This Week’s Topics:
Wherein I discuss the biggest acquisition in the history of video games, the speculated evils of the metaverse, a potential end of an electronic expo, some terrible brick crunching, and the glory of unionization!
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Wherein I discuss my pursuit to the grave, the glory of backwards compatibility, a game where you can play as a pig who can transform into rockets, Activision perpetuating evil from the very top, a cynical crossover clash, and a response to a most “Definitive” failure.
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Wherein I discuss the legal revelation of a clash of industry titans, the continued consolidation, and a tool for the next generation of game devs.
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Wherein I discuss the horse women, an assassination attempt, NFTs (again), a revenue turnaround, and the guns formerly known as toys.
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Wherein I discuss genital electrocution, the consolidation of gamindustri, how propriety memory is always a mistake, the shift from Zero to the Future, a new challenger in this era of platform wars, and a curious compilation of classic titles.
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Wherein I discuss a problematic power paradigm, Smash getting the win-win, a massive temporal rewrite, the end of a mixer, the continued battles fo the EDF, a new digital expo, China’s budding influence, and the Bandai Namcos.
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I think I’ve mentioned this before, but throughout primary school I was not allowed to take regular English classes for reasons I still don’t fully understand. I did not really mind it at the time, but I regularly wonder if I would be a better writer if I had been permitted to take regular classes. I bring this up because I recently fell down a rabbit hole of some of my old writing on this site, and found it to be rife with minor mistakes I either did not catch the first time, or did not know any better back then. It makes me wonder if I am still a garbage writer and will always be, or if this is just a natural creative process, where one grows to dislike the work they did a few years prior, as I have seen that mentality pop up from time to time.
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This past week I’ve been wrapping up my review of Student Transfer V4.1, and in doing so I noticed just how much of this update deals with mental alterations and the chaotic events such changes can lead to. This in turn caused me to realize that, despite never really seeking this sort of thing out, I am actually somewhat fascinated by the concept of information being added, removed, or replaced in one’s mind, and seeing the ensuing results. While I have seen a fair share of media depicting identity death or mind breaks, a lot of ST’s more mental focused content has a tinge of uniqueness to it that honestly gets my creative juices flowing, and is something that I hope to eventually work into some of my future novels… which I really ought to get back to working on. Oh life, why do you insist on keeping me so gosh danged busy?
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About two weeks ago I started playing through Bayonetta, a title that I have tried multiple times in the past, yet struggled to get into due to my ineptitude when it comes to ‘real’ action games and obsessive personality traits that are triggered based on hyper specific criteria. Or in other words, I positively suck at the game, but also wanted to go through the game while doing two very specific things. Get high rankings from every encounter and get all of the collectibles. While I believe that the former is very possible if I were to play through the game on easy, difficulties below normal automatically give the player all the health and magic upgrades from the get-go, and that approach deeply bothers me. These are two incredibly petty things to hold against a game, but it left me unable to truly enjoy myself with the game, so for the fourth time in my life, I’ve given up on Bayonetta. Though if someone were to make an ‘auto-platinum’ mod, I would probably give it a proper playthrough.
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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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After writing for pleasure for about 7 years now, I have learned a lot, and developed my skills considerably, though even with a plethora of writing experience behind me, I still have some bad writing habits (though I don’t really know what they are), and the act of putting my thoughts into words in a semi-articulate manner still takes me longer than I would like. While I have gotten good at the college approach of squirting out papers with relative quickness, for a lot of personal pieces that flood this site, I regularly struggle when describing or wording certain things, and have been known to spend several hours rewriting parts of a review. I’m not sure if this is just a deficiency on my end, or if this is due to how I often write whenever I have the time, and not necessarily when I am in the right mindset. But regardless of the reason, I’m not going to get discouraged and I’ll never give up the fight!
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So, those who have followed my work for any amount of time would have inevitably picked up on clues that I am, to an extent, quite privy to certain concepts such as TG, body swapping, possession, and to a lesser extent whatever narratively flexible and interesting concepts that have been hued by the billowing fetish community. But lately I feel that whatever part of me that would obsess over these things has been steadily and slowly fading away.
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So lately I have been trying to determine the metrics that can determine whether or not I personally would be interested in a game, partially inspired by certain things I have been doing as part of my master’s program, and determining incremental value-relevance of financial and non-financial measures. Riveting stuff, I know. Basically, when thinking about metrics I stumbled onto how many games can be divided into experiences that are either progression or performance driven.
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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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So, after thirteen months of dev time, the latest build of Student Transfer has been released, and going through it has become my first priority. I should have a review of the game up around the 14th, but more importantly, I have to work on another flowchart for the game. While I do enjoy mapping out a complicated series of choices in a visually appealing manner, this build seems particularly… nasty in the sheer spectrum of its choices. I mean, I honestly had to go into the game’s files just to figure out how the heck it all works.
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E3 has begun, and thankfully the duties have been spread apart this year, with the previously mostly vacant Sundays are now being used by two major press conferences. Meaning that I only have three more to go after pushing out this post right at the cusp of midnight because Bethesda thinks it is good to have a press conference at 9 PM PST. Also, the title of this post is not a lie. I do more work per day during the Monday and Tuesday of E3 than I do during any other time during the year. Especially this year, as I have to work and attend class while E3 is going on. Anyways, on with the rundown. (more…)
There is a lot of content to cover, so let’s jump right into it. A rundown detailing the E3 2016 presentations of Microsoft, PC Gamer and AMD, Ubisoft, and Sony. There’s a stupid amount of content to cover, and simply getting all of this done in one day has proved to be quite the challenge. So let’s go! (more…)
I should probably bring up how Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5 is quite the turd of a game from what I can tell. With a Metacritic of 36 on the PS4 and a… 48 on XBO? I thought that the XBO version wouldn’t work for some people because the game is so terribly made and needs a patch bigger than the game itself to, presumably, even run. Bad framerate, textures, physics, and general game feel all make it a title that will likely just be an ash can project made to renew a license that Activision probably only spent a few million making and shat out the door six months too early… Not that I really care about the series though, I just like the soundtracks of the first four games and that’s it. (more…)
Well, next week I’m starting school again, and I am honestly kinda bummed about that. Not because I dislike school or anything, as Highschool involved me going to classes with teachers I liked, doing homework in between, and then fucking off to write stuff for this very blog. It was great. But last year, when I began college, I was met with one okay semester, and one semester I remember nothing of, the one I remember nothing of, and learned nothing from, was my previous one. Oh, I did learn things, such as just because a person have a form of pedigree and are a novelist doesn’t mean they can’t be a disturbingly stupid person. Oh, and this semester I’m taking classes I’m taking for credits, and I know I will dislike the majority of the them with the other one being a class I can thankfully do with my sister, which should be kinda neat. So in conclusion, I would rather be in High School again, even if I had to get up at seven, and have started classes on August fifth. Just give me two days off so I may work at an office. (more…)
It is rather pointless for a little slice of nowhere blog with only a small number of views to do a summarization of the E3 press events, especially when they were not watching them live due to real life events, such as work. But I got home to catch the latter two, and catch up with the former before Nintendo did their event and managed to get everything done before Tuesday’s end… well after everybody and their brother did their own version of this, and often far better than my assorted ramblings that are made all the dumber by the insertion of anime screencaps. It’s Nigmabox’s third annual Super E3 Rundown!
Okay, another short week, and then a week with a good amount of news that I wasn’t particularly interested in. I can make a post out of that, I think! Just as long as I don’t need to talk about them new Call of Duty features. Though, the infographic and ability to finally use a female character are worth noting if only for how big this series has become, and how long it took before them Fem-models were thrown in.
Another week, another batch of news, and another few days of me making minimal progress on my review backlog, while dragging my feet with my novellas. Let’s talk about them there video glumps!
Soft Served News! The greatest time between E3 and Comic-Con, where jack often happens. To remedy this dry season storming in, I’ll talk about the most minor of things that I can justify putting in here. Like the hard to interpret possible reversal of Nintendo’s Let’s Play monetization scheme… Nah, I’ll find something else.
It’s a weird feeling to have all three consoles of the seventh generation behind me, namely in the form of a Playstation my friend lent me so I could play The Last of Us and talk about it for days on end. But I’m also typing this while listening to a fandub of an anime intro where one of the first lines is, “Be gentle, this is my first time.” And am a few minutes away from rewriting the introduction of a Gimpsuited twelve year old boy with a vagina because I think it’s funny… This is my life, and I adore every aspect of it! (more…)
Well Microsoft, now I’ve got to publish something where I got annoyed at your bullcrap. Oh no, I’ve got some words to say about their change in tone, but I’m not going to invalidate three paragraphs! I wanted a smooth week after E3, but nope! Here is what I wrote, thrown out to the dogs as it is already rotting.
Who do I need to scrub like a stain for Having the majority of E3 conferences cram up one single day? Personally, I am starting college today with a summer session. Leaving when Microsoft begins their talks, and coming back when EA begins. However, I managed to watch all the press conferences and give my impressions. So I’ll just leave this here and sleep up as I regret being a bit outrageous with my emotions because I’m just so overwhelmed with the feels! (more…)
Well, this week in the Videospiele was dominated by a single entity, their name Microsoft, or Micro$oft, Micro$hit, or, the one I made, Microsense. And even though I already gave my thoughts on the reveal, the world is set on this Xbone thingie, so I’ll be going on a massive tirade after the more contemporary going ons. (more…)
The world was his oyster, or at least that’s what he always said. Running around the country for 25 years, twice his expected life span. No one cared or noticed, he was just a stray mutt. Still, he bounced between owners, shelters, and even demonstrated his powers in the war. He was effectively a monster who would bite your dick off even after taking some buck to the ass. He never had a proper name, I just call him boss, the leader of the Diamond Dogs… It was either that or, “I know she’s got a booty, and damn is it a cutie, so I’ll go, back it up like a dump truck, gotta get it in and pump-” Which while fun, I prefer writing about immortal dogs biting off knobs, oh and video games.
Let’s make this a dozen and keep this doom train roaring through the great plains of Acirema, the lands of the deities’ kin, and their devoured corpses. Falling from the sky for weeks before landing and altering the land with the fertile moist soil! Let’s make a cake to celebrate the- What am I talking about? I’ve got game news for this rag of an industry.
