you defeat the first 18 levels and arrive at the end credits; the game isn’t over yet! It’s in episodes two and three where you play as Toadette (and later as both characters) as you chase down Wingo, the game’s avian nemesis.

It’s not just about waddling around enemies. There’s also rail-shooter segments.

Is Captain Toad really worth the investment?

So it merits saying that Captain Toad isn’t your Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey. Unless you’re a hardcore completionist, it’s not going to offer you the hundreds of hours of gameplay that the other titles on Nintendo Switch have to offer. Thankfully it doesn’t have to be either of the two games thanks to its price point. In North America, the game is being sold at $40 as opposed to $60, while in Australia it’s being sold at A$60 instead of A$90. And given that the Switch is full of like-minded titles such as Shovel Knight, Golf Story, and countless more, it’s in good company.

Overall, Captain Toad is relatively easy, but 100%ing the game takes much more effort.

It’s reasonable to ask whether or not this game is for you. Captain Toad is like the Kirby series when it comes to difficulty: If you consider yourself decent at playing modern video games, then you should find navigating the 60-odd levels of the main quest a relative breeze. Some levels are more involved than others, and some of the later levels involve a few more timing challenges or tricky spots that require a little more finesse, but you won’t see too many Game Over screens despite the game not inundating you with 1-Up Mushrooms at every chance.

That said, the challenge of the game starts to rapidly increase once you consider all of the optional challenges the game throws at you in order to 100-percent the game. Each of the stages in the main quest has three diamonds in it that need collecting, and failing to collect a sufficient number of these will start locking you out of the game’s bonus content after the main story. Furthermore, each stage has two additional challenges. The first is a simple hide-and-seek game with a pixelated Toad hiding on one of the level’s walls; in the Wii U version of this game, this only could be accessed as amiibo-activated content, but now it’s built into the game itself. Secondly, and more deviously, each level has a bonus mission, and achieving these can actually be quite difficult. It’ll take solid persistence to crack each auxiliary mission in the game.

That said, if you already owned and played Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker on the Wii U, it’s not worth getting the Switch version. With the exception of the hide-and-seek games no longer being locked behind amiibo, the only Switch-exclusive content is four additional bonus levels that are generally inspired by Super Mario Odyssey. These levels actually replace the Super Mario 3D World-themed bonus levels from the Wii U version, and as before you can’t play these levels until you go through the game’s storyline. Each of the four new levels is based upon one of the various kingdoms of Odyssey — namely the Cascade, Sand, Metro, and Luncheon Kingdoms. They’re cute fun, but it’s not much to merit a second purchase.

The adaptation from the Wii U to Switch is actually quite ingenious.

Boss battles are still fun and progressively more challenging.

An underappreciated but solid game

I didn’t play Captain Toad on the Wii U, and I had originally made the conscious choice to skip it for Nintendo Switch as well. Before playing it, I had a pretty good idea of what the game was, and, to a large extent, I was correct. I thoroughly enjoyed playing it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s been a long time since I’ve made the effort to fully 100% any game I’ve owned. (I’ve got too much of a gaming backlog to spend time on that!) While I do appreciate the challenges in the game — and some of them were things to which I immediately said, “Challenge accepted!” — those challenges aren’t something that will drive me back to playing it over and over. But that’s just me; depending upon how you game, your mileage may vary.

But Captain Toad is still cute fun, and I think it’s actually a very good thing that Nintendo came and remade the game for the Nintendo Switch. It’s definitely a game I think didn’t get enough acclaim the first time around, so maybe its presence on Switch will give it a bit more luster.

Score Similarity to other Marios 8.5/10 Mario Vs. Donkey Kong – ★★★★☆ Super Mario 3D World – ★★★☆☆ Super Mario Bros. 2 – ★★☆☆☆ Super Mario Odyssey – ★☆☆☆☆

Review: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is worth playing if you like puzzles Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker is a game that you might have missed. Even if you didn't skip over the Wii U console generation, it could have easily fallen to the wayside amongst more popular entries such as…

[bootlickerhawks]

honestly, if you're thinking of saving up for the game just pirate it lmao. either on the switch itself if you have it (you'll have to check the serial number of your console first + have a sd card) or on your pc by using an emulator. that's what I did and even though it's quite buggy since mine wasn't made for gaming it's still enjoyable ;v; I've made it my motto to never buy any of n*nt*nd* products and honestly, seeing some of the switch games' prices made me light-headed and the switch is already pretty expensive as it is!! and do not get me started on the controllers who stop working after a few months if you don't have a guarantee and which cost an arm and a leg!!!!! anyway rant over loved reading you gushing over the horsies ;V; I thought I was the only one who enjoyed just mounting them (the overworld's background music changes slightly when you're riding a horse and when it hits the deep piano notes... aaah so good makes the experience so much better and worth it <3<3<3<3)

I got the switch oled for sale a couple of months back and I think(???) they fixed the issue with the controllers freaking out. I haven't had any issues so far but I also only have 2 games on the switch : pokemon swsh and smt V, both of which aren't super demanding on the controller (tho I was really scared whenever I played the curry mini game in pkm that I would break it fnjkfek it's insane how fast you have to button mash in order to make good curry 😩)

I would pirate games for the switch but the last time I tried doing that on my wii it locked itself down and it was impossible to fix it :( Plus I heard nintendo takes super strict measures to prevent players from playing pirated games on their consoles so I don't want to take the risk :((

and, unfortunately, I dont think any of my computers are powerful enough to support playing video games on them 😔

I thought I was the only one who enjoyed just mounting them (the overworld's background music changes slightly when you're riding a horse and when it hits the deep piano notes… aaah so good makes the experience so much better and worth it <3<3<3<3)

Omggg that sounds awesome! 🥺

also might check out the games you mentioned!!! i've always loved epona in any zelda game but botw awakened something in me o///o

RDR2 is probably the best one if you want some real bonding time with the horse. You can even make your horse do dressage tricks like the piaffe if you increase your bonding level high enough, which isn't useful but it's a really cool detail imo!

(If you have the zombie DLC), the first RDR let's you get the four horses of the apocalypse which is as awesome as it sounds and they each have their own special power!

[postgamecontent]

The RPGs of the Super NES Classic #2: Super Mario RPG - Legend of the Seven Stars

Original Release Date: March 9, 1996 (JPN)

Original Hardware: Nintendo Super Famicom

Developer/Publisher: Square/Nintendo

There was a time where the idea of Mario being in a role-playing game was absolutely bizarre. Now that Mario's had several turns at the genre it's not nearly as outlandish a concept, but just about everyone I knew who was into games at the time was quite surprised by the mere existence of Super Mario RPG. Looking at it from a Japanese perspective, it's not that strange, I suppose. RPGs were hot, parody RPGs were already a thing, and Mario wasn't any more out of place than Doraemon or Godzilla. In the West, though, things were different. Console RPGs were about to break out on the back of an incredible marketing campaign from Sony for Final Fantasy 7 and the meteoric success of Pokemon, but they weren't there yet. The ones we did get typically fell into the fantasy genre, with the odd science-fiction game to mix things up. The best-known console RPGs were heavy on melodrama and usually played things reasonably straight. So yes, the news of the Final Fantasy folks making an RPG starring Nintendo's mascot kind of came out of nowhere.

Super Mario RPG represented the culmination of what was seen as one of Nintendo's closest relationships with a third party. Square had been peddling their wares almost exclusively on Nintendo's hardware for quite some time to great success. From Nintendo's perspective, having both of the major RPG publishers in Japan on their platforms exclusively was a real boon, and Nintendo had even gone so far as to publish Final Fantasy overseas to try to get it off the ground in the West, just as they had tried to do with Dragon Quest. It was in pursuit of that Western success that Super Mario RPG was born. Square had been trying hard to get the Western console audience to bite on RPGs the way their Japanese counterparts had. They pushed the Final Fantasy brand as widely as was possible for a company of their means, made a spin-off that served as a beginner RPG, and even tried setting up an American development team. Perhaps what they needed, it was surmised, was an established star. For Nintendo's part, Shigeru Miyamoto had apparently been interested in seeing Mario star in an RPG. The deal was made and Super Mario RPG entered development early in 1995.

Sadly, this game would prove to be the last collaboration between Nintendo and Square for quite some time. Scant months before the official release of Super Mario RPG, Square made the announcement that changed the entire video game landscape in Japan and arguably the world. Final Fantasy 7 would be their most ambitious project yet, and it was coming exclusively to Sony's new PlayStation platform rather than Nintendo's Nintendo 64. To say Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, did not take this announcement well would be an understatement of the highest order. It would be several years before Nintendo and Square would mend fences and do business together again. What should have been a celebration of a great on-going business relationship ended up being its eulogy instead.

While Super Mario RPG wasn't exactly the game to break down the JRPG walls in the West, it did do fairly well for itself considering how late it released in the Super NES's life cycle. It turned out that with some careful considerations, Mario was a really great fit for a light-hearted RPG that would appeal more widely than the usual game in the genre. Of course, with the relationship soured with Square, Nintendo went in a very different direction for their next RPG starring Mario. Intelligent Systems drew some ideas from Super Mario RPG for their Paper Mario RPG on the Nintendo 64, but it was very much its own thing on the whole. Meanwhile, several former Square employees, many of whom had worked on Super Mario RPG, set up their own new studio called AlphaDream in 2000. Headed by Square's former president Tetsuo Mizuno, the team self-published just one game before beginning a long-term second-party relationship with Nintendo, the greatest fruits of which being the Mario & Luigi series of RPGs.

For a lot of English gamers, Super Mario RPG was their first experience with Japanese RPGs or even RPGs in general. I've noticed there is a lot of affection for the game and its characters, with many of its fans believing that the Mario RPGs never got better than this. I can appreciate that perspective, but I'm not sure that I'd agree with it. The game was attempting a very unusual hybrid of mechanics and themes, and it doesn't always work out for the best. As we would similarly see in the later Kingdom Hearts series, there's a little bit too much Square in here at times. By that I mean the game occasionally feels decidedly unlike Mario, sliding into odd bouts of melodrama and opting for a slightly darker tone than we would see in later Mario RPGs. The pacing is a little hit-or-miss, too. That all being said, I have tremendous respect for this game simply for being largely successful at navigating the tumultuous waters of mixing a beloved side-scrolling action mascot and his world with turn-based battles and leveling up.

Outside of battles, the game didn't do anything particularly unusual by action-RPG standards. The game takes on an isometric perspective and involves a fair bit of platforming and navigational puzzles. These are all things we've seen before, even among the limited selection of games I've covered on this very site. The angled view of the action can make things somewhat tricky as usual, but Super Mario RPG is wise enough not to ask too much of the player in this regard. Anything truly maddening is relegated to optional content, ensuring that even a moderately-skilled player will be able to see the story through. Battles take place in a separate screen, and basically follow the turn-based rules of games like Dragon Quest or earlier Final Fantasy titles. The big innovation here was in including timing-based commands that, if successfully performed, could increase the amount of damage you deal to enemies or reduce the damage you take.

It was a smart way to bring a little bit of familiarity to a situation foreign to action game fans. Sure, you had to pick what Mario was going to do from a menu, but when he leaps into the air to jump on an enemy's head, carefully-timed button presses will allow him to bounce off of his foe's head and keep on going, just like in the platform games. This semi-action based combat would become the hallmark of Mario RPGs, with increasingly complicated mini-games introduced as time went on. Aside from pulling some of the action elements from the platformers into the game, these commands also kept the players fingers busy during battles. For players turned off by how hands-off many RPGs tended to be, this was a welcome element.

There's something else I have to give Super Mario RPG credit for, too. Namely, this is the game that started to flesh out Mario's world and the characters who inhabit it. This game was Princess Peach's second playable appearance in a non-sports game, and the first playable appearance of Mario's frequent foil, Bowser Koopa. The villainous king of the Koopas had never been presented as anything other than a nefarious bad guy before this game. Here, we saw a somewhat-likable oaf who was more egotistical than evil. This would eventually lead to Koopa starring in his own RPG in the third Mario & Luigi game, and certainly did a lot to endear the character to players. Mario's party is rounded out by new characters Mallow and Geno, who seem to have gone over a lot better with players in general than they did with me.

Beyond the playable cast, we also got a lot of world-building that allowed us to see the Mushroom Kingdom and other locales in ways we hadn't before. A village of Toads, the resident staff of Peach's castle, and even seeing Koopa interact with his henchmen all helped contextualize the platformers we had been playing for years. The game also features numerous nods to other Nintendo properties, to an extent that no other Nintendo title had done before. Do Samus and Link exist in the same universe as Mario? Smash eventually tells us that they sort of do, somehow, but it's first suggested in Super Mario RPG. Sure, it's just a bit of silly fun, but it was neat if you were a fan of Nintendo's wider world of releases.

My own experience with this game is somewhat strange. I bought the game the day it released for just over $100 Canadian, a typical price for Super NES games at the time. I blasted through the game over a three-day weekend, and having little desire to replay it, sold it on to a friend for $95. I was already a big fan of Japanese RPGs by this point, and I found Super Mario RPG to be a little too lightweight for my liking. To be fair, it was following a stretch of RPG releases that included Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. There was only so much it could do. To be honest, very little of the game stuck with me at all. I first replayed it a few years ago when it got released on the Wii Virtual Console. It's a little clunky, and the art really hasn't aged well at all, but the core gameplay is solid enough. It's simultaneously more in some ways and less in others compared to the later Mario & Luigi games.

The game doesn't quite have its tone properly set, for one thing. It feels torn between trying to reconcile the silly nature of Mario's universe with an actual RPG-length plot. Later games in the series would pull back somewhat on trying to develop characters, instead opting for a greater emphasis on events and comedy to stretch things out. That gives Super Mario RPG a feel quite unlike other Mario RPGs, if nothing else. It also feels less confident in venturing too far outside of RPG norms in some ways. The various party members feel in a mechanical sense like the usual templates, something future games would expend a lot of effort to break away from. Still, there's some comfort in Super Mario RPG's embrace of the familiar. I'm not sure if this makes much sense, but if I'm in the mood for an RPG, this game does the job better than the later Mario RPGs in spite of their generally higher quality.

Given its slightly complicated rights issues (the game contains some Final Fantasy music among other bits), I'm glad that Nintendo has made it somewhat readily available through multiple Virtual Console releases and its inclusion in the Super NES Classic. While I don't think of it as highly as some others, it is one of the better Super NES RPGs to get an English translation. It's still a lot of fun, and trying to play the original game on today's TVs can be tough due to latency issues interfering with the timing of battle commands. I suspect that so long as things remain friendly between Square and Nintendo, Super Mario RPG should continue to see releases wherever Nintendo opts to plumb their back library. I only wish it had seen a Virtual Console release on the New Nintendo 3DS so that we could have the whole Mario (& Luigi) RPG series playable on a single console.

Previous: Final Fantasy 3  

Next: Secret of Mana

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[unboundedworlds]

-The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (3D)- [09.06.17] Also currently playing: Final Fantasy IV, Ace Attorney, Infamous: Second Son Within the past year or so I finally got around to playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time and more recently Majora's Mask. While I'm a huge fan of the series, the first Nintendo console I ever owned was an original DS, followed by the Wii, so I was never able to play OoT, MM, Wind Waker etc. for the older systems. Because of this, my introduction to the Zelda series was Twilight Princess for Wii and since then I've tried to grab and play as many games from the series as possible. I've made myself a checklist as I intend to play every main-title Zelda game eventually, when I do I'll probably write about my favourite and least titles were and why. For now though I want to talk a little about Majora's Mask as, what started off as a game I really struggled to get into eventually hooked me until I'd cleared the game 100%. If you've played MM you'll know that this game differs from most other entries in the series in many ways, from the theme, setting and the overall formula and structure of the game. For a start Link isn't even exploring Hyrule in this game, but a new land called Termina. Following this, neither Zelda nor Ganon have any part in this story whatsoever (bar a tiny flashback of Zelda right at the start of the game), and in fact I'm not entirely sure the Triforce was mentioned even once through this story. Instead of saving Hyrule/the world from Ganon, Link must save Termina(/the world) from the Moon that is but 72 hours from crashing into the planet. A Moon that has a giant evil face. Because uh... reasons, I guess? This Moon is being controlled by Majora's Mask which is possessing and using the Skull Kid as it's puppet (a cute little character you may recognise from a side quest in Oot). The story is deeper than that but that's a brief overview. I love the classic and more formulaic Zelda games, but one of the reasons I love this game so much is because it wasn't afraid to break away from a large portion of that formula. One of the biggest pulls for me was its sinister, horror-esque and downright creepy themes and undertones. The game may be creepy enough with its presentation, but look a little deeper into the lore and theories and this game seems to just keep getting darker, especially for a Zelda/Nintendo game. Most of the game will have you transforming into different races/beings using Masks that... pretty much contain the soul of a recently deceased member of that race? Yeah. Dark. Creepy. COOL. Unlike almost every other Zelda game, Majora's Mask's main story actually takes a huge backseat for the majority of the game about an hour or two in. Sure you can boot up the game and play beginning to end focusing pretty much purely on the main quest and ignoring everything else, but everything else is really where the bulk of the game lies. Thus game is full of side-quests and all kinds of mini events, and for the most part this is where the main mechanic of travelling back in time to reset the 3 day cycle comes into play. Almost every NPC has their own schedule and will be doing different things depending on the day and time, and most of the side quests revolve around meeting the right person or doing the right thing at the right place at the right time. Personally these side quests and collecting all 24 of the various masks in the game were what really made this game stand out to me. Mechanically the game plays and feels like a Zelda game, but it's so much more than that. Everything from the visual style, to the characters, to the masks and their unique mechanics to the games incredible soundtrack make this definitely one of my favourite Zelda games I've played to date. As mentioned before it did take me a fair amount of time to actually get into the game, this was because of the initially intimidating and daunting 'time limit' mechanic, but once you've spent enough time figuring out how it all works, the game becomes an absolute joy to experience. Considering I unfortunately wasn't the biggest fan of Ocarina of Time, I'm super glad I was able to enjoy this title as much as I did.

[gavinbowman]

2016

Lol, I just checked, and apparently my big hope for 2016 at the end of 2015 was that I’d be happy if 2016 just sucked less. How’d you think that went?

Amazingly, for me personally, 2016 probably did suck less than 2015. It sucked a lot, and I’m no less bummed out by it than most people, but still. And if I said I’d be happy if it sucked less, I guess I have to be happy.

One of the other things I said was that I hoped I’d release more new games... that didn’t quite work out.

Let’s start with that easy trackable stuff

At the end of 2015 I felt like I’d underachieved, there were only about 20 new SKUs hitting some app store or another, and only really 4 or 5 distinct projects that I’d happily call newly finished games. The heady days where that felt like underachieving are long gone.

This year there were 2. And one of those was an Apple TV game I think I’d mostly finished in 2015 that sold barely more than a dozen copies. And the second only came out on iOS a couple of weeks ago and probably won’t make a dollar in it’s lifetime.

But, I finished it and released it with no expectations because I felt like it’d be good for me to release something, and it was. I already posted about that though. So drumroll:-

Retro Mini: Drop (Apple TV) - An ultra low res magical drop game. Meow Tap (iOS) - A simple card tapping game with cats.

And I did finish another game that I’m very happy with that should launch early in 2017, so that’s a good feeling too.

Aside from new releases, apparently I released 63 updates this year. Holy shit. That’s a lot. I slowed down on that front as the year progressed and continued to focus more on new things, but I’m less surprised how little I finished this year when I look back over the logs for that.

I’m not aware of any rejected apps or updates this year, but I might just not have tracked them. I did pull a couple of updates myself and resubmit though.

Biggest new trend that’s likely to continue is the number of SKUs that ceased to exist this year. We lost 48. Either through App Stores closing down, or just generally cleaning house to reduce maintenance. One of these, Velocispider Zero, got a reprieve a little later since there was no noticeable impact in sales and the free version did get a few downloads now and again.

I’ll probably continue trimming our mobile catalogue down as the months and years go on. I’d like to keep a version of everything available somewhere just for  the sake of preservation, but we’ll have to see how hard the platforms make it, it’ll never be cost effective... so it’ll depend if the costs feel manageable.

Compared to last year, 2017 should almost certainly see more new releases, and probably fewer updates. I don’t know about the removals, I can’t drop 48 a year for long, but l do expect there’ll be more SKUs removed than new ones released.

I’m still not sure if mobile is a viable platform for us as we move forward, but I feel like this story arc is still going somewhere, and for now I’m determined to keep reading until I see something like an ending. I’m still enjoying most of the work anyway, and I still have a lot I want to do here if I can. If I do have to switch things up a bit, I feel like there are plenty of avenues to explore, with PC/Console and VR games still being the most obvious choice.

On that front, Monsters & Monocles did release this year too, it’s nice for us to finally be laying down some roots in a different market. It’s still in early access, and we have some console porting even when it’s content complete.. but we have some good plans, it’s been a great experience so far, and we’re already feeling good about many future plans on that side of things.

We did a lot of shows again with M&M this year, something we’re cutting back on next year for a variety of reasons. It continues to be the most satisfying career thing I’ve ever done, I totally recommend it with the following caveats: if you can afford it, and if you can do it without too much personal physical strain, and while still making sure you get the game made. I hope someday we’ll show something I worked on personally too. And that’s an appropriate segue into the next chunk...

Personal & work/life improvements

I was surprised when I read my 2015 post and saw that I’d written something about starting to think about health and stuff. I guess I forgot about that pretty fast. But luckily midway through this year I had my first “fuck you, you’re old now” medical, and did start to think a bit more about looking after myself. My kid (soon to be kids) is young, so I want to stick around for a while yet, and I guess I’m past the age when I can just go about my business working dumb hours, eating cake pops, assuming that’ll happen.

I’ve been doing a little exercise, and eating a little better, and I feel pretty good. There was a good thing going around around christmas on twitter about the health impacts of stress, and although I’ve been entirely conscious of that for a long time, it was a good reminder that I need to try to manage it better. If managing it was as easy as acknowledging it, that’d be great...

As well as I’ve done with various things this year, I don’t think I’ve really managed my stress levels all that well. Maybe I’ve acknowledged them a bit more quickly, and tried to chill the fuck out when I notice things got on top of me. But the way I respond to stress and my coping mechanisms have definitely changed in the last couple of years, and I really need to get more familiar with the triggers and walking myself back down instead of letting things ramp up. It’s all an ongoing work in progress. I feel like I’m getting to know this version of myself a bit better. If I’m still behaving mostly the same with 2 kids, I’ll hopefully have worked this out a bit by the end of next year.

Although on some level I’m thinking, how can anyone with a family who’s financially dependent on independent video games not be on the verge of losing their shit all the damned time anyway... but as with everything, there are levels and progress is progress.

I noted that my work life balance was a disaster in my 2015 post. I think I did a lot better this year. It’s still a work in progress, there’s definitely been times when I was trying too hard to maintain a work level that just isn’t compatible with my life now. But generally speaking I feel like I’m pretty aware of the time I have and what I can do with it, and that I’m not totally blind to all the joy of parenting and other life stuff happening around me. I’d feel pretty good spending 2017 with my current work rate and family balance... but I’m guessing I’ll spend most of it trying to find a new balance as a parent of 2 kids. But I’ll get it figured out, and I’ll figure out how to keep making shit when I do.

How about gaming?

2016 was not a vintage year for video gaming for me. I really started to figure out my work schedule in the new realities of parenthood and aging, and most of the time I was just too tired to play games after either working or spending time with family. I only finished 6 games. Pretty much all retro games on either my Wii U gamepad or 3DS too. I’m not happy about this at all, must do better next year. Although the thing that excites me most in gaming is the thought that my daughter is going to want to play games before tooo long, and I’m going to get to enjoy some with her, and for this year probably VR and the Nintendo Switch. But VR game time is even harder to acquire than TV gaming time for me these days.

Moving onto 2017

I felt pretty good about my dev blogging here this year. Once a month is realistically all I’m going to do, with optional extras whenever, and I probably repeat myself enough even only posting monthly anyway. I’ll try to keep that up anyway, any higher intensity commitment would be hard work, boring, and doomed to fail. Hopefully you’ll read along. I won’t know. But I’ll post it anyway, it’s good for me.

Hopefully I’ll play more games and make more games this year. And hopefully I’ll get my new normal figured out faster with 2 kids than I did with the first one.

Anyway, here’s to a healthier, saner, less stressed, more productive, more fun, slightly less sucky year. Cheers!

[williamsjoan]

Eon’s GCHD MK-II Review — Unlocking the GameCube’s Full Potential

I love the GameCube. I grew up on my Game Boy systems and the Nintendo 64, but the GameCube defined much of my gaming love to this day. I shout the good word of Paper Mario The Thousand-Year Door from the rooftops and grunt when Nintendo ignores my pleas for a spiritual successor. Wind Waker will always be my favorite Zelda game, even if others have surpassed it critically. I remember playing Mario Party with the microphone accessory or being captivated by the planet of Talon IV in Metroid Prime. 

All this love has also been recently twisted by crippling nostalgia. I have a severe case of it. Throw anything from my childhood on screen and I will likely be drawn towards it. That’s why I have been slowly circling down the rabbit hole of resurrecting old game consoles onto modern HD displays for years now. 

My entry point to this niché hobby was a YouTube channel called My Life In Gaming. Coury and Marc run the channel, creating highly educational videos about bringing classic consoles back to life on modern HD TVs. I immediately jumped to their video on the best solutions for the GameCube and found out the financial horror associated with bringing the GameCube into the modern era. Nintendo’s official component cables cost an arm and a leg, going for $250+ on eBay. To get an HDMI port for your GameCube a few years ago required physically modding the system. I nearly pulled the trigger on a roughly $160 mod, but backed off after more research and not being keen on physically altering my childhood system.

Through all this time in the rabbit hole, I came across a new company early in 2018 that was offering a plug-and-play option for HDMI cables on the GameCube. EON created the GCHD, a tiny adapter that plugged into the digital out port on original GameCube systems and allowed native 480p output for $150. Just like the physical mod, I nearly pulled the trigger a few times, but it was never in the budget. 

Ten months later EON revealed an upgraded version of their adapter. The GCHD MK-II (MK-II from here on out for simplicity) was revealed on November 15 and offered a couple new features and refinements over their original model. We were fortunate here at DualShockers to receive a consumer unit a couple days ahead of its official release on December 15, 2018. Selling for the same price of $150, I wanted to find out if the MK-II is really worth the cost to bring my beloved GameCube onto my HD TV.

Before we dive further in, let’s talk specs. The GameCube is capable of 480p digital output. This is thanks to a snazzy port on original model GameCubes that was meant for stereoscopic 3D. That tech was never fully developed, but the port offers access to the GameCube’s lossless digital signal. That’s five years before the PS3! The MK-II uses that port, along with an onboard FPGA chip with custom version of the open-source GCVideo software, to take the digital signal and output it over HDMI with zero input lag. This does not upscale the video to 720p, 1080p, or 4K. You’ll have to use an external scaler for that. The MK-II also allows for analog output via the common red, blue, green component cables meant for the Wii. There is also a new analog/optical audio port for plugging in headphones or a surround sound system.

The MK-II comes packaged in a tiny GameCube designed box. There are three color choices meant to match your hardware; purple, black, and silver. EON let me pick the black edition to match my GameCube. The back of the box details all the features of the adapter, while detailing the easy setup. All that is inside is the MK-II itself and a tiny instruction booklet.

I popped the MK-II out of its box and immediately went to plug it in the back of my GameCube. This adapter only works with DOL-001 model GameCube systems, which will have the digital out port. You’ll definitely want to make sure you have this model GameCube before buying the adapter. Initially, I had trouble getting the MK-II into the two ports on the back. I had to unplug the system entirely and get it in the light to make sure I was lining it up correctly. Once I got it lined up, it fit perfectly and snuggly.

After plugging it in, using it was nearly a breeze. All you have to do is plug in an HDMI cable and boot the system up. It automatically works and displays the GameCube at 480i. To get 480p to work on games, just hold the B button as a game boots up and select “yes” to progressive mode. I found that most time the GameCube prompted me whether or not I held down the B button, but to guarantee it, I’d recommend holding the button down. I say nearly a breeze because I had some trouble syncing a universal remote to access the MK-II’s settings.

I thought I had a remote lying around, but it wasn’t “universal.” I went to Target and bought the cheapest one they had, but it wouldn’t work either. I had to go back to Target, return the $7 remote and swap it for a $15 remote. This remote worked after I read the remote’s instruction manual on how to sync the thing. This was tedious mostly because I didn’t own a universal remote. I was also sick at the time, so that didn’t help matters.

“…using it was nearly a breeze. All you have to do is plug in an HDMI cable and boot the system up.”

Once the remote was synced, I was able to access the settings for the MK-II. Its feature list isn’t too extensive, but it does offer some interesting choices. There is a line doubler for when the GameCube displays 480i content, to help create a picture quality more akin to 480p. You can turn on scanline to simulate a CRT TV. While slightly nostalgic, scanlines really shine on the GameCube’s rare 240p games and GBA games. You may adjust the brightness, contrast, and saturation. There are even options for tweaking the MK-II’s on-screen display (OSD) settings, which is for the settings. Honestly, it really is plug-and-play ready, with only a few settings you may want to tweak for specific games.

The first game I booted up was The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I thought the game’s bright color palette and cel-shaded visuals would be a great test point. I’ll let the game speak for itself.

It’s as if the old school yellow, red, white composite cables were smearing Vaseline over the game footage, dulling the colors and shapes. It blew my mind to see it in action. It took what I remember the game looking like and put it on display. And didn’t just clean up Wind Waker. All of my GameCube games, from Super Smash Bros. Melee to Metroid Prime to Paper Mario, were being displayed the way that the developers intended it to be seen. It reminded me of when I put on glasses for the first time: There was a whole world of clarity I was missing out on and I didn’t know it.

As I mentioned above, the MK-II also allows for component output. When I first heard this was one of the new additions, I questioned its inclusion. Why add the support for analog video? After mulling it over and having the MK-II in person though, its addition makes sense for the GameCube’s active and diehard community. Having these two ports allows for simultaneous, lag-free output. This makes stream/capture setups simple at events and tournaments. The GameCube and its games were also designed for old CRT displays, as HD was entering its infancy. Including component allows for the highest quality analog output for purists who want to play on CRTs and PVMs the way the designers intended. It lets users have their high-quality cake and eat it too. 

But this analog path may bring up a common question- why pay $150 to have my GameCube in 480p over analog when I could just use a Wii and its component cables? All first generation Wii systems have backward compatibility with GameCube games. It really comes down to two facts. The first is that the Wii output is purely analog, with no access to the lossless digital signal. Using the MK-II gives us that pure signal, giving us a better picture via HDMI or component. The second fact opens a whole new platform of games—The Game Boy Player.

“It reminded me of when I put on glasses for the first time: There was a whole world of clarity I was missing out on and I didn’t know it.”

Back in 2003, Nintendo released the Game Boy Player, an accessory that attached to the bottom of GameCube systems and allowed Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy games to be played on the TV. As a kid, this blew my little mind. I got one for my 9th birthday and it hasn’t left my system since. Now at 24, the Game Boy Player (actually its software) leaves much to be desired. 

There are homebrew software solutions, like the Game Boy Interface (GBI), that put Nintendo’s software to shame. That’s a whole different rabbit hole, but combining that GBI with the MK-II leads to incredible results. 

If the GBI is not an option, the MK-II does a decent job cleaning up the official Game Boy Player software. You can see that the smaller text becomes legible and the overall image is slightly sharper. The GBI is where the crispness of the MK-II shines with GBA games. Even with a CRT filter over the game, it is a better picture than the official software.

When it comes to the audio output, the MK-II matches the format of the video output method. Digital when over HDMI and analog when using component. There is a 3.5mm auxiliary jack for analog output to headphones. I imagine this was implemented for Melee tournaments or just tournament environments.  Tune out the surroundings and really hear the game. The audio still outputs to the TV, so spectators, streaming/capturing setups still get the game audio. Even headphone splitters work!

The 3.5mm jack also doubles as a mini-TOSLINK optical audio jack, providing access to digital surround sound. I tested this out on my surround sound system with Wind Waker and Metroid Prime, both games that support Dolby Surround Pro Logic II. The games sound fuller coming out of three speakers and a subwoofer. Sound didn’t come out of my two other speakers, which is possibly due to the games not taking advantage of 5.1 surround sound. I’m not entirely sure.

“As a piece of hardware, the MK-II is sturdy, full-featured, and straight up easy to use.”

So is all this worth it? That’s probably why you read this far. Is $150 worth accessing the untapped potential of your GameCube? That’s all going to really depend on you.

As a piece of hardware, the MK-II is sturdy, full-featured, and straight up easy to use. It breathes new life into GameCube systems and is one piece that can help the console adapt to modern TVs. But how much do you love your GameCube? Do you play Melee competitively? Do you have a Game Boy Player and want to play your collection on the TV? Is the GameCube your favorite Nintendo system? If you answered yes to any of those and you truly want the best picture that your GameCube has to offer, I think the GCHD MK-II is worth every cent. It’s versatile, powerful, and easy-to-use. Most importantly, it makes the games I love look and feel their very best in a way I just didn’t think was possible.

The post Eon’s GCHD MK-II Review — Unlocking the GameCube’s Full Potential by Max Roberts appeared first on DualShockers.

Eon’s GCHD MK-II Review — Unlocking the GameCube’s Full Potential published first on https://timloewe.tumblr.com/

[thesteadydietofeverything]

Video Game Year in Review: Remakes, Remasters, and Re-releases

I’ve never made a list of remakes, remasters, and re-releases before, but then again, I don’t think I’ve ever played so many in a single year to even be able to. 2018 was a particularly busy year in this end of video game releases, nearly exclusively due to the Nintendo Switch. Now in its second year, the Switch may have been light on brand new first party titles, but the rush of seemingly every developer to get new and old games alike on the portable console came into full swing. “When’s that game coming to Switch?” has turned into a question that could be reasonably applied to...just about every game, but perhaps no more so than great Nintendo games originally released on their previous, unsuccessful console, the Wii U. These games enjoyed a second life in 2018, with many, including myself, playing 2014 games that we never got to as if they’re brand new. Switch re-releases don’t account for every game on this list, but they are a very clear majority...

5. Bayonetta (Switch remaster) - This is the one game on this list that I actually didn’t like. But I tried. Like it’s spiritual cousin, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta is a game that makes you feel shitty for not being good at it. I consistently got low grades on my combat performance, but didn’t feel like the game was offering any particularly helpful guidance in how to improve. It just kept pushing me forward, with dwindling currency, supplies, and patience, all the while just being a bit of a dick to me. If I found gameplay to be more fun, maybe I also would have been more willing to be entertained by its puerile, edgy aesthetic, but as it was, that just became another thing to grate on my nerves. If there’s one thing I gained from this game, it’s the assurance that not every popular game from the late 2000’s that I missed out on while I was barely playing video games is worth catching up on.

4. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze (Switch re-release) - The Donkey Kong Country games have always eluded me. I never had a SNES, so I couldn’t quite get into the bizarre proto-3D graphics of the originals once I finally checked them out. Tropical Freeze is the game that finally proved to me why people love these games so much. Donkey Kong is an unusual platforming star - his hulking frame gives him a slightly out of control momentum that is off putting until it’s suddenly satisfying, and that moment within the first couple hours of play where how to control him suddenly clicked was the start of two weeks of compulsively playing this game to completion during my summer break.

3. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Switch re-release) - What a unique game. A puzzle platformer whose main mechanic sometimes feels like your player character’s lack of an ability to jump. With a perfectly minimalistic mobility design ethos, this delightful experiment encourages you to explore the little 3D dioramas that make up its levels to completion. I’ve been obsessively mining each of them for all they’ve got before moving on to the next one, and it’s slow going - I’ve still probably got about ⅔ left of the game to go. But the thought of it is actually making look forward to my upcoming, otherwise painfully long flight to Japan, because absorbing myself in this seems like the perfect way to make hours go by without notice.

2. Dark Souls: Remastered - Before this remaster, I had played brief moments of the original Dark Souls on a friend’s PS3. Really, though, Bloodborne is where I fell in love with Souls-style games, and last year I obsessed over the excellent, overlooked Nioh. Finally coming to this game after more recent games in its style was a mixed experience for me. Obviously, the rather plain, blocky textures of the last generation are already aging quickly, but the game still has enough style and atmosphere that I wasn’t particularly bothered by that aspect of it. The combat, however, felt...bland. I know, I know, this game and its predecessor, Demon’s Souls, are praised for revolutionizing action RPG combat, with their tight controls and deliberate moves. If it weren’t for this game, the combat I love in Bloodborne and Nioh wouldn’t exist. But having put so many dozens of hours into Nioh, a game with combo attack strings and multiple stances, made the switch back to a game where each weapon basically only has two attacks, feel just kinda elementary. Not easy, mind you - despite my experience with this style, I still found this game to be welcomingly challenging, but performing the same moves over and over again just wore thin.

Nevertheless, this game has something that no game inspired by it has quite been able to replicate, or even, seemingly, really tried to, and that’s the incredible, interlocking level design. Yeah, Dark Souls 3 and especially Bloodborne obviously pull some similar magic tricks in connecting separate sections together, but regardless, feel like fairly linear games. Firelink Shrine in this game has three separate directions you can head in to start with, and the paths just keep branching from there. This game puts remarkable trust in the player in her ability and desire to explore, experiment, and undoubtedly die many times before finding the path of least resistance (because even that path offers plenty of resistance). This is the aspect of Dark Souls that kept me going. Not only has it not aged a day, it’s almost even more impressive in retrospect, a lightning-in-a-bottle kind of  flash of creative genius.

1. Yakuza Kiwami 2 - Last year’s Yakuza 0 was my first Yakuza game, and this year’s Yakuza Kiwami 2 was my fourth. As you might have guessed, I’ve fallen very, very hard for this series. For those not familiar, Kiwami 2 is a remake of Yakuza 2, originally on PS2, just as last year’s Yakuza Kiwami was a remake of the original game. While that game used 0’s engine, which was made for PS3 originally, Kiwami 2 uses the brand new, very pretty engine used for Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, which was released earlier this year. This game recreates just about everything in the original game, and adds a hell of a lot more. This feels so much like a brand new game to me that I considered just putting in on my main top 10, and honestly, the reason that I didn’t had less to do with the fear of breaking any non-existent rules about what qualifies for a year-end list, and more to do with the fact that The Song of Life was already on there, and I just wanted more space to talk about how much I love the shit out of Yakuza.

This game improves on Kiwami in just about every aspect. The main story is a lot more compelling, and it’s obvious that Yakuza 2 is tonally where this series really came into its own, with its so-serious-it’s-actually-kinda-funny Japanese gangster soap opera, mixed with deliberately silly as hell sub stories. In particular, there are two very deep and expansive side stories built around mini-games added to this game: the cabaret club management game borrowed and modified from 0 and the Majima construction clan battles borrowed and modified from The Song of Life. While I appreciated these in those respective games, something about the execution in this game just got me absolutely obsessed. Kiryu’s roll that he fits into with the misfit hostesses of the cabaret club and their scrappy underdog story is my happy place. The older professional wrestlers that play the mumbly, grumpy businessmen/fighters in the clan battle mini-game led to a couple of scenes that had me gleefully cackling out loud. Starting this game out, I had arguably already spent more than enough time playing Yakuza games over the last couple years, but it’s a testament to just how endearing this game is that after 40 or so hours of play, if Kiwami 3 were to suddenly be surprise announced and released, I would have been happy to jump straight into it.

[candyciangaming]

Convention Review: 8-Bit Coference

https://8bitconference.com/

I had the pleasure of attending my first video game convention this weekend, and I'm happy to report it was a fantastic experience from start to finish.

8-Bit Gaming Conference took place on the 28th and 29th of July 2018 at Griffith College, Dublin. This is the second year of the conference and the organizers should give themselves a pat on the back for a job well done. I only managed to get to the Saturday event, but I soaked up enough throughout the day to come back satisfied, but it left me wanting more!

8-Bit is the brainchild of Graeme Moore, and with the help from dedicated volunteers and the staff of Griffith College, the event went extremely smoothly and was great fun for all ages. On site were security personnel, a fire marshal, along with first aid attendants.  The event was backed by a multitude of sponsors, such as AllCast Irish Gamers, The National Computer & Video Game Museum, The R.A.G.E, Four Star Pizza, The Guild of Nerds and Republic of Gaming, to name but a few. The entire list can be found on the events Facebook page (link at bottom). Many of these partners set up as vendors or donated to the conference in one way or another.  8-Bit conference 2018 was in aid of Inner City Helping Homeless.

General admission started at 10am, but early entry was granted to people with special needs at 9am, and there was also a quiet room on-site for people who needed it. Beanbag chairs were kindly donated by the crowd at Beanbags.ie.

My first trip in (after a coffee in Arthurs Cafe), was to the room set up by the National Computer and Video Game Museum. The room was filled with arcade machines supplied by Mini Arcade Systems, and the Museum had a choice selection of video game memorabilia and retro video games. I was more than over the moon to see boxed copies of Final Fantasy IV, Super Mario 3, and Sonic The Hedgehog.

Mini Arcade Systems supply a retro bartop console arcade, complete with tonnes of old 8 and 16bit titles. I had a go playing the original Shinobi game, which was an absolute blast. I would have stayed longer, but I knew I'd never get to leave.

The next room was a mixture of retro consoles, featuring a Dreamcast, Playstation1, SNES, and more. It was like a trip through time. Most impressive of all was a Gameboy hooked up to a massive LCD TV. Playing Tetris in HD never felt so good. The Gameboy was also modified to be used with an SNES controller. It definitely made for a great gaming experience. Super Smash Bro's was also on the go on GameCube, along with House of The Dead on Dreamcast.  

Unfortunately, the PS1 didn't feel like working which was a let down. I'm a huge Playstation fan and it was a shame this particular Playstation wasn't working. There were other Playstations on-site, but it's a shame how one faulty system managed to make it's way through.

After a quick go of Street Fighter II on the SNES, I went upstairs to the main conference room. As I ascended, I was greeted by some familiar 8-Bit music playing through a PA system, along with a huge Mario Kart flag draped around the stairway.

When I entered the main room, I didn't know where to look first, it was my idea of heaven. Game Vendors as far as the eye could see. People gaming, people dressed up in Cosplay, and it was only 11am at this point.

After doing a lap of the floor, I seen a few familiar faces. The Guild of Nerds were hosting a Cosplay competition later on in the day, and had prints of different Cosplayers for sale. The Irish Chapter of the 501st Star Wars club were out in Force (pun definitely intended), and the RAGE (Record Art Game Emporium) had also set up a stall in the room, along with generously setting up a SNES for people to come along and play some games.  The Ghostbusters were also on call for any ghostly problems that might occur throughout the day, just to be on the safe side!

A row of tables had been set up for some casual gaming, Destruction Derby 2 and Rayman 2 were on PS1, an emulation of Streets of Rage was on the Wii, Ninja Gaiden was being played on Xbox. Tekken 5 matches were taking place on PS2, and Legend of Zelda: Orcarina of Time was on Gamecube. People were also on the Dreamcast having a few games of Crazy Taxi. A couple of Laptops were also set up with Wolfenstein 3D for those old school FPS fans, Quake 2, and Worms. It wasn't just games of yore however, Gamevan.ie had set up a few consoles with Fortnite on the go, along with having a vendors booth. I had my fair share of games at the retro table before heading off to do a little bit of shopping.

Rewind Retro Gaming and Retro Ralph sorted me out with some fantastic PS1 titles to ad to my collection. The games were all in fantastic quality along with being extremely cheap in price. I helped myself to a few games (and came back for seconds). Word of advice for people interested in coming to 8-Bit, I couldn't find an ATM machine on campus so come prepared.

I wandered over to Like The Bog Flower Designs and Beanies Art Mart who both had a fantastic selection of homemade figurines, stickers, badges, T-shirts and prints.

As the day went on, I took part in the Tekken 3 tournament, after days and days of training, I got my ass absolutely handed to me by Eddy Gordo, not the most graceful of losses, but it was a great bit of fun for all involved. Other tournaments were Mario Kart, Street Fighter, and Super Smash Bros.

One of the spectacles of the day was a 10-player Bomberman game being played up on the big screen in the main room. This was headed up by the lads at AllCast Irish Gamers, who were also the MC for most of the events throughout the conference. These lads know how to work a crowd and kept everyone entertained until the end.

I was in attendance for a few events on the main stage, the first of which being a panel of gamers discussing all things retro. It was interesting to hear other people's ideas about the way retro games are perceived by a modern audience, and do they still hold up as much today as they did when they were first released. They also held a relatively retro quiz which was a good laugh to see go down.

Ansonix was on the music side of entertainment for the day and kicked things off by performing his cover of the Streets of Rage theme song, before playing some of his own original works. I really dig this kind of 8-Bit style and I think Ansonix is someone we're going to be hearing a lot more of in the future. You can check out his music for free over at https://ansonix.bandcamp.com/.

I grabbed a Slushee from the Candy Pop Man and took a seat in time for the cosplay competition, headed up by the Guild of Nerds. Nate ó Cadhla was the MC for the competition, and there was a panel of cosplaying judges; Jichiie, Shonarrrrrgh, and Twin Tails Cosplay. Some of the Cosplayers really put in a lot of love and effort to both their costumes and their cosplay persona. A particual favourite of mine was Deadpool, who I tried to wind up by calling him Deathstroke (he wasn't too happy  about that)…. The Cosplay competition was short and sweet, with the victor being Totoro (from the Studio Ghibli film My Neighbour Totoro).  

The day wound down with the tournament winners competing on the big screen.

My only regret about 8-Bit Conference 2018 was not being able to hang around long enough to enjoy the entire weekend. I feel like I missed out on so much even though I was there for most of the Saturday. Next year I'll make sure to be in attendance for the whole weekend so I don't miss out on the fun. Graeme, and all of team 8-Bit should be really proud that they put on such a fantastic event that catered to the retro needs of veteran gamers, but was also a fun and insightful look for the younger generation. 

My advice for people who would like to attend the conference in future:

Plan your route, Griffith college is located just outside of Dublin City and isn't a central location

Bring money, as there is no ATM on-campus

Most importantly, take part and have fun, you can sit here and read this review all you like, but trust me when I say, you need to be there to get the best out of it.

https://8bitconference.com/

Photos Courteousy of 8-Bit Conference

Partners associated with 8-Bit Conference

Griffith College Dublin

Trust Gaming

Ti.to

Beanbags.ie

Ansonix

The Pulse Group

Emergency Services Training Institute

Buyndplay/Video Games And Consoles Ireland

Republic of Gaming

Inner City Helping Homeless

AllCast Irish Gamers

National Computer & Videogame Museum

Mini Arcade Systems

The R.A.G.E.

LudoSport Ireland - Sporting Light Saber Combat Academy

Loud Room Studios

Bear Sporting Events Limited

Four Star Pizza

RetroGaming.ie

GameVan.ie

CCS Fitouts

Candy Pop Man

Facepainters Dublin

Retro Ralph Gaming

Rewind Retro Gaming

8-Bit Creations

Game Freeze

Like the Bog Flower Designs

Beanie's Art Mart

Guild of Nerds

The 501st Legion

Ghostbusters Ireland

Fierce Fun

Jairo Lopes

Altero-game

Dublin Games Festival 

[the-backspin-alchemist]

HEY BUDDY PAL FRIENDO. Every EVEN one!

2. A game that has influenced you creatively? Writing, drawing, etc.

Oh man, a lot. Metroid Fusion the most, though, probably. Either that, or Chrono Trigger.

4. Who do you play with now?

My friends.

6. Ever buy strategy guides?

Yes. Don’t anymore though. I am teh smart now. Don’t need ‘em.

8. Rarest/Most expensive game in your collection?

Still think it’s TWEWY

10. Ever go to a midnight game release or stand in line for hours?

Stood in line for and hour and a half for Pokemon Black. Never bothered to do so again.

I might be willing to if they actually made Metroid Dread, though.

12. Ever get picked on for liking games?

I’m a Sonic fan. We get flack for thinking anything in our franchise is good.

I don’t care though. You can tear my enjoyment of Sonic Generations and Sonic and the Black Knight from my cold, dead corpse.

14. Favorite game music?

Another honorable mention: the Metroid games. The Metroid Prime games in particular. (Torvus Bog and the Torvus Underground themes in particular, even if Subterranean Torvus is just a rehash of Red Brinstar in Super Metroid. It’s a rehash with GOOD SYNTHS and REVERB. It’s so SPACEY.)

16. Favorite game to play with your friends IRL?

Smash Bros.

It’s the one game I stand a chance of winning in.

18. Would you date someone that hates gaming?

Eeeeeh, I feel like we wouldn’t get along that much given that I enjoy playing games as much as I do.

I put a lot of good story-driven games on par with, like, movies and books in terms of cultural relevance.

20. Game that you know like the back of your hand?

Aside from Fusion, I know Chrono Trigger almost front-to-back. 

22. Do you wear game related clothing/accessories?

Yes. I had multiple Legend of Zelda shirts. I have multiple Pokemon shirts.

24. First Pokemon game?

Already answered, but it was Silver.

26. Ever form any gaming rivalries?

@anythingelsebutthat and I have an ongoing rivalry in Halo that hails back to high school, given that every time we’ve 1v1′d in a Halo game we’ve swapped titles. He won last time. I won the time before. He won the time before that. I won before that. It has gone on and on and on and on.

Also @lazerzes and I had a small rivalry in Smash for a while. It was rather one-sided, given that they’re actually good at the game while I am not.

28. Ever play in a tournament?

No, I have not.

30. How many consoles do you own?

Just my Xbox for now, although the family owns a Wii U and a Switch on top of that.

32. Did you ever play a game based on your favorite show/cartoon/movie/comic?

I played Transformers: War for Cybertron because it looked cool.

I could not have underestimated more supremely how amazing that game was.

Penultimate level of the campaign is one of my favorite missions in games EVER.

34. Do either of your parents play video games?

Nope, lol.

Well. Okay, my dad used to play 4X games, which is how I picked up Anacreon and eventually Civ, but he hasn’t played those since I was, like, 2.

36. Have you ever shed actual blood, sweat or tears over a game?

I’ve cried over a few games. Bastion, Dust, VA-11 Hall-A, Explorers of Sky.

Haven’t bled for any of them, though.

38. A game you’re ashamed to admit that you like?

I don’t really have one. Im usually fairly vocal about what I do and don’t like.

I will admit that VA-11 Hall-A took me COMPLETELY by surprise, though. I thought I was gonna cringe out of that game so hard, and it ended up being one of my favorite VNs ever. (Except for Dorothy, she still squicks me out...)

40. What to you think of virtual reality headsets or motion controls?

They’re neat. I’m not sure people have figured out their full potential yet, but I doubt that’ll happen until they become not-$600-for-the-cheap-ones affordable.

42. Maybe it wasn’t your first game, but what was the game that started you on your path to nerdiness?

Metroid Fusion. I got INTO that game, and it more or less introduced me to sci-fi as a whole.

44. Arcade machine that has consumed the most of your quarters?

Aw man, probably the Time Crisis 3 machine back at the Funplex in my home state.

Every time there was a party there, my friend and I would bring $10 each in quarters to try and beat it.

We were terrible shots, though, so we never did.

46. Do you like relaxing games like Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon?

Stardew Valley, Mini Metro, Rymdkapsel, Opus Magnum...

Yeah, I’ll take my fair share of them. They’re fun. Help me wind down.

48. How long does it take your to customize your player character?

Depends on how much they give me, and how cyberpunk I can look off the bat.

50. If you were a game designer, what masterpiece would you create?

Metroid: Dread.

52. A game that you begged your parents for as a kid?

Pokemon yellow. I got Pokemon Silver instead when they got me a GBA because I found out “Hey, they made bigger Pokemon games!”

54. Do you give in to Steam sales?

....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Sometimes.

56. Did you ever play Roller Coaster Tycoon and kill off your guests?

Never played RCT.

58. If you can only play 3 games for the rest of your life, which ones do you pick?

Chrono Trigger, Metroid Fusion, and Sonic Generations.

Easy.

60. Do you know the Konami Code?

UP UP DOWN DOWN LEFT RIGHT LEFT RIGHT B A START.

62. Ever buy a console specifically to play one game?

Also answered. Bought my 360 for Halo 3. Everything else was icing on the cake.

64. Ever make a TV or monitor purchase based on what would be best for gaming?

Nah.

66. Did you ever have have an old Nokia with Snake on it?

No, but I had an old LG Chocolate with Snake on it, which is close.

68. Ever save up a ton of tickets in an arcade to get something cool?

Nah, I knew I could never get any of the big things.

70. Very first game you ever beat? 

Metroid Fusion.

To be fair I’m counting me “beating” Pokemon Silver as having beaten the Elite Four twice (once through Johto, once through Kanto), then going and climbing Mount Silver and stomping the ever-loving shit out of Red’s team.

Otherwise, it was Silver version, because I beat the Elite Four after getting the Johto badges before getting Fusion.

So kinda depends on your definition.

My definition says Metroid Fusion.

[blaperile]

Hiveswap Episode 1 Reaction Part 3: Joey’s room? More like our eternal playground!

Before we start again, I had a random thought about something I learned yesterday.

So, Joey implied she doesn't really have any friends. But on the other hand, she also seemed to imply that she has a boyfriend when examnining the Clarissa poster. If she's so bad at making friends, then I'm really curious to learn more about her boyfriend!

I mean, assuming I understood it correctly, perhaps I misunderstood it and she doesn't actually have a boyfriend. :P

Anyway, day 3 of playing! It's weekend and 4:50 PM right now, let's see how much we'll get done today!

First of all we're gonna check out the closet, then try out some more combinations of using items on other items, there's a bunch of those that we can still try out, with the tap shoes, diary key and Cherub key. Afterwards, we'll probably examine the computer, window, walkie talkie and doors and see if we can advance!

Oooooh, nice, we can actually open the closet!

A bunch of puzzles and other neat stuff in there... including a Simon Says game! I saw that in concept art not too long ago, perhaps there'll be something special about it? ...And I'm not just saying that because it seems to be blinking like hell. :P

Oh boy... we can CHALLENGE the Simon Says game. Is this gonna be a mini-game? xD

plainWonder has a cool theory that Joey might use the batteries of this game for her walkie talkie! After having seen it in concept art I first thought she'd get batteries out of that radio, but perhaps this is a more likely theory!

...Pfff, so she even USED the batties of the walkie talkie ON the Simon Says game in the first place, hahaha.

GREEN BUTTON ISN'T WORKING, looooooool. Hahaha, it was worth the try/nostalgia.

Nope, can't use the batteries on the cherub key, obviously. :P

Analogue key, ahahaha. xD

Can we have battery-powered tap shoes? :mspa:

YOU RUN ON RAZZLE DAZZLE OH MY GOD. So THAT'S where that dance from that concept art comes from, hahaha!

Ooooooh, apparently you can also combine items with the Joey symbol in the upper right corner! Looks like it gives a more general explanation on what those items actually are, that's interesting.

Hehe, yes Joey, the lessons you followed for tap dancing probably deserve some credit as well. :P

Oh my god I love all those ridiculous comments when combining items with the ballerina poster. Combining the diary key with it gives some pretty cool insight though, nice.

Tap Shoes && Ballerina poster (might be a handy way to address the combinations!)==> Ha, looks like we'll get another Joey dance if we come back here with the ballerina shoes instead! :D

Cherub Key && Hot Steppin' poster ==> Looks like Ms. Claire probably didn't do ballet by herself but danced in a group together with multiple women! Also, this shows that Joey only got this poster AFTER Ms. Claire died.

Diary Key && Hot Steppin' poster ==> Oh???? She's got ANOTHER diary? Looks like this might be the only time we'll ever hear of it though. :P

Tap shoes && Hot Steppin' poster ==> Doing taxes at church tho' xD

Batteries && Story That Keeps Happening poster ==> IMAGINAAAAAAAAAAATION. That's all there really is to say on the matter. :mspa:

Cherub Key && Story That Keeps Happening poster ==> Oh so the Cherub Key might be a reference to The Neverending Story??? Haha, I didn't know that! It's been years since I last saw that movie. Interestingly, Joey seems to be SURE that the key is older "by at least a few years" than the movie. I looked it up, the movie came out in 1984, so when Joey was 4 years old! Hmmm, curious!

Tap Shoes && Story That Keeps Happening poster ==> Always not-ending routine. xD I love how they're doing everything they can to avoid saying "Neverending".

Cherub Key && Canadian Campfire Spookems poster ==> Huh! This combination doesn't work! Looks like they forgot to implement that one? Eh, oh well. :P

Tap Shoes && Canadian Campfire Spookems poster ==> JOEY CLAIRE, EXTRAORDINAIRE. It even fucking rhymes, that is amazing. (Also there goes Joey again with her cute little dance)

Batteries & Acorn's Shadow poster ==> Eldritch, you say? Hopefully not the kind of eldritch I'm thinking of here. 0_0

Cherub Key && Acorn's Shadow poster ==> Ahahaha, looks like the episodes of this cartoon were 22 minutes long.

Diary Key && Acorn's Shadow poster ==> 17 seasons??? Wow, looks like it's a popular cartoon. Possibly even rivalizing the Squiddles cartoon? :mspa:

Tap shoes && Acorn's Shadow poster ==> Galloping green flames??? Is... is that a reference to the destructive fires Bec and Jack Noir have caused in the comic? Well... at least they weren't part horse. :mspa:

Oh wow, we hadn't noticed yet that we could click on the Connect Four game!

Welp, looks like Joey's good at beating Jude at games (or at least she believes she is). Is she as good at beating him as Calliope was at beating Caliborn? :P

Diary key && Connect Four ==> Pfff, a diary working like a Connect Four game. That kind of reminds me of Fetch Modi. Now imagine a Connect Four Fetch Modus, oh dear god.

Batteries && Diary ==> Electronic diaries, such a preposterous idea, am i right? :mspa:

Batteries && Ms. Claire picture ==> Why do we get so much sadstuck when examining this picture. :(

Cherub Key && Magical Companions Heal Force poster ==> If I were you Joey I wouldn't be trusting that Cherub Key for one bit, and I'm not just saying that because of what is going to happen pretty soon. 0_0

Tap shoes && Magical Companions Heal Force poster ==> Deer hooves, oh my god. Well, NEVERMIND THEN.

Batteries && Bounty Hunter poster ==> I assume Energy Tanks is also a reference to Metroid? :P

Tap dance && Bounty Hunter poster ==> "Turn into a ball in mid-air" METROID REFERENCE CONFIRMED.

Cherub Key && Star Avenue poster ==> Oh wow, Ms. Claire knew Ginger Rogers! That's interesting! It reminds me of how Poppop also met some interesting and famous people in his life and became one himself. And B2 Dave and B2 Rose too of course, like plainWonder pointed out! They knew some famous people too (and were famous themselves).

The Homestuck/Hiveswap Kids sure do have a lot famous family members or family members knowing famous people, haha.

Diary Key && Star Avenue poster ==> I like that Ginger: My Story is also an actual book, of 1991. What Pumpkin sure did a lot of research for this game, I really like what they've done!

Cherub Key && Block Hustle poster ==> L-shaped object??? Oh god, she's right. The key DOES sort of look like an L, just like the first letter of Lord English's name. Oh my fucking god.

Diary Key && Block Hustle poster ==> Hahah, yes, too bad Youtube didn't exist yet to search the song and then practice your routine. And I agree actually, the Tetris song is really catchy and would probably be really cool for a dance! Also, yup, a little slip up there with accidentally writing Tetris instead of Block Hustle.

Batteries && Bubsy Poster ==> Hehe, this description makes me think even more of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Cherub Key && Bubsy Poster ==> She really doesn't like Bubsy, does she? xD

Diary Key && Bubsy poster ==> Heh, that reminds me of what John said about one of his posters, about meaning to take it down because he didn't like it that much.

Batteries && Second Mom poster ==> "Believe me, you've tried" N'awwww

Cherub Key && Second Mom poster ==> Oh hell fricking yes, a reference to Ness' yoyo! (also... yoyo kinda makes me think of juju...)

Diary Key && Second Mom poster ==> Huh, that's a pretty original way of saving your game. Also, unexpected sadstuck is unexpected. :(

Batteries && Game controller ==> And maybe they aren't even the proper size of batteries anyway. :P

Diary Key && Game controller ==> Getting a bit close to the Fourth Wall there, aren't we? ;D

Diary Key && Game console ==> Oh man, I like that this comes with a sweet little animation as well, to show her reaching down to jab the diary key at the console!

Cherub Key && TV ==> OH GOD I'M DYING BECAUSE OF THIS ADORABLE ANIMATION. Joey is just so incredibly cute no matter what she's doing.

Tap Shoes && TV ==> I'm sure Joey would LOVE the Wii Console, to be capable of using wireless controllers and moving/dancing around while playing her games!

Cherub Key && Bean Bag ==> Wait a second... so Mom visited the attic to retrieve these bean bags and place them all over the house! That's really interesting to know that she's already been up there, meaning she might also be aware of the mysterious device up there that Joey will eventually use to go to Alternia!

Batteries && Sir Bappy Pawswatter ==> Oh dear god, I didn't expect those things ran on batteries. Good thing Jade never found out about that, or at least already removed the batteries. xD

Suddenly realized we could also combine items with the ceiling!

Cherub Key && Ceiling ==> ...That is not the right description. xD Looks like that's the description for Cherub Key && Walkie Talkie.

Diary Key && Ceiling ==> Oh wow, so Ms. Claire painted that when Joey was still a baby! ...Come to think of it, how old was Joey when Ms. Claire died? Was she still a baby when Ms. Claire died or not? Because if she was, I think there's a high chance Jude is NOT her son, which is an idea I've been playing around with already (what with their different surnames and all). If so, the question beckons who IS his mother.

Cherub Key && Animal posters ==> That is indeed the cutest idea ever. Even if they don't get any actual gifts from them, at least they still get some nice licks from them. :P

Batteries && Wardrobe ==> Indeed, and her wardrobe doesn't need batteries either, seeing as it's not a Wardrobifier. :P

Cherub Key && Junior Veterinarian Medkit ==> NO SHIT that it doesn't work like that. xD

Tap Dancer && Junior Veterinarian Medkit ==> Oh okay, so she IS still debating on which profession she would like to have in the future! I wonder if her experiences in this adventure will help her make a choice? Maybe... maybe we'll even be able to INFLUENCE which one she will eventually choose? Like, I could see it happening that she'll take care of Dammek's Lusus at some point perhaps, maybe it will get hurt or something. Not sure how her dancing skills would come into play (other than as fighting skill), but it could happen!

Or maybe it will even depend on how you play the game in general: do you take a more aggressive stance against enemies, fighting them with your dance skills, or do you instead go for a more passive route and take care of the wounded and such?

That would be interesting!

Batteries && Clarissa poster ==> GIRL POWER. Why am I suddenly reminded of Game Grl. :P

Diary Key && Clarissa poster ==> So Clarissa ended a month ago, and next day a new episode of Alex Mack would come out about dancing? *looks it up* Yep, all true facts! God I just love how much effort they've put into this.

Batteries && Bed ==> Ahahaha, that reminds me of how Jade tried to sneak past the fireplace in order to sneak by Grandpa, hehe. And yeah, Parker Brothers! That rings a bell to me, a pretty famous company for making board games I believe *looks it up* Yep, they are!

Batteries & Puppy Surprise ==> Exactly what I was thinking just before doing this combination. 0_0

Diary Key && Puppy Surprise ==> Oh wow, we can put the diary key back into the Puppy Surprise! That makes me seem like that is indeed what happened after we tried writing into the diary last time.  Hehe, let's retrieve the key for now and try that out in a few seconds.

*few seconds later*

So, the Diary Key indeed went back into the Puppy Surprise! But sadly, we can't retrieve the key anymore afterwards.

Alright, let's reload the game so we can hang onto the key for a while longer.

Batteries && Toys on shelf ==> Grandpa gave shotguns to Jude, seriously? ...On the other hand, I really shouldn't be surprised. This is Grandpa/Jake we're talking about, after all. :mspa:

Cherub Key && Toys on shelf ==> Welp... literally a baby. That confirms that I guess. Poor Joey, she really grew up without a mom for the most part. :(

I guess like how all Kids and Trolls seem to grow up with no or only one Guardian around.

Tap shoes && Book shelf ==> Oh yeah, I totally forgot about how for a long time a lot of people didn't consider tap-dancing an actual dance, I believe I've heard that somewhere before.

Diary/Cherub Key && Ballerina figure ==> WELP, that gives the same narration as diary key && Cherub key.

Cherub Key && Wizard glass ball ==> Haha, that reminds me of all the discussions in Homestuck on what is or isn't magic, and also the magical properties of wizards.

Tap shoes && Wizard glass ball ==> I love how there are so many combinations of the tap shoes with another item that cause her to just make a dance.

Tap shoes && Oven ==> Lukewarm-steppin', PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Batteries & Skaianet Calendar ==> OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH, so THAT is the context of that picture! So apparently Skaianet isn't "just" a science company that was sneakily behind Sburb, but is actually a videogame company!!! Huh, I definitely didn't expect that! Now that picture suddenly makes a lot more sense, with them all being videogame figures.

Also, that gives a whole new context to Mom working for Skaianet! I always figured she just did it because she was into science, but the fact that they're actually actively making videogames makes a lot of sense too because we know Roxy is so into videogames!!!

Wow.

That's definitely a cool mystery that just got solved!

Tap shoes && Skaianet Calendar ==> Oh shit! Alright, so that's confirmation that she is still in fact babysitting them and that it's not a thing from the past. Also, she's got a driving license! I guess it makes sense because she's probably... somewhere around 20 years old? Give or take a few years in either direction.

And like plainWonder said, that gives a REALLY interesting deadline for Joey to either return from Alternia or for Mom to notice something's up! Because 11/11/1994 is a Friday evening, which means that in the morning of the next day Mom should be coming!!!

Hmm... will Joey come back so quickly from Alternia??? Or are we going to get a surprise appearance from Mom in Hauntswitch or maybe even the end of Hiveswap???

Oh god I'd be so excited if she will physically appear in one of these games!

Diary Key && Other Animal posters ==> Wait, the same company made the diary and those posters? Now I'm pretty curious what the name of that company is, haha.

Cherub Key && Other Animal posters ==> Well, there's my answer apparently! :mspa: L.F. is the name... looks like that might be a fictional one! Or maybe just an abbreviation of a real one, to avoid copyright issues.

Okay, now it's time to start doing some more (possibly) plot relevant/impactful things!

Let's examine the computer and see what that does...

...Ahahaha, some cheap Windows rip-off, of course.

Welp, she's not going to actually do something on her computer. That's too bad, I wanted to see her surf to www.mspaintadventures.com and see what her browser is. xD

What with how she mentions keeping up with a bunch of different websites, that reminds me of how Bro's Completely Bullshit thing that helped him keep track of a bunch of different websites.

Heh, apparently we can't turn the computer back off again! That's such a waste of electricity. :P

Tap shoes && Computer ==> Ahahahaha, tapping the keys VS tapping her keys. I love What Pumpkin.

Let's see what happens if we try to leave Joey's room! She probably won't want to do it, because of the monster outside.

....Yup, that's indeed the case! She wants to warn Jude! Looks like we'll have to use the walkie talkie here, and thus put the batteries in. Which kinda surprises me that we "have" to do this, I thought I saw in concept art somewhere that she had the batteries in her inventory somewhere else? So can we remove them from the walkie talkie again or something?

But first, let's look out the window!

Oh yes, it's this view of the garden, like from the concept art!

....N'AWWWWWWWWWWW. I was about to say: "Hey, where's Tesseract? I don't see him!" when suddenly he popped out of the dog house. D'awww, so scared. :(

Hey, that stone structure by the wall there, the head kind of looks like a Mother Grub! That's a bit suspicious...

Also, that bush there. It looks a lot like the snakey monster chasing Joey! That's also really suspicious, are these monsters "known" around here? Or at least by Grandpa or something?

Let's see what we can interact with here...

Okay, so she calls the fountain Skull Fountain! ....Yup, still making me think of the Mother Grub there. :P

Poor, POOR puppy! I wonder if there's something Joey and/or Jude can do to make Tesseract come out, or if that's something that will only happen in Hauntswitch?

Welp, I hadn't really thought yet about the fact that Joey had only seen ONE of these monsters yet! She didn't know there's going to be a whole bunch of them, yikes.

Oh boy, now the tree hut...

Pffff, so Jude considers it his "mission control room". In other words, he probably treats it more like 'his' room than his actual room. :P

And apparently Joey hasn't been up there yet! Hmm, interesting. I wonder if there are many things that Jude keeps there that Joey isn't aware about?

Alright, so nothing else happens here when examining the tree hut. Looks like we'll be needing to use the walkie talkie to make progress!

But before we do, let's first use some items on this window...

Batteries && Window ==> Ahahaha, too bad they didn't make a stab at the fenestrated windows like plainWonder suggested. That's a missed opportunity. :P

Cherub Key && Window ==> Precious window, ahahahaha!

And now... time for the walkie talkie! Let's finally make some progress in this shit. xD

Oh god... we apparently put the walkie talkie in our inventory as well! Which means... before we use the batteries on it, we got a whole new bunch of combinations to try out with all the different items in the room here.

Nope, progress will have to wait a bit longer. :mspa:

Walkie Talkie && Cherub Key ==> Wouldn't that be cool, a walkie talkie that runs on tap dancing? xD

Walkie Talkie && Skaianet Calendar ==> Pffff, it would be pretty funny if when we establish communication with Jude he immediately makes a remark like this. Plus, it would also be funny if we will actually see Joey's calendar from his perspective in the tree hut.

Walkie Talkie && Oven ==> And sadly, the walkie talkie doesn't run on microwaves either. :P

Walkie Talkie && Toy shelf ==> SHELF BUDDIES. TREE BROTHER. Oh hell yes.

Walkie Talkie && Bed ==> Now this is an especially interesting piece of narration! First of all, Joey apparently also aspires to be a webmaster! Secondly, it's pretty interesting how this also gives some new information because we've already got the batteries!

Also goddammit yeah I can understand why Joey removed the batteries out of the walkie talkie, haha.

Walkie Talkie && Computer ==> Pffff, yes, unfortunately USB cables don't exist yet and as far as I'm aware there are no walkie talkies with USB ports. :P

Walkie Talkie && Game Controllers ==> Pff, so maybe those batteries WERE actually of the right type to be used for the walkie talkie but she just simply doesn't want to take them out of the controllers, haha.

Walkie Talkie && Game Console ==> Whoops, another slip-up there, referring to Mother 2! Heh, so apparently the Famicon had such a special voice feature then?

Walkie Talkie && Bubsy poster ==> He can stay quiet, so that's probably why that SHH sticker is on the poster. xD

Walkie Talkie && Block Hustle poster ==> Incredibly lame pun is incredibly lame. :mspa:

Walkie Talkie && Connect Four ==> Ha, that reminds me of Calliope and Caliborn's chess game, with Caliborn seemingly making bad strategic decisions but actually just luring Calliope into a trap.

Walkie Talkie && Canadian Campfire Spook-ems poster ==> I'd laugh if this is exactly what happens on Alternia with Joey somehow being capable of communicating with Xefros through the walkie talkie. xD

Walkie Talkie && Acorn's Shadow poster ==> It would always make Acorn uncomfortable when her shadow would just stand there... and watch.

Walkie Talkie && Magical Companions Heal Force poster ==> Pffff, wouldn't that be convenient if Joey could just do that.

"the deer is her brother"

...

...

...

0_0

MOVIN' ON.

Oh wow, we only just noticed that we can also use items on Joey's dresser!

Walkie Talkie && Ms. Claire picture ==> MY FEELS. D: How great would it be if she could talk to her through walkie talkie... That reminds me actually of the movie Frequency, where a father and son communicate through time just through a radio.

Walkie Talkie && Diary ==> THE BEST. SIMPLY THE BEST. I love the reference to the memos of the Trolls and all Karkat's discussions of past self VS present self VS future self, hahahaha!

Oh dear god we only just noticed that the disabled hint function gives a different message every time! We'd only pressed it one time.

I love how he just becomes increasinly meta as we keep on clicking it, kind of like in [S] YOU THERE BOY with continuously clicking on John.

And he just keeps on sounding more like the in-comic Andrew, hahahaha.

But... plainWonder's right. As we go on, he progressively sounds more and more like Doc Scratch. I mean... allotting time to 'talk' to us, being smug about being intelligent... This is kind of suspicious.

I highly doubt it's Doc Scratch, that it's just meant to be the narrator, but... HMMMMMMMMM

Okay, we've reached the end of it. Now it just keeps on repeating that the hint function is unavailable. xD

Anyway, that's all for today! It's 8:15 PM now.

I'm pretty happy that we've just about finished up with the actual introduction of the game (LOL, that took long enough, like, 6-7 hours of gameplay so far holy shit), and can now get diving into more of the actual plot. xD

[radramblog]

Video game controller tierlist

What is up fuckers, I’m out of ideas again so its time for another tier list. This time we got video game consoles’s controllers. Link’s (here), and keep in mind I don’t really know much about the Sega ones but its fine since they all suck.

Without further ado lets fucking go bc I have 22 minutes to write this before I get ready for work

D-Tier

Xbox original controller is gotta be the ugliest thing on the planet. That ugly-ass early 2000s (in a bad way) logo, those buttons, the sheer size of the thing, I just don’t know why they thought this was a good idea. Luckily they learned from the mistake that this controller is for their future designs, otherwise the 360 probably woulda been dead in the water.

I don’t know anyone who had a Dreamcast. I mean, that’s because no one fucking bought them, and I’m young enough that people my age basically missed Sega’s consoles completely. With that in mind, what in the goddamn is going on here. Why would you put the cable facing the user, what is this little Tamagotchi-ass screen doing, why is it so dummy thick. I don’t understaaaaand.

Sega gets two entries in the D tier btw. The Genesis competed with the SNES pretty wwell but the controller isn’t even close. “Ah yes rather than four buttons that you can easily press from one thumb position we’ll have three buttons that are all in a line so you have to move it around awkwardly a bunch. Brilliant!” Yeesh.

C-Tier

Okay they didn’t put the Master System on this list so this is the last Sega controller. The Saturn is just the Genesis one but with more buttons and beeg bumpers. This is this low just because of those bumpers- ill talk about it later with the 360, but big shoulder buttons are more trouble than they’re worth imo.

The original Playstation Controller is fine, but it does just feel like it’s missing something. It’s pretty obvious what it’s missing, but without those sticks it just looks naked. And I haven’t played much PS1 stuff but I can imagine not having the analogs is a huge pain for most games on the console.

The Wii U Gamepad was a good idea in concept (I mean, just look at the Switch) but as it is, it’s just way too bulky and awkward. This thing just hurts your wrists if you play for long enough. Without it we wouldn’t have gotten the Switch, though, so it’s for the best that this existed.

Spoilers, I don’t like the Dualshock 4. The big old touchscreen thing does not do it for me. Beyond that it’s basically fine, but that centrepiece just turns me off the entire concept. Also, fuck the Share button.

The Xbox One controller is a hybrid between the Xbox and the 360, except it came after both and the 360 is actually pretty good, so what the fuck is going on here. Didn’t yall learn? Also, again why did you get rid of Start/Select what are these buttons supposed to be help I don’t understand new things

B Tier

This one is here because I don’tt know what it is. Like, it looks like a generic knockoff 360 controller, but no other knockoffs are here, so what’s the deal? What is this? We just don’t know.

Dualshock 1 babyyyy. While the N64 pioneered thumbsticks on controllers, the Dualshock solidified them as a part of gaming going forward. Unfortunately the rest of it is still mostly a PS1 controller, so.

The Wiimote is here because it’s the average of its two components. I actually really like the Wiimote, it’s an excellent, elegant piece of technology that really made motion controls work for the first time. But at the same time, fuck the Nunchuk and the horse it rode in on. Never was a fan of this weirdo periphery. I used to play Brawl without it, and anyone who’s done that knows how miserable that is, but I just dislike the nunchuk that much.

N64 is an awkward mess but I love it. Constantly ridiculed but they really went for something here and that’s worth respecting. This walked so everything else after it could run.

The 360 is the best controller Microsoft has put out. It’s really comfy, feels natural to use, the only downside is the giant fuckoff trigger shoulder buttons. While the idea of an actual trigger for your shooty man games was solid, in execution they’re just a little awkward. Also, the rubber on the sticks always comes off them in my experience and that just sucks.

Joycons would be higher but they drift alllll the fucking time. Also the analog sticks are just a little too small? Other than that I think these are genius, and it would have been hard to make a controller stick size that works for both the two in tandem and individual sideways controllers.

The SNES innovated real hard and got paid off for it. This fucker invented shoulder buttons, which is a pretty huge deal. Notice how just about every other thing on here has those. Unfortunately, and since I’ve never actually used an original SNES controller this might be inaccurate (I’m going off the SNES mini’s ones) the thing is a teensy bit too small for my hands and so it feels a lil uncomfy using them.

Speaking of innovation, the NES controller invented the fucking D-pad. It’s an iconic piece of retro technology, looks great, probably isn’t too uncomfortable, ya know it. Again, never had my hands on an actual one, so I don’t know how good they are to use, but come on it’s the NES.

A Tier

Dualshock 2 and 3 are here because I don’t really feel much of a difference between them- one’s wireless and one isn’t, to my knowledge its that simple. But they’re just so usable, sit really well in the hands, and honestly I do think putting the analog sticks next to each other is prooobably better than the separation every other controller is doing. I’ve seen the PS5 controller, and it’s a real shame because that thing looks like some fuckin Apple shite when they really coulda just updated the DS3 and it would’ve been leagues better.

The Switch Pro Controller and Gamecube controller are also here next to each other because I can’t decide which I like better. They’re both incredibly comfortable and durable, the former the result of decades of innovation and the latter the mildly awkward but forward-thinking icon. I think it’s pretty common belief that the Gamecube just has the best controller, but my dumb ass can’t get used to the weird face button layout, so it’s a little lower in my eyes. Still, Nintendo really got it right this time, and there’s a reason every “classic”/”pro” controller they’ve put out since has been some iteration of the Gamecube’s design. It’s to the point where they’re still making the things, though that may just be because Smash players don’t like change. At least the controller they’re touching is of age, heyooooooooooo

jesus christ that was the worst joke ive ever made im so fucking sorry

[thegeeklee]

Nintendo Switch: First Impressions

So today I finally got my hands on a Nintendo Switch for the first time… a very brief time, but a time none the less. While arguably questionable that I could cast judgments about this new console with such little use of it, I did already have a wealth of knowledge about the Switch prior to using it, that it was quite easy to get some first impressions from it.

The first thing is, it’s small. Like of course it was going to be small, but prior to the announcement of the screen size (6.2”) it was hard to really gauge how large it was going to be, in particular the screen itself. When the screen size was announced to be not a heck of a lot larger than my iPhone 6 Plus screen size, while considerably smaller than the iPad Mini screen size, I had concerns about how good it would be to play on a screen of that stature.

The tablet component of the Switch, in many ways looks like a cheap Android 7” tablet that you find in a bargain bin. It has a really thick bezel, which makes you think, is this the largest screen you could squeeze into this device without damaging battery life too much? I can’t help but think there will be like a Switch XL released in a year or two’s time with a large screen. Despite it looking like a cheap android tablet, the construction of the tablet component feels really solid and high quality. Except for the kick stand. The kick stand is unbelievably cheap and flimsy, I can see that being commonly broken. Also unlike some other devices with kickstands (ie: the Microsoft Surface), there is only one angle that the kickstand can be used at, which severely limits it’s potential.

Another component that feels cheap is the dock. Really cheap feeling plastic, for essentially a fancy AV switch box, it’s hard to understand where the value of $130AUD comes in for one of those docks (the price if you wanted to buy an additional dock). It feels like something that should cost half that price (and probably costs 1/10th the price to manufacturer it).

The Joy-con controllers feel quality enough. While I only spend a short time using one Joy-con, I couldn’t’ help but think, that even with my tiny hands, that the controllers were far from ergonomic. Holding the Switch in portable mode with the Joy-cons connected to the tablet portion, it felt not bad, but I couldn’t help but think the weigh balance ratio should get tiring after a while.

I only got to play one game, which was 1-2 Switch, a compilation of mini party games that attempt to show off the Joy-Con’s features. I played 5 of the 28 mini games including Boxing gym, Quick Draw, Samurai Training, Table Tennis, Beach Flag. The quality of these games ranged from Bad to Terrible. The full motion video featuring actors is really cringeworthy. Luckily I found a skip button that could bypass a lot of that. I guess the game is not aimed at me. It’s aimed at the same casual audience as Wii Sports and Wii Fit. Perhaps it might succeed with that audience as it promotes not looking at the screen to play. The games weren’t overly intuitive all the time though, so I could see a casual gamer maybe struggling with it, but perhaps that’s part of the “fun”.

I like the Switch game cases. It’s something a bit different to the usual blu-ray/DVD style covers. However it’s such a waste of plastic. You open up the case to find the tiny cartridge the size of an SD card sitting inside, taking up maybe 1/20th of the space with nothing else in it. They surely could have shaved about 1/3 of the top of the case off.

So yeah that about covers my first impressions. It probably comes across as highly negative, and I guess perhaps if I had spent more time with it, with some good games, I might have had some good things to say about it. I still really like the concept of the Switch. I think it’s the best iteration of a hybrid concept any company has made thus far. This is the future of console gaming in many ways, but it is also quite disappointing in other ways. With reports it can’t even keep a constant 30fps on Zelda, it’s not a good look for performance when it’s already struggling at launch. What third party developer is going to put any high end recent game on the machine, with specs so lagging behind the Xbox One and Playstation 4. Bethesda is releasing Skyrim on the Switch. While this no doubt great news for Skyrim addicts looking to do some adventuring on the go, this is a game that is over 5 year old. If it ends up being a game library of cartoony Nintendo games and 5 year old triple A titles, the Switch could easily find itself in a similar predicament as the Wii U.

Which is one of my main reservations of getting a Switch. I bought a Wii U a couple of years ago with Super Mario Maker. I played it a few times and it’s gathered dust ever since. I wish I never bought it and had got a Switch instead. But because I have the Wii U, I find it hard to justify purchasing the Switch, when all it offers is portability over the Wii U. Many of the key titles for the Switch are available on the Wii U for this year. At the same time while I’m intrigued by Zelda, I can’t seem to commit to buying the Wii U version, knowing the higher quality Switch version exists (though the Wii U version may become more of a collectors item much like what happened the last time a Zelda game was released on two console generations).

So from my very short hands on, my recommendation is, if you are a massive Nintendo fan, you already have a Switch, and it’s pointless reading my impressions. If you’re not though, save your money. At least for now. It’s basically just a Zelda machine for the next few months. It’s highly expensive (though has some impressive tech). I’d recommend waiting a year at least to see if the console gets the third party support it needs to make it successful. A price drop would also make it a more attractive option, but Nintendo are not famous for doing such things, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.

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