December Events and Incentive Changes

 

The year is coming to a close so its time to run down some events and updates for the blog and the stream

First thing I want to announce is that thanks to some extremely kind donations to the charity the Celeste 2  players 1 controller event has been met.  Things are still being planned but due to scheduling this is more than likely to become a bit that will be run at weekends once a month rather than just a one off marathon.  Once things have been finalized I'll be doing a separate post with more details.  

Next is the main December event which I am planning for the 19th which I'm dubbing The December Derust.  I've not really been doing any speedruns of any game for a long time so I thought in the coming year I'd like to get a bit more into it again.  So for the December long stream I will run through all of my current speed games AND one extra game which I've been meaning to learn for a while in order to set some new splits.  There's quite an array of games in my speed list so I'm sure there will be something for you to check out at some point no matter what

 I'm also changing the way the incentives page works from now on.  This is due to the fact that I'm funneling money from Twitch bits and subs into the charity so I'm now using an "incentive score" system.  This means that from now, there will only be 1 incentive at a time, with a fairly high "score" that you have to meet in order to make it happen.  To add points to the score you can do things like cheer bits in the stream, sub in the stream or donate directly to the charity, here's how it works.

100 Twitch bits = 1 point (I'll keep track, and add a point for every cumulative 100)

1 Twitch sub = 5 points (10 tier 2, 25 tier 3)

Just Giving Direct Donation = Donation value x2 (e.g donate $10 = 20 incentive score)

This way, people can still cheer and donate for things like wheel spins, game requests or any other stream specific things while at the same time helping to reach a goal for a fun event.  Incentives that currently have money put into them will be started at their current value, so the progress you already made won't go to waste!

I will also be adding some new prizes to the wheel of prizes in the coming few days so keep an eye on that page to see what's up for grabs

How About Get It Right the First Time?

 I'm almost certain I've written things on this topic before but very recently I had a very bad experience with some game bugs so I'm going to talk about it again.  

So if you've been watching the stream you know I've been playing a game called Days Gone and while I have a lot of bile to spill about that game one of the things that really sticks out about it is the number of bugs, glitches and hiccups the game has.

I've had textures not loading in, glitching through geometry, audio bugging out, frame rate stutters when its trying to load the world, escort characters just forgetting what they are doing along with a few other things.  The worst however came during a story critical mission where I had to clear a camp of dudes and then rescue a guy behind a locked door.  What was SUPPOSED to happen is that you kill the dudes and then you use your boot knife to jimmy open the door and save the guy.  What was happening to me was I'd kill the dudes, go to the door and then the game would pop up a message saying "Clear the area of enemies to rescue the hostage".  What I think was happening was that the guy in the room who had the guy at gunpoint that you're supposed to kill last after entering was being recognized as an enemy in the previous area and because he was alive it wasn't allowing me to open the door.  The problem with this, is that if I didn't clear this mission, the story WOULD NOT PROGRESS, I was essentially locked out of finishing the game.

The fix came in the form of a 28 gigabyte patch that I had been putting off downloading because space on my PS4 was running rather low.  In a desperate attempt to not have my time wasted by this shitty game I downloaded the patch, reset the mission and THEN thankfully it worked and while I'm happy about that, I can't help be mad about why the fuck it just didn't work in the first place.

This is a pretty big problem with games nowadays where companies will hype a game up, get it out as soon as they can and then fix shit later which is probably one of the shittiest practices I can think of along side gouging money out of idiots with loot boxes.  When we got the ability to download patches and fixes for our games it was a GOOD thing initially because it allowed developers to fix something unforeseen or missed during development but now its being used as a crutch by shitty companies so they can get your money out of you as soon as possible and then MAYBE fix any easily missed issues down the line.

Now when I've moaned about this shit in the past there's always some half-brained bellend who likes to open his stupid halitosis mouth at me with the comment "But game development is really hard! there's always going to be bugs and glitches in software this complex". and you know what? to some degree they are correct.

What I'm not saying is that I expect every game to be perfect on release, they are complex beasts worked on by many people and a few bugs here and there are probably going to slip through the cracks when being play tested.  This is especially true for small indie teams putting out games as passion projects where they just don't have the time or budget for long, drawn out play tests and they just want to put their labor of love out into the world.  But I'm not talking about those guys, I'm talking about big developers like the gigantic sacks of shit who developed days gone or the gaggle of sad fucks that work at Bethesda putting out AAA, full price games that are so badly broken that they suck to play and in some cases can't even be finished.

Even in those games, especially big open world ones I'm willing to let some shit slide.  Things that don't happen often like path finding going wrong or the occasional fall through the floor I can just deal with but HOW THE FUCK did main-plot, progression critical mission bugging out get missed in the initial launch batch?  A full price AAA game, unbeatable at launch, embarrassing.

Like I said, games are complex and bugs are inevitable but if you're going to charge me $60-80 to play a new game on the latest hardware then you better make sure it at the very least fucking works from start to finish.  But if you're attitude is anything like the likes of Bethesda or SIE Bend Studio then I sincerely hope that you studio goes under and every sandwich you have from this day forward is a bit dry and always has slightly stale bread.

Mobile Rhythm Game Bullshit

 

Recently I started playing a game on my phone called Project Sekai: Colorful Stage and despite the bile I'm about to dispense under this introduction, I'm having quite a good time with it.  It's a rhythm game sort of similar to Chunithm in the arcade but watered down and all of its songs are Vocaloid tunes.  Being the huge Vocaloid weeb boy that I am I downloaded it straight away and I'm actually quite pleased, for a game that I fiddle with for a couple of minutes at a time while dropping a log it's actually a lot of fun 

However there's something that Project Sekai does, as well as many other mobile rhythm games, that pisses me off to absolutely no end and that's song grading.  When you clear a song in basically any rhythm game the game spits out a results screen to tell you how did you, how many points you got and how accurate you were, things like that.  Usually taking front and center on these results screen is an overall grade for your performance.  For example in DDR if you fail a song you get an E and if you do nearly everything perfectly you get a AAA. While in every normal rhythm game this is based entirely on your skill as a player, in Project Sekai and many others it's based on something entirely different.

Like every mobile game and it's dog, Project Sekai has a "gatcha" system where you spend some in-game currency to get characters of varying rarity.  With those characters you build a team and in the context of a rhythm game like this they will have skills in order to boost your score or recover lost life bar under certain conditions.  Each of these characters also has a "power" level which increases as they level up and their power dictates how many points per note hit you get and I'm sure you can see at this point why this is a problem.

So when I play Project Sekai and I Full Combo a song on Expert or Master difficulty do you know what rank I get? A fucking B.  Not because I made any mistakes, not because my accuracy was off or anything like that, but I just haven't done the pre-requisite grinding for an S rank so I'm not allowed one.  While this doesn't seem like a big deal, in game rewards, especially timed event rewards, are tied to your song grading so I'm just missing out on a whole bunch of shit because my party just isn't generating the score I need for it.

Now you would think that this would only be a problem for new players, that after a while you'd build a team and start getting ranks no problem right? Well no, because of course there's a bunch of other bullshit that gives passive score buffs to certain characters or certain TYPES of character that you also need in order to get the grades that you actually deserve which of course means, more fucking grinding.

I know that complaining about grinding in a mobile game is akin to pissing in the ocean but there's something about its inclusion in a rhythm game of all thing that really irks me.  There's no reason it couldn't have just been a standard rhythm game and premium currency used to unlock songs or videos or other cosmetic features like note skins or whatever, I mean it's a Vocaloid game for mobile for fucks sake, it's basically a money printing machine in a market like Japan.

Anyway like I said, Project Sekai isn't the only game that has been guilty of this shit.  Idolmaster did it and Bang Dreamin' did it just to name two others.  Truth be told I'm actually sort of impressed at just how little Project Sekai seems to be pushing the premium currency side of things, they constantly shower you with it and the button for the premium store is a TINY thing in the bottom left of the main menu, much better than what I've seen for other titles.  Plus this game has the benefit of being 100% Vocaloid music which means that it could break down my door and murder my family and I'd still probably play it.

Moral of the story: Tie ranks to player skill, not to my fucking waifu collection, goddamn it!