Boy I sure do love videogames! Hey hello and welcome to my weekly blog, where I talk about three of my five favourite things in the world, and then also sometimes anime. What are three of my five favourite things you ask? Well good sir, they are of course My Little Pony, drinking copious amounts of vodka and replacing lyrics of Beatles songs with video game references.

I am here as Toad is here as Peach ain’t here she’s in another castle.

You may ask why my interpretation of I Am The Walrus not about Robotnik, due to ‘I am the Eggman’ being in the lyrics anyway. Well, that’s the kind of amazing observation that we need around here! You eagle eyed readers may also note that this blog is not about any of the above subjects, I so fooled you there!

Data Jammers: FastForward

Imagine if you will for a moment, that I was just minding my own business looking at Steam, as I am want to do when I don’t have any friends, only to see that there was a new indie game coming out relatively soon! And it was one of those good indie games, you know, not RTS based. So I decided without knowing exactly what I was buying, to grab myself a copy of Data Jammers: FastForward as soon as it was released.

In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t read anything about this game before I played it, because no doubt it would have confused me even more than the game itself did. In the game you control a character travelling along the internets, and try not to get hit by viruses or something. Since I’m probably going to find this incredibly difficult to explain, here’s a screenshot to help both of us.

The game automatically goes forward at fixed speeds, so your only control is moving left and right to each of these different lanes, and then also up and down in the screen. The object of the game is to just survive until the end of the level, which is a lot easier said than done. In these different lanes you can find normal data packets, that are completely harmless and just there to take up space, and evil programs or however the game justifies them. These can come in a lot of different forms, but their attacks are usually the same, if they hit you, you take damage. The most basic enemy that appears in every level is a shark fin like enemy that flies towards you, two hits of this and you’re dead. On top of that each level has a different kind of enemy, these can range from other ships that will try to ram you, to tanks that can shoot at you, flying enemies than drop bombs on you or the worst of all, enemies that bounce you around the level and sometimes even off the level to your death.

Your character doesn’t really have any form of attack against these enemies, making the game a lot more about survival than killing. You start each level with two bombs that will destroy any enemy, or data packet, in the close vicinity, and you can collect more of these throughout the level, though you can’t really rely on getting a lot of bombs in a level. Therefore, the best way to kill the enemies is to get them to kill each other. The enemies will attack everything, which includes other enemies, if you can set them up right. For instance, the enemies that just try to ram them, you can lure them into a shark fin, killing both enemies. The enemies that drop bombs will kill any enemy they hit, and if there are two of them on the screen, getting them to collide with each other will destroy them both too. This is a really cool mechanic and makes survival a lot more interesting.

As you go through the level there are multiple things to collect. One of these things is rings. These rings will appear in one of the eight lanes, and will be in a long line of rings. Each ring is worth 50 points and if you collect an entire line of rings, you get another 1000 points. There are also power-ups throughout the level that will net you a fair amount of points too. These power-ups include bonus bombs as stated above, shields, fire shields that will kill enemies upon impact, and full health. Another way to get points is to kill enemies, which can be a rather interesting strategy. If you get a head on collision with the shark fin enemies with full health, you will kill the enemy, net some points, but will have almost no health. However, your health regenerates rather fast in this game, so if you have full health, it’s actually a good idea to get in some head on collisions to try and maximize your score. Though that’s just me talking, only the guy that as of time writing is #1 on the leaderboards for this game.

It’s a fun game if you can wrap your head around the core concepts of the gameplay, and is a fun distraction for the price. It’s a pretty hard game to play muted, however, as a lot of the power-ups are telegraphed by audio cues, which I found a lot more helpful than the visual cue of the lane lighting up green, but that might just be me.

Crash Team Racing

It’s well established that I also associate myself with the best that human kind has to offer, so when one of my friends invites me over to his flat to play 4 player Crash Team Racing you bet I showed up and picked Fake Crash before anyone else could.

So first of all, I have a huge affinity for the Crash Bandicoot series, and Crash Team Racing is quite a large part of that. Crash Bandicoot 2, however, is the reason I am who I am today. It was the game that made me realise I wanted to work for videogames when I grew up. The style, the amazing gameplay and just sheer fun of that game, qualities that Naughty Dog still nail to this very day, in my mind made it one of the best games of its time and in fact still a really fun game to go back and play. Crash Team Racing, I felt in many ways was a superior kart racing game to the Mario Kart series, and thanks to the Playstation Classic initiative from Sony, a game I go back to play very regularly on my PSP, despite owning Crash Tag Team Racing for that system, but the less said about post Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot games the better. Anyway where was I?

So here I was, in a room with three other dudes playing Crash Team Racing, surely, life doesn’t get much better than this. What I didn’t anticipate, however, is that my friends are really good at Crash Team Racing. Like, in some ways better than me, and I can’t accept that at all! We played once on every single track and I came in overall second. However, the person that came in overall first was playing at Penta Penguin, who is extremely broken, so really it was a moral victory for me. The weird thing is in some levels my friends had no idea about some of the shortcuts, a fact I only found weird because I naturally used them in every single lap. The sewer level in which you can powerslide boost and jump up the side to reach a high level path was completely new to them. And the amount of rage in the room that surfaced at the end of a super tight race on the Aztec level when I triple boosted, jumped and skipped the entire last U-turn corner, going from third to first in an instant, was rather overwhelming.

Playing this game really makes me wonder what the Uncharted racing game will be. As everyone knows the traditional Naughty Dog cycle per console. It’s make a trilogy of rather amazing games, and then make a goddamn racing game based on said trilogy. The original Playstation was Crash 1 through 3, and then Crash Team Racing. Playstation 2 was a similar story, the Jak trilogy came out and was also rather amazing, but admittedly out of the three this was probably their weakest. This was reinforced by the rather not-good Jak X. This generation it’s the amazing Uncharted series, and now that the 3rd instalment is upon us, my attention at the very least is turned to what they could possibly make the racing game about! There are two ways they can go about it. One is just go incredibly crazy, make it the most generic kart racer ever, complete with bobblehead versions of the characters and levels inspired by places in the games. If this is what they do with it I would be forever in love with Naughty Dog, and I’d call bids on the blue dude.

Blur

After playing way too much Crash Team Racing, we decided to play a lot more Blur, a game that up until that point I had never actually played. The game is essentially a kart racer, collecting power-ups and trying to screw over the opponents by using the lightning attack in the last lap. The only difference in this game is it uses actual cars and actual places in the world. As a ‘gimmick’ for a kart racer it’s honestly a rather poor one, as it wasn’t as if the cartoony super exaggerated art style of many kart racers were what put me off them.

Quite possibly the most fun about playing Blur was not actually anything to do with Blur itself. My friends and I set up a playlist of songs that played instead of the in game soundtrack. This soundtrack, I have to tell you, might have been the greatest collection of songs ever to race to, despite some of the weirder entries. While I can’t remember every song that played, it did go from the final boss music from Super Mario RPG, to Tiny Tim’s “Living in the Sunlight, Loving in the Moonlight”, to the final duel from The Phantom Menace, to Girl Generation’s “Gee”, to the battle music from Bastion. Like I said, it was the greatest soundtrack to anything ever.

Symphonic Rain

In another attempt to talk about a visual novel that I hold rather dear to my heart, this week I’m going to talk about Symphonic Rain.

The game stars Chris, a Fortelle player, which is some kind of magical keyboard from what I can figure, and is a student at the famous Piova Communal School of Music. He lives in this city where rain falls all the time, a phenomenon that all the local residents are used to, choosing not to carry umbrellas with them and they live their lives as normal. He moved to the city to go to the famous school to become a better Fortelle player, but due to this he has left his childhood love Arietta, whom he keeps in contact with via weekly letters. He is also friends with Arietta’s younger twin sister, Tortinita, who lives with her grandma in the city, and Asino, his male best friend, because apparently every visual novel needs a male best friend. The game starts mere months before his final graduation examination, in which he has to pair with a singer to play with him during his examination. He meets Falsita, the former student council president, and Lise, a talented yet shy younger singer. Oh, and he lives with a fairy that only he can see or hear, and has an amazing singing voice as well.

After meeting each character, you’re left to do sort of whatever you want. Each character will be in certain rooms on certain days, and each day Chris is at school you can decide where he goes and subsequently who he meets that day. The person you end up interacting with the most will more often than not end up Chris’ partner for his examination, but on top of that you can still totally mess it up by selecting the wrong choices during the actual meetings. As well as the standard visual novel gameplay, this game is also totally a rhythm game. Every so often Chris will practise on his Portelle, which will start the rhythm game. The rhythm game is rather similar to Guitar Hero and the like. Keyboard keys will appear on the right and you have to press them when they reach the left of the screen. On the hardest difficulty setting the game will use almost every character on the keyboard, so that’s pretty interesting. It’s possible to fail out of these songs and that will have an effect on the story, and in some routes it’s possible to fail on the final examination to get a different ending to if you passed the song, which I think is rather awesome. Songs are available to play via the main menu too, if you just want to play the rhythm portion, which is a nice feature.

As with most visual novels I really enjoy, I really like the soundtrack of this one, though that’s quite possibly more impressive here as it is a rhythm game too. I like the soundtrack so much, in fact, that I have hunted down sheet music and the CD for this game ever since I first played it. Also, unrelated, but I also have the official art book for the game too, because I also think the art style is incredible, but I digress. I do know quite a lot of the songs in this game on both my bass guitar and piano. The soundtrack, however, is the rather depressing part of this visual novel. The composer, Ristuko Okazaki, unfortunately died during the production of the visual novel, a fact I only found out after tracking down the CD soundtrack. A really depressing fact made even sadder due to the, in my opinion, extremely high quality of the soundtrack.

What makes this visual novel stand out above all else, however, is the story. The story goes in rather incredible directions, both with each character path and with an overarching story that is only unlocked once the player has witnessed all the other routes. The amount of twists and turns the overarching story takes near the end of the game really makes any other play through of the story completely different than the first time, one of those instances that any other playthroughs of the story will feel completely different. I really don’t know how to describe it, to be honest, but it’s a really great experience all round, and one I highly recommend you check out. The gameplay is good and the story is great, even if you can’t work rhythm games there is an option to autoplay the rhythm sections so you can just focus on the story which, again, I highly recommend you check out.

And that’s the end of the blog! Now if you’ll excuse me I need to change the lyrics for ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ to ‘Being for the Benefit of Captain Price’. This might be the silliest thing I’ve ever been a part of, and, well, that’s definitely saying something!