15/04/2025
Helo!
I have an important announcement before today’s blog! There won’t be a blog update on the 25th!
The reason for this is simple, it’s going to be my birthday and I wanted to have no worries during that! So yeah, there won’t be a blog update that day and everything is going to be pushed to the 5th of the month. (including the manga review!)
With that said, here’s today's features: Offline Adventures, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth and The Steam Deck!
Spoilers for those topics and specially Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth!
WEBSITE UPDATES
Hey, did you notice the thing above?
That’s Right, I Added a Brand New Tag System!
So much for nothing this month ay?
I was trying to remake the game shelf page the past few days, but I ended up hitting a wall constantly with that and decided to pivot and make this filter system instead! (Don’t worry, I got a good idea on how to remake the shelf page, so that one is next.)
You can see this filter system right above the blog! You select the topic you want from the variety there and it will show only the dates that topic is present! Unfortunately I don’t have the technology or the know-how to make the filter show specific topics, you still have to scroll through the blog and find the topic yourself. But what’s here is still cool! The system was added despite the many protests from Miya, after all, I need to keep the "polished and rough" aesthetics some how!
I didn’t make this JS from scratch though, I got it from W3School, they had a really helpful page talking about a simple element filter page. As you can also see, I have the ability to customize the tags as well! Be it different colors or art made for them, anything is possible! Making these custom tags is pretty fun and I plan to do more as time goes on. It’s a bit awkward on mobile but I’ll fix that on a later date.
More tags will be added as the blog goes on too, so expect that thing to be enormous by the end of 2035!
“Hey, facing other ways is fun!”
Aside from that, not much has changed on the website, aside from some Phoenix Club Fan Art that I added to that page! This one was my favorite but you can see all the others by click the link:
Pikmin Hiroshi.
LIFE UPDATES
Offline Adventures!
Fun fact! My internet was dead when I got home to finish the last blog update! I had to route my phone’s internet to my pc to complete it. I tried my best to fix the issue by myself but ended up achieving nothing, my only option was to call a technician to fix… which was not going to happen because none work on a Saturday night or Sundays. So I had to settle for having no internet and enjoying my time with that massive restriction.
I decided to play a few games I had installed on my PC:
Portal - This game is such a fantastic puzzle game, despite being my 2nd playthrough (I think?), I still had a lot of fun portaling around and solving the puzzles I already knew the answer to. Playing with portals is just that fun!
I like some of the orange lighting the games has.
Team Fortress 2 - Paradoxically, one of my favorite games to play when I have no internet is TF2! It’s weird, a multiplayer game that I enjoy playing with no internet? Playing against bots sounds boring no?
I would say no, but it’s odd I’ll agree on that. I usually boot up a match with bots and a random map then just play whatever I feel like! The game sets everything to stock weapons and the bots have more simpler behaviors than us humans, turning into a much straightforward and easy to understand slice of this game! That’s why I enjoy it! It’s one of the few times I can play as The Spy and not be severely punished for my lack of mechanical skill, which that’s fun…
Even in bot matches, this games never stops being funny.
There was another game I played a lot too but that one is going to be the next topic.
Despite the lack of internet, I still made the most out of my weekend and it felt oddly comforting to be disconnected from everything else… Well, at least for me. When I’m feeling down, I usually disconnect myself from any kind of social media and just focus on the simple things at my reach, such as games or This website, things I can understand. Being in the company of myself and thinking alone is my way of coping with things in life sometimes. That's how I learned growing up and that’s what I do now. so I guess that’s why I thought it was a comforting experience… though I would prefer to not be forcibly disconnected, I rather have that be a decision I make than being forced to LMAO!
Oh yeah, let’s talk about the 3rd game I played a lot during my Offline Adventures:
Infinite Wealth’s Story!
I talked about the gameplay and my first impressions, now it's time to talk about the story so far since I’m pretty much over half way through the game!
This Tab Contains Spoilers, Click Here at Your own Risk!
The story for this game feels really oppressive and hopeless…
The entire game we spend a lot of time searching and tracking Ichiban’s mother and the child she disappeared with, while having a shadowed entity called “Overseer”, manipulating every criminal group in Hawaii controlling the strings to hunt and kill these two. Ichiban and the party constantly run into brick walls with their search efforts, having to squeeze every single clue and minor hint dry to even get a slight bit of information about who is hunting them and where his mother is. It really gives the feeling of trying to reach out to something that is just outside of reach, no matter how hard you try, you can’t ever grab it.
Thankfully, Ichiban is not alone. His party in Hawaii and his old party in Japan meet up again and together they continue to search every hint they have…
What doesn’t help as well is that the titular series protagonist Kiryu, is not doing so well and needs to leave the party and go back to Japan. His cancer diagnosis has only been getting worse with all the fighting and struggles in Hawaii. He has to go back to Japan and Ichiban sends him with Nanba, while Ichiban promises to Kiryu that he would get his mother and the child to safety. I like the reunion between Ichiban and his old friends, it had been like 30+ hours since we last saw them and it felt touching. Sending Kiryu to Japan also didn’t mean he was out of the story as well, actually, it meant we could explore the story from a whole different perspective-- that’s right, we control two protagonists experience the story in different ways, just like how Yakuza 0 did it! I really liked this! Even if this happens like, a little too deep into the game. Kiryu also has his own minigames and smaller side content you can experience, not the level of Ichiban’s side content, but it’s cool nevertheless.
Getting the gang back together is so heartwarming.
Back to the story, after the send off Kasuga manages to find his mother and the girl named “Lani” and get them to safety, away from all the gangs hunting them. They are getting a jet ready to fly her to Japan, where she will be in absolute safety.
Meanwhile Kiryu is investing things in Japan, since this man can ever stop to relax… like EVER!
Things happen and we get to the end of Kiryu’s chapter, where he’s calling back to his ally in Hawaii… I find it a little bit hard to describe how tense this moment was-- Kiryu is calling Hanawa, but weirdly enough, he’s taking a long time to pick up the call and the very next scene… we see the phone on the ground ringing, in dark room, as the camera leans back to show a Hanawa laying on the group dead.
Ichiban and the party were never safe ever since they stepped foot in Hawaii. The very first person Ichiban met, no actually, the person he met in the airplane before even stepping foot in Hawaii, was a spy. Eiji, a man in a wheelchair, exploited Ichiban’s past memories (for those who don’t know, Ichiban had someone that was basically like a brother to him that lived in a wheelchair) and took heavy medication to basically cripple himself to be in a wheelchair, all in the efforts of staying close to Ichiban’s party and know their every move. The moment Eiji saw that they got the two targets, he called the Overseer and a violent raid in their hideout happened… Despite everyone’s effort, the Barracudas managed to get Lani (their original target) and kill Wong and Hanawa before they could even fight back. (Wong was a previous character Ichiban fought that became allies after the Overseer took his child hostage.)
This moment was UNBELIEVABLY intense, we spent the entire game trying to get a hold of Lani and in just 5 minutes, 2 allies to Ichiban are killed mercilessly and take Lani away. It was a tough moment to stomach, and the scene right after didn’t make things easier. Ichiban had to answer the phone Kiryu’s was calling for and tell that they essentially fucked up and hit rock bottom.
But there’s a light in the tunnel, when hitting rock bottom, you can be sure of one thing: the only way now is up! As Kiryu said and Yamai (the chad that he is) smashed into Ichiban’s skull, this is not the end. The Overseer has Lani but they didn’t kill her yet, there’s still a way to make things right!
This fight was pretty cool too!
As tense, hopeless and reinvigorating this story is so far, I do have some complaints. They are the deaths of Wong and Hanawa.
Wong had his son taken away by the Overseer and he just died before that story thread was even explored a little bit and Hanawa… I know he was a big player in Gaiden and very important to Kiryu but I never played that game. Bothe of their deaths were kind of… brushed off?
Sure, I can understand these deaths being rushed and glossed over to add to the intensity and impact of that scene where the raid happened. But not having dedicated scenes to honor them when all things settled down and just a short moment where Kiryu reminisces about his history with Hanawa was not good at all.
But who knows, I’m still on chapter 11, things might change by the end.
Man, Wong Tou deserved better.
The game’s story so far really brought me back to the previous game, with the whole “We are at rock bottom, but the only way is up now.” thing going on. The duo protagonist mechanic is actually really cool, being able to see the story in Japan with Kiryu while Ichiban is handling things in Hawaii is very cool!
Kiryu’s ability to just ignore the turn based combat and beat the crap out of the enemies in real time combat was hilarious and very fitting for a character of his legacy.
I do have a worry though, my sujimon quest seems to be bugged? I met all the requirements to meet and fight the leader, but I got no in-game emails that activate the quest. I’m hoping that I just need to progress the story to start that, but it’s something I’m worried about.
But yeah, that’s everything I want to talk about Infinite Wealth so far! I’m enjoying and by the next blog update, I’ll probably have finished the story! (Likely won’t but it's a possibility!)
Yamai continues to be cool
I Got A Steam Deck!
After the Nintendo reveal of prices, I made the decision to snag myself a Steam Deck! (A bit of spiteful purchase? yeah… kinda.)
To be more specific, I got an OLED model with 512GB of storage, and I have been loving this, not so little, device a lot!
It has become my preferred way to play many games, such as The Binding of Isaac and other games that I have less investment on! The portability was something I forgot I missed, nothing beats the comfort of laying down in bed, with the lights all turned off at night and just booting up a game to play right before sleep.
Here's a screenshot I took from the Steam Deck itself! Kind of a broken run of Isaac.
Everything runs well and at high definition, the UI & controls feel very responsible and comfortable and the device gets + points for the extra buttons in the back that you can bind to any functionality you want!
I do have some small complaints though, I think the Steam Deck is just heavy enough that sometimes it makes my arms a bit exhausted sometimes. It’s not the weight of a concrete brick, no, no. It’s just heavy enough to do that. The D-Pad also feels like it's in an awkward spot.
But aside from those small complaints, I’m absolutely loving this device! It’s my dream portable console and I can’t wait to get into emulation later on, after I get more used to it! I absolutely recommend it!
Now… I just need to get enough Steam points to get the Steam Girl startup movie…
So close... but yet so far...
Vs(?) Miya in Mario Kart!
This is a smaller topic, but after I mentioned to Miya that I never played any Mario Kart games outside of the SNES one and a bit of the DS one on my phone YEARS back, they immediately got me hooked to a few games from that series and we played together via Parsec.
I was, of course, really bad at them and the input delay due to the continental distance between us didn’t help it, but that didn’t bother me. I lived many of my early years with terrible equipment and still played games despite the problems, so this was still fun! And I still managed to beat Miya once, SO TAKE THAT HA! IT’S NOT 10000000 MIYA/0 PUDDING, I HAVE 1 POINT NOW!!!
I had so much fun that I might revisit the Wii one, since that one is the one I liked the most from the ones Miya showed! (They should the SNES, N64, Gamecube and the Wii ones)
Unfortunately I don’t have any screenshots to share, I forgot to take any… sorry!
And that’s all the topics for today!
SONG OF THE DAY
The Song Of The Day is DKBK by TAK!
Look at that, a song released today is the feature for the blog update!
I said before that TAK is one of my favorite Vocaloid composers, key word “said”! They have turned from just Vocaloid to my favorite Everything Composer! I love this song, from instrumental to visuals and vocals-- IT'S SO GOOD!
GO LISTEN TO IT NOW!
I especially love the visuals matching with the vocals and instrumental, like the part at 1:45, how everything sounds echoey as the song explores the past of the little creature… GRRR, TAK SONGS ARE SO GREAT!
And that’s everything for today! Again, there won’t be a blog update on the 25th, so I hope you enjoyed this last blog of the month!
Thank you for reading!
See you next month, Internet Traveller!
Have a nice day!
05/04/2025
Helo!
Time to return to your regularly scheduled blog updates!
Today’s topics include: Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance - Arachnophobia, Risk of Rain 2 and BTD 6 Rogue Legends!
Spoilers for those topics and more!
This one is going to be a big one, since it covers over 20 days! So, you have been warned!
WEBSITE UPDATES
Present Mystery…!
A weird present showed up on the Home page, I tried to get rid of that but it just kept showing up over and over again… I’ll try again on the 10th, to make sure it’s GONE gone.
Aside from this odd occurrence, the website received very little changes in the past few days, I don’t even remember what I did to be honest… Well, there was new fan art added to the Phoenix Club Fan Art page! The art also has a lovely april fools chapter that Miya made, make sure to check it out! (The chapter is not canon, in case you ask.)
Anyways, I was out of ideas for this blog Pudd art, so I remade an old one:
“...”
As for what you can expect this month, let me see on my list… nothing major, probably!
The Isaac essay page, the 2.0 update and the Phoenix Club content from last month were the last things on my backlog that I absolutely needed to finish first before jumping to the endless abyss of 2025 plans. I can finally say this now, 4 months in, 2025 just started for me!
But yeah, I’m gonna be working on my writing for a good while, so changes will be slow from here and on.
LIFE UPDATES
R.E.P.O. Is A Horror Game!
This game continued to be the most hilarious thing ever!
Though me and my friends have reached and seen everything the game had to offer, while also betting our set goal of 10 days… by going all the way to day 20! This also means we are going to stop playing the game now, but not forever, just until the next update!
Something is behind them…
There’s not much I can add to than I didn’t say last time, so here’s another small clip we got during our gaming:
SPIDERS! SPIDERS EVERYWHERE!
A new Kingdom Rush Alliance campaign just dropped, and I’m here to talk about it! Man, Ironhide is really on a roll with this productive cycle they are at, they have been making content non stop ever since Alliance. That 's impressive!
Anyway, this is a new spider themed mini campaign called Arachnophobia!
Spiders and webs everywhere!
This campaign was pretty solid in my opinion, the enemy variety is a bit low and some assets were reused here and there, but for a free update, I don’t mind that at all.
The main struggle of this one was the fact that the spiders were super fast and most of the time came in swarms, while the more elite enemies had life steal abilities or lethal poison that could turn allies into foes. Thankfully, the spiders are rather fragile, but let one of the special elites around your weak troops long enough… and you might find an outbreak of spiders everywhere!
The new tower looks cool and has great animations, it’s an artillery type tower but for magic damage with abilities tied to a timer rather than cooldowns. The only problem is that the firepower is rather weak without major investment. The boss of the campaign was cool, she had a mechanic where it would disable your tower forever if you didn’t swat her spiders always and an aura of life steal, but she wasn’t too hard to beat.
Fighting spiders with fire!
The highlight of this campaign for me was the new hero named Spydyr… which is a very appropriately named hero. She’s an assassin type hero, so get in, kill a specific enemy and get out. What makes her unique compared to others is that her teleport does AOE damage! She burrows into the ground and comes out dealing AOE damage to everything around her exit. The reason why this is cool is that the player has a quick burst of damage on command anywhere in the map! It’s very intuitive and fun too, micro heavy, but fun!
Evil from below!
Some other minor things are that there’s some real difficult challenges in this campaign and the music was pretty good!
As an expert Kingdom Rusher that I am (gave up on beating that new mod because it was too hard), I give this mini campaign a solid 4/5!
Eclipse Climb!
I decided to start my eclipse climb in Risk of Rain 2!
For those who don’t know, eclipse is a game mode where the game adds negative modifiers such as “-25% gold from enemies” or “-50% teleporter radius” to your runs to make them much harder. Each character has their eclipse level, each level has a negative modifier, beating a run with current level unlocks the next and it goes up to eclipse level 8!
The eclipse climb begins…
My plan is to do the first level for all the survivors (except the newest DLC ones since they are a bit clunky and will get reworked eventually) and then pick a favorite to do all 8 eclipse levels! Right now, I’m thinking I’ll pick either Engineer or Bandit, but it's not set in stone yet.
IDK if I’m going to do all 8 levels for all survivors, that’s a bit of an insane time commitment but we will see how I feel by the end of my first E8.
Of course, I’m still enjoying the occasional mega modded, chaotic multiplayer fun with friends, but I’m slowly growing a preference for the vanilla game over modded.
Illusion of free choice.
Rogues Legends Improved!
The newest BTD 6 update has arrived, and as expected, came with a lot of major changes and improvements to Rogue Legends.
This new DLC mode was in a pretty rough spot, it was needlessly repetitive, lacked variety for a rogue-like game mode and it was very unoptimized. Ninja Kiwi took all the criticism and feedback from the community and really turned this ship around and made it awesome!
Guess whats happening here.
They took a lot of the ideas I suggest actually, like unique regular bloon encounters and more artifacts but also introduced a hard mode with modifiers and a shop to get new permanent buffs and special upgrades to make future runs easier! They also REALLY improved the performance on this mode, my phone no longer runs this at 2 fps while overheating! (To be fair, my phone is a beaten up 6+ year old phone… I really need a new one…)
Boss fights are fun!
But yeah, I have been kind of addicted to it now! Heck I’m playing it WHILE writing this blog update! I just wish this launched in a good state to begin with…
Actually, this confirms something I have been theorizing for a while now, which is the Ninja Kiwi cycle:
Announce and Hype Up a Product -> Launch In A Poor State -> Criticism and Feedback -> They Improve Things Overtime -> Great Game After A Few Months.
I’m not justifying this of course, they really need more playtesters and quality assurance, but this is something I noticed with a lot of their game releases. At least we have the assurance that the game will be good eventually, which is more than we can say for some other companies.
Infinite Well of Content!
Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth continues to give more and more fun huge mini games (that could honestly be games by themselves) that have hours and hours of content to sink your teeth into… I added like, 20+ hours to my hour count and I have only progressed like, 2 chapters in the main story!? It’s crazy! My completionist brain really gets addicted seeing all the completion checklists and challenges being fulfilled.
Something cool I noticed is that there’s a lot of progression that ties back to other mini games/ to the main game. For example, Sujimon Battles is a mini game that is basically a pokemon style battle where you use the freaks you fight in the main game against other freak trainers.
The freaks we made along the way!
Progressing in this mini game unlocks the “Sujimon Master” class for Ichiban, which allows him to use his Sujimon to attack enemies in battle! The power and attacks are even tied to the Sujimon you equip in the menu, it’s so in depth and cool!
I’m really loving this game~
Grab Bag of Topics!
Deltarune Was Tomorrow: That trailer ay? Deltarune was really tomorrow… or I guess yester yester yesterday?
Regardless, CHAPTER 3 & 4 ARE COMING OUT SO SOON! I can’t believe it!!
Deltarune is probably the project I have been the most excited for!!! I can’t wait to buy the game and OST on day one… if Steam doesn’t crash that day of course! Considering what happened to the direct, I think Steam is going to meet the same crashing fate.
Also, the song in the trailer is so good! That last 10 seconds gives me chills EVERYTIME I REWATCH!
Also also, mark my words, that orchestral sounding instrumentals is going to be part of the Knight’s theme for sure!
Also also also, congrats Silksong believers! I have been watching your subreddit for a while now, seeing the E1331 saga, all the skongposting and all. Happy to see that believers won in the end with the new release window.
Also also also also, Nintendo really pulled the rug under us with those prices… I was planning on getting a Switch 2, but after seeing how greedy they are, I’m just going to stick to my plan B. Which is to buy something like the Steam Deck or Asus portable console for my gaming needs. I cannot afford paying such a high price for a game that will cost 400+ (this is my local currency here in Brazil, which is expensive as hell because Nintendo refuses to localize prices NOR make sales.) for a single game. That 's INSANITY! Sucks too, because I really wanted to play that Donkey Kong game and give my first ever Mario Kart game a try… (I only played the SNES one and a bit of the DS one on my phone.)
BIG CHALLENGES: Okay so, I have been watching a lot of Vinesauce recently, something I do sometimes every few months, and I watched his “Hello Kitty Island Adventure” streams and I was shocked to learn that not only Vinny was enjoying a freaking Hello Kitty game, but also that the game was actually really good??? I’m genuinely considering buying the game just from those streams! (Note: I didn’t know what Sanrio was until like, last year, so this is very much out of my element.)
I have also become obsessed with my new found favorite Sanrio character: BIG CHALLENGES!
I love this creature, look how goofy it looks!
A character that was created 45 years ago and forgotten by Sanrio, that just randomly appeared again in this new Animal Crossing Like game!? It 's nuts!
I love this creature!
And that’s about everything I wanted to discuss for this segment! Comedically double the size of the website changes, but it makes sense since last time was only about the website!
As for what to expect… I don’t really have anything in the pipeline, just continuing to play Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth!
SONG OF THE DAY
The Song Of The Day is Machine in the Walls by Mudeth!
In case you don’t know, I’m a MASSIVE fan of Mudeth's take on The Binding of Isaac OST and some reservations about some of Ridiculon’s official tracks. So when it was announced that Ridiculon was going to be the main composer for the new tracks for Repentance and they would not be bringing back Mudeth, I was very worried. The Antibirth mod has some of the best songs from the entire franchise, just look how popular Machine in the Walls is!
But then Repentance came out and I got to listen to the new tracks… I went to the Mausoleum to see how Ridiculon could possibly top Machine in the Walls and listened to Walls of Denial for the first time… I absolutely loved it!
This track has such a creepy and dark vibe with those absolutely killer guitar melodies- wait, what am I doing!? This is my blog, I can just tell you to listen to it!
The Song Of The Day is Walls of Denial by Planet Ridiculon!
That’s right, a double song of the day!
Walls of Denial is absolutely fantastic, Ridiculon killed it with this one, and the Repentance OST as a whole!
I can’t possibly pick one over the other though, to me, these two songs stand toe to toe and are some of the best that TBOI has to offer! As a commentor on the video put: Machine in the Walls of Denial!
And that’s everything for today! As mentioned before, I got no plans for this month, so look forward to uh... nothing? Nah, I'll find something to add to the website for sure!
Thank you for reading!
See you next time, Internet Traveller!
Have a nice day!
