Hey, it’s unfortunately blog time, so I guess we’re both going to have to just put up with it. This is the place where I talk about games, visual novels and link to songs on YouTube that have little or nothing to do with the text in question, or at least I would.
This week my laptop died. Hard drive failure, lost everything.
Also you know how people are stupid and never learn to start backing things up until they actually lose stuff? Yeah that happened too.
Oh well.
Sonic Generations
So before everything died, I started playing Sonic Generations. As with a lot of the games I own on Steam, I bought it and never played it. Well this week I hoped to fix that, and I did! Sort of. My laptop wasn’t the best of things regardless and therefore to get the game running I had to play it in 640x480, so already we’re off to a good start.
Somehow despite that set back, the games looks amazing, the way they capture the feel of the original Genesis games in 3D is incredible, especially compared to that super secret Sonic Adventure 2 attempt. The second group of levels are great too, somehow managing to capture the feel of the 3D games as classic Sonic and taking key elements and basically remixing them for modern Sonic.
Oh and there are three other levels too.
On top of the nine levels, there are ninety challenges split between modern and classic Sonic. These range from simple stuff such as speed runs to introducing completely new mechanics with the friend missions. Though that isn’t always for the best, as some of the worst challenges are these ‘new mechanic’ ones, especially Vector.
I managed to play a little bit before the destruction of everything, at which point I went to a friend’s flat and played even more. The differences between modern and classic Sonic can be a little bit weird if you’re switching back and forth constantly. As expected, modern Sonic has more abilities, and after playing those levels, I started to miss those abilities when playing classic Sonic. For instance classic Sonic has his spin dash, whereas modern Sonic just has a dash button, which is a lot more convenient. On top of that, modern Sonic can ring dash in some levels and homing attack. I know the classic levels are designed to not need these abilities, and they’re still fine without them, but that homing attack sure would have been useful in some of those speed runs.
The game is a great celebration of Sonic and pokes fun at itself in a lot of great ways such as making fun of Shadow the Hedgehog, unlockable songs from the best racing game of all time Sonic R, all the way down to Eggman saying “No-one’s called me that in a while!” when he’s addressed as Dr. Robotnik. There are a lot of really great nods that if you’ve somehow kept up with Sonic until now, sorta makes 2006 worth it.
But only sort of.
Wind ~A Breath of Heart~
O visual novels, you get me through the worst of times. So yeah, this week I delved into Wind ~A Breath of Heart~, a now ten year old game from Minori... Yeah that’s all I’ve got for this intro, bite me.
The game stars Makoto, forced to move away from his hometown ten years prior to the start of the game. Before leaving, however, he made a promise to reunite...
Man I just realised how often this introduction is used holy hot damn.
Anyway.
...with a childhood friend Minamo, he give her a harmonica, and promised to meet up again one day and marry. Now Makoto and his sister Hinata have returned, and he enrols in high school, gets a bunch of friends the majority of which are female and visual novel visual novel visual novel.
Oh right and everyone has super powers.
Hinata discovers she can jump over 2 story buildings and Minamo can control the wind. The sisters Nozomi and Wakaba can create shockwaves and cure wounds respectively. And finally Hikari who is smart? Something like that anyway.
The story has a nice blend of predictable harem nonsense with the whole ‘this city for some reason gives everyone super powers’ thing. Shifting between the two creates a weird pacing for the game that I think actually works, with the main character getting to the bottom of why the city is as it is while still accepting everything as standard. At the end of every route, however, shit goes down. Like, shit goes down in an incredible fashion. The story has one of those twists that can make you do a triple take when it starts happening, and I love it when a story can do that.
But that’s the only point the story falls down. In order to get the true ending, you have to first finish four other routes before unlocking it. While this is rather common in the visual novel medium, when the story has that much of a twist, playing the story again knowing what’s going to happen makes it all seem a little bit weird. Not saying that the twist itself doesn’t make sense, because in the context of the story it certainly does, but just knowing it’s going to happen makes everything before it seem trivial. Maybe that just speaks to how much I enjoyed the twist, but it obviously loses its impact on repeat playing.
If visual novels ain’t your thing the story is also available as an anime. I have no idea how the anime is but hey if they can accurately portray the story from the game then it must be awesome. Then again, it’s an anime based on a visual novel, and they’re usually terrible. Regardless of how you come across this story, it’s definitely one that’s worth experiencing. Sure the shock of the twist doesn’t have nearly as much of an impact on multiple playthroughs, but it’s still effective, and one I personally really enjoyed.
Sweet Plastic Acres
So at the beginning of the year I made a mini mashup album called Discord Days, taking the instrumentals from the Gorillaz album Demon Days and mixing them with the vocals from various songs from My Little Pony. It was a success, as this week that mashup album hit 100k views on YouTube.
Dat shit cray.
So to celebrate I made a follow-up, but this time using instrumentals from Plastic Beach. So yeah that’s a thing.
And that brings us to the end of a considerably short edition of my blog. I guess that’s what happens when the only thing you have that plays videogames and visual novels suddenly breaks. Oh well.
Log in to comment