This Week’s Topics:
Wherein I discuss: My illiteracy. Nina Tendo’s Maple-some Autumnal Treat. Soh Nii’s Amber-some Autumnal Treat. The re;birth of Yakuza. Oodles of TGS-time video game announcements! And the (hopeful) demise of PSVR2.
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Wherein I discuss the aesthetic failures of the hottest game of the moment, Nintendo being Nintendo, the return of the Metatron, and Mr. Keighley’s latest trailer festival.
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Wherein I discuss the merits of multiplayer, Muv-Luv Con, and the hottest games coming to an XSX near you.
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While working at my office job I frequently catch my assorted co-workers ceasing whatever task they were in the midst of or simply passing time by socializing with others. It is an activity that I understand in small instances, but many of their conversations go on for 15 or more minutes, and center around unrelated minutiae rather than anything work-related. Which I personally find to be… wrong at least to some degree. I approach work with a very regimented and task oriented mindset, and while I do take time to check my email or RSS feeds on occasion, I always go back to whatever needs to be done, and try to finish the task in an efficient manner. I suppose this is just due to how I have a more serious work ethic, but it regularly surprised me to see people take such a lax approach to their professions, especially when they have families to take care of. Maybe that’s the right approach to take, and I’m just a fool for working so intently, or maybe they’re just a bunch of slackers. I dunno.
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When I schedule the games that I review, I tend to prioritize two things. Variety and timeliness, as I do not want to have two similar reviews back to back, but I also need to take into consideration my schedule, which I have ranted about in detail over the past year or so. This has left me unable to keep my promise of reviewing longer games, as I only get about 15 hours of quality gaming time in a given week, and is largely the reason why I started the whole monthly Ramble segment. That, and I wanted to try performing deeper dives into subjects that I feel strongly about and do not see discussed by people better and smarter than me.
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So this past week I began another engagement with a CPA, wherein I aid him in various tax related activities while juggling my office job, grad school, personal time, and time spent making content for this quaint little site. It is a side job that pays well, and is rather pertinent to my interests as an accounting major, but it also represents yet another activity that impedes my ability to go through games or work on my own projects. It’s not ideal, and this week is a particularly hectic, since I am going into my part-time job today, on a Sunday, when the office is closed, because somebody thought it would be a nice treat if I went home early on Monday. I swear, I was mentally referencing last week’s header image for the past 5 days, stewing over how much I wish I had done everything sooner rather than later. Garf!
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So remember how I said that I purchased an audio mixer for my Switch? Yeah, that was a dumb idea, because as it turns out I could just have the audio from my Switch go into my computer via the microphone port and have that play back to me, but then I had to confront the horrors of ground loops, which ultimately led me to buying an isolator. All so I could most comfortably use the Switch, which is a nifty enough system, except for some weird oversights. So far it is just minor things like, why do I need to hold down the physical power button on the system and then select an option to turn the system off opposed to simply using a menu? Or why can’t I move around my game library or change the size of the icons. Seriously, this is stuff that Nintendo figured out years ago, and should be pretty basic to implement.
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By the time I have published this post, I have dragged myself through a 13 hour day of work and school, wherein my free time was spent feverishly catching up on the press events in a vain attempt to remain current with the news, before going to bed and spending the preceding morning catching up on everything before the next day of news picks up. It was a rush to get this post out, but as is always the case with E3, I would not have it any other way.
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With Pre-E3, or PRE3 as I like to call it, gearing up with the expected preamble of last minute announcement, showcases, and, of course, information leaks, I should probably inform everybody that I will not be able to cover E3 in my usual fashion. As you can see from the header image, my upcoming schedule will be rather busy during the first half of summer, and I will have very little free time. Heck, I doubt I will even get to watch any press conferences in full on Monday. I would complain, but this is how the world works, and those who take umbrage with it have many colorful ways of separating themselves from it.
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Ever since I started working part-time in 2014, that part time work quickly became full time, or at least close to full time, whenever I happened to have a break from school. Spring break has meant that I work for a full week, winter break rounds out to a full month, excluding holidays and half days, and summer amounts to, well, near full time work for several months, where the projects just keep on coming. I’m not complaining about this, I just find it odd how a “break” to me now means that I wind up working more than I would otherwise.
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So, I recently made my appointment for facial feminization surgery, and as it turns out, I will be using approximately all of my money outside of my IRA to pay for it. Because of this, I will not be doing as I originally planned, and I believe referenced in a prior Rundown, and purchase a Nintendo Switch for my recuperation period. I will also be taking a hiatus beginning in mid-December and lasting until sometime in January. I take pride in how I have maintained a constant weekly review schedule for the past two years, but I will need to break it, on account of my face being reformed into something prettier. (more…)
Over the past week, I was able to finally do something that was approximately 18 years in the making. I was able to catch each and every officially released Pokemon. With 721 unique monsters in my Pokemon Bank, and the newly introduced 79 all organized neatly in my copy of Pokemon Moon, I now have access to all 800 Pokemon, and feel immensely satisfied by that fact. I may not be the very best, like no one ever was, but I’ve completed my real test to catch them all and I’ve followed my case to train them. I travelled across the lands, searching far and wide. I now understand each Pokemon and the power that’s inside. (more…)
So, I’m currently replaying Final Fantasy XIII, because I felt I had unfinished business with that game, and I am thoroughly amazed that the creators were able to tolerate their creation. As a writer, there is so much about this game’s story that drives me nuts, and I cannot believe that 65 million was invested into such a lackluster story. That, and the gameplay’s auto battle system simply does not work as it is told to— I’ll save it for the review proper, for now, The Game Awards and the Playstation Experience both happen, so here is a rundown of some of those things. (more…)
I’m not sure how often I’ve brought this up, but I think that Free to Play games were among the worst things to happen to the industry in recent years, and there have been a lot since I got in this industry’s intestines, mostly the large one, where poop is dried out, around 2006. But after reading this little piece by somebody who has been getting neck deep in whale blood as his employers tried to manipulate individuals with mental problems for the sexiest thing in the mortal world, Kentucky granola, also known as USD, I feel I have an opportunity that I shall not waste, if only because I love the line and it is mostly true. Free to play games were a mistake; they’re nothing but trash. I hope they are outlawed by 2033, when the Great African War begins and half of it is destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Buy War Bonds in preparation of the war to end all wars! (more…)
I am not in the mood to write an intro right now. I am hindered from a lack of sleep, am finishing up this semester of school, and am trying to get myself to edit A Vile Doohickey, when I keep on searching for distractions. I’ll edit chapter five after this goes public, so… here is an unimportant blurb about two mid-sized events in the video game industry.
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Okay, so this whole Zoe Quinn, Phil Fish, JonTron, “Gamer” validity, Journalism Debate, thing that apparently has been dubbed #Gamergate by some dolt, which I think will result in 37 murders, 7,208 layoffs, and 72 company deaths, has been going on, and I’ve lost track of what the hell is happening. All I really gathered was in the form of 4Chan deciding to fund a game made entirely by women, and creating the character of Vivian James, who I will end up using the design of in something I have yet to properly outline. She will probably have a Di-Sword or some shit. Oh, and thanks to TotalBiscuit for keeping a calm head about the situation and making this peachy keen blog post. But let’s not talk about that and instead, let’s just talk about VA-11 HALL-A a bartending sim about “waifus, technology, and the hard lives of post-dystopia citizens”. If it was on the Humble Store and had a Steam Greenlight page, it would already have my $8. Seriously though, check it out! (more…)
You know what I learned by looking into my blog’s metrics? It is the most beneficial for page views if I talk about games that are a year to three years old, as they tend to get the most traffic from me due to the internet algorithms. That is not what I am reviewing Binary Domain, curiosity and a $3.75 price tag did that. Not that I would justify it for much more than that, with my reasoning being listed below.
