Yo readers. My name's Tayne, and I'm your latest dancer. Wait, I mean my name's Big D and I'm here with another grade AYYY blogposting experience that will rock your socks gently to sleep and kiss them goodnight, so buckle up, buckle down, and prepare for a trip to wordston-upon-web with your favourite letter-arranger, the one, the hypothetically only, the man who can't be stopped, topped, bopped or flopped, and that's official: D, for devilishly hansom, E for Everyone's favourite, V for Veritably superior, I for Insatiably intelligent, N for Never does wrong, and ! to add flourish, it's ya boi: DEVIN!
Oh that that reminds me, in an effort to add some structure and consistency to this blogs, as well as 'content', I decided I'm going to write a bit about the games I played each month. I kind of did that anyway, but now it's OFFICIAL, and should water down the ranting and memestealing.
So, with only a customary level of further ado, here, for your eyes only, is Devin's official: THINGS I DID DO ON THE GAMES DURING THE LAST 3-5 WEEKS THAT I CAN STILL REMEMBER AT TIME OF WRITING SPECIAL EDITION REVIEW QUANTUM BOOGALOO. With your special guest: Devin!
Just wanted to check if this blog post had any content in it so far... Nothing on the scanner... Excellent. Engage content Mr. Devin! Aye Lmao sir!
Actual channel news continues below this section!
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This month I played: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Frostpunk and Star Ocean: Second Evolution.
In Metal Gear Solid I wanted to relive the half-remembered twists to see if they were as weird as I remembered. Yeah they pretty much were! I also encountered the nice before-it's-time rant about how the internet would cause a massive build up of false or useless information in our records, and make everyone live in gated bubbles with their own truths. Hey I found it on YT, it's in here:
I remember people talking about this scene recently, since it seems prophetic of problems that are getting more serious ten years after this game was made. Kojima you cheeky magic man you.
Anyway, it's a pretty cool and arty game, while also being a completely ridiculous spy-thriller full of jokes and forth-wall breakages. Definitely a unique product! I really liked the music for some reason. Sneaky-action themes need to be played in public spaces to increase tension. Someone just crawl between your legs? Or what it Just Your Imagination™?
Frostpunk was given to me a kind gift from youtube user C.H., who deftly noticed that I hated all video games and recommended that this one would restore my faith. And yeah, it did, up until...
Frostpunk is, on the face of it, a city builder with a coldness theme. You're in late 19th century Britain during a sudden ice age, and you need to make a city that can survive in the cold. Due to some monumental hiccup, the main way people have decided to keep warm is to try and heat air with huge coal-burners placed in the arctic circle. You build your city in the column of warm air produced by 24/7 coal wastage, never working out that putting a god-forsaken roof up might stop all that air being swept into the -70 degree surroundings.
I think MAYBE it's meant to be like a boiler, and it's making hot water? It doesn't appear to work like that, since you aren't pumping things and it has a very limited range, suggesting that indeed people just want to live near a hot thing to stay warm. It's probably a case where the idea, or the game mechanic, came first, then the story / practicalities of it were long, compromised afterthoughts. I have some of those in my game too, wahey!
Anyway, it's a fun little game where you balance resources and collection rates to try and advance through a tech tree before a time limit runs out, with things getting colder and colder. Your people can easily die, and overall its actually quite a depressing game on account of its hopeless tone: the situation is just constantly getting worse (i.e. colder) and as a player you have no idea what is causing it or whether it will stop, so really you have to carry yourself through the game with the promise that something good will come of your plans.
The massive problem with the game (spoilers ahead) is that there is actually nothing at the end of it. Once you unexpectedly finish the game, you realise that it was a lot more simple that you were led to believe as you went along; all you have to do is not lose, which means all the efforts made to future-proof your city, improve standards of living and stockpile materials are actually not required. The game ends after about 5 in-game weeks, and it ends with a full stop, not revealing what happened in the plot or what happened to your city. Just a plain old message saying 'you survived' before you get kicked back to the main menu, which for a game that appeared quite deep and had so much freedom was just a real let down. Most of what you did was meaningless, and the fate of your city is equally unknown whether you scraped by, or passed with flying colours (WHICH I DID GUYS I'M GOOD AT GAMES).
I was ready for more! Especially annoying is an event towards the end where you choose between losing 90% of your coal production or sacrificing some of your population. I went sacrifice, because losing 90% production would doom the city, but in reality this event is on the final day of the game so if you had enough coal to last that long, which you probably did, it was a sacrifice for nothing due to the game just ending with the state of your city being irrelevant. Salty salty salty man.
But yeah, while actually playing it I had fun, but each of the three scenarios had abysmal non-endings that angered me greatly. The only upside is that the achievements were glitched so I got loads that I didn't actually earn, including the one for 'save all Arks' when I actually lost all of them due to not knowing what the semi-secret condition for saving them REALLY was *SUPPRESSED ANGRY GAME DESIGN RANT*.
Finally I played/am playing Star Ocean: The Second Evolution for the PSP. It's a remake of a game of a similar name for the PS1, which was mentioned in my 'most influential games' list last time. Upon playing it I discovered that most of things that I remembered as being influential about it WEREN'T IN THE GAME AT ALL and were actually from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. So yeah, that section was just great blogging all around.
It's a nice little jrpg that would be literally unplayable by today's standards if it wasn't for emulators allowing the game speed to be increased. Conversations are very slow due to massive delays in between lines being read (a jrpg tradition for some reason), and these are slowed down further by the use of little thought bubbles with symbols (e.g. a question mark) that appear in between lines with a long animation. I played it for about ten minutes before resorting to the 800% speed thing on the emulator, firing it in bursts after each line to skip to the next one. This also skips most of the moving around the linear-ish maps so you can focus on the battles, which are quite good I think.
It's a weird story that combines the most generic, trite and boring jrpg stories with cool, weird-ass sci-fi ideas which are woefully underplayed. I ranted about all this already last time, so I'll just leave it at that... DOUBLE SLASH! Oh but you can craft books your characters write and get them published, that's a neato™ thing!
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Okay lemmie tell you what I've been up to on my high quality youtube channel. I've been playing Star Wars Empire at War badly and giving commentary on it, much to the annoyance of people who are good at it. More of that still to come, where the tables turn and it actually becomes way too easy once I realise how to play it. My classic problem of not being bothered to finish a game has struck here: now that I know how to play it, I am so sure that I will be able to do the rest of the game without trouble that I don't want to actually go through the hassle of proving it. But since the series will probably benefit from a rounded ending, I suppose I will try.
Speaking of endings, I've been working on the ending for Barbarian Masters! Was going to be a half hour special narrative episode... but... Now it's an hour special narrative episode! The script is written, with about 50% of recorded and like 5% edited. No idea how long it will actually take to make, since editing things can take such a variable amount of time. The first 5 minutes have already eaten a good 6 hours, and with something like 12-15 hours a week available to work on it, it might end up taking forever. But I think it's a descent enough ending that won't disappoint too many people.
Probably going to end up having most of the video just be near-static shots of scenery while I read my little story, since most of the stuff that happens can't be at all represented in the game. Kind of lame, but I've written it now and there's no time to go back!
I've also been filming some more TIC of course! Steambot Chronicles has just started its release, and it's probably going to be a long one with 20+ episodes. I've played the whole thing and edited like 16 episodes from what I filmed so far, and at this point you just can't stop me.
In an attempt to have a similar experience, I played another weird and whimsical jrpg about a theater group in 1920s New York who fight crime in giant robots. It's an all-singing all-dancing semi-visual novel thing with a legitimate Southern Belle™ character, fabulous outfits and a flashy combat system. At first I didn't really like it, but the unrelenting campness is too much to resist, so I'll probably play some more and see if I can make anything of it. The part when Manhattan transformed into a giant rainbow crossbow that shoots your zeppelin at the statue of liberty to battle a magical evil clown helicopter robot thing made my realise that this game wasn't messing around. More girls to romance weirdly as well, which is just the best thing of course! 10 internet points to anyone who can tell me what the game is from my description of it.
Aaand as I have been doing for months now I continue to do narration and light editing for Kings and Generals, the internet's nearly-foremost history documentary channel! The quality of the productions there has just been going up and up. I particularly enjoyed the recent ones about the Incas, so if you like my voice and you like history, look that shizz up. I was also thinking just today that I should try and force my voice into some indie video games or something. British characters are all the rage, so there's gotta be some random group that will need my cheap-ass voice. Will probably go look into that once I've sprinkled meme dust over this post...
If you were wondering what will replace barbarian masters, the answer right now is: I HAVE NO IDEA. That's on mental block right now because I think it will be a hard decision to make. Maybe Ancient Empires. I just don't want to actually play anything, let alone go dedicate hundreds of hours to a video series about it. WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
Okay see ya next time.
OH YEAH I PLANTED CARROTS BUT THEY MOSTLY DIED AND I JUST FINISHED TILLING THE SOIL AGAIN SO MAYBE NEXT TIME IT WILL WORK.