Pokémon wasn't the only bombshell trailer to drop today. Much earlier, Capcom released a new trailer for Mega Man 11, which they announced late last year. I fucking LOVE Mega Man, so I am absolutely hyped for this game. The trailer I'm pertaining to can be watched below: Thoughts:
Well shit, if I wasn't excited before, I sure as hell am now. After Capcom spent YEARS ignoring Mega Man, we're finally gonna see the Blue Bomber kick some ass in a brand new game. I hope 11 does well, because that means Capcom will be enticed to make more Mega Man games, and that's a very good thing.
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Amidst the brouhaha of today's Pokémon news avalanche, there's one announcement that NO ONE expected: a free-to-play game on the Switch that comes out– wait, it's ALREADY out? I've only played a couple of hours of Pokémon Quest as of this writing, but I thought I'd give some of my first impressions on the game. Oh, and it you have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, here's the reveal trailer: BACKGROUND:
I found out about the game the same way everyone else did, but as an added bonus, I actually woke up to the news, so that made today rather exciting. PRESENTATION: The first thing you'll notice is the voxel-like blocky graphics. It's a neat aesthetic reminiscent of the Pixelmon mod for Minecraft. It looks very nice in general, and playing this on the TV first really brought that thought home for me. GAMEPLAY: You have a team of three Pokémon, and they run around automatically slaughtering all the inhabitants of a given level. They have an basic auto-attack, plus one or two skills that you yourself activate that are either attacks, buffs, or debuffs. Each skill has a cooldown, so you can't spam that shit. If you are familiar with Xenoblade Chronicles, the combat is exactly like that, except it's super simplified. Playing through the levels nets you ingredients that you use to cook meals. These meals, after doing a set number of missions, lure in Pokémon that you can then add to your party. There are many different recipes that attract different kinds of Pokémon, so when recipe guides inevitably go up on the Internet (i.e. Serebii), it would serve you well to look those up. It's essentially a convoluted gacha mechanic. As with many free-to-play games, it's got a stamina system, and the recharge for this one is a whopping 30 minutes, similar to Pokémon Shuffle. If you're grinding for items/XP, this will likely piss you off. Speaking of grinding, it seems like there's gonna be a lot of that in this game, but mostly for leveling up your Pokémon. Some areas have strong enemies in them, and it may take you a while to raise your team up to take those on. Thankfully, they're slightly more generous with items. as there's a quest system that rewards you with shit as you play on. Strengthening your Pokémon is a lot more than just grinding, however. There's an item in the game called Power Stones (not to be confused with the Infinity Gem), which you can equip to a Pokémon to raise either their HP or Attack (the main stats in the game). Some have extra perks like increased HP recovery or crit boosts, and others are equipped to a Pokémon's move to increase damage/reduce cooldown/etc. Beating areas, along with rewarding you with items, nets you a statue that you can decorate your home base with. Aside from adding a very bare-bones Animal Crossing gimmick to the game, the statues have passive effects and help level up your Pokémon, increase the encounter chance of certain Pokémon, etc. The microtransactions are entirely for buying in-game currency, which, unlike Pokémon Rumble World (fuck that game), this game doesn't seem to be stingy with giving out. It's mostly used to purchase more statues and expand your space for Power Stones and Pokémon. This is a minor thing for me, but is important enough to point out: there's a good amount of loading screens. Just keep that in mind. VERDICT: Most free-to-play games live and die by how much fun they are as time-killers, and Pokémon Quest fits that bill for me. It's a super simple, mostly hands-free experience that'll keep you occupied for five minutes or something, so expect nothing too compelling to really hook you in. Pokémon Quest is free-to-play currently on the Nintendo Switch eShop, and is coming to both iOS and Android in a future, currently unknown date. - end - If you're a Pokémon fan like me, chances are you know how exciting this day has been. This morning, The Pokémon Company dropped a TON of news from out of nowhere, with the main attraction being the reveal of the Pokémon Let's Go games. I'm gonna talk about some stuff in the trailer that caught my eye and add some overall thoughts. If you're out of the loop, go watch the trailer below first. My thoughts in a neat bullet list:
While this may not be the game the hardcore group wanted (chill the fuck out, people; we'll get ours next year anyway), this is a PERFECT entry-point game for casuals and new fans alike. I absolutely cannot wait to see more of this game/play it, and let's hope that Gen VIII game blows everyone away,
- end - I just finished my playthrough of Hacknet, and while I've already left a review on Steam, I thought of writing a more properly-structured one on here. BACKGROUND: I knew nothing about this game until I saw it for free on Humble Bundle this morning. I had nothing better to do today, so I went ahead and downloaded it. PLOT: A hacker named Bit has died, and unraveling the mystery falls to you. You join a group of white-hat hackers, and as you go about discovering the circumstances of Bit's death, you complete a bunch of hacker contracts, many of which present scenarios that deal with issues pertinent to computer security, especially in this day and age. I'm a Computer Science major, and I can appreciate the game tackling such scenarios, and it is my hope that other people playing this game (especially those not-so-versed in the ins and outs of computer security) learn a thing or two. PRESENTATION: It's a hacking game. You get a command prompt. What more do you want? On a serious note, there is indeed not much to write home about when it comes to visuals. However, it's not just a plain-ass command prompt; there are visuals and some clickable elements that make the game easier (e.g. you can just click on a circle in the "network" to connect to a PC as opposed to typing out "connect [IP address]", you can just click about in a directory opening folders instead of typing "ls" like 700 times). The music, to me, was an unexpected surprise. There are a couple of great tracks in there, and since the Humble Bundle came with the soundtrack, I may just go ahead and add them to a "doing stuff" playlist. If you're intrigued, you can go on Spotify and give the entire OST a listen! GAMEPLAY: If, for some reason, the title "Hacknet" hasn't clued you in, the bulk of the game is hacking. You type shit in the command prompt, some shit happens, the game progresses. Admittedly, not a lot of variety, and there isn't much introduction of new mechanics, but it's still fun. You'll definitely feel like a real Guy in the Chair/Felicity Smoak/Oracle while playing this game. The great thing about the hacking in this game is that while many elements are simplified, there's a sense of accuracy put into the game. You use actual commands like "ls", "cat", and "cd" to move about directories and mess with files. It's not just like a lot of other games with hacking, where it's one press of a button and it's "BEEP BOOP BEEP I HACKED IT I'M SMART", or some weirdly unrelated puzzle (which, to be fair, I'm perfectly fine with; plus, this game has that, too). Another display of accuracy to real life in the game is that you have a limited amount of RAM to work with. You can't just run all the scripts at once; you have to wait or kill some processes. While some people may find this vexing, I didn't mind, though I think it's dumb that you only have like 700 MB of RAM to work with in the game. It's 2018; who the fuck has that little RAM? As mentioned before, the UI has a couple of elements like a graphical display and some clickables to help make gameplay easier, but you can play this game almost entirely on the command prompt. There's a healthy amount of hacking missions, and you don't need to play through all of them to get to the end, but none of them present an insurmountable amount of challenge (save for a number of them that are time-sensitive and will screw you over if you're not a fast typer), so beating this game probably won't take long. If you're worried about replay value, there are custom missions on the Steam Workshop to satiate your appetite. VERDICT: It's not the most challenging game in the world, but Hacknet's congruence to the realm of hacking and the landscape of computer security makes it a game well worth playing through. If you're looking for a game that doesn't take long and requires very little in terms of dexterity (other than typing well, of course), then Hacknet may be worth your while. Plus, it's the perfect game to feel like this: Go get the game on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/365450/
Listen to the killer soundtrack here: https://open.spotify.com/album/6vKaTpEfIxe39EkoGlUv9i - end - After waiting several months for Orphan Black's fifth and final season to drop on Netflix PH, I finally got around to binging it last night. While I'm very late to the party, here are some of my thoughts on S5.
Unlike games, I don't really know how to write in-depth reviews of shows/movies. I usually know what to look for in a game, whilst for shows or movies, I just tend to ramble about what stands out to me. With that said, I think the format that works best for me with these kinds of entries is a simple bulleted list. WARNING: I get into spoiler territory. Read on if you had made peace with this fact. I just finished my playthrough of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap on the Nintendo Switch. Normally, I'd just create a Twitter thread of some of my thoughts on the game, but since I started this blog, I thought, why not try writing a full-fledged review?
BACKGROUND: The reason I know about this game is because I saw one of my favorite Twitch streamers play the game during its initial release last year. It looked like a fun platformer with a great art style, so I added it to my Steam wishlist for future reference. I also looked more into the game (mostly finding out who the devs were) and discovered that it's actually a remake of a game that came out on the Sega Master System in 1989. As of this writing, I have yet to look into the original game series (The Dragon's Trap was apparently the third game of the original Wonder Boy series). When I discovered that the game was being ported to the Switch, I decided to spring for that version instead, and bought it as soon as it went on sale. PLOT: The game's got a pretty basic story: you're a brave warrior, and you beat up monsters. This is a game from 1989, after all; I wasn't expecting an Iliad-caliber epic. As I mentioned before, this was the third game in the Wonder Boy series, so I can only assume this title continues a narrative that I know nothing about. Considering the game drops you in what feels like an endgame-type scenario at the very beginning, I feel there is weight to this assumption. PRESENTATION: As I pointed out earlier on, the art style is what drew me into the game. It's not on a Wind Waker-level, immediately-catch-your-eye level of aesthetic, but its cartoony look is gorgeous nonetheless. The visuals are complemented by enjoyable music. While no particular track really stood out to me as noteworthy, it's by no means terrible. What's interesting about this game is, while you can choose to enjoy it as it is presented, you have the option to switch both the graphics and the music to the original 16-bit art style and the retro chiptune sounds. I personally didn't make use of it all that much (other than to do a quick compare-and-contrast), but hey, it's there if you're interested. GAMEPLAY: Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap's main gimmick is the player character's ability to transform into other creatures. Your character can transform into a fire-breathing lizard, a mouse, a piranha (that's what the game calls it; that thing looks more like the Creature from the Black Lagoon), a lion, and a hawk. Each of these creatures have different attack and defense stats, some have unique attack animations, and others have unique traversal mechanics that allow you to get past certain obstacles. Knowing who does what is paramount in succeeding at this game. The majority of the game's combat is about what you expect from a retro platformer: spam attack and stab the shit out of what's in front of you. However, this game adds a small layer of depth with its consumable items. These range from an upwards arrow shot, a fireball, an AoE lightning strike, etc. These power-ups are dropped randomly by killing enemies, or can be obtained as treasure/bought in shops. You can get by without using them, but if you do rely on them, you need to be wary about resource management, because we all know how cruel RNG is. On the subject of RNG, I hope you like coins, because that's the majority of enemy drops in this game. Sometimes you'll get the occasional heart to restore your health, or a power-up, but mostly you'll be getting coins. Thankfully, coins are useful in this game, and can be used to pay for health restores (like how one heals in Castlevania 2), potions (that act like Zelda fairies and only heal you once you're down to zero), and equip items (swords, armor, and shields) which increase your attack and defense stats + grant you special abilities. These equip items give different stat boosts depending on what character transformation you're currently using, so one needs to pay attention and not just equip shit haphazardly. There's not a wide variety of levels, and there aren't many branching paths, so if you're looking for a Metroidvania-caliber world size, this may not be your style. Nonetheless, I found the levels interesting to look at, and there's a good amount of nooks and crannies to find secrets in. There's a healthy variety of enemies, each mildly infuriating to deal with in their own special way. Their difficulty is denoted in their color, so if you see a blue version of an enemy you've already encountered, keep your guard up. The bosses are all dragons themed according to the levels you find them in (for the most part, anyway), and while they're not too difficult to deal with when you're adequately equipped with good gear, you can get stun-locked in a rather infuriating fashion if you're not careful. Taking damage in this game is strange, because while you may have invincibility frames, your character will still react to enemies/enemy fire normally, and give you knockback regardless. I found this mildly frustrating at times, so bear this in mind. Beating the game allows you to play as the human character, who has the best stats out of all the character transformations. Other than completing the game 100%, there's not much else afterwards. Of course, you're free to start anew and beat the game on Hard mode. VERDICT: While the game's not that expansive (any% took me about six hours; I've no estimate on a completionist run), and there's some RNG reliance and weird stun-lock to deal with, Wonder Boy: A Dragon's Trap is a short, but sweet platforming experience. It has some interesting mechanics, great visuals, and surprisingly challenging enemies. If you're looking for a quick platformer to beat on a weekend, this is worth a look. The game is available on all current-gen consoles, and can be bought on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/543260/Wonder_Boy_The_Dragons_Trap/ - end - Well, shit. After years of being on the fence about it, I decided to start a proper blog. Damn it, what am I even going to put on here that I haven't already said on Twitter? Oh well, guess I'll have to figure it out as I go along.
If you're here, a) why?, and b) you're probably wondering what I'll talk about, or how often I'll update this space. For the first question: whatever comes to mind. If you know me, I have a weird set of interests, so a lot of the content I'll be rambling about will likely be about those things. I likely won't talk about anything else, so if you're not into that, there's the door (or you can stay here and bitch about it; I don't care). As for the second question, I have a more definitive answer: I'll try to write something at least once a week. The key word here is "try". If I miss an entry in a given week, leave me the fuck alone. This is just an experimental hobby for me; it's not my career. To end this inaugural post, I ought to leave some disclaimers:
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