January Mini Marathon

As mentioned in a previous post, even if there's no donation incentive marathon goal met, I'll still try and do some kind of mini marathon once a month.  Since no goals have been met at time of writing I'm announcing the mini-marathon for January.  Since it's following the stream schedule and therefore I get to pick whatever the heck I want for the variety stream, I'm going to roll with 12 hours of Sekiro.

I doubt I'll be able to finish it in a single sitting but my plan is to find a guide and get the names of all the bosses and try to do all that game has to offer before reaching the end.

I'm late to the Sekiro party but I'm extremely excited to finally be able to give it a full playthrough after all this time.  So, if you don't already, follow me at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis and come join me in my adventures in ye olde Japan.

The marathon will take place on the 18th/19th of January, hopefully I'll see you there!

Plans For 2020

Since my New Year Holiday at work ended and I'm back to the old grind stone I thought I'd take the time to let you fine people know some plans for Identity Gaming in 2020.

The Stream

Nothing huge really happening to the stream but  I'm hoping to do a marathon at least once a month this year.  What the marathon IS will be dependent on if anything gets donated for but if there are no completed goals I'll probably just do long versions of the current stream rotation.  In case you don't know what that is it's

Variety Stream
NES Challenge
Donation Requests
Speedruns/Variety
Challenges

Speaking of challenges hopefully we'll make short work of FF7 No Materia and I think before the years end I'd like to accomplish FFX Single Character, A souls game deathless and MAYBE depending on how well I can do the previous two, Undertale hitless? We'll see how that goes, maybe I'm being too ambitious there.

The Blog

The blogs been sort of sporadic and inactive since most of my efforts have gone into the stream.  I want to balance things a bit more and get a more consistent posting schedule.  Also I want to add more donation incentives and maybe start doing some actual giveaways to further incentivize charity donations.  I've been toying with the idea of moving from Blogger to a different service but this is a pretty good (and most importantly, free) way to write my silly articles.

YouTube Channel

Completely neglected for a long time now and I want to fix that.  I've got some ideas for play throughs and some other types of video but first I need to organize the channel and cut some of the crap that I uploaded in the sites very early days.  Don't forget if you donate for a playthrough and you'd rather have it for YT rather than done live, just specify that in the donation comment and I'll do it.

Expect maybe some video essay type stuff, some more Japanese arcade coverage and maybe even a hall of fame/shame type show if I ever get time to script anything.

Of course this is all just a rough idea of what I WANT to do in the coming year, I'm sure things will change or I'll have inspiration for more ideas and challenges in the near future.  Of course, on top of all this if we could smash those charity goals that would be even more awesome but just having your support for the above is more than enough <3

2020, lets go!

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.

Stream Update! Challenges Approaching

Right now, the current stream schedule rotation is as follows

Variety Day
NES 100 Game Challenge
Donation Request Day
Shmups and Speedruns

and now we're adding one more, a Challenge Day.  Recently I've been watching a lot of videos on YouTube of people doing 0 hit runs of the Dark Souls games.  That means going through the entire game without taking a single hit from a single enemy.  These guys are so good at what they do I've even seed a guy who goes by the name SquillaKilla on YouTube and Twitch beat Dark Souls 1,2 and 3 back to back without taking a single hit.

I've decided it would be cool if I could push myself to do this kind of thing so as a result I'm starting a challenge day segment on my stream.  Of course, I'm not daft enough to think I could do something like DS No Hit right out of the gate, I haven't played any of the Souls games for about a year now so instead we'll be kicking off with Final Fantasy 7 No Materia to ease us in.

I've made a little list of things I want to try and do that includes things such as Dark Souls no hit runs and single character runs of certain RPGs but I'm also open to suggestions, so if you know challenging ways in which to play a certain game, write a comment or hit me up on twitter and I may add your suggestions to the list.  There are some INSANE challenges that I've been made aware of such as Final Fantasy 7 solo character initial equipment which I will be incorporating as donation incentives so make sure you throw some money at the charity if you really want to make me suffer.

Don't forget to follow on Twitch so you don't miss anything
www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Doom 3

I’ve been playing through the Doom games recently in a sort of slow preparation for when Doom Eternal comes out, a game for which I am quite looking forward to.  The first couple of games are about what you’d would expect from titles that old, dated and kind of clunky but solidly made and still a ton of fun to play.  I got around some of that old DOS game clunkiness by using something called ZDoom which is a sort of mod that makes it look pretty and controls in a way that makes sense (mouse to move forward are you MAD?!) and Doom 2 on Ultraviolence in particular feels like a first person Bullet Hell game at times.  
But then there’s Doom 3, the weird black sheep of the family
Talking to people about Doom 3 it seems like it’s remembered rather fondly.  Hell, if I’m being really honest I myself has fond memories playing it up until the point I finished it last week.  But having replayed it I can’t help but feel that it’s just a bit shit.  It’s not because of its fancy graphics getting in the way for my DOS brand nostalgia goggles or anything like that, it just doesn’t feel like “Doom”, you know?
Sure it’s got “Doom” on the cover and it’s about a man on mars fighting soldiers, imps and other iconic monsters as well as a few new additions but it feels wrong.  Doom levels are maze like and sprawling while Doom 3s levels are claustrophobic and linear.  The “puzzles” in Doom 1 and 2 are about finding keys and navigating the various mazes while Doom 3 has you clearing poison barrels with a UFO Catcher and repairing bridges and doors.  Doom 3 isn’t Doom, it’s Half Life with a Doom lick of paint and the spookiness turned ALL the way up. 
What I’m not saying is that Doom 3 is a bad game.  It’s a fun little spookfest with competently made, satisfying gun play, great atmosphere and great enemy variety, it’s a great game that I would probably be talking about a lot more positively if it wasn’t for the title. 
Hindsight is a wonderful thing too because clearly when they came back to make New Doom they went BACK to big open areas full of monsters to rip and tear on.  Arguably they went a little TOO much the other way but I’d rather have it wide, fast and violent than slow, spooky and.....Half Lifey?
Anyway if you’ve not played Doom 3 I would still recommend checking it out, like I said it’s not a bad game by any stretch.  Do be warned though that if you’ve come off the back of new Doom or the re releases of the old ones, you are in for an extremely different experience. 
Here’s hoping that Doom Eternal is going to be an absolute banger!

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.

Universal Studios Japan 2019 Halloween Roundup

If you've been following the Twitter (@Taurinensis) account you'll know that I've just returned from a trip to Osaka after going to see the Halloween Horror Night at Universal Studios Japan(a while ago now actually since I got delayed posting this) .  I've talked about these nights before on the blog so this time I'm going to just give a quick roundup of all the attractions I saw this year.

Space Fantasy The Ride: Black Hole

Space Fantasy is one of the roller coasters at USJ and puts riders in a rotating car that will twist as the coaster falls and turns.  Usually the ride is all cutesy but entering it during the Halloween event gives you some kind of story with a scientist that is using a black hole to open a dimensional rift or something.  The ride itself is just Space Fantasy but with all the lights turned off.  The exact same ride only this time you can't see shit and there's a voice in the background saying stuff like "Ha ha! I have you now!" and stuff like that.  Maybe if you had never been on the ride before and had no idea what was coming it might be exciting but otherwise it was just kind of "meh"

Area 51

A walk through "horror maze" that was hosted inside the Backdraft ride.  Starts with a guy coming out telling you that there's an alien invasion and that you have to escape through a forest only for him to be gunned down by some woman who then informs you he's been taken over by an alien parasite and now you have to escape to their base at the end.  Interestingly, only half the backdraft ride is used and you get taken out of a back door for the "maze" part of the attraction which has alien dudes following you around the place.  When you get to the base it turns out that it's been completely overrun and you move through alien infested corridors to the exit.  At the end you mash a bunch of buttons with some randos on a panel and save the earth.  Not bad but even it's attempts at jump scares were kind of weak although this is probably by design since the maze opened early in the morning.

Cult of Chucky

A similar walk through horror house to Area 51 but with the intensity ramped up a little bit since it didn't open until the evening, standard fare.

Blood Legend

Blood Legend was a short horror movie in the same "4D" theatre that they host that Shrek show in, 4D being the gimmick of seats moving around and blasting air at you when certain things on screen happen.  The show starts by recanting the legend of actual serial killer Elizabeth Bathory and then plays a movie about two girls who are on holiday in Hungry.  The two girls end up visiting her estate under the impression its some kind of museum and then get chased around a bit.  Fairly standard stuff but I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Bathory is the main villain in Castlevania Bloodlines although I might be mistaken

Biohazard: The Extreme

This was the attraction in particular that I went all the way to Osaka for.  Before you can ride the thing you have to go get a ticket to book a time slot and what I was surprised to see is that there was a "Leon Route" and a "Claire Route" and then whole thing was very clearly styled after the Resident Evil 2 remake.  We did both routes on this trip starting with Leon.  Once again, it's just a standard haunted house type affair but seeing all the scenes from Resident Evil 2 remade for the attraction was kind of cool.  There's a few zombies stomping around that jump at you as you walk through but eventually you get stopped by a staff member who warns you about a creature that's sensitive to sound so you have to be quiet.  You are then led down a corridor with a Licker in it and once out you come to a corridor with a big glass window in it.  This is where the two routes are different as Mr X comes out on one end and then either Leon or Claire will pop out of the other, yell at you to escape and then have a little tussle with the big lad.  You go through some more rooms with some more monsters until you get told that your going to have to fight whatever is chasing you and you are led into a room with a bunch of light(?) guns.  You grab one and start blasting and the enemy on screen which changes depending on which character you are.  I think you can beat it and escape but both times we did it the group didn't do enough damage so it popped up during our escape sequence and we got a "You have died" message.  All in all, a good bit of fanwank if your familiar with Resident Evil but my wife also seemed to enjoy it a fair bit and she doesn't know anything about the series

It may be a little on the pricy side but the Halloween night at Universal is a pretty good time.  I'll probably go again next year when they have more Resi goodness for me.