MIDI Week Singles: "BGM #02" - Boxing Fever (GBA)

 

"BGM #02" from Boxing Fever on the Game Boy Advance (2001)
Composer: Mo Jen
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Majesco Sales, Inc 
Developer: Digital Fiction Inc.

I came across Boxing Fever while listening to Game Boy Advance soundtracks so I haven't actually played this game.  When I looked up gameplay videos to find out where this particular song was featured, I came to a couple of conclusions.  First, the music, I think, is tied to where you are boxing, not specifically who you are boxing against.  Of the videos I watched, there seemed to be a pattern with particular boxers only being fought in a specific location, such as Hammer from Hungary was always fighting in the Irish boxing ring, which used BGM #03, and Maiagaru always fighting in the Japan ring, which used BGM #04.  But I saw a couple videos where Wendy fought in both the Irish ring and the West African ring.

Of all of the videos I watched, I only heard this particular song played when going up against Tiny, who is from Canada, so this could be the theme for the Canada ring (which would make sense with the red and white ropes) or another ring that I did not see outside of this particular video.  If this is the music for a boxing match in Canada, my first thought is that I'm surprised it's as guitar heavy up front as it is, although apart from "Oh Canada" or maybe "My Heart Will Go On," I don't know if I could tell you what of a single national song that would unify all of Canada would sound like.  But the guitars for those first 15 seconds sound like it's from a completely different song than the fanfaric back half of the song, although I do love the melody of the second half of the song.

It's just the weird mishmash of the song's melodies and what this song is supposed to be representative of, which is why I needed to share it with someone.  So thank you and you're welcome.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Game EXP: Crumble (PC)

 

CRUMBLE
Systems: Linux, Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: December 4, 2020
Publisher: BRUTE FORCE
Developer: BRUTE FORCE
Time Spent: 11.5 Hours

I'm not really sure how to feel about Crumble.

I received the game free from a giveaway that Fanatical was doing a couple of months back and it seemed like a game I might get around to playing.  What I watched of the trailer looked interesting, although I was curious if my laptop would be able to play it well enough considering how fast the gameplay looked and how many moving pieces there were at any given time.  I only started playing Crumble when I did because The Squire saw the Steam icon of a blue ball face with its tongue sticking out and wanted to see the "silly face game."  I don't know how you would expect a three-year-old toddler not to ask to play any game with this as the icon really.  On top of all that, when you boot up the game, the same face as the icon becomes animated and starts wagging its tongue around in a way that will cause the same toddler to shake their head with their tongue out and giggle incessantly, then be momentarily annoyed when the face goes away and is instead replaced with a boring starting menu screen complete with a rocket ship.

Well, the "silly face game" has since become the "oops, we died again" game.

Crumble is a third-person (third-ball?) physics platformer speed running game where you jump and swing your way from the starting point to a waiting rocket ship that carries you to the next level.  Most of the stages have some level of dynamic element to them, be it cannons that fire projectiles at you that can damage the environment, or platforms that collapse because they are being perfectly balanced before your bally-self decided to jump on them.  The level design is often impressive and the sense of scale is breathtaking as you roll down a hill at blinding speed only to see the ground a thousand feet in front of you begin to crumble and you know that you're going to have to make that jump and then latch your tongue onto that tree branch.

When I first started Crumble, I wasn't sure that I was going to make it past the second stage (Stage 1B), where the tongue-sticking wall-jumping mechanic is lazily introduced and even on the Steam message boards, has caused a fair amount of frustration.  In this stage, you roll to a wall where the game prompts you to press the RT (right trigger which shoots out your tongue to the closest stackable surface) + A (the jump button).  This button combination, from my own experience, doesn't work the way that the developer thinks it should work in the mind of the player.  What this implies, I think anyway, is that with your tongue attached to the wall, you will jump higher than where your tongue is attached, and when you reattach your tongue, you will inevitably be in a higher position than when you started.  This early in the game, you are unable to fully rotate the camera to see a side view of what is happening, which is when you jump, your ball is actually jumping back, away from the wall, although you will gain a little bit of height, the button combination from the game is actually quite bad.  What I found worked in these situations was to swing like a pendulum against the wall, then jump at about a 45-degree angle then reattach and repeat, but that was only around stage 3D (the 8th stage overall) that I figured out this particular maneuver.

Like a lot of the criticisms about Crumble, they all seem to stem from the feeling that not a lot of consideration was made for people who had not already played this game for 5-10 hours when they first started the game and were not intent on speedrunning.  Some of this feeling is evidenced by the achievements on Steam with ever-decreasing percentages of players actually completing each of the five worlds.  I was telling Conklederp, and she agreed with me, that it says something about a game where just under 50% of the people who have started a game are either unable to or have no desire to get past the first world, being three stages.

• Fall Through the Fog for the First Time (Died): 71.8%
• Finish the First World: 52.6%
• Finish the Second World: 34.5%
• Finish the Third World: 25.3%
• Finish the Fourth World: 20.8%
• Finish the Fifth World: 17.4%
• Complete the Main Levels: 16.3%

I got just beyond this wall the first time I played with The Squire and I very nearly uninstalled the game.  The only reason why we picked the game back up the following morning, was because I had forgotten to uninstall it the previous evening.  So I continued and made it through 1B, and then 1C, and eventually the first world.  Each stage in each world would take me between 8 - 27 minutes, which is absurd when you look at some of the fastest times shown to you when you reach the end of the stage, which I feel is supposed to motivate you, but for me, it was almost the exact opposite.   Like, how am I supposed to feel when [PyNe] beat a stage in 07.905 seconds when it took me over 10 minutes?  Or on the last of the main levels, if it takes [PyNe] 2 minutes 41 seconds, it's going to take me what, 237 hours?*

The primary driving motivator behind me actually beating this game (okay, beating only the main levels) and enjoying it to some extent was The  Squire.  A couple of times a week, he would ask me to play the "Oops, we died game," and so we would play in the mornings while he ate his breakfast (usually while sitting on my lap) and would giggle incessantly whenever I died.  Because you cannot save your game or start over from a checkpoint mid-stage, I was forced to either get better at the game so I could actually finish more than one level when we played, or I would end up playing through the same stage multiple times to try and figure it out.  Because this is a game focused on speedrunning, the button layout can be rather treacherous with the B button dedicated to killing yourself and respawning at the previous checkpoint, but also when you pause the game, if you press the X button, it takes you back to the main menu.  There were multiple instances of accidentally taking myself back to the home menu screen while I was partway through a stage, effectively erasing my progress through that stage and having to start the stage over from the beginning.

Over the course of the game, there were a few more times I felt like I was going to stop playing altogether.  In 1C, the level at which you can fall, even when attached to anything, is significantly reduced to the point where it felt like the dev was butting into my game, and pressing the B button for me when I felt like I could have swung back up to my respective platform.  In 2E - First Flight, I could not figure out a jump from one flying rock dragon to another flying rock dragon, and this stage took me at least three separate attempts.  In 3C, one area that I thought required slow and precise jumping, took me over 18 minutes to get through (the whole stage took me 33 minutes).  And in the final world, I discovered that the game will kill you if the camera perspective ends up in the lava even when your ball is safe on a platform; combined with this I have experienced the game having the ball roll noticeably faster when the camera is closer to the ground as opposed to more of an overhead angle, but that could just be me.

My feelings about the game actually changed after I had finished the main levels and The Squire wanted me to play more (because I don't think he fully understands the concept of beating a game and playing a new one instead) so I decided to play through the beginning levels all over again.  It turned out that I had in fact gotten gud in my 11 hours of playing through all 21 of the main stages and while my first run-through of 1A took me 10:56.283, my subsequent playthroughs have brought me down to only 3:27.348 (still ranked in 10,000th place overall).  2A which first took me 8:17.661 now on a good run taking me only 2:29.006, and the second to last stage first took me 24:18.166 and can now take me as few as 6:34.209 (although my times here have gotten better than other stages because The Squire really likes the music in this stage).  What it boils down to is a combination of feeling more confident with my abilities in this game, the steadiness of moving the small squishy ball through stages that require minuscule movements, and my overall confidence in knowing how the game operates.

So now, it's actually pretty fun, although it can be a little frustrating to my ego when The Squire is telling me, "Get up!" when I'm dangling by my tongue from a ledge with a checkpoint in sight and I can't quite get the swing just right.  But that's the conundrum with Crumble.  I would not have beaten the main levels if The Squire hadn't wanted me to continue playing, and the only reason why I can now say I have fun is because I beat the game. I now have these particular and very specific sets of 3D speed platforming skills, but beating the game and getting to this point was definitely not an overly fun experience.

But you know, it is super satisfying when you're zooming down a track at speed and then swing and launch yourself into the stratosphere leaving most of the visible map behind if only for a moment.  I take pride in beating the main levels, and now I have gotten eight stars for beating the in-game time for each level which then opens up additional levels.  Yeah, Crumble is a real conundrum.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Sometimes I Feel I Should Just Go Home

*Absolutely zero shade towards [PyNe] and their speedrunning skills.  Upon seeing the leaderboard times, I did initially think that something was going on as far as cheating their way through the level, because how in the hell do you beat an entire level in only seven seconds!?  That's how.

MIDI Week Singles: "Blinded By Light" - Final Fantasy XIII (VSD)

 

"Blinded By Light" from Final Fantasy XIII on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, & PC (2009 - 2014)
Composer: Masashi Hamauzu
Album: Final Fantasy XIII Original Soundtrack
Label: Sony Music Distribution
Publisher: Square Enix
Developer: Square Enix 1st Production Department

I get it.  I really do.  One of the last songs you want to hear again from Final Fantasy XIII is probably the normal run-of-the-mill battle music.  So much of the game is just running from one end of a winding hallway to another with one group of people and then running down another winding hallway to its end with another group of people, often fighting a lot of the same enemies, all while hearing this one particular track.  For 30+ hours.  Yeah, there's mini-boss battle music, Eidolon battle music, and boss battle music, I get it.  I'm currently 63.4 hours in, I'm still in Chapter 11.  And I just doubled back to the Archylte Steppe from some underground hallway with a giant C'ieth ball because I felt that I was actually going the right way and wanted to see more content before progressing onto Chapter 12.

I knew about this song back in 2015 when I first heard it in Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call on the 3DS, so finally hearing in the game where it originated has been great.  

I think what I like about this song is that it works well with the battle system in FF XIII.  Maybe it has something to do with the strings taking the melody for a majority of the song that lends itself well to switching between paradigms not feeling like a jarring occurrence.  Or maybe I am just making up stuff again.  Either way, even after umpteen thousand battles, I still have not gotten tired of this song, and that's saying something for battle music in a JRPG.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Hiding In Your Twisted Game

First Impressions: Signalis (NS)

Signalis

Systems: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One & Series S/X, and Windows

Release Dates: October 27, 2022

Publisher: Humble Games

Developer: Rose-engine Games

I heard a bit about Signalis from Dr. Potts a while back and so in June, when I saw the game on sale in Nintendo's eShop and not hearing anything about shortcuts and downgrades taken with the Switch version, I thought this would be my preferred platform, although Steam Deck was a close second.

What I love about Signalis is that it feels like a very pure survival horror game.  There is a lot of confusion as to what is going on story-wise, but it feels the same way that Amnesia: The Dark Descent felt, that by the end of the game, everything was going to make sense; or at least nearly everything.  Like the original Resident Evil playing as Chris, there is an emphasis on inventory management, often coming across items that you cannot pick up because your inventory is full so you would need to either run back to the storage box (which functions the same here in that all storage boxes magically contain your items no matter where you access the storage box) or decide to use a consumable to make room.  Ammunition is also in short supply with enemies not dropping additional rounds, which makes every single shot count, but thankfully there is an optional ability to stomp your enemies for the final kill otherwise they pop right back up and you have to shoot them another one to three times (on average anyway).

Being a survival horror game, I knew that this was going to be an enjoyable stressful experience.  I tend to like my survival horror games in this vein as I don't want to be stressed out the entire time either because of game mechanics, difficulty, or any combination thereof.  In the Resident Evil remake from 2002 when the devs first introduced the Crimson Heads, the zombies that would reanimate as more aggressive and faster versions of their previous form, it offered a new take on zombies in this genre.  Signalis does something different with the enemies that you kill.  After a predetermined amount of time, they will come back to life which means you either have to kill them all over again, using up more ammo, or run around them on your way through the next door; and thankfully they haven't figured out how to open doors.  However, unlike the Resident Evil remake, these risen enemies do not stay dead after you kill them a second time.

From what I read online, they continue to come back as a way to prod the player to keep moving and to prevent them from staying in one area too long.  That's all well and good if you know what you're doing and what you're looking for, but if you're someone like me who tends to overthink puzzles (just ask The Kid on a recent conundrum I found myself in Icewind Dale dealing with a suit of armor and some priests of Ilmater) which leads me back-and-forth across the map multiple times for longer than what might normally be prescribed.  Now, I know that I'm not that far into the game, maybe the third or fourth new area (the one with the flooded bathroom that you drop down from) so there might be an additional consumable item you can use to permanently put down the enemies so they don't come back, and I have gotten pretty good at avoiding enemies altogether so I am not really killing every enemy; and I don't think that there is enough ammo in the game to actually do that.

All of this is to say, that I am really enjoying Signalis although I am finding it more stressful than usual because I know for certain that I am going to run out of time and the enemies I killed are going to come back before I figure out how to earn/gain/find all of the keys I need to open the door to find out whatever is beyond that foyer-to-the-boardroom-looking-room.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Bring Corruption to All that You Touch

First Impressions: Remothered: Tormented Fathers (NS)

Remothered: Tormented Fathers

Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: January 30, 2018

Publisher: Darril Arts

Developer: Stormind Games

I admittedly did not know much before going into Remothered: Tormented Fathers, and what I knew was from one of the release trailers on the eShop.  I knew about Clock Tower as a survival horror game but have not played it.  So I watch this trailer featuring all of this third-person survivaliness and am genuinely taken with how much I love a lot of what I saw.  What the trailer does not show you, are many of the game mechanics and the underlying way in which the game operates once you get to Chapter 3.

The first two chapters were fine, depending on what you are looking for in a survival horror game.  There was a fair amount of set-up as far as the characters go and revealing the mystery about Celeste Felton, the adopted daughter of Dr. Richard Felton back in 1981.  There is a lot of walking since the playable character of Rosemary Reed is wearing sensible heels, although she can break into a bit of a slow sprint with the press of the R shoulder button. But Rosemary essentially walks from her parked car down a forested dirt road to the house of Dr. Felton, walks around the grounds of the house, walks around the house after being let inside, and walks back through the house after being escorted outside and waiting until night when Dr. Felton's nurse leaves.  Then she walks around inside until you are discovered at the end of Chapter 2.

Then Chapter 3 starts, where you are being stalked around the house.  You can sneakily creep through hallways and rooms, but if the stalker [unnamed for the moment to reduce spoilers] sees you, they sprint like a madman armed with a sickle, which they are.  Once spotted you have only a couple of options, and none of them are good.  You can run away, but since you're wearing those sensible heels, your running speed is slower than your stalkers.  If you do manage to make it to another room you had better hope that there is a closet to hide in or a bed/couch to hide under before a slightly confusing mini-game (of sorts) starts which decides if your rapid breathing causes you to be found.  You can throw a distractionary object at the stalker, but the throwing mechanic is cumbersome since you have to essentially cock your arm back with the ZL trigger then release with the ZR trigger, and even then, hope you hit your target.

Once you are caught, because you will likely be caught, one of two things will happen.  Either you will be hit with the sickle taking damage but not killing you, and I think you can take up to three hits before you are killed; oh, and your overall speed also decreases after every hit too, so there's that to worry about too.  The other thing is that you enter a QTE where you button-mash your way to safety where you use up your one equipable defense weapon (which is different than your distraction items), which gives you a handful of seconds to run away to try and hide somewhere else.

Knowing what I know now in Chapter 3, I understand the unspoken emphasis on giving the player nearly unfettered access to a large portion of the house in the first two chapters, and why it is up to you to actually find the people you need to talk to instead of having them come directly to you.  The purpose is to have the player familiarize themself with the layout of the house.  To note where hallways and staircases lead.  Where there is an abundance of items used for distractionary purposes.  Where the dumb waiter is located on each floor even though it is currently not in use.  At the time, in Chapters 1 and 2, I was confused as to why there were so many objects littered around the house that were labeled as a distractionary item and what that really meant.  I could open a drawer and see a pair of knitting needles, or more often than not, nothing at all.  There was also no one immediately around to talk to or interact with until I found Dr. Felton up in his study.  Had I only known that I should have been creating a mental map of the layout of the house?

At the point where I am in the game, there is zero horror about trying to sneak around this mansion away from the stalker.  There is no terror when I hear them running and the screen goes red to let me know that I have been spotted.  There is no fear about trying to escape.  There is only annoyance as I wait to be killed so I can start over again trying to get to the door on the first floor because that is where the key I picked up out of a bathrobe will work.  I have tried many times with little success in trying to create distractions like setting a clock alarm to go off to draw the attention of the stalker so that I can get around their location, only to have them seemingly spawn right outside the door of the room I was in and start attacking me.  This isn't fun, and not in the way survival-horror games are supposed to be fun.

I find myself at a mental crossroads right now.  I have the key that leads to another area of the house that I have not been to before and I know where that door is.  The problem is that the stalker always seems to be hovering around that area.  I have tried creating a distraction, like throwing a vase and then hiding in a closet, but the stalker always b-lines it to me and I have a split second to figure out the QTE to not be spotted.  I know that I could probably just create a noise, then hit the stalker with something to stun them, then run to the double doors, unlock them, and then try to find a place to hide, but if that fails and I start back where I was before, it is going to be a very demoralizing experience to the point where I don't know if I will pick up that game again at least for another year or so and at that point I will likely just start the game over from the beginning.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
A Shadow Just As Dark As Your Past

MIDI Week Singles: "Hang Glider" - Pilotwings 64 (N64)

 

"Hang Glider" from Pilotwings 64 on the Nintendo 64 (1996)
Composer: Dan Hess
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EAD, Nintendo R&D3, and Paradigm Simulation

Just like I said eight years ago about the hang glider music for Pilotwings Resort on the 3DS, this music is chill, which is what you want to be listening to as the game beeps at you because your speed is has dropped below 29 kph and you just know you're not going to have enough lift to reach that next thermal.

For me, I feel like this song has two distinct elements to it.  There are sections where the MIDI flute is playing, and those where it is not.  When the song starts, it very clearly feels like something out of the mid-1980s, and then the flute just elevates the song from good cheese to a level of chill that is almost unsurpassed in the rest of the soundtrack, outside of the Birdman theme.  When the flute is not playing, it really sounds like it could be intermittent music during a corporate instructional video produced in 1983.  Is that Phil Collins?  No, it's Dan Hess.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
There Was A Spikey Cinnamon Roll

P.S.  I recently started playing Pilotwings 64 again for the sole purpose of unlocking the Cannonball mini-game because I was certain that The Squire would love a game where you shoot someone out of a cannon and they smack into an object after screaming their lungs out.  I was right.

Game EXP: Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft (VSD)

 

Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft
Systems: Windows, Linux, HTC Vive*
Release Date: September 24, 2021
Publisher: Bit Golem
Developer: Bit Golem
Time Spent: 1 Hour

Games based on stories and mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft are notoriously challenging to get right, for several reasons, although it really depends if the devs are going for a direct adaptation of a specific work or simply using it as reference material.  First, from a narrative perspective, characters in Lovecraft's stories don't always have the best outcomes; even those who aren't racist or bigots.  Sure, they might survive the initial encounter with whatever unnamable horror they come across, but they are often forever afflicted with some form of fictionalized psychosis or break from reality that might lead them to a premature end.  Being able to convey that in a way that makes sense to the player can be difficult, which often leads to 4th wall-breaking effects like in Eternal Darkness and Dead Space (Mobile).  Secondly, video games are somewhat unique in that they give the observer/player some level of agency in the story being told.  If you take away the player's illusion of choice with the promise of a traditional video game, then you can run the risk of alienating the player when they begin to feel that what they are doing has little to no effect on the story.  Lastly, a conventional video game where you kill enemies runs the risk of minimizing the whole feeling of helplessness against an unknowable cosmic entity that is pervasive in a lot of weird horror literature.  William Dyer doesn't unload a clip from a Savage 1907 into the formless mass of a Shoggoth as he flees the city along with Danforth.  Olmstead doesn't fire off rounds from his Colt 1911A1 into the group of Deep One Hybrids as they break into his hotel room.  Often, their only option is to run.

Where this leaves us is with the visual novel format, which upfront tells us that we are essentially reading a book and that we are only passive observers, at least to some extent.  Bit Golem has gone just a little step beyond a typical graphic novel where you read text, press a button to proceed to the next text, and repeat until the end of the story, but only just.  Here, you do just that, dialogue and descriptions are read to you from the perspective of the narrator, but you are also able to look around your environment, primarily to take in your surroundings.  The secondary reason is that there are little nuggets of historical context hidden throughout many of the scenes delving into trivia about H.P. Lovecraft, the story of "Dagon," elements of the Cthulhu mythos, and other interesting bits of knowledge that are not necessary to complete or understand the story.  It would be like if a video game had annotated footnotes that were partially hidden.

[EDIT]** There are going to be people who are both more and less familiar with "Dagon" that will not like its presentation here, and to those people, I can only say that that is your prerogative and you lost zero money and at most, 30 minutes of your life.  I did play through a second time to re-experience the story and to look for the additional trivia I missed the first time around.

I really enjoyed what Bit Golem has done with their vision of Dagon and I think that playing it in VR would be equally amazing, although it appears to only be available through Steam VR and is not (yet??) available on either of the available Meta Quest headsets through their respective storefronts.  If it does become available, I can assure you that I will buy it and experience one of my favorite Lovecraft stories all over again.  In the meantime though, there are several other stories/visual novels from Bit Golem that I will be picking up by year's end.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Your Mind Rots With Every Year

*I used "HTC Vive" as a catchall when I should probably clarify with "Steam VR" since there are several VR headsets, not just the HTC Vive that are compatible with Steam VR. And since my laptop is not strong enough to run my Oculus Quest 2 headset through to play games with Steam VR, I will still need to wait for either a port or until after I upgrade to a more powerful system.

**I edited the original article which had originally said that the narration from the game was an abridged version of the story, forgetting that the entirety of the text is "only" 2,216 words. I had thought that the story was longer, being a while since I had reread it. Thank you to Bit Golem for the clarification and pointing out my error.

Game EXP: Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate (PC)

Shotgun King: The  Final Checkmate

Systems: Switch, PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One & Series S/X, and Windows

Release Date: May 12, 2022

Publisher: Punkcake Délicieux, Headbang Club, Goblinz Publishing

Developer: Punkcake Délicieux, Headbang Club

I really enjoy the game of chess.  I am also not a great chess player, but I love a novel take on chess (even if the execution isn't perfect) be it in the form of Chess Knights; Viking Lands, a puzzle game centered around how chess pieces traditionally move, as well as this game, Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate where you play as a solitary king going up against a rebelling force of opposing chess pieces.  Armed with a shotgun.

The first thing to get across is that this is not a serious chess game if the title didn't already give that away.  You play as a single King chess piece, armed with a shotgun that allows for ranged attacks with the common goal of taking out the opposing King.  Apart from that, there are a whole bunch of modifiers to this game as you progress through the 10 stages/floors on your way to quell the uprising.  Yes, there is a bit of a story here, which considering the premise of the game, is equally silly, with the player taking control of a King who is violent and oppressive towards his subjects and you are attempting to put down the rebellion.

There are a couple of modes to play, but only one from the start and the primary one, and the only one that I have actually played extensively is the Story Mode, where you play through 10 stages/floors and a final boss fight.  At the end of each floor, you have the choice of two randomly drawn cards where one is a bonus modifier for you and the other affects the computer opponent, often to your own detriment.  For example, your choices are:

• Gain a +1 bonus to your shotgun power / The enemy gains an additional three pawns
  or
• Every 10 Turns, +1 firepower / Removes 1 Knight Add 2 Pawns (Pawns +1 Speed)

While the individual bonuses may not seem all that significant in the moment or by themselves, the card bonuses can stack and carry over to each subsequent floor.  In one instance, I had selected the first above group of cards (+1 firepower vs. 3 enemy pawns) and on a subsequent floor selected the card that gave me an additional +2 to damage after I killed a pawn and the enemy gained the ability to have an additional hit point to the bishop and they could heal surrounding pieces instead of moving.  While somewhat random as far as the cards that are dealt for you to choose from, I have noticed that on the fourth floor, that the opposing card always introduces a Queen to the enemy's side which is always a danger in chess.  But as there are, I believe, 55 cards for each side to choose from, I always feel that I end up having to choose between the lesser of two evils.

One thing that the devs added that I really like are protections from accidentally moving yourself into checkmate, or at least two per turn.  If you select to move your King into check, the game buzzes at you and refuses to move your piece, but you can only have this happen twice per turn; at the start of your next turn, your protections reset.  But, since in this game, the King is armed with a shotgun (or grenades, or ranged magic, or a sword that I still haven't figured out yet), if you happen to kill a piece that was blocking another piece from attacking the king, then that piece will automatically move and kill your King.

Unless, of course, you have the Black Mist card, which penalizes you with -1 to your shotgun range, but protects you from death once per floor.

Shotgun King is an absurdist take on chess that starts out fun, but by the fourth floor, becomes progressively more stressful as the enemy bonuses continue to pile up and taking out the enemy King (or the theocracy if you drew the Theocracy card which replaces the King with a Bishop and requires all Bishops on the board to die to win the round) grows ever more difficult.  There are other guns to unlock, which require you to have certain stats, I think, when you beat the game and as I have only beaten the game once without trying to do a gun-unlocking run, I cannot say right now if that is the case. It's just a fun, light-hearted take on an easy-to-play, difficult-to-master game that can be played in a minute if you're not paying attention and last as long as you can survive in Endless Mode.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Well I Am King.

P.S.  There are plenty of other rules that I have not gone into such as the reloading mechanic, soul cards, and other intricacies of the cards you draw, but that would just bog this article down further than trying to write about an 18-month-old take on a 500+ year-old game.

P.P.S.  This has also recently become a favorite game for The Squire to ask me to play in the morning, which we just call "The King Game" since I'm not comfortable introducing the concept of shotguns into his life yet

MIDI Week Singles: "Fear Factory" - Donkey Kong Country (SNES)

 

"Fear Factory" from Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1994)

Composer: David Wise 

Album: DK Jamz 

Label: Nintendo of America

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Rare Ware 

"Fear Factory" is one of my favorite tracks from Donkey Kong Country, which you could say about almost any song from the game.  Something about the slow build of the intro while still being interesting for 29 seconds before the xylophone/marimba instrument comes in.  And even then, the keyboard/drums don't let up in the background.  Then something about the synth sound at 0:43 to take over the melody is. . . I don't know, it's just perfect.  Then at 0:57 when everything else pulls back except the synth(s) is great.  Then how the drums and horns come back just as the song repeats is just such a great lead back into the song.

I did consider using one of the versions arranged for the Game Boy Color or the Game Boy Advance, but I think the original is just so ingrained in my brain that I'm like, yeah that one's good too, but this one over here.  So that's why we're here.

tl;dr: This song is great and I love it.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

The Language of a Parting

P.S.  One of the reasons why I landed on this song for this week is because the McElroy Brothers have been playing through Donkey Kong Country for the past seven weeks now in a bizarre way that is highly entertaining and at the same time, aggravatingly frustrating.  For the last two (three?) weeks they have been in the Kremkroc Industries, Inc. where the music was featured in Oil Drum Alley and Blackout Basement.  It's a fun and stressful watch.

P.P.S.  And yes, I know that this version is not directly taken from SNES but the uncompressed audio that was on the DK Jamz CD.

First Impressions: SILENT HILL: Ascension

SILENT HILL: Ascension

Platforms: Android, iOS, Browser

Release Date: October 31, 2023

Publisher: Konami, Genvid Entertainment, LLC

Developer: Bad Robot Production, Behaviour Interactive, dj2 Entertainment

I had another article written that started out as a First Impressions but ended up ballooning into what would amount to a Game EXP article for a serial mobile app online TV series.  By the time I realized that I wasn't going to have that article ready for today, I had decided that I needed to either do a serious rewrite, or just start all over again.  So now we're here, starting over.

The SILENT HILL: Ascension app can be broken down into two components.  First, there is the actual show, where you watch characters do things, you know, like a regular TV show.  Normal and creepy things happen to them and they react.  The show itself, I am actually quite enjoying.  The story follows three different and as yet not fully connected characters as strange events begin to happen around them in a format that wouldn't have been out of place airing on Sunday nights on FOX before X-Files in the mid-late 90s.  Because all of the characters are CG, a fair amount of the physical and voice acting can come across as stilted, but when viewed as a cutscene from a game, it feels about on par with what I would expect out of a survival horror video game franchise in 2023.

How the characters react is the "interactive media" aspect of the show that leads directly into the second component.  Every day, characters are faced with a decision to make that is influenced by people voting for any of the three options using in-game currency called Influence Points (represented by the Norse runes  ᚾ ᚹ, presumably because they look like the Latin letters I and P, not because they represent N and W sounds respectively, otherwise the runes would look like ᛁᛈ), that you earn by completing various daily tasks such as watching new episodes, completing mini-game puzzles, or by giving Konami et. Al. money specifically for more Influence Points or by way of a Battle Pass-type system.  There is a lot that I do not like in this second camp, which ended up being 80.55% of what I had originally written.

What it boils down to for me, is that I like short daily episodes, each one lasting a couple of minutes, and I would hope that a full uncut release of this entire series is released at a later date, separate from the app itself, and I dislike nearly everything else.  I am not a fan of the monetization of basic cosmetics for your avatar like hair type/color and skin color/facial structure.  I have also had a pretty negative experience with the app as cosmetic items that I have unlocked through using IP have disappeared from my account and often the game will not register that I have claimed a goal (by logging in, voting in a poll, etc) and will have to perform the same actions multiple times.

Actual Show: Decent enough to be good.

Everything Else: Bad.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
In the Rivers of Grief We are Drowning

Monthly Update: November, 2023

 

I don't even know where to start with talking about October and November.

There was the shitstorm that happened in Israel by Hamas.  There was the shitstorm that happened in Palestine by Israeli bombs hitting civilians unaffiliated with Hamas. This situation is 100% more nuanced.  There is the shitstorm still happening in Ukraine.  There was the shitstorm happening in the US House of Representatives that culminated in electing a hateful bigot and chauvinist (e.g. a white evangelical christian male who helped Donald J. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election and continues to believe that the election was stolen and has repeatedly espoused his hateful view of the LGBTQ+ community and denied the bodily autonomy of women to make their own choices regarding their own reproductive health).  There have been strikes from writers, actors, autoworkers, healthcare workers, and teachers happening on a monthly if not weekly basis (I support workers above corporate/CEO profits).

But I also was able to see a bunch of my family and some friends during the last week of October as my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, which just is a bonkers amount of time to be alive.  Based on my family history of men living past a certain point, I'll be lucky to make it to 84.  I was able to talk a bit with Dr. Potts at the party briefly while I wasn't stressing/panicking over the speech I was supposed to give along with my siblings, and while making sure that The Squire was trying to open the door to the chiropractic office in the courtyard of the hotel, trying to push open the visually enticing emergency exits, or blowing out any candle he could see.  I surprisingly did not drink a lot at that party as I was trying to not have another migraine like the one I had the previous night (tightening headband with boulders in my eyeballs type of migraine).  I also was able to meet up with Dellanos where we talked about various games we're playing, free games from Amazon Prime, and Castlevania: Nocturne.

Speaking of Castlevania: Nocturne,  since we didn't talk about it last month, was an amazing follow-up to the first four seasons of Castlevania.  Yes, liberties were taken with some of the characters and events, just like they were in the first four seasons, but overall, I am very happy.  What I am a little worried about is that there is a semi-large contingent of vocal people/accounts on YouTube/Twitter/etc wanting the series to jump into Symphony of the Night and not see the events of Rondo of Blood.  I mean, the first series took four seasons to tell what was essentially Castlevania III (with obvious expansion on characters from Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness) and I would be disappointed if only the first season of Castlevania: Nocturne was supposed to cover all of Rondo of Blood.  I think I just want this new series to take its time as it seems to have been doing this first season and I just need to not read and/or pay attention to people demanding that season 2 be Symphony of the Night.

Show-wise, Conklederp and I finished the first season of Ahsoka, and while I probably could write an article or five about this, I'll just say that I enjoyed it overall, and hope that more scenes of a certain character only using the force (as their ally) are present in future Star Wars endeavors in the future because that fight scene was my favorite since The Last Jedi.  We are also part way through the second season of Our Flag Means Death, and while feeling different from the first season, I do enjoy Taika Watiti's writing and acting and everything.  And Bronson Pinchot in episode 5 as Ned Low was one of the highlights, at least of the first five episodes.  I'll probably think of other shows we have watched since October sometime around the middle of the month.

Yes, I am still playing Tears of the Kingdom, although I think I might be done by the end of the month/year.  I recently passed the 250-hour mark, I have completed four of the (maybe?) five dungeons, I have the Master Sword (and all that that entails as far as story/flashbacks go).  I feel like, this might be my favorite Legend of Zelda game that I have played over the past 35 years?  But that should not take away from how much I love any of the previous LoZ games.  Best?  I dunno.  Favorite.  Maybe?

Speaking of time spent in a video game, I just cleared the 44-hour mark in Final Fantasy XIII which means that Lightning & Co. are now on Gran Pulse and I am just running around doing quests for the Cei'th to complete their focus; or you know, like hunting marks for Montblanc in Final Fantasy XII, but in a smaller area.  Dr. Potts was right though, that by this point in the game, for SE to only now introduce an open-world map, feels almost too late as I kind of just want to continue the story and not grind for more levels.

On the Switch, for Halloween, I also started Remothered: Tormented Fathers since it looked more cinematic and visually interesting than either Signalis or Milk Outside a Bag of Milk Outside a Bag of Milk.  While I had some idea of what I thought I was getting into, by the third chapter, I really did not expect this level of frustration, but I will cover all of that in an upcoming First Impressions article.

I also finished "Swords of Eveningstar: The Knights of Myth Drannor" and started "Escape from Undermountain" but I think because I bought on-sale copies of those books as opposed to having checked them out from our library, I find that I am reading them at a significantly slower pace.  "SoE" ended up being as slightly confusing as I was expecting a book by Ed Greenwood to be, but I ended up really liking the flow of the book and how a lot of the character interactions felt like sessions of D&D.  "EfU" is more straightforward, but might run the risk of not having enough meat on its bones.  There are a few passages that go into the actual construction of Undermountain and bits and pieces of Halaster and that is when I become invested.

Let's cut it off there for length so that I have time to do some editing and publishing before I start in on articles for the rest of the month.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Und darum leben wir hier