Why hello there! Welcome to my weekly blog of stuff that I do in the seven days that separate the regularly scheduled blogs that I post on the internets. The things I end up doing are usually playing videogames, reading visual novels, watching anime, coding videogames and watching all three Naked Gun films back to back to back. Well, let’s get this stupid thing started!

Streetpass Quest

In what might be the best thing the 3DS has going for it, I’ve been having way too much fun playing Streetpass Quest. So, firstly, if you don’t know what the Streetpass functionality is, it’s basically when your 3DS gets close to another 3DS, your mii appears in the other 3DS’ mii plaza, and similarly your 3DS has a new guest too. This, combined with the fact the 3DS has a pedometer in it, and you get play coins for walking, has convinced me to just bring my 3DS with me wherever I go.

While actually Streetpass functionality is rather boring, the best part about it is Streetpass Quest, a built in ‘game’ in the plaza. When you start the game, your mii, who happens to be the king, gets captured. Then, every mii that guests in your plaza, is a wandering adventurer who can go into a dungeon and attempt to rescue you. Each mii you find has two attacks; they can attack with their sword, or cast a magic spell. If they attack wit their sword, they attack three times, and if they cast magic, they cast a spell that corresponds to whatever shirt their wearing, which in turn is that specific mii’s favourite colour.

This may seem like an incredibly basic thing, but man is it silly fun, and more often than not the very first things my friends and I do whenever we meet up. If you keep meeting the same mii, that mii will level up, and do more damage. You’ll meet ghosts holding shields, that can only be destroyed by mii’s that have the same favourite colour, resulting in a lot of “ok change your colour to light blue for when we next meet” type demands.

When you beat the quest one time, you can activate the second quest, which makes everything a lot harder and a lot more challenging. Two colour shields, enemies that can scare the adventurers away before they even attack, and a lot more stuff like that. In a normal RPG these kinds of things would be just fine, but this entire game is reliant on Streetpassing, therefore, I can only play the game once or twice a day, so having a group of ghosts scare away all of my adventurers can be kind of annoying, since I can’t do anything about it for another 6 hours. But I can see this kind of thing being amazing in other RPGs. Imagine the next Pokemon game, and when you Streetpass someone else with that game, you can then later fight whatever pokemans they were holding at that time. A Dragon Quest game in which Streetpassing people results in a bandit like ambush where the bandits are the people you met walking around. I’m hoping more games implement Streetpass in interesting ways, as it might be the most interesting part of the 3DS to me at this point.

Happy Feet Two

Guys I bought Happy Feet Two. You need proof? Well here you go.

I have more money than sense. Well when I loaded up the game, that Wayforward logo popped up. Looks like I found how they got their hands on a 3DS dev kit.

If you don’t know what Happy Feet is then fuck if I know, something to do with penguins and dancing is really all I can figure out. Honestly, this game is a lot funnier if you imagine it’s March of the Penguins 2, doing the best Morgan Freeman impressions you can while playing. I will justify this purchase god damn it.

The game itself is rather basic fare. It’s a platformer in which you collect musical notes and your attack is dancing. Every so often you meet penguins who are all angry and shit and you COMPELL THEM WITH THE POWER OF DANCE, turning them happy and unable to stop dancing or something. The more notes you collect the different kinds of dances you unlock, but most of them seem rather pointless. You also unlock the ability to summon smaller penguins that can wall jump or ground pound, to get access to hidden notes.

Also because it’s the 3DS there are some 3D elements too, like a minigame in which the main penguin flies, because he’s a penguin, collecting musical notes. There is also a boss that’s reminiscent of the snow boss in Donkey Kong Country 3 in the sense that there is snow and snowballs, not in the sense that it’s fun to play, easy to control or satisfying in the slightest.

Why did I buy this?

Tetris

In another move that will surely go down in history as a videogame that I bought, I decided to pick up a copy of Tetris for 3DS, known as Tetris Axis in that North Murka country, but plain ass Tetris over here.

While my main reason for picking it up is my love for Tetris, and just having Tetris in my pocket is always a great thing, I’ve ended up playing all of the extra modes a lot more than I ever thought I would. Probably my favourite of these modes is the Fever mode, which shrinks the grid down to five columns, which makes the game a lot harder than you’d think.

Another cool thing is the computer battle mode, which has a bunch of powerups. Every so often a tetromino will have a multicoloured glowing block inside of it, have that block get cleared and you get yourself a powerup. These can range from getting rid of some of the lines on your board or really dicking over your opponent. My favourite has to be the grid swap ability, which just switches around your board and your opponent’s board, which might be the worst thing you could do to anyone ever. Thankfully the computer is pretty dumb when it comes to using this ability, as on multiple occasions I’ve had the computer switch boards around right as I’m about to lose the match, and then they proceed to lose straight away. Against other people, however, it’s the worst. I have a friend who won’t play against me anymore because as soon as I get that ability I just stack all my pieces in the centre of the grid and switch them around. He was so mad.

The only complaint I have is that it dresses my mii like shit.

Serious the hell is that?

My Girlfriend is the President

Guys.

Guys I can’t.

What is.

But wait I.

The fuck is going on?

So I decided to get My Girlfriend is the President, and damn, this is the Saints Row: The Third of visual novels. That should be enough and I can just drop the proverbial mic right here and walk away.

So the story is as such, after an intense space battle, a space ship crashes into Japan and blows it the eff up. To cover her tracks, Qoo, a loli alien, decides to brainwash the entire world to convince them that a random girl is the president of the country ‘The United States of Nippon’, and moves the White House to cover the crater. The girl who is now president, as the title doesn’t suggest at all, is the protagonist’s childhood friend Ohama Yukino. The protagonist, Hondou Jun, is the vice president, and his best friend Morita is the director of intelligence. Jun happens to be unaffected by the brainwash by sheer chance, and thus Qoo has to convince him to play along. After a freak jetpack accident, he ends up saving a girl from a group of terrorists, and that girl happens to be the president of ‘Rusia’, Irina Putina. Along with the presidents, there is Miyoshi Ran, another childhood friend of Jun, and Ell, the spaceship that crashed into Japan, who Qoo turns into a teenage girl because why not?

The act of brainwashing the entire world gets the attention of a race of alien known as the guardians, who are trying to turn Earth back to normal. To do this, an alien in the form of a panda tries to kidnap Ohama while she’s at a hot spring and... I, I just can’t.

The set up for this visual novel might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, and it’s amazing for it. The actual character routes, however, can get a little generic if you peel back the several layers of crazy, which is disappointing. But I guess the fact that even though Ohama is the president she STILL ATTNEDS HIGH SCHOOL and then the first day back to high school the Rusian president TRANSFERS TO THAT HIGH SCHOOL and thus this high school HAS TWO WORLD LEADERS AS STUDENTS is a pretty silly little addition.

Did I mention one of the girls is actually a spaceship turned into a girl? Yeah? Well did I mention Qoo transforms another spaceship into another girl who then tries to kill Ohama and the original spaceship?

Did I mention the first spaceship IS AFRIAD OF HEIGHTS?

You should play My Girlfriend is the President.

Anime, you guys, it’s pretty weird. Some might even say it’s specifically made for jerks. I think I broke my friend last week talking about the new winter line up of anime, but only specifically mentioning the anime that took place in high schools. Luckily for me, that was still, like, all of the anime. The last one I mentioned was Mouretsu Pirates, not mentioning anything about high school, and then at the end saying “Oh by the way, she goes to space high school.”

Manabi Straight

But before I can go on to the amazing new high school based anime, I have to clear my back catalogue of old high school based anime, so on that note, I decided to watch Manabi Straight, a rather straight forward slice of life high school anime.

The anime takes place in the year 2035, fro I might add no real good reason, and stars Manami Amamiya, who transfers to Seioh High School. She shows up to school a day before she officially starts to take place in a swimming race, despite not knowing how to swim. On the actual day of her transfer, she crashes into a school assembly and becomes the school council president. Then the entire thing decides to slice of life around her and her friends Mika, Mutsuki, Mei and Momoha as they adhere to being clumsy, tomboyish, tsundere and shy respectively.

Rather peculiarly, an actual plot gets introduced around half way into the series. Due to declining birth rates, the amount of students at Seioh has dropped over the years, forcing a merger between Seioh high school and Aikoh high school. While this seems like a small thing, the merger has caused the cancellation of the Seioh school fair, an event that the student council has been looking forward to and acts as if it’s the only thing that’s ever going to happen in their lives ever. So obviously, they get upset, and the back half of the series is spent trying to get the school fair back on.

But really, is there anything I can say about this anime? It’s high school slice of life, anything other than ‘cute girls doing cute things’ is completely redundant. The songs are nice, the animation for what it is works well, but yeah nothing else I can really say. Apart from the slight amount of plot thrown in at the end you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into when it comes to slice of life anime.

Though the intro song has been completely ruined for me.

The Internet Is For Music

While I didn’t make anything knew this week, I felt with the whole internet blackout thing that happened, I should upload my internet mashup onto YouTube. For those who missed it when I first released it in like September or something, it’s a half hour long mashup featuring 195 samples, all of which are internet memes in some way. The samples used have a little bias toward early YTMND stuff but that’s really just because it’s all based on my last ten plus years browsing the awful brilliance that is the internet.

And I guess that’s it. My sleeping pattern is still completely out of whack since university submission deadlines. Meaning I’m usually going to sleep at 6pm and waking up at 3am now. To be honest I’m kind of digging it, and I’d probably keep this schedule if my friends weren’t annoying and actually wanted to hang out with me like some kind of socializing weirdos. I also started proper work on my latest project, a yet to be named My Little Pony game. I told myself after submission I’d take a lot break from coding, a break that lasted approximately 12 hours before starting on this new project. It’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever come up with, so look forward to it sometime next year!