MrHyruleGamer And Summoning Salt

I think this is the first time I've ever done a post about actual individuals from YouTube and it's not something I want to talk about very often but since discovering the two of them fairly recently I've been thinking about some stuff that I want to write about.

Both of these people make content on YouTube related to speed running.  I discovered MrHyruleGamer during my work break with his speed running cringe compilation videos.  In these videos he takes clips of certain speed runners doing stuff that's a little embarrassing and edits them together so that we can all have a good laugh at them.  More recently though he seems to be putting together his thoughts on the speed running community at large which has opened a whole tin of worms but we'll talk about that in just a sec. 

Summoning Salt is a channel that seems to have a whole bunch of Punch Out videos on it but recently he's been putting a series of videos together called "World Record Progression".  In this videos he gives a sort of potted history of a certain games speed run.  They are informative and highly interesting and some of the stories that he tells about the way certain runners were interacting and getting their times down is really mind blowing.

I'll post a link to both of these channels at the end of the post and I think they are both worth taking a look at.

Anyway, I as I mentioned before, MrHyruleGamer put a video together called "The Problems With Speedrunning"  Take a look

Now while I think his attitude is completely fucked it's not like the guy doesn't have any valid points.  The general gist of his video is that speed running has a sort of image problem and the fact that there is so much cringe may turn new people away.  That said, I don't feel like speed running is in any danger of falling off because as long as games exist there will always be people who want to to them quickly but that side hobby within gaming just might not have any mainstream appeal.  My problem with his videos is that while he says all this, he's uploading compilations of all the cringe for people to look at so his whole shtick about wanting these people to do better while simultaneously acting as an archive of embarrassing moments seems a bit off to me.

Summoning Salts videos though are a lot more positive and they provide people with genuinely interesting information that I'm interested in hearing.  He names and shows examples of all these runs and runners so that if you are interested to do some further watching for yourself you can look these people up and get to know them a little better through their content which is a nice touch.  He's focusing on the triumphs of the community and since a lot of his stories include thing such as members trading information and partaking in healthy competition it paints things in a much more positive light.

There's a gaming bar I go to quite often and sometimes I'll get into a conversation with a random about speedrunning and when I tell them these stories of people cutting down times and some of the stuff that these people have done with classic games they seem genuinely surprised or interested in the hobby.  However I can bet you anything you like that if I showed them a compilation of runners acting like idiots on stream they'd probably never want to go near speedrunning ever again.

MrHyruleGamer, while raising some valid points is going about it in the wrong way I feel.  If speedrunners feel like they have an image problem it would be best to just try and forget all the cringe and focus on setting examples to each other on how to be better streamers or entertainers.   Summoning Salt seems to be a chill dude that not only runs games himself but is putting a pretty significant effort to create content that would attract people, which is what I think MrHyrule ultimately wants.

Anyway I feel weird talking about YouTube personalities at such lengths so I'll put the links to their channels and you can form your own opinions.  They both produce pretty entertaining content at the very least so I don't think  you'll be too bored.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpW9UVYM6M3GflB7Jkz1nJQ

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtUbO6rBht0daVIOGML3c8w

Yoko Taro: The Hero

Nier 2 is on the horizon and I'm hyped as all hell.  If you don't know what Nier is then I don't blame you because it was a little niche but it's easily one of the best games on the PS3/360 and while it wasn't so hot in the game play department, the story was awesome and the soundtrack was out of this world.  If you can get your hands on a copy of the first Nier game before Automata comes out then you totally should give it a go.

Right now he is working as the director for Nier Automata and this guy is a fucking nut.  He always comes out in a big mask shaped like one of his characters and all of his videos are a bit mental.  I watched an announcement this morning about how if you pre order Nier Automata you get a T-Shirt and it ended with him rolling around on the floor rubbing the T-Shirt over his body.  He's fucking great.

Apparently there was a bit of controversy with the upcoming game though because some people don't appreciate the main characters ass being on display.

Outfit is hot as fuck by the way.  A photoshopped image of the character appeared which showed the character climbing a ladder or something and you can see what looks like a butthole.  Of course, certain groups on sites like twitter got all upset and stuff except the image in question which you can find with a simple google search isn't actually from the game itself.  There's a company that makes porn games called Illusion and a lot of their games have really in depth character creation tools so someone made a model of the character and then used it to take the screenshot so at the end of the day these people are just getting upset over nothing.

But the absolute best thing to this whole situation is Yoko Taro's response

The general gist of the tweet is that because of the controversy a lot of rude pictures have been made of the main character but collecting them is a pain in the ass so he wants someone to send them to him in a ZIP file every week.

WHAT. A FUCKING. LAD.

There have been tons of examples of games being changed or censored in some way, especially during localization, because there are lots of crybabies on the internet nowadays who will get all up in arms if you dare to have an ass showing or a character in a bikini or some shit so it's nice to see a developer who embraces this side of things.  No artist should ever have to change their shit just because some prick on twitter or tumblr is "offended", these people should be told to fuck off and their stupid whining ignored.  According to his wiki page as well he likes to be blunt with his opinions and feels that fans deserve truth and honesty.

So let's take a moment to appreciate Yoko Taro, truly a hero that we all need right now.

Tau and Friends Play Gauntlet Part 5

The Blogger App Sucks

Usually ar the top of a post there is an image that's related to what I'm about to talk about.  On some occasions you may have noticed that the images in a post are way too big for the page if you are viewing on a computer, my post about Shadowverse I think is a good example of this.  Whenever this happens it means that I have probably made the post from my phone on what is quite possibly the worst app I have ever used.

Whenever I've put posts together on that damn thing they all look fine in the viewer I get but when I get home and check the site all the formatting is weird and just wrong.  Granted I don't proof read or edit my shit, what you get on IG is my brain vomit on games but even then I have a certain standard.  Adding tags to a post is also a goddamn nightmare because the keyboard covers the tag box so you have no idea if you've spelt things right or put the commas in the right place.

But wait, it gets worse

So I got a new phone after smashing my old one in a temple at New Years and recently I decided to download the app again, despite its shittyness so that I could post more reliably.  However, all my previous complaints are basically void and replaced with the fact that the damn thing crashes as soon as you try to write a new post.  So now it's worse than a piece of shit, it's a useless piece of shit.

So this post is being made from Safari which is also ballache because blogger clearly wasn't designed to work with it.  The worst being that I have to zoom out the page to see wtf I'm doing so I have to squint at my phone like an idiot that forgot his glasses.

Blogger is a solid service, on PC it works like a charm but trying to do things from mobile is a terrible nightmare

MMOs From My Youth

I don't play many MMORPGs any more unfortunately due to a combination of not having much time and a backlog of games in the triple digits.  However, back in my teens I played a hell of a lot of World of Warcraft starting with vanilla and quitting at the tail end of Burning Crusade.  However, before I gained some financial independence and I was able to pay the monthly fee for the game, I used to seek out free MMO games so I thought I'd share with you some of my old, F2P MMO experiences from back in the day.

1) Sword of the New World

Sword of the New World was an MMO me and my friends played over one summer holiday from school.  It was released in 2006 in Korea and had English versions going live in 2007 and it had an interesting gimmick of multiple character control.  Most of the time when you think about MMOs you imagine controlling one player and then if you want to group up you have to find other players, right?  Well in this game you controlled up to 3 and from there you could party up with people for quests and stuff so even our small group of 4 players looked like a huge group of people in game.  That said though, aside from the multiple player control and the interesting world set in a sort of fantasy take on the Americas during the age of exploration, I can't really recall much else.

2) Rappelz

A friend of mine once introduced me to Lineage 2 back before it became free to play except instead of actually paying for it he showed me a private server that allowed us to play for free, it was a good time.  However, as you would expect, the private server got shut down and it was really that first experience with Lineage that gave me my first MMO itch.  Rappelz attracted me because, at least graphically, it reminded me of Lineage so I thought this might help scratch my grind itch.  It did for a while, the game play was nothing special but it played fairly well and it's gimmick was something involving pets that you had to collect and level in order to help you in combat and stuff. 

Interestingly it seems like this game is still available to play so you can check it out if you have a weekend to waste on an MMO from 2006.

3) Trickster Online

A very cutsey online game that I remember very little of which looked sort of similar to that other isometric MMO that almost everyone played but the name I can't remember right now.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about this game is digging. You could dig to get items and a lot of the quests I vaguely remember involved digging up stuff.  While it wasn't the best game I've ever played I was looking for something to go hard on the grind with and this said that it had a level cap of 300 which just blew my goddamn mind.  I didn't play it for very long and I probably got no higher than about 25 but it was the thought that counted.

I thought that Trickster went down for good years ago but a quick google search for the image revealed that the site is still up, the client is (probably) still available and the level cap is now 400.  I would kind of like to try it again but a grind that hard would mean I'd have to sever all ties with anything else I think so I'll stick to working on my endless backlog.

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It would be nice to one day find time or not have a backlog so huge that I could really sink my teeth into another MMO.  That said, I'd probably be staying away from the Korean F2Ps and trying something like Final Fantasy 14.  Maybe one day.