Yeah it’s this thing again. How delightful right? It’s your one stop place for things that I do every week! That usually entails videogames and visual novels, and every so often I venture into the realm of ‘other things’, but you know whatever. So as I sit here with absolutely no money and all these videogames coming out that I can’t buy, I guess this is a highlight of my week.

Which is an incredibly depressing thing to think about.

Oh god.

Mario Party 9

I’m just going to say it, I like Mario Party. I’m that guy that likes Mario Party. I’m that guy that will play Mario Party and will keep track of everything in my head so I’d know exactly who would get the bonus stars and actually employ some strategy to win as many games as I could. So this year marks the 9th instalment in the Mario Party series, and also the 9th instalment of Call Of Duty, yeah, just saying.

Hey so, if you watched the TNT you’ll notice that the game is completely different to the other 8 games, and I don’t have to explain how weirdly different it is. If you didn’t watch it, however, things different yo. Instead of having a set number of turns and collecting stars and having mini games at the end of every turn, you know, the elements that make Mario Party, well, Mario Party, you’re now collecting mini stars and each level in a set length, and mini games happen at random times. I was super sceptical the first time I played it but I actually really enjoyed playing it. Then again, I enjoyed Mario Party, so maybe I’m crazy.

The mini games are vastly improved from Mario Party 8 too, as there aren’t many mini games that rely on motion controls, something that can be a little hectic with 4 people all at various angles to a television. The mini games also appear a lot less which is good as there is less fatigue to them. Each level also has two boss battles which can be a lot of fun and employ a great mix of cooperative and competitive play, trying to work together to beat the boss but making sure you beat the boss more. The silliest change is the Bowser spaces that, among other things, can play reverse mini games, in which the person in last place gets the stars. These are a lot more fun than they should be, such as a normal mini game where you’re trying to avoid getting hit by thwomps turns into who can jump into the thwomps the fastest.

Me, that’s who, I’m the best at losing at mini games on purpose.

As someone who would much rather play this year’s ninth instalment of Mario Party to this year’s ninth instalment of Call of Shooting Dudes in the Face, it’s no surprise that I enjoyed what I got. But it’s definitely a four player game, I can’t imagine the tediousness that would occur playing this in any other situation. Luckily I’ve found myself a good group of friends who I can sometimes trick into playing Mario Party with me. The trick is to never remind them that I win every single time, and if they do remember, try to convince them it’s all to do with luck.

And then destroy them.

Nintendo 3DS

Even though it isn’t a game in its own right, I guess I’ve been playing the Nintendo 3DS game recently. The 3DS is still super interesting to me, even if for the last month or so the only game that’s been in there is Pokemon Black. Sure the whole “I’m a student and therefore I never have any money ever” thing might be part of the reason, but the whole “nothing decent is coming out” might also be a tiny factor.

It’s annoying, really, because on one hand it’s region specific, I dumped a bunch of money into the eShop wallet because I knew they’d be a lot of cool games coming out on that service. And yeah a lot of great games did come out for the system, in America, that is. A lot of the games I’m really looking forward to have yet to release over here, some of them 3 months now after they’ve been released in America. It’s good to know when they do eventually come out here I already have my money ready, but damn, I just want to buy VVVVVV for a 4th time and my region won’t let me.

Not to say the eShop hasn’t served me well, I’ve been playing a bunch of the demos they’ve been released. Even demos for games I know I don’t want to buy like Cooking Mama 4 just because I can. I can’t complain at all though, because it’s how I found out about Rhythm Thief. So in like 2 weeks this game comes out and I’m totally doing to somehow get it as soon as I can and play it a bunch. I went from not knowing this game even existed to having 100+ fan art images of the main character saved on my computer within 24 hours. First impressions seems to be a silly story based rhythm game akin to Space Channel 5, but each minigame seems to be completely different. So expect more on that when it comes out!

I’ve also done most of the whole streetpass aspect of the 3DS. For those that don’t know there are two games you can play which is supported by meeting other people who also have 3DSs and streetpassing them. The two games is a basic image tile swap game and a rather in-depth RPG game. I can’t remember when I talked about it but hey I went more in-depth on these things a few weeks back. Long story short I’ve got pretty much every single hat in Streetpass Quest and almost every single puzzle piece in Puzzleswap. I also found out that the amount of coins you can accumulate at once is 300 the hard way, so I spent them all on Street Fighter IV statues that I never use. Videogames!

Enzai: Falsely Accused

Gay porn. It’s a rather weird thing don’t you think? It’s the one thing that can be so diverse yet for some reason they all are just encompassed in one giant umbrella. Now with ‘normal’ porn there are so many weird and weird categories, but when it comes to gay stuff there is never that level of, personal preference, I guess. There’s also a weird thing where quite a bit of gay porn in Japan is usually just incredibly feminine people that just happen to have penises. Where am I going with this? I really have no idea, but this week I played Enzai: Falsely Accused, another one of those boy love visual novels, so those are still totally a thing!

The main character is called Guys, who is a rather typical rapscallion hanging out with his friends. One day he and his friends take refuge in a shop during a thunderstorm, and decide to steal as the storm lets up. As he’s getting chased away he runs into the authorities and ends up getting falsely accused for murder. After being forced into a confession, he gets thrown into jail where he has to try him damndest to survive.

You can probably assume where the porn aspect of this story comes in from, it’s a jail story full of a lot of guys, and rather interestingly the main character is very often the ‘bottom’, and... Well, very often against his will. It’s an interesting thing to have the main character of the story being the one that’s completely helpless in those kinds of situations. But overlooking that aspect of it, they actually story is honestly rather interesting. The characters are a good range of extremely shitty and sort of likeable, Guys tries his best to form friendships that will help him survive his sentence, and the result is something that works a lot better than I expected.

On top of that, the story weaves in and out of Guys meeting up with his lawyer trying to prove his innocence. While that aspect of the story does get a little interesting by the end, it seems to take a long time for it to actually happen. By the time the end of the game rolls around, Guys has been in jail for three years. While I appreciate the game not taking too long to get to the good parts of the story, it’s weird to just have months pass in a few sentences and the characters not really reflecting that all that well.

But that’s a rather small issue, and if I had to gripe on anything else, all the gay shit gets in the way of the story a lot of the time. In the story there is a guard that always ‘has his way’ whenever he decides to show up, and while that does a great job in making him hateable, it just gets monotonous at a point. It’s a moot point to being up, as I’m sure I could gripe about this about most visual novels I’ve talked about in this blog, but it was especially apparent here. So if you can get past that aspect of it, I’d recommend it for the story. While is really what this blog is about, so mission accomplished I guess.

I’m gonna stop there so you don’t get any more of the gay cooties. You know the worst kind of cooties. I’m pretty sure it’s contagious so you should probably go do something incredibly manly to counteract it. And while you do that I guess I’m going to go to sleep and wait until the next time I get to write another one of these. So until then, catch you guys later!