December Events and Incentive Changes

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How About Get It Right the First Time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile Rhythm Game Bullshit

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I miss GameTrailers

 Usually I like to give game news websites a lot of shit and rightly so.  Most game news sites and most of the people who write for them are inept, braindead twats who gladly bow down at the grand alter of AAA development and suck the many cocks that rest upon it.  There was one website though, back in the day that I actually used to quite enjoy and that was GameTrailers.com

It was a simple website.  You'd load it up and you'd be given a list of videos which ranged from, expectedly, game trailers, news bits, top lists and little bits from various content creators.  In fact, The Angry Video Game Nerd was hosted pretty much exclusively on here in the early days.  He was with some group called Screwattack which was made of of two twats who made nothing but lists and him.

This used to be the main way I followed latest releases.  I think I liked it because I didn't have to listen to some idiot give their opinion on anything if I didn't want to.  I'd just load it up, watch some gameplay footage of something I was interested in, and piss off again, it was bliss.  YouTube could probably give me the same kind of experience I'm sure but I never really tend to venture outside of my recommended list of pretentious video essayists and Vocaloid music.

Unfortunately though, the site has since gone and has been relegated to a YouTube channel that I refuse to sub to because it's now owned by IGN, possibly the largest hive of talentless cocksuckers that exists in the entire games writing sphere.  I have the Steam recommended queue I guess but it's just not the same.

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.

The 2020 Horror Game Gauntlet

 

For October this year I'm doing something a little insane.  I'm planning to try and finish 31 games before the end of October on Stream.  Last night we decided the play order so I'm making this post for people to be able to see what's done and what's coming.  The games are as follows 

1. Cry of Fear

2. Mad Father

3. Sanitarium 

4. White Day 

5. Distraint 

6. Illbleed 

7. Tamashii 

8. FNAF2

9. Resident Evil Gaiden

10. Clock Tower 3 

11. Man of Medan 

12. Metro Last Light 

13. SOMA

14. Days Gone 

15. Mizurna Falls 

16. Outlast 2 

17. Pathalogic HD 

18. Call of Cthulu 

19. Little Nightmares 

20. Dead Space 

21. Galerians 

22. Yuppy Psycho 

23. Inside 

24. Enemy Zero 

25. Slenderman: The Arrival 

26. System Shock 2 

27. Penumbra Overture 

28. Nosferatu 

29. Bendy and the Ink Machine 

30. Alien Isolation 

31. Detention 

Follow me on Twitch and lets get spooky! 

Independence Day (PS1)

 There are some games which have a bit of a reputation that are a bit undeserved in my opinion.  The ones that spring directly into my mind are Nightmare on Elm Street and Silver Surfer on NES.  Given the reputation unfairly due to YouTubers like AVGN making videos on these games and then large numbers of twats not being able to think for themselves piggy-backing the opinion despite having never tried the games for themselves.

Sometimes however the hate a game gets is completely deserved and Independence Day on the Playstation is one of those games.  A truly cursed title that I hate so much that I'm hoping that everyone involved in its development are now suffering from mild back problems.

The first thing I don't get about it is that other people and the game itself refer to itself as "ID4", which despite making a little bit of sense once it was explained to me, still manages to simultaneously still make utterly no sense.  The I stands for "Independence" and the D stands for "Day", seems obvious but the 4 stands for "4th of July" which I know is the American holiday of the same name but that's got nothing to do with the title of the movie...right?

Well doing a quick google search for the movie poster I found this fucking thing.  So does that mean that the ACTUAL title of the movie is ID4: Independence Day? In which case that's a stupid fucking title and however came up with it should be ashamed

Anyway I'm talking about complete and utter bollocks just to fill post space so lets talk about the actual fucking game.  It's a dime a dozen flying game, sort of like those free-fly missions from Lylat Wars. The game gives you a couple of things to blow up and then you get in your plane and you go blow them up, easy, right? No

The first few missions aren't so bad but then the game just bombards you with enemies and dodging anything becomes an actual impossibility.  When you do get hit, in addition to losing HP you also get shunted around like a puck on an air hockey table so you're probably going to take some additional damage from smacking the floor or a nearby building.  The game tells you when an enemy has a lock on you but there are so many enemies on the map at any given point that even if you shake one, the next one is just going to lock you right away, there's basically no point in time when you aren't being bullied by some alien bastards wanting to shove lasers up your arse.  Also your bullet weapon appears to do fuck all of nothing.  I can fire bullets until the town underneath is flooded with shell casings and it would have maybe done about 1 point of damage to an enemy ship.  The only effective weapon is missiles and you only get 20 of those and once you're out and you've picked up all the refills on the map, you can get fucked sonny jim.

At first I thought it was because I was trying to be a big-dick "pro gamer" and playing on Hard.  So I turned it down and still got equally wanked on with Normal mode.  After I stopped the stream I thought I'd see what easy mode was like since that's what the game defaults to when it starts and it didn't change diddly jack shit and I still got wrecked.  I thought maybe there was something fundamental about the game I wasn't understanding so I took to YouTube to find some videos of people playing it.  I found one group of people who struggled with easy mode only to get to the exact level I was stuck on and then they just started cheating! Don't blame them but that's not the solution to the problem I was hoping for.

It's a viewer request so I WILL beat it, even if I have to wear down the skin on my fingers to dust to get there but holy good lord Jesus Christ the internet was not joking about this one, this really is a stinker.