Blog time! Hey everyone and welcome to another edition of videogames, visual novels and probably other stuff! This week has been pretty great for a few reasons, one you’ll hopefully be privy to in the coming weeks! Hell, maybe even next week, who can say! It’s kinda like a big deal, like, you should just stop reading here and just wait for that announcement.

...You’re still here? Well, I guess I have something for this week. Let’s see what I can whip up.

Breath of Death VII

I’ve been meaning to pick this one up for quite some time, ever since one of my internet friends started raving about it back when it was on the Xbox indie channel. Now it’s up on Steam so I finally got around to playing a little bit of Breath of Death VII. The game is pretty short and I completed it in one sitting, which I guess makes sense because it’s so cheap and comes bundled with Cthulhu Saves The World, so I can’t really complain about that.

First off, the humour, I found the humour pretty good for the most part. I lot of references tucked away here and there, and some just generally funny dialogue between the main character and his companions. When I started playing it I was pretty down on the humour, expecting it to just be completely out of place references, as if it was the Family Guy of videogames (which is a bad thing). The moment I turned though was town of Motherbound, a rather obvious nod to Mother/Earthbound franchise. The first person in the town says something along the lines of “Not a lot of people get to visit our town, but it’d probably be too costly to make it available around the world.” Great! I was on board 100% after that.

The other part of the game, literally the only other thing it has, is the combat system. If played the game or even watched the quick look you’ll know a bit about this already, but I find it rather interesting. The battle system itself is also rather reminiscent of Mother, with its first person-esque view and downright silly enemies. The system of the enemies getting stronger every turn is great, but doesn’t really affect strategy as much as you might think. In normal RPG games I usually zone in on one enemy, kill them, and then rinse repeat for the rest of the encounter. Here, however, you might not do this, as whatever enemy you’re left with, if the encounter had a large number of enemies, will be incredibly overpowered. Luckily as luck would have it you’re in luck! There are quite a few spells, and some weapons, that target every single enemy, making taking all enemies out fast a viable option. Except wait! That’ll mean you’re doing less damage to each enemy, making them stay alive for longer, and making them all more powerful as time going on. The power amplifier system does a great job of being well balanced that general RPG tactics can still apply without one being more beneficial than the other.

Another part I liked was how random encounters were handled. This game fixes random encounters, guys, like for serious. Each dungeon or area has a set number of random encounters, meaning once you hit that amount of random encounters, you will never encounter enemies in that dungeon or area randomly ever again. Now, this game doesn’t have any back tracking, but I can see a system like this being incredibly beneficial for an RPG with said backtracking. At a point when you’re going through a dungeon for a second time you’re incredibly overpowered and the random encounters are nothing more than a nuisance. If this system was in place, however, imagine going through a previous dungeon without that worry, and being able to explore in peace, it’s magical! The game also features a battle button, meaning if you want to fight you can, even if there are no more random encounters in that area. If there are though, this will count towards that counter, meaning if you’re crazy like me, you can just use this to prematurely end all random encounters in a dungeon in the first screen. So yes the system can be gamed slightly but I still find it super well done.

Cthulhu Saves The World

I started playing Cthulhu Saves The World right after beating Breath of Death VII. This was probably a really bad mistake, as despite the improvements I was pretty burned out from beating Breath of Death VII in one sitting. I’m sure this one is pretty great just like the previous game but a little bit too much to handle all at once. Hopefully I’ll have this game done by next week and have something to say about it then.

(That’s not the announcement.)

Team Fortress 2

Everyone’s favourite JJWeatherman alerted me on twitter to a Team Fortress 2 Bombing Run happening. Considering I was doing a fat load of nothing at the time I decided to join in! I managed to get on despite a 250+ ping so... sorry to everyone I was with if I was ever glitching around the map. My main class is the Soldier but since I was just fooling around I decided to switch class every few deaths. You can also tell I don’t really play a lot of FPS games or really care about my stats by the way that I expect to die around twice as much as I kill. But whatever, it’s all about having fun!

I wouldn’t even mention this, because I end up playing a little TF2 every so often anyway, I usually don’t have anything other than “yo I shot some dudes” to say about it. This week is different however. Because I shot some dudes...

With arrows.

I couldn’t believe it myself, one map I decided to go Sniper because why not. I don’t play Sniper that much in any FPS game because, despite having good twitch reflexes, I don’t find sniping that fun, ever. I had the Huntsman equipped and was too lazy to switch it out so I rushed to the center point, with JJWeatherman all up in my ass being all Medic like, and got two Huntsman headshots in a row! I even dominated some fool! It was fun and I should play on the Giant Bomb server more often, but maybe I’ll try and get a faster internet connection first.

Tiny Tower

“HEY PSY”, the annoying voice inside my head shouted with the inconspicuousness of a chainsaw powering at 6am, “You should play Tiny Tower while your code compiles!” For some reason instead of completely disregarding what I had to say (I have issues), I took myself up on the offer and downloaded Tiny Tower. I’ve been casually interested in it ever since it was featured on Tested’s App of the Week segment, but never felt the need to try it out until now.

It’s pretty fun, but after the first day or so the addictive nature of it wore off almost completely for me. In the first day I only had about 3 or 4 shops and I was determined to get the most goddamn coins I could. I had alerts on (something I’d rectified since) so I knew exactly when to stock new items, using math to figure out average sell time so I could always make sure stores had at least one item in stock at all times. I was even evicting everyone new to my tower unless their dream job was one of the 3 already established floors. It was crazy. That’s changed already; however, now that I have about 10 or so stores, I just order everything at once and don’t touch it for maybe 4 hours, restock and order again, it’s a pretty basic cycle. I’d say the game is still pretty fun if you like that micromanaging type stuff, but it quickly gets to the point for me at least, that there are too many variables to care about the maximum amount of output without going virtually insane, and the further you get into the game the more variables they’ll be.

Also I have no friends on Game Center so I can’t even show off to other people!

Hitomi - My Stepsister

The one thing I’ve always hated about visual novels is the porn. Not to say that I don’t like boobs or anything, but in the past I’ve tried to make a very clear distinction between ’visual novels’ and ‘porn games’ as I’ve always felt, and still strongly feel, that the two are not one in the same. This is partially the reason behind the stupid blog title; I tried to get one of my friends into visual novels only to be met with “I’m not gonna play porn games what the hell”. After trying my every so damndest to try and make my friend see things differently, I caved as soon as he kept saying “who the hell would play porn games for the story?” Why am I saying all of this? Well this week’s entry is Hitomi – My Stepsister, and this is a fucking porn game.

When you load up the game you’re greeted with a terrible mess of string voices that make up the company’s logo and a main menu featuring one of the characters topless. Off to a good start. The story starts off with the main character, Takahiro, living a normal life with his overworking father. His father divorced from his mother due to him constantly being at work. One day, however, Takahiro’s dad has suddenly remarried, and now they’re living with Yoko, his new stepmother, and the titular Hitomi who, which may come to no shock to find out, is the stepsister in question. Also featured is a classmate of Takahiro whom he admires, but that’s neither here nor there. That’s really all the set up you need, or rather, all the set up you’re gonna get. The game rather quickly goes into choice mode to decide which one of these three girls you’re gonna end up romancing. Both the stepsister and stepmother route just make the main character seem like a giant dick. Especially if you think about his father, who has been alone working hard to keep a roof over their head, and who has finally found love again after how many years, only for Takahiro to fuck everything up in, like, a week or so. Then again, the story was probably not thought that indepthly.

In fact I’d go as far to say the story really isn’t thought about at all. None of the routes make any sense, the main character will do three completely different things one after another, destroying any illusion of him being a well thought out character. The actual story arcs for the heroines are also rather all over the place, with only Hitomi’s plot having even the slightest resemblance to character progression, but even that is stretching it slightly. What the story is in all three routes is just a convenient way to segway from one porn scene to the next. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the porn scenes were made first before someone thinking “oh god we have to justify this somehow” and throwing together this haphazard plot a week before shipping.

Another weird thing that sort of lends itself to that theory is that the game would constantly crash for me, because I’d actually take the time to read the text. So this is probably that “old game meet Windows 7” bug but it happened often enough I may as well mention it. So for some reason every time the music would loop in a scene, instead of setting the music back to the beginning of the song it would instead repeat the last 5 seconds over, and over, and over, AND OVER. This is extra frustrating as more often than not that’d include the fade out to silence. When the music glitched like this, whenever it switched to a scene with different music, the game would lock up and not respond. Again, this is probably a Windows 7 thing, but holy hot hell it was annoying, as it forced me to reload the game and skip to the scene or make saves every time I thought the game would switch scene.

Every so often I do something that can’t be labelled using the admittedly incredibly otaku-esque headers I’ve used up to this point. So for these rare occasions I’ve devised this miscellaneous section! How convenient! Now some of you might be thinking "finally stopping with all this weeaboo crap! Time for some real content like food and blood and handegg!" Well hold your horses, or should I say hold your ponies?

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

Oh boy here we go!

So until very recently I’ve been pretty down on this recent My Little Pony craze, but at the same time never had that much exposure to it. The only people I knew who watched it, or rather admitted to watching it, were my two bestest internet friends who, obviously not caring about my stance on the whole thing, would talk about ponies seemingly ALL THE TIME. It sort of annoyed me but at the same time since I hadn’t even given the show a chance, or rather at that time I was still oblivious there was a show to give a chance to, I didn’t really object that much. Eventually I read more into it and learned about the legacy behind the show, the Powerpuff Girls and Fairly Odd Parents connections, and figured I may as well give it a shot eventually. Then I was linked to one random scene and the only thing I could even say was. “What... wait no wait what?”

“Did they just make a Blazing Saddles reference?”

I was shocked, like, I know I probably shouldn’t’ve been but damn, it was pretty well done. This was the tipping point, and my cold dark hatred filled heart slowly thawed over the full day marathon of the entire 1st season.

So after watching it I can completely understand both why people love it and why people hate it. First off I do have to say that I really enjoyed it, and any criticisms I do have against it sort of crumble and fall apart when you remember the intended audience for the show, so you know whatever. The characters fall into stereotypes rather easily, some of the plots either feel like reused plots from PPG or other shows in that sort of vain with a little twist, and as always friendship conquers all of life’s problems, which admittedly you’d come to expect due to the name of the show. Again, I don’t know how much I can hold this against the show all that much considering the target audience. On the plus side, there are some really funny episodes, the characters for the most part (which can be read, “all except for Rarity”) are pretty great, and as someone who hates when shows just randomly go into song for no reason, the times in which they go into songs rather randomly aren’t that bad, all except for one time but then the joke following the song is that the song is terrible, so that’s pretty funny.

While I’d say I’m a fan, I still find quite a lot of the fandom to be absolutely crazy, but then again you can pretty much say that about most things on the internet, so I’m not going to complain about something like that. Just felt the need to say if anyone is like how I used to be and absolutely don’t understand just what the hell this whole thing is all about, I’d say you may as well give it a shot. Sure there are some bad episodes but I still find it pretty fun to watch, even to re-watch, something which I hardly ever do with any TV show.

And that’s it for this week! I woke up on the Friday to find that Bastion was available for pre-order on Steam so I pre-ordered that before doing anything else that day. Seems like the best decision I’ve made in a while. I can’t tell yet if I want to be that guy who waits for it to come out, and quickly play through it to get all the 10 idols and try and top the leaderboard. Mostly because if I dedicate myself to doing that, no doubt I’ll not make it in time and be super pissed off because of it. If I don’t do it I don’t risk my pride, really. But who knows, August 16th that way as well be years from now! Who’s thinking that far ahead? Not me at least!