cjkeats

[cjkeats]

It’s the End of The Year

A lot of good games came out in 2017. Here’s the list I kept of what I’ve finished, 7 of which actually came out this year. So not limiting myself to just what came out this year, but what I actually completed, I going to talk about the ones that stuck with me the most.

Games Finished

-Pokémon Moon

-The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

-Persona 5

-Emily is Away

-Emily is Away Too

-Nier: Automata

-Blaster Master Zero

-Metroid: Zero Mission

-A Normal Lost Phone

-Metroid: Samus Returns

-Super Metroid

-Mario Odyssey

-Catherine

-Doki Doki Literature Club

Nier Automata

When I finished the last of the 5 main endings of Nier Automata, I was left with such a heavy feeling. I can’t even explain what it was. The game hits you with an option to erase all your save data, and when I chose not to as I wanted to shoot for the platinum trophy (which I still didn’t get), I felt awful.

Nier is the best game this year. The narrative it presents, from the hardest scifi, the the philosophical questions it sprinkles in there, the incredible music, and everything else. It’s a game that will sit at the top of many lists once this console generation is over and we look back on it.

There’s a really good half hour video essay about it that’s worth checking out. https://youtu.be/-NiyfG8Ctbo

Persona 5

Persona 4 is my favorite game of all time, so of course when 5 came out I dove in headfirst and never looked back. A time consuming monster of a game, my finish time was 104 hours. The game drags a little towards the end, but the final dungeon is the most Shin Megami Tensei shit Atlus has done in a decade.

The characters are as memorable as you’d expect for a Persona game, I’d still say the cast from 4 was the best, but the Phantom Thieves are extremely compelling in their own right.

Emily is Away/Emily is Away Too

There are fewer types of games I love more than games with fake computer operating systems. Emily is Away puts you into a fake Windows 95 PC and runs it’s narrative through a fake MSN messenger. I think I loved this so much because it’s a vivid snapshot of my teenage years. Emily is Away Too is more of an enhanced version of the first, with a stronger narrative.

A Normal Lost Phone also deserves a mention here too, as it’s kind of a similar experience. You look through someone's phone, and the game progresses as you figure out passwords and such and it tells a story through text history, diary entries, and forum posts.

Metroid: Samus Returns

Samus Returns was a return to form in a way for the 2D metroid that’s been missing since Metroid Fusion. I played Zero Mission and Super Metroid along with this, in the chronological order, and I can say that Super holds up beautifully.

I don’t have anything special to say that hasn’t already been said about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. They are triumphant games that I’ll forever look back fondly on. Doki Doki Literature Club also wowed me this year with it’s fun take on run of the mill visual novels. It tickles the part of my brain that loves when a games uses your computer in fun ways. If you haven’t played it yet, I recommend playing in a window with the games system folder open. Some fun stuff happens.

As for next year, I’ve already compiled a list of things I mean to get to.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Night in the Woods

Metroid: Other M

Metroid: Fusion

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The Mummy Demastered

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Paper Mario

Yakuza Kiwami

Yakuza 0

Snatcher

Assassin’s Creed Origins

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Hitman

Resident Evil 7

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky

[cjkeats]

When you’re on the last day of a palace (click for audio).

[cjkeats]

The Sony Memory Card Adapter.

Digging around my drawers and found this little guy. 

One of the perks from jumping in the Playstation 3 at launch, was that it backwards compatible with previous Playstation games. The PS3 didn’t have a slot for the proprietary memory cards Sony had for the old consoles, but had a regular SD card, and a compact flash slot, for some reason. They released this product to give users a way to transfer their physical saves over to the virtual memory cards the PS3 creates. 

This was an important thing at launch, as many people, myself included were still playing our library of old and newly released of PS2 titles, and the wireless controllers alone gave plenty of reason to unhook the PS2 and make way for the PS3 underneath the TV. The first PS3 game I remember being excited about was Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, which had a late launch on the PS3 so going back to my PS2 games was kind of the only thing to do with it at the time.  

Even before they took the backwards compatibility out of the PS3, this thing got lost in a drawer or a box almost instantly. Once my saves were transferred over, I rarely went back to the PS2 for any reason, up until my launch PS3 finally kicked the bucket, and only slim models were available. I ended up getting a new PS2 later that year because of my massive back catalogue of games I still mean to play someday and my old PS2 was long lost. 

I doubt I’ll ever use this again, as the PS2 classics on PS3 use their own saving method and not the virtual memory cards, so even if I wanted to bring my Persona 3 and Persona 4 saves to the PS2 Classics editions to start a New Game Plus, I can’t. So this is forever doomed to a drawer or a box with other old junk like Rock Band adapters and Mini USB cables. 

[cjkeats]

Are Games on Phones Even Real Games?

I’ve been on bit of a phone game binge lately. I want to talk about a few of them for a bit and twitter isn’t enough for all these words gushing out of my head about these monsters so here we go!

This is what the first page of my “Games” folder looks like, it’s where I keep the games I tend to jump into near daily.

As you can see, I have a soft spot for animefaceicon crap. I’m going to focus on Clash Royale, Galaxy of Heroes, Fire Emblem Heroes, and Sword Art Online Memory Defrag.

Clash Royale

So first up, let me get my love affair with Clash Royale out of the way. When it launched I played it constantly, it was so much fun! Competitive tower defense? How unique! Eventually I hit a wall. I stopped winning matches, and I mean like, ever. I made it to Arena 4: P.E.K.K.A’s Playhouse and started losing so frequently that I fell back into Arena 3. So I finally quit and uninstalled it for the sake of my blood pressure.

It has been about a year since and I decided to download it again, and here I was still in Arena 3. However, it was fun again. I was winning most of my matches, I was unlocking my chests, it was all going good. I’m gonna start re-thinking my teams and keep on plowing through the chests, but I suspect it’ll get easy, and it’ll finally have a good grasp on how to effectively play my team, I’ll rank up in the arena and then get smacked around again and my phone will end up across the room.

I’m going to reevaluate my team a little and see if there’s anything to beef up or switch around.

One of the best things about this game is the variety of units and the different ways you can play it. My main team, pictures above is mostly aggressive, with units who mostly just charge forward. Recently I battled someone who used a team of mostly unit producing buildings, and I was really impressed with it.

It was a different way to play I didn’t quite think about.

In other adventures since I’ve reinstalled it, I received an invite to a clan, some clan based in India, I’ve forgotten the name. Anyway, a player joined after me, won three times in friendly matches, then proclaimed “Why are Indian Players so weak? I’m  from Bangladesh, we are best players”. Then he was kicked from the clan. It was an interesting 15 minutes.

Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes

I’m not sure if I play this out of commitment or because I actually still enjoy it. I’ve been playing it daily for like 2 or 3 years now. I can’t even remember how long it’s been. Ive sunk a lot of time and money into it. This game is like 25% why I won’t switch away from iPhone, because the game won’t transfer between Android and iOS.

GoH is one of those “collect em all” games. You know the type. The basic premise is that people in cantina’s all over the galaxy play this game with all these different heroes, kinda like that chess thing Chewie and C3-P0 played in A New Hope. Heroes can be acquired in few different ways, a gacha pull, collecting their shards, buying them when they are featured. They all have a star ranking from 1 to 7, and using their shards, you can raise this ranking up to seven stars. It’s a long process.

Crystals are the paid currency in this, which can be used to pull gachas, reset timers, buy rare gear, etc. The game gives you a healthy amount of crystals just from logging in and playing a few of the basic daily tasks. Almost too many. I’ve got my routine down so efficiently with this game that I haven’t bought crystals or put any money into the game in over a year. I usually focus on getting a specific character and getting them to 7 star, so logging in every couple of hours, doing a few of the daily tasks and whatever I need to do to get the character shards, then log out. It hardly feels like playing any more, it’s just doing these tasks to fill up these bars. I doubt I’ll stop, it’s just a routine at this point.

They’ve recently added ships to the mix, but I’ve hardly looked at them. There’s an event going on now which adds Darth Nihilus shards, which is pretty rad. One thing the game is pretty good about is it’s character variety. Spanning most of the vast Star Wars universe with characters both popular and obscure, from KOTOR, Clone Wars, and so on. Even URoRRuR’R’R is in there.

There are three Tusken Raider units in here, and sadly he’s the only named one.

Oh and I nearly forgot! They showed R2-D2 as a playable character at E3 a couple years ago on during EA’s Star Wars montage and he’s nowhere to be seen in game yet.

Fire Emblem Heroes

You’ve probably heard too much about this one recently. Like Star Wars, one of the easiest ways to add appeal to a gacha game is to make the pulls things you recognize. Fire Emblem was kind of a no brainer here with it’s mass amount of characters that people got way too attached to in their respective game. The only real issue I have with the game personally is that the stamina costs are way too high. I know Orbs refresh your stamina and that's how the game makes money, but it’s not quite “I can play this for 10-15 minutes on my lunch break” and more “Oh, dang I’ve played two maps and my stamina is gone”.

My pulls have been pretty good, better than my girlfriend, who hasn’t pulled a single 5 star in like 5 or 6 different five character pulls. The poor girl says she’s done every time but is still playing everytime I look over.

I’ve managed to pull 4 Five Star heroes, enough for a team, even if it’s not a perfectly balanced one.

#TakumiBlessed. Ideally I’d like to get a green 5 star character, but I’m at the point where it’ll be a while before I can earn enough free orbs to do another pull and of course there's no guarantee, and the cost for ranking a 4 star to 5 is almost a little too excessive.

Truly though, I really just want a Hector because I hear he’s just as unstoppable as Takumi.

Sword Art Online: Memory Defrag

Ah SAO. I enjoyed the anime in the same way my girlfriend enjoys Law and Order: SVU. I know it’s not quality television, but it’s easy to watch and have fun doing so. At least I hope she’s aware SVU is awful. Anyways, this game is another “collect em all” with a gacha pull system and characters of various star ranking. I saved for a while and did an eleven character pull and managed to assemble a team of waifus in no time.

Which brings up an annoyance, the party has a cost, so stronger characters have a higher cost. That’s why Asuna and Lisbeth are 4 star and Silica is only 2, when I have a few more 4 and 3 star characters I’d rather be using. Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle does this too, another one I’ve been playing, and while I get why they do it, to keep the game from being too easy for people who just throw money at it, particularly in the multiplayer parts, I still dislike it when I’m mostly a solo player. Like the edgelord himself, Kirito.

What kept me interested in it for more than the first few minutes, is the menus. Weird, I know, but good menus can go a long way, and his game has snappy, quick menus that match the aesthetic designs from the anime. I’m probably hung up on this because I installed it the same day I installed Tales of Link and that game needs polish really bad. The menus are unresponsive and laggy, and the battles are just disappointing to look at. A shame because I like the combat in ToL a lot. SAO has combat that plays out by just tapping on the side of the screen the enemy is on, but it has a parry system to it as well, which keeps it interesting rather than just tapping on a screen mindlessly. Tap and hold to guard, swipe up as the enemy attacks, then switch to a different character to do a special move and a bunch of critical hits. It’s flashy and satisfying to do.

In conclusion, My phone game habits tend to fall into a few major categories: Anime Gacha and screaming at Clash Royale. I didn't talk about some of the games in my folder, such as Crash Fever, which was having a Hatsune Miku crossover event, and like SAO has very snappy menus with a nice Summer Wars/Our War Game kind of aesthetic to it. I don’t see myself sticking to it now that the Miku event is over. Love Live is still the same game it was when it launched all those years ago, and while I don’t play it often, I log in every day and save love up the free Love Gems until I hit 50 and then do the pull. Drift Girls had like a billion updates to download and I keep telling myself I’ll do it one day. These are just a few, but if you look back at my games folder, you’ll notice it’s 4 pages.

Basically what I’m saying is that I spend a lot of time charging my phone.

[cjkeats]

More Relatable Yui™ content from yours truly

[cjkeats]

okay so i work for an online website that sells books, dvds, games etc and a customer emailed in saying that an image on one of our product listings was wrong

this happens fairly often and it’s usually a book or something that has a new cover or whatever

so anyway i went on the product page they mentioned, which was this Scooby-Doo and the Curse of the Speed Demon DVD, not really expecting much:

,and after a few seconds i realised what was wrong

i could not believe it

we had accidentally used someone’s fucking edit to include speed wagon from jojo’s bizarre adventure and change the name from ‘speed demon’ to ‘speed wagon’ instead of the normal cover

obviously someone just googled the name, found this and added it without paying any attention.

i just can’t deal with this

[cjkeats]

In celebration of blink-182′s upcoming album, “California”, I made these wallpapers based on blink-182′s first sticker which dates back to the pre-182 days and features Akane from Ranma ½. The original picture can be found on Mark’s Instagram which was posted years ago.

[cjkeats]

Seinfeld

[cjkeats]

Ariana Grande

[cjkeats]

And what’s a news dump without some shiny new images to go with it? The Ace Attorney 6 site has updated with profiles for Trucy and Ema (and the rest of the case 2 cast), plus a bunch of preview shots from the game’s anime scenes (produced by A-1 Pictures), screenshots of the new fingerprint analysis, Perceive, and… well, you get the gist of it.

The majority of the info was already revealed by Famitsu, but the case itself is called “Turnabout Magic Show.”

Head over the site to have a look around!

[cjkeats]

no… that’s not quite right. not just them. not just these six…

[cjkeats]

NEED NOW

The first, brief PV for the Ace Attorney anime has arrived!

In addition, the anime site has gotten a makeover in anticipation of next month’s broadcast.

Only a few weeks to go!

[cjkeats]

It was supposed to be four simple images in a week …….FUCK MY OCD

[cjkeats]

Cat vs Pancake

@getoutoftherecat @catasters @cats-beingdicks

[cjkeats]

Callie and Marie have chosen their fave! Have you voted yet for the upcoming Pokémon Splatfest?

[cjkeats]

The queen hath returned to get 18 year olds to vote. 

“There's No Way My Little Sister Can Be Campaign Girl For 18-Year-Old Voting”

The world we live in. 

[cjkeats]