MegaTen Mega Day

 

Today has been a day for Megami Tensei games and that means I had a very good day indeed.

In my work lunch break I broke out the Switch in order to play some Shin Megami Tensei 5 which basically involved me spending the entire hour getting my ass handed to me.  I've come across a side quest that I got from a Lilim who said that she would join me in exchange for going and murdering a Principality.  If you present me with a choice of cute girl in booty shorts or Statue of Liberty lookin-ass angel thing, I know where my loyalty lies.  So off I go, about to spit in the face of God once more, as is customary in these games where I come to the grim realization that I don't actually have a demon that knows Mudo.  This, I thought, would be fine because I'm still doing pretty good damage and despite the damage buff they get from the hard mode they aren't one shotting me or anything.  The problem with this fight however is that there's two of these fuckers and they keep healing each other.  Their heal gets them to full and eventually I just run out of steam before I can take them down.  This of course means that I made exactly 0 progress in my play session today as I went around gathering money from vending machines so that I can go and re-summon or maybe fuse a few things with Mudo.  I wasn't able to beat them this afternoon but I think I'm in a good position to win in my next session.

Afer that I came home from the office, fired up the stream and started playing Persona 2 Innocent Sin.  I'm playing a fan-translation of the original PS1 version because it has a set on Retro Achievements and I'm an absolute whore for that website 

https://retroachievements.org/game/11355

Given that modern Persona sort of bears a fair bit of similarity to mainline in demon gathering and fusion it's definately a change of pace to play a game like Persona 2.  Persona 2 still has a negotiation mechanic but a successful demon chat will result in them giving you a stack of cards of whatever type they are.  You then take these cards to the velvet room and summon them so the whole fusion thing is sort of out of the window and instead you just pay for demons.  Between that, the automated combat that you have to manage to make sure you're ranking things up and fusion spells (powerful magics that also have a chance to randomly raise your stats) there's an awful lot to take in at the start.  I spent my time strolling down easy street beating up on demons for level ups and not progressing the plot much but I have another session penned in for the first hour of tomorrows stream so maybe we can at least get to the first boss within that time. Looking forward to playing both this game and it's follow up, Eternal Punishment!

Massive Rat War

 Well my Sunday was filled with mainly not game related stuff but the one thing I did manage to do was finish A Plague Tale: Innocence.  Like I said in the previous post, it's not a bad game but it doesn't have enough good ideas to support its length.  There was about 16 chapters total with the first 6 and the last 2 being sort of cool and then everything in between feeling like a bunch of stupid padding.  They could have very easily cut the game down to about 10 chapters and it would have been a perfect length but instead it really does start to feel like a slog by the end.  

 Spoilers ahead if you care for some reason

One thing I did find quite interesting though is that in the last few moments of the game you get to actually control the rats and you have to sic them on dudes like little diseased Pikmin.  You spend maybe 2 chapters of the game using this power to get through some guards only for the entire thing to climax in what I can only describe as a rat war with a priest.  I was sort of worried that the game would do that really annoying thing of just having you fight goons while a cutscene happens in the background and you just win when enough of them are dead but there's a full on hilarious boss battle with giant rat towers and it was actually quite the spectacle.  I'm glad that I stuck with it to the end but I'm also glad that I didn't have to pay for it. 6/10 I guess.

Before I wrote this article I actually loaded up a game called Ghost Runner, a sort of Hotline Miami via Mirrors Edge that's kind of fun.  I got half way through a stage though when a spinning platform bugged out when I landed on it and angled itself at about 45 degrees.  When I respawned I could still land on the platform but it was clipping through the wall I was supposed to run along and when I tried to do the wall run I'd get knocked off and fall to my death.  I tried to exit the game and reload my save thinking I could go from the checkpoint but when the game loaded in I was at the start of the stage and upon seeing that I promptly quit the game and it might be a good few days before I drum up the will to play it again.  

Tomorrow I'm hoping will be a bit of a MegaTen day.  I'm working in the office which means I'll be lugging my Switch down with me to play some SMT V in my lunch break and when I get home I'll be firing up the PS1 version of Persona 2 (Innocent Sin) for the Stream!  I'll be back tomorrow to report how many times I got my ass kicked by demons

The Worst Controls on the Playstation

 

Was too sleepy at the end of the stream last night to fire up Blogger and write a post so instead I'll do it now, just after I wake up 

I've been making slow progress on Shin Megami Tensei 5, of course.  I've seemed to have hit a bit of a difficulty spike in the area that I'm in.  Previously every encounter was a walk down easy street and then I hit this next big area and suddenly encounters aren't so much difficult as much as they have the potential to go completely go tits up in a single enemy turn.  One bad critical or one miss and my life flashes before my eyees, especially in a game where the death of the main character means a game over even if all your other demons are just fine.  Nothing however, that a bit of demon management and maybe a little grinding for a level or two can't solve though.

I'm also coming up on the end of A Plague Tale which is a game that's FAR overstaying its welcome.  It's not a bad game by any stretch, a fairly generic hairy dad game where the hairy dad has been replaced with a teenage girl and her child brother but it just doesn't have enough ideas to support it's length.  I'm on chapter 15, hopefully the last one, but it feels like should have ended 5 chapters ago.  There's only so much you can do with "sneak around dudes" and "avoid rats" and you can see the game struggling at around chapter 6 to keep things interesting.  I don't hate this game but I'm sure as hell glad that Epic Game Store gave it to me for free, I might have been a bit less charitable with it if I had actually paid money.

Finally I spent my time on stream playing Megaman Legends on the PS1 which is I'm fairly certain the only series of Megaman games I've not played before unless there's some obscure Megaman Kart on something like the Wonderswan or some shit.  The game is actually pretty fun despite feeling a bit clunky at first but once you get a handle on it all it feels just fine.  Also the way the characters act and that specific brand of 90s anime voice acting makes me feel like I'm playing some kind of Saturday morning cartoon, it's the kind of game that a younger me would have REALLY loved.  One thing I cannot forgive though is the movement controls.  Holy Mary Mother of God these are maybe THE WORST movement controls I've seen in a game maybe ever.  People give classic Survival Horror tank controls shit for being "clunky and hard" but Megaman Legends makes Resident Evil feel like the smoothest thing in the world.  You move forward and back with up and down, as usual, but then you rotate Megaman with L1 and R1 and left and right are this weird strafe thing that isn't good for anything since the camera is too close and you can't see where you're going when strafing.  You can reverse these, which I did, but it still feels weird.  On top of that, the lock-on feature is the most fussy piece of garbage I've ever seen in a game.  If you are locked on to one enemy and another enemy comes even remotely near you, the lock on will start swinging back and forth between the two targets thus making killing either of them next to impossible.  Luckily shots sort of home onto enemies if you fire near them so locking on isn't actually required most of the time but it's still annoying when flying enemies decide to turn up.

With that Mega-man-mega-bitching out of the way I'm now off to try and finish A Plague Tale so that maybe I can spend my evening complaining about it on here. 

Valkyrie の Jank

 I know I said not too long ago I would be trying to use the blog for daily posts about my gaming activities but I shortly found myself in a bit of a busy situation and so things fell to the wayside for a while.  I'm still mad busy but I figured at least attempting to write something short for the day is better than nothing at all. 

Today has been a sort of uneventful day for gaming.  A day in the office meant that my time to game while managing this other thing meant that I wasn't really able to do anything until I got on stream.  When I did get on stream though I kicked things off with a bit of Megaman 1, a game I'm attempting to learn to speedrun.  The world recording is an absolutely insane 18 minutes-ish and while I'm struggling to stay under 30 minutes progress with the PB is coming nice and gradually.  There's a TON of very precise tricks in that game to skip massive portions of levels and I can pull of about 2 of them with any kind of reliability, 1 I can get sometimes and the rest I can't do yet at all.  If I want to get serious about cutting that time down learning those skips will be super important.

The main focus of today's gaming though was Legend of the Valkyrie on the NES as part of my 100 game challenge on stream.  It's a fun little game, I described it in my first session as it playing similar to Hydlide but if someone who was actually competant had made it.  Well I say competant but it's got a fair amount of bullshit involved with enemies spawning in at random and flinging fireballs that do a large chunk of your HP.  A problem that's circumvented by wandering around and grinding exp, sure, but it takes so long to get a single level that doing laps of the in starts to become a chore after a while though.

The most annoying thing about this game though is the password system.  Like a lot of games of it's time, when you want to stop and take a break, you have to generate a password.  It's not a huge password like in something like Megami Tensei but it's long enough and the entry screen annoying enough to be a bit of a pain in the ass.  You would think, with a password of that length, it would store everything in your current game but it doesn't.  When you put in the password you start with your current gold and exp intact but your inventory is completely wiped and you start on the first island.  That means that every time you play, you have to walk all the way around the mountains, kill a worm thing and get the boat, then ride the boat all the way to where you were before.  There are teleporters that I've not used yet that may solve at least some of this issue but I've been told that beating the game without the boat is impossible so at the very least you have to do that task every session.  When I played Metal Gear and put in that password that game was able to keep track of all my stuff and even exact location on the map but Valkyrie feels the need to rob all my shit as punishment for turning the game off, what a time vampire.

Anyway, at least the game is kind of fun to play and hopefully I can just sweep though the whole thing in a single session next week.  If you've got a long Sunday afternoon to kill and you wanna try a weird NES game then maybe give it a try, there isn't much text and there's a guide online so it being Japan only isn't really a problem.

Hopefully I'll have more time tomorrow for a bit of SMT V but for now I'm going to bed

Snakes and Organized Crime

 Well I was in the office today so unfortunately the first "game diary" style post I'm putting up, I don't actually have all that much to say.  

In the time I had during my lunch break I, of course, played as much Shin Megami Tensei 5 as I could squeeze in.  I'm currently really enjoying this game and one thing I'm really happy about is my decision to put it on hard mode.  I remember back in my younger days, when I first got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne (Or Lucifers Call as it was called for me) and my unfamiliarity with the series meant that I found the whole thing quite challenging.  Every boss fight was a struggle, a hard earned win that felt good when I figured out a good team of demons or a good strategy.  As I got older and played more MegaTen I eventually "got gud" so when I eventually got my hands on Shin Megami Tensei 4 I breezed through that entire game no problem and with that games hard mode being locked behind a full game clear, I haven't yet got around to doing it.  

Shin Megami Tensei 5 on hard, however, has BIG Nocturne energy that I'm really enjoying.  Just as I was getting comfortable running around the map and making short work of enemies, I enter a building and was treated to a boss fight.  I'm not going to spoil what the boss is or anything like that but it involves snakes but not by Tokyo Tower.  This boss stomped my shit effortlessly because my setup was AWFUL for it and unfortunately my lunch break ended before I could get another try.  However I've got some demons in stock that can help, I changed up my resistances so I'm not just granting it free turns and I'm ready to run right back in there and beat it's ass.  Excitement.

The other game I manged to get a fairly long session on today was Yakuza Kiwami, a game I'm playing on stream as part of my Yak-Attack series playthrough.  Most streams I do of that game devolve into me just doing mini-games for completion points but today I actually managed to progress the plot a little and I really like the plot of Kiwami so it's always a treat to see more of those cinematics.  On top of that I beat all the batting challenges which is a feat I'm particularly proud of since when I started the game I could barely even hit the ball AND I won a game of Shogi, a feat I thought was actually impossible.  I didn't get the completion point since you have to win a match without using the take-back function for that but the game can go fuck itself, I'm just happy I got a win at all.

I wanted to sign off each of these posts with a short "wot I plan to play tomorrow" bit but for the forseeable future every day is pretty much going to be playing just as much SMT5 as possible.  I actually think I'm near the end of my first playthrough for A Plague Tale: Innocence so maybe I'll put some time into that and try and see the ending but demon-busting takes main priority. 

Plans For Identity Gaming 2022

 

It's mid-November at time of writing I've come to the grim realisation that I've barely posted anything here or on YouTube for MONTHS.  Here I've been posting once ever so often but YouTube has been particularly barren of content for maybe over a year.  So the purpose of this post is to layout a plan for the 3 main platforms that I use for this charity page and maybe then I'll stop procrastinating and not let things like this or the YouTube channel fall to the wayside.

The Blog

It's been sort of hard to give a shit about updating the blog over the last year or so.  My main method of content production for the charity effort has been through the Twitch stream and on there I'll discuss things that I'd usually write here but live and with a chat.  I don't need to write a piece about my thoughts on a game I've been playing here because while I'm chilling with chat I can just talk about it there and hear other peoples opinions on it in real time, which is much cooler.

But the blog is where this whole thing started so I don't just want to let it die, so starting from either this evening (I'm writing this around noon) or tomorrow evening I'm going to start using the blog space as a sort of "Game diary".  Just a place I come to every evening before bed to write out what I've been gaming on that day and how I felt about it or some quick thoughts about some piece of news I found or whatever.  A pure stream of conscienceness with no real rhyme or reason, just to give people a little insight into what I've been doing and what kind of game-related thoughts are flying around my dumb brain.

The YouTube Channel 

This is the one facet of Identity Gaming that's basically been dead for a long-ass time.  I used to upload off the cuff lets plays and I experimented with some kind of unscripted ramblings about various topics to not a lot of success.  I'm not usually one to care about subscriber counts and video view counts and I was happy to upload that kind of content to an minescule viewership just because it was fun to turn on my mic and ramble randomly about something while I played odd games that interested me.  Back then though, the YouTube channel was making a small amount of money.  I forget what the network was called but I was getting about $20-$40 a month which I would then funnel into the charity.  My low effort content was generating cash for the Alzheimer's Society and that felt good.

Then YouTube changed the rules to me needing 1000 subs, I lost monetization and, since the point of Identity Gaming is to raise money for a charity I let the YouTube side of things die almost completely, acting more of a sort of repository for when I did something cool on stream like a speedrun PB or my Cuphead 200% deathless run. 

But that's sort of defeatist isn't it?  I'm ignoring an entire avenue of potential charity raising just because I'm too lazy to put some effort into a video.  Well then I got to thinking, I hate the state of modern game reviews and I'm a big fan of YouTube made analytical content, so why don't I do that?  The YouTube channel going forward will be used for long form video essay type shit about games wot I love or games wot I hate.  I've already started working on recording and scripting for the first one and for the first time in a while I'm actually having fun producing for YouTube again.  Even if it gets 1 view, 1 like and my channel doesn't grow at all off the effort, it's better to at least try than to just let the channel die.

Twitch

I don't even need to say anything about Twitch really, do I?  Nothing is really going to change here.  More streams, more donation incentives, more prizes being added to the list via the streak system we have going.  Hopefully I can find a little bit more time to work on emotes, overlays and all sorts of other stuff to make the viewing experience overall better for you guys but generally speaking it's business as usual here.

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There's some other minor things like Twitter where I'm planning to stop doom-scrolling through bad takes written by IGN journos and being toxic and instead I can just fill my timeline with me just enjoying things that I'm playing or finding cool indie projects that I think are worth keeping and eye on.  There's also instagram which is about as equally dead as the YouTube at time of writing so maybe I can put more effort into posting some cool game stuff I find on my travels while drowning the image in hashtags.

I'm hoping we can meet some BIG goals next year both for the content and for the charity and I cannot thank you all enough for your continued support up to this point.