Video Games

What I’ve Been Playing Recently

It’s been a bit, so it’s been a bit busy I suppose. I’m going to mostly push off my current “regular games” a bit with Fortnite and Sky. just for some discussion about what else I’ve been playing.

Death Stranding

Funny enough, this isn’t the only game I’m playing at the moment with “dangerous rain”. Sky has a zone of rain that harms you when you’re standing in it. Though, they call it “Time Fall” in Death Stranding, and it’s a Hideo Kojima game, so it’s full of weird unexplained shit that may or may not eventually be explained.

The core gameplay is nothing like I expected. You’re in this weird dystopian future with rain that makes you grow old if it touches you, and dead bodies explode or something within a few days of dying and then turn into these weird invisible monster things that only show up when it rains and then there is this baby in a bottle for some reason. And so far all of the game play has been, “Deliver things on foot by walking through the wilderness.” Like no joke, there is a balance mechanic to weight distribution that has TWO dedicated buttons on the controller.

I really just, don’t know. But it looks pretty. Also I am told that eventually you can make grenades or something from your poops!

Bayonetta

Speaking of weird but highly acclaimed games. I also picked up Bayonetta. I’m… not sure I have the patience for this style of weird anymore. The gameplay is kind of button mashy and the plot is full of “ZaNy AnImE” style shit. Like the intro scenario has this dude just throwing guns at your character going “guns guns guns” and it’s just like, too much odd for the sake of oddness.

Like Death Stranding is weird, but I feel like eventually most of it will eventually be mostly explained by some sci-fi related world building. Bayonetta is just over the top for the sake of being over the top.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

I’ve been playing a lot of random stuff on the Retroid lately but I’m going to stick with what I played significantly. I’ve beaten Mario Land 2 a several times, but decided to play through it again, which took like 2 hours, maybe. And I beat it again.

The biggest stand out is just how many unique enemies are in this series. Plus it’s weird how much the recent LEGO Mario sets seem to be designed entirely around one world in this universe. The LEGO Mario looks kind of like the Mario Zone robot and the Mario Zone itself even includes a LEGO like level.

Wario Land 4

After defeating Wario in Mario Land 2, I realized I had never really played any of the stand alone Wario Land games. So I loaded them up to play through. I’m not sure why I started at the end in Wario Land 4 but I did. I think mostly because it’s a slightly more polished GBA title, so it was more appealing.

I also completed it. It’s not a very lengthy game. The levels also feel like they are intended to be played repeatedly, but most of them are pretty linear despite the interweaving/multiple paths of them (Wario Land 3 is quite literally the opposite).

Also apparently Wario has his own princess now too.

F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch

I could have sworn I had wrapped this one up in a post. I mentioned FIST Last time, and I have since completed it. I also finished it 100%, which wasn’t actually that hard to do. The last few bosses are really really rough though the second to last boss, the big sumo pig, is a lot more difficult than the actual end boss.

The most amusing thing about this game, a lot of the plot revolves around this super powered crystal, “The Spark”. It’s weird though because there are at least two of these things, and more importantly, you fight three enemies powered by this “ultimate force”. The first is a rock monster empowered by it to retrieve it. Then later you get betrayed and have to fight a dude in power armor powered by the Spark, which destroys it, then SURPRISE there is another one, which you retrieve but it’s stolen then you get to fight the end boss, powered by The Spark.

It doesn’t really feel all that impressive honestly. I kind of defeated “The Power of the Spark” repeatedly. Not that impressive.

What I’ve Been Playing Recently

Jan 5th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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I wonder if those titles should be more distinct or if it even matters. Anyway, I “completed” one game this week. Actually I sort of “beat” two games, but I forget how I have counted the Fortnite Battle Passes. Let’s call it one for now. The Fortnite BP technically goes to Level 200.

F.I.S.T: Forged In Shadow Torch

Man, that acronym. Someone really wanted it to stand for FIST. This was one of the free games from Epic over the Holidays that they push every year. It looked interesting from the animal characters and Steampunkish design then I noticed it’s a Metroidvania title, which is probably my favorite game genre. So I decided to jump on playing it. You play as a sort of, grizzled ex soldier rabbit, armed with a giant robotic FIST from his old war days mech. The game play is pretty smooth and it’s definitely a Metroidvania style title.

My main gripe so far is the slight unevenness of the enemies. Most of the bosses I have encountered are super predictable and almost too easy. Dodge Dodge Dodge Strike. It’s a pretty regular pattern for all of them so far. One large biped mech was particularly easy to confuse because it didn’t move and you could just jump from it’s left to it’s right, meaning it would miss miss miss, then turn around, so you move again, and repeat. But the regular enemies, are often tougher than the bosses, and feel like they have just as much health. There is also this really annoying bit where you can stun them out of an attack animation, but not ALL attacks, and often you can’t stop your slightly sluggish attacking, until it’s too late to dodge away. And the enemies often have huge attack arcs. If that makes any sense.

It’s not awful, but it’s annoying, especially with packs of enemies. The game feels like you should be able to “juggle” the enemies, but you really can’t. It’s particularly bad with the samurai looking dudes and worse with the axe throwing shield guys. The game is still fun, but it feels like it could use a slight bit of tweaking to it’s regular enemies and maybe a slight beefing up on the actual bosses.

Fortnite

I finished the main part of the Chapter 4 Season 1 Battle Pass. Which means reaching level 100. The game is honestly, starting to feel like a chore. I’ll keep at it for now, but at this moment, I have no desire to continue to Season 2 unless things seem really good. There have been a LOT of complaints about the new weekly quest system. They expire now, instead of just stacking until the end of the season, and they are almost always incredibly grindy. Like, “you must do ONLY THIS all week” to complete the top tier. The map also was neat at first but it’s gotten really stale. It also hasn’t really changed at all. It felt like in Chapter 3 the map was constantly changing every week or so. The weapons pool also has not really changed.

Sky: Children of the Light

Now that the Season of Aurora has ended and I’m not worried about maximizing my Candles each week, I decided to just go for it at take a swing at The Eye of Eden, the end zone of this game. man, you want a game that is bipolar on its own game play. I kind of want to do a separate write up of Sky, so I won’t go into a ton of detail, but let’s just sat this. The base game play loop is about as non confrontational as it gets. You mostly just, fly around lighting candles and collecting wax balls and occasionally doing little spirit stories. The final zone, is literally an endurance until you die.

Your health is represented by these Winged Light bits that you collect, which strengthen your overall ability to fly and explore. I was up to I think 76 before entering Eden, which is pretty close to max on regular basic Winged Lights. The first zone is a slow climb up some cliffs through winds and rock storms. The second zone is stronger wings and bigger rocks, but now there are Krill dragons patrolling around. The third zone is where the action is, it loses the dragons, but instead there is a constant barrage of lava rocks splattering all over the zone that will basically one shot you destroying some of your Winged Light. You can hide behind some rocks, but for the most part, you have to run around the zone depositing your Winged lights into these little statues to save them. You give up your health, to save these other entities.

You do this, until you die.

And then you get reborn at zero. Though for each spirit saved you get some special candles to use to buy some more permanent Winged Lights. It’s not 1:1 though. I earned I think 13 Ascended Candles. I restarted the game at around 8 Winged Lights I think.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile

I still jump around a bit on the Retroid Pocket but for now I have settled on playing the first Klonoa game on Playstation 1. I am not sure how far I am, maybe halfway? The game reminds me of the style of Donkey Kong Country, but not nearly as fast paced. It’s a neat little game, though I’m not entirely sure of the ins and outs of some of it. Like occasionally there are clock items to pick up, but from what I can tell, the game has no timer. I’m not too concerned, I am not trying to master this one.

Fortnite Victory Royale The Scientist

Jan 1st, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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A little before Christmas I bought a bunch of “Clearance masquerading as a Christmas Sale from Entertainment Earth stuff. It was all stuff I had been “sort of looking at” for a while, but for super marked down, I decided why not. Slightly annoyingly, a lot of it ended up being slightly disappointing for one reason or another. Maybe I need to start listening to tat little, “you put this off for a reason” voice more.

Anyway, this was one of them. In the last year, I’ve started playing a ton of Fortnite. Though I don’t own a ton of figures from the game. I don’t really want to either. Most of the ones I do have are Bananas or cat people. The Seven seem like they could be an interesting group to have all of as figures though. Mostly because I like Teams.

So far there are only two members of The Seven available though, The Scientist and The Foundation. I figure, even if I don’t bother with any others, this big robot dude would still be cool. And well, he kind of isn’t.

It’s a nice looking figure for sure. Lots of details, but there are a few problems that just drag the figure down. For starters, the face mask gimmick. Without going into a ton of Lore Details, all of the Seven wear air tight suits to protect themselves from The Loop. So they have these expressive digital Facemasks. In the game, you can select from a variety of different styles for each member’s helmet. The figure replicates this with swapable face plates and a neat light up gimmick.These face plates, do not stay on, at all. Just looking at it is enough for it to pop off and go flying who knows where. And it’s two pieces falling off, the plate itself and the clear cover. Neither stays on. I guarantee a lot of these will go missing over time.

As for the light up gimmick, it’s cool, but it also makes him incredibly top heavy. Which is a problem exacerbated by how limited his articulation is. He has plenty of joints as Hasbro 6″ figures do, but his bulk and top heavyness completely limits most of the joints to uselessness. He can’t even two hand hold his gun, and it’s the type of gun you would two hand hold.

There also seems like some plastic tolerance issues going on with his backpack because it also falls off pretty easily as well. All in all, he is just really meh. It feels like they maybe designed a decent figure, then stuck the light up gimmick in later and it ruined things a bit.

Sky: Children of the Light Aurora In Game Concert Event

Dec 13th, 2022

by Ramen Junkie.

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There have been quite a few “Virtual concerts” in video games in recent years, and on December 8th, the game Sky: Children of the Light became one the games that has hosted a concert in game. Though “Concert” feel like a bit of a stretch, it’s more like a Musical Event. Similar TO Fortnite’s Soundwave Series Events. All of the songs also seemed to just be the Studio Tracks, which was kind of a bummer. I didn’t really expect an actually live event, but a bit of a live feel to the music would have helped make it a bit more unique.

It was still quite a lot of fun, and a fairly unique event. It was also a bit of a technically impressive feat, at least for this game.

So what is Sky? It’s a pretty simple game, that feels much more like a relaxing social space than a real “game”. There is some plot to it, you go around collecting spirits which tell little visual stories, and collecting Candle Wax, because the game is all about the Deepest Candle Lore… Or something. The Social Interaction is heavily emphasized, though ironically, because, you can’t actually chat or talk to other players except in a few select spaces or if you are good friends with them through the friendship tree.

I started playing just before the Aurora event in anticipation of the event.

The game also has “Seasons” around various themes with special unlock-able cosmetics and such. In a first for the game, it has tied in with a real person, and not a made up special spirit, in the Season of Aurora. Every few weeks, a new special quest would unlock where you would escort a spirit through a lengthy story set to a song from Aurora, Runaway, All is Soft Inside, Warrior, and The Seed. There are also a bunch of Aurora themed cosmetics to unlock, some free, some exclusive to the Season Pass, some simply purchased in game with money.

The Season has sort of culminated in a giant Concert with an “appearance” by Aurora herself. Or at least, a Sky Child style avatar of her. The Concert consisted of Exhale, Inhale, for the opening and then a repeat of the previous 4 songs, Through the Eyes of a Child, then Queendom as the closing song. Each song however had the players transported to these elaborately orchestrated set pieces where the player was transformed into some sort of creature and transported along side Aurora in a fantastical light show set tot he music. Like the individual quests, these would tell short visual stories involving spirits, which seemed to be more elaborate versions of the stories previously done. It’s honestly kind of hard to tell.

Between each song, Aurora would speak a bit to the crowd and encourage players to use in game emotes and such to react. I feel like on a technically level, this was sort of done to keep players in sync and allow for some catch up for anyone who might be lagging.

The technically impressive part of this, is the size of the crowds. In a normal game of Sky, each, whatever you want to call them, environmental pod thingy, has 8 people, max. So you will encounter people fairly frequently, but not really a lot of huge crowds. For the concert, they ran several simultaneous instances, each maxing out at 4000 players each. At the end of the show it shows how many people were in your instance, mine was 3900 something. Another person on the Aurora Discord I am in had 3800 something. Now, granted, there were some limitations to make this happen. Most of the people in each instance during the arena portions, only show as very basic and generic Sky Children avatars. Once you pick a seating section, you got grouped with a smaller set of avatars and you could see all of them in their full outfitted glory, and chat with them as well. Especially given this is firstly a Mobile Game, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have completely melted people’s phones trying to render out 4000 elaborately dressed avatars at once. I imagine the smaller song segments were helped as well by transforming the players into simple animal avatars, birds and butterflies and jellyfish.

In general, it was quite a sight seeing everyone flying around all over in the huge crowd. Especially at the end of the show when a giant Aurora spirit would suck everyone into a giant tornado of Moths swirling around.

Anyway, if you missed it or want to see the show yourself, it’s running through Jan 2nd or so in game, every 4 hours, and is free to everyone. There is also a special item that can be bought that will let the player relive the show indefinitely. I’m also sure it’s on Youtube somewhere. I tried to record my show but the phone would record for a few minutes then just stop.

According to the Sky Facebook Page, 1.6 Million people watched the initial showing on the 8th.

What I’ve Been Playing Recently

Dec 12th, 2022

by Ramen Junkie.

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# What I’ve Been Playing Recently

I like the idea of this sort of regular, generic post, but I don’t really want to give it a schedule, so I’m just going to throw em out whenever, for now, I think. Considering this si the “first” one, it’s also not clear what “Recently” should mean in this context. It’s my post, my blog, my rules, so I’m thinking, whatever I want to mention really.

Fortnite

Roughly a year ago, I decided I wanted to give Fortnite a go. It’s been popular for years, and i was looking for something relatively mindless to play as a filler game to fill the void left by Overwatch. So I decided to try Fortnite. I had no idea what I was doing, though I managed to win my first match, which felt really cool, until (much later) I learned that all the matches for the first ten levels or so are against Bots. It was Christmas season, so I got a few free cosmetic items, and I even enjoyed it enough to buy a few skins. i also opted to go for the Battle Pass, which I completed to level 200.

I’ve taken a few breaks, but I’m still playing a year later now. Chapter 4 just started, which means a fresh new map to play on. i am pretty sure the new map is a lot smaller than the last one. Honestly, in general, it feels like Epic really wanted to try to break people out of the “Run around and hide” all match mindset. Everything is righter and faster and you’re forced into more encounters. I’m not sure I like it honestly. I usually moved around the map a lot, but I also generally would avoid conflicts. I’ve actually been playing a lot of Bot Matches just so the games are more chill and less stressful.

Something that’s a bit annoying, I actually kind of prefer playing random, NON Battle Royale maps and modes. I played a TON of their Among Us Clone, in the Imposters Mode. Though that got old because groups, completely break that mode. Groups will just tattle on who the Imposter is to their friends. I also do a lot of “Death-run” Obstacle course maps, though there are a lot of these that feel really uninspired these days. Probably my favorite are the Musical Soundwave Series events.

Sky Children of the Light

This one is a super chill “Relaxing” movile game, though it recently came to Switch and Playstation. It’s made by the same folks who made Journey and definitely FEELS a lot like Journey. You float around this world collecting candle wax and meeting people and doing little Spirit Quests. There is only one zone in the entire game where you can be harmed, outside of The End zone. I have not been able to bring myself to attempt The End yet. I hear it’s really hard, plus you lose everything, by default, and start over, after completing the game.

Currently they are having an event themed around the singer Aurora, which was part of why I started playing the game in the first place.

Retroid Pocket

I want to do a proper write up on my Retroid eventually, but I’ve been playing old games on this as well. Nothing in particular yet, I’m still kind of in the “Mess around and see what it can do” phase. Mostly I’ve been playing Genesis and PlayStation Titles, with a few PC Engine games thrown in. I am trying REALLY hard not to fall into my usual Emulation Trap of just playing Zelda and Mario…. again… for the ten thousandth time.

Overwatch 2

File this one under what I’m NOT Playing. I got so tired of Overwatch and it’s unbalanced mess. I quit a year or so ago and every attempt to come back failed within days or hours of every reinstall. I came back more hardcore for the end of Overwatch 1, hopeful that Overwatch 2 would be a fresh, new beginning. I even bought the Battle Pass. Oh boy I was disappointed. I expected nothing and it was worse. Every single match, almost without fail, is a complete steamroll win or loss, and neither is fun. Experience is a slow pain int he ass as well, I gave up on the Battle Pass around level 50 I think. I was not having fun and I didn’t want to grind out 30 more levels. I don’t even care about winning, I just want the game to feel enjoyable I never win in Fortnite and I always enjoy playing. Overwatch should be like that.