Megaman 4 Speed run 46:18

Picross

The last few weeks I've been depressingly busy with stuff and finding time for any real meaningful gaming sessions has been tough.  With what time I can squeeze in I've been playing Persona 5 which I can't share with you guys so I've had to horde that experience all to myself.  However, if I didn't find time to game at least a little bit in a 24 hour period I might go insane and that's when Picross came to the rescue.

I discovered Picross a few weeks ago in my local bar on a weekend.  That seems like a weird place to discover a video game but it's a video game bar where there are systems on the counter and games for days, it's a great place I'll do a post on it one day soon.  Anyway, I'm just sat having a drink but the dude next to me is playing Picross and usually I'm not drawn to puzzle games but for some reason I couldn't stop watching him play it.  Eventually I ask him to explain to me what's going on and after the evening was done I got curious and gave it a try myself the next day.  Well I was fucking hooked since it's incredibly easy to understand and yet still manages to be quite challenging.

The idea is simple, you get rows and columns of numbers and those numbers tell you how many filled in squares there are on that line.  If there are multiple numbers in the column it means that there is a space between the filled in areas and using nothing but these numbers you must uncover a picture on the grid.  The game on Gameboy and SNES has you trying to figure out these puzzles within 30 minutes and hitting an incorrect space causes you to lose time.  As you go on the grids get bigger and bigger which of course means the puzzles get harder and harder.

It's just an incredibly relaxing game to play and the challenge never really feels stressful.  Despite the timer going in the background as long as you take your time to work it out it's never really an issue but in the instances where mistakes are made and you really do end up battling the clock you get quite an intense experience. 


There are a pretty large number of Picross games.  There's the original game boy game and the sequel to that on the Super Nintendo.  There's also Picross 3D on the DS and a sequel to that on the 3DS which I'm told are very good and the extra dimension adds a good amount of extra challenge.  There's also a number of free Picross games on mobile too so if you wanted to give it a try then these might be a good place to start too.  There's even a fucking Final Fantasy Picross RPG for mobile called Pictologica where you solve small Picross puzzles in order to make your party of heroes attack stuff.

There's probably a bunch of other games I don't know about too but that should be enough to get you started.  Give it a try, it's fun, addictive and can be played in very small and quick bursts which means that even if your schedule is fucked you can squeeze in a quick puzzle here and there.

Tau and Friends Play Advance Wars Part 2

Tau and Friends Play Gauntlet Part 7

Tau and Friends Play Advance Wars Part 1

Gaming Log March 16th

Today has just been full of absolute shit.

I woke up and did next to no gaming in the morning just because shit was cold and I didn't want to get out of  the bed.  The little gaming I did do involved firing up Dungeon Travelers on the train and just having a bunch of story dumped on me.

Then I come home and I do a Mega Man 4 speed run which I fucked up immensely and ended up getting a 50:01 time which is just crap and then Waifu Wednesday happened.

So if you missed the first post, Waifu Wednesday is a little stream bit I do every week where I play Japanese dating sims.  There are millions of these games and I'm here to explore the genre live so that you can get some insight into the appeal of these games.  Anyway, today I'm playing and everything is grand.  There's a girl I'm after who I'm in good standing with, my test scores are getting slowly better, everything seems great.  But then I get a message saying "some girls have been saying things about you at school", so I call up my info guy and I get this screen

The little bomb markers mean that these chicks are pissed off for some reason and if I don't fix it then they'll start spreading rumors around the school.  So I try and fix it but there were too many of them and too many mandatory events eating my time.  Not to mention one girl rejected my offer to take her out like 4 fucking times so even though I was trying desperately to remove that bomb marker, she wasn't having ANY of it.  So of course, the rumors pop and this happens

Now everyone hates my guts except for that one ugly girl with the mullet.  From there, my Tokimeki life just went to complete shit.  I nearly got kicked out of the yearly Christmas party, chicks don't want to walk home with me, on valentines day I got 0 chocolate from anybody (chicks give dudes Chocolate on Valentines in Japan) and I failed my University entrance exam. 

The whole aim of Tokimeki Memorial is to build up a relationship with a girl and then ask her to be your girlfriend under some legendary love tree at the end of the game.  On this play through however, every girl basically wanted me dead so I got this for an ending

Fuck it, my right hand will never spread rumors and betray me......

Tau and Friends Play Gauntlet Part 6

Gaming Log March 14 2017

Well shit I fell asleep after streaming so I'm awkwardly posting this log from my phone

Whenever I have to work early my days are quite uneventful so I spent most of it playing Dungeon Travelers again.  I managed to kill that boss though pretty easily after I discovered that my characters could be class changed.  You would think it would take an idiot not to notice that but character levels aren't displayed on the main screen and you have to go into individual status screens to find out.  Since I don't check that shit too often I had no idea that class changes were even an option.

Once I got home I streamed Megaman 4 speedruns which went well for the robot masters and then I fucked basically every end game stage.  I finished the night with Final Fantasy 9 where I watched a bunch of cutscenes and then played Chocobo Hot and Cold which may be the only mini game worse than Blitzball

Gaming Log March 13th 2017

Here's a new blog feature for you all that will keep the written side of things flowing daily once again, a gaming log.  I know most of you don't give a flying fuck about what I'm doing day to day but I quite enjoy the idea of making a sort of public diary of my gaming so here I go!

Well this morning I did what I do every morning which is skip breakfast and fire up Persona 5.  It was a largely uneventful time although I am a little concerned with the current point in the game.  Without spoiling anything I THINK I've cleared the dungeon and done everything I have to do but there's still a big fat red countdown in the corner of my screen that basically reads "8 MORE DAYS TILL YOU LOSE!"

I'm assuming everything will be OK but the progress I stand if the story doesn't get off its arse and start moving soon is pretty great.  Still, I finished the session by heading into the optional dungeon, Mementos and fighting a boss that was susceptible to magic.  He nearly one shot my entire party in the first turn but after I survived and healed up, everything was fine and he went down pretty quickly.

Of course though, I can't spend my entire day playing P5 because I have my job to go to so that means I have to switch to something a little more portable.

Right now my current game of choice is Dungeon Travelers 2 on the Vita which I got for free a couple of months back on PS+.  So far its been a pretty enjoyable experience.  It's a competently made dungeon crawl game with an absolute metric shitton of fan service.  All the main cast with the exception of one character are cute anime girls and all the monsters are cute anime girls and at frequent points the game will show you full screen images of cute anime girls in their pants.  Well I love dungeon crawls and I love titties so everything has been pretty peachy so far.

UNTIL TODAY

The dungeon I've been currently crawling though is just bursting at the seems with complete bullshit.  Monsters doing absolute shit tons of damage with area of effect magic was just the tip of the iceberg with this place.

If you can't read Japanese then the big red text at the top of the screen basically says "No magic zone".  I'm pretty heavily reliant on magic for both killing shit and staying alive so these corridors are particularly annoying.  I don't mind being challenged in a game but this is just balls, I hate having my hands tied behind my back like this, it's just not fun.  Luckily, my main damage dealing spell caster has a rod that does instant death sometimes so it's not all bad I guess.

As if that wasn't enough though, I manage to make it to the end of the dungeon and then this bitch shows up.

HO-LY fuck the game has just thrown some impossible bullshit out of nowhere.  Every single boss up to this point has generally been pretty easy but this bitch is just smacking me all over the place.  If she isn't doing some weird party wide physical attack that comes pretty close to one shotting people, she's doing some weird debuff dance thing where at the start of her turn I just go and take a handful of damage.  Before I could figure out how to kill her I got home and stopped playing but I'm thinking that a little bit of grinding might be in order for this one.

After that I was sort of planning to stream but I made this mistake of getting into bed and lazing around for a bit and now I'm far to sleepy to do anything properly.  I'm sure there's going  to be errors in this post somewhere... Anyway I have to go to work a lot earlier than usual tomorrow so an early night and an early rise might do me some good.

 

Don't Worry I'm Not Dead

You may have noticed recently that written posts have become a little few and far between.  Considering that written content used to come daily I thought I should address why things have sort of ground to a halt.

Work is the biggest offender since getting home at 8:30-9pm  and then having to do a bunch of shit makes finding time to write posts hard but also I'm a lazy piece of shit who tends to collapse into bed for a pre stream nap.  Going is also a big thing where I'll intend to go and have a few drinks with a buddy come home write and then maybe stream a little and then what happens is I stay out until 5am and then I'm just flat out too tired the next day because of my own stupidity.

Still, not all content because of bullshit and my social life has halted, if you're not following the stream then you should go and do that because I'm trying to stream daily during the week.  As I type this post multiple parts of the Gauntlet playthough are being processed so they can be uploaded in the coming week and I'm hopefully going to have time to backlog a bunch of posts to upload in the next few days.

There's also a new YouTube feature that I'm working on so hopefully that'll see the light of day some time soon and of course there's always the stream which I'm trying to do as often as possible so be sure to follow there for the most stuff.

As always thanks for the continued support and hopefully things will be a little more frequent from now

Resident Evil 7

A fair while ago I finished Resident Evil 7 on my PS4 and because I've been so rushed the last month I never actually got around to saying anything about it on here. 

Resident Evil 7 isn't like anything that came before it.  A long while ago there were articles going around the internet that Shinji Mikami wanted to take the series back to its roots.  I think secretly horror fans were hoping that this meant we were going to get a horror game in the classic style but it would look all shiny on the new systems.  Well we didn't get that but what we did get was bloody good.

The game starts out with the main character getting a message from his wife who he thought was dead to come and save her.  Upon arrival he manages to find her but then starts getting attacked by the absolute batshit insane family that live in the house and from there all sorts of insanity goes down.  I don't want to go into the story too much in this piece because its really the best thing if you experience it without knowing anything.

The whole game is done in a first person perspective which at first sounds really lame but actually works quite well.  It was obviously done in order to make the VR thing worth it but it doesn't detract from the overall experience if you don't have it.  If anything Resident Evil is the first game that has made me think that I want to buy a VR set at all which is a pretty good indicator of just how the general atmosphere was done in this game.

What makes Resident Evil 7 so enjoyable is that all the ingredients of classic survival horror are in the game but with the first person perspective it's like they've just put a new twist on it.  Usually these kind of first person horror games involve simply hiding from the baddies but in this one we have all sorts of weapons and items that we have to manage.  The combat, which I'll talk about in just a second is actually fun and it feels like the character is decently capable of dealing with whatever is being thrown at him.

The most important question that most people will be asking though is "is it scary?" and the answer is somewhat.  If you're not the kind of person that is super used to horror like I am then there's probably going to be a great deal of moments that will have you shitting yourself.  However if you're a bit hardened on the genre then while it probably wont scare you as much it's still sort of stressful.  The atmosphere never lets up and while it's predictable in certain places it just adds to that feeling of stress because usually it'll be a situation where it's the only way to progress.  There have been so many shitty horror games in recent memory that maybe I'm being nice to it but it was definitely a nice feeling to be made a little uneasy by some sections.

Of course, the game isn't perfect and while the problems don't detract from the experience so much it's hard to just ignore these glaring faults.  First the movement just feels a bit weird overall.  Of course, you adapt to the games weird movement but there are plenty of times that I took a hit from and enemy or boss and got a little frustrated because if the character just walked or ran like a normal human being instead of like one of those crazy huge movie cameras on legs then avoiding damage would be a bit easier.  Second the AI on regular enemies is laughably bad and once you figure out how to bait out certain attacks then each encounter becomes a trivial inconvenience.  This is a shame because the first time you fight the regular enemies it's genuinely intimidating but then you realize that they all behave like morons and they lose their impact.

The enemy variety is also shockingly bad.  The encounters with the family are extremely fun and varied but the regular characters that stalk the corridors are lacking to say the least.  Just think, Resident Evil 1 had zombies, spiders, snakes, hunters, crows, dogs and the remake brought in the famous crimson heads.  Resident Evil 7 on the other hand has black thing with teeth, fat black thing with teeth and spidery black thing and that's IT.  Finally without spoiling anything the final section of the game is just pathetically easy because the game gives you so much of a certain weapon that the enemies blocking your path have no chance of stopping you because not only is the weapon so powerful but the enemies make 0 effort to avoid it.

Still, generally speaking Resident Evil 7 is a really good game so if you need a good horror fix then play this.  At time of writing I'm not really aware of anything even remotely entertaining in the genre coming out aside from We Happy Few so while Resident Evil 7 is MAYBE a little on the short side you'll be happy you decided to play it by the end.