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

 

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.

Fire Emblem Perma Death is Important

 

In the last week or so I've fallen down a sort of rabbit hole of Fire Emblem content on YouTube which has acted as the inpiration for this post and I want to take a moment to discuss one of the franchises sort of controversial mechanics

If you have never played a Fire Emblem game allow me to fill you in on what I'm talking about real quick.  Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs that has been running since the NES with stories focused on warring nations and their armies and such.  Unlike something like Advance Wars though each unit in a Fire Emblem game is its own character with dialogue, story beats, personalities etc. and if they fall in combat they are usually gone for good.  Some Fire Emblem games have methods of reviving dead party members in extremely limited capacity but generally speaking if someone dies in FE, they are gone for good.

What a lot of players have been doing for years and years, then, is to reset a mission as soon as a single character falls and in the case of the later games the perma death has become a toggleable feature that can be turned off entirely so a fallen unit just "retreats" from the battlefield and can be re-deployed again next chapter.  People do this generally for two reasons.  The first being that they have sort of grown attatched to the character either for mechanical or story reasons and the idea of moving on without them fills the player with such dread that they would rather hit reset and tediously do an entire mission over than carry on without them.  The other reason is fear of "softlocking" themselves by losing either a character they feel is proficient or losing too many characters in a single chapter.  They worry that by losing certain characters they will be totally unable to clear the next chapters and thus have to restart at an earlier save or, in the worst case, the entire game.

Well on both fronts this is completely stupid because these games are designed with player loss in mind.

The softlocking thing generally speaking will not happen on a normal play through of a Fire Emblem game almost no matter how many units you lose.  In each game you are given a lord character and if this guy or gal falls then you are met with a game over and are forced to restart the chapter.  If you're losing bad enough on a map to get more than 1 or 2 characters killed, chances are your lord is going right down with them so progressing past a massacre like that is probably not going to happen.  But even if it does, what Fire Emblem has been doing even since the NES is constantly giving you a stream of replacement units that you can use if the worst case scenario happens.  If you play a Fire Emblem with the perma death turned off or you reset upon a death you will generally find your roster to be filled with tons of duplicate classes.  The units you get later are probably not going to be quite as good as ones you get early that you can train for an entire games worth of maps but if you press on through every death, the chance of you making the game unbeatable are EXTREMELY low.  

Just to really hammer the point home here is a video example of how hard it is to softlock a Fire Emblem game in this manner.  The amount of effort this guy has to go through to get a handful of maps to be in an unbeatable state would never happen in normal play (also sub to this guy he's very cool)

The idea that being able to turn off perma death "for new players" in complete nonsense because Fire Emblem has ALWAYS been kind to new players.  All you're really doing is allowing for sloppy strategy in your STRATEGY. WAR. GAME.

But then there's the other more personal reason of become attatched to the cast and not wanting to continue if someone you like bites the dust.  Well I also think you're being silly by resetting or toggling to off because you are sort of undermining the entire point of these games' stories and removing any and all tension from individual story beats.  These games are about war and war is both brutal and unpredictable.  What the perma death does in a Fire Emblem game is really make you feel the weight of what these characters are going through and adds a lot of immersion to you, they player and supposedly master tacticain, as you work as hard as you possibly can to keep all these indviduals safe.

Here's an example

In Fire Emblem 3 Houses there is a mission when you're looking for a kidnapped person inside a spooky basement.  As you're going through the mission a guy on a horse weilding a schythe with a skull mask on turns up and starts threatening to push your shit through your nose if you don't get lost.  His stats are very high for that point in the game and you are supposed to be intimidated by this guy.  If you have the perma death turned off for this mission you are sucking every last part of the tension out of this scene.  If you screw up and get one of your students in range of him, he will just bonk them on the head, they will say "owie zowie see you next mission" and vanish off the map.  Only with the perma death turned on do you get the intended effect of this enemy.  With it on you'll probably want to stay well away from him to stop that scythe from dicing your cute mage waifu into little pieces or cutting your handsome lance boy right down the middle and thus you must also play smarter and be more creative with how you play.  It's the difference between having a story about war and having a story about a paintball match with swords.

I think the best sort of half way point that has been devised by the developers in the pulse system thing found in 3 Houses on the Switch.  In that game your lord character has a power to rewind time a little bit.  What this translates to for the missions is that if something goes wrong, you can pulse and reset a few turns and try to re-jig your strategy to not get someone killed or get a more favorable position.  This allows the player to still make mistakes or try risky strategy but not get punished too hard for it.  Do it too many times and your pulses run out so after that you're up shit creek so the tension is still there but you still have to play smart.  It then goes and ruins it by ALSO having the death on/off toggle but at the very least I have to give it credit for trying a solution more involved than just a lazy on/off switch.  The best thing about the pulse system is that players who were turned off by the perma death but still wanted to be a little brave and play with it turned on now have a title in the series to help them realize that it's not as punishing as they might think, and as a way of gathering new eyes for the series that's a good thing.

But whatever, if you enjoy FE as a reset-fest or you want to play with it turned off, then power to you.  These are single player games either way so just enjoy them your way.  All I'm saying is that I feel you might get a little more of these games if you played with it turned on.  Greater stakes equals to greater satisfaction when you win which equals greater amounts of fun.

Subscription ROM Services are Dumb

 

Yesterday I caught some news that Sony is joining Nintendo in giant game companies providing ROMS via a subscription service and it's pretty darn stupid to say the least.

On the surface it sounds like it could be a good idea.  The idea is that you pay a every month to get access to a collection of back-catalogue games from the companies previous systems to play as much as you want, good deal right?  Well no.  The initial problem with all this stuff is that you're only getting a very small amount of the back catalogue and usually only the best sellers.  This means that any hidden gems or good games that were less popular just get ignored and fall to the wayside which means that despite these services if there's an obscure game you really love you'll probably never get to play it on your modern hardware no matter how much of your hard earned money you give them.  If Shadow Hearts, for example ever turns up on PSN premium I will literally eat an entire shoe store

Money is the other problem because these companies are essentially ripping you off at every turn.  Nintendo released the expansion to Switch Online where you have to pay fifty bucks a month for a smattering of N64 games.  What's worse is that a lot of these games aren't very well presented with the Switch version of Ocarina of Time being somewhat famous for how shit it was compared to regular emulation on PC.  I've heard it has since become a bit better but the fact it was released in the condition that it was in for that price point AT ALL is really stupid.  Sony are even worse wanting $120 per year just for the ability to play some of the PS1/2/3s best sellers which is INSANE to me.  Maybe if it was a one time payment of 120 to play all those games forever, sort of like a giant greatest hits collection, then I wouldn't be moaning but these payments have to be constant.  If you stop playing for Switch online, no more SNES for you.  Stop paying for PSN Premium? Kiss your games goodbye until you cough up more cash.

All of this, when emulation exists which can be done for free and usually at a higher quality than anything Sony or Nintendo will give you.  Now I'm not going to argue the legality of emulation.  If you download some SNES ROMS or some PS2 ISOs and Nintendo or Sony come after you, they are well within their legal rights to do so but just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.  

Let's think about Emulation for a second, who is it hurting?  For this example let's take someone downloading an ISO of Shadow Hearts on the PS2.  You could argue that they should be paying money to play it to support Sony or the developer, Sacnoth.  Well that argument doesn't stand because 1) Sacnoth ain't around no more, 2) The game isn't being sold anywhere no more and 3) The game isn't avaliable on the back catalogue subscription service.  "So go and buy a disc copy instead of pirating then!" I hear you cry through a wave of drool.  

Shadow Hearts on disc is about $130-300 depending on where you buy it.  Now let's say you go this route, where does that money go?  Does it go to Sony to support their production of future games?  No it doesn't.  Does it go to Sacnoth or their parent company Aruze to maybe fund another Shadow Hearts game?  No it doesn't.  So where does the money go then?  It goes to some fat, middle aged neckbeard who hasn't showered in 2 weeks so he can go scoop up more retro games from garage sales and used book stores to over price in online marketplaces.  I know it feels "morally correct" to buy a disc version of a retro game but you're supporting an absolutely disgusting marketplace that's really bad for players.

So tell these subscriptions to go fuck themselves and go fire yourself up and emulator.  I'm sure the multi-billion dollar corporations won't go under because you decided to fire up Yakiniku Bugyou on ePSXe, you don't need to worry your damaged little brain about it

PS3, PS4 and the Switch Controllers Can Kiss My Ass

 

Somewhere in a cardbox box, probably located in the family home I still have the Sega Mega Drive I got when I was 4 years old.  I can hook that bad boy up and shove a cart inside it and I promise you that the controller will still function.  I will be able to sit down and play a game of Gunstar Heroes or Vectorman on that thing from start to finish with no issues.  This level of durability seems to have gone completely out of the window in semi-recent times and I absolutely can't stand it.

First the PS3 controller.  The PS3 Controller is a pretty good pad that feels nice and is easy to game with, a good piece of essential gear for the system.  However, lurking inside the controller is a small piece of styrofoam that over time, with use, will wear down.  When this sucker wears down it causes your controller to start putting out random inputs.  For example I've been trying to slog my way through Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, an absolutely terrible game that gets even worse when the main character, Gabriel, is just doing whatever the fuck he wants.  Sometimes I would be in combat and despite me not pressing the X button to jump, he would jump.  Even more annoyingly is that killing enemies drops souls that you absorb to charge a magic bar with the L3 button, but pressing L3 would also, for some reason, press L1 which would activate the magic mode and waste whatever energy you just absorbed. The game is already shit and with this extra hurdle it makes me want to not play it at all.  

So I head online and try to find a fix and thankfully I find one.  A simple fix that involves opening the pad, finding the little piece of styrofoam that is apparently the cause of the issue and wrapping some electrical tape around it.  So I did that, great success no problem!  However when I put the pad back together, that plastic that keeps the shoulder buttons in place was so old and shitty that it basically just shattered in my hands.  It's not like I was slamming the controller back together, I was trying to be as careful as possible and the whole thing just fucking fell apart.  But even if I was doing an Incredible Hulk impression with my controller, why the fuck do I even have to do this in the first place?  I have retro controllers that are god knows how many years old and those all work fine so why the shit is the PS3 pad made like this?!

What's even worse, is that I ordered a Hori 3 controller off Amazon to replace it.  I went for this pad because its compatible with the PC and I wanted a pad to replace the shitty PS4 controller.  The reason the PS4 controller is in the title is because while it does work great when being played with the PS4, playing with it hooked up to a PC is a FUCKING. NIGHTMARE.  The micro-USB connection in the top of the pad is looser that your mum and disconnects from the computer constantly.  If you've ever watched a stream where I'm using the pad, you will hear that disconnect/reconnect sound CONSTANTLY and its really fucking annoying when it happens in the heat of game play.  I've never had this issue with any other device that uses micro USB, why is the PS4 pad made like such garbage in this regard?

So the Hori 3 works great on my PC but plugging it into my PS3 turned out to be a complete shit show.  I fire up Castlevania and all the buttons work but for some reason the sticks don't work.  I can do everything except what is possibly the most important function of the character, move.  This would also happen when using the PS4 controller with the PS3.  All these pads are the same fucking thing why do they have to operate so differently between games?!  It's not even consistant either since I had an issue when streaming No More Heroes on PS3 where I couldn't block attacks only to realize that the issue was that in that game, the shoulder buttons weren't working and everything else was just fine.  Playstation hasn't changed its controller layout since the fucking first system they put out, how is this so much hassle? It boggles the mind.

Now I was only going to complain about my Playstation pad woes in this post but any chance to shit on Nintendo I'm going to take.  At least with the Sony controllers they either worked properly for a long time or have annoying things when being used out of their primary intended use.  However the controllers on the Switch don't even get that and the Joycons are quite possibly one of the worst things I've ever had the displeasure of using.  Not only do they feel like shit but they start to drift if you so much as look at them funny.  I was getting Switch drift in less than a year of owning the system and MAYBE I'd understand if I was playing Smash Brothers 10 hours a day but my sticks starting drifting after playing though Fire Emblem of all fucking things.  No real intense stick use, just moving a cursor around a grid and selecting things on a menu was too much for that flimsy sack of garbage.  The only game I played before that was Breath of the Wild which, while a bit more intense on the stick, wasn't too heavy on rapid or strong movements.

But we all know the reason why the Joycons suck so much shit.  It's so that you shell out an additional 6-8000 yen for a Pro Controller.  Do you want to enjoy the games for the system that you already paid money for or do you want to torture your hands and give yourself permanent muscle damage from using the Joycons? Well if its the former better break out your wallet, motherfucker

Fuck you Nintendo, I hate you

Fire Emblem 3 Houses

 Yesterday I finally beat Fire Emblem 3 Houses and I want to say it's probably the best game I've played on my Switch so far.  Although do keep in mind that I thought Breath of the Wild was shit and Mario Odyssey bored me to tears and even though Fire Emblem is way better than both of those, it's still riddled with problems that detract a fair amount of the enjoyment for me.

For those who may be living under a rock, Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs that's been going since the NES days.  In the west, we were first given a taste of the series on the Game Boy Advance but since that entry it's become a fairly popular series.  If you're a Smash Brothers fan you're probably more than just a little familiar with a few of its more famous faces.  The Fire Emblem games are a series of strategy RPGs which are probably most well known for their use of perma death.  In most Fire Emblem games, if you lose a character they are gone for good and combined with some pretty challenging maps the series has a bit of a reputation for being on the tougher side.

If you're new to the series then 3 Houses might actually be a good place to start.  One thing to note is that in this game the perma-death is actually optional.  When you begin the game you are asked to pick a difficulty and if you want the mechanic turned on.  So if you want to play the game on it's hardest modes but the idea of permanently losing a character turns you off, the settings are separate so you can customize your experience, it's a nice touch even if FE snobs will poke fun for you using it.

I'm going to try and avoid talking about the story because it's quite long and there are also 4 different routes which you can go down and I've only played the one for Claude (the yellow guy) so I can't really talk about the story in much detail outside of his scenario.  On a basic level you're a Mercenary that gets picked up by a monastery and you are hired to be a teacher, train your students and save the world.

The strategy RPG gameplay in 3 Houses is actually very good.  If you're a Fire Emblem fan you'll probably enjoy it and if you're new the game goes out of its way to get you acquainted to its many systems so you won't be overwhelmed.  I have very few complaints about the core gameplay of 3 Houses but it's EVERYTHING ELSE that pisses me off to no end.

In older Fire Emblem games, you start a level, complete the level and then move on to the next level.  Each map is book ended by a bit of story and you enjoy a nice strategic adventure.  3 Houses however changed all of that and now you have a sort of Persona style system between every level.  In almost every case, you are given a bit of story and then a calendar and you have an in game month to make preparations and train your troops.  You get a few chances each month to do a few things like explore the monastery and talk to people, take seminars to up your skills, do side-battles or rest up to increase motivation and recharge your super sword.  For the first few maps, this is actually pretty fun but after a while, when you start to get access to more "activity points" it just starts to feel like a drag.  An obligation that you have to partake in to keep yourself up to speed when all you really want to do is get on with the fucking story.  3 Houses took me around 60 hours to beat the first time around but if you took out all of the stupid faffing around between story missions it probably would have been less than 20 

I said above that I was going to try to avoid talking about the story but my next problem point does involve it so spoilers ahead for those that give a shit.

The "main" route of the game involves 22 missions but, much like the between-mission gameplay, the story is also padded out to fuck.  You are sort of acting as a peace keeper in the first part of the game but some shit happens and you are presented with the big bad guy.  Your final encounter with big bad guy happens around mission 18 or 19 where you have them on their knees in front of you and you put your giant blade right in the top of their skull.  Then the game is like "oh but there's also Technowizards with ICBMs" and I didn't really mind this because they are sort of eluded to as a major player in the plot very early.  So you do a stage in Tron world with dubstep music and after you finish that the game goes "oh yeah remember this dude in the worlds lore? yeah fight him" and you have to do ONE MORE MONTH of faffing around and one more fucking mission with an enemy that barely puts up a fight.  After you beat the big bad the story ceases to be interesting and I ended up blasting through the last few missions just because I didn't give a shit.  

Funnily enough, the route I didn't do, the "secret"-ish route, only has 18 Chapters.  So I guess in that path you just do what's required and win and the game doesn't pull the Skrillex Army or Lore Man out of it's arse to pad out a few more levels. 

My final complaint with this game is the localization.  My Switch systems setting is set to English so the game displayed English text but the English voice work was probably some of the worst I've ever heard in my entire life.  I like to over exaggerate my disdain for English voice actors of Japanese anime games but 3 Houses had me literally cringing with how bad it's English voice work is.  Luckily though you don't need to suffer through it as the game has an option to turn on Japanese but that raised another issue.  The translation for this game is just off in places.

I get that translating Japanese is hard, there's plenty of things in Japanese that don't really go into English too well so you have to take liberties but some of the mistakes made completely change the way that certain characters are.  It ranges from little things like completely ignoring one characters strange way of speaking to big things like completely changing a characters personality.  The best example of this I came across is a scene between the characters Hilda and Raphael.  Raph is a big strong punchy boy with a sort of gentle giant type personality and he's trying to make a necklace for his sister for her birthday or something.  He enlists the aid of the usually lazy Hilda and she goes above and beyond to help him out and make a nice gift that his sister would really enjoy.  In the Japanese Hilda says something along the lines of  "The flowers you picked were looking a bit lonely so I added these things" while in the English she says "The flowers you picked looked so pathetic so I added my own touches"

The point of that scene is to make clear that Hilda isn't so much lazy and she just has massive confidence issues.  Shes worried about letting her superiors down and so she asks people to do shit for her so she can keep up her noble appearances but for this task with Raph it gives the idea that when it comes down to it she really is willing to put in the effort for people she cares about.  However the translation just makes her sound like a bitch.  All the nuance of the scene is sucked RIGHT out and the nature of the character is completely changed.  This is the example that stood out the most to me but things similar to this are dotted all over the place, the translators should be embarrassed.

But overall, despite my bile, FE3H is actually a pretty good game.  It's got a ton of content and if you like strategy RPGs this is one of the best franchises to turn to.  So if you don't mind slogging through weird, half baked dating sim mechanics, you'll probably have a good time  

Nintendo's Obsession with Faff

 

I've been slowly making my way through the big Switch releases to try and convince myself that I didn't waste my wife's money asking for it as a gift for my birthday with varying amounts of success but if there's one thread that goes through the big franchises I've played so far it's that Nintendo games are OBSESSED with faffing around.

Faffing around is a British term that means doing a whole bunch of shit that is ultimately a waste of time and it feels like with the Switch Nintendo put up a big poster in the lead developer office with the words "faffing around" in huge block capitals to constantly remind their teams what to focus on.

The first huge game I finished on the Switch was Breath of the Wild and I've commented plenty on how I feel about that one but there is A LOT of faffing in that game.  Searching around for weapons, searching around for korok seeds, pointless side quests, filling in the encyclopedia, cooking and much more all just feels like stupid bullshit to do for the sake of doing it.  In old Zelda games you just....went...and sure there were some side activities you could faff around with but in Breath it feels like the faff has become the focus.  Even the shrines feel like faff because they are so small and easy and once you get a couple of upgrades under your belt they become essentially pointless to even do unless you are a weirdo that wants to 100% it or something.

Mario Odyssey was the second game to showcase Nintendo's obsession with faffing around.  Most Mario games have had 120 collectibles spread out over a number of levels.  Well crafted and fun to play courses with a nice little McGuffin at the end to give you a dopamine hit when the jingle plays.  Odyssey on the other hand has A THOUSAND fucking moons and most of them involve faffing around.  Herd some sheep, guide a dog around to certain points, posses a thing, run around collecting coins, do children's puzzles.  It has so much more to get while somehow also having significantly less REAL content.  The actual moons that you have to get are actually quite fun and Odyssey sports some of the best 3D platforming I've ever played with but Jesus lord Christ in heaven is it padded to fuck with FAFF.

But the game that loves Faff more than a child loves its own mother is Fire Emblem.  Good LORD does this game love some faff.  Most of the Fire Emblem games I've played are just a linear series of missions where you and your army fight off the big bad.  The series is focused on what's important which is this SRPG combat and while there are things like support levels and stuff a lot of that was done ON the battlefield.  You'd have your big burly axe man walk up to the fast sword man and they would go "It's sure great to have such a good buddy by my side on the battlefield" and then it would play a jingle and some stats would go up.  3 Houses however has taken all that and turned the whole thing into a faffing around simulator.  Now you're a teacher in a school so you have to faff around with lessons, faff around on the school ground doing "quests' for students, faff around raising support levels by taking people out to lunch and tea time, faff around fishing and the list goes on and on and on.  But you can't just skip the faff and go to the combat because the faff is INTEGRAL to having a good party.  When you get to the combat it's great, I really enjoy the actual SRPG part of the SRPG I spent 6000 yen to play but it's everything in between that pisses me the fuck off.

Side content is cool and all, gives some extra distractions or an excuse to get stuff to make a character or party stronger but with some of these Switch titles Nintendo have gone WAY fucking overboard with it and now it feels like annoying padding rather than fun side-shows.  Bravely Default 2 comes out tomorrow and I'm hoping for a tight, well crafted RPG experience but my body is in fact ready for large amounts of faffing around.

2021: The Year For Evaluating the Switch

 

About a year ago my wife got me a Switch for my birthday.  I was pretty happy and excited when she pushed the box under my nose, I quickly unboxed it, hooked it up to the charger and started messing around with it right away.  But since that day the Switch hasn't really seen much use.

 I've never once in my life regretted a console purchase.  When I was young and rocking the Sega Saturn when all my buddies had the much more popular PS1, I was happy with my giant black box running Panzer Dragoon Saga, Fighters Megamix and Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo.  When the Dreamcast came out and died a swift death, I was still happy with games like Shenmue, Evolution and Space Channel 5.  Even the WiiU which I have played exactly half a game on since I bought it still has pride of place under the TV in my house.  But when I look at the Switch I just can't help but feel a little bit of bile rise in the back of my throat.

I can't place exactly what makes me feel that way, probably the fact that it was extremely hyped by games media, twats on social media and even friends of mine.  All of them going on constantly "have you played this on Switch?", "have you played that on Switch!?" "oh my god Zelda is SO much fun" etc etc.  So when I did finally get one only to find it quite lacking it makes me feel a sort of disdain towards the thing.

But I'll be honest, I haven't really given it a fair chance.  The first game I played on it was Zelda: Breath of the Wild and I know there are certain morons that will bite my head off for saying this but I HATED it.  It's durability system made it immensely frustrating to play, the exploration while cool at first became a chore after a few hours, the combat was laughably easy and the whole thing was so easily broken by cooking and upgrades that I didn't feel like I was on an adventure while playing, I felt like I was just faffing around until Ganon died and the ending played.  Then I moved onto Celeste and had a pretty good time with that but was having an infinitely better time with the PC version and then after that I played Bloodstained which was so buggy and lacking in performance that I couldn't believe that they allowed it to retail for the Switch at all.  The only TRULY positive experiences I've had with the thing since I bought it have been Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne HD Remaster because portable Nocturne is awesome and Tetris99 which was fun but I haven't played that shit for months.

So this year, before I file it away mentally as a massive piece of shit I'm going to give it a fair whack.  The Switch will be my focus for gaming purchases and off-stream playtime for the year.  I started Mario Odyssey recently and I'm not overly taken with it but it's not awful.  There's also a remake of the ORIGINAL version of Baroque (from the Saturn) which I've been meaning to buy for a while and Bravely Default 2 is just around the corner at time of writing so I'm pretty excited for that.  Shin Megami Tensei 5 (the reason I bought the damn thing) will one day surface and a quick google of upcoming games yields a few results that have piqued my interest.

So the Switch has exactly a year to sell me on its library otherwise it's going in a cardbox box and getting less use Vita for the rest of time

Super Mario 3D All Stars Can Piss Right Off

 

Since I know how much Nintendo fans will froth at the mouth at the sight of anyone badmouthing their fat, mushroom addicted mascot allow me to start with a clarifying statement.  I like all these games.  Mario 64, despite it's wonky camera is still a ton of fun to play, I've always loved Sunshine despite what everyone else says about it and playing Galaxy the day it came out is still a fond memory of mine from my university days.  The games included in this collection are not the problem.

Ironically, despite the title saying that 3D All Stars can piss off, it's the pissing off which is the problem.  When Nintendo announced this collection of 3D Mario classics for the Switch they also dropped the fact that this game comes with a time limited purchase window.  It is scheduled for a September 18th release date but then it is only available until March 2021.  By that, I don't mean it's a limited run release and you you can only get a physical copy until March 2021, I mean it's vanishing from store shelves AND from the online store in March.

I cannot for the life of me imagine why this would be the case and quite frankly it is one of the dumbest decisions I've ever seen for a game in my entire life.

The first problem that this is going to cause is that scalpers are going to be just scooping up physical copies like crazy and selling them at inflated prices.  Hell, it's not "going" to cause, it already has caused scalpers to start going nuts.  Just google "3D All Stars Scalpers" and the top results are stories of people pre ordering copies of the game for $60 and selling THE. PRE. ORDER for anything between $90 to $120.  It's a disgusting practice that takes advantage of people who aren't fast or tech savvy enough and anyone who participates in scalping deserves a big fat slap

The other problem, the one that scares me a little more than scalpers, is the message that this release is going to send out to other companies and will maybe inspire them to do the same thing.  Companies are going to realize that by doing something like this they can force consumers to pay top dollar for their games in and around launch and the people who can't afford or like to wait are going to get completely screwed.  If you're lacking in money, especially in the current corona ravaged climate and you need to prioritize things like food or family expenses, well you better get your sorry ass on your feet because whatever game you were excited for might just vanish from existence if you're not fast enough.  Do you have a massive backlog and want to hold off buying games?  Do you like to wait for a sale so that you can save what little money you have? Are you the kind of person who likes to finish the current game before buying the next one and that playthrough of the Witcher 3 you're doing right now is taking YEARS because you don't have that much time?

Well fuck all of you, either get the game in 12-16 months or deal with it you stupid nerd.  Obvious sarcasm but that's what this feels like

This is the exact reason I hate brands like Supreme.  There's no reason Supreme cant just make more products to meet the demand but they want to keep this image of "exclusivity" and "rarity" so they under-produce and that's why you get droves of twats lining up outside these stores to snap up whatever gaudy bullshit is on sale that week.  That's pretty much what Nintendo is doing with Mario, get in fast or get fucked.

I'm hoping, and the more likely outcome, is that every game suddenly having a limited release window will not happen and this bullshit will only be limited to this stupid little collection title.   

2021: A Year For Extreme MegaTen Hype

I'm a bit of a cynical bugger when it comes to new releases, I sort of just assume that everything that's coming out is shit so that when I buy it and it ends up being shit I don't feel too put out.  As a result of this cynicism I tend to ignore things like Nintendo Directs because I don't give a shit about anything they have to say and if something interesting does happen either someone will tell me or I'll just see it on a shelf at some point after release day.  But good lord do I regret not checking out the Nintendo Direct last night because HO-LY SHIT there was some good news to come out of that one.

Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne was a game on PS2 that came out in 2003 and as quite frankly one of the best games on the system.  For the completely uninitiated the game is sort of like grim-dark Pokémon only the goal of a Shin Megami Tensei game isn't so much to collect them all but to survive whatever apocalypse is going on and maybe punch some Gods in the face.  You negotiate with and collect demons to put them in your party and fight with them in a sort of Pokémon-esque way but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

One of the reasons I personally am so happy about this news is because Nocturne is a game that's stupidly expensive to buy here in Japan.  Over here there were 3 versions of the game released, a standard version, a 'Maniax' edition and a third one that featured Raidou from the Devil Summoner series instead of Dante from Devil May Cry.  The standard edition is pretty fairly priced but it's lacking a lot of the features that the Maniax one does.  The Maniax edition, the one we got over in the west, costs about $200 and the one with Raidou costs even more than that.  This remake version is going to apparently cost $60 and is the Raidou version of the game which means that my wallet is just as happy as I am.

But that's not all!  Shin Megami Tensei 5 also got another trailer and it's extremely exciting to see that the game hasn't been forgotten about despite not hearing anything about it for a VERY long time.  The first announcement for SMT5 was the only reason I bought a Switch in the first place.  I don't give a flying rat fuck about Zelda or Mario or whatever tired Nintendo IP is being churned out but I care very much about being able to play SMT5 on the day it comes out.

Not only is this news extremely exciting but it's also extremely funny.  One quick look at Twitter and the amount of crying from various parties had me giggling all throughout my day.  Nintendo fans were butthurt because it wasn't Smash news or something, despite the fact they very clearly stated it was a partner presentation and Persona fans (an SMT spinoff series designed for braindead twats, myself included) were EXTRA butthurt because they have been clamoring for a Switch port of Persona 5 for a good while now.  There was even a small group of butthurt Persona fans crying about how P5Scramble, a Dynasty Warrriors knockoff set in the Persona 5 universe hasn't been localized yet.

July 21st was an extremely good day for MegaTen fans and we can only hope that the success of SMT3 remake will maybe trigger a remake of Digital Devil Saga or maybe, the best game in the franchise, Jack Brothers.  We can dream

Breath of the Wild First Impressions

Since about mid December I've been slowly working my way through Breath of the Wild on my Switch.  I've been playing it for a good while now, got a handful of things but I'm sort of teetering on the point where the adventure is really going to get into full swing so before I grab my Master Sword and get in some big ancient robots, I'll post some of my thoughts about this game so far.

First lets get some good things out of the way.  The game is HUGE, and I don't just mean in terms of actual game world but there's also a ton of stuff to do.  I've not even seen close to all of it but I'm constantly finding quests, big enemies, shrines, interesting looking landmarks, towns etc.  There is definitely a ton of fun to be had just running around and looking for things which, in fairness, is what I've spent the vast majority of my time doing with the game up to this point.  With a lot of these open world type games its easy for the world to be big but sort of barren of anything interesting (New Fallout for example) but Zelda just constantly has stuff popping up every which way.  You'll set a goal for some quest or to get to some shrine and then on the way there about 7 different things will distract you, but in a good way.

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But after you get over the vast and varied world, things tend to go downhill a little bit.  Zelda doesn't have your usual set of dungeons to explore and conquer.  In this game you have 4 divine beasts that you must go inside and defeat the boss of and then go hit up Hyrule Castle to go slap Ganons shit in.  Conventional dungeons have been replaced with Shrines which are sort of short puzzle or combat sequences which will net you a spirit orb.  4 spirit orbs give you either an extra heart or extra stamina, that choice is up to you.  Since exploring the world is so fun, the act of hunting around and finding these shrines are cool but the only thing that awaits you on the inside is pure disappointment.  Every single shrine is some kind of brain dead puzzle to solve or some shit, non threatening, easy as hell enemy to defeat.  This wouldn't be a problem if the shrines were not such a big part of the game but doing a number of shrines is VITAL to success.  For example getting the master sword requires you to have a certain number of hearts in order to pull it from its stone and so you have to do a button of shrines to get enough orbs to get those hearts.  Health in general is a problem in this game because of my next big gripe which is the combat.

The combat in Breath of the Wild is shit.  There's no if, ands or buts about it, it's just shit.  Partly it's shit because of the breakable weapons thing that the games decided to use and it seems that there isn't a weapon in the game that doesn't just shatter after about 7 or 8 hits.  This problem however is more of an annoyance than a real deal breaker but the deal is indeed broken when you consider the difficulty of combat.  A combat encounter will only really go one of two ways.  The first is that you fight the enemy for a bit and then it lands a hit on you and you die instantly, this is basically the only way to game over.  The second is that you will fight the enemy for a bit and he lands a hit on you and doesn't kill you instantly.  In this situation the enemy has literally no chance of winning the encounter because if your health becomes critically low, you can just chow down on one of the hundreds of steak skewers in your pockets or just spam apples until you are full HP again.  All this challenge (or lack thereof) means is that there exist little pockets of Hyrule that you can't go to yet until you find either enough shrines to get enough hearts or until you get armor strong enough to make sure you don't die in a single blow, after that, every single combat encounter in this game is free.

The tedium of the shrines and the atrocious combat are my two BIG gripes with this game but I'm fully aware I'm only scratching the surface.  I've not done any of the divine beasts yet and there seems to be plenty of stuff dotted around the world that might make up for these two glaring problems by the time I get to the end.  I don't hate this game, but I think that all the hype I encountered before getting my Switch made me think I was in for something really special when all I seem to be getting right now is a mediocre open world action adventure.

I'll do another post after I finish it to see if my opinion changes at all

Missing E3 Hype

E3, the biggest gaming event of the year basically, is around the corner and unfortunately I don't give a flying fuck about it, at all.  I'm not making this post to be all controversial and hate on the show but I'm here to lament how what once was a truly exciting time for me has been reduced to nothing more than a slight blip on my radar.

I remember back in high school I had a group of friends that I'd play games like Counterstrike with.  When E3 rolled around we'd all jump on a Ventrilo server and watch the live coverage and discuss the games that were announced.   I also remember in my second year of university, a friend coming down to my apartment and we stocked up on large amounts of pizza and soda and then watched the event while we played other games, tons of fun.  Even a few years ago, when I had a short stint of living in Sweden, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to watch the conferences live and then spending the best part of the next day talking about the event with friends.  

Even before all this live streaming stuff was popular, back when I was just a wee child, I remember seeing footage on TV from E3 and getting incredibly exciting about the idea of something like that even existing.  I'm sure I gave my parents an earful about how badly I wanted to go to LA to see the show for myself but unfortunately it never came to pass.  

E3 now however is a sad shell of what it once was.  Nintendo have pulled out of the show and this year Sony did the same.  That alone is enough for me to stop caring because I live in Japan and no one gives a fuck about Xbox over here so I have no interest on need to watch a conference from Microsoft.  Sony and Nintendo are doing their own thing at the same time as the show.  I'll just go and watch their shit directly rather than waking up early to catch some bullshit talk from EA or Bethesda.  The last few years have also seen the event marred by various controversy over things like gender, race or identity politics.  I'm trying DESPERATELY hard to avoid any of that bullshit but if the last few years are anything to go by, it means that following the news closely will guarantee that I walk face first into a wall of clickbait bullshit.  If we get through the entire event and there isn't some claim that "X game is racist" or "Y company is sexist" or something like that, I'll eat a shoe

That's not to say I'll be ignoring it completely, once the show is over, the Nintendo Direct done and the Sony thing aired, I'll be sure to at the very least look at a list of games and follow up on things that interest me.  Personally I'm hoping to see some Shin Megami Tensei 5 news during this whole period but to be brutally honest I probably have a better chance of finding a chicken that lays golden eggs.

Dragalia Lost

So this is a game that came out last month for mobile devices that kept popping up on my Facebook feed after a few of my friends started playing.  The first thing I noticed is that it's an original mobile game that has a big fat Nintendo logo on it and along side that a big fat Cygames (Shadowverse, Grandblue Fantasy) logo.  After umming and arring about it for a while thanks to it's MASSIVE 2.5gb download size from the app store I decided to just give it a go.

Dragalia Lost has absolutely NO BUSINESS being this good of a game since it's just your typical mobile gatcha affair but for some reason I just can't get myself off the damn thing.  I have no idea what the story is since following a mobile story is like choosing to eat a bowl of shit but the game play is fun and the amount of stuff there is to do is just staggering.  The sheer amount of content is important considering the games recent release since usually newly released mobile games are a little thin on the ground at first and flesh out later but Dragalia is going all out right out of the gate.

The game itself is the same gatcha bullshit you see on the app store all the damn time.  Pull stuff, power up stuff, do dungeons to power up stuff even more rinse and repeat and grind grind grind ad nauseam.  There's two cool things about it though that set it apart from other games in the genre which is one, combat that's actually more interesting than just tapping until everything falls down and two, a level of polish that is rarely seen in the entirety of mobile gaming.  The combat has you using the touch screen to actually move characters and have them hack, slash and dodge through the environments.  When enemies attack the game will put these sort of markers on the floor, something I've seen done in other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 which means that paying attention to things like positioning is very important. 

There's a lot going on in Dragalia that would take far too much time to type out so instead I'll just recommend that you go download it and give it a whirl.  It's free so worst case scenario is that you'll just be unimpressed by yet another gatcha title and best case is that it drags you in and holds your attention as violently as it has mine.

That Nintendo Direct

So last night this Nintendo Direct went down that I didn't watch but I sure as fuck caught all the information about it via my Facebook and Twitter feed.  Now I don't yet own a Switch and I sure as fuck want one.  They've been restocked in a bunch of stores near me and I'm definitely not lacking the funds for the thing but I just can't bring myself to pick one up and this mini direct pretty much made it clear in my mind why.

On the surface, the Direct was pretty cool.  They announced a whole bunch of titles that were coming to the Switch including a port of Dark Souls and (another) remake of The World Ends With You with a new extra campaign bit stapled on the end which kind of made me a little excited.  But that's exactly the problem, there's nothing new on the Switch AT ALL.  It's either ports, sequels or ports of sequels getting released and that goes for the direct and the current library of games.

Think for a second about what you're getting excited for here.  Just taking the two games that I'm the most interested, Dark Souls came out originally in 2011, that makes it nearly 7 years old.  TWEWY came out in 2007, that's over 10 years ago!!!  Not that remaking or remastering these games (depending on how you view it) is a bad thing but is it really worth sucking the Switches dick for doing so?  I've been playing this game for a long as time and the system is going to have to do more than that to sell me.

Now I understand that some people haven't played these games, especially TWEWY, so for some it's a reason to be legitimately excited but I get the impression that if you've been gaming for a long time and you have eclectic tastes then the Switch right now just isn't for you.  It's a shame too because it's a really cool piece of kit that I WANT to own but I just can't quite justify the purchase yet.

All that said though, Shin Megami Tensei 5 will be dropping at some point and despite it being a sequel I'm an absolute sucker for that series so I'm going to HAVE to buy one at some point.  I just wish the system had a bit more originality going for it.  I'm sure one day it'll happen and when it does I'm going to run to the nearest shop with a fat wad of cash and buy it all.

What excited you the most about the Direct?  What games from the current library are you enjoying?  Leave a comment and let me know!

I don't understand the NES/SNES Mini

Unless you've been living under a rock or something you've probably heard of the NES/SNES Mini.  If you are unsure of what they are then they are little versions of the classic systems that come pre loaded with a bunch of games and you just plug that shit directly into your TV and have a grand old time.  The SNES Mini even comes with the unreleased Starfox 2 so if you're a fan of those games I'm sure that enough is reason alone to jump up and down in excitement.

Now what I'm not going to do in this post is fly off the handle in my usual offensive "fuck you" nature because I don't think that if you buy one or are excited to buy one you're an idiot.  It's a convenient piece of kit, a cool collectors item if you're into that or if you're an oblivious parent looking for a gift then this seems like a sure thing.

Personally though, I don't understand it. 

If we look at the SNES Mini in particular, from what I've heard it's about $80 but that's only if you can actually find one to buy.  Apparently it's selling so fast that actually getting a hold of one is pretty difficult.  For that $80 you get about 21 games and everything you need to play them such as cables and controllers.  Now 21 games for $80 may SEEM like a good deal until you take a look at something called the Super Everdrive

https://krikzz.com/store/home/13-super-everdrive-v2.html

For a mere $6 dollars more you can get a cartridge that plugs into the original hardware and then you play games via an SD card that you load down with ROMS.  I'm not going to discuss the legality of all that in this specific post (not that I'm unwilling in a comment section though) but that means for $6 more than the SNES Mini, providing you have an SNES already, you could play all 783 officially released games rather than just 21.  But maybe you don't have your SNES anymore, fair enough, but you probably have a PC.

Emulation is what seems to make buyers and fans of the SNES Mini roll their eyes in disgust and granted I can see why.  Every Tom Dick and Harry is making that argument against the system that emulation is basically free and you can play any game you want.  You don't even need to look very hard on google to find hundreds of websites just offering ROM dumps of these games providing you can tolerate their 80,000,000 pop ups.  But maybe you have a problem with the legality, maybe it doesn't sit well with you.

Well doesn't almost every modern Nintendo system come with a virtual console that allows you to buy these games for like, $5/6 each?  Granted that would be more expensive than just buying a SNES Mini and of course you can't play Starfox 2 but unless you really like ALL 21 of those games then you aren't really getting the full value.  For example I have absolutely NO interest in playing Street Fighter 2 when I can just pop Alpha 3 in my PS2.  I personally have no real interest in replaying FF6 or Super Mario RPG any time soon.  I don't really take much pleasure in the original F-Zero (not that it's bad mind, it's just hard to play after X) and why the fuck would I play Super Mario Kart when I can just play Mario Kart 8, online, with more than 1 friend.  So already that's cut the value down for me but I understand that not everyone will feel that way.

There's alternatives too but it would take me literally all night to type them out

Like I said, I don't think you're an idiot and I can KIND of see the appeal in certain ways but ultimately I just can't see why you'd drop $80 on a system when there's cheaper (and arguably better) alternatives that you can access without having to desperately search stores for.  Still, power to ya, you do you, enjoy a box full of great games.

Thoughts on Nintendo Switch

For a long while there have been rumblings of the Nintendo NX but very little details were available on the upcoming system UNTIL LAST NIGHT!  Finally we can stop calling it the NX as it now has a real name, the Nintendo Switch.  While there still isn't a huge amount of information on the thing, there's enough for me to write a little bit about my thoughts on what they've done.

It seems to be a sort of home/portable hybrid where you slot a screen into a stand to play it on your TV like a normal system or you can take the screen out and play it like a portable system.  This is a cool feature that a lot of people seem to be creaming their pants over and while I agree that it is pretty awesome, let's not forget that the PSP was doing that back in 2007.  Also the main screen portable body thing just looks like a WiiU controller and the idea of walking around with that fucking thing and whipping it out on the train even makes me cringe a little bit.

Another cool thing we can take from the announcement is the two little slide in controller thingies can be taken out and shared with another player.  In theory this means that a second controller for a second player will be built into the standard system which is an absolute godsend.  Controllers aren't cheap so the idea that I can just buy the system and immediately start playing with another person seems really cool.  Other features include the thing having a Tegra processor and the games coming on cards like the DS which is cool I guess, it means the games will look pretty good and not take up too much space in my house.

The one thing that really piqued my interested are the number of studios that have pledged involvement with the thing

ATLUS, Spike Chunsoft and Grasshopper ALONE are enough to get me interested in the thing.  It's cool to see the amount of 3rd party support for the thing so hopefully the Switch will have a really cool library of games.  Right now the games we know about are a bit meh with things like Skyrim and some Basketball shit alongside obvious stuff like Zelda and Mario.  I am getting the general impression that Nintendo are trying to market this thing for a more core gaming audience rather than trying to make it all family friendly.  Obviously the family friendly stuff is there but I'm getting the feeling they want that core crowd back in a big way.

This is is set to launch in March 2017 so only time will tell if it's any god or not.  I'm not going to get my hopes too high just because I'm a bit jaded but it is looking to be something worth picking up as of right now.  It would be really nice if it was region free....

Super Mario Run Is Dumb

This game isn't even available to me just yet on the Japanese app store but it's already disappointing.  You could argue that I shouldn't be chatting shit about a game I've not even played yet but I'd argue that I played Temple Runner and Sonic Runners and every game in this genre is essentially the same goddamn thing.

Anyway, in case you're not familiar with these type of games, a "running" game is a genre that's pretty popular on mobile platforms.  The idea is that your character will just run forward through the stage without stopping and it's up to you to tap or swipe the screen in order to make them avoid obstacles and not die.  There are usually items for you to collect in order to boost your score and other items that you can buy or find in order to facilitate longer running times.  After that it's just a case of seeing how many points you can get.  Sonic Runners tried to incorporate a story where running a certain distance would progress a plot but at the end of the day it's all the same shit.

Now Super Mario Run looks, from the screen shots, exactly like that.  The game isn't going to be crap per se but it is going to be another forgettable running game.  The kind of game that you'll download, play for about a week and then delete in order to make space for a different stupid weekly top pic game off the store.

It's disappointing that Nintendo have resorted to this and not because it's suddenly Mario on an iPhone but because they just went for a dime a dozen running game.  Nintendo are famous for always trying something new, weather it's successfully with the Wii or the DS or unsuccessfully with the WiiU, the point is the are pretty much always trying new things.  So it's sad to see that the debut game on the iOS is just a running game.  Like I said, I can't get it right now so what's the fucking point?  It's not like I'm going to get excited for a game like this and if I REALLY wanted to play a game exactly like it I could just go and download one of the THOUSANDS of these games available on the store.

What's even more disappointing is that back when Iwata was alive he said that this would never happen, that Nintendo wouldn't just sell out their shit for fast profit.  He DID once talk about how Nintendo had plans to use smart phones as a platform to attract users to the main line Nintendo systems and the piece of software that came from THAT plan was Miitomo.  If Iwata saw THIS shit floating around the app store he would be rolling in his grave.

This is like watching a loved one get sick, deteriorate rapidly and start to die right in front of your eyes, it's just sad.

We Don't Need A Female Link

One of the games that came out of E3 this year that actually sort of surprised me was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  It looks really cool and is sort of giving me weird Souls vibes which is something I would never expect from a Zelda game.  It's definitely something I'll be keeping an eye on in the coming months and I'm looking forward to getting my grubby mitts on it.

So of course, like whenever there is a large piece of gaming news that people are happy about, certain outlets had to run articles crying about a lack of a female link.  These so called "journalists" even got interviews with some people from Nintendo and asked them about it.  They were told that they considered the idea for a while but ultimately scrapped it because it didn't fit in with the game they wanted to make, fair enough?  Well of course not, this idea makes them sexist, women hating misogynists because the cry baby social justice regressives can't get their way and Nintendo will not be bullied on the matter.

Link doesn't need to be a fucking girl anyway, he's already the protagonist of a well established and much loved series, suddenly changing him to female would be just weird.  People have argued that they could at least put in an option but that doesn't work either because this isn't a game where you fucking role play.  You are playing as Link, he is the hero and you join him on his adventure through Hyrule as he breaths on wild things or whatever this game is going to be about.  Link is not you, you do not need to imprint your personality, or lack thereof onto him.  You don't see anyone moaning about how Samus from Metroid should be changed to a man for the exact same reason.  Both Link and Samus are good characters in their respective games and people like them the way there are.  I don't need Samus to be a man for my to sympathize with her quest to save the galaxy because I'm not an overly sensitive little shit stain.

It's not like Zelda is a particularly original or hard concept either.  It's about a character going on an adventure to find a bunch of trinkets to save the world.  This is a concept that is, and has been, easily copied.  If you REALLY wanted a female-led Zelda game, you could quite easily make one. Call it "The Story of Belda: The Whistle of Minutes" or some shit and have a female protagonist wandering around a large world collecting shit in order to save it.  3 of this, 6 or 7 of that and a nice big over world to put it all in and BOOM, there you have it.  Are you seriously telling me that there isn't a single female developer in the industry that can make this happen? Really? Because I'm almost positive there is.  If Clover Studios can do it with a dog, you can do it with a girl.

So fuck all these shitty "journalists" and their whining.  If you don't like playing as male Link, then don't play the fucking game, go find something that suits your tastes or better yet, stop playing fucking video games and put isolate yourself from the rest of the world so that we can have our fun without having to listen to your stupid shit.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Thanks to region locking bullshit on the 3DS it's taken me a fair while to get around to playing this game but it was worth the wait because it's rather good.

It's hard to talk about Zelda really, everyone already knows whats up.  You play as Link and for some reason Hyrule gets fucked and princess Zelda goes missing.  Go around a bunch of dungeons, get a bunch of items, fight a bunch of bosses and save the world.  At this point we've done it a million times and despite things being a bit predictable at this point, it's a tried and tested formula that works and these adventures are fun to go on. 

However, Link Between Worlds tries to mix things up a little bit when it comes to dungeon progression and items.  In previous Zelda games you would go to a dungeon, do some puzzles and get an item, then use that item to do the second half of the dungeon and kill a boss with it.  However in this game all the items are available from the get go pretty much and you pay to rent them out.  Dungeons are still based around the use of a core item but it means that when you find that big chest with the secret thing in it, it's not something predictable and you end up receiving something actually useful and worth the effort of all that puzzle solving.  The games core mechanic of turning into a wall painting to move around the world is also easy to understand and used in a number of interesting ways that keep things entertaining.

I only have two complaints about this game but neither of these ruin the overall experience.  First, the game feels short.  I played it almost exclusively during my work lunch breaks and train rides and I've managed to beat it in what feels like a very short time.  Granted I didn't get EVERYTHING in the game but scouring for little crab things for unnecessary upgrades to my items and raising enough rupees to buy a golden bee didn't tickle my fancy really. My second complaint is that I feel like the game is too easy, I played through the entire thing, had 0 deaths on my death count on the end screen and didn't even come close to dying even once.  There IS a Hero Mode that unlocks when you beat the game which I've yet to try so I'm hoping that a second playthrough may yield a more challenging experience.

Either way, it's a great little game on the 3DS and you should give it a whirl if you haven't done so already.  Just classic, fun adventuring.   

No Hopes for Mario Maker

Everyone likes a bit of the old Super Mario Brothers, classic platforming at it's finest.  Even the newer 3D games still manage to be enjoyable experiences and I can't really think of a Mario game that you could flat out call "bad".  Maybe there are a few mediocre ones but generally speaking they are all well made and fun to play.

So then Mario Maker gets announced and at face value this sounds like an awesome idea.  It's a simple set of tools for making your very own Mario games and levels and the idea of a bunch of Mario fans coming together and making levels for each other sounds awesome.  We've seen other games like it that were pretty fun to play such as Little Big Planet and now this is essentially that but with Mario instead of weird sock puppet things.

Except then I started thinking about the concept and my inner pessimist got the better of me and now the idea of Mario Maker make my eyes roll.  You see, custom Mario levels and games is not really a new idea, it's been going on for a hell of a long time except people didn't have a nice easy tool to do it all with.  Oh no, to this day exists a thing known as ROM hacking, which is where truly dedicated fans will take a Mario ROM, change all the bits around and make their own game with it.  The most famous example of this is probably Kaizo Mario World which is essentially a Mario game only for the most hard core of experts

Something may seem a little different to how you remember

The thing is, ROM hacking isn't exactly easy so it meant that the people who took up projects like this probably knew these games pretty well and had a good idea on how to make a decent level or two.  Now every Tom, Dick and Harry can make a Mario level so just how many idiots are we going to have giggling it up at the fact the recreated 1-1 from NES Mario or the hundreds and hundreds of shitty throwaway stages that are going to be uploaded by complete tossers who don't know what they are doing.

Mario is a big name and it attracts a lot of people which is great, it's always good to see more people gaming but most of these people probably know fuck all about designing a good level in ANYTHING let alone Mario, myself included.  It's going to suffer the same problem that Little Big Planet did with it's 100 pre made courses that will be awesome, a few really good user generated levels and then thousands upon thousands of complete trash stages that most people will only play for about 30 seconds.  Hundreds of people just recreating levels from other games in Mario Maker which may be slightly entertaining but the whole point of this shit is to create something original so if you are the kind of person looking forward to that then power to you but I sure as fuck won't be wasting my time with that crap.

There's a reason I'm a blogger and a speed runner rather than a game designer.  I'm trying to design my own fucking shitty RPG Maker game right now and every time I finish a map for a dungeon I can't help but get sad over how fucking crap it probably will be once I implement it.  Most people are probably in my boat and because of that I probably won't be dropping money on Mario Maker.

Please Mario fans, prove me wrong and then laugh in my face, I'd love it if you did that and I'd buy the game full price in a heartbeat.