I had the fortune to go on a short trip with my siblings to Japan last week, to Tokyo and Nagoya. It was for a family event, and I knew beforehand that there will be a modest amount of downtime waiting around for others or being on planes and trains. I have this habit of over-preparing with video games for trips like these to play during those downtimes. I find it difficult to predict if a game would actually be a good fit to play while travelling and what I will be in the mood for, so I like to prepare a bunch ahead of time and only play one or two that just happen to fit at the time. This time, I mostly prepared only phone games. I brought my spare battery and ordered a pocket Wifi rental ahead of time, so it seemed that only using my phone would at least make things lighter. I always have a bunch of games ready to play on my phone anyway, but the ones I was expecting to play were A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Clash Royale. I also brought my Vita for reasons I'll get into later, and it was also somehow becoming a tradition for me to play LUFTRAUSERS before I board planes (now that I've written it down just now, it does seem rather serendipitous.) I felt like I was ready to go!

Those plans kinda fell apart even before I got to the airport. I'm not gonna go too much into it, but it involved eating too much chilli sauce for dinner. It was a red-eye flight and I was already (er) pooped by the time I got on our ride to the airport. We got to the boarding gate, and when it got a bit quiet I fished out my phone. I really couldn't be bothered pulling out my Vita for LUFTRAUSERS at that point. I played a game of Clash Royale with a friend for the first time, and realised what nonsense this game actually is. It gave the illusion of competition when I played games with strangers on the ladder, but once I played with my friend (who has played more than my couple of days' worth of cards, and coincidentally has an almost identical card selection in his deck), I just got completely destroyed. It was the kind of destruction that seemed completely unfair, since his units just straight up have higher stats than mine do. Even he admits that it was unfair. The point of the game seemed to be the progression of stuff, to level things up and see numbers go up, after all. The game is only fair when you get matched with strangers of a similar rank. I guess there could be some interesting metagame implications there, but it demands so much attention with the chest timers and everything, and it feels ultimately pointless. That completely turned me off the game almost immediately, and I haven't touched it since.

I thought that I was going to be playing XCOM on the flight a little, but I wasn't really in the mood to, and the in-flight entertainment was surprisingly very good. I watched The Big Short before going to sleep, which if you haven't watched, you totally should. It's hard to believe that it was co-written and directed by the guy who also did Anchorman and Step Brothers. It was immensely funny, cleverly shot, fast paced, and so, so bitter about the banking industry. Every single actor in the cast was also brilliant. Great movie. I went to sleep afterwards and watched Creed when I woke up, which was also a good movie!

There was as much downtime as I expected, if not more, when I was in Tokyo. I tried to play A Good Snowman at first. This game is a really good puzzle game, by the way. To describe it in a meets-meets way, it is Sokoban meets Tower of Hanoi meets snowball rolling with a focused and well-paced set of puzzles. You can hug the snowmen you build too! Anyway, I think I was pretty close to finishing at that point, with only about four puzzles left that I can see. I started on one and immediately got stuck. I am still stuck on that puzzle even now. It is so hard. I am going crazy over this puzzle. Gosh, I hate Sokoban. I still wanted to play a puzzle game then, and I basically just fired up whatever puzzle games I had on my phone. I played Threes, which is great but not quite what I wanted. I played Alphabear, which I have not played in a long time and only reminded me that I did not really enjoy playing it.

Somehow, I settled into playing Hearthstone instead. Maybe part of it was vindication for my loss of faith in Clash Royale as a competitive game, and it has a certain mix of problem-solving and progression that was hitting the spot. The game lengths are short and predictable enough to fit in whatever small bits of time I had. When there's not enough time, I just read up on strategies online and try to build decks. There was a lot going on in the metagame: the new expansion was slowly being announced, and the new Standard format was also on the way. It was pretty fun, and I think I've gotten better at the game as a result. The only unfortunate part was probably that week's Tavern Brawl being the return of the worst Tavern Brawl in history: the one where pretty much everything is just random nonsense.

That said, Hearthstone is still just Hearthstone, and playing card games over and over can only last so long. Having watched Creed, I was in the mood for more Rocky-like entertainment. I saw that Punch Club was on sale on the Android Play Store with a new expansion, so I got it. It's kind of weird how much I like and dislike this game at the same time. In terms of playing it on-the-go, it is great. It is a solid life management sim with pretty good Rocky-esque vibes. The interface is simple and low-maintenance, and there's enough variation in the gameplay for it to be reasonably interesting (as in, not boring.)

What is irritating me is the goofiness and really obvious low-effort references to all possible inspirations that the game has. The guy who first takes me under his wings is named and looks like Mick. The love interest (and only woman, so far) is named Adrian, and she is my friend's sister. What is also annoying about them is that they are some of the most pointless video game nonsense. As far as I can tell, Mick doesn't do anything other than feeding me if I become broke (which I haven't), and the first thing Adrian does is give me a freaking fetch quest to collect 5 flowers or whatever. Seriously, game? That's only some of the Rocky references, and there are other nostalgic references to other movies, especially in similar martial arts / fighting sports genre. I hate it. It's done to a level where I am not sure if anything in this game is original. The game is also pretty buggy; UI elements often freak out, and it completely crashed my phone a few times.

Despite those complaints, I do enjoy getting buff, learning new fighting skills, juggling between fighting and surviving modern life. I like how stat points are lost over time, which means that I have to do extensive training right as fights happen (although it's kind of a bummer that there isn't much novel ways to training, mostly only gym training like I'm the Ivan Drago half of Rocky IV or something.) The combat system was perfect for my situation, but I cannot see it working in any other situations. It is almost completely off-hand and random. I even literally stopped looking at the screen when the characters fight. I can't imagine how boring it would be if all you can do is watch the two pixel men punch/kick each other sometimes for a minute or however long a round goes.

When I got to Nagoya, I had some time to visit a couple stores that sell games. They were only a book store and an electronics store, but beggars can't be choosers. I wanted to go there because I wanted to buy a Vita game; specifically, Taiko no Tatsujin: V Version. I used to be super into portable Taiko no Tatsujin games years ago, when there were a few on the DS and PSP. I wanted to see if I could go back into it now. It is a simple two-button drumming rhythm arcade game that has not much to it, but the difficulty does scale up pretty high. I heard that there is a new, harder difficulty, and a new RPG mode like the one in one of the previous DS games. The book store that I went to does have a sizeable video game section, but it was telling how unpopular the Vita is. Among the numerous shelves, there were more shelves dedicated to PS2 and PSP games, separately, than there were to Vita games. There was only one small shelf for Vita games. I could not find the game there either. The electronics store was a little better, having two shelves of Vita games. In comparison, there were maybe more than ten shelves of 3DS games. I luckily found a single sample case for Taiko no Tatsujin in one of the shelves, and bought the game. (By the way, it seems like the most hyped game then was the new Dragon Quest game. It seemed interesting!)

I tried playing the game that night. The menus were surprisingly familiar, as if nothing has changed in so many years. The difficulties were all unlocked from the very start, with the exception of the even more difficult difficulty setting which, I found later, unlocks per song after beating it at the then-highest difficulty. There are many settings for play variants (no miss, mirror, etc), and they are streamlined in a way that made me think that the game is designed with serious veterans in mind. I fired up a classic, Ridge Racer, and found that it is almost identical to how it was 6, 7 years ago. I instinctively remembered most of the song, even if my skills have become very rusty. I was honestly not sure if I was happy or sad that the game had not changed in so many years. Playing a few other songs also showed that their style of notation is still about the same. It often focused on the melody or switching between parts of the song in a way that doesn't always make sense for a percussion instrument. There was a detachment between the gameplay and the music that I had found to be a problem with many rhythm games back then, and with other rhythm games having tried to improve beyond this over the years, it seemed a bit archaic.

The RPG mode had a lot of things that made it seem like a complex RPG system, with equipment having different stats and custom effects, a sort-of party system, and quests. It was a little reminiscent of how Theatrhythm works, and I liked Theatrhythm, but it seems a little out of place in this game. The mode in general seemed like a step back from the old DS game's RPG mode. The core mechanic of playing the game and dodging bomb notes remain the same, only this time there are variants depending on the quests. It's an incredibly slight improvement for a 5+ year difference. The RPG part of the game seemed to have been boiled down to just menus, while the old DS game had an overworld and a random encounter system and everything. I have to say, I was very disappointed. I don't know if I want to ever play this game again. What a waste! The game wasn't cheap too!

Whew, this ended up longer than I expected. Anyway, thanks for reading! I'd be interested to hear what everyone's travelling habits are too. Do you usually bring games when travelling?