Hello everyone and welcome to this here another addition of my weekly blog! This is the place where I take time out from doing all the university coursework I left until the last possible second to tell you about what I’ve been doing instead of doing my university coursework. It usually involves videogames and visual novels, but I’ve been known to do a lot of other stupid stuff too. So let’s get to shufflin’ as much as we can!

Mario Kart 7

So in a desperate attempt to actually own games on my 3DS, I went out and bought Mario Kart 7. Luckily I’m friends with two other weirdos who also own 3DSs and copies of Mario Kart 7. Slightly unrelated but in that same trip I bought Super Street Fighter IV for the 3DS, which makes technically the 8th copy of that game I’ve bought, and the Ultra edition of Super Meat Boy. A pretty good haul in my opinion.

Anyway, the videogame, this is a pretty great Mario Kart game. Rather predictably the basics are still the same, kart racing, items, blue shells, they’re all here. So really the only real differing factors here from the other games are the levels. The new levels for the most part are really good, there’s still a super easy Luigi’s Circuit equivalent and all the stuff you’d expect, but there’s a lot going on in the levels without them being distracting from the actual racing. And of course the 3D adds a lot to them. There are a few, specifically Rainbow Road and the two Wuhu Island tracks that are one lap. This is really cool, as it means the track itself is three times as long. These levels can get a bit annoying, like for instance if you mess up on the first lap in a normal race, you have two laps to get it right, but here the track is new all the way through.

Also what has been standard for the last few entries are levels from previous Mario Kart games. There are a lot of good levels from old ones too, but it’s not like they could have messed that up that much. They did have that stupid prehistoric track from the Gamecube game which is terrible, hell at least it’s not Daisy Cruiser! ...Which is also in the game. Man. At least they had the sense to include the original Rainbow Road as the final track this time. I was hoping that when they first had old tracks, they’d just be a ‘Rainbow Cup’, going through all the old Rainbow Roads.

They also introduce paragliding and underwater sections in this game. The paragliding is a great addition, adding a nice element of strategy to the races. These sections activate when jumping off blue jumps, of which there are a few in every level. They’ve even reworked some of the old levels to include them, usually for the better. The underwater sections, however, are pretty bland. Unlike the paragliding, underwater your kart is still on the ground, the only real difference is that the handling is worse. It’s good for a little variety but most of the time I could have done without them. I knew the game wasn’t going to turn into Diddy Kong Racing, but still.

Also this game is pretty Mario Kart you guys. I was in first on the new Bowser’s Castle, final lap. Blue shell comes from behind me and hits me just before I go off a jump. ‘No problem’, I think to myself, ‘Im right next to a boost anyway.’ Then before I could move, a red shell hit me. Then, the person in 3rd knocked me off the ramp, into the lava. By the time Lakitu brought me back, I was in 5th. Before I could move again, a Bullet Bill hit me back into the lava. I ended up in last place, and a single tear fell from my eye.

Katawa Shoujo

AWW YEAH KATAWA SHOUJO LETS DO THIS WOO!

Now I’ll try to be as objective as possible, but I feel I have to say something first. Katawa Shoujo is the single reason that I read visual novels. I was following the development for a little while before the initial release of the Act 1 demo, and been anticipating it ever since. After about a month, I decided I’d pass my time reading other visual novels. 3 years later here we are, and I can’t tell if I should be thankful I read VNs as often as I do. On top of this, I’ve become massive fans of various artists on this project due to me following it. The reason I say all of this is so, even though I went into the game with reasonable expectations, there’s a lot of reasons why my opinion would be skewed. Having said that, this is an amazing visual novel, and screw you all.

The main character is Hisao Nakai, a seemingly regular high school student. That is, until, record scratch, and he has a heart attack during a love confession. He’s hospitalised for several months, before winding up at Yamaku high. Here he meets a colour cast of characters, like the deafmute Shizune and her “what’s her disability” signer Misha, the blind foreigner Lily and the burn victim Hanako, and finally the no legs runner Emi and the no arms painter Rin.

Now I was trying to figure out how to do that last section for a long time. As even though I just reduced all the main characters to their disabilities, the game and its story does everything but. There were multiple times over the course of playing the different routes that I completely forgot that the girls were disabled in some way. This is because the stories do a fantastic job at creating characters that just happen to be different in some way, as opposed to making it the crux of their life. So much so, in fact, one route hit so close to home that Hisao and one of the girls had almost word for word a conversation I’ve had in the past with a significant other. So that was incredibly weird. There are also a fair number of faux pas jokes that work really well, Hisao making the majority of them as he’s trying to adjust to this new life. Relaying a few of these to one of my friends he told me a story where he did something similar, where he saw a one armed man struggling with something, and without thinking asked if he needed a hand.

The different stories are well told. The game is split into four acts per character, with the first act serving as the common route and the point in which you choose what girl to get with. The common route is fine for what it is, but even having played it before, it can be a bit ambiguous what options lead to what girl, and I can see most people either getting stuck with Emi first time through or partying with Kenji. The character routes are roughly 3 to 4 hours each, and within the routes there aren’t a lot of selections to make, instead opting for a more focused story. Each character has two endings, with the good ending usually leaving on a ‘and they lived happily ever after’ note. It’s kind of standard, but what is also kind of standard is a tacked on epilogue of the characters being all “oh remember Yakamu high all those years ago that was something right”, this doesn’t have that and honestly I think it loses something because of it. Sometimes having the last line in a story being “So what do you want to do today?” doesn’t have enough closure. What is a really amazing addition is the short animated sections when you go from act 1 to act 2. Each girl has their own short but sweet animation, before going back to the story. It’s a small thing but it verges on being something really special.

The art is unfortunately hit and miss. The art at some points look wildly different from one scene to another, which makes sense with multiple artists working on the same project. The biggest offender of this in the character sprites is Emi. Emi’s character sprites, since the very first demo release, have had a complete overhaul. While her sprites on their own look really good, they look out of place whenever she’s standing with other people, especially next to Rin, Emi’s best friend, as her sprites in comparison lack a lot of detail. All of the backgrounds are also still pictures, which is fine but in some situations the visual effects that have been done to them make them just look bad in some scenes. The good parts, however, do outweigh the bad. A lot of detail has gone into some animations of the sprites and cut-in graphics showing objects that are talked about in the game. The CGs for the most part are also amazing and really bring the characters to life, but they also suffer from having different styles from one scene to the next. No matter how good some of them are, the lack of consistency can be jarring.

Not only is it amazing that this game ever got released, it’s amazing just how well done it is. It’s unfortunate that the coverage this game got kept going back to the same things that more often than not weren’t actually true. While the first drive to start this project was on 4chan’s Anime board, and the fact that the group’s name “Four Leaf Studios” pays homage to that, this isn’t a game made by people from 4chan, and it’s crazy people still think that. Every time I think why would anyone get mad over video game journalism I have to remind myself of Giant Bomb’s favourite female reporter Leigh Alexander’s “article” on this game, which could pretty much be summed up as “4chan videogame where you take advantage of cripples who would want to fuck disabled girls right guys VIDEOGAMES!” almost had me punching my monitor. Again, that’s probably an aspect of following the development like I have been but, man. My hat goes off to the people behind this project, for not only having to deal with that kind of bullshit, but also coming out the other side with a legitimately great project.

So in lieu of any real resolutions, I decided this year is the year I start diving more heavily into music production. Music production has been my hobby ever since programming changed from being my hobby to the thing I’m studying. I’ve been having fun with it and I think I could get a lot better at it if dedicated some time to it.

But disregard all of that, because I made some mashups. Both of them are also My Little Pony related so that’s still a thing I guess. The first of these is called Discord Days. Now, I got the idea of this one when I stumbled across fanart of the Gorillaz’ “Demon Days” album art, ponified. As soon as I saw that I got a flash of inspiration and ended up mashing the entire album to pony songs. There are a few that don’t work because I’m still terrible at determining keys by ear, but it’s been my most popular one to date by a significant margin.

The second out is Party Rock Anthem with a fanmade song called Party With Pinkie, because PARTY ROCK.

I also decided to start a Tumblr page where I’ll be putting all of my mashups, which includes mashups I would have never uploaded to YouTube or anywhere. I used to just make stuff, post a link on Twitter and by like “well that was a thing.” By having this page I have some place to at least catalogue all the stupid stuff I make. So if what I make is interesting then, I dunno, something. It’ll probably be where I put all my programming stuff to so who knows?!

I guess that about covers it. At some point this week I have to learn 6 months worth of Direct X and also create a game with that knowledge, and then write a report of said game and submit it all by Friday. You’d think as soon as this is posted I’d go straight into doing just that, but I’ll probably be playing Street Fighter knowing me. Oh well, if I get kicked out of university it means more time for visual novels!