I mean, it’s just an unfortunate combination of some easily misread text combined with placement on a photo that just happens to draw your attention to someone’s butt. You would need to have all of the sophistication of a 12-year-old boy to giggle at it. For shame.
On the other hand, sometimes the inner 12-year-old wins.
So, back in April, I had a filling come out. Like a big doof, I decided that it wasn’t really bothering me THAT much and I had an appointment scheduled for the middle of July for a cleaning ANYWAY so it could wait.
About a month ago, it decided to start hurting, but, you know, it seemed silly to make an appointment then when I still had the one scheduled in July…
Anyway, the result was that I went into the appointment yesterday as scheduled, and my dentist looked at the X-rays, and then we had a talk about abscessed teeth, and then I got to have a root canal where – as an added bonus! – I had what he called a “hot tooth”, so the anesthetic didn’t actually work to numb the nerve endings and I got to feel every moment of having four nerves pulled out of my jaw through the tooth.
So I deserved some retail therapy.
I had heard that Nintendo was planning to release Callie and Marie amiibos, but I’d put it out of my mind as a crazy fantasy that would either a) never actually happen or b) be such an amazingly limited release that I’d never actually see them, so I was very startled to see this box on the shelf at Fred Meyer and very quickly made it mine. They don’t do much in-game, but I don’t care.
Anyway, I haven’t logged any time in Splatoon recently, but the final Splatfest approaches and I am going to need to strap on my big squid pants and do my best for Team Marie.
Then, I decided to grit my teeth – that is a figure of speech, in this case, because teeth gritting is not to be happening in my near future – and go see Ghostbusters, a movie I did not have high expectations for after seeing the awful, awful trailers.
It turns out that an awful trailer is not always the sign of a bad movie, and I’m glad that I gave it a chance. It wasn’t a shot-for-shot remake of the original movie, but it followed more-or-less the same story arc while being very much its own film.
Nostalgia forces me to always rank the original movie first, but I’m comfortable giving this the #2 spot in front of the 2009 game. All three are, of course, miles and miles ahead of Ghostbusters 2, a movie I like to pretend never actually happened.
Also spending 18 bucks on a movie ticket came with a shiny plastic souvenir:
I will treasure it forever.
…
Well, probably not that long.
Being as I have yet to grow up, every time I go into a store to buy grown-up items, I invariably wind up taking a pass through the video game section. That’s how a simple trip to Target to buy trash bags wound up with me holding a sack full of clearance-priced Disney Infinity stuff, including the Finding Dory and Twilight of the Republic play sets and a mess of random figures. I haven’t actually SEEN Finding Dory yet – though I hear it’s good – but most of the DI stuff was marked down to 50% off and had a Cartwheel coupon available to knock an extra 30% off, so I figured it was worth it.
Sadly, their registers were smart enough to apply the markdowns in order rather then adding them together, so it worked out to 65% off rather than 80%. Still, it was a pretty good deal, and I now have every 2.0 and 3.0 play set and the three-pack (Monsters U, Incredibles, Pirates) from 1.0.
I think I can live without the Cars, Toy Story, and (dear God, what were they THINKING?) Lone Ranger play sets.
At some point, someone with more free time than I have is going to sit down and do their research and figure out just how Disney took the most valuable set of entertainment properties AND made some of the best-looking toy versions of the characters from them AND STILL managed to cock it up badly enough that they wound up canceling the whole thing without even getting around to half of said properties.
I mean, not that I’m bitter or anything, but I wanted my Pixie Hollow character pack and play set, dangit. And maybe some Rescue Rangers. And, like, half of the Marvel universe. And on and on and on…
It’s a good thing that I have absolutely no interest in any of the games coming out between now and November, because the end of June was a little expensive. I had pre-ordered both Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE and Star Ocean without realizing that they (a) released in the same week and (b) it was the same week as Project Diva: Future Tone. Fortunately I had some extra income last month to offset this, but I will be honest in admitting that I didn’t know about the extra cash at the point where I made the unwise purchasing decisions.
I suppose I should be thankful for how generous Amazon is with pre-order discounts for Prime customers, though being enthralled by their aggressive discounting is precisely how I wound up in this mess in the first place.
So it goes.
Anyway, Project Diva: Future Tone is pretty much Sega’s ultimate love letter to Miku fans, collecting all of their songs from the PSP and Vita games and presenting them with HD visuals and some updated mechanics.
Seriously, it has 220+ songs and was a little over 60 bucks after the currency conversion; previous games have cost nearly that and only come with 40 tracks. If you like Vocaloid music at all, it’s a crazy deal.
But, as I found out, it’s both naturally harder – which is fine! – and can also be made quite difficult for yourself without really meaning to.
For example: I often make use of the headphone jack on the PS4 controller so I can hear game audio without disturbing my wife. It turns out that using a wireless controller, and then using the controller’s audio out, and furthermore playing on an LCD screen without, you know, using the game’s built-in timing calibration feature… Well, it’s not exactly a recipe for precision timing.
I did very, very poorly even on “Normal” difficulty, and that’s with playing songs that I have heard, on a lowball estimate, twenty or more times.
On the other hand, after pulling a Hori Fighting Commander wired pad out of a drawer, and plugging in a cheap USB DAC so I wasn’t using Bluetooth audio, and actually calibrating the game to the screen… I STILL did worse than I would like but much better than before. I can now blame mistakes on my OWN derpiness rather than wondering if I’m being undone by wireless latency.
Mind you, the front of my PS4 looks like it’s buried in black spaghetti, what with the cable for the DAC and the way overlong cable for the wired pad and the necessary USB hub and so on. But it works!
One final note: Future Tone gives me a new nemesis to replace the godawful scratch sections in Diva F2. Now, it has single notes that need to be played by hitting four buttons at one. I’ll get the hang of them in time, I’m sure, but for now I curse them and whoever thought they were a good idea.
Well, the Steam Summer Sale has been a little disappointing this year, owing to no daily deals and no flash sales and no metagame or anything like that. Also I feel like I already own, like, 90% of everything on Steam already.
But, I didn’t have The Witcher 3, and I really liked the first one, so I dropped the $22.50 to add it to my library.
Then I figured I should probably play the middle chapter.
So some initial thoughts on The Witcher 2: Epic Subtitle Here, after 11 hours played and finishing the prologue and first chapter.
Playing a game five years after launch may be a bit unfair, because I keep running in to small annoyances where my initial thought is “Skyrim (or Dark Souls) did this better” and then I need to remind myself that both of those games came out months after TW2 and had the opportunity to learn from places where CD Projekt RED might have stumbled. With my possible unfairness documented, I will continue on to say that my initial impressions of TW2 are that it is a game with a really engaging story and compelling world, hampered by mechanical choices that make all of the bits between conversations and cutscenes (you know, the bits where you kill monsters and take their stuff, aka the GAME parts of the game) a right pain in the rear end.
For example: The world is frequently very dark and takes place in swamps and forests, places with lots of underbrush to hide loot and harvestable items, so you have a button for “witcher sense” which sends out a SONAR-like ping that highlights everything you can loot, harvest, or otherwise interact with. The highlights go away after a few seconds, and the witcher sense button has a short-but-frustrating refresh time tied to it, so a pitched battle with seven or eight enemies is followed up by pushing the button, looting a couple of items, waiting for the button to refresh again, looting the things you can loot, waiting… and all the time hoping that a wandering monster doesn’t happen by, because you are locked out of looting during combat and for several seconds after combat – even if “in combat” just means that something has seen you from a great distance away and is running towards you.
Fortunately, I found a mod that a) highlights every lootable and harvestable object all the time and b) auto-loots enemies as they die regardless of in-combat status, and another mod that pulls back the camera so I can actually see more of the world and less of Geralt’s oh-so-manly clavicles.
There are fewer fixes for things like the number of button presses it takes to navigate your equipment and find or equip an item, or the way the inventory UI makes it terribly easy to unequip your boots, or the way pressing the “Craft This Item” button on the crafting screen creates the last SELECTED recipe rather than the recipe you have highlighted, adding an extra required button press to avoid making the wrong thing and losing hard-gathered crafting components.
Also it has QTEs. There’s an option to turn off “Difficult QTEs” in the game settings, but what it desperately needs is an option labeled “turn off QTEs entirely and apologize for putting them in the game in the first place.”
The game’s final sin is including stealth bits in a game whose engine does not seem designed around having stealth bits. Most of the ones I’ve encountered so far have been of the variety where failing at stealth means that you just kill everyone who noticed you, but I was warned that choosing one side over the other when you need to pick sides leads you to a mandatory mission where you MUST be stealthy and where failing at stealth is an insta-fail-start-over situation. So I picked sides appropriately and am grateful for the warning.
Basically, what I’m trying to get at is that the game is fantastic in spite of itself, because normally I would not have time for this crap.
OK, so I don’t gush a lot and usually it’s because whatever game I’m playing has top-tier waifus to fit every taste, but OMG Lifeless Planet.
The shtick is, you’re an astronaut who volunteered for a one-way trip to a newly discovered habitable planet, and you’ve been in cryosleep for 15 years to get there. Your lander crashes, you wake up with a damaged suit and the other members of your crew missing… oh, and the brilliant green planet you were expecting is a barren wasteland, devoid of all life barring a few exceptionally homicidal plants.
Then you find electrical lines in the middle of said wasteland, and they lead you to an abandoned Russian town that looks like a slice of 1950s Americana, with white picket fences and everything. That’s when your focus shifts from “how am I going to survive” to “how am I going to survive… and what the heck happened here?”
There’s no combat. Three things explode. You fall to your death a lot. There’s some phenomenal atmospheric music to accompany your frequent deaths.
I loaded it up just after midnight to “get a feel for it” with the plan of playing it when I got up in the morning, and I was up until 4 AM.
Available on PC and Mac; I played through it on the Mac and got roughly consistent 30fps at 1920×1080 on my integrated-graphics 2015 iMac so it does not need a lot of oomph. If you do likewise and want to play with a controller, you’re going to be spending some time in the button assignments menu. Presumably controller support on the PC is a little more plug and play.
So, we have a policy at work right now where everyone needs to use up a week of their vacation time by the end of July. Nothing ominous there, no, not at all. It couldn’t possibly be indicative of trying to hit artificial numbers to make analysts happy. This isn’t really that unusual in the corporate world, come to think of it, but it is giving us all a sense of low-grade dread.
Anyway. I had a co-worker who was trying very hard to get ready for his week’s furlough but kept having people walk up and interrupt him while he was trying to get his customer cases organized for someone else to watch during his time away. He eventually got so fed up that he went and fetched a whiteboard, set it up outside his cubicle, and wrote
in large red letters.
Well, this served its purpose and drove people off so he could finish his work and get out of the office. That was Friday.
Come Monday, the whiteboard and its rather annoyed message were still in place, and I thought that it needed a little, you know, flair.
Hence:
It’s been a couple of days and everyone’s favorite 90s mascot character is still prominently displayed in our department. I wonder if it will last the week?
Edit: for the record, the word “Bubsy” got erased on July 8, but the picture remains. Hang in there, Bub!
Sep 21: Bubsy remains defiant. Three months and counting. It is my belief that everyone simply accepts that one of our whiteboards is the eternal home of a forgotten mascot.
June 21, 2017: One year later. Bubsy remains. He has become a fixture. He will probably outlast my own tenure at this job. And he’s getting a new game. I have unwittingly opened a portal to some kind of hell dimension.
Ninja Blade is one of those games that must have been very cheap at some point, or perhaps part of a bundle, because the name is so ridiculously generic that I can’t think of any other reason it would have wound up in my Steam library.
It turns out that the game is pretty generic as well. It plays something like an clunkier but easier version of Ninja Gaiden Black with the body horror turned to max. You run around and hit monstrosities that used to be human, trying to clean up the monster-infested streets of Tokyo before the Government blows the whole thing up to prevent the infestation from spreading. You get to use three different types of swords, there are a couple of element-based ninja arts that you use for combat and to solve puzzles, there’s lots of wall running and swinging off conveniently-placed poles and a grapple to help you clear long gaps, and it really has a lot of elements that could have made for a really fun game but just kind of don’t.
The saving grace of the game is its sheer absurdity. You play as a Ninja named “Ken”, the last member of a team of Ninjas that apparently Japan keeps around to deploy in monster-infested-Tokyo situations, and everything you do is so over-the-top that I would question the humanity of someone who can play this game without laughing frequently.
It’s not just the way you ride missiles like surfboards, or hold back a runaway plane with nothing more than a rope in one hand and your sword stuck into the pavement in the other, but things like deploying to a new mission in an Osprey and riding there on the outside of the aircraft.
On one of the wings.
On the underside of the wing.
Hanging UPSIDE DOWN from the underside of the wing.
Because you’re a Ninja and that’s what Ninjas do apparently.
Also you can do all of this while wearing a pink Ninja outfit:
The crazy extends to the far-too-frequent QTEs. These stink up the game every few minutes, and would absolutely get it tossed into the “never play” pile if it’s weren’t for the ability to set the QTE difficulty independently of the combat difficulty, so you can play with normal or hard combat difficulty while setting the QTEs to “Foolproof”. With this done, when you are prompted to hit X or dodge or what have you, you can simply press ANY key and the event will succeed and the QTE will continue.
With this done, boss fights all end with particularly gruesome and visceral displays of Ninja Bad-assery, and again you will likely be giggling like a schoolgirl as you watch them.
Or, more accurately, giggling like a full-grown man who should know better.
Sooooo… if you can get it cheap, or if you get it in a bundle or something, I think it’s worth putting in your Steam library. Probably. You could do worse.
Gone Home isn’t my usual sort of game. There are no bikini ninjas and absolutely nothing explodes.
It’s one of those games, like Dear Esther, that gets rather uncharitably lumped into the category of “Walking Simulator”, and similarly it has a mute protagonist wandering around while you piece together a deeply personal story. While Dear Esther has you roaming a rather starkly beautiful island, Gone Home takes place in a massive empty house full of lots of little things to pick up and read or fiddle with and then carefully put back where you got them. It’s much more the game for the casual voyeur than the scenery tourist. 🙂
There’s not a lot of “game” to Gone Home, in the traditional sense, though it does have a few puzzles to solve. Mostly, you wander an empty house turning lights on and discovering that your parents’ marriage has been decaying and your sister has been seeing someone they don’t approve of. You read a bunch of notes, get a sense for your father’s frustrations and your mother’s regrets, find combinations to open locks and maps to expose secrets, and listen to a very sweet romantic story unfold.
The whole thing is steeped in that mid 90s just-before-the-Internet-age nostalgia vibe that should have anyone of a certain age waxing poetically about mix tapes, photocopied zines and Super Nintendos. I suspect it’s got much more impact for the Gen X kid than practically any other generation, and anyone born after that might find the whole thing a little dull.
For me, I was square in the middle of the target audience and found it well worth the 70 minutes it took to go through the house’s nooks and crannies.
Yes. Yes, I did.
Going from “OK, I’m going to man up and try this Demon’s Souls thing” to, two months later, finishing the last of From Software’s series of rather brutal RPGs has been an interesting experience. It’s made me take a second look at how I think of difficult games – which I’ve never been a fan of, traditionally – and why the Soulsborne series turned into such an exception.
I think it comes down to the way they make it easy to fail, but also don’t punish you for failing. The series is defined by its bosses; but almost every boss fight has a, let’s call it a pre-fight stage, where you grind through the level to GET to the boss and, just before you actually fight them, you unlock a shortcut back to the last checkpoint. When you die, you respawn at the last checkpoint, run back to the boss in a fraction of the time it took to clear to him the first time, and take another crack at him.
There are obviously some exceptions to this, but MOST bosses share this design.
It also doesn’t rub your nose in the fact that you died. As an example of what I mean by this: a few months ago, I tried playing Aliens: Colonial Marines, a roundly-panned first person shooter known mostly for terrible enemy AI and graphics that came nowhere near the quality of the trailers.
I’ve played plenty of games with bad enemy AI and games with dodgy graphics, so I figured it would be good for a laugh, if nothing else.
I hated it, largely because every death was accompanied with an annoying unskippable cutscene wherein your character got murdered by an Alien, and then some loading screens, and then you had to fight through the level from the last checkpoint, and there were so many bits in the levels where you were tapping your fingers impatiently waiting for an NPC to do something… cinematic. It was a game that was so full up in How Awesome It Was that it made me hate playing it.
The Souls “YOU DIED” screen is, by comparison, brilliant. You died, the game acknowledges it, you can try again in a minute. If you don’t feel like fighting everything in the level, there’s probably a way around them or through them if you have one finger on the dodge button. If you die a second time, well, there go those souls you were trying to get back to, but now you don’t have the stress of trying to get back to them. You can let them go, because now you have license to goof around and try new things.
It also doesn’t hurt that they are absolutely dripping with atmosphere and – even when you’re slogging through Yet Another Poison Swamp Zone – the games make you want to see what’s around the next corner. Usually it will be something that tries to kill you, of course.
I’m trying to avoid turning into a Souls evangelist around friends and family, because I recognize that they’re not for everyone and I really think that Demon’s Souls is essential to play AND my favorite entry in the series and not many of the gamers I know even still have a PS3 hooked up. Should From/Sony put out a PS4 or PC remaster, they will be “encouraged” to play it.
Oh, and on that note: My final ranking. Entirely personal opinion here, with all that entails and acknowledging that every one of these has been an A+ game. Some have just been that tiny bit MORE A+ than others:
Now I guess I get to join the ranks of the fans hoping that Miyazaki was kidding about that whole wanting to do something different thing. 🙂
Baud Attitude 