Psycosis

Hey guys, bet you’re excited it’s time for this thing again, right? I know I am, even if I might have just woken up. I mean, since when has a proper sleeping schedule ever helped anyone? This is the penultimate entry in my blog that talks about videogames and visual novels, two of the most amazing things in the world, and that’s just fact. Well I guess let’s get this over with!

Portal 2

Portal 2 was without a doubt one of the best games I played last year, the story, atmosphere, the amazing co-op that I played through no less than 5 times with different people and somehow managed to have fun every single time. It’s hard to deny how good the game is. Then they released free DLC for user created levels, annoyingly actually releasing it just before I had university submissions, which sweetened the deal even further.

While I didn’t get the chance to actually mess around with the level editor itself, because I’m usually incredibly terrible at stuff like that, I decided to sample some of the higher rated levels that were already released. I got to the game a few days after the DLC was released, and already the amount of levels were in the thousands, which is insane .I downloaded a few pages worth of levels to see how crazy people are.

They’re pretty crazy.

The standout is called 12 Angry Tests, a 7 level long saga featuring 12 or so puzzles, finally ending in a straight up boss battle against the defective turret. It’s fucking crazy how well produced these levels are, especially for showing up within the first few days of the editor even being available. My brain can’t actually process it, and I love that.

There really isn’t much to this section other than ‘guys you really need to play 12 Angry Tests’, I played a lot more from the first few pages of the top rated section, and yeah a lot of them are really well done. Puzzles that would rival some of the harder stuff from the main game, even a few that I honestly couldn’t figure out and ended up skipping. Considering the only problem I had with the main game was the puzzles weren’t that hard, this DLC fills that void with abundance. The idea that now any time I load up Portal 2 there are an impossible number of new puzzles to play is both scary and amazing, and I can’t wait to actually sink some time into contributing levels myself.

Eiyuu*Senki

So my love for Sengoku Rance is rather well known, and I would honestly put it as one of my top 10 games I’ve ever played. Naturally, when I stumble across a game and the only information I have on it is it’s a “Sengoku Rance clone”, my ears perk up and I immediately buy it. That’s how I came across Eiyuu Senki, and man, was that the best decision I’ve ever made.

The story is rather straight forward, you control a rather Rance looking dude called Chihaya (though the name can be changed) on a quest to take over the world. To do this, Chihaya teams up with a girl called Yamato through a series of events. Once you take over Japan, Yamato betrays you and splits, leaving Chihaya to take over the world himself... or something. To be honest that’s about as much as I could understand of the story, given that it’s still entirely in Japanese. Whatever, I’m pretty sure that’s close enough. After Yamato splits, King Arthur shows up and forms a pact with Chiyaha, so that he won’t take over Hong Kong. Chihaya then continues his quest for world domination, starting with the rest of Asia.

You may have noticed I referred to King Arthur as ‘she’ in the last paragraph, and that’s one element of the game that is completely insane. Every country is ruled by various leaders or important figures from that country’s past. The UK is ruled by King Arthur and the knights of Camalot, Europe is ruled by Napoleon, Nero & Ceaser, America is ruled by Christopher Columbus and Geronimo. All fair enough, the mishmash of history has been done before, but in this game, all the characters are Japanese girl versions of said people.

This is a rather insane thing, trying to re-imagine these leaders (and in some cases really fearsome leaders like Ivan the Terrible) as Japanese girls, but I think it’s so insane that it makes the game that much more hilarious. After all, Nero is a magic girl. That’s just silly.

Since this was described as a Sengoku Rance clone, there is gameplay here too, and it’s a lot of fun. Each side has a 3x3 grid that can hold up to 6 commanders. Each commander takes turns in attacking and so on and so forth until one side wins. Positioning in a big part of the strategy as each commander can have different classes. Chihaya can attack to columns in front of him and in any of the three rows, gun units like Columbus and James Cook can attack only in the row they’re in, archers have a much larger range, and so on. After every attack each team gets a small amount of brave balls, which build up to allow magic attacks. Also each attack will net brave balls depending on the amount of damage it inflicts. Magicians such as Copernicus can heal using this bar, and most commanders will have super attacks that use the majority of this bar. Attacking works similar to Sengoku Rance in that, each commander’s health is also their power, as it actually indicates their army’s size. On top of that each commander has their own strength, speed and defence stat, which can be boosted by equipping items. Each turn nets more money, which can be used to increase the size of a commander’s armies.

On top of all that each turn also has a bunch of missions that can be taken, which results in anything from more money, to more story, to a commander learning a new ability. These missions require a certain amount of points to actually trigger, which requires a certain amount of commanders. In each turn you can only use a commander once, so if you send them on a mission, they can’t in the same turn attack, or in fact defend if the enemy ends up attacking one of the cities you own.

So that’s a decent summary of the gameplay, and if you’ve played Sengoku Rance (which I keep saying you should) you’ll notice that a lot of that is almost identical. The key difference here though is that this game streamlines a lot of it to make it, well, more fun. Sengoku has this whole capture and kill mechanic, meaning if one of your commanders goes down they could be killed off altogether. That doesn’t happen here, and all of the named characters are automatically added to your plethora of commanders as soon as you take over their country. Not having to worry about those things makes the game a lot more forgiving, and to certain extend a lot more fun.

So here’s the weird thing, this is the best game I’ve played so far this year. I honestly think when/if it gets translated it’ll shoot right up there as one of my favourite games ever. The characters are ridiculous to the point where it’s just funny, the gameplay has a lot going on while still being simple enough to pick up straight away, and even though I didn’t understand much of the side stories, the main story’s plot twists made me literally stand up and applaud. Seriously this game goes in a really stupidly awesome direction and, while I probably would have seen it coming if I understood more of the text, when it happened it was the greatest thing ever.

And that does it for another week! Man, this week didn’t feature that much stuff. Probably because instead of playing a bunch of games I just played those two, for like days and days at a time. I’m surprised my friends didn’t think I was died because I don’t think I’ve left my flat in the last week... I should probably get on that.

@Jay444111: I've been meaning to pick that one up for a while now actually, thanks for reminding me of it!

@Mento: I don't have wireless internet for my 3DS but I'm sure as soon as I can connect it I'll be downloaded VVVVVV. I think that'll make it the fourth or fifth time I'm bought that game at this point too.

Why hello there! Welcome to yet another one of these stupid blogs in which I talk about visual novels and video games. It seemed like a daunting task but somehow in between all of these games and all of these Japanese anime characters, I actually finished another year of university. Turns out waiting until 2 weeks before submission to make 3 complete games is a little harder than you think, but on the other hand, I’m pretty awesome.

So how ‘bout those videogames?

Puzzle Bobble Universe

So during one of my midnight shopping trips I found the 3DS Bust-a-Move for pretty cheap. And, because I’m a sucker, I bought it. I had no knowledge that there actually was a Puzzle Bobble for 3DS, but always figured it was about as inevitable as death and Bomberman. IT was literally the first time I had ever seen of it, so eh, why not right?

The biggest problem with this game is just there’s not a lot in it. There’s a puzzle mode which is broken down into several worlds of 10 levels each, with every world culminating in a boss battle, and a challenge mode where when you complete the stage a few new lines are added. Yeah, that’s all there is in this game, no multiplayer, no fun bonus modes, no crazy campaign in which Bub has to traverse a giant map beating AI opponents, no level editor, none of that. In fact yeah, the Playstation 1 version of this game had more stuff packed into it.

It’s a shame too because I do really like Puzzle Bobble, but when the phone version has more features than handheld version, someone somewhere fucked up. Also a funny little aside, before I first loaded the game I told my friends “Hey I hope they have that one song in there, you know, the main theme from the Playstation version? That’d be cool.” It’s almost as if they heard my wish, because that song is in there! And it’s the only song in the game. Every single theme is just a remix of that one song, which might be the funniest part of the entire game.

Offspring Fling

No unfortunately this is not a Angry Birds spin-off off of Crazy Taxi, instead, this is an indie game that was recently released of Steam. Before even the introduction video is over I’ve bought and installed it. This is the tale of Offspring Fling.

But first here’s the video.

So if that trailer didn’t sell you, Offspring Fling is a platform game in which you pick up your offspring and fling them places. Well, mostly it’s to pick all of them up and head to the end of the level, but flinging them is usually needed to reach said end. Basic platforming tropes like buttons, platforms... err, jumping? Yeah it’s not the deepest game in the world, but you get flowers for completing levels fast enough, and I’m a sucker for time trials.

One of the really cool things about the collecting Offspring albums mechanic is how it effects the character’s movement. The more you’re carrying, the slower you move and the worse your jump. It’s a great small detail that adds a lot, as it means you have to strategically plan out which offspring to collect and in which order to get the best time. They also increase your size, in the fact that if you’re carrying one of the offspring you can’t fit through one gird high holes, but you can sure as hell fling them through and pick them up on the other side! Videogames!

So yeah again another news flash man who likes indie games enjoys new indie game. The only real downside is the lack of Steam achievements, which even though I might be the only person I know that actually cares about Steam achievements, it’s still pretty annoying. Luckily the platinum flowers which can only be obtained by beating the developer’s times of every level will render me completely insane instead.

Galaxy Angel

Like I’ve said in the past, I try and not partake in adapted Japanese media. Usually the transition between anime to visual novel and vice versa loses a lot of the original story. However, that really isn’t the case with Galaxy Angel, as it’s less of an adaptation of the anime story, more of a... well, giving it an actual goddamn story. Oh and this is actually a game too, so win win in that regard!

The main character is called Tact Mayers, the commander of the second Frontier Fleet, a group of five highly trained space combat peoples, who are in charge of protecting the white moon. They find Tact Mayers and force him to become their new commander. The story follows Tact and the group, known as the Angel Wings, trying to foil a plan hatched by the exiled Prince Eonia to pretty much take over everything.

But really enough about that, this is a videogame. By which I mean every so often the usual visual novel style story telling goes away and in its place appears a space strategy game. You control the five Angel Wings and, well, fight enemy ships. Objectives are pretty much the same of just destroy all the enemy ships, but sometimes you have to make sure cargo ships aren’t destroyed, or just make it to the other side of the map, and stuff like that.

The combat itself is pretty fun, even if sometimes it doesn’t feel like you’re doing much. At the start of the game, it lets you know if you don’t issue any commands the characters will find the enemies themselves are just start fighting anyway. This means for the first like 6 or so fights I actually didn’t do anything in the game. There were a few close calls but yeah, just walked away and when I came back the mission was complete. Obviously later on the game gets a lot more challenging that you have to be paying attention to what’s going on, but I thought that was worth mentioning.

Even though there is that whole gameplay part of it, it’s still pretty visual novel through and through. Whenever the group isn’t fighting, you can choose different rooms in the spaceship to go check out. Sometimes one of the girls will be there and you get a small scene with them, complete with choices and flags to raise and whatnot. Around chapter 7 the team gets invited to a dance, and Tact gets to ask one of the team to be his partner, which is what seamlessly takes you into each character’s route. Though the girl you ask can say no if you don’t raise enough flags for her, which on one hand makes sense but on the other hand I had to go through the entire game and all those fights again just to see that route UGH.

Overall it’s actually a pretty great experience, something I honestly didn’t expect. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the anime so I was rather sceptical going into this, but the storyline is great if a tad drawn out, the gameplay is fun if a tad too slow, and the characters are interesting if a tad too Japan. I mean seriously, one of the squad members is 13 years old, sure she might be talented but aren’t there like space laws against that or something?

And that’s the end of another exciting week of stuff that I gone and done did. Fun fact I wrote this entire blog post without any pants on. Now you may be sitting there thinking “well that’s fair enough but I didn’t need to know that” but then maybe you’ll slowly start to remember I’m Scottish and that word is rather different over here.

So on that note!

Hey there! While I currently should be stressing out over university, what with submission being less than a week away, I’m here telling you about all the videogames and visual novels I played this week! I hope you appreciate that, well that, and the fact that the last time I ran my program the graphics card practically went up in flames and the computer couldn’t display anything, so I turned it off and hastily left the labs. But you know, baby steps, or something. Let’s get it on!

Mario Kart Wii

Man I’m really been on a Mario Kart binge recently.

So my friends and I played Mario Kart Wii this week, except we didn’t play Mario Kart Wii. So something I didn’t know until this week is that there are a lot of really crazy Mario Kart fans out there. So crazy, in fact, that there are a bunch of hacked levels available for Mario Kart Wii. Now, I was aware of the whole Brawl hacking scene, but I didn’t think it was a thing for other games.

So what my friends and I actually played was some weird compilation of custom made levels for Mario Kart Wii. The hack adds like 20 new cups to the level select (complete with the majority of the cup icons having white artefacts around them, letting you know up front how high quality these tracks are going to be), making it rather impossible to play them all. Another element that makes it impossible to play them all is that they’re all just so terrible.

Now I admit I didn’t go into this with the highest of hopes but god damn. So many giant tracks that jus take way too long to play with nothing going on, so many same level tracks, so many un-textured walls, one track in which the track texture was clashing with the grass texture which was completely horrible, and I don’t think there was a single shadow in any of the tracks.

I guess this is another redundant write-up, because hey you could probably guess fan made hacks wouldn’t be of the highest quality, but man, we pretty much played until we were completely sick of what we were seeing, and that didn’t take long at all.

Rugrats: Search for Reptar

Fuck your Amnesia, this is a real scary game.

I have incredibly fond memories of Rugrats for the PS1, so when a friend of mine got his hands on a copy, of course it was played for several hours. If you haven’t played it, it’s a Rugrats game in which you play as Tommy, walking around the house which acts as a hub world, and playing short levels to get puzzle pieces that eventually form Reptar. The levels range from an Easter egg hunt, mini golf, playing as Reptar destroying a city, collecting balloons, you know, basic stuff. But man is this game just weird.

It might actually just be due to the limitations of the PS1, but the environments are just creepy in some levels. The backgrounds just fade to black way too soon, the models just look messed up in some really peculiar ways, and just a lot of weird things all throughout. Again this is all probably attributed to the limitations at the time, but man if some of that stuff didn’t freak me out growing up.

The worst part of it is the goose level. So one level you play as Tommy and Chuckie in a mission to get Grandpa’s teeth back. The first section of the level takes place in a giant hedge maze. Now before I go on there was one of my friends and I present, and we had played the game before, and one other friend who hadn’t, who wouldn’t believe us that the game was scary. So anyway, Tommy was navigating the maze, and all of a sudden the goose was right in front of him. Now it’s an old game in which the camera isn’t that good, so after turning a corner you’d have to manually reset the camera, and then oh god goose. We ran away from that screaming and took another path. All of a sudden we saw the goose again at the end of a long straight just... waiting. It looked like it was in the default Jesus cross pose but a lot more menacing. We decided not to get closer and just turn around. We turn around, centre the camera, all of a sudden, goose right in front of us again.

It’s messed up man, it’s just messed up.

A Profile

This one has been a while coming, this week I played A Profile, a game from the same team as Sharin no Kuni and Devil on a G-String, so needless to say I was pretty excited for this one. Those other two games I mentioned are two of my favourite visual novels to date, with plot twists so insane and amazing that I’m still amazing at how they managed to pull them off. Expectations are a weird thing; this is a good visual novel, but the weakest of the three by a long shot.

He story stars Masayuki, a typical school student with a small group of friends who just so happen to be mostly female. This group includes his sister (stepsister that is, because you know, visual novels) Rizu who he has to wake up every morning. Miku, the silent type who doesn’t talk to anyone except Masayuki, and seems to just stare out of the window before class every morning, Miou, Masayuki’s childhood friend whose only real characteristic is the fact that she’s the protagonists childhood friend, Kaine, filling in the silly otaku best friend role. The actual story is mostly just slice of life based, main character hangs out with girls, then eventually one of the girls and hey they develop feelings for each other.

But wait, it’s by the same writer as Sharin and Maou, the stories get the rather audacious plot twist treatment, but I’m not just going to say what they are, that’d be silly.

It’s incredibly hard to compare to those other two visual novels, mostly just because I love them so much, but the thing those other two did well was the worlds they took place in. While those other two games took place in something resembling reality, it has their own unique twist on it. This game, however, is just a straight up high school slice of life with some crazy thrown in for crazy. I mean sure the other two were also high school based (since, you know, Japan) but it was different enough that it still remained interesting.

The thing I find weird about this one is the order in which you play the routes. I thought it might have just been my experience but it seems that there is an enforced playing order which makes it a lot weirder. Basically, without spoiling anything, one of the routes made me hate one of the other heroines. It’s a great moment in the story and it’s completely intentional, but then after that happens you then go on and play that route afterwards. What this resulted in was me caring incredibly little for that route. I can’t help but feeling it would have made more sense to switch them around, making the hatred in the first route I mentioned even more intense. But maybe that’s just me.

I’m not saying it’s a bad game, the twists are rather intense all things considered, but everything leading up to said twists are just rather generic. Not only that but other games have done this generic setting a lot better. But having said that the fact that the twist can make me just straight up hate a character (even if they’re redeemed and forgiven afterwards) means the story is effective. I guess I’m torn, so I’ll leave on an incredibly non-committal “yeah sure”.

Psycosis Befriends Nopony

So here’s a project that’s been in the works for quite some time. I decided about two months ago it’d be fun to make a bunch of mashups featuring My Little Pony fan songs, because those are a thing. At this time I had already started talking to one or two people that made MLP fan songs, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask them for their song stems to see what I could do with them. Two months later I have this album! The album has 26 tracks and lasts almost 2 hours long. Check it out on Bandcamp or check the preview below.

I usually don’t go into depth on my mashup side on this blog, so I won’t bother here considering this really isn’t the audience for it. But yeah, I made a thing, crazy right?

And that’s it for me; I’m going to go back to trying to figure out Direct X. By next week’s entry I’ll have done all the coding I need to do for university, or at least the submission dates will have passed. Less than a week away and currently my program breaks nvidia drivers. I should probably fix that.

@Video_Game_King: Ok yeah if there's one thing I absolutely loved about Mario Kart 64 it was the Block Fort level. Didn't play that recently but that's the one map I think of when I think of the battle mode in the Mario Kart series.

@ArbitraryWater: The thing Diddy Kong Racing and Crash Team Racing did great was the hub world you can just race around in. Somehow those games did it amazingly and then most attempts since has been rather bad.

@Little_Socrates: I'd say it's worth checking out if you like that type of story, all of the articles talk about how each SCP is contained and how it was discovered, various reports on them and even interviews on the more humanoid entries.

Another really cool thing they do is what they don't talk about, a lot of names and locations are blanked out, and key information is removed. It's that whole thing of what you can't see is a lot more interesting than what you can, allowing you to imagine yourself what it could possibly be.

My favourite instance of that is the Cyborg Girl, one of the tests they run on her is letting her play a Wii game, but the game name is replaced with squares. So on the site it's written as ███████ █████ █: ██████████, but with enough deduction you can figure out they're talking about Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

Oh hey! How y’all doing? I’m doing fine I guess, just writing this blog. Pretty boring if you ask me, you should probably just skip past it and not even acknowledge its existence. But if for some reason you chose to read this, then welcome, hey hi hello, let me tell you what I am.

Yoshi’s Story

So a friend of mine decided to buy Yoshi’s Story on eBay for a few bucks, because hey, it’s Yoshi’s Story. Now I hadn’t actually played Yoshi’s Story before now, but I always heard it was pretty good with a great visual style. And yeah that’s what I came away thinking.

While the gameplay is what it is, it’s definitely the art style that stuck out in my mind. It’s pretty much the same idea that Little Big Planet had, of all the levels looking like they’re just made from actual materials. It’s a really cool look and, even with Nintendo revisiting it somewhat with Epic Yarn, really should be done more often in my opinion.

The game itself is incredibly short and easy; again I never played it before now so I don’t have any nostalgia associated with it, but man it isn’t the best game to actually play. While there are a fair number of levels, only 6 if I remember correctly are actually required to be played to reach the end of the game, with the rest of the levels being available as alternative routes pretty much. It made for a decent system when playing with multiple people; however, as we’d each complete the game using different paths, but it’s still weirdly short.

Mario Kart 64

After being bored of that, we threw in Mario Kart 64 and actually had fun for once. I’ve never actually believed Ryan’s theory of the first Mario Kart you played is your favourite, because Super Mario Kart is the first one I played, and I think it’s the 2nd worst of the lot; Mario Kart 64 is in my opinion the... worst version. Yeah I really don’t like this version that much.

I don’t really know what part of it that I don’t like; maybe it’s the weird character sprites on a 3D level, maybe it’s the actual levels not being that good, maybe it’s the fact that the controls and the camera is just incredible weird after being used to the newer entries, or maybe it’s because Diddy Kong Racing is superior in every way, but this is a bad version of Mario Kart in my eyes.

Not to say the entire thing is bad, that Yoshi level in the last cup remains my favourite Mario Kart track. It’s just so stupidly designed that they somehow managed to overflow the ‘stupid’ integer and find themselves at ‘amazing’. Especially due to the fact that the map and the ranking system just replaces all the characters with question marks. I know that’s mostly just because of how many paths there are that ranking would be changing way too frequently, but it adds to the stupidity. I’m legitimately depressed they haven’t thrown this track into any of the newer games yet, as when they announced that feature in the DS version this was the track I thought of that’d be perfect for that.

But like I said this is nowhere near the best Mario Kart experience, give me Double Dash any day. I actually got the starman statue in that game, which you only get if you beat all the hard staff times in every level. Doing that replaces a Pinata statue in the Peach Beach level with a starman, and I can’t tell if this is a glitch or not but next I loaded up the game it was gone. I was obsessed with that game, and I really hope they release a ‘double dash’ mode or something in a handheld entry at some point.

Or maybe I’m just crazy.

Ef – A Fairy Tale of the Two

This week I read Ef – A Fairy Tale of the Two, a visual novel by Minori. Minori was the group behind Wind, the game I covered two weeks back. If you remember, the thing I loved the most about Wind was the twist, so I had high hopes for this one, and man, it didn’t disappoint in the slightest.

The story is split up into four separate stories with four separate protagonists. The protagonists (in order) are Hiro Hirono, Kyosuke Tsutsumi, Ranji Aso and Shuuichi Kuze. Most of the characters have some sort of tie with each other, such as Kyosuke being friends with Hiro, which makes all the stories feel rather intertwined without any story actually relying on the events of the other. One of the cooler things is that with this format, there are four different character routes technically, while making all the routes make sense. Probably the best example of this is the first and second chapter stories. The first chapter has a love triangle as the focus, between a girl called Miyako Miyamura and the main character’s childhood friend Kei Shindo. Not to spoil the first chapter’s ending, but the weirdest thing was I aiming for one of the girls, but that turned out to be the bad choice, and the girl that Hiro didn’t get with turned out to be the main heroine of the second chapter. On one hand it’s weird that it presents two girls and then says one of them is the wrong choice, but on the other hand the story makes sense and it was mostly just be trying to fight where the story was going.

I also have to point out this game looks phenomenal, like legitimately the best looking visual novel I’ve played, and even better than a lot of actual games I play too. While a lot of visual novels rely on twenty or so character sprites, maybe five per character, and a few event scenes, this visual novel must have thousands of these character sprites. Characters animate like an anime, using what I can only assume to be voodoo magic to determine the volume of the voice sample and animating the mouths to go along with it. There are quite a few scenes of the characters walking down streets and they have side view versions of the sprites on screen as if the character was actually walking. It may seem like small things but considering a lot of visual novels just have the character sprite on screen rather lifeless, it adds a lot to the experience.

The stories themselves culminate in a rather great twist as well; one I think is on the level of Wind, with the added bonus of the entire game just being one big story, so you don’t have to repeat the twist several times, so a lot better in that regard. The entire story is told as recollections from two other characters, Yuuko Amamiya and Yu Himura (which isn’t the twist, as that’s how the game opens), and the final nature of those two is a pretty bad revelation, but that’s only a minor nitpick on an otherwise amazing story.

Much like Wind this also has an anime adaptation, and much like Wind I haven’t seen it so I can’t comment on how good or how faithful it is. What I can say is this is another story that definitely has to be experienced.

Then again what do I know I must say that like 50% of the time.

SCP Foundation

Hot damn, the SCP Foundation is my current obsession and I can’t tell if I love that or hate that fact.

For people that don’t know, the SCP foundation is a wiki dedicated to supernatural stories, and if I’m getting my facts straight (which I never do) it originated on the 4chan /x/ board and pretty much spun out of control. What the site is now is over a thousand stories, quite a lot of which are really interesting, and quite a few that are actually really scary.

The reason I’m not too sure if this is a good thing for me is that I’m incredibly easily scared. The first day I read some of the entries I pretty much couldn’t sleep, and yet went back to read a lot more. An example is the original story, which is weird reading up about it now because it’s pretty much an angel from the Doctor Who reboot. Yet for every scary one there are a handful of really stupid ones. Such as a tomato that can propel itself at incredible speeds at a person that makes a bad joke.

The outcome of all of this is a giant pool of really interesting ideas and concepts. My friends and I are all in agreement that a lot of the concepts on that wiki would make amazing bases for short stories. So much so I’d describe that wiki as the logical progression of the Goosebumps books.

And now that this is over with I’m going to go back to coding stuff. Cause as it turns out when you leave all your university work to the last minute things can get pretty hectic! Oh well, serves me right I guess.

@Wraith1: It's pretty much what I do when I have free time, I guess the trick is to not be employed and constantly ignore university submissions.

@Bocam: Yup! I guess in one sense it's effect that it can be as depressing as it gets, but on the other hand that's not what I'm looking for in visual novels. It's like the Drug That Makes You Dream thing, Aeka dies if you don't take her route, and for me it makes it harder to care for the other routes because of it.

@TopSteer: I think I'll end up using more Tekken characters eventually, I started getting really good at Paul and Hwoarang, but that might just be because that was my main team in Tag Tournament and I made sure I could use them in this game before anyone else.

Man has it been another week already? Seriously I thought yesterday was Wednesday or something. I guess that’s what happens when you have exams and coursework submissions due and you really haven’t started anything for anything! Anyway, welcome, I talk about visual novels and videogames, hope you don’t mind.

Videogames?

So like I only played like one or two things this week so I decided instead of trying to stretch segments on stuff I played for five minutes I’d lump them all into one and call it a day.

Street Fighter X Tekken is pretty great. I don’t own the game myself so I’m ignoring all of that gem nonsense and focusing on actually playing the game. The split between Street Fighter and Tekken characters is really cool even though I favour the Street Fighter characters a lot more. However, I think it goes to show just how well the game is made when I can use a Tekken character and, even though my knowledge of Tekken ended with the first Tag Tournament, still pick up those characters and use them well. Also the backgrounds are insane and I love them.

DJ Hero 2 has to be my favourite rhythm game, I was actually sad when Activision shelved the Hero franchises only because I felt the DJ Hero games were going in a great direction. This might be due to my fascination and experimentation with creating mashups, but I really enjoy the gameplay and the soundtrack to DJ Hero 2 above all other rhythm games. I really hope a third one will find its way out at some point, only because I really wonder how they’ll evolve the gameplay. In the first game there was a Daft Punk mix incorporating quite a few Daft Punk songs, I’d be really interested to see how they’d handle more than two songs being mixed at once, sorta Girl Talk or Super Mash Bros style. If only.

Super Smash Bros. Melee is a videogame.

Ok that’s that over with.

Daibanchou -Big Bang Age-

When I’m not playing Sengoku Rance (which I admit is a very short amount of time) I’m trying to play Daibanchou -Big Bang Age-. Both games are made by Alice Soft, and both games are visual novel in terms of story and then super strategic gameplay in between. Both games are about starting in a small territory of Japan and eventually taking over everything with an army. But the difference is; only one of them is good.

In the year 200X a giant crater appears in the middle of Japan, dubbed the Demonic Hole. It caused the land of Japan to be shifted and caused the appears of dark crystals that give people special powers, who were in turn dubbed Special Students. These Special Studnets ruled Japan out of violence and fear. The main character Zanma Rouga transfers to Seijou Academy and proclaims he will conquer Japan, and thus he bands together the Special Students at his school to restore order there, and then the entire district, then the entire nation.

The gameplay is split up into like 10 different stages, and that’s really where most of the confusion of this game takes places. Hell I don’t think I fully understand how each stage works but I’ll give it a go. First you have the option to load or save the game in stage one, then after that you get the traditional visual novel story aspect. Then you get a set amount of income every few turns, check your prison in case you want to recruit new members to your team, and then finally the main character’s brother informs you on any updates to the map or whatever. That’s like the first five or so stages and for the most part can be ignored. After that you can go explore a part of the place you control to trigger some character events and whatnot. Then you can talk to someone in your group to trigger events for them. Then you can send people to attack specific areas, and therefore finally the actually gameplay starts.

The battles are up to six members in each fight, and works on a point based system. If you land an attack you get one point, and if you kill an enemy you get two points. At the end of a fight, if you score more than 5 points difference, you get 2 control points in that area, otherwise you get 1 control point. Gain all the control points in an area to seize that area. After the battle the final phase is counter attacks, where enemy forces can attack places you control.

This is the order in which this game is played, and it’s incredibly unforgiving because of it. Sengoku Rance has a similar amount of shit to do each turn, in fact it probably has more, but the difference is you can do it in any order. Sengoku Rance did come out after Big Bang Age so it’s obvious Rance just refined these mechanics, but the way they’re represented here is way too confining.

I feel like if I gave this game enough time I’d end up liking it as much as Rance but even after sinking a considerable amount of time into it I’m just not feeling it. The gameplay is too constrictive and the game is incredibly unforgiving for beginners. But probably the worst part of it is how it handles the porn aspect. While Rance freely goes around raping, he is an incredibly likable character and everything is done in a very silly manner which makes it endearing. This game, however, it’s just the worst. The main character does get it on with quite a number of the girls, but a much higher percentage of the scenes are horrible. If I remember correctly in Rance there are maybe 2 or 3 of these scenes but they’re usually if you fuck up at some point. Here, however, you’ll get the choice to save one of two girls and you really don’t want to know what happens to the one you didn’t save.

Summer Wars

So my friends got me to watch Summer Wars this week. I had heard of it before in passing on the internet but never bothered to actually seek it out, so I actually never know what it was actually about. It’s a rare treat going into a movie almost completely cold, especially with my rampant use of the internet. Anyway, the movie.

Summer Wars is about a giant network called OZ, which is pretty much that universes version of the internet. Imagine if Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and, like I don’t know, Habbo Hotel, all joined together and was this giant system that almost every single person is connected to, that’s what OZ is. The movie stars Kenji Koiso, a talented mathematician, who gets roped into pretending to be Natsuki Shinohara’s fiancé for a family reunion. While there, he receives a text message featuring a math problem, which he easily completes, and accidently decrypts the security of OZ in the process.

The story balances a giant family reunion and this ‘giant social video game world’ rather well, especially with Kenji and Natsuki’s second cousin Kazuma trying desperately to fix OZ and prevent what spirals into the destruction of the world, while certain members of the older generations present consider them wasting their time playing a videogame. I will admit a lot of those kinds of interactions really made me laugh, especially one person getting punched for saying “It’s just a game”.

The story does that whole Truman Show thing of showing how easily our current path as a society can bring about a lot of terrible things. Where The Truman Show focused on reality TV, this applies that similar logic to social media. Thanks to OZ’s security being decrypted, an entity known as ‘Love Machine’ enters and steals accounts. Now before that wouldn’t’ve been such a big deal, but in this world not only does each account have the personal information of the people that created them, but also the same permissions, such as gaining access to the account of the guy in charge of the power grid, you’d have access to the power grid. While obviously if something like this happened in today’s world, the results wouldn’t be that drastic, but it’s definitely in the same vain.

Though the weird thing is we were watching the English version. I say weird because, well, to me I just find anime dubs to feel weird. The dub itself was pretty well done, the voices suited the characters and it felt like a lot of work had been put into it, but it’s still off putting. I haven’t seen the Japanese version, and I think when I re-watch it I will watch that version instead. Am I the only one who acts like this? I’ve never minded subtitled foreign movies be it anime or live action, and prefer them to re-dubbed attempts. I used to believe this was because usually the dubs aren’t good, but even in this case it still felt disjointed.

So yeah I really enjoyed this movie, and I’d really recommend checking it out. Although now that I’ve talked about it you won’t be going into the movie as cold as I did, so hey who knows that might affect something. Cause really all I needed to convince me was “Hey Psy the bro who did those Digimons and the Girl what leapt through time gone done made a movie”.

Animal Crossing

A week ago or so my friends and I were debating what the most accurate video game adaptation to movie is, we were pretty stumped and just defaulted to Mortal Kombat. Then all of a sudden, I’m informed this movie exists. “How the hell could they make Animal Crossing into a movie?” I pondered. Surely that’d be impossible considering nothing happens. They would have to make it nothing like the games to make it enjoyable.

Long story short the Animal Crossing movie is the most accurate video game adaptation ever made.

And it’s pretty great.

There’s really no need to explain what happens in the plot. A girl called Ai moves to an animal village during the summer. She gets a house there and to pay it off she does chores for Tom Nook, she befriends some of the villagers and plays around with her friends. She finds messages in bottles on the beach. She and the other human, a boy named Yu, and their friends go looking for fossils, they go to a K.K. Slider show, go to the bar for coffee. Resetti shows up every so often to lecture them.

Guys this is Animal Crossing.

Like eventually near the end there is plot, but that’s more in the sense of they needed something to be an ending to the movie. Now I’m not saying it’s an amazing movie experience, I’m just saying this is an incredibly accurate movie. I myself am a huge fan of anime like K-On, so it doesn’t really say much when I say I enjoyed this movie despite the almost nothing that happens in it, but they somehow made an Animal Crossing movie work, and that in itself is pretty impressive.

And I guess that brings me to the end. I always find the endings of these blogs a lot harder to write than anything else, mostly because I just wanna go “yeah that’s it bye” but that’d just look weird. Though maybe talking about what to write is even weirder... Oh well, this is already typed and I’m too lazy to backspace through it all.

...Yeah that’s it bye.

@believer258: Nah of course not, there are plenty of amazing visual novels that are 'family friendly' like Ever17, 999, the Phoenix Wright series and Symphonic Rain to name a few.

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.