Shovel Knight Part 8

Closing Down The Facebook Page

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Right now Identity Gaming has a number of social media accounts tied to it.  Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and as one guy doing this by myself that's a lot to manage.  So, I've made the decision to close down the Identity Gaming Facebook page.

There are two reasons for this decision

1) The quality of the page itself is garbage.  I've put basically no effort into the Facebook side of this website, I just sort of opened it at the start because I felt that I had to for some reason.  So if I'm not using it, there isn't really any point of it existing.

2) Facebook is cancer.  I follow a number of gaming groups on Facebook to browse through while I'm bored in the bathroom or on a train but almost every single Facebook gaming group is an absolute shit show filled with the absolute worst people.  Have you ever seen someone post a speedrun on a Facebook and then looked at the comments section?  The absolute biggest sacks of shit seem to frequent these pages and on the off chance that IG does grow bigger and get a bigger following, I do not want your average Facebook ruining my day.

For friends of mine who may be reading this, this does not mean I'm closing my personal account, I'm still going to pester you all with my links whenever I put out something new.  It also doesn't mean that Identity Gaming is in any danger of closing down either.  I'm just chopping off the worst part of it

2019 Vlog March 17th

Kenishi Yonezu

Look at that sexy, sexy man, hanging out in a trolley by the ocean like Mancunian chav trying to get the perfect Instagram picture.  This is Kenishi Yonezu, a sort of Japan music sensation who's been around for a good while but has really started exploding big time in the last maybe year or so.

If Yonezu had to be compared to a sort of some kind of Western artist he's sort of like Ed Sheeran.  Obviously being from two different parts of the world their actual music sounds way different but they are both pop artists that write and perform their own music and somehow just pump out really good songs constantly.

Usually with the weird, twee, "moe" type shit that infests my playlists a lot my friends hate it when I have control over a music selection but I have yet to meet a single person who hasn't found at least one Yonezu song that they really like.  My personal favorites are Mad Head Love, Flamingo and Loser so go give those a Google, maybe let me know what you think and if you find any others drop a comment about a song you enjoy.

Anyway, why the fuck am I talking about this guy?  This is a video game blog, not some kind of music blog.  I know next to nothing about music so why am I even bothering to make a post about some kind of Japanese music sensation?

So I discovered Yonezu through my wife when she started listening to a song called "Lemon".  That sort of set me down a road of exploring his library and learning a few of his songs for Karaoke.  One evening I'm in a karaoke booth with my wife and her sister when he sister drops the fact that Yonezu used to make music on Nico Nico Douga (Japanese YouTube) under the name Hachi.

Where had I heard that name before?.....

Oh yeah! He'd just had a bunch of his music featured in the god damn Hatsune Miku games.  Open, Close, Demons and the Dead (結ンデ開イテ羅刹ト骸 ) is probably one of my most played songs of the entire franchise and it was written by the man himself. Before he really got going he would make songs with Vocaloid and upload them to Nico Nico which then got picked up by Sega and featured in a number of the Hatsune Miku rhythm games. So turns out I'd been a fan of Yonezu the whole time and just didn't know it! So go check him out, he's a cool guy. His songs have been stuck on my playlist since at least December and ever month or so I somehow manage to find a new really catchy track buried somewhere on YouTube. It's also inspired me to dig out my Vita and give those Project Diva games another play!

The PS Vita is Dead, Long Live the PS Vita

Well it's over, the dream is dead, everybody go home.  Sony have announced that as of about two days ago, the PS Vita is to be discontinued.  A sad day for gaming indeed.

The PS Vita had a hard life, it was sort of hard to justify buying one if you lived outside of Japan.  I remember seeing it when it was new and thinking that it looked cool.  I went to the store to pick one up, looked at the selection of games that were available and just INSTANTLY put it back down.  I didn't really give a fuck about that Uncharted game that was released for it and the selection of titles for the system around launch time were extremely lacking.  Eventually I moved to Japan where the selection of games was much better and even better, my wife gifted me one for my birthday.  But the Vita had another curse which was it's memory cards.  You couldn't just use a normal micro SD card or anything like that, you had to buy a special PS Vita memory card and those bastards were NOT cheap.  I got the smallest one and still had to shell out $60 or so for it.  That's a pretty high barrier to entry.

Eventually the library of games got better and I built up a pretty enjoyable library of titles, most of which are Japanese exclusive unfortunately for the Western audience but the memory cards never got any cheaper and it could just never build the same kind of hype that it's competitor, the 3DS, was creating.

If you could read Japanese then the amount of surprisingly good JRPGs and dungeon crawling titles was kind of staggering.  Due to this, the Hatsune Miku Project Diva games and the fact that it's region free, my Vita has seen WAY more use than my 3DS.  I've not played my 3DS since Bravely Default came out but I'm still using my Vita about once a week.

So let's take a moment for our fallen hero, the Vita, the little console that good.  Hopefully some kind of effort will be made to emulate it so that a bunch of fan translations can be released and people can enjoy the great library of games that never made it across the pond.

2019 Vlog 3/3/2019