Shogi Is Impossible

 

Back when the Corona pandemic was in full swing there was a bit of a Chess boom.  A few content creators went hard during the lockdowns, some interest was whipped up and a bunch of people starting playing Chess a bit more seriously to pass the time.  Me and a few of my friends also go swept up in the Chess hype and now I like to fiddle with a few puzzles or a game of bullet pretty much every day.

On Stream, one of the segments that I am doing is playing every single Yakuza (Now "Like a Dragon", a lame, overly direct translation of the Japanese title) to at least 75%.  If you have played a Yakuza game then you will now that in order to score some of those sweet, sweet completion points you are required to engage with at least a few of the mini games.  Now I thought, with my new found 1000-ish rating Chess skills I might be able to adapt to Shogi pretty easily and score some easy percent.  Well I was very fucking wrong and Shogi is completely impossible.

On a surface level, the two games are extremely similar.  You have pieces that have different ways that they move, a king that you must lock into place in order to win and a system of upgrading pieces when they get to the opposite end of the board.  Well that's the first big difference because in Chess its only pawns that upgrade when they hit the back rank.  In Shogi, getting a piece, any piece, to the back 3 rows or so allows you to flip it and upgrade it.  These upgrades aren't just into higher tiers of pieces like pawns becoming queens or rooks, they gain a whole new set of movement and if it wasn't for the video game versions of Shogi that I stick to showing me the valid moves I think I'd have hard time remembering it all.

But the large amount of basic shit to remember is just the very tippy top of this fucking iceberg.  The thing that really makes Shogi impossible for me to comprehend, the thing that fucks me up basically every time I play, is the ability for you to play pieces that you have taken back to the board instead of making a move.  Losing a piece in Shogi isn't just you losing strength in your forces, you are handing your opponent ammo to use whenever the fuck they like, takes and exchanges have to be considered way more carefully than they do in chess.  It adds a layer of strategy to the game that is deeply fascinating and that I don't think I will ever be able to get my head around.

It's not just me that struggles with this shit either.  I have lost the link (if I find it I'll edit the post) where there was a Chess grandmaster talking about Shogi.  He said that Chess GMs usually end up eating shit if they try to play Shogi but Shogi players can adept to Chess pretty easily.  However though, apparently Shogi players giving chess a try will absolutely fall apart and shit their pants in Chess endgames because of the lack of ability to put shit back on the board.  It was an interesting chat and I wish I could find the video again to share here, maybe one day.

But this post isn't me complaining about Shogi as much as it's me sharing my reverance for the game and the people who are good at it.  I suck at it, I'm clearly too caveman to understand it on a deeper level but with that said, I sure as shit will keep trying my luck against the easy CPUs in the Shogi halls of the Yakuza games.

Grandia 2: A Deeply Flawed Classic

 

Not too long ago I finished Grandia 2 on the Dreamcast.  It was a game that I had beaten before a long time ago, probably during my high school days, on the PS2 and giving it a revisit in 2024 almost felt like playing it for the first time again.  While my memory of most of the story beats were pretty hazy, going in I remembered pretty vividly really being sick of it by the end and unfortunately by the time I reached the end of the game, that memory had turned out to be correct. 

The game follows the adventures of Ryudo, a "geohound" (a sort of monster slaying mercenary, I think) as he accompanies some chick from the Church of Granas as they go on an adventure to put an end to an evil god called Valmar.  On the way they meet a burly furry, a little boy and a robot and together they have to deal with all manner of evil as they go around beating up Valmar's individual body parts that have been locked away in seals.  It's a simple story with plot twists that you could see coming from several thousand miles away even if you had just suffered massive head trauma in a car accident but for the most part it gets the job of pushing the player from dungeon to dungeon fairly well.  

The game has a number of cool things going for it, mainly in the combat department with one of the most interesting implementations I've seen of the standard ATB that I've ever seen.  Instead of just waiting for a bar to fill and then taking a turn, all enemies and party members in Grandia 2 share the same ATB meter.  The meter is split into two sections with a wait mode and a command mode.  When your character reaches the command line you tell them what to do and then they will either execute right away if you're doing a basic attack or there will be some charge time if you're doing a spell or special move.  What makes this so interesting is that both you and the enemy can knock you out of your command with certain skills so aside from the usual strategizing that one does in every RPG of what to use and when, there's also a timing element to all your decisions.  There was one major boss fight, which I won't spoil, where it had an extremely damaging attack that could bring all of my party members to near death in one go except he was never able to pull it off after the first time because every time I would see him charging it up, I would knock him out of it.  The move I would use to do so would deal less damage, but not having to waste time healing up every time he did it made the fight, overall, much more efficient.  Grandia 1 had the same battle system and the only game I can think of outside of these two examples that does something similar is 2014's Child of Light that basically ripped off the battle system wholesale from Grandia.  

Usually I like to shit on English voice acting in modern games because most of the people that seem to work in that field have about as much vocal talent as a used up kitchen sponge but Grandia 2 has some decent performances going on in the dub.  Mainly because the majority of the main cast is made up of Metal Gear Solid voice actors such as Cam Clarke and Kim Mai Guest as well as many others so even though the script in the latter half of the game is so painfully cringe-worthy I nearly turned myself inside out, its softened by at least having voice actors that are easy on the ears.

But Grandia 2 also suffers from a lot of issues.  The writing is a big glaring one where it seems OK at first but then turns into a 14 year olds first story in the latter half but the gameplay is where most of the bullshit in this game goes down.  The dungeons are short, boring and uninspired.  There's a few cool ones but the vast majority of them require no thinking and don't even have that much in terms of explorability so after 5 or 6 of them they just become sort of grating.  Not to mention that whenever Ryudo has to climb a ladder or push a block the animations for these things are PAINFULLY fucking slow.  You can go and find a life-partner, have a child, raise the child and watch your child graduate university in the time it takes for Ryudo to push a cube a few inches or in the time it takes for you to watch the party climb up or down a ladder one by one.  Thankfully its not to prevalent throughout the game but any dungeon with cubes or ladders can go fuck itself.  

Another big issue is the grind.  You don't NEED to grind to get to the end, for the most part you can just get a couple of things and get to the end if you want but who plays RPGs like that really?  The game throws so many skills, spells and passive abilities at you that all need to be upgraded using coins you get from combat that if you wanted everything you would be grinding for HOURS.  At first I was trying to upgrade everything to max before moving on but the amount of coins needed to stay up to date was so insane that I ended up just finding one battle strategy that worked and then telling everything else to fuck off.  I didn't even unlock a single one of burly furry mans skills except for his first one that could knock enemies out of there charge time because the amount of coins I needed for Ryudo's "win the game" button along side the passive skills to make sure he doesn't eat shit was just too much.

The combat though is where one of the games biggest problem lies though.  As interesting as the battle system is, almost every skill and spell in this game is accompanied by a long, unskipable cutscene of the magic flying around the battle field doing its thing.  I was playing via an emulator for the Retro Achievements and even with the power of emulator speedup, by the time I was at the end of the game I was about ready to eat buckshot for breakfast if I had to watch that fucking ZapAll spell effect again.  This is true for enemy skills too so while you can kind of make regular combat not as tedious by only spamming regular attacks and the early skills with short animations, if an enemy wants you to watch a 90 second cutscene of the sun exploding then you better hope to fuck your cancel skills are ready or your time is being well and truly wasted.   It's a fun bit of spectacle at the start but by the end of the game you'll be begging for a way to skip them.

But despite all of those complaints I did genuinely enjoy my time with Grandia 2.  It's deeply flawed in a lot of ways but its charming and cozy.  Maybe it wouldn't appeal to todays RPG fans who are far more used to either extremely dull real time combat found in the likes of modern Final Fantasy or snappier turned based systems found in games like Persona 5 but if you're willing to exercise a bit of patience then Grandia 2 is a generally pretty good game that's worth checking out. 

One Google Search Is All It Takes

 

We all like to rag on a game journo from time to time.  Despite being members of enthusiast press they often don't seem very enthusiastic about the things they are writing about.  However upon my travels around the internet it seems that it's not only video game press that consists of hack writers that probably failed English in high school and the world of Table Top also seems greatly affected.

Despite how steeped I am in Shin Megami Tensei video games I had no idea that this rule book for a table top game even existed.  To be fair, almost all of my table top gaming experiences to this day have been extremely negative so its something I tend to ignore and turn my back on.  Anyway, the game is called Shin Megami Tensei: Tokyo Conception and its based on, obviously, SMT 3 Nocturne and was originally released in 2004.  It even has a supplementary book called the Amala Labyrinth or something that adds even more shit to it.  It seems pretty cool and if I could find a table top group that doesn't make me want to fellate the business end of a shotgun then I'd be extremely down to give it a try.

So in swoops Chase Carter of Dicebreaker.com and to his credit, the majority of his article isn't even that bad.  He mentions that there's other SMT table top systems and these things have been around since 1993 which was an interesting fact I didn't know.  Pretty much exactly what I wanted that hack at Gamespot to do when talking about Helldivers (http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2024/03/gamespot-being-embarassing-again.html) although he then does proceed to refer to the game as Tokyo Connection and Tokyo Conception so maybe a lack of reading is how such a fucking awful headline happened.

"Shin Megami Tensei tabletop RPG based on Persona's video game series" is what it reads and if you know anything about Shin Megami Tensei even just in passing you'll know that what is written here is just WILDLY incorrect.  Just in case I have to spell it out for you, Shin Megami Tensei is the mainline series and Persona is the spinoff.  It's not so much that the information is wrong that gets to me, its that this guy is supposed to be a contributer to this niche interest website and yet can't do even the most basic bit of research to get things correct.  One google search is all it would have taken to know that SMT is the main one, Nocturne is the 3rd game and the Conception is the event that happens at the start of the game which kicks of all of its events.  Its literally on the fucking Wikipedia page and takes about 4 seconds to look up.  Even if you didn't want to look it up you should know that the headline is just wrong because Persona 3 and 4 both had "Shin Megami Tensei" in the fucking title.

If I was willing to be charitable to Mr Carter here I would say that, at best, he's a click harvesting little fuckhead.  Persona is undeniably, at this point, the more well known and more popular arm of SMT so using that in the headline is probably more likely to draw traffic to the rag he's writing.  However I'm not willing to be charitible so I'm just going to assume he's a lazy piece of shit.  You're a niche writer for an enthusiast website.  A website where I imagine its members spend all day pretending to be half-elves while jacking off to pornography of bears or whatever the fuck you weirdos are into.  You aren't so busy that you can see something like this and not look up the absolute basics of what it is and what is is about.

If you're going to take the trouble of writing for a niche topic or in this case, a niche interest within that niche topic, make sure you do it justice.  Instead of just shitting out a crap article to earn a quick couple of bucks why don't you take some time and actually write something helpful to people who may be interested.  But let's be honest, Chase Carter doesn't really give a fuck about what he's doing and gives even less of a fuck about SMT.  Farm clicks, get money and move on

A fucking sad way to exist

Cave Appreciation Post

 

If you were to ask someone who their favorite game development studios are you might get a couple of standard answers.  Square Enix, Capcom, Rockstar, Nintendo maybe Naughty Dog if the person you are talking to is a braindead twat and Activision Blizzard if the person you are talking to is into findom.  However if you talk to someone who's interested in the extremely specific niche of bullet hell shooters the one name that might come out of their mouth is Cave.

Established in 1995 Cave are probably the single most recognizable name in the genre of bullet hell.  Kicking things off with Donpachi back in 1995 Cave's shmups have a unique style and feel to them where you can recognize them right away.  Some of their biggest titles include Donpachi and all its sequels, Mushihime-sama, ESP. RA. DE and Deathsmiles.  For a couple of their lesser appreciated games I would suggest checking out Guwange and Progear as well.   

While shmups are Cave's bread and butter it isn't the only kind of game they have ever put out.  Semi-well liked snowboarding game Steep Slope Sliders was developed by them as well a number of driving games including one Japan only title which I think is about delivering soba noodles to an office?  Its called Delisoba Deluxe and I watched a longplay and couldn't quite work out what the fuck was happening but that seems to be the premise.  They even have what I think is a Tokimeki Memorial clone under their belt called Princess Debut which seems very off brand for them but when I looked up a video to see what it was all about the comments were like "OMG SUCH A GOOD GAME!" and "SO NOSTALGIC" so I guess it resonated pretty well with a few youngin's at launch.  

The one thing that actually blew my goddamn mind was that, apparently, they worked on fucking Shin Megami Tensei Imagine Online of all goddamn things.  If you aren't aware SMT Imagine was a free to play MMO that, was maybe a little barebones but I'm enough of a sucker for MegaTen to have sunk a fair few hours into it.  It shut down and was then kept on life support by some fans running a private server but because the business-men over at ATLUS are fun-hating turbo cunts they shut that down too.  I guess Cave are too busy making more DoDonpachi games to give a shit but I wish someone would bring it back or even just make a new one.

Now that you have read this post you are required to go and play a game made by Cave.  I suggest ESP.RA.DE if you like top down and Progear if you like side scrolling.  Doesn't really matter what you pick in the end anyway because its basically guaranteed to be a good time

Gamespot being embarassing again

 

I don't usually read gaming news websites but every so often an article from one of these rags will come across desk and I was absolutely stunned when I saw the headline of this one inparticular written by one George Yang. 

I had to do a double take when I first saw it and read it slowly.  Helldivers was a game that came out in 2015 that I didn't play.  It was a twin stick shooter with online co-op about shooting stuff, I didn't give a fuck about it.  The game has a lot of positive reviews on Steam, netting it an overall Very Positive rating and yet I have never met a single person either online or in real life who has played it and until its sequel came out, I think a vast majority of the gaming public didn't know what the fuck it even was.  Then Helldivers 2 comes out and the game explodes in popularity and granted, after looking up some gameplay for this post, it does look kinda cool.  I'm not personally a fan of doing online co-op, I'm not into games that are multiplayer focused but it looks like a good time.  It looks like Earth Defense Force.

The first Earth Defense Force game came out on the PS2 back in 2003 developed by a company called SANDLOT and was released under the SIMPLE series.  The SIMPLE series was a collection of budget games for various systems where the number in the title indicated their cost.  For example EDF1 was released under the name SIMPLE 2000: THE 地球防衛軍 MONSTER ATTACK in Japan, the 2000 in the title meaning that the game cost 2000 yen.  This game actually got a western release under the title Global Defence Force and involved shooting a bunch of bugs in third person.

Now I'm not particularly good at doing maths but Helldivers 2 came out in 2024 and I'm pretty sure that is a long time after 2003.  I'm pretty sure, Mr Yang, that your title is the wrong way round.  The title of the article makes it sound as if EDF 6 is cribbing off Helldivers 2 despite not only the series being much older, but Earth Defence Force 6 coming out TWO FUCKING YEARS PRIOR in Japan.  What makes it even more frustrating is that he knows this fact and gives this half assed little paragraph at the bottom of the article about the original EDF but only talking about how the name changed a couple of times before finally settling on the Earth Defence Force title.

This is frustrating in two ways. The first, is that George Yang is such an insipid, crap writer that he's name dropping Helldivers 2, a hot trending game, to drive clicks.  But whatever, that's not exactly uncommon practice in 2024.  What's more frustrating is that George had an opportunity here to educate some people on some gaming history.  "Earth Defense Force 6, the game that helped inspire Helldivers 2, delayed to summer" could have been the article.  He could have spent more time talking about the simple series, EDF and letting people know about a cool series that might have not known about prior.  And let's be honest here, the kind of people who are reading Gamespot are the kind of people who have the most surface level knowledge of gaming, these are the people who could maybe use a little nudge into something about more lower budget and unknown. 

I had a look through George's article history and inspid unseasoned-chicken style writing seems to be his bread and butter.  You're a fucking writer for an enthusiast press outlet, George, why don't you fucking act like one.

Bellend

Consoles Feel Utterly Pointless

 

Back in 2020 the PS5 relased and with a sort of poor lineup of launch games I told myself that I would wait for there to be a better lineup of games before jumping on, also hoping to capitalize on a price drop as reward for my patience but we are now 4 years in and I'm staring Part 2 of the Final Fantasy 7 remake right in the face and I still can't bring myself to buy one, it just doesn't feel worth it at all.

The big problem is exclusivity of titles, it's just not really a thing anymore.  Any game that I think looks interesting on PS5 will, at some point, end up on PC sooner or later.  The one exception to this might be Demon's Souls Remastered but who gives a fuck about that game, really? I'm not about the drop a couple hundred bucks on new hardware and go through the rigmarol of finding space for it under my TV stand and going through all that setup and updates just to re-play a game that I already played to death back in 2009.  Timed exclusivity isn't going to get me to buy it either, the hype surrounding FF7 Rebirth, at least for me, died forever ago and watching streams of the game now that it's finally come out leaves me thinking that not rushing out to get it was probably a good decision.   The Switch sort of deals with this problem by locking a bunch of its games exclusively to that, forever, but a lot of Switch games run like ass-dick and probably would be better on PC.  I'm quite happy, for example that Shin Megami Tensei 5 is getting a PC release so that all the stupid performance hiccups can be squashed and I can play a version of the game that is distractingly shit in the performance department.  Deadly Premonition 2 is another example of a Switch game that saw vast improvements by coming to PC.  Put that stupid fucking rectangle with its flimsy controllers in the trash and just make games for PC instead.

In current day Consoles, to me at least, feel like shitty toys that are aimed at people who have the tech literacy of a 4 year old or actual 4 year olds.  Redundant pieces of hardware sold almost entirely on brand recognition than actually being useful as an entertainment device.  It never USED to be like this, PC gaming and console gaming felt like two entirely different things that offered entirely different types of games.  Look at the libraries of the PS1 and the PS2, for example, and then the PC games that were also being released at that time, there's a little crossover, sure, but it felt like owning a decent PC AND those consoles was a good idea if you wanted to experience the best of everything.  The other thing to consider was that PC gaming back then certainly felt a bit more cumbersome.  It wasn't like today where you can just download a game off steam, click go and it goes, there was usually some form of troubleshooting involved to get the game working and so consoles shone in that department because being able to just slap in a disc and play was great.  But not only is PC gaming significantly easier now in most cases but you can't even just slap a game in a console and play it anymore.  Mandatory updates and subcriptions to bullshit like PS+ and Switch Online hounding you at every turn make the experience very annoying.  Do you want to play Dead by Daylight on the PS5 where you must also have to pay an additional subscription to PS+ to do anything other that the tutorial?  Or do you wanna play on PC where you can play online as much as you want and there's no additional fee to pay on top of your internet bill?  I know which one I'd pick.

Crap libraries, shitty ancillary services that you are pretty much forced to buy into to get full functionality and the fact that you can have a better experience on a more versitile piece of equipment means that consoles are fucking pointless.  Maybe there will be a Switch 2 or a PS6 in the future but unless the landscape of console gaming changes drastically the whole thing can just fuck off

Donkey Konga: The Worst Rythm Game Ever Made

 

No genre is free from it's trash entries and rhythm games are no different.  If you had asked me what I thought was the worst rhythm game before playing Donkey Konga I might have said Parappa The Rapper.  But despite my extremely low opinion of Parappa as a rhythm game, I can appreciate it as being one of the first and the music absolutely fuckin SLAPS but then Donkey Konga comes along and shows me first hand what a really trash rhythm game looks like.

I'm not the kind of guy to get really hung up on UI.  Unless the UI in a game is particularly unreadable or badly made then its not the kind of thing that will even cause a blip on my critical radar.  But right out the gate, the first thing thats very noticable when you hit the start button is that Donkey Konga's menus feel cheap.  This is a first party Nintendo game, featuring one of the companies biggest mascots that's been around since 198 fucking 1 and it has a menu screen that looks like something you'd find on some shovelware bullshit that you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin, thrice discounted to a dollar.  Zero effort put into these menus at all.  One of them is even called "DK City" or something, the area where you use coins to buy new music and stuff and I thought it make take me to a fun little jungle island interface but no, just the same shit garbage menu to buy nonsense.

But that's just the menus, in the actual rhythm game itself the UI is also trash.  There are 4 types of notes, a left hit, a right hit, a double hit and a clap.  The notes are an obnoxiously bright shade of red and yellow so when you're playing on the harder modes your eyes start to strain trying to read the chart.  There's also no options for speed mods which makes reading charts a pain in the cock but the only reason this isn't more of a problem is because the game is piss easy and even a newborn that's been dropped could clear the highest settings.  Even worse with the UI is that the feedback for successfully hit notes is fucking bullshit.  In literally every other rhythm game that exists there is some feedback for telling the player they hit a note.  Usually the note will vanish and you'll get a little mark that tells you your accuracy, like in DDR you get Marvellous or Perfect or whatever.  In Donkey Konga, though, when you hit a note you get get feedback mark but the note KEEPS FUCKING SCROLLING past the hit zone.  That's behaviour entirely reserved for missed notes, what the fuck.  Not that getting distracted matters even in the slightest because the game isn't tracking full combos anyway.  There are 3 ways to end a song.  Fail, which I have never seen, pass with a silver crown and pass with a gold crown.  The only difference is if your life bar at the end of the song was full or not.  You could go away from your bongos for 75% of a song, then play the last stretch perfectly and end on a gold crown.  It's like the complete opposite of IIDXs failing with a AA rank, it's fucking bullshit.

But all of this is just set dressing, the most important thing is the music right?  Well guess fuckin what? That sucks too.  Nursery rhymes that would even make its target demographic eye roll, terrible covers of pop songs including the worst versions I have ever heard of Another One Bites the Dust and All the Small Things and weird old shit for grandad.  The only good tracks on the game are the Pokemon Theme Song and the DK Rap.  When you're rhythm game has only 2 good tracks in it that is probably  more than any shitty UI and toddler grade peripheral will ever be.

The most frustrating thing about all this is that the template was done for them already.  Donkey Konga isn't even an original idea, it's a straight rip off of Taiko no Tatsujin just with the Japanese drums replaced with bongos

Taiko is great too, it's good good music, plays great, looks great, there's a reason that it's been around for so long and is a staple of basically every arcade, even the shit ones in shopping malls and sports centers, even to this day.  All Nintendo had to do was make it like that and instead we got this low effort, lazy, poorly thrown together dollar store knockoff.

Donkey Konga is bar far the worst rhythm game ever made.  Even the biggest arcade rhythm flops like Museca don't even come CLOSE to this level of shittiness.  An embarassing title from Nintendo that makes a good case for maybe not all video game preservation being a good thing. Fuck this game and fuck anyone who worked on it. 

The Real Problem With A Massive Backlog

I have an absolutely staggering backlog of unplayed games, easily in the quadruple digits.  This is not a flex since I don't care about game collecting per se, it's just a problem that's been festing in the background of my life since I've been old enough to have some kind of disposable income.  Even when I moved to Japan and a big chunk of my physical collection got nicked in transit, thanks to the likes of Steam, Good old Games and now Epic giving me free shit that event barely put a dent in my never ending to-play list.

The most obvious problem with a big backlog is time, a real too many games with too little time situation but I don't feel like that's too huge a problem for me personally.  Sure, I'd love more time to game but I get through a decent number of games every year, usually within the triple digits no problem so it's a pretty minor factor.  Another slightly less obvious problem is decision paralysis that one gets from having so many games to choose from.  There have been instances where I'm trying to decide what to play next and have just sat looking at my steam list or flicking through my discs for hours without being able to land on a single thing.  It usually ends up with me picking nothing and doing something else for a bit before I can decide something.

But no, the real problem comes with me being a massive idiot and not remembering what games I have bought already.  The other day on my travels through Nagoya I came across a small used goods store which I decided to have a quick peek inside because sometimes these places have cheap games to buy.  I was right, and there was a tiny shelf of about 6 PS3 games and a couple of PSP games, all for 200 yen each.  Most of it was crap, multiple copies of some Gundam game I don't care about but I did come across a copy of Front Mission Evolved.  I have heard its not that good and I know its not your usual SRPG that Front Mission usually is but for 200 yen, less than a can of Red Bull or a pack of fried chicken at Lawson? Hell yeah I'll give it a go.  When I get home though, I'm going through my Steam library and there it is, Front Mission Evolved on PC sat right there in the list, I already owned the fuckin' thing and because I have so many games and I have long since forgotten what I've bought already I now own two copies of this potentially shit game.

This isn't a recent problem either, back in my high school days I bought Diablo 2 THREE fuckin times.  GAME, the UK version of Gamestop or whatever, would stock copies of it for 5 pounds and I would see it on the shelf and go "oooh! Diablo 2 for a fiver? I'll take that!" only to get home and find it on the shelf by the computer.  What I probably need to do is make a list on my phone of all the games I own so that next time I'm looking through a used game shop I can quickly scroll through it and confirm I don't own it already before checking out.  Although with the staggering number of games I own and a complete lack of motivation this will never happen 

So that it's.  The biggest problem of having a massive backlog of games is that it turns you into an idiot.  Front Mission Evolved isn't the first duplicate game I've bought and I can PROMISE you, it won't be the last

Go Play a Toriyama Game Today

 

In some absolutely soul crushing news today, it turns out that Akiratoriyama, an absolute legend in video games and anime, has died at the age of 68.  I remember when I first came across his work around the time I was in middle school when Dragon Ball Z started being aired on TV and his work has been hovering around my life in various capacities ever since.  Hell, even right now there's a Dragon Quest Monsters towel with a bunch of monster and character designs of his adorning it pinned to the wall behind me as I write this post.  This guy was such a massive force in the field that even people like my wife, who are WAY outside of any of those interests knew who he was an the impact he had.

During his life he was quite the busy guy in the field of video games.  The most well known of it by a wide margin is Dragon Quest with Chrono Trigger following close behind but he worked on some other games that you may not have heard of or played.  The one that sticks right the fuck out in my mind is Blue Dragon, an RPG that sadly remains locked to the 360 and didn't review particularly review very well at the time but back then next gen JRPGs were a bit hard to come by so this scratched a particular itch and the effort was very much welcomed.  While the OG Blue Dragon is locked to the 360 there were a 2 sequels made for it on the DS so maybe those are easier to obtain and certainly easier to emulate if you chose to go that route.

If RPGs aren't your speed though he also worked on some fighting games.  You may think I'm about to list off all the Budokai and Tenkaichi Dragonball games but I'm not and of course I'm talking about the legendary Tobal No1.  It might not look much nowadays and it plays stiff as dick but it hails from a time when fighting games actually had content to experience so comes with a full on adventure mode that involves running around mazes and fighting dudes for experience alongside the regular 1v1 fighting.

The one thing I discovered while taking a quick glance at his wiki page for this short appriciation post is that he worked on a game called Fantasian.  Fantasian looks like a pretty standard JRPG but it's got a fairly unique visual style as all the environments are made out of hand-crafted dioramas instead of 3D graphics and that alone is enough to get me interested enough to give it a go.  Unfortunately it's been locked to the apple arcade for YEARS but maybe, in light of the news, I'll bite the bullet and give it a spin because I'm not sure when or even if a PC port is happening.  I'm not going to look it up in advance, I'm going to see if I can guess which diorama is his as I play then look it up at the end.

Japan and the world lost a legend today, 68 is far too young for anyone to be pushing up daisies.  Fire up some of his games, read some of his manga, watch some of his anime, put some respect on the mans name

Nintendo are Scummy (and quite stupid)

 

Another day, another instance of Nintendo being complete fucking dirt.  Thanks to some nasty lawsuits from Nintendo, Switch emulator Yuzu has been completely taken down.  If you go to their site right now you are sent to a, admiteddly quite funny, message from the developers that reads like a hostage being fed lines from their captor with a gun to their head about how the project is dead and they didn't intend any piracy.  It's not just Yuzu that has been baleeted either, Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra has also been completely removed and is no longer avaliable for download, which in my opinion is considerably more of a problem than the Yuzu takedown.

Now to some degree I get it, the Switch is a current piece of hardware and Yuzu was being used to pirate various games by some users.  Not only this but the Yuzu team had a patreon and were making some decent cash off the emulator which some theorize to be the big reason why the lawyers got involved and why, at least at time of writing, Ryujinx is still alive.  There is also no denying that some people were using the emulator to pirate games, Nintendo are well within their rights to take this stuff down.

But there's a problem.  The first problem is that while I can understand Nintendo taking umbridge with ROM and ISO sites, Emulators aren't JUST for piracy.  For example I have a large collection of PS2 games that I bought back when I used to collect games extensively.  My actual PS2 is being kept in a shoebox in the store room of my house right now so just being able to pop the disc copy of the game into my PC and play it via PCSX2 is an absolute godsend.  Yuzu wasn't a piece of software made for piracy, no emulator is, they are made for convenience and preservation and Nintendo just decided to shit all over that for reasons I cannot comprehend

The other problem is that the Switch is a piece of fucking garbage.  The controllers suck, the pro controllers are overpriced and the system can barely handle its own games.  For example, the last big game I played on my Switch was Shin Megami Tensei 5, a game exclusive to the system AND YET suffered from massive frame drops when entering the fucking menu along with a bunch of other performance and visual hiccups.  My joycons have suffered from drift and the system feels like shit to play in "portable" mode and looks like shit when its displayed on my TV.  People who were using Yuzu to get a better resolution or not have their games run like trash don't deserve to be inconvenienced like this because of couple of fossilized scumfucks in Kyoto are mad they can't win a lawsuit against Palworld so they take it out on some emu devs.

I wrote a post about it previously before I had heard about any of this but emulation of systems and games is the single most important thing we have for preservation.  Nintendo won't fucking do it, if anything they keep closing down stores and services so that tons of games become just flat out unobtainable and unplayable outside of emulation or overpaying for hardware and a used game that they don't make any money off.  You can argue that maybe I'm overreacting a little because some other person will come along eventually and make a different Switch emulator in the future when its less relevant but the fact that a company is so willing to spit in the face of these efforts is just scummy and infuriating.

The funny part, the part that makes Nintendo seem a bit stupid and short sighted though, is that if you do a quick Google search for Yuzu or Citra, you will now find quite a large number of people flocking to uploads of the emulators in order to start using them (and probably pirating some games in the process) now that its ease of avaliability is dissapearing.  I found a certain webpage that had Citra and Yuzu avaliable for downloads and between a bunch of comments saying simply "fuck Nintendo", there were some users saying "I had never heard of Yuzu before but after seeing the news I decided to download it and try it out".  Does this count as the Streisand Effect?

Nintendo can throw their little tantrum and ruin a couple peoples lives, sure, but they aren't ever going to be able to stop the Emulation train.  The more Nintendo do this kind of thing the more people will start to think that its morally acceptable to pirate their shit, and not just their old shit either.  While they are probably a company that's too big to fail and have too many mindless fans that will give them millions of dollars for actual trash I can dream that one day all that good will will run dry and they will be forced to shutter their doors forever

Fuck Nintendo, haven't been good since the SNES

 

Does a Good Video Game Movie Exist?

 

I was reminded this afternoon of the existence of the new Mario movie, a movie I refused to see on principle because it was made by actual trash-lords Illumination.  You cannot convince me that a movie made by the people who are responsible for The Minions existing are able to create something entertaining when the film they are creating only seems to serve as fanwank for children to excitedly point at and go "I KNOW THAT REFERENCE!"

In fact, I can't think of a single video game movie that I have seen that is even remotely acceptable.  Silent Hill might be one that comes sort of close but the story is so fucked in that film and the Pyramid Head cameo so uncerimoniously shoe-horned in that it falls short.  Maybe if it wasn't called Silent Hill it would be a sort of slightly above average horror movie but slap that brand recognition and it becomes unbearably stupid.  Advent Children may also come close but I've not seen that movie in many many years and the only thing I do remember is the fight choreography and the antagonists were constantly asking where their mother was like a lost child in a supermarket.  In an example of one I've not seen I have been told by people who's opinions I don't really take seriously in the first place that the Uncharted movie is pretty good but Uncharted was already ripping off a movie (Indiana Jones) in the first place so turning it into a movie again feels a bit daft.

I don't even understand this obsession with wanting games to have movie adaptations anyway.  The idea that I get from people is that having a movie come out for a game somehow legitimizes gaming, or at the very least that title, as a "proper" artistic medium but that's bollocks.  Who gives a fuck what stuffy old film makers think of gaming, why do people care about their validation so much?  The alternitive is that people just want to mindlessly consume more crap pumped out by a thing that they like which is equally, if not more sad.  I understand wanting a movie adaptation of a book, having the things written on the page that exist only in text brough to life on a big screen.  It's fun to see if how you envisioned the events in a book play out the same way on the screen.  But gaming is already a visual medium, gaming already has titles like Metal Gear that are basically like really long movies anyway but where YOU get to control all the cool gun-fighty and sneaky bits, you don't need a movie.

But maybe I'm wrong, maybe the adaptations of games I have seen thus far have just been bad picks.  Maybe Uncharted is great, maybe Five Nights at Freddies is the best horror film ever made (lol), maybe the Uwe Boll House of the Dead movie isn't complete gutter trash (double lol).  So to test this idea, I will spend the rest of 2024 watching as many video game adaptions as I can, both movies and TV shows.  There's an Onimusha show that dropped on Netflix kinda recently actually so maybe I'll start there.  Also there's movies and a series, I think, of Persona which is basically already an anime anyway so maybe that can't go too wrong either.

I'll probably come back here and write a little blog post about each one as I watch them so watch this space, my quest for a good video game movie/TV adaptation begins today

I hate Micro USB

 

This is probably going to be a pretty short post but Micro USB has caused me such problems for such a long period of time that I have to write it down here and make my distaste for this cable connection known to the public.

I'm a big fan of the Playstation 4 controller, it's great.  Looks good, feels good in the hand and the triggers are quite nice.  I like the Playstation 4 controller so much that I decided that I wanted to use it with my PC games too which I was able to easily do by just plugging it in with its charging cable.  The thing about the charging cable is, however, that the side that goes into the controller is a Micro USB connector which for some infuriating reason seems to wear down over time and makes the controller next to unusable.  Not usuable in a nice clean way though, it'll still connect and let you play games with it but if you move even a nanometer the thing will fucking disconnect and either pause the game or get you killed.  

The absolute worst thing that I've seen happen with this controller disconnect is where the pad stops responding but it holds the last input you made.  Back when I was doing deathless or hitless runs of Cuphead there was more than one occasion where my pad would stop working but it would keep running to the right and off a ledge or into a bosses attack.  For anything more intense than a turn based RPG, if you're using a controller that works off micro USB then you may as well just not even bother.

It's not just me either, almost everyone I know has this issue with these controllers.  A long time ago I did a classic Mega Man 2 players 1 controller marathon where we used the PS4 controllers that my co-pilot had and even his cables were suffering from the same issue.  We had to wrap a bunch of rubber bands around the connector to hold it in place and even that wasn't a sure fix, we still had to contend with disconnects throughout that events.  PS4 controllers, not even PS5, PS fucking 4 controllers are still 3-6000 yen, I shouldn't have to McGuyver the thing to operate as intended when I'm paying that goddamn much.

What's even worse is that while I'm focusing on the PS4 pad because its the thing that's been pissing me off the most recently, it's not the only piece of tech that uses micro USB that I've had trouble with.  I recently bought a baby monitor where the screen component of it has a micro USB port on it for charging.  I had that baby monitor for about a month before I started having charging issues with the damn thing.  Not because the monitor was fucked in anyway, but because the fucking connector on the cable had worn down and absolutely refused to charge with out A LOT of fiddling to get it in a very specific position.  We had a separate micro USB charger thing that we ended up swapping that busted cable out with and it works for now but it's only a matter of time before this one dies too.

I know there might be sentient cum-bubble that might want to respond with something like "bUt TaU, jUsT uSe It wIrElEsSlY" but 1) I have tried that and for some reason it won't take and 2) Even if it did work, it doesn't change the fact that micro USB is a pile of shit and no company should be making anything that uses it.

I can't believe I'm at a point in my life where I have strong feelings about cable connectors but here we are.  Fuck micro USB

The Best Marketing Campaign In All Of Gaming

 

I'm not one, personally, to get too swept up in hype and marketing.  Usually what will happen is that I will find out that a game exists, maybe watch a short trailer and then file it away in my mind and not look at anything to do with it ever again until it launches and I get a chance to play it.  I have to admit though, if I was a young Japanse boy in the 90s then there's a good chance that this advertising campaign for the Sega Saturn would have swept me right up into a hype train.

Segata Sanshiro, a play on the Japanese セガサターンしろ (meaning, "play the sega saturn!" said in a sort of aggressive way) arranged so that it sounds like a dudes name was a series of advertisements played on Japanese TV to, obviously, promote the Sega Saturn.  The first few snippits of these adverts depict our man, Segata Sanshiro, a bloke in a karate gi, approaching groups of youths who are not playing Sega Saturn and then beating them up and demanding that they go and do so.  Later adverts depict him doing absolutely insane super-human feats that relate to the theme of whatever individual game they are trying to sell.  For example, one of my favorite versions of this is where Segata is acting as goalkeeper in a football match and instead of just blocking the oncoming ball, he proceeds to flip the entire goal net over his shoulder so TECHNICALLY the ball didn't go in.  After some clips of the game, World Cup 98 ~Road to Win~, the ad ends with Segata being red-carded by the referee while shouting "OH NO!" in an overexaggerated katakana-English accept.

The absolutely insane thing about this series of adverts is that when it came for the release of the Dreamcast, the ad involves a bunch of business folks celebrating the launch when a missle is launched at Sega HQ.  Segata, who just happens to be standing on the roof of the building, proceeds to catch the missle in mid-air, rides it into space where it then explodes and kills him off.  Honestly, a truly hilarious way to give the mascot a sendoff for the next piece of hardware.

Segata Sanshiro seemed to be such a well-liked figure within Japan that he even got his own game on the Saturn but I've heard its an extremely lackluster mini-game collection where your reward for beating the games is the ability to watch the adverts which, honestly, seems trash but having not played it at time of writing this article I'll withhold judgement.  More well liked that the mascot though is the man himself Hiroshi Fujioka who is a bit of a legend here in Japan.  Known chiefly for being in Kamen Rider he's a sort of cultural icon that even my wife, who knows barely anything of video games and even less about Tokusatsu, knows who he is.  Hell, when I looked him up on Wikipedia before writing this blog I found out he even has a fucking planet named after him.  

I wouldn't be surprised if this ad campaign is the reason that the Saturn is remembered quite a bit more fondly in Japan than it is in the west.  Back in England I barely knew anyone who even knew what the Sega Saturn was, let alone had played one.  It was one of those systems that only weirdos like me owned alongside things like the Neo Geo and even today its only really hardcore enthusiasts willing to dig into gamings history that give enough of a shit to look at its libarary.  In Japan though it's a little bit more well remembered.  I've met plenty of folks who have at least got some memories of having fiddled with a game or two on the system in their childhoods.  I even met one guy in a bar once who spent the better part of 2 hours trying to convince me to play Wachenroder which, while it looks cool, I still haven't done yet.  Sorry.

There's a lot of weird, gross and shitty video game advertising out there, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, but Sega really knocked it out of the park with this one.  It's a shame it wouldn't last and Sega would bow out of the hardware biz after the Dreamcast but at the very least their efforts gave us some truly hilarious bits of old advertising to look back on fondly

Localizers Suck But So Do You

 

I was browsing a certain video game forum when I came across this image complaining about the quality of the translation of the upcoming Vanillaware game Unicorn Overlord.  To me, the image at the top of the post seems fine.  Certainly a great deal more flowery than the original Japanese script but not wrong, you aren't being given a greatly different script to the original Japanese.  However this thread was full of people, who I assume don't speak Japanese, absolutely frothing at the mouth at how the translation was "wrong" and going off on conspiracy theories about how "they" are using video game translations to push agendas or whatever weird terminally online bullshit these people like to go on about.

But to some degree I can sympathize with what they are saying.  Not the conspiracy part, that is absolute lunacy, but there does seem to be a severe lack of skill within the field of media translation that needs to be adressed.  I have played some absolute fucking STINKERS in my time, the chief example which really sticks out in my mind in recent years has been Fire Emblem Three Houses.  Never have I quite had an experience where the Japanese voices that I was listening to compared to the English text boxes I was reading felt so wildly different.  I covered it in a blog post I did previously on the game 

https://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2021/04/fire-emblem-3-houses.html

Fire Emblem seems to be famous for it actually with 2 characters basically having a support conversation stripped from the game entirely

You can basically take any game from recent memory, give it to someone who knows Japanese and I guarantee they will be able to find some pretty bad errors in it.  Hell, even in games with generally good translations like Triangle Strategy there is one mission where the dialogue is basically flipped to have the opposite meaning.  It's only a small scene and doesn't really affect anything but the idea that someone who is supposedly fluent in Japanese who is being paid to put the game into English making such a basically Genki Book 1 level error is embarassing.

You aren't free from these problems though by avoiding official translations because Fan Translations are even worse.  While a few good ones do exist, most of these fan translations are done by hobbyists who probably couldn't pass the JLPT N3 desperately sitting there with a kanji dictionary and google translate cobbling together whatever they can to provide an obscure game to western players.  The only reason I don't rag on these guys harder is because what they are doing is actually pretty cool and fan translations are generally aquired for free.  For example, there's a fan translation of one of my favorite Sega Saturn games, Baroque, and while it's probably awful (just assuming, I've not played the translated version, maybe/I hope I'm wrong) I would rather it exist and allow people who can't read Japanese to discover a great game like that than have it fade into true obscurity on a shelf in a Super Potato.

But on the flip side of all this are the people actually making the complaints.  Most people on social media or in forums who are levelling these criticisms at a games translation do not speak Japanese.  Someone with Google translate or a very surface level understanding of the language will tell them that it's wrong and then treat that as absolute fact when, a lot of the time, the things they are complaining about are daft.  Take that Unicorn Overlord screenshot at the top of the post.  Nothing that the guy is saying in English isn't reflected in the Japanese.  What I imagine happened is that someone on production looked at the setting to that game and said "ok we are going with ye-oldy flowery bullshit for the English" and then made those demands to whoever was actually doing the translating and English script writing.  In the few cases of game translations that I have personally been a part of, stylistic requirements for writing are usually made by a higher up who usually would have a mental break down if they tried to order a plate of spaghetti in a resturant.  I'm not sure if that's how it works in a much larger studio like Vanillaware but someone not related to the work making those stylistic demands is a situation I can easily imagine from my own experience.

That's sort of beside the point though because when you waste your time arguing so passionately about stuff that is generally fine not being 1 to 1 is that people who are within those circles will use idiotic rantings like this to dismiss large swathes of criticism and therefore things will never get any better.  I have known people who worked for Nippon Ichi who can't pass the JLPT N5 working on translations for Disgaea Mobile and another guy who had the creative writing skills of a well weathered rock claiming he worked on Scarlet Nexus and One Piece Odyssey.  The field is FULL of people like this who either suck at writing or suck at Japanese or both but the field is so underpaid that it only attracts these kinds of people.  Anyone who is worth a shit at Japanese language goes into things like Engineering or Computer Sciency type shit, you'd have to be a failiure or a weirdo to have a decent JLPT result and still want to do that.  What the field needs are skilled lingusts calling out the awful translation quality and maybe fighting for some actual decent salaries but that'll never happen so we're just stuck with this bullshit.

The best thing you can do if it bothers you that much is just learn Japanese.  I can promise you that it won't take anymore than about 2 years of study to get to a point where you can start playing most games without much issue and having language skills outside of just your mother tongue is never a bad thing.  

Hit the books, ya fuckin nerd

The Windows Are Gone

 

On my stream I like to do a little segment that I call "free game dumpster diving" which, I know, is a strange thing to call it considering that a lot of the things I do play end up being quite good but I started with that and I'm not about to change it now.  One of the things I played recently on that segment was a little thing called The Windows Are Gone which I found moderately impressive so I want to do a little post about it and shine some light on it.

The Window Are Gone starts out with a character moving into a new house as a way of getting a fresh start after experiencing some kind of horrible event.  It starts out quite simple with you just having to carry your boxes of stuff into the house but before too long things start to get a little creepy with a next door neighbor coming to say hi and things going bump in the....day.  Things going bump in the day I think is a smidge creepier because the day is when things aren't supposed to go bump.  Bump in the night? no problem, deal with that shit all the time, bump in the day? that's just fuckin wrong.

Anyway the story is extremely short and I want you, the reader, to actually go and play it so without getting into any spoilers things escalate pretty quickly and a decent horror experience ensues.  The story is pretty predictable and you can KIND of guess whats going on as early as the first little text message you get on your phone from another character but what the game lacks in originality it makes up for with absolute SPADES of atmosphere.  Come cool sound design couple with the not-quite PS1 visuals and some funky tricks with timers and triggers was able to actually get a little bit of a spook out of me and when considering that most AAA huge budget large studio bullshit horror games can't get that out of me, that's impressive.  

What Mr or Mrs ScaryCube has managed to show here is restraint, which I feel is a bit of a lost art in the genre in recent memory.  While a lot of horror games want to hit you with dark corridors, lound banging and BOO! CREEPY FUCKIN MONSTER! as quickly as possible The Windows Are Gone knows how to use its short run time to allow itself to build up properly.  Start with something mundane, get comfortable, get a little cozy even and then slowly IV Drip that spooky shit until the climax.  I've always thought that short stories are probably the best delivery method for horror literature and I'm starting to think that short, bite-sized games like this might be a more advantagous method of delivering horror games as well.  A solid 1-4 hour experience is proabably more conducive to making something truly scary rather than an 8 hour gory screamfest that you become desensitized to by hour 3 (Dead Space, you unscary fuck).  

Finally, the game allows you to actually open up the boxes and decorate the house which, in my opinion, was a way more entertaining part of the game than I ever thought something like that could be.  Move over Unpacking, The Windows Are Gone has got your fuckin number.

This post could be longer but I really don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it before and didn't see it on my stream.  It costs literally 0 money and is short as fuck so don't make any excuses, go try it now.

ATLUS Piss Me Off

 

When I got home from work this evening I came face to face with an announcement for Shin Megami Tensei 5 Vengeance.  In fairness, SMT V probably needed a bit of a re-do.  While I didn't hate it on the Switch it felt a little half baked, especially in the story department and it sort of ran like complete garbage with weird frame drops when doing basic stuff like opening the menu so moving it to PC is probably a good idea.

But what pisses me off is that this sort of initial release followed by a "real" release is a thing that ATLUS has been doing that really pisses me off.  A good example is with Persona 3 all the way back on PS2.  Persona 3 comes out in 2006 and then in 2007 they drop an updated version, Persona 3 FES, in 2007 which is basically the same game but better.  Then they do it again with Persona 4 on PS2 and then Persona 4 Golden on Vita where P4G is basically identical to the base game but with just more stuff.  Persona 5 is also guilty of this shitty practice with base P5 and then Persona 5 Royale coming out a year or two later.

You might think that mainline MegaTen is free from this practice since the only thing that seems to come close before this announcement is SMT 4 but 4A is a sequel to 4, its an entirely different game.  But what you may not know is that Nocturne did this shit a couple years prior but it was only in Japan so most players weren't aware.  There was a initial release of Nocturne and then this was followed up with Nocturne Maniax which is the version we got in the west with the True Demon ending and the fiends and all that good shit.  If you were a Japanese player though, you might have got fucked by buying the initial version because its basically the same game just with less shit.  Then they released it AGAIN with a version called Chronicle where its basically the same as Maniax just with Raidou instead of Dante (from Devil May Cry).  

It's not just the double releasing to leech money out of fans that pisses me off though, their DLC policies are horrendous.  When SMT V first dropped it came with a whole bunch of DLC.  Demons, quests, a secret boss fight all locked behind a paywall instead of just being in the game so some scumfuck suits can make a line go up.  Even worse than that you could just pay for levels and money with another set of DLC and what made the whole thing super annoying was that you couldn't just buy the demons and secret boss, it was all or nothing.  It took me way longer than needed for me to get the DLC because I had to painstakingly buy the "good" DLC one by one in order to avoid that pay to win magatama dogshit.  The DLC side of things gets especially shitty with the release of Soul Hackers 2

Fucking iconic demons like Mara and Satan locked behind a 10 pound day 1 DLC.  Absolutely fucking disgusting considering that the game is (still) 50 fucking pounds.  Shoutouts to BOOK OFF for selling me the PS4 version for the yen equivalent of 5 pounds.

I fucking love Shin Megami Tensei and I'm of course thrilled to be getting more of it.  I just wish whoever is in charge of the more business side of the franchise would just fuck off forever because I'm sick of being nickle and dimed with one of the only IPs I'm still passionate about.  

Also bring back SMT Imagine, ATLUS, you fucking cowards

Super Mario Kart is Actually Garbage

 

I remember as a child seeing  Super Mario Kart on TV screens around electronic stores and thinking it looked like the coolest shit in the world but for some reason my parents never got it for me.  None of my friends who also owned a SNES at the time had it either so while I enjoyed Mario Kart on the GBA, DS, Gamecube and Wii throughout the years, the original outing had completely passed me by until recently.

Well, I really should thank my parents for never buying me this one because holy shit is this game a piece of fucking garbage.  I'm actually surprised at just how popular Mario Kart is in the modern day because if I had played this one when it was new, I sure as shit wouldn't have been so willing to give the later entries a try.

As far as the core game is concerned its pretty similar to what you might be used to if you too have only played the newer games.  Drive around the track, collect items to pelt at the other racers, try to come first.  The big difference with this game, however, is that it's worse in pretty much every way.  Most notably the handling of the karts is complete ass.  Just steering left and right feels like pulling teeth and the drifting?  fucking forget it.  You jump and do drifts in basically the same way but the drift sends you flying super wide around corners if you try to hold it for anything more than a nanosecond and the AI that is constantly cheating will just take it tight without so much as a jump and just overtake you anyway.

Not only does the AI cheat with its driving but it LOVES to cheat with the items too.  On 50cc its not so noticable but on 100 is when you really start to feel it.  Most tracks only have a single section on them where there is a collection of item boxes.  But the AI racers don't give a fuck about that, if you are in first the second place racer will CONSTANTLY be pelting you with shit to try and make you screw up.  Even if you aren't in first place the AI fucking cheats with the items.  After I managed to pull a win on the 100cc special cup, I decided to check out the 150cc mode because that's usually the most fun in these games.  I was in like, 6th or something and the Luigi in front of me popped a star, ok fine.  But then, right after that star ran out, he just fucking popped another one.  We hadn't crossed the item boxes, his inventory should have been empty, but nope, fuck the rules he's just invincible forever I guess.  Even when you get items sometimes they just wont work.  At one point I had a red shell which I fired at the first place racer who then proceeded to just fucking jump over it.  Not like, the little hop that you do when you press L or R, a big ass fucking jump as if they had the feather item but, once again, there's no way in hell they should have had that shit because earlier in the lap they were pelting me with mushrooms, so what the fuck?!  Playing Super Mario Kart is like playing with a shitty little kid who just starts making stuff up when they start losing.  "Nuh-uh, you can't overtake me because my car suddenly has giant rocket boosters", fuck off kid, how about I boost you into a wood chipper.

Not to mention that a single error can basically cost you an entire race even if that error is made on like, lap 2 of 5.  In the later games the AI also cheats a bit there too but you can outskill them.  You can race so well and be so far ahead in those games that even if you get smashed with back to back blue shells, in most situations a human player will be so far in the lead it won't matter.  In Super Mario Kart you can be in first for a whole race, playing perfectly and then clip the dirt for a nano-second and suddenly you're in 7th holding nothing but a banana peel and a bucket of salty tears.  If the course has bits that you can fall off and you happen to go off track then fucking forget it, just restart because you aren't climbing the positions fast enough for a decent result.

I'm sure there's some massively sweaty bellend who's really good at Mario Kart who can play all the tracks perfectly and get world record times who would disagree with everything I've said about the game but to you, hypothetical person in my mind, I say that you can fuck right off and fellate an exhaust pipe.  Mastering a shit game doesn't change the fact that it's a shit game, go away.

Thankfully, unlike the later entries the game rolls credits at the end of 100cc special cup so after trying 150 and seeing the bullshit dial turned to fucking 15 I put the game down.  No, I refuse to sit here and roll the item dice for hours on end until I get a gold cup, it's not worth it, not even for Retro Achievements.  The later games are fun as fuck but this first game belongs in the pits of hell next to Shaq-Fu and fucking Hong Kong 97.  Piece of actual garbage

The Worst Kind of Horror

 

I am a big fan off the horror genre as you might be able to guess from the fact that I always do giant 31 game challenges of various horror games every October.  It's not just one of my favorite genres for video games but it's also the first genre I go to for books and movies too.  I'm just can't get enough of all that spooky bullshit.

Horror is a pretty broad term as within "Horror" there's all sorts of different types of horror.  Slasher, supernatural, body horror, psychological, sci-fi and found footage are just a few examples of all the different sub-genres within the giant umbrella that is "horror".  But there is one sub-genre within this niche that has consistently just the absolute worst content known to man and that's Mascot Horror.  If you see a game within this sub genre then I suggest you ignore it and not waste your money (or time, if its free to play) because the only thing you are in for with the majority of games within this genre is a bad experience with maybe a couple of jump scares peppered in between.

I feel like the big jumping off point for Mascot Horror was Five Nights and Freddies, the game that really put the genre on the map.  Now I don't actually hate FNaF all that much, it's not mind-blowing or anything and its tension is quickly ruined by its eagerness to kill you with a jump scare but its a neat little idea for a game.  However the majority of its sequels and all the copycats it spawned are probably some of the worst things to happen to the horror genre in its entire history. 

Poppy's Playtime, Garten of Banban, Baldi's Basics, Amanda the Adventurer, countless examples of just low effort trash shat onto various online platforms for idiots to waste their money on.  Desperately hoping that the game, like FNaF, will be picked up by enough children that think it's being really clever to develop a following and in turn, make a boatload of cash.  Really though, juxtaposing childrens entertainment with horror elements is just a really lame way of generating fear and it's the kind of thing that only a person under the age of maybe 12 might think is effective.  Movies do this too where horror films like to take a childrens song and have it play slowly over some scene of violence and I have never once in my life met a person who thinks that that kind of thing is effective in any way.

The two worst offenders I can think of within the genre are Bendy and the Ink Machine and CASE: Animatronics.  Both games are janky, poorly made pieces of actual shit that fail both as horror properties and as games.  CASE is far worse being a buggy, low effort mess clearly trying to muscle in on some of that FNaF money but Bendy is just as offensive to the senses as that has somehow manage to build itself a little bit of a following.

You aren't being clever by taking something that's "for children" and making it spooky or worse, covering it in gore for shock value.  Take your Unreal Engine horror game template and fuck off, stop wasting time and money by putting this shit to market.  Go and work on something actually interesting instead.

ROM Sites are Important

 

In the last couple of days well used emulation website CDRomance I assume got contacted by some legal types and were forced to take down all of their download links.  A sad day for users of emulation as CDRomance was probably one of the easiest places to get even some of the most obscure games you could think of and now those users have been scattered to other sites once again as a giant of emulation has fallen.

There are going to be a number of people, mainly Nitendo fans for some reason, who will see this news and think "Good! Another piracy website getting what it deserves" but I wish to point out to these idiots that emulation websites like CDRomance and Emuparadise before it are probably the best thing we have when it comes to the preservation of old games because we all know that developers and publishers sure as shit aren't going to preserve the data themselves.  In fact, companies are going out of their way to erase the past in the form of the hundreds of remakes that you see every year.  One look at Twitter when Resident Evil 4 Remake came out with people saying absolutely insane things like "Resident Evil 4 was always bad and this update was completely needed" and it paints the picture that even so-called "gaming enthusiasts" don't care about preserving the past of the medium.  People are more than happy to have the old thing erased if we can get another version of that old thing that just looks a bit shinier, even if its completely removed from what that original thing was.

There are purists out there who will also argue that emulation is bad because if you wanted to play or preserve the old thing so bad then you should go through the effort of aquiring original discs/carts and hardware.  Well there's two big problems with that.  The first being is that no physical media will last forever.  As much as I enjoy owning discs and carts of my personal faves there will come a day, maybe within my lifetime or maybe after I'm dead, it doesn't matter, that those discs and connectors on the carts will rot and the data will be lost.  You can make all the clone systems you want to play them but that doesn't change the fact those carts and discs will die one day.  Just because it might happen a few generations from now doesn't make it not a problem.  The second issue is that a lot of these games, the ones people want to play and preserve are prohibitably expensive thanks to absolute idiots treating old games like NFTs, not as games to be played or pieces of art to be preserved, but things to speculate on and hopefully get rich off of.

Don't forget, that when you buy an overpriced video game off some sausage fingered unwashed cunt on E-Bay or whatever other service, you aren't supporting that game in any meaningful way.  The money doesn't go to a developer that worked on it or even a grimy publisher that put it on store shelves, it goes right into the pocket of that unwashed cunt so that he can find some other obscure Saturn or N64 game to buy on the cheap and sit on it in the hopes that it'll build in value.  These phsycial copies don't hold any real purpose if they are priced so high that most people who remember them fondly or may want to experience them for the first time can't get hold of them.  

That's why emulation is so important, it makes the entire history of the medium avaliable for everyone to play and who knows how these older games may inspire another users who otherwise may have never gotten to try them.  How many games that have been locked to Japan for years for most people have been made avaliable to wider audiences thanks to emulation and ROM sites.  NO ONE would have known what fucking Racing Lagoon was if not for the efforts of those fan translators and sure, a bunch of people "pirated" the game to play it in English but if you think about it another way, the interest generated from that fan translation should maybe have the cogs going in some Square Enix money-mans brain to do a remake or a sequel.

Companies need to put the legal threats down and let ROM sites for old games just exist and a "necessary evil" for the sake of the mediums history.  Sure, if you have some sweaty nerds pirating the lastest Switch games to run on Yuzu, sure, take that shit down but if little Timmy wants to download fucking Albert Odyssey (real game btw) and experience it for the first time then fucking let him, I'm sure SEGAs bottom line will be just fine even if 100,000 people did that.

Leave the ROM sites alone
Fuck you Nintendo

Note: I'm aware of the half-truths in this post but I'm not discussing that here, shut up and enjoy your tickets in silence, idiot

I liked the Vita more than the 3DS

 

I feel like today there's not a lot going on in the realms of portable gaming.  Sure, the Switch has a "portable" mode and the Steam Deck exists but both of these systems are wide and unwieldly, not the kind of thing I can just yank out of a pocket on a work commute and play for a short time.  But not that long ago we had the dual choice of either a Nintendo 3DS or the Playstation Vita and while most people preferred the 3DS or never touched a Vita, I was one of these mutants that opted for the Vita significantly more than my 3DS.

Now for the record, I own both systems and I like both of them.  What I am NOT saying with this post is that the 3DS is a shitty system.  I know in most gaming spaces the idea of liking 2 "opposing" things is an impossibility but I don't roll like that.  The 3DS had Shin Megami Tensei 4 and Persona Q for fucks sake, I'm not just going to write it off.  That said though, the Vita feels like a system that was almost made entirely for me and my weird tastes as well as my unusual situation at the time that I got it and therefore got significantly more play time.

The first reason for the preference, the big one, was that the Vita was region free.  I bought my 3DS from a friend while at University in England and with it I got a handful of games which was very cool.  However shortly after making this purchase I moved to Japan where I was basically locked out of buying more software for the thing.  I WANTED to give Nintendo my money for new games and they said "what's that? you're an British expat in Japan? well why don't you go fuck yourself, eh?" and thus no new games were ever bought.  Well almost no new games, I bought a copy of Persona Q and by "I bought" I mean I had my mother buy for me and send to me here in Japan which was unfair to her, making her go to game stores looking for weebshit and was a pain in the ass for me in wait times, potential package theft and subsequent repaying of game price.  I didn't even play Shin Megami Tensei 4 on my own 3DS, I borrowed a friends American 3DS with a copy of the game downloaded to it off the e-shop.  I couldn't use the e-shop because the British e-shop wouldn't accept my Japanese credit card and I didn't own a British one so even the digital path was blocked off to me.  And I know there's some fucking gimp reading this post going "jUsT hAcK iT" to which I say that you can go fuck yourself.  I can't be bothered with that and its not something I should HAVE to do just to play new games.

The Vita on the other hand was more than willing to accomodate my multi-region needs at the time.  Bought for my by my wife in Japan, then taken to Sweden, England and America for various reasons and I bought games in all of these countries and just popped them in and had a grand old time.  Not to mention that my PS+ subscription was giving me 2 Vita games a month for free as well as 2 PS4 so I had quite the collection of games and I didn't even have to spend all that much to get it.

Speaking of the games, that's the other reason I like the Vita so much.  I don't care all that much about the 3DS library.  Bravely Default was pretty good and SMT4 and 4A were fun but I can't recall much that really stands out in my mind.  Even flagship titles like A Link Between Worlds, while not shitty, were unmemorable and not the kind of games I'm ever going to rush back and play.  Hell, as I wrote this post I went to go dig out my little box of 30 or so 3DS carts just to make sure there wasn't something amazing that had slipped my mind but all I got was disappointment.  I had middling amounts of fun with the 3DS when playing it, but nothing that stuck out.

The Vita on the other hand seemed to be made EXACTLY for me.  I bought it with a copy of Project Diva F and anyone who watches my streams knows how much of a sucker I am for my weird vocaloid rhythm games.  At the time, the Vita was also the only way to play Persona 4 Golden so that got a great many hours put into it too.  But most of all, the Vita seems to have a large supply of what I like to call "Windows Screensaver Games".  They are usually known as "first person dungeon crawlers" but "dungeon crawler" has been co-opted by idiots who put things like Diablo and Baldurs Gate in the category as well so I like my name better.  Dungeon Travelers, Wizardry, Zanki Zero, Mary Skelter, Labyrinth of Galleria are just a few of the more obvious ones but my Vita's memory card is full to BURSTING with these fucking things.  Tons of obscure Japan only dungeon crawls for me to satiate my weird niche interest that I can just slide into my jacket pocket and play anywhere I want?  Actual gaming heaven.  Hell, about a week before writing this post I JUST bought Meikyuu Cross Blood off Amazon for the Vita, its fucking 2024 and I'm still discovering new dungeon crawls to enjoy for the bloody thing.  So between the rhythm games and the catering to a niche genre that only I and a few others care for, the Vita got the majority of my love and attention.

Not that it was a perfect system.  The 3DS certainly had better portibility, the Vita's design is sort of similar to the Switch and Steam Deck but JUST small enough to not be a pain in the cock, but only just.  Also the 3DS let you slam any old SD card into it for memory but the Vita had these absurdly expensive Sony memory cards the largers versions of which were as much as 2 or 3 games in terms of price.  Sony can really lick my balls on that one, worst part of its design by a lot.  Also the Vita has this stupid back touch screen which I don't think I've ever used once personally and I only know 1 game off the top of my head that uses it at all.

I can fully understand why the 3DS greatly outlasted the Vita and why it enjoyed significantly more popularity from general audiences.  However, the Vita, for me, seemed so attuned to my weird tastes for grid based weebshit that there's no way Nintendo ever stood a chance in my household.

God bless you, PS Vita, I don't think there will ever be a system with a library quite like yours ever again.