The Final what? Eh, just a Japanese style naming thing that sounds cool. Still, this is it. Final entry under the [insert title] name.

GAMES!!!!

Game's been out for two and a half weeks now, and it's been interesting to follow. The game delivers on an old school first person shooter experience. It's really fast, level design isn't linear, there are secret areas to find, all sorts of stuff. But the game has had severe optimization issues that not even people with a Titan can get good framerates consistently. The game has already had two hot fix patches, the last one being this previous Wednesday, and Interceptor are at work on version 1.1 that will (hopefully) fix the optimization issues and will release the mod tools around that time. Regardless of issues faced with the game, it's been absolutely fun, both single player and multiplayer

I don't have any particular nostalgia for Rise of the Triad, but from everything I've seen and heard, this game is incredibly faithful to ROTT '95, while adding in a few mechanics of its own. For one, you can actually jump in new Rise of the Triad and have proper mouselook. And since you have a ton of rocket based weapons, you can utilize that to rocket jump. You also have an off hand melee option, where you whip out 2 knives to stab people with. Enemies will sometimes roll out of the way of fire and may even try to steal your weapon. The first level is a remake of the first level in ROTT '95, while everything afterward is its own thing. Everything else from the weapon system to jump pads and tokens you collect is faithful as can be to the original game.

Multiplayer has been very fun, which is what had gotten me interested in this game after seeing the 18 minute video of the game months ago. There are only 5 maps to start, and the two I've enjoyed the most have been Drop the Base and Castle Grounds. The former I like the most because of the small size, and when you get enough people in there fighting it is pure chaos. While I had enjoyed the multiplayer side of the game a lot, the amount of servers in the browser shrunk to a small handful (as to probably be expected), and god mode in multi was deemed way to over powered in a game where every weapon was over powered. Thankfully patch 1.0.2 addressed that so it's fun to play on Drop the Base again without some asshole getting god mode and winning the game in less than a minute.

Going back to the single player stuff, I've tried my hand at speed running through the early levels of the game. Two things that make it incredibly fun to do are rocket jumping and the off hand melee. Reason for the melee is that in single player it has you basically teleport to the enemy and stab him, so if you get enemies position just right you can save a few seconds of running by warping and stabbing dudes. Though rocket jumping is ultimately more effective as you can bypass certain sections of levels and even not trigger the scripting. It's really cool, plus rocket jumping is never not fun. More games need it.

I'm still playing the occasional multiplayer match with people in the steam community chat for the game, though like everyone there I am waiting anxiously for the 1.1 patch and the major fixes it will bring. Hopefully it does fix those things as I'm not bringing my main computer down with me to Redmond and I got an average 15 FPS on my laptop.

Last time I had used my Wii U was sometime before E3, and the last thing played on it was that Rayman Legends Challenges App. Now I've played through the game with both the Gamepad (off TV play) and the Wii Remote controls, and have enjoyed the game immensely.

The only Pikmin game before this that I played was Pikmin 1. I know about the premise for Pikmin 2 and how it dispenses with the time limit of the first game. Pikmin 3 strikes a good balance between those two games by having a time limit via the amount of rations you have, but you can increase that limit by finding fruit and juicing it. When the game started and was trying to get the handle of things, learning the layout of the maps and trying to solve my main objectives at the same time, getting fruit felt like the biggest priority as you only start with 3 rations. When you get to about 10 or so rations worth of fruit you can worry less about getting more fruit and focus on the main objectives at hand. Although there is a particular moment later in the game that for story reasons leave you at 0 rations, which is makes things even more stressful as you gotta find fruit ASAP.

One thing I like especially about the Wii U is being able to play games on the Gamepad screen, should the game in question support Off TV play. Pikmin 3 supports it, and even better it's as simple as pressing select and it will switch instantly. Playing the game that way was nice and convenient, and controls felt much like they did on the gamecube, with the inclusion of a lock on mechanic when holding ZL. While this isn't to say that the Gamepad controls are bad, the Wii Remote control scheme is the proper way to play the game. Heck, proper way to play it is with the Wii Remote and have the Gamepad next to you to access the map and other functions. It might seem weird that the game is designed around a controller from Nintendo's last system, but honestly, all you're missing is just a certain level of accuracy with the cursor. The lock on helps make up for that. I don't really mind it to much, since I prefer having the proper control setup for the proper game. Plus, where I play the game isn't exactly a living room set up as my desk is right next to the TV so I can easy reach the Gamepad's touch screen while sitting in front of the TV playing the game.

Also a minor detail, but I experienced some minor amount of slowdown on the TV while I did not experience any on the Gamepad's screen. So if that sort of thing bothers you than off TV play is a good option.

I've had a ton of fun with this game, especially since it's given me a good reason to use my Wii U. It looks great, it plays well with both control scheme (even with the advantages of the Wii Remote), and it's polished like you would expect a Nintendo game to be. Now to wait a couple weeks for Rayman Legends, and then another for the Wonderful 101. Games are starting to come out for the damn thing again.

And the Rest

The Wonderful 101 Demo

First, if you did not watch the Director's trailer for the Wonderful 101, stop reading this and watch it now. Second, the demo is great. It's cool having the experience of playing the game at PAX Prime last year, back when it was called Project P-100, so I've noticed many improvements in this game since that demo. If only Nintendo didn't have their stupid limited uses on demos.

Old School Shooters

Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior, Shogo, Brutal Doom, etc.

Other Things

Well, this past Thursday was my final day of work at Michaels, and the day before that I got my new laptop that I'll be bringing with me for school. I've already got most of my programs and files on there. My anime, music, Chrome bookmarks, games, and so on. I was surprised to find that it actually had a disc drive, so I got my disc games on there as well (NOLF, AVP 2, Diablo, and so on). It's pretty nice, though I'm not big on the lack of resolution options, compared to the dozen I get from my main monitor. Oh well, it's just something to tide me over until I settle down in Redmond for good and all my stuff is down there. I can only bring so much with me this first semester after all.

In Conclusion

Considering that I'll be living in Redmond as of this coming Thursday, it kinda doesn't make sense for me to keep using the name "Alaska_Gamer," since I won't be in Alaska anymore (duh). Considering I had been preparing for this by using a different name for new accounts I make, I'll be changing to ArclightBorealis. It's my PSN name as well as my WiiU account name. Of course that's assuming if there isn't a 15 character limit on names here, otherwise it'll be ArcBorealis.

And as I said at the top, this is the last blog entry I'm making under the [insert title] name. Not necessarily the end of me blogging, but I'm gonna try changing things up. I'll try to get atleast one blog entry in per month, probably at the start or end, whichever I decide to do. I don't even know if it will be it's own new series as well, but again, this is all very early. Changes are happening. I will say that doing this blog thing for the last two years has been fun. Before that I had not been doing as much blogging even though I felt I had plenty of thoughts to say about different games.

Thanks for everyone that read these posts I made every week or every other week or whenever I posted them because I got lazy and missed a deadline. It'll be great to not hold to it for a while.

Peace.