My Friend Pedro

Just before my winter holiday started I had the joy of playing through My Friend Pedro on PC and while it is a simple game, it's an extremely fun one that you should check out.

There isn't too much of a story to speak of in Pedro, you wake up in some place and get told to kill dudes by a Banana.  I think you're trying to get revenge on someone but I don't really remember since it was early December when I finished it but the story is basically just background noise as you run through stages shooting dudes and having your banana companion quip at you.

The gameplay however is where things get interesting.  At a basic level you are tasked with running through the stages from the start to the end, killing all the dudes along the way.  You are given a pair of pistols to do this with and you can find a bunch of other weapons on the way.  You are also given a bullet time mechanic to help you line up shots and avoid damage and if you are wielding two guns you  can use the right click to split your aim between two targets.  The game itself, at least on normal difficulty, isn't that hard to just finish, but where things get tricky is the scoring system.  You are given points for each kill, for each kill you make within a certain time frame you are given a multiplier for those points and on top of that you are awarded extra points for being flashy.  So for example, you COULD stand at a distance and pop at guys one by one and play it safe OR you could run into the room, flip off a wall, shoot and exploding barrel and use your split aim to headshot the two guys nearest to you in mid air for big score.  There's also plenty of pans, bouncy thingies and other environmental things to help you with the carnage.  Those who play nice and flashy are rewarded with a rank at the end of each stage AND the game gives you a little gif of your flashiest kill that you can share on social media.

There are a couple of stages that change up the gameplay style such as a bike chase and a part where you're falling off a building but these really just amount to auto-scrollers where you shoot a set amount of dudes and maybe fight a boss.  Each stage also has its own little gimmick which means that you have to juggle planning the best way through the stage to not die and trying to find a way to get the most score.

My Friend Pedro, while a little on the short side, is a great game with quite a bit of replayability between hunting for ranks and extra difficulty modes and at 15 pounds that's a pretty good deal for what you're getting.  So if you're into things like Hotline Miami and other arcadey type, over the top action games, give this one a try. Oh, it's also avaliable on Switch.

My Top 3 Games of Heisei

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

Tau Plays Hotline Miami Part 5

Tau Plays Hotline Miami Part 4

Tau Plays Hotline Miami Part 3

Tau Plays Hotline Miami Part 2

Tau Plays Hotline Miami Part 1

Bloodbath Kavkaz

Good lord what the hell is this game?  If you go on Steam and have a look at the store page you may be led into believing that this is some kind of Hotline Miami clone and while you'd be right from a game play perspective the content of this game is so unhinged that it feels like it was created during some kind of acid trip.

Developed and published by Dagestan Technology and released on Steam in 2015, Bloodbath Kavkaz is essentially a Hotline Miami clone of the most shameless variety.  You play from a top down perspective and control aiming with the mouse as you shoot your way through a bunch of retro looking levels.  The difference between this and Hotline, at least on a surface level is that while in Hotline EVERYTHING is sprites, the enemies and characters in this game either look like they were drawn in MS Paint or they have weirdly realistic faces as if someone took a photo of their corner shop owner and slapped it on every bad guy.

Where the game starts to differ though is in the story.  I would love to tell you what the story is but it's so fucking insane and the translation so badly done that I can't even really describe it.  You start the game being told that you need to go and kill a guy called Jafar and then from their you embark on acid trips and take orders from sentient pineapples and all sorts of other weirdness.  I imagine during development they just locked the writer in a closet with a large pile of hard drugs and told him that he wasn't allowed to leave until A) He'd written the entire game and B) taken all the drugs

While the game has certain points of being so bad that it's funny, for the most part Bloodbath Kavkaz is painful to play.  The collision on levels is atrocious, hit detection can be strange the sound and music design assaults your senses and sort of leaves you dazed and upset when you finish a session.  Occasionally a level will just break and become unbeatable but on the other hand I had one occasion where my death resulted in a level clear and took me to the results screen so it seems as if the game doesn't even understand its own rules.

Bloodbath Kavkaz also has some DLC called Khovan Revenge but I've heard it's short and doesn't have any English text.  Although while Kavkaz has a "mixed" rating on Steam while Khovan Revenge has a "mostly positive" so either people are trolling hard or they actually made the follow up game a little better.

Either way, there are plenty of short, cheap, not shit games you could get your hands on without wasting your time with this tripe.  I don't even remember how I came to own this game but you could do yourself a favor by keeping it out of your library.

On Hatred

Hatred is a game I've been largely ignoring.  I caught a quick glance at it back when it was first announced and then I just stopped caring until today.  I caught wind of an online petition made by some guy whom I can't remember the name of threatening the developers with all sorts of horrible crap unless they take down the game and apologise.

So I decided at that point to actually take a look, "how bad could it be?" I thought.  Well it's pretty bad, the game play trailer depicts some dude stepping out of his house and gunning down a bunch of innocents.  The action is occasionally split up with scenes of him gruesomely executing some poor person in some terrible way and there's a little bit at the start where he gives some speech about how much he hates the world.

I don't like the look of Hatred but not because it offends me or anything stupid like that, it just looks shit.  From what I could gather, game play wise, it just looks like Hotline Miami but with all the challenge and charm taken out. Also the game fucking REEKS of trying too hard.  It's obviously lacking in certain aspects so it's relying entirely on shock value to draw you in but really it just feels like something an extremely angsty 16 year old would produce.

However, as for people complaining about this game and calling for it to be banned or whatever, you people are fucking morons.  Sure, the game looks like shit and it's tasteless as all hell but it does have a right to exist.  You can't just live in a bubble the whole fucking time and demand that anything that even remotely upsets you be wiped from the face of the earth.  The developers of this game do have a right to make it and if there does exist an audience for this kind of game, or if it does turn out to be really good (HA!) then it will be successful.  If it's a shit game that no one wants to play, it'll bomb and chances are that it'll be a good while before anyone wants to try another shock value project like this again.

If you don't like it then just don't play it.  No one is going to FORCE you to play Hatred and you whinging about it to be censored just to suit your taste is as equally pathetic as the games tasteless content.  Let the people who just want some senseless violence have it and let the people with a sense of morbid curiosity for a game like this indulge and waste a few bucks.  You can go on playing the games YOU like and Hatred will have no bearing on that at all.

It's the kind of game that will fall into obscurity a month or two after launch and only a handful of people will ever mention it again.  Like Postal.  So shut up and just enjoy your own fucking stuff rather than trying to police peoples tastes and interests. 

Too Much Drama In Western Games Industry

I want to come clean about something.  Ever since it started, I've been silently following the #GamerGate story pretty closely.  I'm not going to talk about that whole thing at any length because it's the kind of interest controversy that I don't want to get myself in.  If you give a shit about what some nobody on a blog has to say about the whole thing, then make a request with a charity donation because I've already received nasty emails for making certain, unrelated tweets and I can't be arsed potentially getting anymore.

#GamerGate had me thinking though that there is WAYYYY too much fucking drama in the western games industry.  Every time there's a new game or someone writes an article it's always surrounded in some kind of fucking drama and it's rather tiring.

A while back there was some promotional content released for the upcoming Hotline Miami 2 but any excitement I had was dashed by a number of idiots on the internet crying about a certain scene and how it offended them.  More recently, Bayonetta 2 came out recently and while press surrounding the game is positive I can't help but trip over a number of articles crying about how the game is "sexist" or whatever stupid uneducated bullshit they are trying to peddle for clicks.

All these issues that keep coming out of the western press about violence, sexism and other stupid shit just pisses me off.  Why can't I play a game with a sexy woman and just appreciate it for being a damn good brawler?  Why can't I just play something horrifically violent and just have fun killing dudes in a virtual world and not have someone claim that I'm a serial killer waiting to happen?  Whenever I read articles on websites about games that I enjoy, I get the impression that I'm not allowed to have fun unless I feel some kind of sense of shame or self disgust for finding said games enjoyable.

There's a lot less of this drama and PC crap in Japan though.  Granted I don't follow either regions gaming press all that closely but all I ever see out of the Japanese press is a celebration of a games release.  It can be a game about big tit ninjas or killing millions of dudes and as long as it's fun to play then it will be talked about favourably.   I find that Japanese people care a lot less about the various -isms or worrying about if X, Y, Z game is going to cause the next mass murder, they just ask "is it fun or not?" and go from there.

I'm not saying western games are bad or anything like that, just that western releases always come with a lot more baggage than Japanese ones, which is sad really.

Nothing Is Ever Easy, Is It?

Sorry for the shitty stock image but that's really how I feel about my new goddamn computer, at least until today.

You may have noticed that I've not made any posts for the last couple of days.  It's not because I've been busy with work or social stuff or because I don't have anything to talk about or anything like that.  It's because I got this new computer and it's spent all this time being a complete fucking asshole.

I just wanted to unbox it, plug it in and fucking play same damn games but no, of course it's not that fucking easy.  Everything (with the exception of DotA2) ran like total and complete garbage and it only got worse if I tried to stream.  This didn't make any sense to me because the damn thing is faster than my last one AND has a better graphics card in it so I was totally stumped.

Then, with a little help from a friend of mine, we managed to figure out what the fuck was going on.  This fucking machine has 2 graphics cards in it or something.  One is the Intel HD integrated card and the other is my NVidea thing.  The idea is that the computer will automatically decide when to use the HD crap and when to use the NVidea card.

This explains why I was able to run DotA2 no problem and have it look all nice and shiny.  Except when it came to running Hotline Miami or They Bleed Pixels it was using the fucking integrated shit and not switching over to the NVidea, or at least I think that's what was going on.  The result was that the games ran like total shit and streaming would only make the problem worse.  However after fucking about with some options I've managed to make everything use the NVidea stuff so now it all runs nice and fast.

.....Or at least I think that is what was going on.  I like to think I'm OK with computers but I'm absolutely no expert.  Long story short is that I fixed my shit, I'll be able to start writing/recording/streaming a lot more often now and everything should be grand.

Why I love Speed Running

Very recently I've been speed running Silent Hill, or at least learning how to but if you watch the stream at all you already know this.  One thing I find when I talk about speed running to a few of my friends is that sometimes they say that they don't get it.  "Why would you want to beat a game as fast as you can? why not just enjoy it?" is the most common thing I hear from various people so now I just want to take a moment and explain why I love doing it so much even though I'm terrible.

Reason #1: Game Longevity

With some games people may complain that replayability is an issue.  They beat the game once and then have absolutely no desire to go back and attempt to beat it again because it's just not as fun as second time round.  What speed running does, for me at least, is makes games that have that issue a lot more fun to play over and over again.  For example, Hotline Miami is the kind of game that originally I had no interest in playing through more than once.  I'm not the kind of person who is interested in high scores or anything like that outside of the shmup genre so after I beat it once I didn't have much desire to go back and play.  But since discovering speed running I've played the shit out of Hotline Miami, just because the idea of beating my own time to the end of that game is really fun to me.

Reason #2: Knowledge of the title

I think that one misconception that people have about speed running is that it's JUST "getting to the end as fast as you can", but really it's a little more than that.  Let's say I go and pop in Metal Gear Solid 3 right now, I've played that game A LOT but there's no way I could do an effective speed run.  That's because the knowledge required to simply beat a game and the knowledge required to speed run it are 2 entirely different things.  Usually speed running will require quite intimate knowledge of the title and not just the route through each stage.  You have to know basically every little thing there is to know about not only the game itself, but all the technical things surrounding that game such as how many frames of animation something might take or how the hit boxes function.  It's something that I find fascinating to "study" and kind of goes hand in hand with the whole game longevity thing that I mentioned before

Reason #3: The community

It's weird, I've entered quite a few gaming communities over my many years and I'm sorry to say that the vast majority of them are filled with complete twats.  This isn't true for 100% of them though, and the speed running community are one of those few groups that aren't heavy on the twats.  One thing that people worry about when they are new to speed running is that "oh I'm bad, it would be embarrassing to even try when there are already so many good players".  But this is a load of crap because generally speaking people who speed run stuff are really nice.  I'm terrible at Megaman X but when I've done races on Speed Runs Live for it, people don't come into my chat to mock me, they come to give me advice and help me to improve my times and that level of friendliness is hard to find when it comes to strangers on the internet.

So, that's the big 3 reasons why I love speed running so much.  I know most people reading this probably don't care about why I love speed running so much, but it was something I thought I'd share so that maybe I could inspire a few others to take it up.

Personal Best Double Bill

My speed running skills have been getting better and better over the last few days!

Yesterday I streamed some speed runs of Hotline Miami live and ended up getting a new personal best time and then this morning I streamed some They Bleed Pixels and got a new personal best time in that as well! 

So right now, I'm sharing the runs with you for your viewing pleasure.  They don't come anywhere near any records but I'm quite proud of them, so even if you only watch a few minutes of it I'll be happy

The Vita: Good System, Needs Some Work

I own both a Vita and a 3DS, so what I'm not here to do is have a stupid one man portable console war.  I will say very briefly though, that I do prefer my vita to my 3DS.  It feels better to use and the games on it (Project Diva F and P4G, for example) I feel like playing way more than anything on my 3DS.

Anyway, if you do a bit of googling around for the Playstation Vita, it's not hard to see that really it's not selling all that well.  It's not doing awfully badly in its own right but it keeps trailing behind basically every other system on the market.

Now Sony have made some good steps getting all these indie developers involved.  The inclusion of The Binding of Isaac and Hotline Miami on the Vita is really good, but if Sony want this thing to do well they need to do more.  I think the biggest problem is that while the system is a nice piece of hardware, there really isn't anything good to get people to buy it.

Sony got kind of lucky with me, since I had a great deal of my shit stolen.  The port of P4G and Muramasa made me really excited because I would be able to play updated versions without having to overspend on original PS2 and Wii copies, which was nice.  But one look around the shops in the EU make it very clear that the Vita isn't getting much love in the games department. 

The situation in Japan isn't much better either though.  The selection is far far greater out here than it is in Sweden or the UK, but the problem is that the current game library for the Vita is mimicking the late PSP library.  What I mean by this is that there is nothing that really stands out, everything is just school girl dating sims or generic looking anime RPGs that only the most hardcore otakus would be remotely interested in.

If Sony just buckled down and put out lets say, 3 absolutely stellar games with good amount of content and quality, sales would skyrocket I imagine.  The Vita is a really nice piece of kit, people just need something to fucking play on it.

Terrible Journalism Strikes Again

How long has this been a thing!? I only found out about it a few days ago and you know after that big gushy post I made about Hotline Miami I'm hyped as hell for this.

So, what does my hype for Hotline Miami 2 have to do with terrible video games journalism?  Well have a read of this article on PC gamer.

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/hotline-miami-2-wrong-number/

The title reads "Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number hands-on" so you would expect this author, one Cara Ellison, to talk about the game right?  Well wrong, she spends very little time talking about the game and the majority of her post talking about her fucking feelings.

Her issue with the game is that the end of the tutorial features some kind of implied rape scene where the player character has his wicked way with a women and how she feels "betrayed" by its inclusion.  You may be thinking at this point that I'm going to go on another "games being sexist" rant, but I'm not, but before I get into the main point I have let me just point something out about Hotline Miami.

This was a screen shot I took last night while I was going through the levels getting puzzle pieces and A+ ranks.  If you look just in front of the open door, there is a dead male who has had his genitals blown off.  This, if you ask me is just as "bad" as that implied rape scene because you can infer from this situation that he was tortured by having his genitals mutilated before eventually being put out of his misery and shot in the head.  Sounds awful right?

Well on the other hand you could just realise that you are playing a game that is making you perform horrible acts against other human beings for points while showing you other horrible acts to bolster the games atmosphere and maybe even make some kind of statement into video game violence if you're the kind of person willing to read into it that far.

But anyway I'm getting far too into something that isn't my point.  My point is, that these so called "journalists" like Cara Ellison and many others are in the wrong job.  That article should have been about Hotline Miami 2, but instead it turned into another rant on feelings and political correctness.

I know exactly nothing more about Hotline Miami 2 after reading that article than before I came across it.  All I learnt is that the game is violent and that someones feelings were hurt, but I don't care about the writers feelings and I already knew it was violent so basically the whole thing is a big block of text about nothing at all.

These "journalists" with agendas need to be booted out of this industry, they are completely toxic for it and contribute nothing.  They aren't here to talk about games, they are here to talk about false controversy for nothing more than page views and it's getting a bit stupid now.  There are lots of sites such as Kotaku who care more about printing bullshit rather than actually talking about games.

I don't want to talk about this shit either, I just want to enjoy games.  Really I had planned to write a little mini review for 3D Dot Game Heroes since I just replayed it recently but if the people with common sense don't make it clear that this kind of "journalism" will not fly, then within the next 5 years there will be so many social justice "gaming" websites that finding actual gaming news will be next to fucking impossible.

If you want to talk about social justice shit, make a fucking blog or something and stop clogging up sites like PCGamer.com with this shit.  Those sites are for games and game discussion/news and I don't want to read about your fucking feelings on it.

Late to the Murder Party! Hotline Miami

If there is one thing I seriously regret, it's that I didn't pick this game up when it was first released, oh my god is it good.

Hotline Miami is a cool little Indie game that was released on Steam some time last year.  The story follows an unnamed protagonist as he gets messages on his answer machine to go murder a load of dudes.  There is more plot about this group of strange people in masks talking to you in riddles and some other stuff, but generally speaking the plot takes a back seat to the game play.

While the plot is sort of bare bones, the game play on the other hand is one of the most fun things I've had the joy of playing.  It's extremely basic yet there is a lot of strategy involved that'll keep you coming back to the same stages again and again.  You control your guy from a top down view, you use the right mouse to pick weapons up and left mouse to use them.  You then have to wander through each stage murdering all the guys in a given area before progressing to the next one.

It sounds easy but your character is just as fragile as the enemies so one bullet or one baseball bat to the head will have you restarting the level, but the levels are short and sweet so it's not too rage inducing.  The strategy comes from planning your route and executing it without anything going wrong, which isn't likely.  There is also a pretty in depth scoring system so if you're the kind of person who enjoys replaying stages for rank (like me) then you'll find that there is plenty of replay value to be had as you try lots of different thing to get that A+.

The other cool thing about this game is the masks that your character wears.  At the start your mask does nothing, but very quickly you get masks that have all sorts of strange effects like deadly door openings or longer combo windows.  It all adds to the overall strategy, so if you find yourself stuck, just wear a different mask and try something new.

Basically, Hotline Miami is a great game and if you've not played it already then you are missing out, hard.  Go on steam, pick it up and whittle away the hours killing lots of guys in white suits, assassination has never been so much fun.