A Change of Plan (Resident Evil Marathon)

Last Saturday I did my Resident Evil "marathon" and quite frankly the whole thing was a disgusting failure.  I tried my best but I didn't even get to the end of Resident Evil 2 before sadly logging off and going to drown my sorrows in alcoholic beverages at a bar near my house.

There's no real excuse for it other than the fact that I have become complete shit at these games.  I grossly over estimated my own skill and memory while grossly under estimating the overall difficulty of these titles.  From a donation stand point I'd say the thing was a success though, there were a number of donators who gave generously despite my failures and a decent amount of money was raised at the end of the day.  I still have cash donations to calculate and transfer so I'll save the end amount for a tweet.

However, I'm down but certainly not out.  As a way to make it up for all the people who donated for this thing to happen, the "marathon" will continue but instead of being done all at once it will be spread over multiple normal streams.  The twitch channel will now be showing nothing but Resident Evil games all the way up to RE0.  That means you'll get to see Resi 6 and 0 for free.  I might try and juggle it with some Final Fantasy 9 as well but the core focus will be on Resident Evil games for the foreseeable future.

Once again thanks for the donation and hopefully the next marathon won't fail as hard.

The JLPT

Right, OK, sorry, I know it's not video games but on Sunday I took the JLPT exam and it was distracting me from proper gaming so much that I thought I'd at least talk about what went down on the day.

For anyone who may not be aware, the JLPT is a Japanese Language exam that happens twice a year and it's designed to test a persons Japanese proficiency (no shit, huh?). The test comes in 5 levels with N5 being designed for people who don't speak Japanese and watched a few episodes of Naruto and N1 being designed for people who know WAYYYYY more Japanese than would ever be required for anything ever.

I did N2 and that shit kicked my ass so hard that it's not even funny.  The test is split into a few sections of reading, grammar, vocabulary, Kanji and listening.  What this really translates to is that the test is split into a few sections of Kanji, Kanji, Kanji, Kanji and listening.  If you can't read the Kanji in this test then you are just fucked and considering that Kanji is my weakest point when it comes to my knowledge of Japanese, a swift ass kicking from the JLPT was pretty inevitable.

The test itself is fine though, I'm just a huge dumb ass, but there is a lot of bullshit involved.  For example, they tape a pink piece of paper over the fucking clock in the room for some stupid reason that I can't figure out.  Someone told me that it's to stop people cheating but that's a load of stupid bollocks and you know it is.  They also don't tell you anything about the remaining time of the exam which is another thing I can't work out.  Every single exam I've taken in my LIFE will give an indication when time is short because people understand that in the heat of the moment maybe you don't remember to look up at the clock or take a peek at your watch.  BUT NOT IN JLPT! No of course not!  They just tell you out of the blue that times up and if you didn't finish in time then fuck you.

Also they make all these rules like don't read the exam book before it starts or don't leave the room at any point or else you'll fail but in my classroom there were a handful of people flicking through the fucking book and at multiple points in the exam people left and came back.  What's the fucking point of having all these goddamn rules if you're not going to enforce them!

Also a few months ago I bought a textbook to help study the JLPT and I quickly discovered that the studying I did from that book was......absolutely fucking useless.  I already knew all the goddamn grammar, I studied this shit at university for my fucking degree!  What I was after is something to help me study Kanji but of course the only real way to learn Kanji is to be exposed to it a bunch and I don't need to drop money on a book for that when I LIVE IN THE FUCKING COUNTRY!  What a rip-off

I found that reading and translating The Silent Hill Play Novel was FAR more useful than any of these fucking textbooks.

Probably failed
Will try again in December
Video games in the next post

Tau and Friends suck at games

We had a hard time with this final boss, the successful attempt is coming soon

John Romero Made Me His Bitch

Oh man, that marathon ended in complete catastrophe

Allow me to tell you the story.  Last night I held the Daikatana "Until I Win" marathon, and for the first marathon of this kind, it did not end well at all.  First of all, you have to realise that Daikatana is complete and utter garbage of the highest level.  The AI is awful on both your enemies and your allies, the levels are all murky and shit so it's hard to see anything, the guns are all crap and unsatisfying, the story is a mess etc etc etc.

Despite all that, with the people who were with me in the stream both in Twitch chat and on mumble, I was kind of having a good time.  It's one of those games that's SO bad that there is a certain fun to be had by raging at it as you suffer through.  The fact that I had received charity money to do this made the suffering at least bearable.

But then it happened.

I was playing through the Vault level, I had just rescued some girl and now I was having to wrestle with 2 AI buddies.  Given that the stage is full of ladders and elevators this made things particularly frustrating.  Anyway I soldiered through and got to the end of the stage.  Now something to consider before I go into the next bit of the plot is that both me and my allies are at nearly full HP at this point.

The level loads in and suddenly BAM! I'm fucking dead.  I reload my save and I dodge a little bit then a few shots later BAM! my ally is dead, game over.  Rinse and repeat this god knows how many fucking times before I just had to call it quits. 

I can wrestle with bad design and and I can deal with horrible gameplay in the name of charity, but I could literally progress no further past this point because I was being insta gibbed at the fucking doorway to the stage.

So, even though the marathon's failure TECHNICALLY wasn't my fault, I'm going to match the donation provided by the guy who donated for this thing in the first place, and then give him a choice of incentive.  So if anything my failure just means more charity money, which isn't really a bad thing at the end of the day, it's just my pride that hurts.

Speaking of money, over a very short period of time, a total of £35 was raised, which is great considering I have streamed for longer and raised less in the past, so big thanks to all who donated.  If you include my punishment donation that makes the total £60, so not bad for a 6 hour stream all things considered.

The December marathon will be Tomba Until I Win and given that Tomba is a good, well made game, that one should be WAYYYY more successful!  So look foward to that one.  Finally, I'm going to review the part of the stream where it all went wrong and if it's interesting enough I'll upload it!

Tau and Friends Play Silent Bomber Part 11

I'm don't even have any excuses for this episode, I'm just terrible.