Right now, the current stream schedule rotation is as follows
Variety Day
NES 100 Game Challenge
Donation Request Day
Shmups and Speedruns
and now we're adding one more, a Challenge Day. Recently I've been watching a lot of videos on YouTube of people doing 0 hit runs of the Dark Souls games. That means going through the entire game without taking a single hit from a single enemy. These guys are so good at what they do I've even seed a guy who goes by the name SquillaKilla on YouTube and Twitch beat Dark Souls 1,2 and 3 back to back without taking a single hit.
I've decided it would be cool if I could push myself to do this kind of thing so as a result I'm starting a challenge day segment on my stream. Of course, I'm not daft enough to think I could do something like DS No Hit right out of the gate, I haven't played any of the Souls games for about a year now so instead we'll be kicking off with Final Fantasy 7 No Materia to ease us in.
I've made a little list of things I want to try and do that includes things such as Dark Souls no hit runs and single character runs of certain RPGs but I'm also open to suggestions, so if you know challenging ways in which to play a certain game, write a comment or hit me up on twitter and I may add your suggestions to the list. There are some INSANE challenges that I've been made aware of such as Final Fantasy 7 solo character initial equipment which I will be incorporating as donation incentives so make sure you throw some money at the charity if you really want to make me suffer.
Don't forget to follow on Twitch so you don't miss anything
www.twitch.tv/taurinensis
I’ve been playing through the Doom games recently in a sort of slow preparation for when Doom Eternal comes out, a game for which I am quite looking forward to. The first couple of games are about what you’d would expect from titles that old, dated and kind of clunky but solidly made and still a ton of fun to play. I got around some of that old DOS game clunkiness by using something called ZDoom which is a sort of mod that makes it look pretty and controls in a way that makes sense (mouse to move forward are you MAD?!) and Doom 2 on Ultraviolence in particular feels like a first person Bullet Hell game at times. But then there’s Doom 3, the weird black sheep of the family Talking to people about Doom 3 it seems like it’s remembered rather fondly. Hell, if I’m being really honest I myself has fond memories playing it up until the point I finished it last week. But having replayed it I can’t help but feel that it’s just a bit shit. It’s not because of its fancy graphics getting in the way for my DOS brand nostalgia goggles or anything like that, it just doesn’t feel like “Doom”, you know? Sure it’s got “Doom” on the cover and it’s about a man on mars fighting soldiers, imps and other iconic monsters as well as a few new additions but it feels wrong. Doom levels are maze like and sprawling while Doom 3s levels are claustrophobic and linear. The “puzzles” in Doom 1 and 2 are about finding keys and navigating the various mazes while Doom 3 has you clearing poison barrels with a UFO Catcher and repairing bridges and doors. Doom 3 isn’t Doom, it’s Half Life with a Doom lick of paint and the spookiness turned ALL the way up. What I’m not saying is that Doom 3 is a bad game. It’s a fun little spookfest with competently made, satisfying gun play, great atmosphere and great enemy variety, it’s a great game that I would probably be talking about a lot more positively if it wasn’t for the title. Hindsight is a wonderful thing too because clearly when they came back to make New Doom they went BACK to big open areas full of monsters to rip and tear on. Arguably they went a little TOO much the other way but I’d rather have it wide, fast and violent than slow, spooky and.....Half Lifey? Anyway if you’ve not played Doom 3 I would still recommend checking it out, like I said it’s not a bad game by any stretch. Do be warned though that if you’ve come off the back of new Doom or the re releases of the old ones, you are in for an extremely different experience. Here’s hoping that Doom Eternal is going to be an absolute banger!
At time of writing this post I've just finished a mini marathon session of Death Stranding that was 12 hours over the course of Saturday/Sunday and I'm going to share a few of my thoughts while it's fresh in my mind. I'm only going to scratch the surface with what I'm saying though since 1) I want to avoid spoilers as much as possible and 2) There is A LOT going on and talking about all of it in one written post would take way longer than I'm willing to sit in front of my computer for at this time.
If you read the back of the box for Death Stranding it'll tell you it's "a new genre of game, the Strand game" and even after an extended session I'm not entirely sure what they mean by this. If you go on Twitter you'll see a number of people complaining it's a walking simulator which also isn't fair or accurate. What Hideo Kojima has done with Death Stranding is ask an extremely important question within gaming which is "What if we took Euro Truck Simulator 2, filled it with enemies and gave it a bonkers plot?" which is a question I'm glad he asked because the result is REALLY good.
At it's core, Death Stranding is about delivering the mail. You are treated with a pretty dramatic opening sequence and then once it dumps a bunch of intrigue in your lap you are free to collect cargo and deliver them, mainly on foot, around various locations on the map. As you deliver cargo you connect people to the "Chiral Network" which is the games 1st main objective. The main premise of the game is that an apocalyptic event known as the Death Stranding took place some time in the games past and after that an expedition went out in order to reconnect the people of North America. The woman in charge of the expedition has sort of being "kidnapped" by a militant group known as the homo-demons and it's your job as Norman Reedus to reconnect the country and get your sister back, the games second objective.
After you get people on the network, you can do jobs for them or find their lost cargo and deliver it which nets you "likes" and the more likes you get, the more tools and resources are available to you in order to make your courier life easier. Standing between you and your deliveries though are two groups, the BTs and the MULES. BTs are basically spooky ghosts and I have no idea what they do to you if they catch you because it's not happened yet and the MULES hang out in little pockets of the map and if you try to go through they will hunt you down, beat you up and steal your shit. While the gameplay can be a little repetitive, the game is constantly dangling the mystery of what actually is going on in the plot in front of you and finishing a delivery for another tidbit of story is a surprisingly satisfying reward.
The multiplayer aspect is sort of similar to Dark Souls in a way but you can't invade other people and steal their cargo unfortunately. Once you get an area on the Chiral Network you are connected to other players and you can see the structures they have placed down on the map. These include ropes, ladders and bridges for easier traversal or things like generators and watch towers along with other things for utility. There's a ton of other multiplayer systems going on as well though such as entrusting lost cargo from depots or finding other cargo that a more careless player has dropped so you can claim the likes of yourself but I've not really been engaging with it too much. My gripe with the multiplayer is that it makes things a bit too easy. Clearly the game wants you to carry ladders, ropes and the building item in order to help yourself get around but player have already put shit in the best places so you don't NEED to do any of that yourself because it's already been done for you.
When I finish it I'm going to be sure to finish it and write a spoilerific post about my thoughts on the plot and other things but for now I'll leave it there. There is A LOT I've not mentioned but all I can say is that if you were on the fence about Death Stranding, you should absolutely try it out. I'd not disagree with you if you said on paper it sounds a bit dull but there's something about it that just grabs you and doesn't let go, it's sort of hard to put down really.
If you've been following the Twitter (@Taurinensis) account you'll know that I've just returned from a trip to Osaka after going to see the Halloween Horror Night at Universal Studios Japan(a while ago now actually since I got delayed posting this) . I've talked about these nights before on the blog so this time I'm going to just give a quick roundup of all the attractions I saw this year.
Space Fantasy The Ride: Black Hole
Space Fantasy is one of the roller coasters at USJ and puts riders in a rotating car that will twist as the coaster falls and turns. Usually the ride is all cutesy but entering it during the Halloween event gives you some kind of story with a scientist that is using a black hole to open a dimensional rift or something. The ride itself is just Space Fantasy but with all the lights turned off. The exact same ride only this time you can't see shit and there's a voice in the background saying stuff like "Ha ha! I have you now!" and stuff like that. Maybe if you had never been on the ride before and had no idea what was coming it might be exciting but otherwise it was just kind of "meh"
Area 51
A walk through "horror maze" that was hosted inside the Backdraft ride. Starts with a guy coming out telling you that there's an alien invasion and that you have to escape through a forest only for him to be gunned down by some woman who then informs you he's been taken over by an alien parasite and now you have to escape to their base at the end. Interestingly, only half the backdraft ride is used and you get taken out of a back door for the "maze" part of the attraction which has alien dudes following you around the place. When you get to the base it turns out that it's been completely overrun and you move through alien infested corridors to the exit. At the end you mash a bunch of buttons with some randos on a panel and save the earth. Not bad but even it's attempts at jump scares were kind of weak although this is probably by design since the maze opened early in the morning.
Cult of Chucky
A similar walk through horror house to Area 51 but with the intensity ramped up a little bit since it didn't open until the evening, standard fare.
Blood Legend
Blood Legend was a short horror movie in the same "4D" theatre that they host that Shrek show in, 4D being the gimmick of seats moving around and blasting air at you when certain things on screen happen. The show starts by recanting the legend of actual serial killer Elizabeth Bathory and then plays a movie about two girls who are on holiday in Hungry. The two girls end up visiting her estate under the impression its some kind of museum and then get chased around a bit. Fairly standard stuff but I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Bathory is the main villain in Castlevania Bloodlines although I might be mistaken
Biohazard: The Extreme
This was the attraction in particular that I went all the way to Osaka for. Before you can ride the thing you have to go get a ticket to book a time slot and what I was surprised to see is that there was a "Leon Route" and a "Claire Route" and then whole thing was very clearly styled after the Resident Evil 2 remake. We did both routes on this trip starting with Leon. Once again, it's just a standard haunted house type affair but seeing all the scenes from Resident Evil 2 remade for the attraction was kind of cool. There's a few zombies stomping around that jump at you as you walk through but eventually you get stopped by a staff member who warns you about a creature that's sensitive to sound so you have to be quiet. You are then led down a corridor with a Licker in it and once out you come to a corridor with a big glass window in it. This is where the two routes are different as Mr X comes out on one end and then either Leon or Claire will pop out of the other, yell at you to escape and then have a little tussle with the big lad. You go through some more rooms with some more monsters until you get told that your going to have to fight whatever is chasing you and you are led into a room with a bunch of light(?) guns. You grab one and start blasting and the enemy on screen which changes depending on which character you are. I think you can beat it and escape but both times we did it the group didn't do enough damage so it popped up during our escape sequence and we got a "You have died" message. All in all, a good bit of fanwank if your familiar with Resident Evil but my wife also seemed to enjoy it a fair bit and she doesn't know anything about the series
It may be a little on the pricy side but the Halloween night at Universal is a pretty good time. I'll probably go again next year when they have more Resi goodness for me.
So we did it! The PS1 marathon concluded and we did 24 hours of assorted PS1 games! Big thanks to everyone who came in the stream and showed their support and an even bigger thanks to anyone who donated before and during the marathon!
I will now do a whole bunch of short, 1 sentence reviews for all the games I remember playing
-Silent Hill: Probably the best horror game on the system
-Tenchu 1: Broken but awesome
-Tenchu 2: Janky but awesome
-Klonoa: Really fun but the last world can eat a dick.
-Future Cop LAPD: Great game but navigating levels is a real pain in the hole
-Pandemonium: Terrible platformer but it was incredibly satisfying to reach the end
-Parappa the Rapper: Punch, Kick, it's all in the mind, the timing windows make no goddamn sense.
-Ninja: Shadow of Darkness: Couldn't make it work during the marathon but it's really good I swear
-Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub Zero: Remember enjoying it when I was younger but good LORD that game sucks ass
-Dance Dance Revolution: Dub-I-dub is best DDR track don't @ me
-Pepsiman: Way more fun to play than I thought it would be but the last stage can kiss my ass
-G-Darius: One of the best shmups on system but goddamn is it hard
-Spyro the Dragon: Why do people like this game? It kinda sucks
-LSD: err, what?
If I forgot any I'm sorry but I think I got them all.
There's so many good games on PS1 I didn't actually get to play all the games I wanted to play so I'm putting this incentive up AGAIN! Just donate another 100 pounds to the alzheimers society and we'll do all the other great games we didn't get around to in this marathon
Earth Wars is by far one of the worst indie games I've ever played and I'm the kind of Steam user that spent 25p buying a game called "Oppai Girl" so that's saying A LOT.
Earth Wars is a game that I played on PS4 after getting it for free as part of my PS+ games one month. I finished it last week after nearly a solid year of chipping away at it because playing it for any more than about 20 minutes at a time made me want to vomit in my mouth.
The story is set after some aliens show up and make a mess of planet Earth so you and your squad have to get in there and get rid of the aliens. Truth be told, the story had a lot more going on than that but by the 4th area or so I was so sick of it's technobabble that I just started skipping everything. Aliens are bad and the power suits used by the Earth forces may or may not also be killing them or something like that, who knows and who cares?
Earth Wars really falls down though in it's gameplay department. Each major section of the game is bookended by a mission where you'll kill a big boss alien. After you kill the boss alien you are given a real timer that usually counts down from something absurd like 60 hours. From there you play sub missions which usually involve finding an item, racing around a zone or killing a certain enemy and you are rewarded with skills for completing these quests. The missions start to get dull and samey right in the first zone but by the end of the game every missions is basically "hey, go kill this major boss again" and it becomes even more tedious. Finishing a mission reduces the timer by a handful of hours so clearing a few missions gets you to the next big story beat but you actually have to CLEAR the mission for it to count. Meaning if you spent 20 minutes on one mission only to fail it near the end, then have fun doing that all over again unless you want to leave the game running for 60 ACTUAL hours.
The gameplay within these missions is even worse. Imagine a game like Odin Sphere or Muramasa but as if it was designed by a guy who was extremely high on very powerful painkillers for the entire development cycle. It's wooden, unresponsive, nonsensical, confusing and a whole ton of other adjectives that mean bad things. Your character controls like your controlling one of those paper puppets with the butterfly pins so that the child who made it can manipulate the joints. The enemies animate just as atrociously so usually combat is dreadful yet manageable but there's one clawed enemy in particular that is so fast and powerful that you are guaranteed to lose about half your life bar to one EVERY TIME. Everything is just so janky and difficult to control and for a fast paced action game like this that's very clearly trying to be Odin Sphere or Muramasa but IN SPACE it's a massive letdown.
I do want to end on a positive note so I will say that the backgrounds and nicely drawn and the does use an interesting skill system. You sort of have this network of nodes where one half is stat boosts and the other half is your movements. So you can junction +X attack to the first, second or third swing of your sword so you can either spread that damage out or just do what I did and make the first attack hit like a truck and then everything else just be a shitty follow up to try and proc the death effect from my sword. There is also a crafting system that I expect wanted you to make elemental weapons to exploit weaknesses and stuff but you just make a weapon have a death attribute that you can just smack a normal enemy until it gets the effect and then dash around the field until it dies, rendering all non boss combat trivial.
Clearly the developer of this game had their heart in the right place. It's a terrible, horrendous, irredeemable shitty mess but a clear effort was made and I can respect that. However that doesn't excuse the game itself from being as bad as it is. I got it for free and I want my money back
It's not often that a mobile game grabs my attention but the release of Dragon Quest Walk was one I was very excited for, especially coming off the back of Dragon Quest 11. Before I go any further I have to warn you that as far as I know, this game is Japan only so if you don't live in Japan and don't care about how cool my new toys are then you may as well stop reading now
For those that do care however, Dragon Quest Walk is probably one of the best mobile games I've played ever. It's got a decent amount of content considering it just launched, it's running special events already and if you're looking for a way to sort of "gamify" your power walks, this is a great way to do it with.
There's other systems as well such as raids which I can't comment on because I've yet to do one. There's a house system where you put an icon on your map that is your home and you can decorate it with furniture and whatnot and players are incentivized to visit your house because each house will have an item on the floor for you to get. There's also a gatcha system which might make some people groan but at time of writing the gems and tickets for the gatcha are plentiful and getting a 5 star piece of equipment seems to be a fairly common occurrence. There's some other things I haven't mentioned but if I tried to mention every little feature I'd be here all night
If you live in Japan and you're looking for an excuse to get out of the house and burn some calories, then DQ Walk is a good place to go. If you don't live in Japan then I'm sorry for you and I really hope that the game gets an overseas release because for a free little mobile game about hitting slimes with swords, it's REALLY good.
I know I've announced it on Twitter and Facebook but I'm fairly certain I haven't made an official post about it on here. On October 5th and 6th there will be a "24 hour" marathon of assorted PS1 games. So look forward to that
But the main point of this post isn't to just to announce an upcoming stream event but to tell you all about how I'm modifying the system for these long 24 hour marathons. I have a problem with these things where not only does it completely screw with my sleep schedule and day for a few days after they are finished but I find it incredibly hard to be stay entertaining for that entire period.
The Megaman marathon was the worst example of this. Not only did I get tired and almost completely stopped commentating my progress through the games but I died about 100 times on a boss that should have, at most, maybe taken about 5 goes.
To avoid this the PS1 marathon and every marathon after this will be broken up into 2 big chunks over the weekend. There will be 24 hours played within the weekend period but just not all at once. This means that I can focus better and give a bit of a better performance. Not only that but it means that with a bit of luck, we might actually get MORE than 24 hours out of each marathon. For example if I do 12 hours on Saturday, but then chat is popping off and the game is really fun at the 12 hour mark on the Sunday then I'll just keep going, which means your charity donations are going to go just that little bit further.
Keep an eye on this space, I'll be posting some additional details about the PS1 marathon next week some time!
Just before I went on holiday another donation incentive got met and I forgot to announce it on the main blog page so I'm doing it now!
As previously mentioned, there's an Undertale marathon planned for the 15th of September so once we finish that there will be a 24 hour marathon of PS1 games which I'm, at the current time of writing, planning for some time in October.
It's a pretty straightforward marathon, I'm going to dig out my fairly sizeable collection of PS1 games and play through it for 24 hours without stopping. I'm probably going to stick to shorter games since if I played something long like an RPG then the entire marathon would be just me playing that and it wouldn't be much fun at all.
Keep an eye on the blog for more concrete dates later. I'm hoping to have at couple of guest appearances to play through some select titles and of course, I'll be taking requests in return for charity donations!
A while ago I decided to replay Quake so I'll take a moment to blog about it. It's a short and simple game so this will be a short and simple post.
I don't really feel like I need to introduce Quake in any sort of way. If you're interested in games and you've not at least heard of Quake then you must have been living under a rock this entire time because this is one of the big bad granddaddies of FPS games. It's basically Doom but with proper 3D which isn't really surprising since they are both made by the same people.
As fun as Quake is, and it still is a ton of fun to play even today, this game is really, REALLY ugly. The level design itself is up to the usual id standard for these kind of games at the time but the graphics are all just brown, ugly castles full of swamp water. Doom, by contrast, while still sort full of dingy corridors on space stations at least had some variation to its color palate. The levels in Doom manage to maintain some kind of visual interest while Quake just looks like you're staring into a pool of sewer water the whole time.
Complaints about the old, brown graphics aside, the core gameplay is still really fun and the game itself is a classic. You can actually get the collection of Quake games on Steam for about 5 pounds and with that there's all sorts of mods you can apply to make it look nicer/play a little better than it used to. So if for some reason you've NOT played Quake in 2019, go ahead, pick it up and give it a spin. They don't make 'em like this anymore
It's 2004, I'm about 15 and in high school. I have a friend at school who, for the sake of this story I'm going to call Mo. Mo and I were two very different people who at first glance you probably would expect not to really get on. He was a huge dude from the West Indies who played a ton of sports, liked to party and listened to hip hop, rap and all that stuff. I on the other hand was a sheltered white kid from a suburb who spent almost 100% of his time playing video games and listening to the old cassettes of late 80s/90s pop music from my mothers old collection. However at school I bonded with this guy over games like Megaman, anime like Dragon Ball Z and...Linkin Park of all weird things.
We would often go to each others houses to play video games, usually an overnight stay so we could just play into the wee hours of the morning. I remember going to his place and spending a LARGE amount of a day just playing Wind Waker and REMake when those came out and he would come over and we'd play stuff like Megaman X, Dragonball games or one of the obscure RPGs from my collection.
There was one time though he brought a game round to my place, which was Def Jam Fight for New York. I didn't know anything about Def Jam other than the fact it was a rap label and therefore didn't want anything to do with it. I called him a piece of shit for having garbage taste in games and didn't want to play it. However he was twice my size and a lot more assertive than me so we ended up playing it anyway.
The first thing that really caught my attention however was the games blazin' moves. When you fill up a meter you can enter a "blazin" state. In this state, if you grab the guy and push the right stick you'll do a special attack. These attacks are INSANE, gravity defying, multi hit combo, earth shattering attacks that really make you feel like you REALLY just ruined a guys day. There's one in particular that I think Ice T does where he punches you twice in the gut, and flips you over his shoulder so that you got your head down and your ass up. He then winds and essentially rugby punts the opponent right into the goddamn Shadowrealm and everything about these attacks and the combat in general is incredibly satisfying.
What really got me into the game though is when you get to the 3rd fight venue or so and you get to fight Sean Paul. Sean Paul I don't particularly dislike, even back then, but I always perceived him in my teenage ignorance as just some fuck who rapped about doing drugs, fuckin' bitches and drinking copious amounts of alcohol so I really started paying attention when I found out one could beat the shit out of him with a custom character. So we wailed on him and the grabbed him and slammed his face so hard into a jukebox that he lay defeated as a twitching mess on the floor and I fucking loved it.
I loved it so much in fact, that I ended up buying the game for myself, playing through the story mode multiple times and unlocking basically everything there was to get. One thing that I also started to warm up to though was the soundtrack. The soundtrack is comprised of different songs composed by people from the label and I actually found myself really enjoying them, thus broadening my horizons with my music tastes. The solid gameplay, the bumpin' soundtrack and the performances from the rappers themselves, despite being in a corny gang war story, are actually quite entertaining and even pretty hilarious at times.
So not only is this is a long winded way of me saying that Def Jam Fight for NY is a fantastic game that you should try if you have not already but I also, in case he reads it, wanted to thank my dude Mo for not only introducing me to a great game but for also heavily broadening my music tastes.
Tl;dr; This game is sick and you should play it POST HASTE
This will be a nice short post today because I'm basically just announcing another event!
On September 15th me and my good friend Pithoui will be streaming an Undertale marathon. This however will not be a 24 hour marathon like usual, instead we will be playing the games 3 endings (Neutral, Genocide, Pacifist) back to back and we won't be stopping until they are done.
That's all there is to it, so save the date and come join us for a bad time!
At the end of last month BTMyDonate closed it doors and stopped accepting charity donations. It's a shame but we had a good run with them and we raised a good bit of money with them as the tracker. However I needed a new tracker and it has now been set up! At time of writing the links on the blog and on the Twitch page have been updated but I still need to go through my YouTube channel and update the links on all my videos, which may take a hot minute to say the least.
If you've been here since the start you'll know that I actually started with Just Giving and then moved over to BTMyDonate after I heard that JG were skimming 10% of donations off the top in order to keep their site running. I'm not throwing any shade at them for doing that, they need money to keep their shit going and they provide a good service but it didn't sit right with me. If you donated 10 pounds to the Alzheimer's Society, I wanted you to be sure that 10 pounds was going to it.
There are 3 main reasons I've picked just giving and they are as follows
1) On the official website for the Alzheimer's Society they suggest to use Just Giving if you are doing fundraising for them.
2) Just Giving allows donations to be made via PayPal. I've had a number of people who I don't know ask to make a donation but couldn't because they didn't have or couldn't use a credit card. Now that PayPal is an option, hopefully this opens the gates for more potential donors.
3) Just Giving now ask you if you want to give an additional sum of money to support them AS WELL AS the charity. For example if you donate 10 bucks, they will ask you if you mind putting an extra 1 buck on the top of that which will help run their service. There is also no complaints if you opt to send 0 to them and only give to the charity itself.
So with this switch over hopefully we'll see a lot more money going into the charity. Just a reminder to, if you donate through just giving I DO NOT SEE A SINGLE PENNY OF YOUR MONEY, it will all go directly to the charity. It won't come anywhere near me. You can still donate to me via Twitch bits, subs or directly via my personal PayPal, which I will use to improve content which will hopefully have the knock on effect of getting even MORE donators but if you have to make a choice please pick the charity EVERY TIME. I'm improving this place slowly by myself anyway, I don't really need it.
Thank you for continued support and happy donating!
At time of writing I have so much actual gaming content, YouTube videos and Streams to be doing but I had such a bad experience with this stupid fucking piece of shit software that I have to do a blog post on it to vent.
Excel is such a stupid, hard to use, user unfriendly piece of crap software and I hate the fact that everyone in Japan seems to suck its stupid green dick constantly. I guess, maybe, if you're doing some simple number crunching then maybe doing it in an Excel spreadsheet is OK but I see it used for all sorts of shit that it just doesn't need to be used for.
I had to recently translate a list of things from Japanese to English but instead of putting the document in something that made sense like, oh I dunno, WORD, the whole thing was written in excel. What this did was make everything really small and unreadable and it also made editing the text way more of a pain in the ass than it ever needed to be. On top of that, because each field was so small and cramped up I ended up missing a load of stuff just because I didn't see it which resulted in a right bollocking from my higher ups when I sent them a "translated document" with blotches of Japanese all over it in small, ant sized cells.
But even if Excel wasn't needlessly used and awkward as shit I just don't understand why anyone would use Microsoft Office at all. I don't know when they made this change but back in the day, you used to just buy the software, install it and then use it. Now they have this weird fucking subscription service where you have to pay $100 A YEAR just to be able to use their shit.
Fuck Excel and fuck Microsoft office. I don't know about their spreadsheet software but there's a completely free package called Libre Office that I've been using at home recently that does everything that the Microsoft software does only it won't cost you $100 a year, instead it'll cost you $0.
I know this post is dumb, incoherent and ranty but I needed something stupid to post while I set up the new donation tracker since BT MyDonate cut its service. Sit tight for actual content in the next post!
So I took my time to recover and now I'm back in business with our usual stuff. I've noticed actually that thanks to things being a little hectic recently there's huge gaps between me posting any kind of content so hopefully, in the second half of the year, I'll be a bit more consistent.
Anyway, the 24 hour Megaman Mega-Marathon was completed. I haven't added up all the donations properly (I just have them listed individually, don't worry) and I suck at math but I'm pretty sure around 400 GPB, including the initial donation incentive, was raised over the course of the marathon. As always, BIG thanks to anyone who donated to the cause, it's always nice to see the support for me and the charity that these marathons tend to generate.
The games that were finished during the marathon were classic 1-4 and Megaman X 1-4. I had memories of the X games being a lot easier but they absolutely kicked my ass sideways and took me way longer to finish that I imagined. X4 especially has a particularly horrible final boss fight but I'm going to make my excuses and say that it was fatigue from playing for so long and not just that I'm shit (spoilers: I'm shit).
I do have a little confession though for anyone who missed the marathon live which is I didn't actually finish and entire 24 hours. It was only off by about an hour and a half but I still feel pretty bad. By the end of the marathon I had a killer headache and I felt really quite ill, I think brought on by a combination of an extremely busy work event that involved 3 days of straight drinking and Nagoya now having the muggiest, most horrible humid weather ever.
This however is not an excuse, so to make up for the lost time I will be adding a "Megaman day" to the stream rotation. This will involve playing every single Megaman game that exists that I didn't play during the marathon, so this will be a feature that will stick around for a while. Some people donated for me to play Megaman Battle Network over my choice of Megaman Command Mission for the RPG in the marathons final few hours so that will be the first game to get streamed and then we'll go from there.
There's another event in the works so stay tuned for more extended gaming goodness in the near future!
Because of the charity donation incentive reaching its goal, on the 29th of June there will be a 24 hour marathon of Megaman games!
The marathon will start at 7am Japan time and will end at 7am the following day. There will be a 30 minute break for me to not die every 6 hours and at around the half way point I'll be using one of those breaks to move all my kit to Critical Hit video game bar and perform the last half of the marathon at that location rather than my house.
I'll be starting with Megaman classic and hopefully within 24 hours we can make our way into the X series and hopefully even Zero and maybe near the end, when my fatigue is high and my concentration dwindles, we can end with Megaman X Command Mission. The games that I'll play aren't set in stone.
I'm also planning to do some prize giveaways for anyone who donates to the Alzheimer's Charity during the marathon, so tune in at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis on the 29th for a chance to see some great games and win some cool swag.
About 6 months ago I changed my job. I moved from teaching English into the field of engineering. Now I don't actually know diddly jack shit about being an engineer or anything related to that field but I was lucky enough to get in based almost purely on the fact that I speak English and Japanese.
During my time at this company so far I've been learning a whole bunch of different things related to the type of engineering I'm in but there was one slow day where one of my coworkers approached me and reccomended that I try to teach myself a bit of Python.
Now I didn't know the first thing about coding (and I still kinda don't) but I got to work on teaching myself the basics of Python 3. After watching a bunch of tutorials on YouTube and following some guides online I got to doing the one thing I always wanted to do, which was making a game. Of course, I'm trying to throw together a little project with barely any experience and in my work office so the only idea I could really muster for an environment like that was a silly text adventure.
So here I present to you, "Escape from Mr Stabby's Mansion", a silly game full of cheap deaths and badly written gore. Please give it a download and maybe give me some feeback! I'm going to carry on my adventure into programming and maybe try and produce something that's more than just text in a command prompt.
It's a fun hobby and if you were thinking about getting into it I'd recommend just throwing yourself at it full force. It's daunting and there's A LOT to learn but even something stupid and simple like this is a lot of fun to throw together!
I will make a separate page for "Things wot I made" soon so this link doesn't get buried but for now feel free to download it off this page!
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.
This will be a short announcement post just to let you guys know about another donation incentive that got met!
The Megaman marathon was finally met last Friday and I know I'm a little late to update it but I'm still working out possible dates to have the marathon on. Basically I'm going to play through as many Megaman games as I can for 24 hours. I imagine I'd start with MM Classic and then move into the X Games and probably end with something like Command Mission as I start to get sleepy near the end but we'll see how it goes.
Watch this space for dates and further information!
Like all things I seem to really enjoy, Dungeon Crawling is one of those niche genres that doesn't have wide appeal but does have an insanely dedicated following of fans. I'm almost certain that in the past on this blog I've gushed, at length, about how much I love this style of game but for this post I'm here to complain about something that really chaps my ass which is the misgenre-ing (if that's even a word) of games in this genre.
A dungeon crawler is typically an offshoot of the RPG genre that revolves around an individual or group of people navigating a big maze, solving puzzles, killing monsters and surviving with what little resources they have all usually in first person. Famous titles in this genre include Dungeon Master (Pictured above), Shin Megami Tensei, Legend of Grimrock, Etrian Odyssey and many more. The real interesting part about this genre is that a large number of titles will require or ask the player if they want to draw their own maps. Back in the day if you wanted to effectively navigate these dungeons you'd have to break out some square paper and get drawing. More modern titles have an automap but, for example, Grimrock will ask the player if they would like to turn the map off or Etrian Odyssey actively forces you to draw your own map on the bottom screen of the DS.
You know what isn't a dungeon crawler though? Diablo, Zelda, any of those roguelikes on Steam. Diablo is the one that comes up most of all whenever I go looking for dungeon crawl recommendations. I don't have a problem with Diablo, it's a good game, but Diablo is an action RPG loot fest, extremely far removed from the style of game I'm usually looking for.
The reason this gets my back up is because dungeon crawling is an extremely niche genre and it's been mislabeled so much that now, finding a traditional style dungeon crawl is extremely difficult. If you go on Steam and type in "dungeon crawl", you get a mix of classic RPGs and rougelikes with the occasional actual dungeon crawl peppered in there. If I wanted a fucking roguelike, I'd search for fucking roguelikes, but I want a goddamn dungeon crawl.
Still, despite seemingly no one know what a proper dungeon crawl is, all is not lost. There's a website dedicated to enthusiasts of the genre
I'm so happy I didn't pay for this game. I'm "happy" that it was given to me for free via my PS+ subscription on my Vita before Sony stopped making that a thing. For a long time I thought that Silent Hill: Homecoming was the worst Silent Hill but this thing really steals this shit show like nothin' else. But not only is it easily the worst Silent Hill game it is quite possibly the worst video game ever made BAR NONE. Worse than Hydlide, worse than Action 52, worse than any game you could possibly ever mention.
The story, what little of it I've bothered to pay attention to, is about a guy who gets a book of memories. The book is sort of like a Death Note but it comes pre written with everything that's happened to you up to that point. You are then free to change the contents and the book will bend reality to fit whatever it is you wrote in it. It's actually, in a non-Silent Hill setting, not a bad idea for a plot but that combined with the fact it's told almost entirely through poorly written notes and poorly voiced audio clips makes it completely uninteresting.
Game play wise Book of Memories is a hack and slash game with random dungeons. Think Diablo but instead of having a huge budget it was made by a team that seem to have been paid about 32p and given a single tube of Pringles to share. You start by making an incredibly generic looking character and picking a "gift", which ends up doing fucking nothing and then hacking your way through a bunch of dungeons until you reach a boss. Rinse and repeat until you finish all the worlds.
The combat is clunky, unsatisfying and lacks any challenge whatsoever. Part of the lack of challenge comes from the fact that your stats and gear don't actually mean ANYTHING. The only stat that matters is strength and MAYBE if you want to make the game even easier on yourself, throw a few points into vitality. Strength does the obvious thing of making you hit harder and Vit makes your first aid kits heal for more and makes your character harder to hit. Couple this with the enemy AI being dumber than a pile of rocks and you've got one really tedious game. Assuming that you have working fingers and you're more than 6 months old, the only enemies you MIGHT die to are the Bogeymen (From Downpour) because he's got a heal, and an AOE ground pound that takes 70% of your life and the Insane Cancer's (3) that explode when they die and if they hit it does about 90% damage.
The absolute worst part of this game though is the sound design. There's no point during play you won't be either extremely annoyed or cringing so hard that your body turns inside out. Go and look up an old game called Dark Castle, either play it yourself or watch the AVGN episode of it or something, but Homecoming sounds almost EXACTLY like that.
This is hands down, the worst game ever made. The development team behind it should be ashamed. I don't know diddly jack shit about video game development outside of making text adventures with Python and I could probably shit out a better game in a week doing everything by myself. The worst part is that it tries to worm itself into the series by changing the character motivations from the first few games but thinking about it just makes me too mad but there's plenty of YouTube content out there that explains that side of it.
If you ever see it on sale, run, run and never look back
So I finished River City Ransom on Stream a few days ago and despite it being my second time to finish this game I've never said anything about it on this blog, which is weird considering how good it is.
On the off chance that you're not familiar, River City Ransom was a game released in 1989 for the NES and you play as a dude called Alex, and maybe one other guy if you're in two player mode, as you go around the town beating up thugs. The game is actually the third entry in the "Kunio-Kun" series preceded by Super Dodge Ball and Renegade before that.
Gameplay involves walking around a town, beating up dudes until you find a boss dude, then beating him up and getting a hint on where to find the next boss dudes. When you beat all the boss dudes you go to a school and beat up the final boss dude on the roof and the game ends. As you beat dudes up they drop money which you use to go to the various shops and buy food items to increase your stats. I have no idea what most of the stats actually do but you should just aim to get big numbers so you can relieve dudes of there cash in one punch rather than multiple. It's got a small but open world so it's really up to you to explore and while this can be a little confusing your first time round you'll never really get truly lost.
Despite the NES being famous for having hundreds of really hard games, River City Ransom is kind of on the easy side. It can be a little challenging at first but once you start to get your stats up and your head round the combat the game becomes an absolute cakewalk. Late in the game you can pick up some cowboy boots that make your kicks strong enough to kill most enemies, including bosses, in a single attack so once you buy those it really is just game over from there. My only complaint about this game is that occasionally the enemies will go absolutely crazy and just bully you in a corner until you die and you can't do shit about it. However this is only really a mild annoyance because in this game death doesn't mean a restart, it just means you lose half your cash and go back to the last shopping area you visited.
So if you've somehow gone your whole life not having played this, go grab it. I'm sure it's been released for virtual console or whatever given it's legacy and failing that I'm sure you could use some slightly more dubious methods to play it if you were that way inclined. This series is actually still going too with some of the most recent entries being released for the PS4. Go get to know good ol' Kunio-Kun, he's a stand up lad
I couldn't have been more late to this party even if I tried. A game series that's gathered a massive following and that has tons of sequels but only now am I getting around to actually playing it for myself. The curse of a large backlog I guess.
Five Nights at Freddy's is a horror game where you play as an after hours security guard in a chuck-e-cheese style pizza restaurant. On your first night you get a message from the guy who worked there before you warning you that the robot mascots will wander the halls at night and if they see you they will attempt to shove you into one of the suits, killing you violently in the process. Armed with nothing but some security cameras, light switches and a couple of doors, you must survive from 12am to 6am in the restaurant. It sounds easy on paper but in practice it really isn't.
The game itself consists of not much more than the screen above. You move the mouse down to the bar to open the camera and click the buttons on the wall to toggle the lights and the doors. You'd think that you'd just be able to close the doors and just wait it out until 6am but the problem is that pesky little power percentage in the corner. Turning on a light, closing a door, opening the camera all drain your power supply at an increased rate. If the power hits zero then the lights go off, the doors fly open and the mascots are free to just walk in and give you a very bad day at work. The crux of the game is quickly checking the cameras to get the rough positions of the mascots and only closing the doors when absolutely necessary. Of course, once you get good and know what you're doing there's ways to game the AI to make your life a little easier but the game is pretty heavy on the randomness and sometimes you'll just die because the game wants you to. It sounds really annoying but considering a night is only about 8 minutes and the restart is pretty much instant it's not so bad.
The horror in FNAF manifests itself almost exclusively as jump scares, which is usually something I hate but here I don't seem to mind it so much. If a mascot gets into your room the game will leave you unawares for a moment before throwing the 3D model into your face with a loud noise quickly followed by a game over screen. Kind of like any of those screamer flash games from the early days of the internet. I think the reason I give it a pass here though is because it's not TRYING to be anything more than a jump scare game and it tells you this in its loading screen before the main menu. It's not like, let's say, Dead Space, a game claiming to be at atmospheric romp through a derelict ship and then a good deal of it's "horror" coming from having Necromorphs jump out of small holes screaming at you. While jump scares ARE cheap and I still hate them, at least the developer Scott Cawthon is up front and basically just flat out says to you "I'm going to jump scare you now, have fun!"
The game is cheap on Steam so I'd recommend going to pick it up. I finished it in a single evening on stream (granted I had some help) but when you finish there's a sort of "hard mode" in the form of 6th Night and when you finish that you get Custom Night which lets you set the AI levels of each mascot to your own liking, so it's got some replayability too. Even after the jump scares stop making you jump there's something rather compelling about the mechanics of the game that will keep you coming back. Every afternoon I've been firing it up to attempt to clear a custom night with all the settings turned to max and it really is quite challenging.
If you're looking for a cheap horror experience, Freddy Fazbears Pizzeria is a pretty good place to go.
So the trailer for the new Sonic movie dropped and OH BOY what an experience that was to watch for the first time.
So I think everyone in existence who saw the design of Sonic for this movie recoiled at just how awful he looks in this film. He just looks....weird. I think what they were trying to do was to make him look "realistic" but now we have this..thing..that makes just a little bit of sick come up in the back of your throat every time you see him. For me personally it's the teeth, whenever he opens his mouth and I can see his teeth it just weirds me out for some reason. Whoever designed that and whoever OK'd that design really needs a slap upside the head.
But that aside, the trailer actually sort of impressed me. It's not going to win any awards but if you go in expecting a dumb bit of fan wank based loosely on some video game source material this looks like a good bet to me. Jim Carrey as Eggman/Robotnik really made that trailer for me, from those small clips I already really enjoy the performance he's giving out with it. I mean, for a Sonic movie to be "true" to its source material all it really needs is Sonic, Eggman, robots and sonic destroying those robots. In the trailer it shows Eggman chasing Sonic and some dude in a car where Sonic then gets out of the car and spindashes Eggmans vehicle causing it to fly off the road. Sonic quips at him and then Eggman sicks some robots on him. Can't get much more Sonic than that without making the movie just a 90 minute lets play of the first game.
For anyone who looked at that trailer and threw their hands up angrily like "oh my god what the fuck is wrong with these people?!" my reply to you is "what the fuck is wrong with YOU!?". Video game movies have been shit since the dawn of video game movies. Just because you ironically like the original Mario Brothers movie doesn't change the fact that it's a steaming pile of shit that has nothing to do with Mario. I can hear people screaming at me now like "But Silent Hill is a good video game movie", which it's not. Even the Mario Bros movie didn't misunderstand the source material quite as hard as that movie did, Silent Hill isn't just hot garbage but it's offensive hot garbage. On top of that, don't forget the piles of boring, forgettable, shit video game movies like fucking Hitman and Warcraft that have come out over the years.
This will either be a good bit of stupid fun and be remembered for being so bad it's good OR it'll be a boring pile of nothing that everyone will forget about in 6 months after it's release. I for one, can't wait to see it, I'll be in that line for the theatre DAY. ONE.
If you're a piece of weaboo trash like me then you'll know that on May 1st the era of Heisei is coming to an end and it will change to Reiwa. If you aren't a piece of weaboo trash and don't know what that is the name of the era in Japan changes when the emperor changes. This effects the Japanese calendar so right now the year is Heisei 31 but as of May 1st the date will change to Reiwa 1.
I saw a tweet that said that Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu, asked 7000 people what their top 3 games of the Heisei period were. Heisei started in 1989 so that's a huge pool of games to choose from. The top 3 for them was Chrono Trigger, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Nier: Automata. So of course like the self important little shit that I am, I'm going to tell you my top 3 games of the Heisei period.
#3 Hotline Miami
This entry could have been one of so many things. It could have been Undertale, it could have been ANY Shin Megami Tensei game, it could have been Dragon Quest 11. Ask me tomorrow what my number 3 would have been and I promise you it will change, I just can't really pick with great certainty. The game that sticks out in the front of my mind right now though is Hotline Miami. Released in 2012 (Heisei 24) it was a violent, retro style half action half puzzle game that had you don an animal mask and mow down men in white suits. It was fast, frantic, fun as hell and became one of my core speedrun games for a long while
If you've not played it then please give it ago. Great gameplay, great soundtrack and great style. It's cheap on Steam so don't dilly dally, go buy it NOW
#2 Shadow Hearts
Shadow Hearts is a sort of unique JRPG released in 2001 (Heisei 13) on PS2. It follows the adventures of half Japanese, half Russian protagonist Yuri Hyuga as he travels across Asia and Europe in an attempt to stop all manner of nightmare creatures and an English gentleman from doing all manner of unspeakable things. The games most interesting point was its "Judgement Ring" battle system, every time you did ANYTHING in a fight you had to play a sort of little timing mini game that would decide the outcome of your action. Miss the ring and you'd fail your attempt but get right near the edge of the hit zone and you'd be awarded bonus damage/healing or, lets say if you were using a stat-up item, a greater increase to that stat. The game also had a sanity system where if your characters fought for too long the stress of battle would cause them to go berserk and you would lose control of them.
Yuri also had an ability to fuse into one of about 21 demons to aid you in battle, all with really cool abilities. If you REALLY knew what you were doing you could get some secret demons too that would essentially break the game and make you an unstoppable power house. Getting them was a challenge but when you pulled it off the reward was very much worth it.
It also has a sequel, Shadow Hearts 2: Covenant which is also worth playing but nothing quite beats the charm that the first game had.
#1 Panzer Dragoon Saga
I mean, I gush about this game a lot, did you really think it could be anything else for me? Released in 1998 (Heisei 10) for the Sega Saturn, Panzer Dragoon Saga is easily one of the best RPGs I've ever played in my damn life and almost nothing has come close to besting it.
I could go at LONG length about why this game is so good but instead I'll just link my playthrough of it and you can see it for yourself
I'm also learning how to speedrun it currently so drop in the stream to see my progress with that.
If you can play it for yourself you ABSOLUTELY should. Don't question me, just do it.
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Of course, 1989 to 2019 is an extremely long time so I'm sure almost everybody will have a different set of 3 games that mean a lot to them. If you feel like telling me your top 3 then let me know, maybe you'll really love something that I've not heard of and I can find a hidden gem that I missed during my youth
Right, bit of a short post this time round but I'm changing up my stream schedule a little bit.
As of today, the only days for a guaranteed stream will be Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There MIGHT be streams on the other days of the week but don't expect them to happen too often.
There's a number of reasons for this. First and most importantly when it comes to the site is that I feel like the blog and the YouTube channel have kind of been sidelined in favor of me streaming almost every day. It would be nice to take some pressure off myself (purely self inflicted pressure) and have time to write more posts here or actually create some content for the YouTube channel that aren't just off the cuff game play commentaries.
The other reasons are more personal but include stuff like wanting to work on other personal projects, spending time with my family and trying to make a schedule in such a way that accounts for doing bullshit overtime at work.
The rotation of whatever day, NES Wheel, donation games and speedruns will not change, just the frequency at which these are happening. Hopefully I'll have some time to make more improvements to the stream as well. I got a new computer that's absolutely bestial and I'm clearly not using it to its full potential.
So again, thanks for the support, hope you keep watching and supporting the rest of the content, hopefully I'll have some exciting things to put out soon!
I was hoping this would die down, but it's been about a week and its still cropping up on my Twitter feed so its time for my hot take on the Sekiro easy mode debate.
If you don't know what's going on then thank your lucky stars but allow me to fill you in. Sekiro was released not too long ago, a game that's basically a Souls title but set in feudal Japan. Instead of fighting demons like in Souls or Lovecraftian horrors like in Bloodborne, you fight ninjas and shit. My experience with the game at time of writing is extremely limited but it's fun as all hell and extremely challenging.
I can pinpoint this controversy starting when some daft cunt called David Thier on Forbes wrote an article titled "Sekiro: Shadows Dies Twice Needs to respect its players and add an easy mode". Now lets ignore the fact that this guy is so stupid he cant even get the title right but this article sparked a bit of a thing on Twitter where a bunch of people who suck at games agreed wit him, and anyone with motor functions above that of a 4 month old baby thought that those people should fuck off.
I will take the top 3 arguments that I saw that these idiots on Twitter were making and tell you why your opinion should be thrown in the bin and you should never be listened to again.
1. The game should be accessible to everyone. It's too hard and drives people away
The short answer to this one is that the game just isn't for you. From Software made the game THEY wanted to make and THEY made an extremely challenging game that requires you to get to know it pretty well in order to win. This isn't about From respecting you, it's about you respecting that a group of artists wanted to make a game that's hard as shit and that's what they did. You crying about it is directly disrespecting the vision of these people who brought a game to the market with a very specific audience in mind.
Now I'm not saying don't play it, you just have to "git gud" (more on that later). If gitting gud at Sekiro is too much for you, go play Breath of the Wild, go play Skyrim, go play The Witcher or any of the other hundreds of games that are more than happy to hand hold, quest marker, auto save every 30 seconds your way to victory for you. There's nothing wrong with those games, I like those games, but sometimes I want to beat my face off a brick wall and for that reason I'm glad that Sekiro and SoulsBorne and as unrelenting as they are.
If From Software WANTED to put in an easy mode, then fine, no complaints from me. But saying that From are "disrespecting their players" because you can't figure out how to parry correctly and learn a boss pattern are too just makes you look like an entitled little prick. Their game, their rules, step up or step off.
2. The "git gud" mentality is "gate keeping" and turns people off the game
This point always makes me chuckle for two reasons. The first being that this is the internet where people will call each other the most horrible, racist, bigoted shitty things at the drop of a hat for almost NOTHING. People who play souls tell you get good at the game your playing instead of whining about it and THAT'S "gatekeeping"? Are you insane?
The second funny thing is that if you go into a Souls community with actual questions for advice, tips, how you should set up a character and things like that, they are more than happy to help. If you go in there with a positive, can do attitude, I GUARANTEE you that 9 times out of 10 you'll get some genuine help. You are right in saying "git gud" is an insult but its not aimed at the lesser skilled looking to get better. It's aimed at people like Thier and everyone who agreed with him, who got killed by the first few enemies and threw a strop screaming "this game needs to be made easier for ME!" on social media.
3. Making Sekiro hard is ableist
BAM! THERE IT IS! It's 2019 so everything has to be some kind of -ist or -phobic, right?
This point is interesting because I do sort of agree that it would be nice if games COULD be a bit more accessible to people with limited functions so that more people could enjoy these games. It's a big world of super fun media and it would be a shame to miss out on it because you were in an unfortunate accident or you were born with some kind of defect that leaves you unable to play.
But the game that you decided to pick on for this point was a Souls game.......are you really that fucking stupid?
Souls games ARE hard as hell, everyone knows that, but because of that people have done incredible things with it, they, got gud so to speak.
You think Souls is discriminating against you because you have no use of your arms? Well it's been provably done with feet only
and not just that guy.
People have beaten these games in all manners of ways with all manners of objects from Guitar Hero pads to Frying pans. You might have a point if you went against literally ANY OTHER GAME with this point, but you chose a Souls game, you are just ASKING to be clowned on.
Sekiro doesn't need an easy mode, end of story. Complaining that Sekiro needs an easy mode is like me complaining that a romantic comedy movie doesn't have enough horror elements. Those movies aren't FOR me, there are plenty of other movies to watch. Just the same, Sekiro might not be for you, there are plenty of other games you could play instead. If you want to take the time to build your skills and achieve victory, the community will welcome you with open arms, but just don't cry when your caustic whinging makes people tell you to fuck off instead
