Natalie Rambles About Gacha Games
Because crack is wack, coke ain’t woke, ya don’t need weed, and generally speaking drugs are for thugs. But indulging in regulated vices is good for the economy and government, so gamble to your heart’s content!
Rundown (8/04-8/10) Drop the Crack, Nat!
Seeing as how I now have a smartphone, the idea of playing mobile games suddenly became a very real possibility for me, and I figured what better way to go about things than returning to Fire Emblem Heroes. After using up the orbs I accumulated on my Android tablet, I tried getting back into the established groove, and quickly remembered why I stopped playing the game in the first place. This game is bloated with content, time locks just about everything it can, and is designed to fuel obsessive tendencies while being built around a stream of constant grinding. It is suffocating and overwhelming how much time-gated content and rewards there are in this game, and I honestly could not tolerate it after a two days of playing it during my free time rather than doing anything remotely productive. Like playing Sushi Striker.
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The End of 2018!
Well, it’s that time once again! The seasons have passed, the Earth has concluded another rotation around the sun, and a whole bunch of nonsense happened! It’s the end of 2018!
Rundown (10/7-10/13) Dreams of A Better Gacha
Lately the subject of Gacha games has been present on my mind, and how they are ultimately designed to manipulate people into spending large amounts of money on shiny husbandos, sexy doohickeys, and handsome waifus by tricking them into thinking that they can beat out the mathematical juggernaut known as probability. So, I got to thinking what if a gacha game were either 100% free or a premium title rid of any microtransactions? It’s a fantasy that I find to be fairly easy to imagine, as from what I know of the bigger Gacha RPGs, there is a core gameplay loop to make the games entertaining, and all that would really need to be changed is to prevent events from being limited on a daily basis, remove the stamina system, rework the probability of drawing rare characters, and make currency easier to obtain.
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Fire Emblem Heroes (2018) Review
One year and several hundred hours later…
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Rundown (7/23-7/29) Much Ado About Rambles
Seeing as how this week had little in the way of news that I cared about, I ended up doing a lot of rambling about two specific topics I have some level of passion behind, but do not fall into the category of gaming news that has come to define these Rundowns. Sorry about that, but this is my segment, and I’ll talk about whatever I goldarn want to. (more…)
Fire Emblem Heroes (2017) Review
As Nintendo’s second effort to branch out into mobile game using one of their established IPs, Fire Emblem seems like an incredibly odd choice. While the series saw a rise in popularity after the release of Awakening in early 2013, it is still a very niche franchise for the company, and does not initially seem like the best fit for the platform, as the games are story driven strategy RPGs. In actuality, Fire Emblem Heroes proves to be a surprisingly good fit for the platform, a pretty solid strategy game, and also one of the most engrossing yet frustrating experiences I willingly put myself through in quite a while. (more…)
Rundown (1/15-1/21) Super Mario World Adventure DX Director’s Cut 2 Battle & Knuckles
I did not notice this after the Nintendo Switch event last week, mostly because I try to curate my media feeds as best I can, but apparently everybody who watched the trailer for Super Mario Odyssey compared the game to Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) because it has a cartoonish character wandering around a realistic city with realistic people. Even though the far simpler and, well, better comparison to make here is between Sonic Adventure. The general aesthetic is basically identical, as both games feature sections where a strange creature jumps and runs around a metropolitan environment filled with street lights, skyscrapers, and cars that move down the street. Oh, and yes you ever insightful children, if Mario was real, he would be dissected and branded a mutant. You’re as clever as a whoopie cushion and somehow more irritating. (more…)