The Second Worst Way To Play Mahjong

 

If you know me, even in passing, you may be aware that I am a big fan of playing Japanese Mahjong which is also known as Riichi Mahjong.  I like it so much, in fact, that during my time at university me and 2 other dudes would travel around Europe going to tournaments for it which led to some pretty interesting adventures.  

If you're unsure what Japanese Mahjong is exactly then to cut a long and complicated explination as short as possible it's sort of like Poker.  It's played typically with 4 people and each of these players have to take turns drawing and discarding tiles to create hands and when one player wins points are exchanged.  You do this for about 8 rounds and then a winner is decided by whoever has the most points.  It's a lot more complex than that are there are a lot more hand variations than there are in Poker but that's the basic gist of it. In actuality it's a lot closer in basic play to Gin Rummy, another card game but every time I ask people if they have played that they say no so Poker is probably the easier to understand comparison.  The wikipedia page for Gin Rummy says its one of the most widely played 2 player card games to this day but I'm almost certain that's total bullshit.

Mahjong has a fairly large popularity in Japan so of course companies came long to make video games of it.  Probably the most famous example of Japanese mahjong in video game form can be found in the Yakuza games where people complain at length that they can't get 100% because they just cannot figure out how to play it properly. But if you dig through the fairly large library of retro Mahjong games you'll find that they are all this weird 2 player head to head variant of the game that is just immensely boring to play.  You may look at an early Mahjong game on the Famicom or something like that and think something like "oh well they had to make it 1on1 because of the system limitations" but that's dogshit because 4 player Mahjong for the famicom exists as a separate game

Also there is this weird abundance of pervy Mahjong games that were exclusive to various arcade machines.  It's the same boring 2 man variant of the game but when you win you get to see some titties or something.

Nowadays it's not something you see very often, if at all.  Mahjong games for modern systems are almost always 3-4 players and in the arcade both Mahjong Fight Club and the Sega Mahjong game are 4 players and the cabs are hooked up to the internet so you can play online, the two player type being the norm on consoles and arcades is long gone, I think.  Maybe there are some 2 player Mahjong games on the Switch or something that I've never heard of but no one gives a shit about those as the market for these kind of games is basically dominated by Konami and Sega.

In the title I said that 2 player Mahjong is the second worst way to play the game,  if you're wondering what the first is, it's that stupid tile matching thing that you get on windows PCs and is sometimes offered as shovelware on some portable systems.  A lot of people just know it as "Mahjong" even though it has very little to do with the actual game, some people call it Shanghai and some people know it as Mahjong Solitare but the point is that this form of it is just a complete waste of time and I'd rather have painful dental surgery than waste my time playing it.

Neo-Persona's Insane Game Over Mechanic

 

Persona 3 Reload is on the horizon and I'm sort of torn about it.  On the one hand I am completely fucking sick to death of remakes.  The constant remaking and remasting of various games that were already good is tiring. It feels like a big chunk of the industry at the moment, both AAA and indie, are just constantly re-treading old ground for nostalgiabucks and safe bets rather than pushing anything even remotely creative.  On the other hand though, Persona 3 has a number of glaring issues that probably need fixing and could be fixed in a remake.  For example, the biggest example actually, Tartarus is one of the most boring dungeons ever conceived not only just for Megami Tensei but for JPRGs just in general.  Hundreds of floors of samey bullshit with the most monotonous music ever written, it's actually fucking awful.  Juding from the gameplay trailers we have of Reload so far it looks like that won't get fixed and this whole thing is pointless but we've seen very little so far so let's withold judgement for now.

But what I really want to talk about is a problem that has plagued Persona since the third game and is probably the most annoying aspect of the franchise and that's the instant game over on main character death.  This isn't something that's new to SMT, there are a number of games in non-Persona entries that also have this mechanic.  For example Shin Megami Tensei 5 also has this feature but in that and other games it sort of makes sense.  In the other entries in the series you are a demon summoner of some description, either through some kind of magic or the series mainstay, the COMP, so when you eat shit the control you had over your party of accumulated demons gets broken and they leave you to die.  That's what you get for relying on demons from hell to help you fight God, I suppose.

But in Persona it's a different story.  You aren't negotiating with demons, (mostly, 5 is the exception but even then it's different) you are a group of high school friends, quite close knit ones we are led to believe, going into a shadow world to fight weird Carl Jung bullshit. So when you eat shit in those games the instant game over makes absolutely ZERO sense.  You can be surrounded by characters that are holding actual kilograms of Revival Beads in their pockets and monsters in their brain that can use magic to revive you but instead they leave you for dead, fade to black, game over.

What makes this even worse is that this never happened in Persona 1 or 2.  The MC or Maya in those games can eat a big attack and have their HP reduced to zero but their friends are able and more than likely will pick them up before the battle is done.  Imagine if you had the ability to revive people from the dead with a magic spell and while you're walking down the street someone rolls up and shoots one of your parents in the face with a shotgun. You aren't just going to run away, you're gonna wait for the guy to leave and then pick them up and dust them off, right?  Makoto, Yu and Ren all have the worst fucking friends of all time.

What makes this mechanic even worse is that SMT has spells such as Mudo and Hama which, if they connect, insta-kills you.  If it's your first playthrough and you are unaware that demons in whatever dungeon you are in are packing those spells then there is a fairly high chance that you are going to take one right to the chops and lose a bunch of progress.  Obviously there's counterplay to this with you being able to fuse Persona's that have resistances to this stuff or null it outright but if you don't know it's coming then kiss your progress through the dungeon goodbye.

I hope it's a feature that Persona 3 Reload changes.  Hell, I would be OK with the next player turn being forced by the AI to use a revival bead or a recarm spell and you only get a game over if you have no items in your inventory OR you are completely out of MP.  At least then your friends being unable to revive you makes sense for a game over rather than they just run away from your unconcious body as soon as you get knocked out ONE time.

At the end of the day, just get better fucking friends

The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

Returning To Cookie Clicker

 

Back in 2013 I caught wind of a little game called Cookie Clicker, a silly little browser game where you click on a cookie to make a number go up.  When you have enough cookies you can buy buildings that make cookies for you and the goal of the game is to make number go up and nothing more.  

Somehow this game became a sort of internet sensation and gave rise of a plethora of imitators thus giving birth to the "idle game".  A genre where you fiddle with a thing for a bit and then you have the game basically play itself and you come back to check on it every so often to buy upgrades to make whatever number you're trying to raise go up faster.  For the most part it's a pretty insipid genre that isn't worth your time at all full of low quality titles made by devs looking to get something quick into their portfolio or worse, to try and get a quick buck out of you for very little effort.

But during a particularly boring work day I got curious and decided to return to the OG after 10 years to see if it was the same old silly distraction and was surprised just to see how much it had expanded.  I didn't think there was a lot you could do with a game that's solely about clicking on a cookie to get buildings to get more cookies but it seems I was mistaken.

The standard cookie clicking, building aquring gameplay is still there but now you can harvest Sugar Lumps once ever 24 hours to upgrade the buildings for greater efficiency but there are a few buildings that, when upgraded have mini games attatched to them now.  For example one of the buildings you can buy is a bank and when upgraded with a sugar lump you get access to a simulation of a stock market where you can buy and sell goods that change value every 15 minutes or so and you can get a quick burst of cookies if you invest wisely.  It comes complete with the ability to upgrade it further with sub-buildings and brokers and it comes with a full on graph that updates in real time and it's not very complicated, sure, but its an interesting addition considering the main game that it's attatched to.

Another feature that is new from when I played it all those years ago is the ascention system.  When you bake a certain number of cookies you can ascend, as in lose everything you currently have, for a permanent buff and a token to spend on a staggeringly large talent tree.  I have no idea what half the upgrades even are as they are hidden behind branching pathways I can't see yet but the most useful one so far has been the one that allows cookies to build up at a reduced rate while the game is closed.

The game has so much stuff going on in it now that there's a dedicated wiki for it and even that's telling me about stuff that I haven't, after about a month of playing, haven't even caught a whiff off yet.  For example there's a thing called the "Grandmapocolypse" which involves making all the grandmas you bought get mad at you for some reason and the game starts spawning "wrinklers" or something and I have no idea what those are.  The art changes to this sort of weird horror-esque mural and it all sounds very strange and I think the mystery of what this feature is exactly has me captivated enough to keep an tab open every day that I fiddle with between other games and housework.

It has got me wondering if there are similarly fleshed out and feature heavy idle games out there that might be worth a look but unfortunately the genre is full of so much garbage that it will probably forever remain a mystery and I'm more than happy to just sit here and bake cookies for eternity

[Backlog Update] Having My Time Wasted

 

Since I just recently became a father my time for working through my backlog has been fairly limited but I have managed to find a decent chunk of time to put a decent-ish dint into Yooka Laylee and Xenoblade Chronicles.  The theme for both of these games seems to be wasting my time a great deal so let me vent about that a little bit

First Yooka Laylee which I had a rather large accident with about a week ago.  See, I just became a father recently and so in order to help with the child care I have moved my computer to the area of the house where the baby sleeps, it's not an ideal setup but it allows me to get a bunch of stuff done while not leaving the newborn unattended, for a temporary setup its not so bad.  My computers power cable is plugged into one of those power strips that have the little on/off switches on them and then that power strip is next to me on the floor.  As I was playing Yooka Laylee, pretty much the moment I picked up a Pagie (the game's main collectable, for those that haven't played) I accidently hit the off switch on the plug for my PC with my big fat arse and my computer abruptly shut down.  When I resumed, probably because I lost power as the game was saving, my file had been corrupted and I could not load my game.  I had to delete the file and start over again, but I can't be mad about this really because this is a case of me wasting my own time.

What I can be kind of mad about is just how stupidly Yooka Laylee is designed. One of the reasons I was hating it so much my first time round is that I would be exploring a level and be getting blocked every few minutes or so because I would start a level challenge only to find that I didn't have the right ability to actually clear it, a whole bunch of the pages across the first three levels are just completely inaccessible without skills gained from later stages.  This is fine in a lot of other games, Metroidvanias do it all the time but in a well designed game it happens once every so often, a little goody to keep in the back of your mind to come back to when you fill out your move set but in Yooka Laylee its ALL the fucking time and it was pissing me the hell off.  

In this second attempt though I said fuck ALL that and I'm basically blasting through each stage, getting the powers and the bare minimum pagies to unlock the levels and then once I have everything I'll come back and clean up to get the 100 I need to beat the game.  I'm hating the game a lot less now that I know to play it that way but even though I have a bit more momentum going this time the game just generally still feels very bland and soulless.  

Xenoblade on the other hand isn't particularly badly designed, I'd say generally speaking it's a good game when you're moving the plot along and having fights with monters your level but MY GOD does this game love to fuck you about with just the most boring area design and the dumbest side quests I have ever seen in an RPG, I am starting to remember why I gave up on it back when I played it on the Wii.

I got to a town called Aclamoth? Akalamoth? Alakazam? I can't remember but it's full of bird people and this place is fucking HUGE.  It looks like the kind of place that would sit right at home in some massively popular MMO with other players running around shopping, handing in quests and looking for raid groups but Xenoblade isn't an MMO it's a single player game and therefore this area sucks shit.  It's full to bursting with side quests from various NPCs and all of these guys are spread way the hell around so just running from one exclamation mark to the next took fucking ages and then once you've done that the quests you get aren't any fun either

One quest had me going back to an area called Tephra Cave, an area from the start of the game with level 5 monsters (I'm 40-ish) to collect NINE randomly spawning little blue balls.  If that isn't the very definition of a time waste then I don't know what is.  I don't mind quests to kill X number of Y if it's done in the current area and killing those monsters is a nice excuse to get some bonus EXP but half of the quests from this town are like that Tephra Cave shit and I can barely stay awake playing it.

You COULD argue, if you were a stupid twat, that these are optional side quests and if they suck so much I should just skip them but fuck you if you think that because I paid what? somewhere in the realm of 3-5000 yen for this shit.  I didn't pay my hard earn money to NOT engage with its features and content, I'm not a shitty journo that plays only easy mode and then shelves the game for life, miss me with that shit.

Anyway I've finished most of those quests now so hopefully by the time I have another backlog update I'll have something nicer to say as the plot, which admittedly I am quite into, progrresses. 

Making Anime Robot Fights Boring

 I had a series that I did over on YouTube for a while that I called "Battle Against the Backlog" where the idea was that I'd sort of vlog the progress through my insane 1000+ game backlog.  However thanks to an obsession with Dead by Daylight and some life things getting in the way, finding time to write a script and then edit all the footage together, even for videos as simple as that, was proving far too time consuming.  So I thought since the blog has been neglected for a while in favor of Twitch and YouTube, I will move the backlog stuff here so that there's at least a new post once a week and then I'm freed up to either play more games or work on bigger projects I have flying around my big dumb brain 

Anyway, like I said I've mainly been playing Dead By Daylight as opposed to making progress in anything that actually has an ending.  I don't know what it is about that game considering it has exactly 1 mode of play and it's essentially, when you boil it down, just freeze tag but it's a weirdly compelling experience.  You might think that the one mode thing would make it get boring pretty quickly, it does it other games after all but I like to think that Dead by Daylight is the Ichiran Ramen of video games.

In case that reference went over your head let me explain.  Ichiran is a chain of ramen stores here in Japan but unlike every other ramen store that have menus of different kinds of ramen, Ichiran has one thing.  They do that one thing SO WELL that no matter how many times I eat it, I never get bored of it and I quite often get urges to go back. That's what Dead by Daylight did, they picked one thing and have done it so incredibly well that I don't seem to ever get tired of it.  No matter what side I'm playing on I'm just constantly hankering for more.  It's even gotten to the point where I'm looking up DbD content while I'm working and listening to pros talk shop.  Maybe once I get better at the game and I start hitting the higher ranks more consistantly the allure might wear off but for now I'm absolutely HOOKED (haha)

Anyway, onto the actual subject of the blog post because I did finish one thing recently, a big thing, and that was Daemon X Machina.  Daemon X Machina on paper sounds like it should be cool because it's a mech combat game made by some of the same people that previously worked on Armored Core but the game is just awful.  It's fine for the first handful of missions where there's some mystery regarding and apocolypse and you're blowing stuff up but then you quickly come to realize that all the missions are the same.  Every mission involves either blowing stuff to or preventing something from being blown up by blowing stuff up which sounds like all you'd need from a game about giant robots but the enemies barely fight back and every enemy can be killed by just locking on, holding down both mouse buttons with rifles equipped and spamming the Q key to fire extremely powerful homing rockets.  There where even a number of instances where I didn't even have to move to fight bosses and other mech-style enemies, it was an actual joke

The story isn't much better either because the game throws way too many characters at you all at once, none of them are fleshed out and you don't care who anyone is or where their allegiances lie and then near the end of the game it starts killing a few of them off in heartfelt death scenes but instead of having any emotional impact I was sat there saying "who was that again? have we even been in a mission with that guy yet?" 

You can tell as well that the developers just completely ran out of ideas by the end because the final 4 missions all take place on the same stage where you do the same thing.  You fight 4 different characters as boss fights but all the enemies fight in the same way pretty much so it's literally just the old double click spam Q song and dance for half an hour while the AI partners babble on coms and not help with the combat

It should be impossible to make anime mech fights boring and some how this game did it, so hats off to the developers for doing something that I thought was impossible. 

Anyway, that's about all I've done recently.  I've also been playing Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch but I got to this place called Makna Woods and have been bogged down in side quests for many hours now so not a lot to say there really. I'll try to put DbD down for a while so I have something interesting to say next week!

May Horror Month

 Every october I like to go all in on the halloween spirit and attempt to finish 31 horror games within a month.  This year, however, I have a number of plans already set in my calendar for October so finishing 31 games in a month with that kind of schedule is probably not happening but instead of not doing it at all, I thought we'd instead just move it to May!  So here is the list of games we'll be playing between May 1st and May 31st

1. Spookys jump scare mansion
2. Metro 2033 REDUX
3. Within skerry
4. Pony Island
5. Visage
6. INSIDE
7. Necrovision
8. Nosferatu: wrath of the malachi
9. The Evil Within.
10. Penumbra Black Plague
11. Ring: Terrors Realm
12. Signalis
13. Devil May Cry
14. Resident Evil: Dead Aim
15. Cold Fear
16. House of the Dead 2
17. Sagebrush 18. A girls fabric face
19. Suite 776
20. Snafu
21. Gray Dawn
22. Silent Hill 3
23. Echo Night
24. Enemy Zero
25. Siren
26. F.E.A.R Perseus Mandate
27. Castlevania 2: Simons Quest
28. Outlast
29. Luigi's Mansion
30. The Suffering
31. Traumada

If you watch the stream much you'll know I have a fetish for spinning wheels so this year, instead of deciding the order in advance we'll just slam everything into a wheel and play the games in whatever order that dictates for is.

Come watch it live from May 1st over at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

See ya there