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.