June
June Features: Saturn Bomberman, Sonic Journey And Deltarune Chapter 5!
30/06 - Deltarune Chapter 5!# 43
Tags
Series - Deltarune.
One Last Adventure!
It’s rare for a game to keep my attention for 9 hours plus and not get me tired… But Deltarune keeps doing it with these chapter releases!
I played through the entity of chapter 5 in one sitting, and it was a lot of fun!
Short Spoiler Free!
This was a pretty gameplay heavy chapter, lots of fun set pieces, new characters to meet and all that good stuff we got in chapters 2 & 3.
Before getting into the dark world, we have a segment dedicated to the castle town and home town that were both very fun. Castle town is just as crazy as ever with the many darkners all hanging out there, while the home town had the festival going . A lot was going on in this early segment, so I basically spent 2-3 hours just talking to NPCs LMAO. The final scene of this light world segment was pretty cute as well.
Purple guy is there too.
One aspect I liked about this segment is that we got to see the light world at other times of day! It was very fun, it made me feel like this place is lived in.
The dark world was also equally as fun as the light world segments, lots of shenanigans going on there with some insane new gameplay gimmicks that I’ll not be talking about for spoiler reasons…
No, I WILL talk about them NOW!
So if you have not played chapter 5 yet, go finish that up and come back here!
Long Spoiler Full! (SPOILER WARNING!)
^ Careful with this! ^
Flowery Vs Ralsei!
Flowery’s introduction was basically a jumpscare to me.
The sudden fade to black to then playing a crusty MV from a PS1 game was a real system shock to my brain. I’m glad that I was not alone in this, many other people felt this was basically a jumpscare as well.
Anyway, he was a pretty good antagonist to the fun gang, similar to Queen and Tenna, he constantly got in the way and messed with them. What makes this one different from the rest is that, for the first time ever, someone actually got under Ralsei’s fur!
Mald at the low quality MV guy.
We got to see a new side of Ralsei in this chapter, one of HATRED! The fur ball despised Flowery from the get go and it makes sense.
He constantly challenged Ralsei on his views and role in this story.
Flowery has the same general knowledge of the nature of this world as Ralsei, but he’s always one step ahead of him. Teaching Susie about the diegetic UI, adding new control options, giving himself 999 stats on everything, he does it all before Ralsei gets the chance to!
Flowery and Ralsei are two similar characters, but what makes them different is that one chooses to keep quiet and walk along the straight road to avoid a terrible outcome, while the other doesn’t care about the rules and embraces his role.
I find it so cool that Ralsei gets mad at Flowery not just because he’s annoying at times, but because he does what Ralsei prays that he can do in the future.
Ralsei being replaced was a funny gag.
At least that's what I got from their dynamic in this chapter!
It was pretty cool to see a different side of Ralsei AND see chapter 1 Ralsei design again! I have a plushie of that design because I think it’s really cool!
The 6 Other Hu- Flowers!
Everyone kind of already knew that the next fountain would be at Asgore’s shop, he has been hitting this for a long time. The question was: “What would the 7 flowers be turned into in the dark world?”
Welp, we have our answer: “They are Undertale references LOL.”
Every flower is based on their Undertale soul counterpart and utilizes their gear left behind in that game. (Flowery being the outlier here, he was a Flowey counterpart.)
While it doesn’t make too much sense for this to be the case, it’s still cool and they were a fun cast of characters the fun gang interacted with the entire chapter.
Double trouble!
It’s funny, at first I thought Aqua and Seth were counterparts of Kris and Susie, since they are kind of similar but opposite of them. For a brief moment it made me think that maybe the secret boss would be a Ralsei counterpart… but anyway, I cannot not associate Petal Dance, their battle theme, with Aqua in particular. She made quite the strong impression on her first battle!
If I were to rank all of them from my favorites to liked the most (I really like them so there’s not “liked the least”), it would be something like this:
- 0 - Flowery - Bro goes from being annoying to being the coolest guy ever, more on that later;
- 1 - Orange - Very funny gremlin;
- 2 - Yellow - CAN YOU STOP TRYING TO KILLYOURSELF;
- 3 - Blue - A voice of reason, finally 🙏;
- 4 - Green - The true ally to the fun gang;
- 5 - Aqua - Funny knife gremlin;
- 6 - Seth - The ONLY PERSON EVER to like Berdly.
They were all a lot of fun to interact with and their fights were pretty fun!
The final fight with Flowery really cemented this character as my favorite of the flowers. They all knew that the dark fountain was going to kill them at some point, flowers can’t survive in the dark for long.
So, upon being given this opportunity to live in a dark world and after witnessing everything Asgore has gone through, they decided to give him the fantasy and everything he always desired with the very little time they have left.
No other flower embodies that message than Flowery, constantly trying to distract Asgore with his favorites and keeping his attention away from the fun gang. He wasn’t doing the things he was out of selfishness, it was all for love. Paying back for all the love they received from Asgore over the years.
Even at the final fight, he pulls out all the guns to prove that his will is stronger than the fun gang… but in the end, what stops him was the very thing he wanted to give a perfect dream to. Being faced with Asgore’s rejection of this whole dream, he just… stops.
“Can’t argue with that, oldbuddy.”
“If that’s what he wants… that’s what he wants.”
He accepts that Asgore can’t live this dream forever, he has things he needs to do in the real world.
I found that really cool and likeable about his character. He didn’t impose his will on the person that he cared for the most, he just accepted their wish and moved on…
Pretty cool to see Ralsei step in.
That final clash with the Knight was also rad as hell!
Taunting him so that would hit a wall face first (DRAMATIC AURA LOSS FROM THE KNIGHT HERE) and then utilizing the rules of the world to trap the Knight into a fight he can’t run from- THAT WAS SO HYPE!
Flowery knew he was outmatched and tired, without all the other flowers, he knew he was going to lose this fight AND YET THIS MAN FOUGHT UNTIL THE BITTER END AGAINST IT!
Go Flowery!
The Dark World Itself!
I have been talking a lot about the characters, so let’s change things up and talk about the dark world!
Funny, I was talking to my friend Miya about how much this game has evolved since chapter 1 released a couple days before chapter 5 release… and one of the first things you see in this dark world is a “remaster” of chapter 1.
It does make me wonder how chapter 1 would look like if it was made today…
Btw, ignore the messed up cropping in the previous images, I don't know how I messed up that bad.
Oh yeah, they turned this game into a 2d platformer??
Getting the feather for the first and seeing the isometric board turn flat and just being able to jump and move around was a CRAZY twist!
They use this new gimmick to great effect as well, there’s plenty of stuff to do in this mode and you constantly switch back and forth between isometric and platformer throughout the chapter.
2 particular highlights for me were the cliffs section of the dark world and the top of the castle. Running through those parts in the 2d mode with those fantastical songs and background was really something special. Probably my favorite moments of this chapter.
Some Random Things For Funzies!
Here’s a list of moments I wanted to share that I didn’t find a place to include in the previous paragraphs:
- I love kikky;
- I regretted muting Ralsei… but it was VERY funny;
- I liked the introduction of more varied equipment and weapons, most of the equipment were a bit boring at this point, just being stats up and all;
- I really overthinked the egg room trigger, I lost basically 45 minutes in total doing random stuff in rooms I thought the egg was… but the most obvious answer was the correct one;
- I got a very well earned 6.9 on the chef minigame and I’m PROUD OF IT!(I stopped trying after getting this for the fear of getting the forbidden number that is 6.9 - 0.2)
Minor Disappointments…
I really liked chapter 5, there was lots of gameplay and fun things to do.
The only thing that disappointed me was that the story took a bit of a hit…
Coming off the heels of chapter 4, this one felt lacking in the overall narrative. We got exposition about the diegetic UI in the dark world and some VERY minor details on the incident that made Asgore lose his job on the police force and that’s it. The speech he gave was very vague.
Even the trio of secrets that have been a constant for all these chapters so far (secret boss, egg and IMAGE FRIEND) all just abruptly dead ended in this chapter.
Egg man gave us an egg that we will only know the purpose of when the time comes, then said good bye. O-okay?
IMAGE FRIEND was there like always, but this time they were actively hostile to the player. Spoooooky~
The secret boss… while it was a surprise for sure, I feel like Pink doesn’t contribute much to the big narrative. Cool parallels with Kris and the soul, but she feels kind of out place with the rest. (I also don’t know much about Mew Mew so after the shock I was just questioning why. I mean, to be fair she was an exclusive boss for the rerelease of Undertale for the Switch, I’m probably not the only one that vaguely knew of her/ didn’t know at all.)
The shadow crystal lore reveal was pretty cool, but I feel like they were reckoned after their first appearance. Broken dreams fits with Spamton and maybe Pink, but what Gerson and Jevil have to do with that? Sure, someone gave Gerson the crystal, but what about Jevil?
Actually, why did Pink have one? She only started to break down during the fight. Did the crystal form during the fight? No, she says after the fight that the crystal was with her body since the fountain was formed. How is that the case when sh-
My brain hurts thinking about this…
I wish there was more warnings about side content you might miss. Like, you can play the entire chapter AND COMPLETELY MISS the fact that Orange AND Pink appear in the café!
THE GAME JUST NEVER TELL YOU THAT UNLESS YOU ARE IN THE CAFÉ!
To be fair, these are mostly nitpicks from me. Toby himself said that this chapter would serve as a pace breaker from the past two chapters who were very focused on the story.
“Let’s turn around and watch the sun, before it goes down completely.”
“Let’s have one more fun adventure, okay?”
Toby... you piece of little bee...
We are kind of left in an awkward spot at this moment because of the chapter release format, basically a non-issue when the game is fully done and released…
The weird route did not disappoint tho!
That thing was HORRIFYING!
At The End of Sunset.
I’m very interested to see what chapter 6 has to offer, especially after what happened in chapter 5.
We are reaching the climax of this story now, the dark clouds are filling the sky after the sun has set. I wonder what’s going to happen, since we got basically ZERO information about chapter 6 so far.
We know more about chapter 7 (the end) than chapter 6 (precursor to the end).
Chapter 5 as whole was a great last adventure, I felt very satisfied with everything, even if the story took a backseat.
So go play it!
Very few games can keep me engaged for 9 hours straight without getting bored, this is mega high praise!
I had another segment for this blog planned for this blog which was “How I thought chapter 5 would be like” but I decided to to turn that into a separate blog to get this out today LMAO!
Look forward to me being comedically off the mark and wrong with my fanfiction!
23/06 - Sonic Journey - A Somewhat Pleasent Surprise# 42
Tags
Series - Sonic The Hedgehog (Series).
Pleasant Surprise!
We passed the half-way mark for the journey, and almost immediately, I was surprised!
SONIC RUSH ADVENTURE
This is what I’m referring to as a pleasant surprise!
This is a sequel to the first Rush game.
It has the same mechanics as its predecessor but it has been polished to almost perfection!
This game just FEELS better and more fun to play, levels are well designed and EVEN THE BOSSES, WHO WERE A CONSISTENT LOW POINT FOR HANDHELD SERIES, ARE FUN HERE?? HELLO??? IS THIS A DREAM???
The Fun Plot!
The game starts off with Sonic and Tails being dragged on to a storm and ending up washing ashore on a mysterious island. Being found by the habitant girl racoon named Marine. (Newcomer to the franchise.)
She's funny
From there all three work together as a sudo-crew and explore the islands in this vast sea so that the duo can find their way home.
Eventually they bump into a pirate robot named Captain Whisker and his crew who are our villains this time around (there’s a robot just named “Johnny” which is kinda funny), as well bumping into Blaze, who returns from the previous game!
He looks cool too.
The story itself is nothing THAT great, but it’s something fun to see while you go from point A to B. Captain Whisker was a pretty goofy villain but at least he had a cool design. Not having Eggman and Eggman 2 as villains for a change was fun…
Improving On The Formula!
Anyway, the levels are separated by islands where you need to traverse the sea to get to. You do that by drawing the line on the touch pad and then playing a minigame while you're on the way to an island.
Each vehicle has their own minigame which is cool.
This travel system is… okay.
It feels like blatant padding, but I don’t mind it much because they were fun to play at least. I can see why some would take issue with it though.
Vs Johnny!
As for the levels themselves, they were all fantastic!
A big issue I had with the previous game is that the “difficulty” was less about thoughtful design and more “bottomless pits everywhere”.
In this game, those issues are all resolved! Which made it a whole lot more fun to play!
Max speed!
We should forbid this team from making sky themed levels, because they are always HELLSPAWN! The one in this game was less, but STILL, YOU GUYS GOTTA STOP THIS!!!
There’s also a hidden island you can find by exploring the sea, which rewards you with a short but gimmicky level which is fun.
The trick and boost mechanics were improved and felt a lot more intuitive to use for me, going for high combos and maximizing my boost was very fun.
This is not a hidden island level, I just forgot to take screenshot of those!
After beating a level, you get some materials that enable you to build your vehicles to traverse the map better/ upgrade them… which is another case of forced grinding, but I didn’t mind this one as well because the levels were just so fun to go through and get higher ranks.
EVEN THE BOSSES are better here. The handhelds so far were notorious for terrible boss fights, but this one's had some actual thought put into them!
Crazy!
More Scattered Thoughts!
This game also features Blaze as a playable character, just like the last game!
Unlike the last one however, you choose between Sonic or Blaze before entering a level, instead of both having different campaigns.
Blaze gets aura.
Blaze is slower in general but she has more vertically with her jumps and tricks.
While Sonic is your go to for getting S ranks and being fast.
I actually started to like her character here.
She's the “non-goofy around, this is business" type of personality that bounces off well with the cast of characters of this game.
I liked her! Probably my favorite of the franchise as well.
The soundtrack and graphics were a big improvement, at least for me!
That Haunted Ship theme is a BANGER and no one can tell me otherwise!
Overall, Game Was Amazing!
So much that I felt compelled to get all the Retroachievements for it and actually grind for better ranks! (Getting all the achivos was a pain in the ass, since I had to beat bosses without getting hit… on boss fights not designed for that.)
(FUCK THE FLAGS MISSIONS TOO)
No other game in this journey has made me do this mind you.
This is not a goodbye forever... RIGHT???
I don’t know if this is bias after playing so many mediocre/ bad games in a row, but I really did love this game
It's my favorite of the franchise so far!
Rush 1 was them testing out the waters, Rush 2 was them perfecting the formula. I can't wait to see what the next game in this series has to offer!
And I can’t wait to play as Blaze again as well… and see more of her… hahaha…
Anyway, go play this game! It 'sa banger!
SONIC AND THE SECRET RINGS
Back to mainline consoles, after the DISASTER that was Sonic 06, fan morale for the series was on a record low.
Sonic Team had to get their shit together and bring the series back from the bottom… but this is not that story yet. Before their next big game, they decided to release this curious title for the WII.
This game decided to utilize the new and innovative Wii Remote and make the controls motion based!
… which I severely nurtured and circumvented by the power of em*lation. (I was not going to buy a Wii remote, much less engage with motion gimmicks.)
More on the controls later, let’s talk about the rest of this package.
The Exposition
This is a pretty unique game for this franchise.
The art direction is based on the Arabian Nights stories and the stages in this game really stand out in a positive way from the rest of the franchise.
Some of the environments look kind of impressive for a Wii game. Just look at Night Palace and Levitated Ruin, those look crazy good!
The storybook aesthetic for cutscenes and menus was also a nice touch.
Super unique Sonic game, artistically speaking!
The story is also based on that setting, with Sonic being taken inside the book to stop the new villain called “Erazor Djinn”, who is a rogue genie of the lamp who is destroying the stories from said book. The plot itself is nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done.
It’s nice to see a nice new villain for once! I liked his design, wasn't too big on his VA tho. He did a good job at it, I just think it didn’t fit him that much.
Sonic’s friends play cameo roles in this story, while being dressed as characters of the Arabian Nights, which is pretty fun.
Oh yeah, the OST is stellar as well, the arabian/ desert theming was pulled off really well!
Funny enough, my favorite song in this game is none of the vocal stage themes.
YUP! So many with vocals that sound cool, and yet, my favorite ended up being the ONE stage song with no lyrics.
High and Broken (it’s right up there on the Song of the Day section!) was so good in fact, that I started humming the “chorus” melody after being surprised while listening for the first time. (Although I had to do it quietly because I was on a Discord call with some french friends and didn’t want to bother them.)
I forgot to take a screenshot of the place so have this image from the end of the game.
Oh… I have been avoiding the elephant in the room…
The Climax
I talked very positively about this game so far, because I see a lot of potential in this game!
Unfortunately, the gameplay part of it… drags EVERYTHING down.
This game is an auto runner, so Sonic goes off on his own and your controls are basically: Jump, steer left or right, move back sometimes and misc stuff…
Dino running.
It would’ve been fine (even if a little odd) if the game was just that, but it’s also a super clunky and buggy game. (How did they fuck up the camera on a AUTO RUNNER)
A lot of times you can input an action and nothing happens.
I doubt this is a side effect of my control scheme that avoids the Wii Remote, because a lot of people say this game has HORREOUNDOUS controls as well.
Even if it worked properly, at best the gameplay loop would be… boring.
The game gets more engaging later on, because of a level up system that allows Sonic to do more things, but that’s like, after 70% of the game?
You start off bored, spend a couple of hours grinding the story levels which uh, will discuss that in that moment- only to have just a bit more fun with a little interactive experience.
The levels themselves are weird. After completing a level for the first time, you unlock more missions for it which are objectives to play.
You play basically the same level while going for a goal, with very little to make it interesting. Things get repetitive quick.
Worst yet, you can’t even avoid them, because the game DOESN’T tell you which missions are part of the story and which aren’t!
So you have to play them all in hopes to find the one mission that will continue the plot.
I had to look up what missions to play to advance the story after being suddenly locked out of the ending…
The Resolution
This a very unique game in the franchise, almost everything in terms of art it gets right…but bad gameplay, forced motion control gimmicks and bugs really drag this experience down.
The idea of this game is awesome, but the game is not. (Common sentiment with these games at this point.)
Thank you Sonic The Hedgehog™
If the levels were structured more like regular Sonic levels with proper gameplay, this could’ve been a cool and very unique Sonic game!
Unfortunately we don’t live in that time line.
At least the new transformation is cool? (The VA sounded so much like the werehog LMAO)
Anyone feeling Déjà vu right now?
Progress!
And that's all the progress for now!
Here’s the list:
Gold means beaten since last time.
I find it funny the difference between main line games and handhelds during this time.
The main line was just the 9/11 of the franchise, meanwhile the handhelds are starting to thrive with a new series!
But anyway, the next game is an exciting one for me!
Can’t wait to play it!
After blog edit: Apparently today is Sonic's birthday LMAO! I did not plan for this blog to release on his birthday AT ALL!
Very funny coincidence that was.
18/06 - Kingdom Rush 6: Genesis Demo!# 41
Tags
Series - Kingdom Rush (Series).
The Genesis!
As you may or may not know, I like the Kingdom Rush franchise a lot.
Ever since I was a child, I have been replaying these games over and over again while keeping with the newest ones. (As of late at least!)
Everyone knows that the franchise took a huge swing around the 4th game and things have been mixed ever since.
Fast forwarding to Alliance’s release (the 5th game), I was there and I played it day 1. And I thought it was pretty good!
It’s different from the OG trilogy, but it was very fun!
The DLCs that came after ranged from good - great, so it was a pretty solid line up!
After Alliance, came a mobile game called Battles that… really rubbed me the wrong way. It was one of those grindy, pay-to-win games that tried so much to look like other successful mobile games.
Unique gameplay, but very much scummy mobile practices.
Doubts Before The Demo.
You might be asking “Why are you giving this quick history lesson?”
That’s because I wanna tell you my expectations before I played the demo.
When this game was showcased, it looked pretty cool!
But I noticed that a couple things were off, the game had individual levels for your heroes, which wasn’t out of the ordinary, but also powers and towers??
Hero levels increase their stats and powers in previous games and I was afraid that this would also be the case with the others.
Why would this be a problem you may ask?
Well, difficulty would no longer be about strategy anymore. Instead you would be forced to grind to beat levels, which paired with the “mobile game” like UI, felt like a clear message.
The main franchise was taking the wrong notes from the scummy mobile game and implementing them.
So I lived on with a cautious optimism about this next game in the franchise.
Fast forward again to the NOW of today, I played the demo for it in the Steam Next Fest and… I was pleasantly surprised!
Demo Was Pretty Good!
The gameplay is much like Alliance, you pick two heroes and five towers before heading to a campaign stage.
You unlock them through progressing the story- blah blah, the usual.
So, about that leveling system.
They decided to not go the nuclear route! Levels don’t automatically give you tower stats and instead give you points for you to spend to unlock abilities (and what seems to be passive ones!). They are also capped at 10, so no infinite levels to grind!
With this new information, I understand the vision they are going for and I can see the fun!
Though, the exp gain is very slow in the demo, that needs to be buffed by 100% asap (for the towers and powers at least.)
The UI still mostly sucks. The victory screen looks like a mobile game, but aside from that, there’s a lot to look forward to!
Many people hate the new art style, which is fair, but to me this looks fantastic! (I like the OG one and this modern one equally!)
Alliance’s graphics and animations were incredible and beautiful, the Wukong DLC was some of their best work yet!
This game is shaping up to surpass that!
The story seems to be more involved then before, there’s new game modes after you beat a stage that look fun and the game seems to have a lot of content to offer.
This game is shaping up to be a good one!
My only points of complaint are the UI and slow leveling. If they can figure those out before release, this game is going to be a banger!
(Funny how one demo changed the whole image I had of this game in my head LOL)
Also, I’m scared of this gem icon beside the stars… what is this??
PLEASE DON'T BE BAD
13/06 - Saturn Bomberman!# 40
Tags
Series - Bomberman (Series).
Not-SEGA-Kid Bomber!
My early gaming adventures almost exclusively revolved around the Super Nintendo and its billions of games.
(I had a PS2 with a pirated disc with all SNES games, but let’s not sweat on the details!)
I played the Super Bomberman quintology a bunch as a kid, they are some of my favorite games on that console!
But being bound to the SNES library meant I never got to see some of the gems outside of this ecosystem… which honestly, I'm perfectly okay LMAO.
Not many SEGA System exclusive games ever caught my attention, since I was a child and now as an adult.
Anyway, back to the topic, I never heard of Saturn Bomberman because of that background!
And man… I think I missed out on the best of what classic Bomberman had to offer…
Peak Bomber!
Saturn Bomberman takes everything classic Bomberman has to offer and improves with the more powerful hardware!
We have a bunch of new powers, the Louies are back (but this time they are dinosaurs called Tirras for some reason. They also have a level up mechanic which is cool, they get stronger the longer you keep them!) levels are connected (they have a little cutscene that transitions to the next one) and levels/ bosses fights are bigger in scope!
Basically, everything is cooler and better!
Fun level transition!
There's even an opening movie and some voice acting that sounds very crusty, but it’s cool to see Bomberman have a voice and the cool new villains have awesome voices.
The only thing this game doesn’t beat the others is the music. The music in this one is good, but I just prefer the others.
Master Bomber!
The game has an extra campaign mode called Master Mode where you go up a tower by clearing "difficult" rooms, defeating bosses to reach the Dragon Bomber at the end. You only have one live btw!
This is a cute pause screen.
…Well, this mode is not as master as it sounds. In terms of difficulty, it was somewhat easy and the occasional challenges were more a showcase of the game’s items and mechanics rather than a real challenge.
This is all fine though, the game is plenty fun as it is!
Battle Bomber!
I don’t have much to say about the multiplayer of this game.
The mode features battles that can go up to 10 players, which is pretty cool! The AI gets a little bugged out though, they sometimes get stuck in a loop doing nothing.
I played it for the achivos and that’s about it. If I had this game as a child, I would’ve played it a bunch of times though.
They also had a pretty cool selection of playable characters from other Hudson franchises! Pretty cool!
Achivo Bomber!
The Retroachievements aren’t much to write home about, mostly “get X thing” or “reach X point of the campaign”.
But the achivo of getting 300k score was pretty cool, because it made me actually care for the score I had. I was actively maximizing my ability to get scores and all that because I had a goal at the end of the tunnel!
Usually I don’t really care about that stuff, but when you have an achivo to work towards, things like these become more fun!
Playing the campaign at exactly 10-11 am was very strange though. Like, why is that a thing in this game??
Why if I play during that I get extra starting lives??
I have so many questions!
Lolo Bomber!
End Bomber!
Ending thoughts are: Man, I wish I had this game as a kid… I would’ve been addicted to EVEN MORE Bomberman!
08/06 - Backrooms Movie!# 39
Tags
Series - 1-Off Films
The Backrooms
I'm… not a big backrooms guy.
Well, not a big modern backrooms guy.
I played a few too many shitty “Escape The Backrooms” games in my lifetime.
I prefer when the concept is just “Lost in an endless maze of places we don’t think about” instead of the “Escape the monster in the maze”.
Kind of lost the sauce.
Despite all that, I decided to watch the Backrooms after hearing a lot of people sing their praises.
And it was pretty good!
The Movie
Before anything, this will be a mostly spoiler free blog, if you are in the fence on watching this movie: Go watch it!
It's a very good horror movie and the concept is executed very well!
Now, for my thoughts.
The movie is separated into 2 halves and we follow a different protagonist in each.
The first part is peeeeerfection!
I love how the concept was fully realized for the big screen. I was genuinely wondering if the set was actually real or just CGI!
Many objects seamlessly clipping through the ground and walls, impossible room structure and unusual sized spaces. Everything that makes the backrooms what it is, an unsettling place to walk around.
(It was a real set and man… I would kill to walk around there!)
We also spend a lot of the time using the found footage format, which was pretty cool and well executed.
Roa Lost In The Rooms
The second half of the film is where I have some small problems.
Small spoiler, the backrooms in this universe is a place which vaguely remembers people.
They describe it as such: “It’s describing a dog or someone who has never seen a dog before, then asking them to draw it. They might get the general idea, but the details are always off.”
This idea of remembering a vague memory is cool, the part I liked less was that they show the “monsters” of the backrooms. They are weird messed up versions of people that don’t entirely make sense.
Throughout the movie, it's only implied that there’s other things in the backrooms, in this second part they show it.
And in the scene they are at, they do a good job at making you feel unsettled and creeped out.
The problems come at the end of the film, where we try to bring more sciency stuff into this. I liked that less but thankfully the movie still ends in a weird way without a proper explanation or science.
The Side Topic
I liked the movie!
It's definitely a slow burn and maybe not for everyone, but I really enjoyed it!
It was pretty cool seeing this concept be fully realized on the big screen.
I heard this movie was part of Kayne's Youtube series about the backrooms, which I haven’t kept up with for many years. (The movie stood up on its own btw, don’t need to watch the series to enjoy this.)
Maybe I'll check out Wendigoon's coverage of the series!
Oh yeah, since we are talking about him, check my favorite clip from the guy:
The End
It’s funny, after seeing this movie, I got out of the theater and decided to walk around the mall for a bit before going home.
This mall was basically empty. Almost no people were in sight! (Aside from the store owners in their shops.)
That oppressive feeling of being alone in a space meant to be full of people was hitting really hard at the moment… but that was a good reason. That mall in particular was one for furniture, architecture and all those kinds of stuff for homes and all. It was also past 9 pm. It’s not the type of mall you would visit for fun- that one was just across the street!
So I went there and got a severe whiplash from watching a movie about empty spaces, witnessing these empty spaces and then seeing these spaces occupied by people.
It felt… oddly comforting seeing a place like this being occupied.
It was nice feeling.
04/06 - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 First Impressions!# 38
Tags
Games - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
First Good Impressions!
I’m currently having a blast with this game!
I just got done with the Gestral Village and I have some early impressions to share.
Story and World!
The story so far is a bit fast paced, but I’m invested in the characters and the world it takes place in.
They are the 33th group of expeditioners that are sailing to an unknown land to uh… kill an entity named the Paintress? I think that’s right.
Some tragic and terrible thing happens when they get to the lands and Gustave, our protagonist, gets separated from everyone and the story follows him as he tries to regather with other people who lost their way as well. While also trying to put pieces together to why the other expeditions failed before theirs.
That’s the basic summarization of how this game starts, and so far I have no complaints!
This world is full of wonder and magical things! Coming out from a game like Final Fantasy XVI, where everything was grounded, gritty and “realistic”, it's a huge breath of fresh air!
The only thing I don’t like as much is that the cutscenes are really fast. The story has a very fast pace and characters talk fast.
But it’s not that big of an issue because they are portrayed in a very human way, where some characters sometimes mispeak, talk over each other by accident and overhaul feels super natural. Facial expressions are a bit wacky though.
Exquisite Gameplay!
Traversal in the map is about what you expect, but the real stars of this game for me is the combat and equipment system!
The combat is like the Mario & Luigi type of games, where the act of using skills and reacting to enemies attacks require input from the player.
Skills are simple, just press the buttons at the right time, while enemy attacks have a risk and reward mechanic to it.
Battle screenshots are hard to take due to all the motion blur.
You can dodge enemies' attack, which avoids the damage if timed right, ooooooooooor- you could try to parry the attack! Hitting a parry is MUCH harder than a dodge, but you are wonderfully rewarded with a mega powerful attack by doing so!
It’s kind of addicting to pull them off… so much so that I have been using them exclusively… which is making me lose a lot of my battles.
But I really don’t care, cause the game is just so fun to play!
This after battle one looks cool though.
Oh yeah, every character has their own mechanic exclusive to them which… admittedly I haven’t paid much attention to it so far. The early game feels a little too restrictive to make any builds utilizing the character mechanics outside of “Using X skill while character is Y state = more damage”.
Awesome Equipment!
Your characters don’t have accessories or armor in this game, instead they have these things called “Pictos”, which behave like accessories where they give passive effects and stats to your characters. But what makes them different is that characters can learn these and have them permanently!
Once a picto is learned, you can unequip it and equip the effect instead, at a cost, as a permanent thing for your characters!
It’s a very fun system that will allow for a billion kinds of strategy builds and I can’t wait to gather and learn more!
Coming from FFXVI, which had mostly boring equipment and weapons, this is an even bigger breath of fresh air~
On a side note, love these stupid things.
The Other Great Parts!
You heard the praise for it at this point, this OST is fantastic so far.
The opening scene made me emotional, even though I didn’t have any deep attachment to the setting or story yet! That’s a huge accomplishment by itself!
The sound effects are also equally as great, hitting a parry FEELS great because of the sound effects tied to it.
This game has a lot of pretty scenary.
This game is awesome so far, I’m really enjoying it!
And I don’t want to just talk shit about FFXVI, I liked that game as well! But sometimes the gameplay part of that game really took a backseat for the story and world, which would be fine if the game wasn’t so slow as well.
It feels nice to have a game with lots of gameplay to sink your teeth in for once!
May
May Features: Final Fantasy XVI, Sonic Journey and Aria of the Beech Forest!
29/05 - Sonic Journey - Halfway There# 37
Tags
Series - Sonic The Hedgehog (Series).
It’s Finally Back!
The Journey Resumes!
It’s been a long time since I last talked about this thing, so I owe an explanation as to why it took me so long to get back into it…
Basically, I didn’t have a controller and didn’t want to continue the games using a keyboard. More precisely, after my pro switch controller started to break itself, I started eyeing the new Steam Controller for the fix of all my controller problems.
But after a long time of waiting, I got impatient and decided to get a 8BitDo instead… only for the controller to release a month later!
That’s beside the point, I didn't continue the journey because of that reason.
Yes, I did have the Steam Deck to use as a controller, and no, I didn't use that because… uh, because I was lazy…
ANYWAY, the important thing is that everything is back to normal, so let’s continue the journey where we last left off:
SONIC RUSH
(For the record, I played this one before my controller died back in January.)
The DS is now the new portable console in the market! It’s a console that features two screens for the player to interact with!
After 3 Advance games, the portable game series team decided to change up the formula.
Utilizing the two screens the new console had to offer, they decided to change the gameplay by incorporating stages that would switch the focus from one screen to the other depending on where Sonic would be in a stage!
Crazy stuff… but more on that later.
Trying To Be Fancy
Since this was a DS game, I tried a novel setup where I would use my Steam Deck as the bottom screen and monitor as the top screen, thinking this would emulate the feel of a DS perfectly. It took a lot of troubleshooting and cable wizardry, but I finally got it to work and- it was… underwhelming!
I forgot to take a picture of the setup so here’s unrelated gameplay.
The disconnect between the two screens was far too clunky to ignore, I would find myself looking at one screen, then when the action transitioned to the next one, that half-second/ second of looking up/down would be enough to get me out of the action and sometimes make mistakes.
If the screen was directly above the Steam Deck’s display, that would be much better. But from what I saw, doing things that way is a bit expensive and very difficult to set up, so I decided to stick with the normal emulation.
Tails Moral support!
(Okay, so I lost a lot of the images I had so images will be very samey... whoops!)
(That first image was from the wiki for this game btw)
Back To The Game
Anyway, back to the game, the two screen gameplay wasn’t the only change this got during the transition from the Advance series to the Rush series. Sonic can now boost!
Boost gives Sonic extreme levels of speed and lets him over power most obstacles in his way, but you can’t use a lot of it since it’s tied to a bar that you have to fill and having extreme speeds means you will have less time to react to things.
It’s a surprisingly spin on the usual Sonic gameplay, having a button for instant speed and managing that resource made it for some fun segments. The two screen gameplay was also cool, but a little awkward… sometimes it felt more like a gimmick than a natural part of the game.
The transition between screens didn’t feel natural, getting to a high point in the stage wouldn’t make the focus go to the top screen or vice versa, instead, it felt more like it was preset parts of the stages that would trigger the transition.
Another big difference is that there’s no longer a billion characters to play as with different movesets, this time you have Sonic and Blaze The Cat! A newcomer to the franchise!
She’s alright. Her levels, despite being a separate story in the game, felt the same as Sonic’s so I decided to not play through those… Wait- OH GOD THE LEVELS!
Sonic vs Blaze!
The Level Design And Rest
The levels in this game are… interesting to say the least.
They are fun up until world 4 or 5, after that, they decided to up the difficulty by not making meaningful obstacles to overcome or any of that. No, they decided to make the game harder by adding a bunch of bottomless pits!
The later levels were so painful to get through.
The bosses- man the bosses… They range from mediocre to bad, some many janky mechanics that sometimes insta kill the player and very little rings for a safety.
Despite the many changes to the gameplay, they still couldn’t figure bosses out…
The key art is pretty cool!
At least the graphics were pretty good!
There was a story that was there!
And the OST was… eccentric? I don’t know, I didn’t like it that much.
Overall, it was kind of a weak entry to this new series for handhelds, but I was able to see the potential! (I think I said this phrase a bunch of times for these games already.)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG (2006)
Here we are, the product of SEGA’s hubris- The game that shocked the gaming masses- The game that they had the gull to call “The Sonic Franchise Reboot”.
You heard the horror stories about this game. I have been dreading this game since I started this journey.
But let’s dial it back a bit.
This game returns to the Adventure formula, you have three stories that are connected and happening at the same time, with many playable characters as well, featuring a “Final Chapter” if you complete all of them of course.
Let’s talk about each story individually:
Sonic Episode
Following Sonic’s side of the story, it’s a story about him meeting Princess Elise and the shenanigans between them and Eggman.
Sonic gameplay in this game is exactly like the Adventure games, but form an unfinished game. Jankgalore and if you slightly nudge Sonic at the wrong time, you might fly to outer space or bug out.
Rolling around on glitched textures from emulation.
Sonic also has special “auto run” stages where he will run in one direction and you have to dodge the things on his way… but be careful, if you slightly bump into something, it means DEATH!
I’ll let you imagine how terrible those stages are with a game that is broken in controls and physics.
Tails and Knuckles and thankfully they don’t feature any gimmicks, just get to the end of the level and win. They are better than Sonic’s by a mile, because you have some leeway in movement with glide or fly.
The story itself is very weird, you spend most of your time chasing Eggman as he captures Elise for the 15th time while occasionally bumping into the major narrative here and there. It’s the first one you play, but Sonic’s adventure feels so disconnected with the whole narrative at times, even at the end!
This was a mechanic for sure
It just ends abruptly with a “happy ending”.
Shadow Episode
Here we start to get a more in-depth look into the story, as we see what Shadow and his crew are up to while Sonic and Elise are having a jollyful time together.
Gameplay wise, Shadow controls MUCH better than Sonic because he can’t go as fast as him, meaning you have much more control over the jank.
Vehicles are Shadow’s gimmick in this game and they are surprisingly good! They control relatively well, don’t bug out like many other things and actually feel fun to use!
Shadow being cool
Rogue and Omega return as playable characters and they are fine much like Tails and Knuckles. I had a lot of trouble with their combat moves, they were really buggy and weird though.
You will hear no complaints from me however, playing a character that has some kind of forgiving jump mechanic is a good thing in this game. (Shoutouts to that one Rogue stage where you can complete the entire thing in less than a minute because she can glide.)
The story gets more complex and weird during this episode. Shadow and Co encounter this weird creature named Mephelis that looks like Shadow and they get involved in some time travel nonsense that is way too much for my head.
Shadow goes to the past, then Mephilis forms in the image of Shadow from the past and kick starts the events of the game, but the present Shadow doesn’t know about that because he didn’t engage with the time travel yet, but how is this possible since for Mephilis- it’s complicated!
At least Mephilis sounds and looks cool enough as a villain.
Shadow got a glitch beard.
The ending is just Shadow being Shadow.
Silver Episode
We got a newcomer to the series: Silver, a hedgehog from the future that has telekinesis powers! He was born into a ruined future where everything is constantly on fire and life seems to be mostly extinct.
Thankfully, he’s not alone in this mess, Blaze the cat is also in that future with him. (The same Blaze from the Rush series!)
Their future’s ruin is because of an entity named Iblis, and despite their best efforts to defeat it, the duo can never kill Iblis for good.
That is, until Mephilis shows up and tells Silver to go to the past and stop the “Iblis Trigger”, which he says it’s Sonic in the present time.
So the story goes on from there.
Silver plays very differently from the other hedgehogs, he’s slower but he can use his telekinesis powers!
… which basically means slow gameplay and puzzle level design, which REALLY doesn’t work here. His levels REALLY are not fun at all (looking at you 9 ball) and his awkward combat kit makes it all the more annoying to play as him. At least he can hover for a short time after jumping, which helped the platforming a bit.
Blaze… uh… You play as her in this episode but francanly, you see/ play as her so little that you forget that she exists until you are jumpscared at the end by, spoiler warning, she dies while you sit there feeling nothing because there is no moment in this story where we see her a lot to justify this emotional sc-
Iblis fight break.
I think you get it by now by ramblings, this story is very confusing when you start thinking about it.
Like, Sonic’s cat and mouse chase with Eggman just goes nowhere for a long time.
Shadow changes events in the past by saving Elise but nothing changes in the present.
Silver gets the ability to seal Iblis from the past but instead of stopping the root cause of the problem BEFORE it was born, he elects to go back to the hellish future and seal Iblis there??
Here's a slow Silver.
Final Episode
These all lead to this final event where it’s revealed that Iblis was inside Elise and her crying was the trigger to the end of the world, and that Mephilis was planning to release Iblis and uh… merge with it? I don’t remember exactly, but he does this by killing Sonic right in front of Elise, which makes her cry.
After this, Iblis and Mephilis merge with the power of the chaos emeralds and create Solaris, a being that exists beyond time and space.
Sonic DEATH scene!!!!1!
Conveniently, everyone relevant to the story is teleported to a rift in time, at a period where Solaris is not in full control of everything yet. Sonic is lying on the ground dead there with them by the way.
Everyone present goes on their own to grab the chaos emeralds Solaris scattered in the rift and to perform a miracle and revive Sonic…
Basically, you play a short level with all the playable characters you played as during the game (except Blaze and Sonic cause y’know, they are too busy being dead.)
These levels are pretty bad because they have these random black holes that suck you into and insta kill you on contact.
These black holes suck.
But anyway, they collect the emeralds and perform the miracle to revive Sonic by … ELISE JUST KISSING HIM?????????????????????????????????
EXCUSE ME?????????????????????????
BY THE WAY, AMY IS IN THAT SCENE AND JUST ALLOWING THIS TO HAPPEN!
I don’t even need to explain why this was such a STRANGE scene.
Ba-Back to the story, Sonic is revived and the three hedgehogs turn super to defeat Solaris and restore time…
The fight is okay, you cycle between the 3 of them as necessary for the bosses phases and do the same things until the health bar is gone.
Thus they save the world, there’s some lore about Iblis being something else and the timeline is restored to the start, but this time Sonic never meets Elise.
Picking Up The Pieces
This was an ambitious game, I think you can tell from the massive story alone.
But unfortunately, we don’t live in the timeline where this game was given the time to be fully developed and polished.
Instead it was rushed out of the door as a broken game, touting it as the anniversary present for Sonic fans and THE reboot worthy of the name “Sonic The Hedgehog”.
It’s truly such a shame that we live in this particular timeline, because I could see the vision and ambition Sonic Team had for this. There’s some small bumps in this vision, the hub kind sucked and you really got lost not knowing what to do without a guide, the graphics were all over the place with motion cap being super goofy on the cartoony characters, the clash of realism and cartoony style of the characters (JUST LOOK AT EGGMAN) and of course THE KISSING SCENE!
The End
Somehow, against all odds, the OST was the only thing in this game that was not unfinished and it slapped pretty hard.
But yeah, I think all this sums up my thoughts on this game.
Was it THE worst thing I ever played? Probably. Lots of bugs, confusion and annoyances to deal with.
Is it THE worst thing of all time as people claim to be? I mean, you CAN beat the game. It’s a very low bar to meet but hey… I can’t call it THE worst thing of all time because you can beat the game by just playing it.
Still, it’s a terrible mess of a game that, in the wreckage, you could see the vision of something great… that never came into fruition.
I like Silver though, he’s kind of pathetic the entire game, losing most of his fights and just being lied to by Mephilis, but he was cool!
The Midway Point
And here we are, at the EXACT midway point of this journey.
I didn’t plan for Sonic 06 to be the middle point, this was kind of a coincidence, but I’ll take it!
Here’s the list so far:
Gold means beaten since last time.
That game was certainly a major turning point for this franchise, according to our Sponsor (Miya), the games get better from here on… I sure do hope so!
The Three Gelatinous Girls
Now if you excuse me, I need to figure out how demotion-gimmickfy a couple of games because I’m NEVER BUYING A WII REMOTE AND I HATE THE WII’S MOTION NONSENSE!
And that’s the end of this blog!
Quite a lengthy one!
I had a lot to say about 06 and this blog format allowed me to put everything out there!
So much freedom~
25/05 - Reflourished Appreciation!# 36
Tags
Games - Plants Vs Zombies (Series).
It’s About Time-
I talk about the definitive version of PVZ 2 again!
(See what I did there? It’s about time!!!! Plants Vs Zombies 2: It’s About Time!!!!!!!!)
Since last time, I completely finished all the worlds the game had to offer, including the 2 new ones added during that period, did all the important quests, obtained every plant and did quite a bit of the mission archive + the ones that happened in real time.
I wanted to say my general thoughts on the new worlds I played! (excluding Holiday Mashup since that world is kinda of a mess.)
Let’s do it!
Steam Ages
This world was originally from the China version.
The main gimmick here is the manholes on the lawn that blocks you from placing non-flying plants and a couple of defensive plants. They also occasionally spawn zombies that walk backwards in the lawn!
So basically, you are being attacked from the front and backline at once!
This world was pretty fun, the unique gimmick made a lot of underused plants, like peanut, very fun to use because they work pretty well as a defensive plant at the back while helping on the offensive at the front. The gimmick was also pretty fun to strategize around, good stuff!
The plant roster in this world has some of my favorites,I love Maypop Mechanics and any plant whose plant food effect gives a permanent buff to them!
The zombies were okay, I didn’t think anything special about them aside from the gargantuar, he threw imps that went backwards in the lawn. That was fun.
Airship Assault
This is a very unique world ported from the China version.
The twist in this world is that the lawn has completely changed! Your house is flying and zombies will come flying towards your house packing a good amount of projectiles! You have to utilize the cloud tiles and flying plants to fight off the zombies beyond your house barrier, and if that barrier dies: You lose!
MAXIMUM POWER!!!
This was a pretty unique world to play through, since the objective is to protect the barrier at your home instead of the usual “don’t let zombies get to your house”.
This world also has a bullet hell mini game!
And that’s about it for what I thought…
The zombies were a bit tanky and the plants were kind of meh for me…
Unique lawn but nothing more than that.
Caliginous Carnival
I believe this world is unique to this mod! That’s pretty cool!
The gimmick in this one is that the lawn will have cards scattered around the place, putting a plant on the tile where a card is will reveal the card and send an effect to the closest zombie.
There’s positive effects, such as making a zombie drop sun/ plant food on death, but also quite a lot of negative ones, like transforming a zombie into a bucket head and etc.
There's a pick the correct hat mini game here, which is fun.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the implementation of this gimmick because, every time a new card spawned in the lawn, the plants on that tile would be bounced to an adjacent one, which made things quite annoying sometimes. Aside from that, it was a cool gimmick for the world.
The plants here were a bit of a hit or miss for me, I love Sweet Pea and Potato Chip, but never used Boom Balloon Flower or The Great Zucchini.
The zombies were cool though! There were a lot of them that could disrupt your defense and even some that could deflect the card effects back at your plants, which could cause major chaos to defense!
Cool and unique world, even if the gimmick was too disruptive at times!
Lunar Rainbow Market
A weird crossover between Touhou and PVZ 2…?
The world gimmick is that a package will fall from the sky at a certain point in the level, destroying the package will unleash an effect at the lawn that can be positive, negative or neutral. Tables will also be in the lawn with an object at the top, if a zombie gets to it, they will pick the object and use it against you. You can destroy the tables with enough fire power as well.
The zombies picking up things from the tables was pretty cool, making for a fun race against them. The main gimmick of the world, the falling packages, was less fun though. They can appear at any point of the level and it’s hard to control because you can’t know if the effect is bad or good before destroying.
The special zombies here were pretty annoying to deal with, lots of insta-kills and invincibility…
The plants were pretty cool though! I liked using them!
Oh, oh yeah, Tenkyuu Chimata is here. Don’t ask me for the reason why, I don’t play PVZ 2 for the lore, gameplay only!
Fairytale Forest
The newest world at the time of blog’s publication, I think this is a port from PVZ 2 China. Not too sure on that though.
The gimmick is a remix of the Caliginous Carnival one, instead of you activating the cards on the lawn, the zombies will when they pass over it. Don’t worry though, you have mirrors you can place anywhere in the lawn to reflect the effects back at them.
Buff/ sleeping fog is also a big gimmick here.
This world was pretty tough and very micro intensive for me…
The roster for this world is pretty tanky and very hard to deal with when paired with the card's effects. The mirror helps dealing with them, but it also has a cooldown after you move, so you can’t deal with all the lanes at the same time. Plus, for some reason, zombies sometimes triggered the card effects and other times not, which didn’t help me because I would move the mirror to one lane only for nothing to happen there and the other lane gets assaulted by a billion card effects.
Plants were pretty cool though! Pretty fun to use!
Here's a Lolo doing the P part.
Fun world but super hard because of the extreme micro, which isn’t my usual cup of tea.
And that’s everything so far.
I really love this mod, makes PVZ 2 an actually enjoyable and good game compared to the modern version.
If YOU want to play Plants Vs Zombies 2 the way it was intended (no micro transactions, no leveling system and no arena nonsense), play Reflourished!
It’s painless to set up and it’s super fun!!
Oh yeah, before I go, check out these awesome costumes I got recently.
Awesome costumes as always!
16/05 - Manga of the Month: Aria of the Beech Forest!# 35
Tags
Series - Aria of the Beech Forest.
Aria of the Beech Forest
Made by Yugiri Aika
Here's the synopsis: Aria, a lone witch living hidden away in the woods suddenly finds a weak, white wolf at the front of her tree house- that speaks just like a normal human??
I was looking around Anilist for “witch” mangas (don’t ask for a reason, I have none to give…) when I saw this one in the recommendation of another I plan to check out later.
This one is a slice of life manga about Aria, a witch that has (mostly) lived by herself in the woods. Due to a chance encounter, she meets a white wolf that can speak like a human.
After that, the story revolves around her struggles to socialize and explore the world she was hiding away from. While it doesn’t do anything that will rock your socks off, it’s still fun and cute.
The manga does do some small twists on the formula here and there, the reason why the wolf talks was very funny to me. He also looks kinda cursed when not drawn in a chibi style…
Here's a Roa for today, she likes big hats!
Aria makes a couple of dishes in the slice of life portions that actually have full recipes, so you can recreate them yourself!
I wanted to do that for this blog, but ended up scrapping it because I’m a terrible cook…
But anyway, there’s also a good cast of side characters and even a little bit of romance towards the end, that to me felt a little tacked on but it’s okay.
I recommend it, very cute and fun witch slice of life!
12/05 - Website!# 34
Tags
Website - Website Changes, Phoenix Club.
Updates, Updates And Updates!
Just a quick check up on all the changes the website received in the past 2 months!
- Filter Section Updates!
I updated the filter section of this page to more align with the new (future) vision of the website, where it features Pudd, Lolo and Roa equally!
Instead of being all Pudd, now we have all 3 characters featured on the type of blogs they are themed around. I also updated other buttons I did art just for consistency sake.
(If you don’t see anything new in there, just CTRL + F5 the page and that will fix it!)
Aside from these “OC” buttons, I did other minor changes here and there to that… I forgot to note down!
Pudd breaks boundaries!
There were also the regular updates for the Game Shelf page, a new tier list added to the Misc page about Mewgenics, a new special theme for blogs and that’s it…
Yeah, not many changes happened this time around, I decided to spend most of my time doing other fun stuff.
But now that I’m right back at the groove, expect the next time to have a moderate amount of changes listed!
Updates, Future And Updates!
Let’s talk about the future!
- Phoenix Club Updates.
We are still working on it!
Mini 2 is now being drawn, which is great progress! Everything else is still on some kind of “stasis” though… So I don’t know when the release date will be.
Have this sneak peek with a punk Chie edit by me!
Side note: Due to our new way of making Minis, I have full access to every layer in the drawings, which is too much power for me to handle and I definitely didn't spend an hour changing characters’ hair colors for fun!
- New Secrets…
I plan to add a couple new secrets to the main pages!
One that I started working on last year, another that has a secret “green” home theme tied to it and maybe some other silly ones in between.
But before that happens, I need to rework the main pages to feature the new characters we got this year…
- Actual Near Future Plans!
Okay, things that are ACTUALLY coming next (after the Phoenix Club releases)!
The rewrite and theming of the main pages!
Those texts are very old at this point, so they need to be rewritten to better fit who I am now and what the website is. I’ll also take this opportunity to feature Lolo and Roa more prominently in their respective pages as well (Lolo being in the Games one and Roa in Anime).
And that’s everything planned in my mind that I wanted to share.
Thank you for reading!
09/05 - Memes Vs Machine Is Back!# 33
Tags
Games - Team Fortress 2.
It’s Back!
And better than ever!
After a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong hiatus, one of my favorite MvM community event series returned!
Here's an unrelated Pudd made not by me.
Very Fun Missions!
I played through all of them, because y’know, I’m THE MvM guy. I also had very fond memories of the previous Memes Vs Machine’s that happened so long ago.
So I was hyped to play this one!
And I must say, they did not disappoint and completely surpassed my expectations!
Robot (Singular)
I won’t spoil much about them, because these are something 100% worth checking out, instead I’ll just briefly talk about my top 3 missions:
Agnosiachromatopsia - Probably the best mission of this community campaign.
This one features a bunch of crazy stuff I didn’t know was even possible with MvM in TF2!
Such as: A functional Wario Ware style gamemode, proper cutscenes and so much more!
Careful though, the map is very… uncanny…
This Feels Uncanny…
Every wave has some cool gimmick or funny thing going on, so the mission never gets boring!
Roguelikemod - Less of a meme and more a cool concept!
Memes Vs Machine aren’t just about memes, it’s about showing off cool stuff that the community can do with the tools they have!
This mission is exactly as it reads, a roguelike mod for MvM.
Upgrades are completely disabled, instead, you get 6 points that you get to spend on 6 completely random upgrades at the station! Every time you spend a point or the wave is cleared, the shop is rerolled.
The waves itself are recycled from the base game, but the gameplay changes more than make up for that.
The results by the end are very wacky!
Unrelated, screens are spooky.
I somehow got top damage as SCOUT of all things, something I have never done before!
A Dark Zone - . . . VERY WELL. . . IF YOU COME CLOASER TO THIS PLACE. . .
. . . THEN YOU MAY FIND. . .
. . . THE DARK. . .
. . . HAS COME TO YOU!!!
Yes, this is the JACKENSTEIN fight from Deltarune, but in MvM form.
And it works pretty well!
You are put in a maze and you gotta find your way to the robot that has the key and then leave.
With, of course, the usual nonsense from that fight perfectly captured in TF2:
Go play it! Super fun!!!
Other honerable mentions are: Total Chaos (This mission is EXACTLY what the name says) and Dejav Vu, Deja Mort (A boss rush type mission that features some pretty cool gimmicks and proper bosses!)
Glad To See It Back!
I’m so happy to see Memes Vs Machine back with such a strong line-up of missions!
The event is still ongoing, so make sure to check it out before the end of May!
I had lots of fun playing and I bet you will do too!
Classic TF2 Killbind moment.
Oh yeah, if you think the Song of The Day is an unrelated song, it’s not! You will be jumpscared by it just like I was playing through it!
That song is a banger!
Actually, the Judgement series as a whole is my favorite part of Yakuza… maybe I should play all the games properly one day… now that they are all on Steam…
05/05 - Let’s Watch Bots!# 32
Tags
Games - Garry's Mod, Team Fortress 2.
Misc - Random Topics.
Wanna Watch Some Bots?
Have you ever tried putting a bunch of bots in a video game for a whole hour?
… Huh?
What do you mean no?
How silly of you dear reader, I know you meant yes!
Worry not, I did that work for you!
Wanna Watch Some Bots?
A while back, I saw this Garry’s Mod addon called “Zeta Players” which is basically a sophisticated bot you can spawn in the sandbox gamemode and they will do a bunch of wild things.
Things like building, talk to other Zetas using sound effects and even fight each other at random!
Trying to mimic what a regular player does but in a much sillier way.
So I got an idea: What would happen if I let 5 of these bots loose on a server for an hour, while adding 5 more bot every 5 minutes?
A couple of months later, I finally got some free time and put this idea to the test!
The video containing a full hour of chaos!
(Idk why the thumbnail is low quality here... but I'm too tired to fix it...)
Go check out the video…
Well, check the chapters that peak your interest at least! 1 Hour is a lot of time after all.
Results!
Admittedly, the result was a little more boring than what I had on paper, but I still had fun editing the video and setting up all the chapters for Youtube!
I actually had to condense a lot and even remove a few chapters, because Youtube has a 100 chapter limit. They wouldn’t show up on the video if you passed over that amount…
(The original number was around 160 chapters BTW.)
Zeta unite against heli.
As for what I learned from this experiment… the more bots there were, the more explosions and noises happened!
They also love wheels for some reason.
…yeah, I just stated the obvious.
That’s because I just did this for fun, it’s not a real experiment or anything.
Some Bloopers.
It took some trial and error to do that video in full, so I made a video containing all the failed attempts as well:
The Cut Content!
A couple of crashes, wrong settings and mistakes on my end.
You can notice time passing in real time looking at this video, because of the skybox addon I had!
The addon is called Atmos and it changes the skybox according to my IRL time. It’s pretty cool! I also had a couple of other addons installed that didn’t really show up at the end, thankfully.
I specifically had to remove one that allowed you to spawn bombs, because I was afraid of a Zeta spawning a nuke and blowing up everything 40 minutes into the recording, forcing me to start all over again.
Source Bots Are Kind Of Magical!
On the topic of bots (the ones made by the game, not the malicious ones made by players), I think Source games bots are really cool!
I sometimes find myself playing Team Fortress 2 and sometimes even Counter Strike: Source completely by myself with bots.
MoreGun breaks speed cap!
These matches are always a chill time for me, free from the stress of interacting with other players… Well, stress is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get what you mean.
Everything is far more predictable and consumes a lot less brain power on days where you just want to relax playing your favorite games.
(I would also mention that it just allows me to play my favorite maps in TF2 without needing to wait/ play for more than 2 rounds before being forced to wait to play again, but that’s a whole other can of worms for another time.)
When I’m feeling down/ have to think a few things through, I usually unplug myself from the internet as whole and play my favorite games isolated from everyone else.
Away from everyone and doing the things I enjoy is my method to stabilize things in my mind.
So these bots help a lot in that effort, cause I don’t need to interact with other humans!
Zeta too shy for camera.
Some Personality!
A thing I like about these two game’s bots is that they even have a bit of personality!
TF2 bots taunt you if you taunt them and enemies will even forfeit all self-preservation and just taunt you for your death cam with your entire team around them! That is hilarious!
While CS:S bots will constantly communicate with premade voice lines and even respond to your voice lines sometimes!
(Not) Intense Fire Fight!
These bots have a lot of effort behind them that is rarely discussed… which I guess it’s fair, the games are ONLINE MULTIPLAYER, so the appeal are matches with real people and not bots.
But it’s still very cool that they put effort into them, so that the people who can’t enjoy the online part can still enjoy the game!
Ending The Ramble.
This is a bit of magic I think it’s lost in more recent games.
Most games nowadays don’t have bots, don’t allow you to play offline or have really REALLY basic bots that just do X thing and that’s it. Nothing extra.
I would cite Deadlock as an example, but with every update, they have been updating the bots over time. Bots a year ago wouldn’t even parry, but now they can do it and they even do comms! Now they just need to learn to farm jungles… oh and also they need to allow you to play the game offline against bots, that would be nice too!
Unrelated GMod screenshot I had on my folder
Again, my complaints are a bit unfair, because a lot of these games are ONLINE MULTIPLAYER, the idea IS to play with other humans.
So I guess I’ll cut this blog here before I keep walking in circles with this topic.
Thanks for reading this blog featuring a very niche topic most people never talk about!
Blogs are best when they are exactly that after all~
02/05 - Final Fantasy XVI Is Done!# 31
Tags
Games - Final Fantasy (Series).
Quite A Big Game!
I have finished the game (finally) and… yeah, it was cool.
The Story! (Without Spoiling)
The game story suffered from a lot of pacing issues, especially when it was moving from one objective to the next, because you would essentially be forced to do sidequests that were part of the main quest.
While I don’t think this is bad inherently, it’s nice to have some downtime between big events, having to do these “chores” before moving the story forward REALLY felt like padding here. It did affect my enjoyment of the story by the end.
(Cool) Splitting up!
Padding aside, the story itself was fun and had a great ending.
Clive’s character was very well done, his climb from darkness to being the one everyone places their hope into felt very earned to me! His VA did an amazing job portraying the character as well, it almost felt real!
The climatic moments of the story were a big highlight as well, Square Enix really knows how to make a cool looking movie-game sometimes. Just look at the entire Titan Lost fight! That stuff is going to pump adrenaline to EVERYONE who sees it!
(But not when the game crashes at the end and you have to do it all over again…)
(^ This happened two times to me, during Titan Lost AND AT THE END OF THE FIGHT BOSS! I HAD TO PLAY THE FINAL BOSS TWICE)
Titan loses!
The Gameplay!
Action RPGs aren’t my usual vibe, especially ones like this game. I struggle to string combos and dodging things, but the many Eikons and abilities you get throughout the game kept the combat engaging for me.
I found gear to be very boring in this game because there was no thinking involved. 99% of the time Higher stats = Better, no variety in type of builds you can make or lean to. Even the accessories were very same-y, just “small cooldown reduction to X skill!”.
The Side Stuff…
Something else I found rather boring was the side quests.
There’s a billion of those and some are pretty good, which do explore the world a little more.
I'm the type of player that likes to do a lot of the side content, and this game was a little rough.
The reason they were boring for me is that you do the exact same things on all of them, gameplay wise. There’s no variety, the only thing that changes is the stories they tell, and don't get me wrong, some of the stories are really good! I just wish there was more gameplay involved instead of “Go to X place, hear NPC, Fight, hear NPC, end quest.”
Singing with bird.
You fight the same enemies later on in the game, variety on enemies gets very dire at the end of the game.
Having everything, including side quests, being fully voice acted did make this better to sit through though.
The VA work in this game is fantastic! Gave the characters so much personality and depth.
The World And Everything!
Exploring the world was very confusing to me, but they were very beautiful vistas! The graphics in this game are fantastic, as expected from Square Enix, they make amazing virtual worlds full of wonders. Which are paired with wonderful music that just makes them feel so alive. (When the poor framerates didn’t get in the way, of course.)
The dark and gritty atmosphere did make some areas blend together at times, but everything was still beautiful and rich with detail.
The OST here is sooooo good, from the epic battles, the experimental tracks and even the more chill ones, they were all great to hear…
Here's some cool bright lights!
I mean, the reason why I wanted to start playing this game was because of “Find Your Flame”, so you expect me not to praise the OST!?
I don’t plan on getting the DLC for this game, this experience left me plenty satisfied as it is.
Despite the many hiatuses, I enjoyed the time I spent with the game. No regrets from here!
…aside from taking many hiatuses…
Lolo wields the Arm Of Darkness!
The Future!
So, next up on the list of RPGs I planned to beat for 2025-
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I wanna get back into Turn-based games already, this whole action thing gets my brain tired.
My original plan was to play Persona 3 Reloaded, but SEGA is very scummy with rereleases with that series, so I'll just wait until the inevitable happens and they release Persona 3 Reloaded FES!
(Note: I'm not a leaker, nor do I like leaks for the most part. If this ends up being true, I was gifted a prophecy and was NOT leaking anything dear layors.)
