Difficulty Nostalgia

I think everyone gets that nostalgic feeling some time.  When a memory of a game pops into your head and you get this uncontrollable urge to play it again.  When most people talk about their nostalgic experiences with a game they usually talk about a games quality, the game being either just as good or at lot worse than they remember it being.  One thing I noticed that people don't mention too much when talking about their trips into the past is difficulty.

The things I hear the most when people talk about older games the phrases I usually here are "yeah it still holds up today" or "man, that has NOT aged well".  I however had a strange case the other week when I decided to play the Vita remake of Muramasa: The Demon Blade, a game that came out on the Wii in 2009.  As I slashed my way across ye olde Japan the game played EXACTLY how I remembered it, ar least in terms of gameplay and fun factor but I found it to be WAY harder than I remembered.

I seem to remember the game being pretty easy back in 2009.  It was fast paced 2D hack and slash heaven and I don't remember getting a death until near the end of the game but in my current playthrough the second boss is pushing my shit in really hard.  I don't want to believe that I've gotten shit at games in my old age but it's either that or my memory of how well I did is WAY off.

This also occasionally happens in reverse where the game is way easier.  For me it was when I was learning how to speedrun Silent Hill 2 and I was dreading the maze near the end because in my mind it was complex and full of shit trying to kill you.  When it came to it though I blazed through it and none of the enemies came even close to touching me.

It's always fun to go back and play old games and it can suck when it doesn't live up to your expectations.  Although in my mind it kind of sucks a bit more when you go back to a game you thought you were good at only to find that you suck.

Reminder: DPD Are An Awful Company

This afternoon I was browsing the "memories" section of my Facebook account and apparently, 6 years ago today is the day I discovered that most of my gaming collection from the UK was stolen!  I've blogged about what happened in the past but I'm going to jump at any chance I can get to bash the company that stole all my shit.

I remember it clearly, I had just finished my course at university and I was gearing up not only to leave Uni but also the country.  My family had moved from England to Sweden and I was moving from England to Japan.  I had such a large collection of games at the time that there was NO WAY I was going to lug all of my shit to Japan so I decided to send it to the family home instead and have it sit there.  I only took my PS3 collection and my portables since those are region free/small and the rest I loaded into boxes and gave to a courier service to deliver.

So some time past and I get messages from my mother saying that the boxes arrived to the family home but they weren't the boxes I sent.  Instead of games my mother received boxes of Jay-Z albums and Bill Clinton bobble head dolls or something.  I was mad, my mother was mad, everyone was mad, so of course we call up the piece of shit courier service that we used called DPD.  According to them and the tracker, the boxes were at some warehouse in Germany.  Why the ended up there I have no idea but for some reason they "couldn't be sent" and shortly after that they were just "lost".  Now I'm not an idiot, I know full well that at some point on my collections journey, some fuck face must have cracked open those boxes, saw all the games and decided to help himself.  Here's a list of what was stolen

All my PS2 games (nearly 100)
All my Wii games (about 50?)
All my Xbox 360 games (about 70)
A random assortment of PS1 games (a decent 20 or so)

The company is pretty adamant that no one stole my shit and paid me £600 in compensation.  If my shit wasn't stolen then why pay me any compensation? Also £600 to replace ALL THAT SHIT, good fuckin' luck.  Luckily thanks to Steam and the abundant game stores offering old stuff for cheap I've been able now to replace a good chunk of it but I'll never forgive the gigantic sacks of shit at DPD for stealing my shit in the first place.

The moral of the story is don't EVER use DPD for ANYTHING.  If you are planning to send something and you're thinking of using DPD to deliver, DO NOT.  You'd be better trusting Garett to run your shit to the location, a literal member of a thieves guild, than having DPD even go near one of your boxes of stuff.  We're all going to lose games at some point, maybe by stealing or by wear and tear but to lose so many all at once still hurts 6 years down the line.

Motion Controls Were A Mistake

We are now moving into an age where VR is all the rage.  With the release of things like the Occulus Rift and the HTC Vive, when people talk about novel ways to control games that's at the forefront of the conversation.  But not so long ago motion controls were all the rage with things like the Playstation Move, Nintendo Wii and the Kinect.  It was a terrible time but it seems to have been a fad that is mostly dead now.

It all started with the Wii, when it was announced that instead of having a traditional controller it would have this remote type thing.  People were understandably excited because imagine playing something like Zelda where you could manipulate the sword freely, it was a cool concept.  What the controller for the Wii turned out to be is an awkward piece of shit that didn't quite work correctly and a lot of the best games for that system don't make all that much use of the motion part of the controller.  Hell, I remember buying Monster Hunter Tri for the fucking thing and having to drop extra money on a "proper" controller so that I could play that thing.

After that, Sony tried to imitate the Wii because despite the awkwardness of the controls, it did sort of work and the system was selling well.  The PlayStation Move came out and was largely ignored.  I've never met a single person who owned a move and now that I think about it the only game I can think that actually used it was that Time Crisis spinoff thing.  Microsoft was the company that really came along and ruined it thought with the Kinect.  A terrible, barely functional camera type thing that had 0 compatible games of any quality.  It's legacy can be boiled down to a Star Wars game where they made a bunch of corny Star Wars versions of pop songs that you had to dance to for points.

Motion controls were a thorn in the side of the industry and we are better off now that they are mostly gone.  They still exist in some capacity, for example you can tilt the WiiU controller in certain games for certain effects and that feature also extends to things like the Vita but it's not so bad since the movements are slight and the applications limited.  When a game does feature that sort of movement control as a main feature it's usually not very good.

Like I said before, we are moving into an age of VR now, so it'll be interesting to see if this is another "innovation" that will cause a slew of shit titles for years to come or a quality innovation we will stick with in the distant future.  VR is sort of a cool idea so I'm hoping that it's something we stick with but as of right now, this very second, things aren't looking so hot.  Give it time though, I have faith.

The WiiU ain't so bad

The WiiU has a pretty rough time in a lot of gaming circles.  It's always branded as the "kiddy" console or tossed aside because it doesn't have all the next gen military first person shooting games that the PS4 and Xbox One has.  It's also not as powerful so for the kind of people that think graphics are super important to a game then there is no way they are going to touch the damn thing.

But it's a damn shame really because to me, the WiiU is about the only console I can talk about and not get incredibly pissed off with.  There's so much drama surrounding the PS4 and the Xbox One and there are so many extra features and other useless crap on those machines that it almost feels like they have forgotten what their first function is.  Playing fucking games.

That's not to say that the PS4 or the Xbox One are bad and that the WiiU is super good, but it's just a case of the WiiU having some fucking personality that the other two don't.  Off the top of my head at time of writing I cannot think of a SINGLE PS4 or XBox One game that I am looking forward to.  However I can think of plenty of WiiU titles that I want or am looking forward to and I don't even own the bloody system yet, I've been playing one that I borrowed from a friend.

I'm sure this will all change over time but right now the WiiU is absolutely storming this generation and it's being ignored because of the reputation Nintendo created for themselves after the Wii.  There are things I dislike about the WiiU but the quality of the games and the general ease of use makes it the number 1 system for me right now. 

Will be picking up one of my very own rather soon I think

Can't give a shit about the WiiU

Read the title again just in case you saw it and got angry.  It's not "don't" give a shit about the WiiU, it's "can't" give a shit.  I've been trying really hard to get myself hyped up for this new bit of hardware from Nintendo, but I just don't give a fuck and I can't bring myself to give a fuck.

Initially, I was really interested in this thing, mainly for it's controller with a screen in it.  When I first saw it announced and got a glimpse of that thing my mind started thinking about all the cool concepts that could come out of a bit of gear like that. 

But I'm not really one for following hype so the WiiU dropped off my radar for a while, then I eventually got round to looking at a list of launch titles for it and good lord was I disappointed.  Everything that's coming out for this damn thing already exists on another system, is garbage aimed at non-gamers, or is just not very interesting.

ZombieU was the game I paid the most attention too, but it still doesn't seem all that interesting to me.  The controller screen stuff is cool, but you don't NEED the controller screen to have those features, it feels like a gimmick and nothing more.  That's the problem with the WiiU I think, for me at least, it feels like a gimmick.

That said, I thought the exact same thing about the DS and the exact same thing about the Wii, and after it gained some steam we got some really impressive games out of those systems.  So, either hurry up and come up with a really cool game concept with that controller screen thing OR release a Trauma Centre, because that'll do it really.

A dark day for my game collection

Well, I was gonna use this space to write about Castlevania 3, but the most insane, idiotic thing has happened and it feels like it would be a crime not to rant about it.

Basically, at the end of May I moved to Japan, and previous to this my family moved to Sweden.  While all this shit was going on, I was attending university in a city called Preston and I couldn't exactly cart 5 consoles and all those games to Japan with me, so I sent them to my new home in Sweden. 

Anyway, I fuck off to Japan and I'm having a grand old time when I hear there are some problems and the boxes are being thrown back and forth between Preston and Germany like some kind of shitty fucking tennis match and eventually I just give up paying attention to the situation and bank on them arriving eventually.  I mean after all, even if they arrive I can't use them for a year at least, so no point worry about it, as long as they get there right?

FUCKING. WRONG!  So today, a single box arrives in Sweden filled with SOME of my stuff.  The majority of my rarer PS1 and Gamecube titles are intact but the consoles, and 4 sleeves worth of Xbox360, PS2 and Wii games are still not accounted for at the moment.  In place of my consoles and a shitton of games, I got a metric crapton of cutlery and dolls of Bill fucking Clinton.

I mean seriously, what the fuck, how do you fuck this up so bad?  I give the company NOTHING but video games, and they some how mix it in with fucking Bill sodding Clinton dolls?!  Oh yeah, and on top of that there is an assortment of Jay-Z CD's and some other artists that I've never heard of and are probably wank.

Now while writing this post, I got an update saying there are 2 boxes just milling about in a German depot somewhere that need to be delivered, so hopefully they contain all the shit, or at the very least the 100+ titles in those sleeves.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to the gaming and not post personal rants on how my shit that I can't use or talk about on here has gone missing, but this story is so stupid it needs to be told.

A Gamers Dilemma: The Eternal Backlog

OK, well since last nights post was a little bit on the crap side, I thought I'd shoot for doing 2 today.  This post I want to talk about something that I've been struggling with basically since I gained a second video game console, and that's the backlog.

I think if you own a PC and a gaming system at least, chances are you have some kind of backlog.  For the luckier gaming enthusiasts, your gaming backlog may be around 2 or 3 games, maybe 5 at a stretch.  However, I'm not what you would call one of those lucky gaming enthusiasts.

Usually what I do, is I'll be playing through a game, usually quite a long one, and during that time I'll be buying basically every daily steam deal, scouring GoG for cheap stuff and picking up obscure JRPGs and the like that I'm convinced will disappear from existence if I don't buy it RIGHT GODDAMN NOW!

So the situation that this has left me in is that I have a HUGE gaming backlog, some games I bought on release day about 2 years ago and STILL haven't touched.  What makes this even worse is that I have now moved to Japan and most of my gaming stuff is back with the family as I'm not about to take all my consoles and all my games on a plane with me.  So the only thing I really have access to now, is my PC and a PS3(not including bits of my old collection which I can emulate) which I recently bought and I know that when I do go home, I'm going to be buying all the stuff for Xbox and Wii that I couldn't buy when I was here, and new systems if they are released by then.

What makes matters even worse is the fact that I'm spending a great deal of time in Japanese arcades, playing coin-op shit rather than slogging through my ever growing backlog, so I'm doomed to an eternal backlog of games that I'll be trying to get through until I either quit gaming as a hobby or die.

For those who are lazy and don't want to read the above post: So many games, so little time