Yurukill Pre-Purchase Impressions: Worryingly Interesting

 

Yurukill is a game that doesn't come out until July this year but after seeing the trailer it's such a weird idea that I have to say a few things about it.

Yurukill is being advertised as an "escape adventure bullet hell" game that is planned to be released for the Switch, PS4/5 and PC.  From watching the trailer it's easy to tell that this means the game is a visual novel combined with a sort of point and click adventure type thing that's ALSO combined with a....bullet hell shooter...of all things.  It's an interesting idea that will either be really good or be the gaming equivalent of chocolate mint ice cream on black pudding.  An idea that's so out there that regardless of what I hear about it from now until release, it's basically guaranteed that I'm going to buy it

Being a cross genre game doesn't inherently make it a bad idea.  Games like Persona 3 and up that combined Tokimeki Memorial style dating sims with RPGs turned out to be a fantastic idea and indie darling Undertale showed that you combine bullet hell "shooting" and RPG mechanics for something really special.  However what a game like Undertale also shows is just how hard it is to make a decent bullet hell shmup.

Let's be honest here, the combat in Undertale is kind of ass.  With the exception of maybe Sans and Genocide Route Undyne, most of the enemies have boring as shit, dull as dishwater attack patterns and the controls feel sort of "heavy" and the combat generally isn't all that great.  The writing and characters in that game is what makes it so special and the sub-standard combat can be forgiven because it's contextualised probably as part of the story.  As a "shmup" Undertale is a pile of ass but when regarded as an entire piece, it's not bad at all.  The other thing that elevates Undertale is that the set pieces in that game are incredible.  Like sure, the controls are kind of dog water and the patterns are basic and a bit dull for a shmup but the overall vibe of a fight like Metaton or the emotional weight behind the battle with Asgore means that it can get away with it.

But then there's Yurukill 

Just from this game player trailer alone you can see that Yurukill is a boring, generic looking ass shmup that looks like it was pulled from the underside of some doujin game freeware site.  Also it's hard to say for sure given what we know right now but it also looks like it doesn't benefit from having story context to help forgive boring game play.  Like there's a bunch of visual novel shit and then "oop, time for a shmup break" and the impression I get is that it's poorly thought out.  Some proper Triggerheart Excellia lookin-ass garbage.

But these are just my initial impressions from a trailer, who knows the later shmup levels might be crazy intense with fun game play and story context, don't judge a book by it's cover right?  I have another, slightly more personal reason for being wary of this game.  The first thing that this whole thing reminded me of when I first saw it wasn't Daganrompa, like it seems to in most people, but  Deadman Wonderland.  A fucking HORRENDOUS anime about a high school student being framed for a murder and having to serve a prison sentence in a theme park prison where people have to the death duels with their blood-based super powers.  It's fucking awful and I can't look at Yurukill and not get traumatic flashbacks to watching that pile of garbage.

Yurukill is an interesting combination of genres that means that even despite all the shit I just gave it in the above paragraphs I'm going to buy it and therefore I hope to whatever God may be watching down on us all that I'm wrong and the game is actually incredible.  But a dull shmup and a setting reminiscent of one of the worst pieces of fiction ever made means it has some work to do for a good write up.  

Fingers crossed though, I love it when whacky ideas work

PS3, PS4 and the Switch Controllers Can Kiss My Ass

 

Somewhere in a cardbox box, probably located in the family home I still have the Sega Mega Drive I got when I was 4 years old.  I can hook that bad boy up and shove a cart inside it and I promise you that the controller will still function.  I will be able to sit down and play a game of Gunstar Heroes or Vectorman on that thing from start to finish with no issues.  This level of durability seems to have gone completely out of the window in semi-recent times and I absolutely can't stand it.

First the PS3 controller.  The PS3 Controller is a pretty good pad that feels nice and is easy to game with, a good piece of essential gear for the system.  However, lurking inside the controller is a small piece of styrofoam that over time, with use, will wear down.  When this sucker wears down it causes your controller to start putting out random inputs.  For example I've been trying to slog my way through Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, an absolutely terrible game that gets even worse when the main character, Gabriel, is just doing whatever the fuck he wants.  Sometimes I would be in combat and despite me not pressing the X button to jump, he would jump.  Even more annoyingly is that killing enemies drops souls that you absorb to charge a magic bar with the L3 button, but pressing L3 would also, for some reason, press L1 which would activate the magic mode and waste whatever energy you just absorbed. The game is already shit and with this extra hurdle it makes me want to not play it at all.  

So I head online and try to find a fix and thankfully I find one.  A simple fix that involves opening the pad, finding the little piece of styrofoam that is apparently the cause of the issue and wrapping some electrical tape around it.  So I did that, great success no problem!  However when I put the pad back together, that plastic that keeps the shoulder buttons in place was so old and shitty that it basically just shattered in my hands.  It's not like I was slamming the controller back together, I was trying to be as careful as possible and the whole thing just fucking fell apart.  But even if I was doing an Incredible Hulk impression with my controller, why the fuck do I even have to do this in the first place?  I have retro controllers that are god knows how many years old and those all work fine so why the shit is the PS3 pad made like this?!

What's even worse, is that I ordered a Hori 3 controller off Amazon to replace it.  I went for this pad because its compatible with the PC and I wanted a pad to replace the shitty PS4 controller.  The reason the PS4 controller is in the title is because while it does work great when being played with the PS4, playing with it hooked up to a PC is a FUCKING. NIGHTMARE.  The micro-USB connection in the top of the pad is looser that your mum and disconnects from the computer constantly.  If you've ever watched a stream where I'm using the pad, you will hear that disconnect/reconnect sound CONSTANTLY and its really fucking annoying when it happens in the heat of game play.  I've never had this issue with any other device that uses micro USB, why is the PS4 pad made like such garbage in this regard?

So the Hori 3 works great on my PC but plugging it into my PS3 turned out to be a complete shit show.  I fire up Castlevania and all the buttons work but for some reason the sticks don't work.  I can do everything except what is possibly the most important function of the character, move.  This would also happen when using the PS4 controller with the PS3.  All these pads are the same fucking thing why do they have to operate so differently between games?!  It's not even consistant either since I had an issue when streaming No More Heroes on PS3 where I couldn't block attacks only to realize that the issue was that in that game, the shoulder buttons weren't working and everything else was just fine.  Playstation hasn't changed its controller layout since the fucking first system they put out, how is this so much hassle? It boggles the mind.

Now I was only going to complain about my Playstation pad woes in this post but any chance to shit on Nintendo I'm going to take.  At least with the Sony controllers they either worked properly for a long time or have annoying things when being used out of their primary intended use.  However the controllers on the Switch don't even get that and the Joycons are quite possibly one of the worst things I've ever had the displeasure of using.  Not only do they feel like shit but they start to drift if you so much as look at them funny.  I was getting Switch drift in less than a year of owning the system and MAYBE I'd understand if I was playing Smash Brothers 10 hours a day but my sticks starting drifting after playing though Fire Emblem of all fucking things.  No real intense stick use, just moving a cursor around a grid and selecting things on a menu was too much for that flimsy sack of garbage.  The only game I played before that was Breath of the Wild which, while a bit more intense on the stick, wasn't too heavy on rapid or strong movements.

But we all know the reason why the Joycons suck so much shit.  It's so that you shell out an additional 6-8000 yen for a Pro Controller.  Do you want to enjoy the games for the system that you already paid money for or do you want to torture your hands and give yourself permanent muscle damage from using the Joycons? Well if its the former better break out your wallet, motherfucker

Fuck you Nintendo, I hate you

Martha is Dead Censorship

A few days ago I came across a news story about some horror game I hadn't heard of until that point called Martha is Dead that was apparently being censored on Playstation and left alone on PC and X Box.  I then made an offhand tweet about some silliness I saw in the discourse surrounding the game only to find it getting flooded with likes, retweets and a couple of absolutely brainrotten comments from people who cannot read.  So I thought I'd take a little bit of time to say a few things on the issue here.

First of all the censorship itself seems stupid but at this point it's something I have come to expect from Sony.  The clip that is circling around social media is a scene of the game where the player is holding a severed head of some woman and the player character proceeds to use a razor to make cuts in the side of the head and then pull off the face (complete with button prompts!) and then they wear it or something. Sure, the scene in question is sort of shocking but it's no worse than anything else that comes out of other titles in the genre and even out of the genre of horror.  Severing limbs and DIY eye surgery in Dead Space, Lara Croft getting brutalized in the reboot games, Fatality animations in Mortal Kombat, no one seems to give a shit when this kind of thing is going on from huge studios but a small indie group make a face-ripping scene and suddenly its all "ooooh this is absolutely disgusting how could anyone possibly make this?!"

At least for me in Japan, Sony censoring violence is nothing new.  I have talked at length both on the blog and on stream about how parts of Until Dawn were censored so heavily that if affected the story.  Resident Evil is also very heavily censored when it comes to violence even in it's more expensive "Z-Versions".  The story I have heard (Im not sure how true this is, keep in mind) is that in 1997 is that some 14 year old kid abducted and beheaded a couple of Elementary school children and left their severed heads on the school gate for people to see.  The kid was caught and after all was said and done a politician called Shizuka Kamei put the blame squarely on "violent and cruel movies" and so acts of extreme violence in mutilation in films and games have been censored or not really done since then.  

So while the censorship is stupid and shouldn't be done, it at least makes some degree of sense that one of the biggest companies in the entire country wouldn't want to get on the bad side of those rules.  Nintendo, as far as I know, doesn't really have any games in their library that would require that kind of censorship and Microsoft is an American company that doesn't need to give a shit, which is why you probably don't see this kind of thing happening on those platforms.  

But I'll be honest, I stopped giving a shit about Sony censorship a long time ago, thems just the breaks, what my tweet was actually about was the individual user response about the content itself.  Most people responded with outrage at the censorship and that it should be left alone and if that kind of extreme violence in a piece of media makes you uncomfortable to the point of "literally shaking and crying" then just don't play it, something I agree with quite strongly.  What people need to realize is that while "video games are for everyone" is a nice fluffy statement that lets you pretend to be a good person on social media, the truth is that while games are for everyone, not ALL games are for everyone.  If you don't like violent, grotesque acts in your games, don't play horror.  If you don't like difficult gameplay, don't play Dark Souls or Cuphead.  I don't like endless boring life-sim bullshit like Animal Crossing but instead of moaning about it I can very easily accept its just not for me and then not buy it, it's really that easy.

Where I get my back up is when I was scrolling through the tweets and I saw someone describe the developers as "irresponsible" for "releasing the games without trigger warnings".  What this is doing is attempting to villify the creators of Martha is Dead for hiding the nature of the content in the game and acting as if the violence and adult themes are some kind of surprise.  Except that's not true is it?  The game is rated M and has all the relevent warnings and even if it didn't have that, the literal FIRST THING you see when going to the Steam page is this.

It's RIGHT THERE, before you can ever access the game description or the button to buy, you have to accept this warning.  Do not try and pass off your inability to read or lack of attention span on the developers as if it's their fault.  Just because it's not written with the words "TRIGGER WARNING" at the top of the page and is written as a paragraph full of vapid social media buzzwords doesn't mean it's not there.  

Anyway, I had no idea what the game was before this controversy and now I'm excited to pick it up for myself, possibly to play in some kind of October Horror Playlist on stream later this year.  So while the censorship is bad and the controversy stupid, at least I found an interesting game out of it.

Until Dawn

 

Until Dawn is a game that I ignored for the longest time because I saw it was a similar sort of title to things like Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain and David Cage had very much destroyed any hope I had of the "interactive movie" genre being any good.  Well, thanks to the viewer request system on my stream I was eventually forced to play it and I would like to formally apologise to Supermassive Games for ignoring their first game for so long because Until Dawn was probably one of the most fun experiences I've ever had on my PS4

The game follows a group of young adults (teenagers maybe? they might be high schoolers I forget and they look older than the game is telling me they are) having a weekend getaway in a snowy log cabin on top of a mountain.  The group pranks one of the girls who then gets upset and runs half naked into sub zero weather where she is then set upon by something or someone and ends up falling off a cliff with her sister to her death.  One year after the prank gone wrong, the group re-unite to try and have another party but this time with a bit less death and shenanigans ensue.

You, the player, are effectively watching this teen horror flick and every so often you get to make decisions for the characters or attempt to clear QTEs to see if they live or die.  There isn't quite as much weight to each choice or action as the game might have you believe in a lot of cases but some decisions are quite severe and do effect the plot in major ways and even a few of the QTE's will result in a character just outright biting the dust when failed which is a lot more than I can say for other games that I've played in this genre.  On your first go through you learn pretty quickly that this is the case but you aren't sure which decision will lead someone to their doom and which you can fail for the funnies so there is a decent sense of tension on that first run 

I'm going to get into spoiler territory  so if you haven't played it and you give a shit, stop reading here and go play it.

For example there's a part sort of early on where a boy and a girl are tied to a couple of chairs and one of you must die so the other may live.  The boy has a free hand and a gun on the table and you must decide if you are going to shoot her or yourself.  No matter what decision you make, no one dies because this is where the first of the games major twists takes place, where the whole thing is an elaborate prank being carried out by another character.  The two characters who were tied to the chair don't really talk about the effect of this decision after this scene so you may be led to believe that it's just one self contained scene for a long time, the boy and the girl even carry on their adventures and everything seems fine.

That is until the games second twist, where the game changes from a slasher movie to a supernatural monster flick and the group is being chased by the Wendigo, a lanky fucker that will rip your head off.  You get to a scene near the end of the game where the boy from the previous scene is being chased down a snowy path by the monster and when he reaches the cabin he needs the girl to open the door and let him in to safety.  If you shot yourself in the buzzsaw scene, she opens the door and you survive.  If you shot her she keeps the door tightly locked and watches you get your head ripped off by the Wendigo and sort of pretends to be sad about it.  There's even a combination of events you can do that I'm unsure of where she doesn't open the door for some reason and is distraught when she watches you get torn to shreds.  

There are plenty of scenes that play out in this way and are affected by stuff from WAY earlier in the game and it sort of invokes the same feeling that I had playing Kamaitachi no Yoru (also set in a snowy log cabin, funnily enough) on the SNES where we were working out every decision comination possible to get every possible ending scene, it was good fun there and it's good fun here.

I do have some minor complaints about the game though and while they don't ruin the experience they are worth noting.  There are some characters in the cast, two in particular spring to mind, that don't get nearly enough screen time.  They appear at the start and then either die SUPER fast or are ignored for most of the game and then get a little scene near the end.  Some of the decisions the cast decide to make on their own, outside of your choices, sometimes feel a bit stupid but I suppose you are playing a teen horror movie where this kind of thing is to be expected but it's still annoying.  Also parts of the game that involve walking from one area to another are PAINFULLY slow, with no proper run button and nothing to really do or figure out until the next set piece starts in 99% of cases.

There is one other HUGE complaint I have with the game but I'm separating it out because this is a problem that is no fault of the developer or the game itself.  Since I live in Japan, I was playing the Japanese version of the game and this version is HEAVILY censored.  Most of the deaths that the characters experience in this game involve either decapitation or amputation and in Japan, this is a big no no for games.  That means that when a character is killed the game will usually fade to black or certain parts of the kill animation will be modified.  This however goes as far to effect the story near the end.  There is a scene where you open a door and find a hall that is filled with the hanging, mangled corpses of every character who has died up to that point.  You go through the hall to rescue another member of the group and on the way out he has a sort of break down at all the death he's surrounded by.  In the Japanese version of this game not only is there a fade to black during some of it but the 3D MODELS OF THE BODIES ARE COMPLETELY REMOVED.  I had NO fucking clue what the cast was getting so upset about and I would have never have had an idea if it wasn't for someone in my stream chat explaining what was supposed to be happening.  Japanese censorship of this game really fucked some of it's best moments so if you're going to play it, don't play that version, import a UK or US version or something.

Overall though, Until Dawn was an extremely fun game that has quite a surprising amount of replay value considering the kind of genre it's in.  If you played a Quantic Dream game and found it lacking, give this game (or it's sequels Man of Medan and Little Hope) a try.  If you're a fan of the old school SNES sound novel like Kamaitachi no Yoru and Otogirisou you might also like it since it's sort of a modern version of that kind of experience.  Or if you just like trashy teen horror slasher flicks you'll probably like it as well because it plays VERY heavily into it's influences.  

Bottom line, give it a go.  Pop it in your PS4 in the evening and you'll probably be playing.....Until Dawn

Dohohoho

Days Gone

 

Does anyone actually give a fuck about zombies any more?  The zombie genre, for both games and movies is so played out that whenever I see something that features zombies in it I now reflexively groan and roll my eyes.

Now the big mother-fucker of zombie fiction is The Walking Dead.  While it's not so popular now, just a few years ago people were going fucking CRAZY for that show.  One of the most popular characters in that show was Daryl, a rough and tumble biker type with a lone-wolf type attitude and the kind of guy to not take no shit from nobody, no sir.  So one day a bunch of stupid wankers had the brilliant idea of making a zombie survival game where all the characters were Daryl and everyone behaved like they had fallen off their motorcycles and landed on their heads one too many times.

I'm going to skip a real description of the story to this game because it's very long and very stupid but I'll do my best to give you a cliff notes version.  You play as Deacon St John, the most Daryl-like of all the people in the land, and while riding around the zombie infested mountains you get jumped by a bunch of cultists and your friend, Bald-Daryl, gets his arm messed up by a blow torch.  You then gotta help him out, help out a bunch of camps, kill the cultists, join the army, find your wife and then murder the army before they start an outright holy war on all the people of the land.  The game ends with the army dead and nothing solved as you ride off into the sunset.

But who really gives a shit about the story when its such an obvious "the real monsters are us humans" kind of tale so what we are really here for is the game play.  Well sadly, the game play is simple, generic over the shoulder 3rd person action bullshit like you've played a million times.  The enemies are daft, the zombies are stupid and easy to kill and every mission is basically go somewhere and shoot shit or go somewhere and chase shit on your bike.  The survival elements are non existent because the getting camp money is easy as fuck and even if for some reason your run your supplies down, almost every car, building and bush is bursting at the seams with supplies for you to craft stuff.  

 The games big draw, the one thing that anyone remembers from the E3 demo that they showcased that one year, is the zombie hordes.  Dotted around the map are HUGE numbers of zombies that will all aggro you at once if you alert them.  The problem with the hordes is that throughout my entire play through I couldn't find a reason to give a shit about them.  There's a few missions throughout the campaign where you HAVE to fight a horde but outside of that you just very easily avoid them as you do all your other shit.  The horde fights aren't even interesting either, you just let them chase you around and when they bunch up around something explosive you shoot it.  Throw molotovs or napalm while your being chased and once the numbers thin out finish the job with your gun.  It's a test of patience rather than a test of skill or preparation.  A lot of hype for a non-feature.

But the absolute worst aspect of this game is the bugs, there are, SO MANY bugs in Days Gone that it's actually embarrassing.  I didn't bother to update the game upon first putting the disc in and before the 28gb patch I was getting hard frame rate drops, textures not working, AI bugging out, missions not working, the whole shabang.  There was one mission in particular where I had to rescue a guy from a camp.  Upon arrival one guy took the guy into a back room and I had to gun my way through the other guys.   What was supposed to happen is that when I killed the guys outside, I would jimmy open the door, kill the leader and rescue the dude inside.  What actually happened is that the game bugged out and it would not recognize the henchmen as being dead so I would go to the door and it would just throw up a message saying "clear the area of enemies to rescue to hostage".  The problem is that this was a main story mission and despite many attempts at restarting the game, reloading save files, resetting the mission the thing WOULD NOT PROGRESS at all.  

 That's when I caved and installed the 28gb patch that it was pestering me for on my Playstation menu and that fixed that mission bug but the game still suffered from constant broken textures, crap AI, crashes and there was one mission near the end of the game where collision with the floor just crapped out and I couldn't progress for a while AGAIN because I kept falling into the abyss under the world.  

This game really is the whole package of long, tedious, broken and predictable.  If you saw the E3 trailer all those years ago and were thinking about picking it up, just don't.  Save your money and use it to buy something better than this such as Dying Light. 

Mirrors Edge: Catalyst

 

Sometimes I like to over-emphasize my opinion on certain games.  Like for example, if I'm feeling particularly mischievous I'll say something like "Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a shit game for twats" and while I don't like BotW personally, I do actually understand why its so popular and why people like it so much.  However I feel like maybe I should stop doing this because it does a disservice to games that actually do deserve it such as Mirrors Edge: Catalyst, a truly shit game for twats.

I remember the first Mirrors Edge coming out for the Xbox 360 when I was in University and I remember liking it quite a lot.  I beat it multiple times, would sometimes listen to the OST while studying and even tried to sort of speed run it.  Not in any serious way but I'd spend quite a few hours finding the optimal route through a stage just to see the little time trial numbers go down.  Mirrors Edge: Catalyst however pissed me off within the first 30 minutes or so of playing and finishing it was one of the biggest chores I have ever undertaken in the 26 years of my gaming life.

I don't even know what it really is.  I thought it was a sequel but it seems more like a sort of reboot more than anything else.  I'd love to tell you about the story at this point in the article but I hated the dialogue in this game so much that I played most of it with my TV muted and just switched my brain off and followed the little red noodle to my mission destinations.

What I can tell you though is that the parkour gameplay isn't actually all that bad.  As far as running around, jumping over, on and around things is fairly functional.  The downside is that it's marred by one of the most boring open worlds in the universe.  The world of Mirrors Edge has nothing in it, nothing to explore or see or experience outside of the set pieces in the main missions.  The only thing the open world is good for is getting from point A to point B and watching a cutscene which means that it doesn't matter how good your parkour gameplay is when you don't fucking do anything with it.

That's not to say that the world is completely void of things to do, it's just that the things to do in that world are pointless bullshit busywork made to prey on 100% wierdos like me.  There are delivery missions when you run from point A to point B, these tower things that you blow up and then run away from and a bunch of random crap to collect throughout the various areas of the world map.  None of this does anything though outside of giving you experience.  However I did a couple of these side shows at the start and quickly gave up yet still managed to max out the skill tree by the end of the game.  It's all literally just pointless bullshit to pad out the game

But let's talk about the skill tree quickly shall we?  One thing I wish games in general would stop doing is including bullshit systems just because it's the "in" thing to do.  The skill tree in ME:C is the most needless token addition to a game I've ever seen.  The developers were so starved for ideas for this token skill tree that one of the skills you unlock is fucking QUICK. TURN.  A feature present in most games as a standard bit of control has been slapped inside a fucking skill tree because whatever gimp decided it was a good idea to have it couldn't think of enough things to fill it.  You may find at that start that certain delivery missions are kind of challenging but NOT because you aren't good enough, it's because the game wont let you move fast enough.  Delivery missions are a breeze once you have quick turn, fast climb, tuck jump and extended slide but until you get these skills the missions are borderline impossible.  If I'm failing something in a game I want it to be because I need to "git gud" not because the dozy idiot I'm controlling hasn't earned the arbitrary amount of points in order for her to "git gud".

Although I'm not saying anything new or controversial with this post, people have been calling it shit since 2008 and rightly so.  I was just late to the party and didn't want to believe it going in so at the end of the day I'm the one with egg on my face.

Foray Into Fall Guys

 

A little while back a game called Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout came out and as a member of Playstation + I was able to get a copy of the game for free!  The internet is going crazy for it, it's the next big thing so I just HAD to try it

I don't think I have ever lost interest in an online game so quickly in my life.

For anyone living under a rock and doesn't know what I'm talking about, I'll give a brief intro.  Fall Guys is an online sort of "Battle Royale" type game.  You play matches that start with 60 people only instead of shooting and looting each stage will involve something like an obstacle course or some sort of team game where you have to roll a ball or collect eggs or something.  You keep doing these games until there's only about 8 people left where you make a mad dash for a crown and the first one to grab it wins.  Rinse and repeat for all eternity.  If you remember that TV show called Takeshi's Castle, it's basically that but as a bright online game with cartoon bean creatures 

Now you might be thinking that I'm about to go off on a long rant about how much the game sucks considering how fast I claimed to have lost interest but actually it's pretty fun and well put together.  Games are quick, the characters are cute, the art is nice and vibrant and when you do start doing well it gets really exciting, it's a game where I can totally understand the appeal.  There's something about it however, for me, that made me lose interest incredibly fast and I can't quite place my finger on it.

Maybe it's the sort of monotonous music and really irritating sound effects the little dudes make as they tumble over each other.  Maybe it's the repetitive nature of the game play.  Maybe its the abundance of annoying as fuck team games where, once you get used to playing them a bit, losses start to feel like they weren't entirely your fault and having to restart a match just because you were unluckily placed on a team with a bunch of twats feels unfair in a game like this.  Maybe it's the fact that the number of stages is pretty limited so every game starts to feel samey and uninteresting after about 6 matches.  I'm sure its a combination of all these things 

When I played my first few games my initial reaction was "Goodness golly me! Isn't this a barrel of laughs, I just HAVE to play more of it" which was quickly followed by "yeah it's aite, maybe a game or two before I play something else" which was then quickly followed by "I never want to touch this boring sack of shit ever again"

But like I said, the game isn't clicking particularly well for me and on this one I know very much that it's a me problem rather than the game being bad.  I can think of a handful of people just off the top of my head that I would happily recommend this game to and I'm really glad that such a neat little idea is getting so much traction.  It's absolutely worth checking out if the idea of Takeshi's Castle: Online appeals to you even a little bit.  I, however, will be uninstalling and going back to my weird, obscure weebshit.  

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo Thoughts

I'm not usually one for demos.  When I'm even remotely interested in an upcoming title I try to avoid as much of the hype and marketing as possible and then just go into it on release day completely blind.  However when I caught news of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo dropping onto PSN my curiosity got the better of me in a BIG way and I practically ran home from work to download it.  Now having played it through I'll share some of my thoughts on it.

The game kicks off with the old opening that everyone whos even has a passing knowledge of the game is familiar with only this time its an absolute trip to see all that 1997 FMV done in all new PS4-O-Vision.  Not long after that cutscene ends you're in control of Cloud and are set upon by a couple of dudes to hack at.  I was playing with the combat on Normal mode but when you start the demo you are given the option of Normal, Easy and Classic and I will be going back to the demo very soon to try out the classic option but at time of writing I've not tried.

There's not really a lot to do in this demo since its just the bombing mission from the start of the game so the focus is really on getting some hands on experience with the combat.  At the start of the demo you have just Cloud to play with.  He can hack away at things with this Buster Sword in 2 modes, one for speed and one for damage or he can do an ability or cast a fire spell.  As you hack at things you fill up at ATB gauge which lets you use those spells an abilities and you can store up to two.  So for example, using the fire spell, a potion or hitting something with Braver uses up one of your meters and then you either have to wait or do some more regular hacking and slashing until you can do it again.  The more you hit things the more you fill up a little stagger meter and when that gets full you do extra damage to your opponent and exploiting weaknesses of enemies helps raise that meter even faster.  Things get real interesting when you get Barret into your party and you then have to manage a second character.  You can freely switch between your two guys and while your inactive guy while wander around the area killing enemies for you, their ATB fills up at a much slower rate than if they are actively fighting under your control.  So while, at least for the demo, its perfectly viable to control Cloud pretty much the entire time (outside of a tutorial when Barret first joins), if you really want to maximize damage then you'll want to be switching between your party members to fill up their meter and then take full advantage of a stagger when it happens. 

The one thing I didn't like about the demo was the English voice work for the characters.  It was hammed up and every time Jesse opened her mouth I got the pangs of cringe through my chest.  I'm sure the full game will have selectable voice tracks but the demo version just uses whatever language your system is set to.  My Japanese PS4 is set to English so everything was in English which means that if you're living in Japan the game will probably have full English support but its a little concerning for those that want the English text but the Japanese voices as there are no language options in the settings for the demo.  

Either way, the more I see about this game the more excited I'm starting to get.  I'm still a little skeptical of the whole, being split into multiple games thing but as far as gameplay is concerned its a solid action RPG experience and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the "full" thing.

Windjammers

If you follow the site/twitter/twitch much you'll know that I have an absolutely massive backlog of games to get through and because the list is so huge, it's not very often I allow myself to just sit and enjoy more simple games that don't really have an "ending" as such.  Sure, there's a single player mode in Windjammers where you beat all the characters but in a "sports" game like this or a fighting game, finishing it isn't really the focus so titles like that tend to fall by the wayside for me.

That said though, I recently sat down at a friends place and just enjoyed some good old fashioned arcade action and one of the games we spent a pretty significant amount of time on was Windjammers and good Lord is it amazing.

Windjammers is an extremely simple game since essentially it's just a supped up version of Pong.  There are 6 characters to chose from that each have a different power and speed stat and then you play up to 3 sets of 30 seconds each (by default) trying to throw a frisbee into the goals at the end of your opponents side of the court.  There are 3 point zones and 5 point zones and you can also score some cheeky points by making your opponent fail to catch the frisbee.  Each character also has a sort of special move where they will charge their throw and then launch the frisbee in some kind of physics defying way.

That's basically it, there's some other things like being able to throw the frisbee crazy fast and a couple of times me and my buddy got the frisbee to sort of curve in a weird way but we weren't playing long enough to really figure the specifics of those moves but for the most part that's the entire game.  Like Pong, Windjammers, especially when played with a friend, is the kind of game you can just kick back and play for a good few hours without it getting boring.  It's easy to play and understand too which means that it also makes for a pretty good party game.  Matches are short so there won't be much sitting around, it's fast paced and occasionally some crazy stuff can start happening once both players start launching supers all over the place, it's an all around solid experience.

My only real criticism of the game is the price tag.  It's available for PS4 with a price tag of $15 which is a little steep considering how bare bones it is but if you're the kind who has guests around a lot to play games, this is a great one to break out and it's something that even the less experienced members of the group can enjoy right away.  Also considering it was originally released as an old arcade game, the price tag won't be an issue for....certain users.

It doesn't look like much at first glance but Windjammers is easily some of the most fun I've had with a multiplayer game in a long time.  Grab a copy, grab some friends and go have yourself a grand old time.

My First 12 Hours With Death Stranding

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.

Earth Wars: A Godawful Mess

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

Apex Legends

I mentioned this game in the vlog above but unless you've been living under a rock for the last week or so then at this point you've probably heard of this hot new title that's taking the gaming world by storm.  A spinoff to title to Titanfall, it's a Battle Royale game that no one asked for but apparently everyone needed in their lives.

I think the best way to describe Apex Legends is sort of PUBG meets Overwatch.  At the start of each match you are grouped in teams of 3 and 60 of you (instead of the usual 100) are dropped onto an island with no gear and it's up to you to find loot and kill everyone else until you're the last team standing.  Of course there's a standard array of weapons to find and kill people with but to assist you in your killing each character you can pick has a different skill.  For example, one guy called Bloodhound has skills that reveal people close by to him  and as a passive he can sense "evidence" of other players if they did a thing within 60 seconds of you arriving.  Another character, Gibraltar, is a big dude who sets up big fat shields to help protect teammates when you get yourself in a pickle.  As of now there's 8 characters, 6 playable from the get go and 2 of which are locked and you have to "buy" with either in game or real currency.

When looting not only are you looking for guns, ammo and protective gear but you're also looking for gun attachments.  The guns themselves, for the most part, seem neither here nor there and you're allowed to freely pick and choose whatever weapons you like based on your personal play style.  What a gunfight really seems to come down to is what attachments you have for that gun.  As you're looting you'll find barrels, stocks, sights, mags etc that will help you kill your fellow man and it's these items that make ALL the difference.  In one game I had a fully kitted out rifle which turned my SMG into death laser but the next game I had the same gun with no attachments and could barely hit shit as the recoil sent my view flying about 180 degrees with every bullet.  I quite like this approach since it allows you to play with whatever you want while in something like Fortnite I was always just looking for rare versions of very specific weapons every game.

The absolute best thing about this game however is the team communication.  You can play with no mics and still be able to communicate really clearly thanks to an absolute genius pinging system.  Of course, mics are better overall but if you get paired with some really annoying morons you can give yourself some peace and quiet and still be able to point out an enemy or a useful bit of loot for them.  The downside of the coms in this game however is that if you DO have a mic, it's IMPOSSIBLE to mut it (at time of writing).  This is unfortunate for someone like me who lives in a Japanese apartment because if my wife wants to listen to music while I'm playing then I risk getting mad hate as Celine Dion blares down my playstation mic.  I could just unplug it but I shouldn't have to, just put a fucking mute button in goddamnit. 

Of course, since it's a free game there are microtransactions but they aren't too intrusive.  You can pay for currency or you can get an in game currency by leveling up and this will allow you to purchase characters or cosmetics for your character.  Also when levelling up you get a pack that contains items like gun skins or character related voice quips and other things and the drop rates on these packs seem pretty good.  I'm only level 13 and already have 2 epic tier skins and there is A LOT of skins despite the fact the game just launched so if you like Overwatch style lootboxes then this game has a lot to offer you.

Anyway, the game is free and it's surfing a wave of popularity right now.  Will it kill Fortnite? Probably not but it's gearing up to be a decent contender for a quality alternative. No longer will you have to suffer the buggy, broken mess that is PUBG or the skid stain that is that Call of Duty thing.  Worth trying once at the very least 

Earth Wars

Here's a game I'm still playing but it's taking me so long to finish it I felt like I'm just going to go ahead and talk about it now.  It's also not very good

Earth Wars, also known as Earths Dawn (I discovered literally just now as I tried to Google information about the developer) is a 2D side scrolling action game about people beating up aliens.  I lost interest in the game so quickly that I now just skip all the cutscenes but from what I can tell aliens came out of the Earth and now you have to retake what was destroyed as part of an elite squad that all decide to use swords instead of guns.  You have to battle your way across North America killing big bads and doing other random missions such as saving soldiers or finding items until the problem has been solved. 

The first thing you'll notice right off the bat is the art style and game play are extremely reminiscent of games such as Odin Sphere or Muramasa but sort of like the poor mans version of this style.  The visuals are sort of "chunky" and nothing animates very well.  Couple this with the fact that combat is very busy with explosions and particle effects flying everywhere and what you have is a very visually frustrating title.

But I didn't download this game for free of PSN just to look at it, dangit, I came to play!  Unfortunately the game plays like a pile of rotting assholes and is generally frustrating and just flat out not all that fun.  It's again, trying to imitate the fast melee type fighting that you find in games like Muramasa but it's clunky and quite often the character doesn't quite do the exact things you want them too.  Also there's no "impact" when attacks connect and you have no real feel for exactly how much damage you are doing.  Also there's no variation in attacks or combos, you just mash attack on the thing until it explodes into tiny pieces and then dash to the next guy to repeat the process.  I'm even at a point now where my weapon has a death effect on it so I just mash until I see the icon and then run away until it the death kicks in and I get to move on.

Speaking of a lack of variation the missions are absolutely abysmal.  You get the main story missions which have you fighting through a map to fight a big enemy which are kind of cool but these sections are always book ended by pointless "free missions".  The free missions have you running through the same drab environments again and again to do such exciting things like "Kill X of Y", "Find Z of this item" or "reach location with time limit".  Once you've done enough free missions to run down a timer you get to do another cool mission but these last about 5 or 6 minutes before it's back to the boring grind again.  The game seems to have an embarrassingly small amount of content but just has you do boring shit on the same 4 or 5 maps to pad things out and make you think that you got your moneys worth.

But the worst part is you MUST do these free missions because they get you skills which you have to activate on your, quote from the steam page, "Massive Skill tree".  The only thing massive about this skill tree is the size of the interface that you have to scroll through to get to each skill to activate them but the skills you get are all samey drab bullshit.  Most of the skills are stat increases or passive bonuses and the "active" skills that you get are all dumb shit like "Guard".  That's right folks, I'm 8 hours in and JUST got the skill that lets me block attacks.

Now I'm being very harsh but it's easy to see that Earth Wars had a lot of ambition behind it.  Clearly, the developer oneoreight has some good ideas but due to a lack of time/money/talent, whichever, the game just turned out a bit crap.  Of course, I'm not one to give up so I'll play it through to the end and if my opinion changes I'll be sure to make another post but I very much doubt it.  Even though I got it for £0 off PS+, I feel ripped off.  Don't spend £25 on Steam or whatever for it, just go and buy literally ANY game made by Vanillaware instead.

Spider Man, Puddles and Controversey

The new Spider Man game dropped recently and while I've not played it yet it does at least look pretty good.  I'm not one for comic book heroes personally but it does look like a generally pretty fun action game.  Something I'll absolutely grab once the price drops a bit. However I'm not here to talk about the game itself, but about some recent controversy that surrounds it regarding puddles.

The story goes that there's a room in the game that was shown during a trailer at E3 looking a certain way but when the game came out the room looked a bit different.  Now I'm not going to say flat out that the release version looks like shit but it does look worse.  It's hard to make a game look like shit in 2018 but there clearly is more polish on the trailer version than there is in the version players paid money for.

So this prompts a bunch of people on twitter to start asking questions to the developer, Insomniac, about what the hell happened.  Insomniac responded by shrugging their shoulders saying "we didn't do anything" which upset a number of people and then glorious internet drama happened.  Of course, when there's drama news websites flock to it to write about it (kind of like I'm doing lol) and put in their two cents.  To my surprise and horror (not really) there's a great deal of outlets calling the issue stupid and using the whole thing to take a jab at anyone who has THE NERVE to criticize the game.  For example one idiot on Forbes writes his article like gamers are nothing but a pack of hungry wolves just waiting to rip any game dev apart if they do meet their high standards.

It seems like that idiot along with every other idiot who wrote articles like that are missing the point entirely as to why people are upset.  Let's make one thing very clear straight away, the puddle isn't the reason why people are upset, it's the fact that we were lied to by promotional material, AGAIN.  If all the trailers for Spider Man were cutscenes no one would say shit but that was GAMEPLAY so I don't think it's so unreasonable to ask that the gameplay looks the same as your damn trailer.  It's also not the first time it's happened either, just off the top of my head Dark Souls 2 and Silent Hill Downpour are guilty of the same thing and it was JUST as bullshit with those games as it is with this one.  Imagine that you went to a restaurant and there was a picture of a juicy, medium rare, perfectly seasoned absolutely delicious looking steak on a menu, so you order it.  When it arrives at your table though it's well done and just not quite as appealing as it was in the picture.  So you eat it anyway because you love steak and yeah, it's still good, but it's not what you paid money for.  Do you see where I'm coming from here?

The worst part about this whole thing is that if you look up the game on metacritic, despite the controversy it still has an 87 rating.  People are still enjoying the game despite their gripe with the graphics so all these outlets are shitting on gamers for what? Being upset about promotional material lying to us about what the game looks like?  It's understandable that things change over the course of development but don't wave the game in our faces going "LOOK AT HOW GREAT THIS LOOKS" and then make it not look like that.  For some, they are paying money BECAUSE they said it looked that good. 

Sure, it doesn't ruin the game and sure, it's not really THAT much of a big deal.  For me though, seeing the response of the gaming press further cements the idea that gaming media is nothing but a massive collection of gaming shitrags not worth giving the time of day to.

Fortnite Season 4 and leveling frustrations

If you've been watching the stream you might now that I've jumped on the Fortnite wagon pretty hard.  How could I not when for a while almost every advert I saw was "CHECK OUT THIS AWESOME FREE GAME!"  I wanted to try a battle royale game but PUBG was £15 and looked shit, Fortnite at the very least had some personality.

So it dragged me in really hard with its fast paced game play that was enjoy to enjoy in short bursts.  It also helps that I can just camp in solos while I do housework or work on other things and the occasional fiddle to get inside the zone helps break the monotony. I really enjoyed the the event with the meteor and the map change that came with it too, the game is telling a sort of loose story without words that you have to figure out by yourself by observing small changes to the map.  It's a cool way of doing it that gets a community discussing ideas about what might come next.  

I enjoyed it SO much I ended up dropping 1000 yen on a premium battle pass, which is very out of character for me since I've not payed for a cosmetic since about 2010 but I just couldn't help myself.  The battle pass and the challenges that come with it are a nice mixup to play and without them I'd probably play at lot less.  It's crazy how a simple objective like "get a kill with a trap" can make you want to play over and over again until you get it.  

The big pot of gold at the end of the battle pass is the Omega skin and the "omega challenges" that came with it.  I was hyped for this, I was expecting some really hard shit that would really test my skills but when I unlocked it all it asked me for was to level to 80.  That's not a challenge, that's just demanding my time, and a huge disappointment for all the work it took to reach tier 100 on the pass.  

Still, the good thing about the premium pass is that it spits out enough currency to get the next one for free.  Now that I know what's coming I know that AFKing for exp is something I need to do more of if I want to 100% everything in season 5 but I don't think I'll ever quite forgive Fortnite for this crushing letdown 

Torn About Resident Evil 2 Remake

So a remake of Resident Evil 2 got announced and when I first heard the news I was absolutely fucking stoked.  Resident Evil 2 is quite possibly my favorite Resident Evil game and the idea of having a version of it that's all in shiny next-gen-o-vision is a truly exciting idea.  However upon seeing some of the game play footage for it, I'm a little torn.  First let me start by showing you a video of the demo that someone has done that doesn't have any commentary on it so you can just see and process for yourself.

Like I said, on one hand I'm really excited because at the end of the day it's fuckin' Resident Evil 2.  It's the best game in the series made to look all pretty and have modern game play and whatnot but that's also half the problem.

I didn't WANT this.  When I first saw someone on my social media post about it I had visions of REMake but it's Resident Evil 2 instead of 1.  That's what I really wanted, just a nice shiny remake of the 2nd game for modern systems.  REMake had some extra content as well in the form of Lisa Trevor and all that stuff so maybe this dream RE2 remake I had in my head would have had some of that too.  Hell, I bet there's a lot of stuff from RE1.5 that could be implemented as bonus modes or as extra content to the main story.

But what we got was the RE6 looking thing that's stolen RE7s interface with all new shit going on.  Of course that isn't inherently a bad thing but I'm having trouble getting over the shock of it not being REMake 2.  I think that one things that long standing fans of survival horror have wanted for a long time is for games to go BACK to that old style because it helps to serve the horror.  I hate the fact that all modern "horror" games have just turned into 3rd person action games with jump scares and gore and that seems to be the direction that Resident Evil 2 Remaster is taking.

Still, I'm not going to completely shit on it just yet since a short game play video and a trailer aren't really enough to form a complete opinion on.  I've yet to see anything of Claire's campaign and I'm interested to see what they do with the plot since I've heard that they've done away with the whole A/B thing that the first one had.  Let's hope they do it justice.

Fortnite

Every so often a game will come along that completely dominates the landscape for a while and Fortnite is one of those games.  Created by Epic Games and originally showcased WAY back in 2011, Fortnite is the current big-hitter in the now popular Battle Royale genre and it's basically impossible to have at least not heard of it given all the publicity it's been getting.

Fortnite is actually some kind of zombie survival game that I've ever played.  I think it involves a team of people scavenging and building a fort in order to survive against waves of zombies that get progressively harder.  I think it has characters that have unique abilities and you're supposed to work together to save the world, or at least that's what it says in the menu.

However following the popularity of Player Unknowns Battlegrounds they added a battle royale mode where 100 players skydive into an island to kill each other until there is only one player remaining.  You start the game with no gear save for a pick axe that you can use to gather materials and from there it's up to you to find guns and supplies in order to kill everyone else.  As you play there's a storm that encroaches on the play area every couple of minutes forcing the survivors to get closer and closer to each other as time goes on.

Games of Fortnite are very quick too despite how many people are involved in each match.  Landing in popular areas where all the sick loot is will get you murdered quickly and if you are lucky enough to survive then the deadly storm which shrinks on you every 2 minutes or so will ensure that you're in someones face sooner rather than later.  The quick nature of the game prevents it from being overly frustrating on a loss since you can pretty much instantly get into another game with very small amounts of downtime which means you can enjoy it in quick bursts or for extended periods depending on your mood and schedule which is rather nice.

The big gimmick that sets it apart from PUBG though is the building.  You can an interesting situation where when the circle starts to get really small players are forced to sort of just build upwards since a more horizontal approach to combat is out of the question.  I'm bad it at at time of writing but seeing the speed and skill with which players build these forts at each other to try and get the upper hand is absolutely mesmerizing and it gives quite an interesting spin on the late game combat.

It's also weirdly addicting, invoking that "just one more game" mentality that I've personally not experienced from a title since I used to play League of Legends back with my university buddies.  Not only that but there's a certain thrill that comes from being within the last 5-10 survivors on the map and then getting into a fire fight which could either mean victory or a painful reset to the lobby menu.

The game also has a ton of style with it's cartoony graphics and a "battle pass" feature, bought for about £10, which allows the player to unlock a metric fuckton of cosmetics.  I never usually drop money on a free game for something as inconsequential as cosmetic items but even I couldn't resist the allure of Fortnites battle pass.

If you're on the fence about it, I'd say give it a go.  It's free, it's fast and it's fun and even if it doesn't hook you like it completely hooked me you'll still have a good time with it.

Since When Was Monster Hunter so Huge?

Monster Hunter World has come out recently and everyone around me is raving about it.  I'm not disagreeing with the raving either, Monster Hunter World looks absolutely fan-fucking-tastic, and while I've not bought it myself because it's like 8000 yen (when new games are typically around 6000) I can't wait to get my hands on it soon.

While it's nice to see a game series I enjoy get so much positive press, it's popularity is somewhat confusing to me though.  In Japan I know that Monster Hunter has always been big, you sort of just bump into it everywhere.  It might be a poster advertising Frontier in an internet cafe or some kind of promotional thing like a Monster Hunter themed design on a drink or something, it's the kind of thing that just pops up in every day life fairly often.  Now I can't speak for America but in the UK it was a different story completely, I only knew 2 people who also played Monster Hunter and apparently there was some little shop in London where hunters could go meet up to hunt stuff on Freedom Unite.

They were games that had good reviews but never much of a following.  I started to get into the series around the time of Freedom Unite and I remember having a grand old time with it.  However, back then I remember getting an armor set and posting a picture of it on Facebook to show some friends and a bunch of people chimed in with comments like "why are you such a sad fuck?" or "this game is for losers" etc.  It wasn't even a high level set, it was a shit early game thing that required no effort too, not that it really matters I guess.

I stuck with the series up to Monster Hunter Portable 3rd on the PSP (so 2008-2010 roughly) and in that time only met 1 other guy who was at all interested.  After that the series moved to 3DS which was all region locked and shit and I was living in Japan so I was sort of locked out of playing it unless I wanted to import or drop money on a Japanese 3DS but even with each DS release I didn't see anyone talking about it.

Now it's 2018, World gets released and suddenly everyone is all "MONSTER HUNTER OMG LOOKS SO GOOD!".  Like, where did this excitement come from?  I spent so much time looking for people with even a passing interest to no avail and now suddenly everyone's a fan? What the fuck happened?  It feels to me that some people are bandwagoning a bit here.  They actually don't know jack shit about the series past World but because of all the praise and publicity suddenly they love it now.

Still, I know I might be coming across as all bitter and sort of gatekeepy like "who are these filthy casuals playing MY game" but that's not the case.  It's confusing but it does make me happy to see a series I like getting so much praise and hype around it.  It all means that when I DO go and buy it I'll have plenty of people it with, finally.

Happy Hunting to newcomers and veterans alike!

Crash Bandicoot HD Marathon Update

So as you may or may not know, the incentive for the Crash Bandicoot HD marathon was met a little while ago and now I have some information regarding the event for you.

So I'm planning to run the event on the 24th February and I will play Crash Bandicoot HD on PS4 until I have either finished all 3 games or played for 24 hours.  Now I feel that Crash 1 is a little bit of a challenge but Crash 2 and 3, if memory serves, are pretty easy to at least finish.  So in order to spice things up a bit, I'm adding a stretch incentive to make things a little bit more interesting.

Between now and the end of Crash 3 if an additional £100 are donated to the charity I will play the 3 games to 100% (no DLC) or until I hit the 24 hour mark.  As a backup, if that goal gets met and for some reason I at least don't finish the 3 games in 24 hours, I'll take a rest and then dedicate the 25th to playing even more Crash HD to get as close to 100% as I possibly can.

As always, big thanks to everyone who has donated for this and everything else so far!  Keep the kindness coming and keep supporting IG! It means a lot!

Dragons Crown: Money Grub Edition

So I was talking with my friend the other day and he said that all I do is complain on here, like I'm full of nothing but rage and negativity.  This may be partly true so I planned a bunch of blog topics so that the next handful of posts would be nothing but sunshine and rainbows but then I saw this and now I can't help complaining again.

Dragons Crown is a game that was released in 2013 for the PS3 and Vita and was a bit of a side scrolly hack and slashy affair and if there's one thing I can't be mad about it's the game itself.  If you haven't played Dragons Crown I would totally suggest picking up a copy and giving it a spin, it's really fucking fun. 

So ATLUS did this a while ago with a similar game called Odin Sphere which was awesome.  The original Odin Sphere came out on PS2 and playing a PS2 game on a modern TV can look a bit crappy, which was a shame for a game with such a beautiful art style.  Not only did it get a bit of a facelift though, it came with some extra content and tweaks to game play which made it worth buying.  I have no problem re releasing an older game if it has some, even just a little, extra or different shit in it to warrant the purchase.

Dragons Crown on the other hand is a different tale.  This is a game from just the last generation that looks just fine on the PS3.   It's not like the PS4 can do all that much to improve the look of that game really, the generational face lift is not needed here.  It feels like that sort of pointless remake that's put out just  to milk a bit of extra money from the fans, kind of like the "HD" version of The Last of Us.  Not only that though but from what I can tell after reading some of the news stories about this game, there is NOTHING new in terms of content.  The only thing I can find is that it contains all the original games original features.  It's a fucking sad day when the fact that we're not having anything removed from a remake is noteworthy.

Unless for some weird reason you don't own a PS3 (or a Vita), don't buy the £50 pro edition of the game.  Just go find a PS3 or Vita version in a store or on Amazon or something.  At time of writing the original PS3 version is available on Amazon for like £30 so save yourself the money and get the exact same game at a much lower price.

Finally the thing that irks me is the name.  It's not Dragons Crown: Remaster, it's Dragons Crown Pro Edition.  With a name like that you'd expect it to be tweaked to be harder or something.  Like, the PS2 SMT RPG Lucifer's Call (Or Nocturne depending on where you're from) in Japan has something called a "maniacs edition".  This is the version that featured slightly tougher combat, an extra hard as fuck side quest and Dante from Devil May Cry.  There's nothing "pro" about this version over the other one, it's just the same fucking game with some slightly better graphics.

Anyway, go try Dragons Crown because it's fucking sick, just don't pay out the nose for this version and grab it on PS3.  ATLUS have been good in the past with shit like P4G so don't let them get away with this crap.