Games I Need to Finish

The other day I was looking through my collection of video games, and noticed several that I’ve started but never finished, for one reason or another.

What games are those, you ask? Well, that’s what this is about.

First, there’s Okami. I have the Wii version (and yes, I see that the box art is straight from IGN), and it’s actually a rather enjoyable game, mainly because it feels so much like a Legend of Zelda game, a franchise I’ve always been a fan of. However, the game can be vague in telling you about your next destination, something that caused me to lose interest when I got the game last year. I picked the game up yesterday, and, having no idea where I was to go next, decided to start a new file (I wasn’t that far into the game anyway, so not much progress was lost). Maybe this time I’ll see this game through to the end. We’ll see.

Next, there’s Eternal Sonata. This RPG is one of two that I’m borrowing from a cousin, so I should probably finish it sometime soon. Anyway, this is definitely a JRPG, as that box art should scream as soon as you look at it. I love the visual style of the game, though. This game’s story focuses on the Polish romantic pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin, which I thought was a rather interesting decision. What’s this? An anime-style game with a famous Polish composer from the 19th century as a main character? What is this madness? The gameplay is rather fun, with battle sequences that remind me of the Tales of… franchise (though I’ve only played one game in that series, that being Tales of Symphonia on the GCN, and damn do I love that game).

I played this game up until a boss battle against a pirate leader. The sudden rise in difficulty during that battle caught me off guard and I realized I probably needed to level grind. I never got around to level grinding, and that game got put to the side as life happened. Considering I’m borrowing that game from a cousin, I should probably get back to finishing it.

Next on the list is the other game I’m borrowing from that same cousin, this game being The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I’ve not played any entries in the Elder Scrolls game, and I was lent this game soon after Skyrim was released. I do like the style of this game, and the freedom to explore anywhere and practically everywhere. There also seems to be consequences for various acts; for instance, I was exploring a shop in a city, and a door was locked, so I had to deal with that before exploring further, but for some reason a guard took interest in me at that point, so I had to flee the city, but the guard chased me all the way into the wild. I had to fight for my life, and I defeated the guard. However, the next time I stayed the night at an inn, some representative of a dark and evil guild approached me and said I was on my way to joining their order, and was given an order to kill a certain person. I didn’t know what was going on.

But it’s that freedom to explore that, I feel, hinders games like The Elder Scrolls. You can’t go into these games with a short attention span, and you can’t be impatient. After not playing for a while, I went back into it, but had no idea where I was going or what was going on. Sure, there’s a menu for quests, that gives details, but I’ve already forgotten major story details. This makes completing the game rather difficult.

I’ll have to finish this one soon.

Next is Borderlands. This is an odd game. On the surface it’s a first-person shooter, a genre I generally couldn’t care less about (an exception is the Metroid Prime trilogy, but I consider those more first-person adventure than FPS, if that makes any sense), but once you start playing, you’ll notice more traditional RPG elements (stat-building, leveling up, equipment and upgrades, and so on). So I’m a bit divided on this one. The first-person shooting is fun, but can become challenging quickly. There are the RPG elements, which I’m right at home with, so that’s okay. The story is intriguing, and the setting is one that I want to explore, so I can deal with the shooting.

Borderlands also has a nice visual style. It’s not gritty realism like you’d get with a generic FPS, but rather it has a somewhat comic-book feel to it. It’s a pleasant change to what I usually see in FPS games (and one reason I generally avoid them).

Borderlands is a game I would like to finish, but I keep getting killed. I’m not the best at aiming on these games, and I don’t shoot quickly enough. I prefer to take my time with things (something the Metroid Prime games allowed me to do). We’ll see how this goes.

Then there are games I have, but haven’t yet started. This includes two DS games, Dragon Quest VI and Dragon Quest IX. I’m letting someone else play through them first. (On a side note, DQ IX only has one save file. Why’d you do that, SquareEnix, when previous DQ games have had three save files? That doesn’t make sense to me)

So. Games I need to finish. There are probably some that I’m forgetting (such as Bayonetta, Devil May Cry 4, Final Fantasy XIII and Infinite Undiscovery, but there you have it.

“Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai” Anime Review

I’m catching up with some anime I’ve been falling behind on. I started earlier this week with C^3: Cube-Cursed-Curious, then switched over to ぼくは友達が少ない (Boku ha Tomodachi ga Sukunai). Both series ran for twelve episodes in the autumn, 2011 season.

BTS, as I’ll refer to it in short, is a slice-of-life comedy about two high school students, neither of which have any friends. They start a club specifically for students who have no friends and whish to meet people. Various other students join and shenanigans ensue.

There’s quite a bit of ecchi fodder in this series, of course, but it doens’t detract from how enjoyable the series is, overall. It’s actually quite amusing.

Anyway, the characters are amusing, and by halfway through the series I was already noticing how many episodes were left and realizing I’d actually miss the characters. Watching the characters become friends, and staying with the club over summer break, I realized this was more than just an ecchi series, that there was a solid story behind the series.

There’s an underlying plot throughout the series, where the main character, Kodaka, is remembering a friend he used to know a decade earlier at school, but moved away and never saw again. The resolution to this storyline is rather obvious, and I spent most of the series wondering why he hadn’t put the pieces together. Seeing this resolved in the final episode was something I rather enjoyed, and it even brought some tears to my eyes (also owing to that being the final episode).

The various production elements in this series (art style, animation, voice acting) were all well done. The OP and ED (intro and outro) were amusing.

On a side note, after watching the final episode, I looked into the manga. While I’ve not read any of the manga, I discovered that the anime has gone beyond where the manga is in the story (as of this writing, the manga is about halfway through the anime’s story). I was hoping for a continuation of the anime story, and maybe the manga will deliver (or maybe the anime will be picked up for a second series).

Overall, I definitely enjoyed this series. I liked the characters. I liked the story of friendship, and remaining friends. The last episode left me wanting more, and I do hope it gets a second series.

This series gets my recommendation. AnimeNewsNetwork themes this as “afterschool club, Ecchi, Harem, school”. It has been licensed by Funimation.

Remembering Hugo

Last year, I wrote an article for this blog discussing the DOS game Hugo’s House of Horrors. Some people remembered playing the game, which was good to hear.

This past week, I decided to upload playthroughs of the Hugo games, after realizing I could record footage in DOSBox. I’ve not added audio commentary to these (mainly because my video editing program doesn’t seem to like the .ZMBV codec that DOSBox uses for video recording). So far, I’ve uploaded playthroughs of the first two Hugo games (Hugo’s House of Horrors and Hugo 2: Whodunit?). I’ll get around to the third and final game, Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom, soon.

The playthrough of Hugo 2: Whodunit? ended up being in four parts, and here’s the first entry:

So there you go, two DOS games from my childhood. (Note: the second part of my Hugo 2 playthrough features rather neat cameo appearances of two characters from something else entirely)

Games I Don’t Think Anyone Remembers: Commander Keen (Any of Them)

Back in the early ’90s, id Software developed a series of games, released as “episodes” (and as shareware, if anyone remembers that term) for DOS. Yes, the days of gaming in DOS, which I remember fondly. These were the Commander Keen games, which were 2D sidescrollers/platformers. (Though they were released as episodes, there were really two Commander Keen games; the first was episodes 1-3, the second episodes 4-5)

The games presented the adventures of Billy Blaze, who took on the alias Commander Keen for his adventures through space, where he combatted aliens and explored dungeons and towers and ships and stuff. Yes, things and stuff. And he jumped around on a pogo stick.

Back in the day, I had episodes 1-6 (which are all the entries in the series), and I played them quite a lot on my family’s old Windows 3.x machine. I remember navigating the DOS prompt, starting the game, and beating them. The basic gameplay is simple: two types of jumps (normal or on pogo stick), firing the phaser (which you have to collect ammunition for), walking around, that’s about it. Later games have you finding gems and switches to complete stages.

A while back, Cosmowright on Twitch was speedrunning the fourth game in the series, and that led me to retrieve the games from my external drive. While the earlier games feel a bit sluggish, the later games in the franchise hold up to modern games surprisingly well.

If you want to play them, the once-shareware games are officially available on Steam, where you can get episodes 1-5 for just $5 (it seems episode 6 was discontinued back in the day, so the fact I have it on floppy means something).

So, if you’re looking for some old-school games that are still fun to play, check those out.

In researching this, I discovered there was one additional game, this one made for the Game Boy Color, called simply Commander Keen. I may vaguely remember hearing about it at one point, but I’ve definitely never played it. It was developed with id Software’s permission, but didn’t involve any of the original developers. Tom Hall, creator of the franchise in the first place, has since stated that he does not consider it part of the Keen series.

Does anyone else remember the Commander Keen games?

Bleach Anime May Be Ending Soon, or May Be Moving Timeslots

This comes from a news article on AnimeNewsNetwork, and which I found on Reddit’s /r/Bleach, which in turn comes from a program listing in a Japanese publication.

It says that Bleach will end its run on TV Tokyo’s 6pm Tuesday timeslot on 27 March, a bit over a month from now. It will be replaced by Naruto SD: Rock Lee no Seishun Full-Power Ninden, a new spin-off of Naruto.

Bleach animation director Hiroki Takagi replied to this on Twitter by saying, “So quick. I was going to paste it… /(^o^)\”.

So that’s that. It’s not confirmed as of yet that Bleach has been canceled. I’m actually reading that as the show being moved to a different timeslot, which isn’t a bad thing. If I’m remembering correctly, Bleach used to air on Thursday evenings, and was moved during the Bount arc (which was also around the time the anime had some double-length episodes). Nowhere in that does it say that Bleach is being canceled, exactly, so it might just be moving to a different timeslot.

Given that, I’m not jumping to the conclusion of Bleach being canceled. Others are thinking that, but I’m awaiting further details. It’d be a shame for the series to be canceled after, as of now, nearly eight years and 361 episodes. The current story arc, the Fullbringer arc, is just now getting exciting, and the new, final arc, deserves to be animated.

We’ll see how this unfolds.

Update: Looks like the anime series has been canceled. The manga, however, will continue to be published.

Gaming Streams and Twitch.TV

Of late, I’ve been watching various gaming streams on Twitch.TV. The site began as an offshoot of Justin.tv, and focuses entirely on people streaming video games.

I’ve seen three main types of people streaming games on Twitch.TV. There are gaming tournaments, which I rarely watch, there are people speedrunning various games, under various conditions (so called “any%”, where the point is just to complete the game as quickly as possible, 100% runs, and bingo games, where participants use randomly generated bingo cards to complete various tasks on their game (the game is usually Zelda: Ocarina of Time)), and there are people playing video games just to have fun and entertain those watching, via the game and just generally conversing with viewers.

I was introduced to Twitch.tv via MonotoneTim’s stream. This was around when Justin.tv launched the Twitch site. Tim described the purpose of the new site, that it would be devoted entirely to video game streams.

Well, it wasn’t until earlier this year that I decided to peruse the site and see what games were being streamed.

I’ve since come across some entertaining individuals, including Siglemic (he only speedruns Super Mario 64, but seeing all the tricks he uses in the game can be entertaining), Cosmowright (he mainly speedruns Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but does speedrun other games), XylemTube (plays Sonic and Battlefield 3, along with all sorts of other games), and the list goes on.

This isn’t just to discuss people I watch on Twitch, it’s also to mention my own attempts at streaming games. I have a channel on Twitch, and I’ve tried streaming things, without much success. I’ve left a sample video on my feed there, showing how my audio just wasn’t at any acceptable level. I don’t understand why, unless it’s my upstream not being enough to handle video and audio, but the more likely explanation is XSplit, the program I’ve been trying to use to broadcast. XSplit is probably garbling the audio somehow. This is rather frustrating, since my audio comes through perfectly clear on Skype or X Lite (the latter being the app I use to call in to TalkShoe).

However, I can get audio from the computer to play clearly. Back on Halloween 2011, I tried streaming all of Marble Hornets, by playing the files on my computer. The only problem there was my upstream wasn’t good enough, and there was significant lag. So, XSplit doesn’t play well with my microphone, that’s what I’ve determined.

Anyway, that’s Twitch, and my attempt at doing streams.