Essiexiare: It's SCXCR, But Fancy

SC on Metroid: Samus Returns (3DS)

2017-09-24T13:35:00.002-04:00

They took the word "finally" off the end of the title.

One of the highlights of this past E3 was Nintendo's seemingly out-of-nowhere announcement of Metroid Prime 4. It was just a title graphic, but it did a lot to revive some ounce of faith in Nintendo not letting their non-Mario or Zelda franchises waste away. I was particularly excited about this because, though I haven't articulated this much in my videos (since Nintendo copyright flags my references to it), I'm a big fan of the Metroid games. Metroid was the first game I played on the NES that wasn't Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, and I got hooked quickly. I also sunk more hours than I can count into Metroid II: Return of Samus on the Game Boy and my copy of Super Metroid is still in good condition, box and all.

So you can imagine how I reacted, after already losing my shit over the Prime 4 announcement, when Nintendo's Treehouse segment started with the reveal of Metroid: Samus Returns. I thought for sure I was daydreaming. Two Metroid game announcements in a single E3? And one's getting extra special amiibo? Fuck going to a convention, I'm stocking up on Metroid gear!

The one thing that gave me pause about it was the developer, Mercury Steam.

One of those "Wait, what?" moments.

Mercury Steam's reputation to the gaming public was heavily marred in the eyes of many. Their most high-profile games to that point were Clive Barker's Jericho, which was meh, and the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games. The first one was generally received well despite some shortcomings, but the second one was panned to the point that it lingered with Mercury Steam like a fart in a blanket fort.

Once they were revealed as the developers, my friend Unreal and I were going back and forth about this on the RiverCityGamers podcast and privately. At some point we both agreed that we hoped Mercury Steam would "pull a Double Helix."

Double Helix Games was a punchline for their work on middling or bad titles like Silent Hill: Homecoming and the Battleship tie-in game. Then they worked on the first season of Killer Instinct and the newest Strider game and were seen in a much better light. That was the hope we had after seeing the announcement and the gameplay demos which followed.

That being said, Mercury Steam pulled a Double Helix.

And there was much rejoicing.

Good thing they did, too. I spent a couple hours driving to a store to make sure I got the special edition. Just saying, it probably helped that they were working closely with a company hellbent on getting first-party titles right (lately, at least) like Nintendo instead of Konami, which was approaching the height of its "I don't give a fuck" attitude toward video games at the time.

Samus Returns may be advertised as a "reimagining" of Metroid II, but that's only part of what it actually is. It has the same general sequence of events from the game—hunting down Metroids, getting the lava levels to drop to explore more areas, etc.—but it also borrows elements from other games in the series, namely Super Metroid; things like Super Missiles, the Grapple Beam, and Power Bombs are present. It borrows the idea of unique animations for kills on some encounters like Other M had and also adds things that aren't in any Metroid games, namely the Aeion abilities and some new boss encounters, effectively making it a quasi-new experience.

Not that one, thankfully.

Control-wise, there is a slight learning curve to Samus Returns. Holding the R button to use Missiles, Super Missiles and such takes some getting used to for someone like me, who's been conditioned by games like Super Metroid to just press a button to switch to them. However, it didn't take more than a half-hour after getting Missiles for me to make the adjustment. By the time I was a couple hours in, I wasn't even thinking about it. Even hopping around walls and onto ceilings with the Spider/Spring Ball for some more complicated puzzles wasn't an issue. Even the melee counter, a key feature for dealing with boss or miniboss encounters and another way to handle regular enemies, works well.

Samus' movement controls are modeled to take full advantage of the platform it's on, and maybe a little common sense about what she might be capable of. Rather than being locked to eight directions all the time, she can aim in eight directions while moving or absolutely anywhere by holding L and aiming manually. Ledge grabbing makes navigation easier, as does being able to aim and fire in most directions while hanging from a ledge. From this position Samus can jump off, hoist up, drop off, or climb up while rolling into a ball. The one thing that I can say is nerfed about her movement is wall-jumping, which can't be abused the way it is in games like Super Metroid but is still simple to pull off.

Among my memories of it, one of the things I distinctly remember about Metroid II was getting lost thanks to the lack of an in-game map. Samus Returns not only rectifies this by having one, but makes it so you can add multi-colored pins to the map for things you might have to come back for later. It's minor, but still handy for marking passages or items not otherwise explicitly shown on the map. The one thing that could make it better would be adding captions to said pins.

Met Raid: Sam Is Return is good goode.

Having to go back to a previous state, either due to a severe fuck up or just plain missing something you might want or need, is simple as the game allows you to load previous checkpoints or saves at any time. In terms of the user interface and controls, Samus Returns is made about as versatile and accessible as possible. It clearly has a modern audience in mind, but throws in more than enough nostalgia and adherence to the original Metroid II to keep old schoolers happy.

The environments are well done in their own right. While the Game Boy original largely had flat black backgrounds, here every area has unique backgrounds to each area and areas within those areas. I'd frequently glance at the background and see machinery moving or collapsing, alien lifeforms resting or moving along the walls, or storm cells on the not-so-friendly surface of the planet.

This is complemented by a soundtrack which borrows elements from a few different Metroid games, namely a couple tunes heavily inspired by Super Metroid's soundtrack, and even borrows a few sound effects from it. The songs range from haunting to energizing and almost always work well with each action and environment, save for maybe the first part of the credits roll. When the theme for the surface of SR388 started up, I was locked in.

Me, shortly after hearing the Brinstar "Red Soil Wetland" music.

Enemy variety is a little lacking in some parts, with a couple particular ones getting palette-swapped and given slightly different abilities. I'm talking about common enemies, not the various Metroid mutations you hunt throughout the game. That said, it didn't bother me in the slightest as Metroid II had the same issue. Not excusing it, just saying it's a common thread.

Boss encounters are challenging at first, but still generally simple to figure out what to do to beat them. That's only half of it, however, as most fights in this game require equal parts strategy and proper execution of said strategy. The Queen Metroid and the Diggernaut in particular have a heavy emphasis on execution.

I've completed the game once (in about 10 hours) and am going back to 100% the game, since each area has several sections with items you can't reach without power ups from the later stages. This is made less of a chore by the teleportation stations scattered around the map, which can send Samus from one end of an area to another or to another area entirely. I, for one, welcome this as a way to take the tedium out of backtracking for completion's sake.

There's another reason I'm doing this, which is the Chozo Memories gallery, somewhat similar to what Prime offered but in a different format. Tied to item completion, it shows images of the Chozo civilization before it completely fell to shit, which are divided into four parts, each unlocking separately based on your progress. I'm a sucker for lore stuff like this so I'm anxious to find out for myself what all of them are. It's a nice incentive to not just drop the game after getting through it once.

Me, going over the Bloody Roar manga again.

I can't speak much for amiibo compatibility, though I did use my Samus Smash Bros. amiibo on it just to see what it did. Doing so gave an extra missile reserve tank and a concept art gallery (about 35 images) after beating the game. Other amiibos have the similar effect of unlocking items, but also grant things like a sound test option, Metroid II art for the gallery, the Fusion suit, and a "Metroid marker" of sorts for the map.

Metroid: Samus Returns is exactly what I hoped it would be. It's a great take on a classic formula with some new tidbits thrown in that make it a unique experience from its source material. It sucks Another Metroid 2 Remake got taken down, but it's nice to see that it wasn't in vain considering how well the official game turned out. Despite my concerns, leading up to its release I was hoping I'd be able to say what I'm about to say, and now I can finally say it.

Good job, Mercury Steam.

SC On Resident Evil 6 (PS3)

2015-09-06T17:53:00.001-04:00

The Insidious Sixth.

There's quite a story involving myself and this game. I avoided it initially because I was highly skeptical of what I'd seen and heard about the game. I didn't touch it until early August of 2013 when I rented it from GameFly and started playing Leon's campaign.

I became so frustrated and disappointed with what I played in the first two chapters alone that I stopped playing it entirely. I didn't return it because I kept telling myself 'I'll just give myself a couple days to calm down and go back into it. I will see this game through to the end."

That was two years ago. I didn't play the game again until fellow RiverCityGamers member WellUnreal007 played through every campaign with me via co-op in mid-to-late August.

Let's make this perfectly clear right away: Resident Evil 6 is the game that reminded me what hatred feels like. I hate this game. I hate so much of this game that I won't even consider getting it for collection's sake. Resident Evil 6 gave me a new level of appreciation for Resident Evil 5, which I was largely indifferent to and gave up on after about half an hour.

I will say a few positive things about the game, though. Mercenaries is still fun, even if the unlockables and playable characters initially available don't all make sense (coughAgentbut notAdacough). Movement is relatively fluid, being able to pick up items on the run is great, and being able to dive back, lay on the ground and fire as well as do melee attacks is a nice addition, in particular for Mercenaries.

What follows is not any kind of in-depth, structured, organized review as much as it is a list of grievances and rants for why I hate this game so much. Some of these are things I made notes on from way back when I first started playing the game, but most are from my sessions with Unreal.

Note: I played every campaign on the Normal difficulty without infinite ammo or such cheats active.

"Until you can pin me, Resident Evil 6 is not over."

There are so many poor and/or disorganized design choices that even starting up the game is awkward. The game loads a screen which is essentially the title screen without the title and prompts the player to push a button. Then it goes through the loading screens, then it goes to the intro to the title screen, then the title screen, then it goes to the menu. This kind of Chinese fire drill shit is almost as bad as the autosave clusterfuck in Tony Hawk Ride.

Also, the overdramatic "I'm Not Inception" orchestral menu music never. Fucking. Stops. That's not to say the game itself doesn't also have a shit ton of overdramatic orchestral music. The music itself is fine, but for the most part it's grossly misused, playing way too often or at really awkward times. Opening a door to an empty room? STRIKE UP THE BAND!

Going back into the game was a struggle because I didn't remember all the controls. The game was no help with this because the controls section of the options menu doesn't show the controls, just some options to switch around a few things like inverted aiming and the reload and fire buttons.

There were so many fucking item drops in this game that I never ran out of ammo for any weapons and I never found myself short on healing items. In fact, I had the opposite problem; I was overloaded with ammo and grenades and mixed herbs, the last of which I couldn't use because I was maxed out on tablets. This can be made even worse by equipping perks (who the fuck thought Resident Evil needed this?) to make even more items drop, on top of doing things like boosting defense, boosting different attacks, etc.

The prologue, aside from not matching up with what happens to Leon at the end of the campaign, was a harbinger of things to come that would piss me off; being unable to walk in any direction but forward while carrying Helena, being able to kill everything by spamming Leon's kicks, invisible walls forcing Leon to jump over a particular railing, and FIFTEEN QUICK-TIME EVENTS. Yes, I counted.

Speaking of quick-time events, they are so poorly implemented in this game that I wound up dying a number of times because there was so little time to react to the button prompts. It didn't help that some of these were stacked in succession (e.g. Ada with the chainsaw monster). Because of the QTE setup for getting grabbed by enemies, I had a low-health Leon get grabbed in a single frame and then disabled before the enemy could do anything. It looked like Leon was near death because he sucks at playing tag. And why, when being grabbed by an enemy, would you have a QTE where you're supposed to wait for the right time to hit R1? I'm getting hit as I'm playing light stopper in this asinine QTE.

On a related note, a monster with a bio-chainsaw-arm thing? Fuck off. That's just stupid. This will become a pattern, but most of the big bad threatening monsters in this game are so overblown and so (for lack of a better term) fanfiction-esque that I just laughed at them, then got annoyed at them for coming back again and again and again and again, across multiple campaigns no less, only for them to die from things way less impactful than what they went through earlier. It's the Fingerpoke of Doom in Resident Evil form.

That awkward moment when Nash and Hogan act out

most of RE6's boss fights.

Speaking of, cross play (being able to jump in at points where characters from different campaigns cross paths) is an okay idea, but the implementation is pretty poor. AngelHalo would jump in when this happened and he basically had to act as a minute man, keeping his game on and ready to jump in at a moment's notice. On more than one occasion it flat-out didn't work and he couldn't join us.

Leon's campaign has a couple places with decent atmosphere like the subway tunnels and (sometimes) in the streets early on, but it's repeatedly undermined in various ways throughout the game, namely by music choice or the horrible dialogue.

The beginning of his campaign is also excessively on rails. You can't run, pause the game, or access the item menu initially. The guy you find says "It's locked, but I work here" for every single door Leon and Helene encounter which they can't open before he opens it, and he doesn't open it until a bunch of predetermined pathing and dialogue take place. This guy has no reason to exist other than to try and create tension and die in the elevator.

On a similar note, it's easy to tell who lives for any significant length of time and who doesn't. If their character models look like they're last gen or worse in quality, they're dead. If the character doesn't even get a first or last name, they're dead. Resident Evil 6 seemingly only bothered to make things the player would directly look at for more than ten seconds look decent. Other survivors look like they came straight out of an early Gamecube game and it's really easy to tell which ones will come back as zombies and which won't; the ones that don't revive have absolutely no wounds anywhere on their bodies. Background vehicles, especially in the helicopter sequence with Ada, look like empty box-shaped husks of what were supposed to be abandoned cars. Framed pictures on desks and walls are horrifically pixelated and what's supposed to be a breaking news story on a television is a JPEG image of a news caster whose mouth has been cropped at the lips and moves up and down like a ventriloquist dummy, out of sync with the dialogue. The average Newgrounds flash animation has more effort put into it than this.

Also, every goddamn playable character in this game (except Piers and Sherry most of the time) has to make some kind of action movie-esque quip for damn near everything. If they're not going to take what's going on seriously, why the hell should I? Then again the characters are all so poorly written, going from one-liners to brooding assholes back and forth so fast they get whiplash, I thought the big plot twist would be that most of them were schizophrenic the whole time.

Leon, for example, has this recurring idea of him trying to save too many people and ending up not saving anyone, which gets dropped and not mentioned for long periods of time and/or undermined by dumb bullshit. The first time this shows up is when Leon and Helena see some guys on a security monitor holding up signs and calling for help. They proceed to stare at these guys long enough for them to get overwhelmed by zombies, and ONLY THEN does Leon move away from the monitor to possibly do something. Later on he and Helena get to a chapel full of survivors waiting for help and Leon doesn't seem to give a shit about any of them until a B.O.W. shows up and kills all of them. Even later on they hole up in a gun shop where, again, Leon proceeds to not care about anyone until after they're dead. This is a big difference from me, because I didn't care about these people before or after they died. Most of them can barely get out a sentence of dialogue before dying. Yeah, that guy I saw for twelve seconds and didn't really know dying really shook me up. I've had burritos more emotionally involving than these random nothings.

There are also little scripted scenes in which Leon tries to, say, help a guy out from a car or motorcycle crash in the middle of the street, and the guy almost immediately dies because of an explosion or another vehicle crashing into the pile. In one scene moving toward a group of survivors got me killed because an ambulance came out of nowhere and sideswiped me.

How scripted is Resident Evil 6? After a motorcycle and ambulance crash on one side of the road, flaming cars magically appear on the opposite side and block my path, forcing me to continue following the straight line of the campaign. Note that there's a button you can press which will bring up a beacon pointing to exactly where you're supposed to go if you get to an area that isn't a hallway. Also a dozen zombies appeared, even though I went through the whole area and killed everything and nothing had spawned for a minute or two.

Thanks, game. Not only is there a "where do I go?" beacon, but you even have on-screen indicators for where to find keys to unlock doors. Why bother telling me to search for a key(s) if you're just going to tell me exactly where they all are? There aren't even that many places to look in the first place!

Hey, remember how zombies were threatening in the earlier Resident Evils because they showed up a lot in tight spaces or effectively blocked off where the player needed to go? Because I don't think the developers remembered that. Most encounters can either be easily avoided or one-button melee prompted into submission.

The melee prompts are just plain dumb too. Some are alright, but for some reason every character has a bunch of pro wrestling moves as their melee prompts. Yes, moves that tend to hurt the person doing the move as much or more than the person taking it. I would be one thing if they were doing the moves deliberately wrong so a zombie would land on its head, but they don't. Leon german suplexes a zombie on concrete in a way that should easily bruise or chip multiple vertebrae in his back. Even worse, I saw Helene kill a zombie with a tilt-a-whirl arm drag, a move so effective in pro wrestling that nobody pretends to be hurt by it. It would be more believable for me to kill the zombie by punching the TV screen.

Helena says "Oh God!" In reaction to a grate falling from the ceiling and making a loud noise. The catch is she does so a good four to five seconds after it happens. How do you fuck this up?

Helena also does weird shit regardless of whether she's controlled by another player or the AI. I've seen her warp at light speed through doors, spins rapidly in a circle right before a cutscene triggers, and have her character model lock up while turning a crank, at which point the crank spun super fast through her face. At one point she sprinted off-screen while I was kicking zombies and I noticed some were falling over for no apparent reason. Helena, located about 40 meters away in an alley, was shooting through a building and several cars and hitting the zombies I was fighting.

I get that zombies aren't smart, but when I'm standing 10 feet away from a zombie that's looking directly at me and it doesn't react at all to my presence something is wrong. Something similar happened with a whole swarm of zombies about 15 feet away from me in a later section. Even worse, one zombie I shot turned around, ran away, then attacked another zombie!

Too stealthy!

How scripted is Resident Evil 6? At one point Leon's flashlight stops working right before he's supposed to go through a dark area. I backed up a few steps and his light came back on. Stepped forward again, it turned off. Backed up again, it turned on. Either Leon or his flashlight is a melodramatic douchebag.

Why in the hell does choking down a health tablet near your partner heal them? It makes sense with the first-aid spray but this?

The over-dramatic bullshit that goes on in this game really exposed some of the voice actors. Hunnigan in particular, a character who's had zero range of emotion in games and films prior to this, sounds really awkward when she has to show any sort of emotion beyond dryly spouting exposition.

At some point there was a sequence in which I jumped off a bus and a car almost instantly went from zero to sixty in reverse. There are no words for how bad this looked.

About those QTEs? I was initially keeping count of them but I stopped after 22. I didn't even finish Leon's first chapter and I was up to 22.

Chapter 2 of Leon's campaign starts as a result of the driver being a fucking moron and deliberately running over a zombie, which caused the bus to spin off the road and crash. It then begins with Leon and Helena on their backs on the bus floor being "attacked" by zombies which are hovering a foot-and-a-half off above the ground and not really making an effort to go after either protagonist.

At this point Helena's AI took a nosedive. Helena not only blocked a grenade I was throwing which blew up in my face and led to me dying, at one point I was downed and near death, which Helena responded to by running away and letting me die.

This whole time Leon keeps asking Helena what's going on with her and she keeps saying "I'll explain when we get to the cathedral." They get to the cathedral, get to the basement of the cathedral, get even further below the cathedral and she still didn't explain anything until she almost got herself and Leon killed. At this point I'm struggling to find a likable character.

Oh, I didn't even mention any of the story so far. This whole thing starts with the President of the United States dying before he's about to speak at a university. He was about to go public about what happened with Raccoon City and, rather than do this at the White House or any other highly-secured location, he decides to do this at a college where someone causes a viral outbreak which kills him and thousands of other people. This President not only was completely ignorant to how much danger he willfully put himself in, but he told enough people what he was going to do that word spread to the wrong people and they were able to plan this outbreak. People are dumb in this game.

You know game, if you wanted me to sympathize with Helena you shouldn't have had her be manipulative up until finding her mutated monster sister, then have her be a dumbass by repeatedly trying to negotiate with the mutated monster sister.

I got hit by zombies through a door, but I couldn't shoot through the gaps in the door to hit them.

There's a boss fight in the cathedral in which absolutely nothing was happening, but Leon got thrown backwards and took two dots of damage. Before you say it, it wasn't the gas attack and I wasn't playing online at the time.

There is no time table for how long it takes zombies (or anything else for that matter) to reanimate. Some people don't reanimate for hours or even days, and some reanimate in less than a minute. This gets even worse with Chris' campaign wherein some people reanimate as fully-mutated monsters in about ten seconds and some never reanimate at all. Oh, did I mention that all the notes to this point were largely just on things I jotted down during Leon's campaign?

May or may not be a monster in RE6.

The "main bad guy" is a defense secretary named Simmons. If he wasn't the main bad guy I would have forgotten he existed because this guy is one of the most bland antagonists I've encountered in awhile. He dresses all in white with one of those neck things that makes him look like a young Colonel Sanders about to give everyone a bucket of fried chicken. And of course, this guy puts himself in the middle of a massive outbreak where he ends up getting infected by Not Ada.

Speaking of, there's a plotline that there are two Adas, one of which is a clone. The motivations of the clone are never explained as she goes after both the protagonists and the antagonists (including one flashback wherein she kills Chris' squad) for no apparent reason except to maybe cause confusion over what the real Ada is doing. Nobody catches on to the fact that the Adas are dressed completely differently (blue dress and red scarf vs. black leather pants and red jacket) even after seeing them mere seconds apart.

The prologue, which is supposed to be set later in Leon's campaign, doesn't match what happens when Leon and Helena finally get to that point. Also, why did Helena try to stop the dead pilot from falling out of the helicopter? All it did was get her grabbed by a conveniently-just-reanimated zombie and set up more goddamn QTEs. People are dumb in this game.

The gas which turns people into zombies is very selective about where it goes, unless you're telling me that vehicles in this game, like the hummer Leon and Helena ride in through the gas, is completely air tight. Also, the gas just stops spreading at a certain point and forms another "keep following the one path forward" wall.

The final boss in Leon's campaign is a neverending pissing contest between the game designers, seeing who can make the biggest and most ridiculous boss monster. First off, the boss monster is Simmons. Second, Simmons' infected form looks like the monsters from Alone in the Dark. Third, Simmons becomes a big monster, a big monster that becomes horse-like and runs alongside a train Leon and Helena are on, which was so goofy I wound up dying because I was laughing over one of those ridiculously short instant-death QTE, a larger monster which shoots what appear to be white Cheetos, a dinosaur which rips off animations from Deviljho in the Monster Hunter series (remember to recycle, everyone), an even bigger monster with long limbs for a building climbing and skywalk fight segment, a huge insect-like monster which can only be killed by getting it to absorb zombies impaled with lightning rods and having lightning strike the monster, and then just a giant insect. The game simply doesn't know when to stop with this bullshit and I was begging for the game to end by the skywalk fight.

During some of these fights Simmons will mutate back into his Alone in the Dark form where he's vulnerable to a one-button prompt where he gets mounted and punched in the face MMA style before mutating back into his giant monster form. Thanks for ensuring I can't take any of these fights seriously by making Simmons a fucking Transformer, and for breaking the law of conservation of mass over your knee even more than RE5 did.

These bosses typically end with Simmons not dying despite getting blown up, falling off buildings, burning horrifically, or all of the above. As such it's anticlimactic that he's killed just by getting impaled on a statue. Then I told this game to go fuck itself when Simmons bled out and it formed the Umbrella logo beneath him. Get it? Because Umbrella started all this shit and there's now a company called NeoUmbrella? Get it?! DO YOU GET IT?!

Chris' campaign pissed me off more than all of the others, and it's not because it's the least Resident Evil-like of all of them. It starts with Chris getting drunk in a bar because he lost all of his squad, because that's never ever happened to him in the history of Resident Evil. Even then he didn't lose all of the squad because we see in a cutscene later that Piers Nivans (If there was ever a name for a guy I'd want to punch in the face repeatedly, it's Piers Nivans) was in the squad and saved Chris from dying, even though the last time we see them Piers is trying to drag an incapacitated and jibbering wreck named Chris while shooting at a group of monsters that are clearly going to catch them. I guess one of them had a deus ex machina grenade to get out of that bind. Beyond that Chris apparently never tries to go after Not Ada

Piers is eating a steak in the seedy-looking bar (this shithole serves steak?) when he confronts Chris in the bar and forces him to face his past, which Chris has somehow forgotten. Piers then says they're bringing him back into the fold with the BSAA and everyone in the bar, all BSAA members, stands up. This is the kind of cliche bullshit I'd expect if someone made a BSAA-based anime, but here it just made me groan and regret not returning the game after finishing Leon's campaign.

So Chris is back in charge of a squad. Yup, the guy with a history of not having squad members survive is back in charge. Again. You can probably guess where this goes.

Chris' campaign, and to some degree every campaign in this game, is designed similarly to Red Steel; hallway, area with enemies in it, hallway, checkpoint, repeat. Yes, I just compared RE6 to Red Steel.

At least this game is a somewhat physical workout instead of

one long headache.

The camera is at its worst in Chris' campaign. You know what I don't need in a cover shooter? Well, Resident Evil for one thing, but I don't need QTEs and in-game cutscenes that spin my character around so I get disoriented and can't tell which direction I'm facing or where the enemies are relative to me.

How scripted is Resident Evil 6? Chris has a flashback to when his squad got wiped and, during this flashback, he gets a new gun. When the game goes back to the present Chris now has that weapon, as well as any other items he got in the flashback. Did Chris somehow forget he had that stuff with him the whole time? Also, this is where the dead cocoon people do not hatch at all when the flashback showed them hatching seconds after dying. Also, why do different monsters hatch from different people that this happens to?

The main enemies in Chris' campaign can mutate and their weak point is whatever mutation they have. In other words they were normal-sized people and mutate to get an even bigger weak point.

When Chris' squad members start getting picked off it's usually because they wander away from the group or run off by themselves, which Chris tells them not to do. People are dumb in this game. I'm not excluding Chris from that, who said everyone should stick together and then moments later tells everyone to split into three groups. Oh, and we usually don't even know their names or hear them speak until they're about to die. Yeah, that's how you engender sympathy for these guys that otherwise look and act like each other and we know nothing about. 10/10.

One of the last squad members with the most lines of the expendable lads sounds like a cartoon police chief. This did not help at all.

Ghost Yawn. They took Yawn from the first Resident Evil and made it a pseudo-ghost giant snake with QTEs because of course there are QTEs. Why does Chris go on the warpath for this thing but not for the other shit that's killing his squad? And why did they bring back what was a pretty "meh" boss from RE1 which had way more to do with Jill because Richard sacrificed himself to save her from Yawn? Fuck this game.

This storytelling is bad even by Resident Evil standards. It does the Pokemon anime thing of creating an almost-subtle message, then spelling out what that message is over and over and over. Yes, I just compared RE6 to the Pokemon anime.

Piers did nothing but piss me off the majority of the game. He's one of those uptight military types who's constantly going on about what the mission is and what they're supposed to do. On top of that, he's the reason Ada escapes when Chris and Leon finally catch her. Good job, numb nuts.

Before that there was an annoying driving sequence which starts with Piers driving (he says he's the best driver in the BSAA) and Chris on a gun turret, trying to catch Ada and taking out other vehicles with enemies on them. Then, for no fucking reason, Chris says he's going to drive and Piers goes back to the turret. Asshole, you just gave Ada a head start because you forced the driver to get out. This is one of those sequences where making a couple mistakes means failing the whole section and having to start over at the point where Chris thinks he can drive.

Chris and Piers don't even "kill" Not Ada. Some random assholes in a helicopter shoot her and they just assume she's dead after she falls several feet to the lower part of a ship.

The running sequence right before the final boss is absolutely terrible. The camera is Sonic 06-like with how much it swings around and changes position, making this sequence harder than it should be. I couldn't see some obstacles I had to slide under because of this and got killed. This sequence already has zero margin of error and this makes things even worse.

How scripted is Resident Evil 6? Even if you nail every move and never stop running, the big monster is scripted to catch up with you at certain phases. Yup, no matter how well you do at this whole sequence, the monster will catch up to you repeatedly regardless. I even had moments where Unreal and I did everything right and we still got killed. Fuck this game.

I have no caption for this. I just wanted to remind myself of

better Resident Evil games.

Seeing Chris still try to save Piers after he'd already mutated himself to kill the boss monster was beyond painful to watch; not because it was emotional, but because Chris is such a goddamn idiot. They don't build any kind of significant relationship between Chris and Piers over the course of the game so by the time this ending sequence happens I was glad to see Chris be rid of this asshole and Chris didn't have enough reason to flip out the way he did, much less convince himself Piers could be cured somehow.

And then Chris goes back to the shithole bar and eats a steak. Fuck this game and its piss poor attempts at subtext.

Now for Sherry and Jake. I'll spare you the rant on how Capcom killed off Wesker in the last game, then immediately turned around on it and said "Oh wait, he had a son guys! Did we mention he had a son? Because he does!"

I played as Sherry as partial payment to Unreal so he could run around and punch things as Jake. It's the least I could do.

According to this campaign, Sherry has a mutation as a result of the G-Virus injection from RE2 that gives her Wolverine's healing factor. Why, then, does this apply to a cutscene where she gets impaled in the back by a large scrap of metal and nowhere else in the game? Why does she even need healing items? Oh wait, I'm putting thought into this. Nevermind, let's go back to the loud dumb game.

Can you tell I'm struggling to keep writing at this point? I still have half a page of notes to get through and it feels like three pages.

There were QTEs on the helicopter scene which I missed, but the game kept going like I succeeded anyway. What was the point of that?!

Have I mentioned how many goddamn explosions there are in this game? There are a ton of explosions across every campaign, but I really noticed it during Sherry's.

That one part where I had to go up an icy slope and getting hit at all would force me to slide all the way back to the bottom was such a crock of shit.

Why is it that when an in-game cutscene happens it switches whatever weapon I'm holding to the stun rod? This got me damaged later on because the game wouldn't stop switching me from any of my guns to the stun rod.

I was technically player 2 for Sherry's campaign. This game defaults player 2 to a left-handed camera so it's over the opposite shoulder. There's a button to switch it to the right-handed view, but the game keeps switching it back after loading screens and some cutscenes.

The running sequences have a Sonic 06 camera angle looking behind the characters at the thing chasing them. You know what you absolutely shouldn't do with this angle that Resident Evil6 does? If you said 'have some sequences in a set of narrow twisting hallways where you can't see when or where to turn' you'd be correct!

The snowmobile sequence was miserable. Why even put these kind of vehicle sequences in the game if you're going to make them ridiculously stiff, have isntant-death chasms that appear and have the characters on them look like they're riding horses and not snowmobiles?

Once they're captured, Jake and Sherry end up getting all their weapons back once they find new clothes in a random set of lockers. What?

So Simmons' group captured Jake and Sherry so that no one would find the data Sherry had to engineer a vaccine from Jake's blood, but then they proceed to conduct all the research necessary to engineer a vaccine from Jake's blood? What the fuck?

The final boss fight, which is the same monster machine thing that's been chasing Sherry and Jake the whole campaign, is basically one long QTE. There's a game called Let's Go Jungle which has QTEs where you and the other player have to hit a button at the same time, including delivering a final shot to the final boss. RE6 does the same damn thing. This boss, which has been shot, beaten and blown up with every weapon in the game, set on fire several times, blown up several times and had buildings and cars and other debris crush him and survived all of that, gets done in by a single magnum shot, falls into a seemingly neverending explosion, and THAT kills him. It's underwhelming to say the least, but also par for the course in Resident Evil 6.

Me after this game's final bosses.

The whole reason Sherry is with Jake is because his blood sample could cure the newest virus that's causing the latest outbreaks. So of course they end up getting kidnapped and dropped into China, right near where Sherry has to rendezvous with her boss, Simmons! Again, why the fuck is Simmons right in the middle of the outbreak? Why does Sherry not get suspicious of this or meeting Leon and having him say point-blank that Simmons is behind everything? And why does Simmons, knowing that Sherry and Jake will be there and having a vested interest in Jake dying, only have a small firing squad about 30 feet away that doesn't shoot them until Simmons says so, by which point they're already ducking for cover? People are dumb in this game.

There's a motorcycle sequence in which Jake and Sherry jump out a building and past a helicopter. Jake did a literal 360 no scope (as in spinning while shooting) on the motorcycle, then the models glitched out and the motorcycle was facing upward, at which point Jake and Sherry rocketed into the sky before the game set them back on the street. I completely lost my shit.

Jake, as a mercenary, initially asked for millions of dollars for cooperating with Sherry, but in the ending he texts her saying he changed his asking price to $50 before riding off on a motorcycle while wearing sunglasses. We get it. You're Wesker's kid and you like emulating Cloud Strife. Or Shadow the Hedgehog. Or that guy from Ride to Hell: Retribution. Or whichever lame "badass" character does that.

Ada's campaign, as the shortest one which was initially designed as a single player experience, is probably the best. I say probably because Capcom decided to throw in Agent, a faceless, nameless husk of a person as a co-op partner. He can't open doors, he can't activate switches, he's invisible to the gun turret security cameras and he can't even aim during the helicopter sequences. When Ada goes through a door, grapples to another location or enters a cutscene he disappears and reappears wherever she ends up. His dying still results in a game over, though. He's important enough to hold Ada back but not important enough to otherwise be worth the effort of fully integrating him into the campaign. Agent just shoots straight ahead and can't hit anything unless it moves into his bullets. Fuck this game.

This has the same problem with running sequences as Sherry's campaign. Fuck my life. And this game.

The part where Not Ada mutates is okay, but again the game can't stay consistent about what can hold back Not Ada, heretofore known as The Blob. A single door leading into the ship holds her back for a bit, but none of the other structures are capable of holding back The Blob, except for a few other similar doors deep inside the ship?

That explosives are necessary to beat the final incarnation of The Blob is kind of shitty. I mean, I had a shit ton of explosives with me because this game is ridiculous with item drops, but why would you do that?

And that's it. I'm done. One last time, fuck this game. I'd rather play through Escape from Bug Island again than go back to any of this game's campaigns.

Simmons vs. Not Ada

Five Dollar Gaming: Tony Hawk Shred (PS3)

2015-01-21T10:48:00.000-05:00

Five Dollar Gaming: Tony Hawk Shred (PS3) by scxcr

Just a Moment with Neverending Nightmares (PC)

2014-09-29T21:57:00.001-04:00

There must be some kind of way out of here,
Said the Thomas to the nightmares.

Just a Moment with Neverending Nightmares (PC) by scxcr

SC on Mighty Gunvolt (3DS)

2014-09-12T14:17:00.005-04:00

The gun is good. The volt is evil.

Well, I wasn't expecting this (blog entry) to be a thing. Mighty Gunvolt, as the name suggests, is a title from Inti Creates, also known as "those people working on Mighty No. 9." While it won't be commercially available by itself until December, it's being given away for free to two groups of people:

1. People who buy the recently-released Azure Striker Gunvolt, and

2. People who backed Mighty No. 9's Kickstarter.

Mighty Gunvolt plays, sounds and looks like the retro Mega Man games, so I'll try and make clear where it's different. For example, the translation job on the game is so shoddy I can't tell what's going on. Take this excerpt from the opening crawl:

The other time, the other place: experiments on humans started by massive media group "Sumeragi" to audition for next "muse" idol. their magic hand even reached female schools. Female students vanished, and no new couples formed. Love was in danger.

"Gunvolt," it's the name who we call the only one to fight them. It's no accident he was involved in the troubles. Together with angel "Ekoro" and robot "Beck" he fights to free successivefuly occupied major city facilities.

Mission: Successivefuly.

As the text suggests, there are three different characters to play as which affect the order of the stages slightly. You can't switch characters as the game goes on, but the game's only five levels long so whatever.

Each character has different abilities that affect how you might approach certain parts of each stage. Gunvolt can double jump and has a mid-range pillar of sparks he can shoot which can be moved slightly up and down. Ekoro can hover (think Toadstool in Mario Bros. 2) and charm enemies to fly with her and shoot other enemies, as well as launch them into other enemies. Beck has a dash attack, which he can also use to enter narrow passages.

There honestly isn't much to say about the levels as they're all pretty basic jump-and-shoot sidescrolling platforming. As someone who doesn't play a lot of Mega Man I had no problem reaching and beating the end of the game in a single playthrough, much less the two other playthroughs I did afterward. The one sticking point is being able to defeat the bosses at each level, which comes down to the old newbie Mega Man strategy of sacrificing a life to see what their attack patterns are like. The bosses do tend to throw out an extra attack when they're low on health, but by then it's too late for them.

The game doesn't run smoothly though, save for when you're playing as Ekoro and try to grab onto a ladder while holding a charge shot; you can get stuck to the ladder doing this.

Overall I'm glad this was just a free game, and allegedly it won't cost very much when it does release by itself. It's a fun diversion for a half-hour or so but I can't see myself playing it anymore beyond now.

Anyway, once you complete the game you'll see the following text:

In order to prevent a "muse" auditions, "Copen" infiltrated Sumeragi group, to rescue "muse". But his plans ware shattered by "Zonda" easily defeated him. "Zonda" would use her, to fill the world with ultimate love. But "Zonda" was a failure.

What was the true planning of "Zonda?" With his death, no one may never know. The first place it is unknown if anything really existed in that world was real. So, perhaps all "Zonda" has showed may have ben illusion...

Who the fuck is Ben Illusion?

MIGHTY GUN REX

SC On Sega Superstars Tennis (Wii)

2014-08-19T16:40:00.000-04:00

In the background: characters who were collecting dust before this game.

This is going to be relatively quick as I didn't have much patience to play beyond what the game initially offered. As such, don't view this as anything more than an extended impression of sorts.

That being said, I found Mario Tennis on the N64 more enjoyable.

Sega Superstars Tennis doesn't have much to offer in terms of stuff to do. You can experiment with different characters as there is a decent roster of 16 characters (though 5 of them, almost 1/3 of the roster are Sonic characters). There are different types of characters with different focuses such as ballspin, speed, power, control, and all around. The only ones that seemed to make any major difference in how I played were speed and power.

Each character is also supposed to have a special ability that builds up over the course of a match which can cause the ball to take weird paths through the air and confuse the opponent, as well as having other effects such as the Rokkaku Police running onto the court for Beat's and Gum's specials. The thing is, the computer opponent is never fooled by the weird flight patterns, which make the ball take way more time to get across the court and reduces that would-be strategic move to little more than a novelty.

You can play a singles or a doubles tournament if you like, though at most you'll end up playing three matches and a "special" hidden stage against the Sonic villains before a rather lazy credit sequence plays. Outside of adjusting the difficulty, that's it for this mode.

Yay?

I don't wanna work. I wanna bang on this game all day.

The beef of the game, however, is in a mode called Planet Superstars. The idea is to jump around different game worlds based on different Sega franchises and completing specific tasks according to the world you enter. For example, the Puyo Pop Fever world involves completing a game of Puyo Pop by smacking tennis balls at grouped puyos of matching colors. The House of the Dead "Curien Mansion" world involves hitting zombies with tennis balls as they shamble toward you and/or throw axes. The Virtua Squad world turns the game into a gallery shooter where you try to take out targets before they "shoot" you. Space Harrier world is basically Space Harrier... with tennis balls and without the ability to fly.

Those are all well and good except for two things.

One, some of these challenges really expose how strange some of the game's controls are. Only in singles or doubles matches/tournaments can you pick the control scheme to use, of which there are three (one with the nunchuk, two without). Most of the time it forces you to play with the Wiimote held like an NES controller, where performing drop shots or lobs involves mashing both buttons at the same time in a certain sequence. Aiming these is also a chore as sometimes you need to hold a certain direction, then move to a diagonal direction while making the shot. This is absolutely infuriating to do in places like the Chu Chu Rocket world, where you need to hit a specific tile, sometimes more than once, quickly to not fail the stage. Thanks for taking the fun out of Chu Chu Rocket, Sega.

The second problem is the more glaring issue, though. There is zero balance to these worlds. The Sonic world has a total of 14 missions, easily the most in the game. Super Monkey Ball and Jet Set Radio have 12. Virtua Squad, Puyo Pop Fever, Chu Chu Rocket and Space Harrier have 10

Guess how many missions the Space Channel 5, Samba de Amigo, OutRun worlds each have? Just two each.

NiGHTS isn't much better off with only three missions, though all of them got it better than Golden Axe and Alex Kidd which have just one goddamn mission each.

More like Lonely Axe, am I right?

Not only that, but many assets get reused between each world. For example, Space Channel 5's court is used for the Chu Chu Rocket world, which really pissed me off because Space Channel 5's court legit screws with my eyes. Because of the mix of dark colors and bright lines I would occasionally lose track of where the ball was or, for overhand smashes, have no idea where the ball was in the air and completely miss the shot.

Oh, and did I mention the game isn't the best programmed thing I've played recently? In the time I spent playing doubles matches with this game, my character froze for no apparent reason on five separate occasions.

It's a good thing I didn't pay much for this game or I'd be more pissed off. Until then I'll just continue to sulk about how there are no new Jet Set Radio/Golden Axe/Chu Chu Rocket/OutRun/House of the Dead games coming any time soon.

Although there is Hover: Revolt of Gamers being developed, so that's something.

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 8 (The End Is Near)

2014-06-29T19:47:00.004-04:00

The mood was still up, but you could tell some people were starting to get a little down that the marathon was so close to ending. A lot of people would be heading home after the last part of the marathon, leaving about five hours between the time the marathon finished and checkout Sunday morning. The parking lot thinned out quite a bit by Sunday afternoon.

On a lighter note though, I managed to catch the entire FF6 run, aside from a few minutes where I stepped out for a bathroom break. MisterMV has the singing voice of an angel. Essentia has the singing voice of a fallen angel, though I credit that more to the filter put over her voice.

Meanwhile, the bonus stream would get going later in the day Sunday with the most official of organization methods; paper and pen. Bonus stream is a lot more laid back, so there's not a ton of pressure involved. I volunteered a couple of games which might make it on at some point, though I'm trying to defer to anyone who signed up before me.

Until I get back, this will be the final entry in this series of blogs. I had a great time at this year's SGDQ and hope that I can make it to future marathons as a runner, volunteer or otherwise. I'm also not looking forward to the drive back because seriously, Kansas is terrible. Thanks again to the folks at SpeedDemosArchive for organizing the event and letting me run a game during the marathon (with a donation incentive no less) and to LazerLong for letting me sit in on MadWorld. Also thanks to |3ass|3oost for splitting a room for the duration of the marathon and then some.

And before I go, congratulations to JKB for winning that Mario Sunshine race. Ohio was represented well this marathon. Now to get back to putting together the next Five Dollar Gaming...

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 7 (Viva Video Juegos)

2014-06-28T14:26:00.001-04:00

Oh, of course. Now that I don't actually need to be awake at some ungodly hour for my run, now I'm waking up at 5:00 in the afternoon. Ah well, at least I'll get to see some of the Mario bloc and maybe get to the practice room when it's thinned out a bit.

I forgot to mention that at one point the previous night the stream window cut out for a bit, as in the computers used to run the stream were still going but the display was gone entirely. Much to their credit, the guys running tech didn't panic and got the stream back to normal within a couple minutes.

I was stunned at how much money had been raised since I last checked the total: over $300,000. When I went to sleep it was around $260,000. It turns out they added some more donation incentives, including a race of Ocarina of Time between Cosmo and Skater. Since then they added a couple other incentives and the donation total has been climbing at a rapid pace. Someone donated saying they were going to snipe the Save/Kill the Animals bid war for Super Metroid, and to that guy all I can say is I hope you have very, very deep pockets.

Another event started at the convention center as SGDQ soldiered on. I don't know what it is, but it seems to be some sort of Hispanic culture event. I can hear lots of singing and music and people generally having a good time in the adjacent rooms. At one point during the Mario World run a really loud air horn went off at that event, loud enough that it came through over the SGDQ stream. I should mention that the microphones used for the marathon are generally good at not picking up background noise and people talking or moving around in the background, so having it come through on the stream gives you an idea of just how loud it was.

Meanwhile, my PB for Zombie Panic "Why the hell not try running it?" in Wonderland dropped again to 27:24. Considering the first time I kept track of is almost 4 minutes slower, I'm quite happy with how things have gone so far.

And when I went to sleep, the marathon hit over $440,000. I can't wait to see what the final rally of donations during FF6 looks like.

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 6 (Milestones)

2014-06-27T19:41:00.001-04:00

Usually when I sit in the marathon room to watch I sit near the back, close to where the registration table is set up. It's pretty cool to see and hear how excited some people, including and especially people who aren't necessarily runners themselves, are about being able to attend.

I ended up pulling an all-nighter because there was no way in hell I was going to miss Metal Wolf Chaos cutscene%. If you aren't familiar with the game, it's a Japan-only XBox game which is by far the most American game ever made. I know you might be rolling your eyes at that, but so was my girlfriend until she watched the run, then later called me to apologize for having her doubts.

At some point during the Castlevania III run the marathon hit the $250,000 mark. Incredible. That's about what they raised at last year's SGDQ and this year they still have a few more days to go. Here's hoping the build-up for the end of the FF6 run is as dramatic as the Chrono Trigger run was at AGDQ 2014.

Again, I spent some time working on Battle Clash in the practice area. I'm at the point where every single shot counts now, as I've lowered my personal best time by over a minute since being here. Well, that and I'm at the mercy of how some of the bosses path around because my co-pilot likes to wobble drunkenly back and forth on some of them. I'm definitely aiming for the bonus stream with this one.

And on a side note, FUCK YEAH USA! I mean that for both the World Cup and Metal Wolf Chaos.

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 5 (Smash and Singing in Denver)

2014-06-26T21:36:00.001-04:00

I forgot to mention this before and it seems pretty minor, but a quick note about BlueGlass. During the El Viento run there were a total of two people watching the projection of the stream, one of them being me. BlueGlass came in from the other side of the room and was going to cross in front of the projector to get to another set of seats. Rather than walk in front of the projection, he got down and sorta-crawled under the screen. The guy went out of his way to not be a minor inconvenience to two random people for a quarter of a second, if that.

There was a Smash Bros. Melee tournament being held adjacent to the practice area, as well as a Project M tournament. Against my better judgment I signed up for the Melee one, despite not playing Melee in years. You can probably guess what happened next; I lost every single match, seeing as how several of the people who entered are hardcore competitive players of Smash. I ended up driving the point home when I was asked about striking stages (or something like that, can't remember the exact term) and my response was 'What does that mean?' The tournament was a $5 pay in, but it was all going to Doctors Without Borders and I just wanted to have a bit of fun so whatevs.

Despite being in the room to watch the entire thing, I'm still not sure what exactly happened during Cosmo's ZZT run. I was just born early enough to have memories of playing some games similar to ZZT on my parents' IBM computer and always figured I didn't know what to do or what was going on because I was too young to get it. Now I'm not so certain about that.

I was wondering why he was carrying around a guitar most of the week, but after hearing Striker's speedrunning song, I may have to ask if he'd want any royalties for doing a cover version.

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 4 (It's Time)

2014-06-25T22:50:00.000-04:00

I didn't wake up at 9:30 in the morning despite being awake until the sun came up. Nope, I woke up at noon. This whole "changing my body clock" thing isn't working very well.

I must say, I was happy to find that there was a Qdoba and a Subway nearby because having only burger places around (Wendy's, McDonalds, etc.) would have gotten old fast. Even better though, today Qdoba catered lunch for SGDQ! Burrito is love. Burrito is life.

Somehow I managed to post improved times on almost every stage of Battle Clash as well as get a faster single-segment time that's below 14 minutes. If I work up the nerve and find out how to do it, maybe I could try getting this on the bonus stream after the main marathon.

I also decided to start running Zombie Panic in Wonderland because... because. I haven't gotten much planning done on it yet, but I did manage to figure out some ways to drop my time from a little over 40 minutes to a little over 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, I was still nervous as hell about the Ninjabread Man run. I've played shows in a band and as a solo act before and done the YouTube thing for a while, but the audience for that was nothing like what the GDQ streams get. I practiced until the game locked up trying to do the level skip and took that as a sign to stop.

Being on the couch for MadWorld did help calm my nerves a little bit, and for that I really owe LazerLong for letting me on it. I was trying to keep track of the amount of swears in the game as part of the MadWorld Swear Jar, mostly relying on my knowledge of the game's music to count those so I could focus on the in-game commentary and goons. In the end, over 250 swears were counted. I hope that guy who said he'd match the swear jar has deep pockets!

For the Ninjabread Man run most people lost the fight against time and had to go to sleep. Laz offered to stick around since he'd seen me practicing earlier and knew a bit about what I was trying to do. Cool guy, even letting me use his Wii cables to make setup go faster. Mike Uyama was also there, which made me even more nervous. If the texts I got afterward from my friends were right, the twitch chat was on me for the fingerless gloves I was wearing. To that all I can say is 'Twitch chat will be twitch chat.' Well, that and 'My hands are really fucking cold, especially when the AC is cranked up to 11.'

The actual run went surprisingly well. I missed the tutorial skip a few times and had to use the safe (read: slower) method of doing it, but the rest went rather well and I wound up with a time around 4 minutes 43 seconds, well under my "everything went wrong" estimate of 20:00. Thanks again to everyone who donated for the one-handed incentive and the GDQ crew for deciding to take a chance on a rookie like me.

Also, I looked up the comments from the guys at RiverCityGamers who donated. I swear, you likely won't see me streaming this game for a long, long time. I have other terrible games to beat as fast as possible. :D

I stayed around for a couple more runs before my eyes were burning from being awake too long. I did manage to catch Graviton destroying the first Bubsy game, though. That takes me back to when I had the game as a kid, dying in nearly every conceivable way.

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 3 (Is That a Super Scope?!)

2014-06-24T20:43:00.003-04:00

I was trying to adjust my sleep schedule so that I'd be awake more late at night, but even after staying up until almost 6am I still woke up around 9:30 in the morning. I wasn't even that tired most of the day, either. What the hell, body?

Other runners use the practice room to play stuff other than what they run because, let's face it, you'd go stir crazy otherwise. I brought my Super Scope and Battle Clash because it's a game I've been working on running and it's a nice break from something like Ninjabread Man. It drew some looks and a few people asking if there was a Super Scope game on the schedule. Heh, I wish. After doing a little strategy testing I decided in a "Why the hell not?" moment to try taking the aiming scope off and playing the game while only having a general idea of where my shots would go. Somehow I managed to complete the game, with only one game over no less! Maybe I should think about pursing this further...

My favorite run of the day (that I saw at least) was easily Blasto. The guy running it (Saint Connor) is a pretty cool guy and he certainly put on a show with the game, especially when his character model was tumbling ass over tea kettle through an underwater level that wasn't supposed to be underwater, trying to shoot an alien but only spraying random shots everywhere. If you watch absolutely nothing else, watch what he did after the run finished.

I think I'm as prepared for the run as I'll ever be. I've beaten Ninjabread Man at least 40 times since I got to Denver and I've found a consistent way to do the one-handed incentive without the Wiimote slipping entirely out of my right hand.

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 1 (It Begins)

2014-06-23T05:31:00.000-04:00

Before the marathon started the head honcho held a quick meeting in the practice room with most of the runners to go over what not to do. At one point he said just try to get along and be nice to each other, which prompted someone near me to hurl a half-hearted insult my way. This somehow led to trading quotes from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, ending with us both saying "Happy Chanukah" at the same time.

Shortly after the marathon officially kicked off the crowd was a little stunned to hear that SGDQ had already raised $12,000. Even considering it was possible to donate shortly before the marathon, There wasn't nearly that much money donated as recently as the day before and this was only about seven and a half minutes into Mario 3D World.

While not too surprising that there are other US soccer fans in attendance, it's nice to see a couple USA jerseys around. There were a couple dozen people who stopped at the hotel bar to watch the match between the US and Portugal. Half the people there wanted to strangle Bradley for giving up the ball that allowed Portugal to tie the game, and for his poor play in general.

I'm surprised at the amount of times someone has stopped and watched me practice Ninjabread Man, though I think it's mostly for the "Someone speedruns this shit?" factor. To cool down from that I brought my Super Scope and Battle Clash, which also got a few looks. I found out purely from a dumb idea I had that I can in fact beat the game without the aiming reticule attached to the scope. Future run donation incentive maybe?

I'm trying to adjust my sleep schedule so that I'll be awake--not just conscious, awake--for MadWorld and my run after that. I was watching runs in the marathon room to help with that, but considering that I was starting to nod off and there's a rule that anyone who falls asleep in there might have random shit put on them if someone donates for it, I thought it would be best to not stick around that area. It's 5:30am and I still have a couple days to adjust.

SGDQ 2014 Blog: Day 0 (Travel Day)

2014-06-22T02:08:00.000-04:00

Why? Why not? I need something to do when I'm not flipping out about how badly I'm going to bomb my run.

I left for Summer Games Done Quick around 10pm last night with another runner from the area. Good thing he came too, because by the time we were heading through Illinois I was getting really tired. We would trade off, driving in shifts. This worked up until we hit Kansas.

Anyone who ever bitched about Ohio being boring to drive through can kiss my ass. If you ever wanted to know what the "Great American Desert" looked like, try driving through Kansas along I-70. Not only was there little to speak for outside of endless grassy plains, several signs of civilization were abandoned. In our case, it was mostly gas stations. When we needed gas. Fun times.

I can say this about Denver, though: we never saw it coming. I kept checking the GPS which said we were 30, then 20, then 10 miles away from the city and I still couldn't see the city skyline on the horizon. Denver just sort of appeared after we were within about 5 miles of it, way after I got my first in-person glimpse of the Rocky Mountains behind it.

After getting to the hotel I quickly found out that there was a convention going on at the same time SGDQ would be starting: RomCon. As far as I can tell it's a convention about romance authors, stories or some shit like that. At one point a group of SGDQ people and RomCon people were in the same elevator. One of the RomConers had a riding whip and said "The safe word is yellow." She remarked to the others about how fast the gamers were walking away when the elevator opened, probably not realizing that some of them likely go to anime conventions and have seen as bad or far worse than what she just did.

In the parking lot I was mistaken for Murphagator. Not sure how the hell that happened.

The convention center attached to the hotel is where SGDQ will get streamed live, and holy shit the space is huge. It's one massive open area split into a few areas. The first is the registration and main streaming area where you see everyone speedrun their games. Next to that is the practice area. The third space is the food area, the only space where food or drink is allowed. At the moment all I can say about the entire space is holy shit, it's really cold in there. Hopefully firing up a couple dozen computers and consoles warms the space up a little.

Also, I met another runner there who happens to be an Ohio State student. O-H!

By sundown the practice room was in full swing. A couple dozen TVs were set up with a few more in reserve and everyone was either playing Smsh Bros. Melee, practicing, or streaming their practice. It's weird to stand at a TV muddling through Ninjabread Man while there are some people who have a game running on a TV, streamed to twitch via a laptop and webcam, with a condenser mic suspended over the set. It was one of those "Am I really supposed to be here?" kind of moments.

SC On Sony's E3 Experience and Nintendo's Smashfest

2014-06-11T20:42:00.000-04:00

The odds of someone like me, from a financial and geographical standpoint, ever getting the chance to go to E3 are slim to none. Actually, get rid of the "slim" part. That makes events like these, even though they're such a small sample of what E3 presents, increasingly important for console companies trying to reach as much of their audience as possible, including and especially people who can't be at E3. Two such events happened recently; Sony's E3 Experience, Nintendo Smash Fest and ~~Microsoft's E3 Hands-On Demo~~.

Sony's E3 Experience

This event was a special screening of Sony's E3 conference which took place at select movie theaters across the country. The one I attended was at a local (as in 'I drove half an hour on the freeway to get there.') Regal movie theater. I printed off a wait list e-mail after registering for the event earlier in the week and got there around 80 minutes before the conference started, finding myself about 12 people deep in a wait list line that was on the other side of the theater. Only people who got tickets could wait at the check-in area.

We were the "have nots" that evening.

So I'd have something to do I brought along my 3DS with Fire Emblem Awakening. After a while I started to notice something. Even considering that people might not have them out, there seemed to be a lot more people with a 3DS in attendance than a Vita or a PSP. I counted four or five people with a Sony handheld versus the 14 or so 3DS users. I wound up with 18 StreetPass tags before the night was through.

The line for attendees with tickets was steadily growing, stretching back to the theater entrance while I and the other have nots sweated it out. After a long wait and several slain Risen, the ticket attendees were taken care of and we were moved into the check-in line.

Chuck it out. You're che-cking-iiiiiin!

The guy at the front of the line handing out passes with "VIP" printed on them warned us that there would be limited entry to the event, reminding everyone several times that being on the wait list didn't guarantee us entry. After getting to the point where I stood eight people from the front of the line, that same guy held up his arm so we could see it, pointing to the four passes left hanging on it, and said "This is all I have left." Shortly after that an attendee with a ticket who got his pass walked out of the screening room to get some popcorn, but not before turning to the wait list line and saying "They've still got a TON of seats left in there."

That's when the whispers started. Were we really going to be left out of the event despite the number of open seats? Hell, were we going to miss the conference entirely?

Then the guy handing out passes got on his phone and gestured to the woman checking off names to look under the desk. She pulled out a box and dumped out a few bags, each having at least 30 passes in them.

The guy smiled as half the line gave him a stare that said both "Oh thank God" and "You motherfucker."

The audience is now hype.

The screening itself got off to a strange start. The lights in the theater weren't turned down until a few minutes in, which prompted someone to yell "CLAPPER!" and clap a couple times. Then at around the 50-minute mark the bottom half of the video started to glitch out. Ten minutes later the video began flickering and, about a minute later, the video and audio froze before cutting out entirely. This happened a few times over the course of about fifteen minutes.

Aside from that, there wasn't too much noteworthy. Someone in the crowd yelled "Last Guardian?!" at the start of a trailer for The Order: 1886 and someone else yelled "Sly Cooper crossover!" when they saw Ratchet & Clank on screen.

The best part came after the conference ended (and some interviews by Geoff Keighley after the conference started airing). Upon leaving the theater the same people handling the line earlier were handing out a poster of some games presented at the conference and reminding people to check their badges when they got home. Each badge had a web address and a code printed on the back. Redeeming the code got a person access to the Battlefield: Hardline Beta on June 16th, the Destiny Alpha on June 12th, 30 free days of Music Unlimited and a $5 PSN voucher. Thanks, Sony! I can't use half of this, but thanks!

Nintendo Smash Fest

Smash Fest is similar to an event Nintendo ran last year. At Best Buy stores across the nation they took over a demo station and used it to show off a series of upcoming WiiU titles. This time they did the same thing, but exclusively for the new Smash Bros. game... or so we thought.

Best Buy wasn't quite ready for the coming storm.

I got to a local Best Buy (fifteen minute drive on the highway) and found myself sitting around 29th in line, getting there an hour and a half before they let people inside. I don't know if it was just due to the specific people in line, but they seemed way more social than the people at the Sony event did. Carrying on with random people helped the wait go by much faster. Well, that and the few dozen StreetPass tags.

Somewhere between that pillar and the highway a half-mile away

is the end of the line.

Then the moment came where they tried letting the whole line into the store at once. Oh, those poor Best Buy bastards trying to keep the line organized. It became pretty clear they'd have to improvise a bit when the initial roped off line was completely filled, people were piling up at the appliance section (a little over halfway into the store grounds) and there were still a lot of people in line who hadn't even entered the building yet.

My name is Smash. For we are many.

They took chunks of the line and started winding them through the aisles of the appliances section. My section wound up waiting next to some stoves and coffee makers.

For we are many!

People were still filing into the building as they took the line and extended it into the home theater section of the store (read: the back wall of the store) as well as the main aisle in front of it. Finally they got everyone into the building, but not without ensuring no one would be able to shop in about one-sixth of the store.

FOR WE ARE MANY!

My wait was not just relatively quick, but also well-positioned. I wound up at the end of an aisle right before the main line and could see the first couple groups playing. Everyone in line got to play two four-person, two-minute rounds. The idea was to have a round where people could adapt to the controls, since they only had pro controllers to play with.

And of course, thanks to D1's commentary during the Smash Bros. Invitational, the first round of the first group of people wound up being Mega Man vs. Mega Man vs. Mega Man vs. Mega Man. And yes, someone did scream the Mega Man theme when one of them did their final smash.

You can't unhear it.

Then the damndest thing happened. The line was progressing at a good pace and people were having a lot of fun with the Smash demo, but in addition to the WiiU demo there was also a person in line with a 3DS tethered to her belt letting people try out the Smash Run mode in the 3DS version. It was a fairly quick demo, what with having to keep the line moving and all, but nice nonetheless. There was another person doing the same thing at a table after people played the WiiU version as well.

I can only imagine how much she got dragged around the line as the event went on.

Then the moment of truth came and I got to test run the WiiU version. I wound up picking the person I was most interested in testing out, which was Little Mac. Apparently I wasn't alone, because there were about six other guys in line watching and rooting for him.

The round ended with Sudden Death between me and a Donkey Kong player which went on for almost a full minute of us dodging each others' attacks. I didn't expect to do nearly that well considering I haven't touched any of the Smash games in a long, long time. By sheer luck I wound up getting the win and eliciting some cheers from the peanut gallery before playing as Samus and getting third in round two.

According to an anonymous source, the hype is real.

Everyone got to take home one thing from a prize table they had set up off to the side. I wound up grabbing a pack of Mario Party AR cards purely because Toad was on the front and I didn't want a Yoshi's New Island sticker sheet. The Smash logo button was tempting, though.

Overall, a very fun event to go to. The demos were fun, it was nice that they had a 3DS demo of sorts, and the people there made the atmosphere a blast to play in.

Oh, and it's happening again this Saturday. As such, don't try to contact me at all this Saturday.

Toad Awaits.

SC On Kung Fu Rider (PS3)

2014-06-02T17:25:00.002-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the pride of the Playstation Move.

There is only one place I can possibly start with this game, and that's how I got it in the first place. I was at an EB Games in Canada with some of the other RiverCityGamers guys when I saw this with a couple price tags slapped over the top of each other. The most visible tag said $0.49. Yup, I paid around 50 Canadian cents for this game ($0.46 in USD). That's not the worst part, though; it was a new copy.

A new copy. For 50 cents. Of course, it also requires a Move controller and camera/sensor, which can cost upwards of too damn much. Thanks to AngelHalo for supplying both for the brief period I/we could tolerate this game.

The idea of the game is that private investigator Toby (the guy on the box art)and his secretary Karin (below) are stuck in Hong Kong, running for their lives from the Triads (for simplification's sake, the Chinese mafia). The two split up to make a break for their escape vehicle, a.k.a. the "finish line" for every level, by riding through the (all conveniently downhill) streets of Hong Kong on whatever they can find, usually things like desk chairs and wheeled luggage.

"Ma'am! Wait! You dropped your dignity!"

The idea is to get through each stage by riding around or ducking under obstacles, jumping over obstacles, grinding on rails (it looks as dumb as it sounds), and using "kung fu" moves, most of which equate to spastic flailings that sort of end in a kick, to take out various suit-clad Triad clones waiting in the streets. The enemies are only slightly varied in that some of them run at you and try to punch you, some push obstacles into your way (most of which don't do anything), and some of the less mobile ones have tonfas or bo staffs to swing at you. It's okay, though. One kung fu move or even one piece of the environment tapping any part of their body causes them to go into an instant rag doll state.

Strange hit detection makes the flimsy enemies matter very little, though. Running into an enemy sometimes knocks Toby over and sometimes it doesn't. Slightly grazing the side of a parked car can send Toby flying, but slamming directly into a wall doesn't. I've had Toby rag doll and scream bloody murder at hitting his foot on a traffic cone at roughly half speed, but stay on his chair after having a trash can thrown at his head. There is less consistency in the hit detection than there are exclusive games on the XBox One, and considering you can only take four or five hits before having to start a level over, this becomes tiring very, very quickly.

Office chair racing. It's a thing which is more entertaining than Kung Fu Rider.

Get used to not just seeing the same three or four enemies over and over, but also the same four or five levels. While the game has at least 18 stages to it, it doesn't take more than six to realize that the game is reusing levels while making minor changes to enemy and object placements. As such, you might think that it is pretty simply to navigate through each of these stages, having played all of them several times by the end of the game.

Nope. After all, I deliberately held off on mentioning the controls to this point.

Above: the amount of space you should have around you when playing this game.

The controls assigned to buttons on the Move controller function well enough. The problems there have more to do with hit detection and boundaries than anything else, especially when it doesn't register grinds or registers them from several feet away.

Motion controls, however, are an absolute chore to use. Pushing forward to accelerate and doing a mad dash forward are assigned to similar motions, so there were innumerable times where I'd try to get a little speed and end up charging chair-first into a wall. Jumping sometimes didn't work at all or registered as a dash. The worst was having to recalibrate the controller every few levels or so because Toby would get stuck leaning right and going in circles for seemingly no reason.

You know what? Why even have the chair? Toby gets off of it to do his dash move, so why not just have the game be Toby running around smacking mobsters with traffic cones? It- oh, right, that's how the two-player works.

No, Dad! No!

Two player co-op has one person controlling Toby/Karin and the other person playing as a floating hand that collects money (used for getting other rides of varying stats, few of which matter) and, more importantly, grabs parts of the environment to move aside or hit/throw at people. AngelHalo took on this role when we finished the game in what felt like a whole night, but turned out to be an hour and a half, if that. He would grab a traffic cone, cart, or anything else he could find and just hold it up on screen. Anyone that touched it would go limp. Most of the time. Maybe. Let's say 8 out of 10 times.

There are other (recycled) levels where you can collect medals around the course, but it's hardly worth the effort to play through the game at all. There's little to no reason this game couldn't be mapped to a PS3 controller and release as a somewhat more playable, but still not worth the effort title. If I never hear Toby say "I hope Karin will be alright!" in his voice-cracking shriek before every level begins, it will be too soon.

Pandas eat bamboo. Toby the teddy mistakes it for a Move controller.

Everquest: 15 Year Anniversary Ramblings

2014-05-01T15:04:00.000-04:00

Evil boats, shirts, Jackass stunts, weird guild raiding policies, everyone hating my race + class combination and one of the worst things that could happen to someone on a raid. All that and more as I reflect back on the 15 year anniversary of Everquest, the MMORPG that started it all.

The Best and Worst Thing

2014-02-26T12:55:00.002-05:00

For those of you who don't know, I've taken a bit of a liking to speedrunning, or the act of completing a video game as fast as possible. This started a while ago after seeing one of the Awesome Games Done Quick marathons, hosted by Speed Demos Archive and Speed Runs Live.

They seem like nice people.

I don't think I'm particularly good at it, but in a "why the hell not?" moment I decided to try submitting a couple games (all but one of which were crap) for Summer Games Done Quick.

Well...

Uh...

How should I say this?...

Guess who's traveling to Denver this summer to play Ninjabread Man for charity?

Countdown Clocks

SC On Backyard Wrestling 2: There Goes the Neighborhood (PS2)

2013-12-14T16:25:00.000-05:00

This series was given more than one entry. Think about that.

Gee, just what I was hoping to get as a gift from one of my convention buddies. Thanks, Macho Man!

For those of you who did a double-take at the "2" in the title, yes, this was a thing. Not only was the first game a thing, it was a thing that sold half a million copies. This game would sell almost 400,000 units, thus reaffirming my lack of faith in humanity, or at least the average video game consumer.

Casuals. Fucking casuals everywhere.

As the cover might suggest, the game does indeed include Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope from the Insane Clown Posse, who also co-founded Juggalo Championship Wrestling (yes, that is also a thing), which is where several in-game wrestlers now or at some point in the past worked. Also included are people from Combat Zone Wrestling, the stereotypical "hit me with something until I bleed, then hit me again" promotion where the infamous "JEZUS" Botchamania clip comes from.

And thus Maffew would spend the rest of his life avoiding Zandig.

Also on the cover is New Jack, also known as "that guy who technically killed four people." He and another alum of Extreme Championship Wrestling, The Sandman, are in the game because reasons. As for the woman in the middle, she's either Tylene Buck, Tera Patrick or Sunrise Adams. I don't know who specifically she is because they're porn stars and why should I even bother talking about them?

The game boils down to a career mode and exhibition mode. There is multiplayer but let's face it, the only people who would play this game with you are only doing so ironically or out of pity. Career mode is where you create a custom wrestler, assign them a move set and go around various "backyard" locations to win titles by completing missions to unlock challenges, namely a tournament to win a title which unlocks more areas to compete in. The idea is to win all the belts to get to the final section and beat the Insane Clown Posse guys (yes, they're the final boss) to collect a million dollar prize, which is a simple enough setup if not kind of dumb.

Then I tried playing it.

In case you can't tell, I'm the one with hair.

The custom wrestler creation is, in a word, unusual. I would say lacking, but in truth there is a wide variety of options for the most mundane shit while other aspects are left woefully understocked. For example, there are 132 tattoos available from the beginning, but only 18 pants options. A character can have a lot of different skin colors, even allowing for Mr. Game & Watch black, but there are only six faces and seven hair styles to choose from. Also if you make a female character you only have two body types. They're called 'Athletic' and 'Muscular' but they actually look like 'Needs a Sandwich' and 'Had a Sandwich.'

There are three different sections (East, West and North) with three separate combat areas in each, then the final area where the ICP hang out. Each area of each section has five missions and five challenges unlocked after completing the missions. One area of each section has a title tournament which opens after completing all available missions. Winning the title opens up a new section and the game moves on. This essentially makes all challenges but the title tournament a waste of time, unless you really want to earn some extra money to unlock a new hat or some other crap that should have been available from the start. Besides, more than half the challenges are the same across each area.

There's a problem with these missions, however. Each area has a set number of generic create-a-wrestler characters that appear in each match. Even when just doing each mission once I ended up seeing the same half-dozen or so people over and over. Even worse, there's so little variety to these missions that I quickly realized two-thirds of the mode was "perform X move Y amount of times" or "get your opponent to X Y amount of times." And if that wasn't bad enough, some missions where you have to do an action four or five times, for example, show you as having cleared the mission by only doing the action once. Proper programming is for those WWE wussies.

Okay, forget what I just said.

I haven't touched on the actual "wrestling" part of the game yet, though. Each match consists of two sort-of mobile character models awkwardly jogging around an environment trying to beat each other up. Each environment has specific environmental hazards and weapons that can be used and, unless there's a mission objective that requires doing something else, each mission can be won by finding a weapon in the area that won't break and doing three-hit combos over and over until the opponent's health runs out. That's more hardcore and extreme and awesome and real and entertaining than pinfalls or submissions, right?

Sometimes the reach of said weapon only makes things even more ridiculous. In the pool level there's an indestructible pool skimmer which has about a five-foot reach. Coupled with how bad the grappling is, why would I do anything but use weapons?

Oh right, I haven't explained that yet.

Grappling in this game has a few key problems with it. For one, you can only irish whip (read: throw) or drag/lead people while in a front grapple. There's also a big input problem when trying to pull off "Super Moves" by mashing the two attack buttons at once. Sometimes it just plain won't register that both buttons are being hit at the same time, which for me meant doing shoulder breakers half the time I tried using it.

The worst part however is how evasion works. It's possible to mash a couple buttons to do a "grapple escape" when the turbo meter (also used for the supers) is full, but most of the time you'll have to try and counter by hitting either the attack, throw or submission button when the opponent tries to do an attack, throw or submission. This has to be done before, not during, the move, meaning reversals boil down to a 1-in-3 guessing game for what the opponent will do.

Why am I not surprised that the game with poor wrestling mechanics has several people from promotions that go through thumbtacks, barbed wire and light tubes the way I go through cherry soda?

Scratch that. Why am I surprised that this happened when I tried playing it?

The styrofoam head avatars seem unfazed by this.

There's yet another reason to just use weapons the entire time: the enemy AI. It is, in a word, terrible. The AI constantly tries to get in as close as possible to do grapples while sometimes doing attack combos, however leading them near any elevated surface leads them to climb on top of it and attempt a diving attack, which can be avoided by not standing still and leaves them open to be attacked, pinned or put in a submission hold.

Then there are times where the AI, while trying to find a weapon, runs into environmental hazards and takes damage. I've won a few matches this way.

Committing suicide in a survival challenge? That's a paddlin'.

You do eventually fight the actual wrestlers (and porn stars) in the game and have a chance to unlock videos of them for one or two-thousand dollars. That means doing missions, challenges and general matches over and over to earn enough money to buy the videos, most of which aren't worth the effort. That and the videos for the porn stars are the most expensive despite being less risque than a Dead or Alive volleyball game.

Or you could save some real money and not even bother with the game to begin with. That is, unless someone gives it to you, like in my case. When I get the chance, this game's going through my friend's window Paperboy-style.

This gif syncs well with most polka music.

Content ID: Get a Real Job, You Say?

2013-12-13T16:21:00.001-05:00

(Note: nonsensical mess of words ahead.)

This will likely be the only thing I say on the subject, seeing as how the YouTube community has already proven to be both way more knowledgeable and not very knowledgeable at all of what exactly is going on.

Before getting into it, here is where I stand. I am virtually unaffected by this. I have a job, am working toward a college degree and treat video-making as a hobby. I have monetized none of my videos and, to date, have copyright claims on about 55 videos, three of which are blocked in Germany. Ich bitte Sie, Deutschland. Most of them are dumb bullshit, but among them are also the Guitar Hero III and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 videos (licensed music), the last part of the Shenmue videos (again, music), one part of the Jumping Flash playthrough (yet again, music), the last part of the Resident Evil: Survivor video and the James Bond Jr. video. If you are seeing ads on these or any other videos, I have two words for you. Adblock Plus. If you're on my blip channel, use it there too. I'm not sure why it even still exists when I went out of my way to make the front page look as ugly as possible.

However, that doesn't mean others aren't affected. Some people at RiverCityGamers do monetize some of their videos and can be affected by this. YouTube's "guilty until proven innocent" approach--don't kid yourself on this one. It's been like that for a while, but only now has it started to affect larger, partnered/network-managed channels--means that monetization of a video might not be possible now or ever. YouTube moves at a snail's pace on any sort of claims, even slower than they did when I first started getting claims and had to dispute them left and right to keep the videos on the site at all.

That also means this applies to the "big fish" like Angry Joe, Rad Brad, Classic Game Room and a laundry list of others. In fact, Classic Game Room, who has been with YouTube since the passing of the first ice age, appears to have up and left YouTube in favor of using his own site for his videos. The new content ID system is the rough equivalent of treating everyone like Milton in the movie Office Space; management 'fixes a glitch' in payroll which stops him from getting a paycheck and not only does no one tell him about it, they avoid the subject when confronted by him as he continues showing up to work.

In theory I should be somewhat glad about this because, if enough people are driven off YouTube, it opens the opportunity for someone else to step in who couldn't because of the gap YouTube's site creates between promoted and non-promoted channels. That and I've had various disagreements with certain content creators in the past, namely Joe. Then again, I've only stuck around as long as I have because of the people who look at or are subscribed to my channel. If there were a solid alternative to YouTube, I would have left years ago.

That would be the case, except that the same rules everyone has struggled with now apply across the board. A person in the medium of creating gaming videos now has limited options when any video or audio from the source material is a copyright flag waiting to happen, one which several publishers or creators of the sampled content have had to manually whitelist users who were flagged by YouTube's content ID system without their go-ahead.

Some might say to make gaming-related videos without using the game video or audio. People have done and do this, with a prominent example being Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation, yet another person I don't really like. Also note that Yahtzee left YouTube and didn't return with ZP until 2011 on The Escapist's channel. My opinion on "vlog" style reviewing of games is as follows:

I don't trust you.

That's one thing I give people like Angry Joe and which I try to emulate in my videos. When I talk about something, positive, negative or otherwise, I show it so you'll know I'm not pulling "facts" or opinions out of my ass. Vlog reviews of video games are the equivalent of writing a research paper without citing any sources. Yes, I have done the rough equivalent of that before, and no, I don't expect you to believe or agree with what I say in those videos, much less anything I've posted.

Others have tossed around a phrase I'm all too familiar with. "Get a real job." This phrase should have died along with the "real jobs" that became obsolete or unnecessary as time and technology have moved on. As an aspiring musician, you can probably guess how tired I am of hearing this phrase get tossed around in lieu of an intelligent statement, especially when it implies that there is no work involved in anything that is not a job in the most traditional sense.

What defines a real job? Having set work hours? Having some signed paperwork on the subject? Having a set salary and steady paycheck? Having a boss? As someone whose father works as a self-employed architect, all but one of the prior conditions does not apply to him. Try telling him he doesn't have a real job.

In the sense of a "real job" not involving the use of material originally created by other parties or for the purposes of review or parody, I suppose anyone who samples sounds or music like DJs or musicians have real jobs. But then, would the original content creator, who is also a musician, have a real job? Let's not go into anything too paradoxical. As for parody, comedians and entertainers don't have real jobs. For review, critics of various things such as video games, movies, food, toys, books, cars, computers, and more 'I think you get the point' examples don't have real jobs, even though there are several such people employed in such roles, "real jobs" if you will, by various outlets.

There seems to be a disconnect between the idea of a "job" and doing "work." Let's ignore the old formula of plopping a camcorder in front of a TV and talking over it in real time for something like I would do. Game reviewing is not a job of mine. I try to show what I can from the game so, depending on its length and content, on average I end up recording roughly 10-12 hours of footage for the one game the video focuses on. Then I go back and review all of the footage, taking another 10-12 hours, making notes about what happens where and which clips illustrate different points. As this is going on I also have to script out the entire video, hitting all talking points and organizing everything into a pseudo-comprehensive and logical flow while marking sections for narration over game footage, live-action shots or other external clips. I also do background research on the game, its developers, etc. Depending on writer's block and information availability, this can take anywhere from three to eight hours. Then after all that I film any live segments and locate external video clips, which takes maybe an hour if things go well. Then I finally start editing which, depending on how my editing programs feel that day, usually takes about 9-10 hours. Then I can finally render the video which, depending on length, might take another 2-3 hours, and assuming the whole video rendered correctly then I can upload it.

If you do the math, that equals anywhere from 35 to 46 hours of work on average. That's for a relatively short game, too. Things like Evergrace or Muramasa wound up with closer to 25 hours of recorded footage.

I'm getting sidetracked.

The point is this: don't fall into the trap of thinking that because X is enjoyable, any form of profiting or working through X is automatically not considered a "real job." Also, stop talking like a crotchety old man. That's my "job."

Blip Videos: What Do I Do?

2013-10-10T22:58:00.001-04:00

Conflicted. That's the one way I can describe how I feel at the moment.

In the midst of midterm week and trying to get the next RiverCityGamers podcast together (coming this Friday, hopefully), the video-hosting service Blip, which hosts videos for every member of RiverCityGamers, started cutting back on the bulk of its userbase. Specifically, they cut back on people who, in their eyes, weren't contributing a "high-quality original web series." As far as I know, the list of RCG members affected is as follows:

Zeromaster
Blondeguygamer
ShadowSnake123
AngelHalo (who I feel especially bad for, considering he's also had his original YouTube account wrongfully suspended)
WellUnreal007
Nightman39

I haven't heard from Onirokaku or Wizwar100 on the status of their accounts, though you might be asking why my name isn't listed.

Well, Blip e-mailed everyone on their site, whether their accounts were getting removed or not. Here is the e-mail I received:

Dear Blip Producer,

The following message is regarding the Blip account SCXCR.

You may have heard that we’ve been telling some legacy producers that we're going to close their accounts in an effort to keep Blip focused on high quality shows. To avoid confusion, we wanted to reach out and preemptively head off any misconceptions or concerns you might have.

If you did not receive an email asking you to move your content, you will not be affected by this effort. If you are producing a high quality original web series, you have nothing to worry about. On the contrary, expect to get more love than ever from us!

Once again, we also want to reassure you that the core Blip toolset (producer dashboard, video player and monetization tools) will remain the same; Blip.com will continue to operate as a robust entertainment destination; and the industry-leading Blip sales team will be ramping up their efforts.

If you have any questions or concerns, please visit Producer Support at http://support.blip.tv or contact us with specific questions.

Thanks,

Blip Support

I've spent the past couple days wondering how and why my account isn't on the chopping block (yet). I haven't uploaded anything to Blip since July (the Lifeline video) and I purposely made my show homepage look like utter garbage, partially to drive away dirty casuals and partially to stand out from the over-professionalized personification of stagnation that usually clutters the front page of the site. However, now I'm stuck asking myself this:

Should I close my Blip account?

This account is something I specifically created to host my more well-produced (by my standards anyway) videos, as well as the Soulja Boy mixes when they got copyright flagged to hell and back. I specifically refused to monetize any of my YouTube videos because of my disgust at some of their practices, but with Blip ads were part of how they did things so I put up with it. I've seen exactly one payout in the four years the account has been up (which I promptly used all $25 of to buy Persona 4) and am probably four years from another, so I haven't gained much nor stand to lose much from leaving. That and I'm particularly pissed off about my friends' show pages getting the boot. For some reason though I feel... I don't know, attached to it? The point when I got the Blip account is the point where I really started putting in the effort to try and make my videos the best quality I possibly could, and I've put a fair share of time into both the videos and that account to make it happen.

I just...

I don't know. Thoughts?

SC On Ninjabread Man (Wii)

2013-08-16T12:11:00.001-04:00

This will go exactly how you think it will.

I could just say this game is awful and move on, but you already know that, don't you? So why am I writing this blog? Partly because it's a slow day at work and partly because most of the people I see talk about this video don't get further in depth than 'the motion controls suck and this game sucks.' Did I mention it's also a slow day at work?

Let's start by going back in time a bit, before Ninjabread Man ever came out. There was a British company called Data Design Systems formed in the mid-1980s to make games for the Atari and ZX Spectrum platforms. They eventually became Data Design Interactive in the 90s, somehow getting by purely on licensed titles such as Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy while churning out such gems as Rise of the Robots and Tonka Space Station.

Then they decided to stop screwing around when the Wii came out and started producing the Popcorn Arcade label to go after casual gamers with low/budget-priced games. In addition, they developed G.O.D.S. (Game Oriented Development System) to develop cross-platform games faster and with only a few staffers.

In other words, DDI developed a way to push a lot of games with a short development time onto a lot of different systems.

A dumb parent and their money soon go separate ways.

The games sold moderately well, but were also lambasted by critics. The studio itself was at points singled out as being responsible for the "shovelware" tag the Wii couldn't get rid of and even blamed by some for hurting the system's credibility with titles like Action Girlz Racing and the Kidz Sports series. DDI eventually stopped trading in 2009, robbing the gaming world of such future classics as Kidz Sports: Crazy Mini Golf 2 and the sequel to Ninjabread Man.

That being said, Ninjabread Man.

Essentially the same game as Anubis 2 and Rock n' Roll Adventures (from the same company), Ninjabread Man is about stopping an evil army of cakes and bees (?) called the tooth-rotters (only know that because the instruction booklet said so) from taking over Candy Land. (Doesn't explain the bees, but okay!) At least that's what the back of the box says. However, not only is this never addressed anywhere except the back of the box, every level revolves around grabbing eight blue... vials? Power sources? I don't know, but they power up a teleporter to get the hell out of each level except the mandatory training stage. Apparently Ninjabread Man fights off evil by getting the hell away from it, because even the last level has him getting in a teleporter instead of fighting... whatever he's supposedly fighting.

Running: the one thing Ninjabread Man does well.

Actually doing this is a major challenge, mostly because of the controls. Sword swings are tied to swinging the Wii remote, but most of the time they either don't register or register after an enemy has already landed a hit. Hell, there were times where, while the Wii remote was motionless on the ground, I had my character doing sword swings by trying to jump.

Oh, jumping. For the longest time this was my biggest problem with the game.

Jumping is done by raising the nunchuk straight up, and you need to double jump to get through the bulk of the game's platforming sections. I wound up having to point the nunchuck at the ceiling and make a punching motion for it to register once, and beyond that it was a 50/50 chance for the second jump to register at all.

Complicating this even more is the way Ninjabread Man (screw it, I'm calling him Jim from now on) moves. Jim essentially has three movement speeds; standing still, beginning to lurch forward before an all-out sprint, and all-out sprint. The second only happens for a moment before he takes off at full speed, so it's more like two speeds. There was one time I got him to walk, but it didn't last longer than a second or two before he did his best Road Runner impression. This, coupled with Jim's jump height being about six inches, makes even the most basic of platforming a pain in the ass.

That is, until I realized that the Z button also jumps. It still has moments where it doesn't register, but it's way more consistent than the motion controls. Oh, and the instructions never say Z is a secondary jump button.

I googled "consistency is amazing" and got this.

The other means of attack, which is much easier to use, is the... pink... glob... things that Jim throws at enemies. They're in unlimited supply and, though Jim has to stand still to use them, they also function as a means of moving the camera around outside of repeatedly resetting its position behind Jim. They also have lock-on, since the aiming is so sensitive the reticule bounces all over the screen virtually regardless of how steady your hand is.

There's also a "bomb" attack, which I didn't know existed until reading the instruction booklet. Even the training level never mentions it. As such, I never used it. Good thing too, as it involves a combination of holding and releasing A and swinging the Wiimote away from and toward the TV. Stonekeep: Bones of the Ancestors taught me that's a recipe for disaster.

Then again, you might not actually attack anything. It's actually better to avoid fighting anything since, even though there aren't many enemy types and most just try to run into you (which also has weird hit detection involved), the biggest threat are the slices of cake that spit heat-seeking... things at Jim. These and the random landmines which can hit Jim from several feet above or below him and a good ten feet beyond the visible blast radius are the only real threats, more so because they'll knock him off platforms than because they do a lot of damage. Everything in this game can only take off one heart of damage at a time, and every enemy (except the bees) drops a heart when killed... which flies out of Jim's reach in a few seconds.

With all of these problems though, the game does have one saving grace. It's only 4 levels long if you count the training stage. On my first try, I beat the game in under an hour-and-a-half, and when I went mildly insane and tried it again, I beat the game in about 20 minutes.

And by the way, there is no ending. It just cuts back to the title screen.

You think you had it bad?

The only other really noteworthy thing about this game is its website, which still exists (www.ninjabread-man.com). For the most part it's a bunch of tripe trying to up-sell the game's quality (or lack thereof) but there is one saving grace. Apparently they wanted to get some fan feedback on what they wanted in the sequel and, amazingly, those few people that somehow derived enjoyment from this game responded.

I may have a burnt face, but that doesn't mean I can't take over the world!

Take that Ninjabread Man, you shit! Wa ha ha ha!

The amount of MS Paint creations and shoddy printer paper sketches that you'd expect to see Maddox make fun of in his free time is limited, but still quite something to behold. There are even one or two people who can actually draw AND had unique ideas I doubt Data Design Interactive would ever be smart enough to come up with themselves. One guy even plugged his website in the middle of the art submission.

Free advertising, whether Data Design Interactive liked it or not!

And in the end, this is all we'll likely ever see of the proposed Ninjabread Man sequel, titled Ninjabread Man: Blades of Fury. All I can say is thank God, because if the sketch below is any indication, it might have ended up being the bastard child of Candyland and Saints Row.

Coktel? Liquorice Lounge? Was Ninjabread Man going to fight alcoholism in the sequel?

SC On Lifeline (PS2)

2013-07-18T15:17:00.000-04:00

"Voice-based controls? Why the hell not?"
-Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc., circa 2002

New Music Track: Vidya Games on Unicycles

2013-05-02T15:43:00.000-04:00

My apologies for not posting much, but there is something I've done recently that I'm actually sort of almost proud of. It took almost eleven months due to near-constant writer's (musician's?) block, but here it is. Now you can headbang to Uniracers music. Not that you couldn't already because Uniracers has awesome music, but still.

The Bloody Roar Retrospective: Bloody Roar: The Fang

2013-01-04T15:16:00.001-05:00

Have no idea how to read Japanese? Me neither, but let's try to understand anything from this alternate universe in which bats actually look like bats and Not Yugo sucks at video games.