MIDI Week Singles: "Simon Belmont's Theme" - Super Castlevania IV (SNES)

 

"Simon Belmont's Theme" from Super Castlevania IV on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Composer: Konami Kukeiha Club
Album: Super Castlevania IV Original Game Soundtrack & Akumajo Dracula Best 2
Label: Mondo & Konami
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami

I almost wanted to not use this track because of how much I love this song, but I decided to ultimately feature it because it is just that damn good.  I writes good.

Super Castlevania IV was the eighth game in the series to be released (including the arcade's Haunted Castle and the MSX Vampire Killer) and this would be the fifth game to feature Simon Belmont as a playable character (after Castlevania, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and the aforementioned games) so it would have been easy for Konami to want to use a previously composed musical number for both the opening level theme and/or for Simon Belmont's theme.  Instead, Konami Kukeiha Club (this time being comprised of Masanori Adachi and Taro Kudo) composed an entirely new theme.

Any song that features an organ as the primary carrier of the melody with a bass line that is that awesome is going to be.

Also, the structure of this song is a little odd.  Maybe.  There's the main melody (A) that repeats twice, there's the keyboard and bass vamp (B) that repeats twice, followed by another sub-melody on the organ (C), followed up by the organ fanfare  (D) that plays once, then the second bass and keyboard vamp with organ towards the end (E) then ends with the main melody playing twice.  So AABBCDEAA, which is why the main melody plays four times when you listen to the song being looped.  Maybe it is not odd and there is probably a musical definition for that somewhere.  Conklederp?

I do not know what I am actually trying to say with all of this.  This is a great song and what a way to help to make a formulaic game (because in 1991, this would be the seventh time you go out to kill Dracula in the last five years) so engaging.  This music is awesome.

Music is awesome.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Welcome To The Land Of Questions

P.S.

And maybe it is just me, because I do not have any evidence to back it up, but after the song repeats and begins looping again, at 1:39 when the melody is repeated for a second time during this second playthrough and each time after that (for a total of four times), it just seems louder to me.  This is something that I have heard since I first played the game some decades ago and until I look at the song in something like Audacity, I will always have that second iteration of the melody just a little bit louder.  Because that is the way my brain hears it.

Game EXP: The Sinking City: Deluxe Edition [Part II: The Good] (NS)

If you read my Part I article (Game EXP: The Sinking City: Deluxe Edition [Part I: The Bad & The Ugly])about The Sinking City: Deluxe Edition on Nintendo Switch, you very probably got the impression that I did not enjoy the game, that it was broken, an unfinished mess, and was a low-effort money grab by a studio that was not up to the challenge of creating a semi-open world Lovecraftian mystery game along with worthwhile DLC.  If that was what you took away from that article, along with the mentioning that I spent 70+ hours playing a game that I was not paid to but willingly played, then I apologize for giving the wrong impression and I am here to clear things up.

Is The Sinking City a great game?  No.  Is it a fun game?  Definitely, yes.

In The Sinking City, you play as Detective Charles Reed who is experiencing disturbing visions that lead him to the fictional town of Oakmont, Massachusetts being a city that six months prior experienced a flood that still impacts the city.  There are several elements that I feel like could have made the game just a little bit better, like more random NPCs that had dialogue amongst themselves recorded by more than one person, additional floorplans for buildings, greater end-of-quests events, and maybe an explanation as to why people use bullets as a form of currency and why can there not be a store where you can buy things?  Maybe.  But we are here to talk about all of the things that I enjoyed in the game.

What I figured out pretty early on in the game was that there was a steep learning curve in terms of the archives mechanic.  Knowing what information to take from a conversation or a scrap of newspaper and where to go with that could lead you to different conclusions depending on how you personally think about information.  Do you go to the local newspaper, The Oakmont Chronicle, to look up a previously published article?  Do you go to the Police Station to look-up police reports?  Or maybe to the archives at the Hospital of St. Mary to look up patient records?  There were several times that I did become confused as to where I needed to go, usually because my line of reasoning was different than what I actually needed to be looking up (City Hall versus the Police Station), but after completing a number of the main quests which walk you through this process on a number of occasions, introducing you to each place that has their own archive and what types of information can be found in each place, it was quite the rush to correctly figure out the deductions on my own.  After talking with the quest giver, going to the Oakmont Chronicle and looking up a District of Oakmont along with a particular time Period and cross-referencing that with the Advertisements Section to find out the location of a building (you are given the cross streets in the particular district) that was ruined during the flood and filed for insurance loss, is a pretty great feeling.

A lot of video games since Mass Effect have adopted morality-based decision making and with The Witcher series throwing the concept of not-quite-good and not-quite-evil choices in the players face, I was not surprised and actually thankful that some of the situations I found myself in were not black-and-white, but various shades of grey and puce.  Do I side with a gangster who is knee-deep into human trafficking so that I can get an informant out of the city, or do I side with a war hero who might be part of an eldritch cult who is vowing to clean up the mob scene in Oakmont and putting your informant at significant risk of retaliation?  Do you not interfere in a local election?  Do you side with a doctor who is experimenting on his subjects that borders on torture for the benefit of the citizens of not only Oakmont but the entire world?  In games like Skyrim and The Witcher series, there are times when I feel like Pollyanna going around and happily solving people's problems.   In The Sinking City, while there was some altruistic work performed by Reed, it just felt like you were delaying the inevitable until it became someone else's turn to deal with the situation.  At times Charles Reed was only a bandaid, and that felt pretty refreshing.

There were also a number of times when the story had what seemed like branching paths.  Questions asked by prominent NPCs with one of two options were asked, clues from crime scenes lead to one of two possible outcomes depending on how the evidence was interpreted, were a welcome mechanic.  There was even one case that allowed me to plant evidence on someone who was innocent of the crime they were accused of, but they themselves were a particularly bigoted person (who may or may not have been involved with the KKK; fine people on both sides and all that).  I have not played any games that I can recall that included this type of storytelling, but I assume that detective genre games like LA Noire or other games in the Sherlock Holmes repertoire from Frogwares probably include this type of storytelling device.  It was pretty great because I was agonizing about this decision, to follow the law, which Reed has sworn to do, or to make a decision based on morality.

The overall story felt fairly Lovecraftian in this sense, that this did not always feel like Charles Reed's story, but a story about a city that Charles Reed was caught up in.  There were several times that I felt that I was not so much beating enemies or saving the world, I was just surviving.  In one of the boss fights, your goal was just to survive while this cosmic horror lobbed projectiles at you and cultist tried to kill you.  You had no way of really harming this creature, you just had to dodge its attacks, collect your objective, and get out without dying.  The hook to get Reed to Oakmont felt a little flimsy at times (wanting to find out about his visions and having a contact in Oakmont who said they can help) and I do wish there was a little more in the way of interacting more with characters and exploring the backstory of some of the more prominent NPCs, but maybe that fits in with the idea that Reed is a pawn.  He is not supposed to find out everything little thing about every person.  Every person who appears in need of help may not actually want Reed's help, or when Reed does what he thinks is helping, people end up dead.  Which may or may not have happened.

And even if there were not as many additional scenes expanding on characters and the setting of Oakmont, there were plenty of scenes that offered nothing in the way of supplementary information.  You might be walking down the road and find a dead octopus inside a baby carriage.  On the second floor of a tenement building in the center of town, the body of an octopus and a tuna lay dead.  No passerby batting an eye at the woman crouched on the ground poking her hands into the long-dead and rotting carcass of shark.  It is little scenes like this that I feel were put into the game for the player to question not only what it is they are seeing, but why they are seeing it, as well as creating and maintaining a feeling of unease.  Sure it would be interesting to find out why this woman is nearly elbow-deep in the body of a deceased shark, but her story may not be interesting to everybody, so better to let the player have this image in their mind, developing their own conclusions five minutes after the fact.

As I reached the end of the game, I was kind of wanting to be finished, not because I was not having fun, but because all of the main stories were being funneled to a conclusion, although not being able to build up Reed's stats/skills anymore certainly played some part in that feeling.  And when I reached the end of the game, I was thankful that I could experience all three possible endings, albeit one-at-a-time.  There was the semi-good ending, the semi-bad ending, and the hands-off ending which ended up being my favorite, as it felt the most like an ending, both in a story sense, but also an ending that Lovecraft might have come up with, or at least something akin.

70 hours is how long it took me to beat The Sinking City and some combination of the Worshippers of the Necronomicon and Merciful Madness DLCs (all came bundled in the Deluxe Edition, which does not look like it is currently available anymore for the Switch), which is a decent amount of time to spend in a city running away from large bulbous creatures and skittering cats with crab-like arms.  And considering that this was Frog Wares' first semi-open-world game, I do hope that they take what they learned from this endeavor and that their next game(s) is more impressive because I know that I will be waiting.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I Want to Look Down When He's Screaming

P.S.

Here are some additional pictures that I couldn't fit into either Part I or II of this series.

This was pretty early on in the game, and I slowly noped my way out of this room.  After I may have accidentally reanimated the creature.

Can't really blame these creatures if they're also killing KKK members.

Oh you know, just riding in a boat up to a flooded graveyard.  Just your average Tuesday.

Game EXP: The Sinking City: Deluxe Edition [Part I: The Bad & the Ugly] (NS)

At the moment, this is a planned Part I of a two-part series looking at The Sinking City Deluxe Edition by Frogwares on the Nintendo Switch.  Part I is going to cover all of the critiques I had with the game, which is not to say that I didn't enjoy the game, and you will just have to read both parts to find out why I spent 70+ hours in a game that I obviously had some issues with.  But that is what we are here for, constructive criticism because I have never made a video game and it is easy to be on this side of things and be as critical as hell.  Also, if you haven't already, you can check out my First Impressions article from back in May.

[This article will not touch on, apart from this statement, the delisting, and troubles Frogwares has and are going through regarding The Sinking City.  For that information, I direct you to their own statement.]

This last weekend (in reality this was a couple of months back) I finished The Sinking City and played it on the Nintendo Switch for just over 70 hours.  I mention the 70 hours game length because when I started the game, HowLongToBeat has a completionist run at 30 hours, so I wanted to state right off the tentacle ladened bat that I took two-and-a-half times as long, which is something that I am perfectly okay with.  Possibly leading to my extended playtime was that I purchased the Deluxe Edition, which includes the Worshipers of the Necronomicon DLC and the Switch exclusive Merciful Madness DLC, but mainly because I rarely fast traveled and instead used the boats and the eldritch god-given legs to get Private Inspector Charles Reed to/from his destinations.  There are three other DLC packs, none of which seemed to be all that interesting, but I will get to those later.  Lastly, this article is going to be very critical of The Sinking City, not because I thought it was a bad game, but because I really did enjoy all 70+ hours, but that also gave me plenty of time to pick apart what I liked and where I thought that Frogwares could improve on this, their first foray into open-world games.

And that is where I am going to focus on today's article, my critiques of a game that I very much enjoyed.

After a few hours in and I had been exploring the city of Oakmont, Massachusetts, I began to feel that I had been in buildings and houses that I had never been in before.  I began to feel that I could anticipate the layout, where holes in the floor would be, where doors to other rooms were, where the staircases to either the basement (oh, nope, that staircase down has been flooded) or to the upper floors, or even where containers with loot and materials were located.  I realized that the developers were reusing building assets, and in some cases, the exact same building layout and what looked like the same set dressing for different buildings.  You could chalk this up to lazy development, although I liked to tell myself in my head canon that the town was planned and built by the same architect and developer and had not been updated since its inception some 100 years before.  This was the lie I would tell myself rather than believe that the frequent recycling of assets was due to Frogwares getting tired developing new assets or floorplans.

One of the more unique NPC interactions. This time, the white cop did
shoot the black man here but I did not hear any dialogue leading up to
the shooting.  The next time this interaction spawned, I pulled a gun on
the cop and both people ran away.

There were a couple of other aspects to the game that felt a little lackluster too, especially considering how much time I spent in this world.  Perhaps if I had not walked and boated everywhere and fast traveled it might not have been as obvious?  This had to do with the day-to-day operations of Oakmont.  As you jogged throughout the city, you would come across citizens going about their daily lives, although for a city of this size, there was very little to be heard as there seemed to be fewer than ten types of NPC citizen that had dialogue you would hear as you passed them by.  There was the fish barker, "Fresh fish! Just caught!"  There was the newspaperman "Paper, paper, read all about it!  Buy a paper mister?"  There was the person selling... something, "...cheaper than the rest."  Later in the game, there were two different politicians giving general pro-Oakmont statements.  The point is, there only seemed to be a few lines of NPC dialogue that would repeat regardless of who was saying it or where they were located.  If the newspaperman was an Innsmouther or and Oakmonter, the same audio file was used.  Then there was the doomsayer who I only recall finding in Salvation Harbor, being one of the harder-hit areas by The Flood, so that kind of made sense.  The other aspect that felt left by the wayside was that aside from a small barge you would come across in the flooded streets, there were no moving vehicles in the streets.  Yes, there were trollies and trains derailed, there were cars either up in flames presumably right after a crash, or left off to the side of the road.  But The Flood happened six months before the events in the game and it would have been nice to see at least some cars moving around the city.

Terrible Fetus was probably my favorite LoO case. Great atmosphere, the
the setting was somewhat unique and the set decoration was 100% unique.

When I purchased The Sinking City, I did spring for the Deluxe Edition, which contains the Worshipers of the Necronomicon and Merciful Madness DLC packs, but there was very little information as to what those three quests in each pack entailed.  What was even more confusing was where to find these DLC quests and how to activate them.  It was not until I was 20 hours into the game that I realized that I had already picked up one of the DLC quests, the Mystic Tomes quest being part of the WotN DLC that I believe I found by exploring one of the rooms in the Devil's Reef Hotel.  Then there was the Defunct Brain Cylinders quest that I found lying around the police station (I think?) and the Letters from Oakmont that was given to me by the owner of the Devil's Reef Hotel, but I could not tell you which DLC pack this questline belonged to.  While exciting to have side-quests to do, these essentially were mostly all fetch quests consisting of the following actions:

• Mark Map with Marker from Street Address on Case Description
• Arrive and Kill Wylebeasts
• Although in one instance there were no Wylebeasts which was creepier than actually having them around.
• Search house/building.
• Find the Tome/Brain Cylinder/Occult Object
• Gain Experience Points and Materials.

That was it.  There were no additional character interactions, no special items apart from costume/cosmetic changes.  Just a description, a location, and an item with a semi-obscure description that had no bearing on anything aside from gaining experience points and eventually Knowledge Points to bulk up the character.  I will say though that there was a unique creature at what was supposed to be the end of the Mystic Tomes quest, but since these can all be done out of order (in my case I just went to whichever one was closest to my current location), I ended up coming upon this mini-boss fight halfway through this quest-line.  And even when I finished the questlines, there was no fanfare, just text that I had completed the questline and received a lot more experience points.  And while one might argue that performing a thankless job plays well into this type of horror setting, it was a little disappointing.

All available DLC packs, and the ones I haven't purchased
in red. 

And then there are the three other DLC packs which do not seem all too useful.  There is the Chicago Organ Grinder which is just a skin for the eventual Tommy Gun that you earn in the last third of the game, which has confused some people who thought that you would start off the game with the Tommy Gun.  There is the Investigator Pack which gives you another costume change, which again is all purely cosmetic and does not translate to the cinematics, plus "permanent access" to both health and psychoactive health packs, which reads that you can have infinite health items, but that remains unclear to me, and would be significantly overpowered especially in the early game.  And last is the Experience Boost which is just a single Knowledge Point at the start of the game, and would only be semi-useful in the opening area, but as I was able to earn experience points and knowledge points and a regular rate, I feel that this would only prove a waste of $2.99 pretty quickly.

Maybe feeling overpowered before the end of the game could be chalked up to having access to all of the DLC quests and completing all the ones I could find, that I maxed out the skill trees before the end of the game.  I even curmudgeonly picked the last couple of skills because there was no point not to, even though I knew I was not going to be receiving double the rewards for completing the quest because that meant completing the game.  This was the point when I started fast traveling because uncovering new places along the way would not result in anything tangible and hoping to stumble across another reference to Lovecraft's work would be cool, by the 65-hour mark in the game, again, I just wanted to reach the end and experience the conclusion of this story, which I recognize is a sad view to have for a game that I had so much fun playing.  

I know the takeaway from this entire article is that The Sinking City be it with or without any of the DLC expansion quests, is a bad game, but that is far from the truth.  Knowing that this was Frogwares' first foray into, more-or-less, an open-world exploration, it was both a bit easier to forgive all of the blemishes as well as making it easier to notice where corners might have been cut so that the game would properly function.  Maybe they did not expect players to be able to max out the skill tree before the end of the game, or someone spending 70 hours on a 30-hour game?  Maybe there were additional floor plans for buildings but then somehow that became too complicated for the semi-procedurally generated city/interiors?  Maybe Frogware cut their losses and shipped a functional game rather than spend more time and money?  I know that these issues/complaints were not isolated to the Switch version as the game is the same across different platforms, so this is nothing against Frogwares' ability in porting their own game to the Switch.

You know, that might be it, or at least, as much as I can recall after not having played the game for a couple of months, which probably means that I should have been taking notes.  But stay tuned for a more positive article about all of the reasons I did enjoy The Sinking City.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

And We've Never Sailed A Ship

MIDI Week Singles: "Awake" - Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (GBA)

 

"Awake" from Castlevania: Circle of the Moon on the Game Boy Advance (2001)
Composer: Sotaro Tojima
Album: Castlevania: Circle of the Moon & Castlevania: Concerto of a Midnight Sun Original Soundtrack
Label: Konami Music Entertainment
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon has a strange place in Castlevania lore?/history?  One of those.  Around the time of its release, it was praised by some as being the next best thing in the franchise to Symphony of the Night, although in 2002 the game was removed from the official timeline and exiled to be a standalone game in the franchise.  The soundtrack though, like a lot of Castlevania games has tracks from previous games like Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, Castlevania 64, and Castlevania: Bloodlines among a number of other games, but "Awake" was one of the few original songs composed for Circle of the Moon; coincidentally, this song was also used in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as one of the Castlevania songs, presumably for Richter's stage (I've never played Smash Ultimate).

What is great about "Awake" is that it sounds so much like Castlevania, and fits so well with other staples like "The Sinking Old Sanctuary" (which also makes an appearance in Circle of the Moon) and "Aquarius" from Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse.  Now, it has been a time since I played Circle of the Moon, long before it was removed from canon, but it is nice to know that a lot of the original music here, albeit there is not a lot, still fits in very well with this world, 19 years after it was released (although sadly this was Sotaro Tojima's only foray into Castlevania music).

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Their Grandeur Shall Remain Untainted

First Impressions: Goetia (NS)

I wanted to have a Game EXP article written and ready for last Friday.  Then that date changed to today's Friday.  That still is not happening because in Goetia, a game that I thought might take upwards of 6.5 - 8 hours, has currently taken me over 5 hours and I look to be only 40% of the way through, and at times I feel like it might end up taking more than 10 hours.  Which is not a bad thing considering my usual slower-than-usual play style.

I am torn.  I love the visual aesthetic, I love the referenced source material, I love the story, but playing the game is mentally draining and there have been times when I have consciously not wanted to jump in and play.

Goetia (Go-eh-tee-uh as it is pronounced in Greek where the word originates, as opposed to being pronounced Go-ee-shuh as it is often pronounced in occult circles) is a point-and-click adventure and mystery game developed by Sushee and released on multiple platforms in 2015 and ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2018, which is the system that I played it on.  This was one of those games that pulled me in because of the name, the banner in the eShop, and the low (probably around $1) price tag when I bought it.  Finding out that it did include artwork and actual sigils from "The Lesser Key of Soloman" was an added bonus.

Goetia is notoriously difficult, possibly made even more difficult by the fact that I have been playing in handheld mode, so noticing visual environmental and puzzle related cues are sometimes lost on me.  The number of times that I have missed stairs or a ladder in a house (signaling that there is an upstairs/attic to explore) are somewhat frequent.  In the room on the left, the stairs could be easily missed, especially with a lot of the rooms already being very dark and often using environmental lighting.  Knowing that there is a little black tick mark on a scale and to place the right combination of objects on said scale without any other clue in a room was definitely lost on me as I thought the puzzle in that room had to do with being able to stack so many oddly shaped objects without them tipping over.  I have talked a number of times about how my brain makes puzzles, especially in point-and-click games, a lot more complicated than they actually are, and in Goetia that is definitely true as well.

Then there is the issue that I have with too much of the game being accessible.  When you start the game, you are limited to the number of rooms and areas you are able to explore.  You are blocked from areas by locked doors and occultist sigils barring you from passing through to other areas of the main mansion.  Then, in what seemed like a very quick series of events, more of the house opened up, access to a forest (outside of the mansion) opened up, a village in the opposite direction of the mansion and forest opened up, and I stumbled into a picture (kinda Mary Poppins style) where you could dive into other paintings and pictures, essentially being a new full-on multi-screen area.  I was a little overwhelmed with access to all of these new areas and having access to items I still did not have use for.  Mental strain abound trying to keep track of all of the rooms I now had access to as well as what objects I could posses 

The second issue I take with the game is when you find notes and letters, you see pages with the text printed in books or handwritten letters.  In a lot of games that have this visual feature, there is the option to bring a sans-serif text of what is written, partly because reading and processing some handwriting can be difficult, but especially on the Switch's screen, it makes reading a digital font quite the strain on my lil' peepers, and there might even be something about retaining information if you read in a font that is not a serif font.

But despite game feeling like it is a trudge to play at times and difficult to read had written notes and small text, Sushee thankfully integrated the use of the Select Button (is it still called the Select Button or just the "- Button") to bring up little magnifying glasses over objects you can interact with.  While there are occasionally are objects on screen that glow and have sparkle-like sparkles coming off of them (signifying that they are items that will end up in your recorded notes inventory), some items blend in perfectly with the rest of the background.  While you could just run the cursor over the screen and inevitably find something to interact with, there are times when there are multiple object so close to each other that it would be easy to not realize that the radio and the paper on the desk are selectable.

I am actually enjoying Goetia when I get into the flow of the game, usually when I am exploring a new are and everything is brand new.  It is when  have been in an area for a while and I have a couple puzzles that I know exist but do not know how to complete that I become exhausted.  Even before I boot up the game, knowing that I have left so many puzzles unsolved can be a deterrent to turning the game on and instead playing either Super Mario Bros. 35 or booting up Castlevania again for the umpeetnth time just to play up to the third stage.  But I will finish Goetia because I am interested in the story and how it incorporates the "Lesser Key of Soloman" in a way that is usually left to independent and art house movies that most major studios would never go near.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Like This One Here

MIDI Week Singles: "The Prayer of a Tragic Queen (Stage 5 BGM - Palace of Versailles)" - Castlevania: Bloodlines (GEN)

"The Prayer of a Tragic Queen (Stage 5 BGM - Palace of Versailles)" from Castlevania: Bloodlines on the SEGA Genesis (1994)
Composer: Michiru Yamane
Album: Akumajo Dracula Best Music Collection BOX
Label: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami

Here we are again in the world of Castlevania!  This time we visit the one Castlevania game that was released on a SEGA system and now thanks to the Castlevania Anniversary Collection (available on multiple systems), you too can hear this wonderful Baroque-esque piece from Michiru Yamane.

Now, I have only played the first two stages in Castlevania: Bloodlines so I have never heard this music in-game aside from watching a longplay, but I love that this game has both John Morris and Eric Lecarde traveling all over Europe and in Stage 5, they reach the Palace of Versailles.  The Hall of Mirrors, which looks like the art department from every Castlevania game in existence (when you look at the layout, all of the chandeliers, statues holding (electric) candles just asking to be whipped) was constructed between 1678 - 1684, which is smack dab in the middle of era of Baroque music (right at the beginning of the Late Baroque Period), which perfectly corresponds with Michiru Yamane's Baroque-style "The Prayer of a Tragic Queen" music in this stage.

The point being, that Michiru Yamane nailed the musical style with both the Castlevania aspect of the game, and the setting for the level.  And it's a great song too.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Shade These Austere Lights

Rocket League is a Blast (Switch) (Multi Platform)

[Dr. Potts] Rocket League is a blast.  It taps into something primal:  the desire to hit a giant soccer ball with a car.  I didn't know I had this desire until I tried the game.  I would never call myself a car guy.  I'd never say I was particularly into racing games.  But somehow, driving a car that can jump and slide really nails a sweet spot.  

[Jaconian] I'm in the same boat.  One of Conklederp's friend's husband suggested it to me a few years back and while I knew of the game, I have never been a big video game soccer person, and until recently, multiplayer online gaming was never a draw for me.  But a free game that remotely interested me that until recently has retailed for $19.99, I'll jump all over that.

[D] It helps that the matches are 5 minutes long.  Other games such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater or Stardew Valley or even Minnit have hit on the special serotonin boost that is a short-run game that you can just start again if you want to.  And there's so much joy in just driving around, it's up to you to decide how much purpose you want to give it.  

[J] Yeah, the length of the matches I feel is perfect.  10 minutes would be too long for the type of game Rocket League is.  It's a good feeling to know that, apart from queue times, I can play three to four matches in fewer than 30 minutes.

[D] Lately, my favorite thing is to grab a bunch of boost and hang out in the backfield, and then if I see an opening, burn *all* of it in a mad dash at the ball.  It sometimes results in some great shots.  Other times hilariously I will just fly right past the ball.  And, of course, there's always the possibility of blowing someone up.  CRASH, BANG, ARRGHHH!!  

[J] I haven't really developed a consistent strategy yet, and I only recently figured out that the boosts with the ring-thing hovering over it will fill your boost back up to 100 whereas all the others only replenish your boost by 10.  After one game in particular when no one was really playing defense, I realized that playing goalie is not the most glamorous job but I do find myself making a mad dash for the goal and skid around doing a 180 when the other team makes for our goal.

[D] I love that move.  It's like 'to the rescue!' and, well.. it doesn't always work out but at least I put my body in the right location.  

[J] Right!?  It may not work but at least in the replay of the other team scoring, I will at least look like I made an effort to stop the ball.  You know, as opposed to making a sprint for the ball and accidentally knocking it in our own goal and looking like a complete idiot. Which I have totally never done.

I did make the mistake recently and watched a highlight reel of people who are actually good at Rocket League and it made me feel like I have been playing the controller using only my feet with an eye patch on.  These people are blasting into the air to grab the ball as well as a car can, and literally, flying it down to the goal to score.

[D] Okay, that is insane. I can't imagine being able to control that well.  I have no idea how jumping works.  I cannot play defense.  If the ball is in the air, I will jump at it, but I will almost certainly miss.  I also frequently mistake my jump button for my slide button.  I think the manic energy of the game short circuits my muscle memory.  Also, I could stand to spend more time with the tutorial.  But I don't wanna! 

[J] I would highly recommend the tutorial, I mean at least I found it to be really helpful.  I initially kind of poo-pooed the idea of playing the tutorial because, like, "I've played video games before, I can figure this out" but for me at least, I found it useful as being able to judge distances, the trajectory of the ball when defending as well as trying to play forward (or Striker as they call it in-game).  Plus completing the tutorials unlocks more cosmetic features which isn't a bad thing.

[D] Okay, you make a good case.  My distance judgment is pretty bad, I miss the ball a lot, especially if it's bouncing.  And I do like the cosmetics.  I like Rocket League so much that I actually spend time customizing my car.  A thing I normally don't care about, especially not with cars.

The craziness of the game is a big part of the fun, I almost don't want to get too good at it.  But at the same time, I am compelled to try to do things on purpose.  

Recently I played a game where our team was dominating by like 5 points, and I felt so bad for the other team, I just stopped trying to win and instead ran around like crazy, not trying to win anymore.   But one nice thing they include, if you need more chaos in your life is 4v4.  It's pretty fun, intense and lots of smashing. 

[J] Haha, yeah.  I've been on the receiving end of an 8 - 2 match and the game does give you the option to forfeit when you're down by five, but I decided to continue to play (I don't know if everyone on the team has to agree to forfeit, or if it's more than half?).  And one of the things I have noticed which initially kind of irritated me was when people would just drop out of the game, especially if the team I'm on is losing.  And then this last weekend I had to drop out mid-game because I was holding Goblino while playing and he just woke up and went from sleepy to everything'swrongandI'mgoingtodie in about 4.7 seconds, so maybe I'll have a little more compassion for people who just leave.  Or not.

[D] Yeah, I notice people drop out a lot.  And yeah, as you mention, there's no way to know what their reasons are.  It might be butt-hurtitude, or it might be that something else has intervened, such as baby freakout mode.  I just get a little bummed because sometimes I want to rematch.  

[J] I think Dr. Potts perfectly summed this game up last weekend in that it's like playing with Hot Wheels.  It's fun to drop in play a handful of games and call it good.  I don't have the drive to become so much better, just enough to feel like I moderately know what I'm doing.

[D] Yes, I do want to comment on the Hot Wheels thing.  My memories of Hot Wheels are pretty mad cap.  The cars were never really restricted to a 'track' per se, nor did they have to stay on the ground- they could jump, and float.  Mostly, they would make noise, go fast, squeal their tires and turn, flip or barrel roll.  And, of course, crash into one another.  Basically, exactly: Rocket League.  

 

Dr. Potts & JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

MIDI Week Singles: "Battle of the Holy (Stage 1 BGM)" - Castlevania: The Adventure (GB)

"Battle of the Holy (Stage 1 BGM)" from Castlevania: The Adventure on the Game Boy (1989)
Composer(s): Shigeru Fukutake, Norio Hanzawa, & Hidehiro Funauchi
Album: Akumajo Dracula Best Music Collections BOX
Label: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami

Probably the most frequently heard track from this game is from Stage 1 as it will be at this point that the modern player decides if they are able to stomach the painfully slow pace of Christopher Belmont as he trudges through the Transylvanian countryside on his way to defeat Dracula.  I do not recall this theme ever being reused outside of Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth soundtrack (that was coupled with Contra ReBirth) which looks like it never actually made it into the game and is kind of a shame because the melody sounds very much rooted in the style of music that I think of when I listen to Castlevania music.

And even though I have never beaten Castlevania: The Adventure, it really is the music in this game that keeps me playing it every so often.  Had the opening track been anything less than this, for me at least, I may not have given this game a second glance.  Or have purchased it twice, once on the 3DS and again on the Switch.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Surviving

Monthly Update: October 2020

 

It's October!

One of the main things I wanted to talk about today was the genre of game I found myself to be focusing on last month: free-t0-play games.

Now, I have not hidden the fact that I have (at least for me) an embarrassing number of hours in Fortnite and would say that I am only marginally better than when I started back in 2015 in that I do on occasion actively run towards gunfire, but how else am I expected to complete the daily challenge of pistol eliminations if I do not shoot some other player with my digital common pistol?  Then, on the same day in September that Vigor was released (see below), Epic Games released Rocket League as a free-to-play game and offering a similar-to-Fortnite Battle Pass to upgrade your vehicle's cosmetic options, when previously the game ran for $19.99 across most gaming platforms.  I may write an article about Rocket League even though the game has been out for five years, but that is just how we do things around here.  And lastly, Vigor, the resource gathering post-apocalyptic Norwegian battle royale game that I played the beta for back in April.  Pretty much everything that I said in my beta Review article still stands, although there have been some graphical improvements but I have experienced some loading and connectivity issues.  It is still a semi-fun game to play (if you do not get killed when you are loaded with lootz) and managing to escape an encounter as you run through the woods after jumping down a rocky embankment is still pretty thrilling.  So I am not entirely sure what it is about these free-to-play games that have really grabbed my interest over the last month when I already have a number of games that I have paid real-world money for sitting in my queue.

And then there are a number of other free-to-play games that I have yet to dabble in like the recently released as free-to-play, Rogue Company, the street racing game Asphalt 9: Legends, and then a whole host of other games like Super Kirby Clash, Dauntless, Pokémon Quest, and SMITE; there are a lot more (like a number of pinball games that give you a free table to start but you have to buy additional tables) but those are the ones I have decided to name drop, and I am going to stop because this is turning into me just listing the names of games.

The game (that I have actually purchased) that I have been playing, although not in the last two weekends, is Ring Fit Adventure.  I also have not made much of any progress on Phantasmagoria as we aim to finish the final season of LOST, and then we have also been enraptured with Lovecraft Country and I think I am okay with this being a limited-run series, in that there will not be any more episodes after this season concludes, rather than run a great show into the ground; which I realize is quite the statement to make following that we are rewatching LOST, but in all honesty, when you watch LOST without a six-month break between mid-seasons and season premieres, the story does feel a lot more cohesive and less like the everything coming out of left field.

Speaking of left-field, I decided to participate in #Inktober this year, not because I fancy myself an artist, but because I like the idea of prompts and unironically bad artists who are not two years old are vastly underrepresented online.  Over the past X years, I have found that I personally feel a lot more creative if I have something to work from be it writing D&D stories, coming up with backstories for Skyrim characters, so it makes sense that I would be drawn to Inktober.  Now if NaNoWriMo had different prompts for each day, I might be able to slide into that river too, although I have been tempted to use NaNoWriMo to write another D&D quest.  Side note: I remember in English my junior year in high school, our writing prompt was a random object and mine was a hex-nut, that we had to describe but without actually describing the object; so I could not say things like "this hexagonal nut was shiny on all sides."  I hated that assignment.

And as seems to be the theme with a lot of what happens to us in Ravenloft, I am a little afraid that we might die, or at least someone might die.  We went from one hectic battle that my character was unable to participate in as they were too far away when it started and could not reach the area in time, and almost immediately into another one that is just chalk-full of modestly-weak enemies, but there is a butt load of them.  Our resident paladin is unconscious and 2/3 dead, two of our other characters are restrained multiple times (from different sources), my sorcerer's big bad AOE spells would also end up encompassing the other PC's, and our Indiana Jones is trying to stabilize the Paladin.

Lastly, I had a coming-to-Jesus moment with Cooking Crack (which legitimately had nothing to do with the alt-right troll on Twitter), re-evaluated my life, and came out the other side as The Faceplantman, which stems from an episode 35 years ago involving my face, a neighbor's fence, and the same neighbor's cement driveway.  Dr. Potts was there at the time, or at least he is in my memory of said event.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Because His Name Makes Me Uncomfortable