I had a series that I did over on YouTube for a while that I called "Battle Against the Backlog" where the idea was that I'd sort of vlog the progress through my insane 1000+ game backlog. However thanks to an obsession with Dead by Daylight and some life things getting in the way, finding time to write a script and then edit all the footage together, even for videos as simple as that, was proving far too time consuming. So I thought since the blog has been neglected for a while in favor of Twitch and YouTube, I will move the backlog stuff here so that there's at least a new post once a week and then I'm freed up to either play more games or work on bigger projects I have flying around my big dumb brain
Anyway, like I said I've mainly been playing Dead By Daylight as opposed to making progress in anything that actually has an ending. I don't know what it is about that game considering it has exactly 1 mode of play and it's essentially, when you boil it down, just freeze tag but it's a weirdly compelling experience. You might think that the one mode thing would make it get boring pretty quickly, it does it other games after all but I like to think that Dead by Daylight is the Ichiran Ramen of video games.
In case that reference went over your head let me explain. Ichiran is a chain of ramen stores here in Japan but unlike every other ramen store that have menus of different kinds of ramen, Ichiran has one thing. They do that one thing SO WELL that no matter how many times I eat it, I never get bored of it and I quite often get urges to go back. That's what Dead by Daylight did, they picked one thing and have done it so incredibly well that I don't seem to ever get tired of it. No matter what side I'm playing on I'm just constantly hankering for more. It's even gotten to the point where I'm looking up DbD content while I'm working and listening to pros talk shop. Maybe once I get better at the game and I start hitting the higher ranks more consistantly the allure might wear off but for now I'm absolutely HOOKED (haha)
Anyway, onto the actual subject of the blog post because I did finish one thing recently, a big thing, and that was Daemon X Machina. Daemon X Machina on paper sounds like it should be cool because it's a mech combat game made by some of the same people that previously worked on Armored Core but the game is just awful. It's fine for the first handful of missions where there's some mystery regarding and apocolypse and you're blowing stuff up but then you quickly come to realize that all the missions are the same. Every mission involves either blowing stuff to or preventing something from being blown up by blowing stuff up which sounds like all you'd need from a game about giant robots but the enemies barely fight back and every enemy can be killed by just locking on, holding down both mouse buttons with rifles equipped and spamming the Q key to fire extremely powerful homing rockets. There where even a number of instances where I didn't even have to move to fight bosses and other mech-style enemies, it was an actual joke
The story isn't much better either because the game throws way too many characters at you all at once, none of them are fleshed out and you don't care who anyone is or where their allegiances lie and then near the end of the game it starts killing a few of them off in heartfelt death scenes but instead of having any emotional impact I was sat there saying "who was that again? have we even been in a mission with that guy yet?"
You can tell as well that the developers just completely ran out of ideas by the end because the final 4 missions all take place on the same stage where you do the same thing. You fight 4 different characters as boss fights but all the enemies fight in the same way pretty much so it's literally just the old double click spam Q song and dance for half an hour while the AI partners babble on coms and not help with the combat
It should be impossible to make anime mech fights boring and some how this game did it, so hats off to the developers for doing something that I thought was impossible.
Anyway, that's about all I've done recently. I've also been playing Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch but I got to this place called Makna Woods and have been bogged down in side quests for many hours now so not a lot to say there really. I'll try to put DbD down for a while so I have something interesting to say next week!
