Astonishing Quality, Insane DLC Dickbaggery - 2015 Nintendo Xmas Loot Report

Even though I grew up in a mostly Segan household with a bit of NEC PC-Engine on the side, we've owned every major Nintendo Handheld device from a crappy Game&Watch thingie to a GameBoy classic, Advance/SP, Color and the DS in various shapes and releases. Also, I'm going to pretend the VirtualBoy never happened.

With very few exceptions, I've always considered Nintendo's portable games to be something you do whilst waiting for the bus, taking a dump, some quick and easy entertainment when there's no PC or home console nearby. I've spent ridiculous amounts of time playing games like Gargoyle's Quest, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and, weirdly enough, Monster Racers, when these games came out, but for the most part I didn't play these portable games for more than 30 to 60 minutes at a time. It was entirely possible to beat most shmups and brawlers within these amounts of time, lengthier titles came with a save feature and some 10-20 hours of total play time. Happy days.

Having spent a few days with the humble ten or so games we now have in our 3DS library, I've come to realize that handheld gaming has changed a whole fucking lot from one generation to the next. Some changes are really surpsising to me, such as portable games with production values, which make certain PC titles look like shit by comparison. On the not so happy side there are invasive DLC and microtransaction methods, which rival all the shit I'm used to from EA or Ubisoft. Yes, Nintendo were facing some hard times when the WiiU bombed, but holy shit, they're cold and greedy for somebody, who is all about family values.

I have spend the last three days playing Fire Emblem: Awakening, interrupting only for a few hours of sleep here and there. I'd get up, fire up the 3DS pretty much straight away and play till 5 or 6 in the morning, Claire doing pretty much the same, alternating between Tomodachi Life and Ocarina of Time. I have never finished a Fire Emblem game before, even though I tried some of them on the GBA. I liked the gameplay, because it was very similar to Shining Force, but the crappy visuals and the permadeath mechanic always put me off in the long run. Awakening lets me play without permadeath and it looks absolutely amazing, so it was the first game in the series I actually played all the way to the end. I got about 40 hours of play time out of it, not including most DLC or bonus missions. That's some great value for ~25 Quid.

In many ways, Fire Emblem: Awakening is like a better Shining Force. The tactical, turn-based battles are very similar to Sega's ruined franchise, there's a friendship system, which allows your units to provide bonuses to one another and since this is a Japanese game we're talking about, of course certain characters can also get married and have children, which will eventually join your army when they're fully grown up. Because reasons, time travel, the story is pretty awful, but what the hey.
The game also sounds pretty fucking great:

There's also enough paid DLC available to spend more on added content than on the original game. There's a lot of free DLC here, too, and the main storyline was created without bonus content in mind, so you can easily complete the whole thing without forking out for extra stuff. Still, it's annoying to play a brand new game and five minutes in you're presented with a cash shop, which offers tons of new stuff for lots of real currency, including Pay2Win-crap such as paid maps, which reward you with insane amounts of gold and experience, which can be played an infinite amount of times.

But the game which absolutely takes the piss when it comes to microtransactions is Bravely Default, which combines old school JRPG mechanics with the worst, most annoying features of browser/mobile gaming.

Holy shit. Bravely Default features so much quality voice acting, incredibly detailed hand-drawn landscapes and an absolutely amazing soundtrack, I haven't seen such production values in a portable game since Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Which makes sense, seeing as they were both made by Square Enix.

The game actually freaking looks like this!

Hidden underneath the fancy visuals and audio and tons upon tons of unnecessarily cheesy, cringeworthy dialogue is a fairly standard JRPG, which plays a lot like the old-school Final Fantasy games. You have your four warriors of light, you put a bunch of weapons, armor and spells on them and explore dungeons, solve quests and battle your way through tons of random encounters. The whole thing gets spiced up by the brave/default combat mechanic, which lets you perform multiple actions in advance at the cost of missing turns further into the battle. Or deliberately skip a turn, turtle up, then perform multiple actions afterwards. Or ignore the whole thing and just play it like any other JRPG before it. It's pretty fun, I guess.

What ruined it for me about ten minutes in was a popup, telling me that I can basically cheat by spending real money via microtransactions. There's a feature, which lets you freeze time and perform attacks, spells or any other action in order to gain an advantage in battle. Normally, you only get one of these actions for every eight hours you put your game into sleep mode. However, you can buy potions to refill your action meter by spending real currency. But the game doesn't just tell you about it once and then shuts up about it. It goes out of its way, breaking the 4th wall and all immersion the first time you try this feature.

"Is it true that there are other ways to use this ability besides putting the system to sleep?" Your fucking characters say these things out loud while you freeze time, constantly hinting at the fucking cash shop. This isn't a Free2Play game, it's not a budget title and having characters ruin immersion like that, only to remind me that I should spend more money on microtransactions is absolute bullshit. And while this is the only form of microtransactions I've encountered thus far, Bravely Default still goes out of its way to keep you from actually playing the fucking game.

You see, there's a little minigame, which has you rebuild a village in real time. Tell your villagers to build or upgrade the potion shop, have them open a weapon shop, that kind of thing. Think WoW garrisons. Some tasks only take five minutes, others take several hours and a little icon will flash at you and remind you to keep checking on the villagers whenever they complete something. There's also a flashing icon when new sidequests appear. "Change the order of your party!" "Slow down or speed up combat!" Yes, tutorials are great and everything, but I've played RPGs before and I'd really like to skip this. You will also get random visits from other players' characters, who can be summoned in battle for a bit of extra damage, which also causes random update notes to flash on your screen. So in between build orders on your village, pointless side missions and random online crap you get drowned in so many notifications that it becomes pretty difficult to focus on the actual game. Thank god you get a "party dialogue" notification flashing every two or so minutes, whenever you group wants to share their thoughts on the situation. And they want to share a whole fucking lot.

Music is good, though:

Out of all the games I've tried so far, Bravely Default is the only one that really disappointed me. I'll keep at it for a little while longer and give it a chance to convince me, but I'm not expecting much. I don't like it when a relatively basic RPG is cluttered up in so many minigames, social media features and other meaningless garbage. Just let me play the damn game!

On the other side of the spectrum is Luigi's Mansion 2. I didn't really want that game, but Claire put it on the Christmas list for the heck of it. I played the original for a few minutes, but I never had a Gamecube and I've never been a huge Nintendo fan outside of their handheld department, so I didn't expect much. And damn, was I wrong!

This game is amazing. I think it looks even better than Fire Emblem or Bravely Default, because it has some incredible lighting effects, it makes excellent use of the stereoscopic 3D and plays around with perspective a lot, when you move and tilt your DS. Music and character animations are awesome and it's really funny when Luigi suddenly hums along with the background music. See, this is how you break the 4th wall without fucking up the atmosphere, Square Enix! Vacuuming up ghosts is pretty easy and for the most part this game reminds me more of a point & click adventure than a platformer or whatever it's supposed to be. There's a lot of discover, it has a great sense of humour and I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying this. Definitely worth it!

Another big surprise was Street Fighter IV. It's been out for a while, but I still can't believe how close it is to the PC and console versions:

Characters, moves and animations are just like in the "big" version and they even put all the taunts, colours and costumes in there! The one thing that bothers me is how all the characters and animals in the background have been turned into flat, dead cardboard cutouts. I know they're doing this for performance reasons, but those bystanders just don't look right when they're flat 2D pictures with zero animations or depth to them. This is especially true in the dynamic 3D mode, which slightly alters the camera angle for a better 3D effect. You get to see all the 2D bystanders from the side and they look incredibly fake and cheap. On the other hand, how much time to you spend looking at details in the scenery when you're playing Street Fighter? It's not a massive drawback and the game is still incredibly fun, but I think I'd prefer it if they had removed those guys altogether instead of turning them into still, ugly sprites.

People in the background never move and they're all in 2D.

I'm pretty sure there is nothing that hasn't already been said about Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart 7 or Ocarina of Time, so I'll just say they're all great, though Mario Kart feels unusually difficult for some reason. The entire 50cc cup is so laughably easy, that I was bored the entire time and really just wanted to get it done. But when you get to the 150cc races, things get so incredibly tough, that the whole experience can get a bit frustrating, especially when you just want to unlock additional characters and vehicles. It looks great, it runs well, it's a nice game and everything, but it didn't really blow me away. I'd say it's still worth it, especially when you have friends to play against. It's just a shame that the stat system for the karts seems a bit messed up and apparently everybody chooses maximum acceleration over stats like speed, weight, handling or off-road, as most of them are pretty useless. I prefer Smash and the Zelda remakes, but none of these games are really bad.

Goodbye, 2015!

I've been living in the UK for more than a half decade now! Can you believe it? Man, time is flying! And things could only be worse if I had cancer and lived under a bridge right now. Merry Christmas!

Five years of working our asses off, which usually includes saturdays and sundays. Heck, Claire is working right the fuck now and my next article is due in the first week of January. And guess what? We're not a single step closer to that marriage we may as well give up on planning, we haven't been on a single vacation and I haven't seen a single square mile of this fucking island, which isn't part of our daily trip to Farm Foods.

But that's our own fault, because we blew all our hard-earned cash on fancy Nintendo toys this year, right? Yeah well, I had work days in November, which started at 9am and ended sometime around 1am in order to afford that shit. And guess what? Claire and I gave each other NOTHING, nada, zilch for Christmas or our birthdays in 2014 or 2013, because we had to save all our pennies to pay a guy for shoving cotton up my dead father's ass, so the family could look at him one last time before they put him in a vase. Because enbalming isn't just fucking pointless, it's also ridiculously expensive.

So here's to the next 5 years with no hope for change, no future and no proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, because we live in a day and age where 70 Euro a page is considered fair pay for freelance writers. Because unreliable assholes with zero talent are okay with these wages and they'll also do it for less. Hurray! Hey, maybe I'll just fart out some stolen, badly-researched news articles at 3 Euros a pop and "if I offer you six, you should consider it a favour, not an insult, but we'll have to renegotiate afterwards" you stupid, fucking, greedy bastards!

Here's to another year of 7 days work a week, taking all the shit and the scraps nobody else wants, getting by on 800 Quid per month and whatever working tax credit the Tories say I deserve. It's not like I need fair pay or a vacation, seeing as tinned and frozen foods are getting better and better each year and I can see most of the countryside on tv, anyway. And it's not like our 7 year engagement looks like a total joke or something. Ho, ho, fucking ho. Happy Christmas, you cunts!

Getting Hitler & Death To Make a Baby

Bring Hitler to your island and suddenly there's a death problem. Weird.

Tomodachi Life lets you mess around with the virtual lives of your friends, families and favourite celebrities and fictional characters. Which is boring, so I did the only reasonable thing by putting Hitler in there. Yeah... we may have to skip this game when Claire shows the 3DS to her Nana this Christmas.

I may have been a little too accurate recreating the angry little shitsack inside the game, so we had to nerf him a bit by putting a pink bunny hat on him and stuffing him inside a giant hamster cage.

Who's a good little Hitler? Does Hitler want to play? 

To make things a little less creepy we've also put some actual friends in there, such as our good friend Haggy. He plays a sick Ukulele.

I don't know if he also plays any real instruments. But look! There he is now!

He's still playing the theme from Halloween outside assorted ladies' bedroom windows every night.

And five minutes later, this is what happened:

Abort! Delete! UNINSTALL!

Since Tomodachi Life is 90 percent soap opera, a huge part of it is really a dating simulator. Claire has put our Miis in there, who were set up with one another by Twilight Princess' Midna. And only 38,433 dates later, they totally hit it off, despite their low compatibility rating of 7 percent! Or as we're hoping to proclaim in our wedding vows one day, "Eh, close enough."

I didn't take off the penguin suit all night, ifyouknowwhatimsayin

Ironically enough, Midna ended up all heartbroken when she finally realized that her aching loins were screaming my name all along. No matter what we tried, she simply wouldn't stop feeling moist for me, so we deported her to some random 3rd world country. She still sends creepy pictures every once in a while.

We've removed the bottom half of the pic. She's completely naked down there. It's not pretty.

Meanwhile, Haggy and Hitler were getting dangerously close. Sure, they make a cute couple and everything, but the whole thing still seemed a bit wrong, so we added Death to the show. Did you know the Grim Reaper is really female? It's so hard to tell when somebody is a skeleton, but Death spends most of her day painting her nai... um... finger and toe bones, knitting disgusting sweaters and singing to herself in the bath tub. I think Death might be too nice for Hitler. Whoa.

Eventually we decided to distract Hitler with random toys like a metal detector, which lead to some bizarre moments. Here's a picture of our Miis enjoying a midnight walk on the beach, while Hitler is furiously digging in the sand after his metal detector found something:

Wo ist mein hidden Nazi Gold??

Besides, it looks like there is somebody much better suited to hook up with good old Death.

I don't think this is what Nintendo had in mind when they came up with this game. To be fair, the game is pretty bizarre even when you don't turn it into a boning simulator with Death and Hitler. I'm well over a year late to the party, but just in case you missed it...

I'm a Dinosaur!

Claire and I have finally transformed into one of those elderly couples, who sit up in bed and read, occasionally turning their heads to comment on interesting stuff happening in their books. Or however that works. Except our books are portable consoles and our reading material consists of demos, videos and a bizarre life simulator.

Nintendo is weird. Everyone, myself included, is happy to make fun of EA and Ubisoft for farting out the exact same games over and over again, as well as releasing tons of overpriced DLC for their games. Last night I spent five Quid to unlock Cloud Strife in the 4th Smash Bros. game. And if I wanted all the additional stages, costumes and characters, I could spend more money on DLC than what I had to pay for the game itself. And we're on which Mario Kart now? Eight? And don't get me started on their DLC...

Yet I didn't hesitate to fork out some real cash to put Ryu and his stage in my portable game, which I'll probably never even look at a couple weeks from now. Funny how that works.

Perhaps I'm so okay with throwing lots of money at Nintendo, because they also do a lot of things right. Fucking demos, for instance! Remember when you could fucking try a game before you shelled out a ton of money on something you might not even like? Without pirating it, that is? There used to be a time where playable demos were a pretty common thing - or so I've learned from ancient cave paintings. And apparently this is also a thing on the 3DS. Awesome!

I have spent hours trying all kinds of games on there. Surprisingly, the new Sonic Game (the one with the hideous, malformed characters) is actually really fun to play. There's also a crazy cat lady simulator, which couldn't possibly be any less realistic. The cats on there are friendly, happy, they eat their expensive brand name cat food without drama and you can freaking walk them using only a laser pointer. The demo cat looked exactly like one of our cats. I uninstalled the demo five minutes later and cuddled the real cat. She hated it. Life is good.

If I offer my real cat the same brand of food twice in a row, she'll turn her ass on it and do a burying motion. True story!

But we didn't just dick around on weird game demos. There's also a new anime channel in the 3DS home menu, which plays crap like Pokemon episodes and the cringeworthy Kirby show. I always thought games turned cartoon show served to sell a product, but I actually kind of hate Kirby after watching the first episode of that nonsense. But everything was better after we watched I'm a Dinosaur!

It explains all cool dinosaur facts in a funny, easy to understand fashion. Ancient monster lizards never looked cooler! And kids will like it too, I suppose.

We've also bet some (virtual) money on a bunch of live battles happening around the world on Super Smash Bros. Amazing stuff, really. There was always a match about to start, never any delays in between or during battles. I suspect we were really just watching replays of recent matches rather than having them live-streamed as they happened, but it was still a pretty cool feature. It's fun to see what other players can do on there. And things get infinitely more interesting when you bet on somebody and hope for them to win.

Wanna know what new content is coming up for Smash Bros.? Here's some lag-free high quality video showing all the new characters and costumes in all detail! We've also spied on our sleeping Miis in Tomodachi Life and shot each other's faces in some weird built-in minigame thing that lets you shoot faces. It also plays all our favourite Xtube videos.

Yeah, I know. This thing is basically a smartphone with better games and without the phonecalls. I can awkwardly update my Facebook status on there using the stylus or I can watch Youtube videos on a much smaller screen using a much lower resolution than my PC. And it doesn't exactly run Dragon Age or Warframe, either. But who gives a fuck? We have Mario Kart. Heh.

XL Fun!

Our New 3DS XL consoles arrived today and exceeded all expectations! As a cave-dwelling backwards fuck, who refuses to buy a smartphone, I have now finally reached a stage in evolution, where I get to poop and watch Youtube at the same time! Whee! Here's me killing five people in the Ghost in the Shell FPS game:

I can now chill out on the sofa and book face like a pro. Oh yeah and apparently the thing plays games, too. Ryu on Smash Bros. feels weird and out of place, but I'm having too much fun to care. We've also ordered another brand new game, today. And if anyone had told me it was gonna be Tomodachi Life, I would have laughed them off the internet.

There's a trial version of that game on the new 3DS. So I dicked around a bit with the lookalike Miis the console created for Claire and my grumpy self. Highly unflattering stuff, but what the hey. I had a little virtual Claire in my game and then she got a cold, so I gave her some medicine and then I put her on a swing and pushed her a little and then I gave her orange juice and she really liked that and damn, this is the biggest waste of time, EVER, but I can't stop caring, because she's Claire (sort of) and it was fun watching our Mii's interact with each other on there andand... ahem.
Well and then I pictured a scenario where Claire was dead and all I had left was her Mii in Tomodachi Life and I got really depressed, because the human brain is a dickbag.

Apparently, old NDS games look pretty good on the 3DS, as well. Claire's going through all her old Mario games right now, starting them over to experience them all over again. And I'm waiting to get my hands on Fire Emblem. Starfox looks pretty neat and is on offer for less than 20 Quid right now. Final Fantasy Explorers is coming next year. And another Fire Emblem. And there's like a dozen games rated 90+ on that console already. We'll be very busy these next couple of months. And hilariously poor. Time to eat cardboard! Whee!

Go Fuck Yourself, eBay!

Living in the UK whilst getting your monthly salary in Euro is a pain in the ass. You try and do your Christmas shopping on Amazon when all your money is in the wrong fucking currency. Of course this wouldn't be such a big problem if Amazon accepted PayPal, but of course they don't, because PayPal is affiliated with eBay. Of course I could order all my shit from online stores which accept PayPal such as game.co.uk, but those bastards charge 180 Quid for a product I could get for 140 on Amazon while I'm writing this.

Amazon

Game - the extra 40 Quid are for the English text on the cardboard box.

So yeah... turns out eBay still exists. Did you know? I mean, have you honestly used eBay within the last decade or so? That website people use to sell you all their broken shit, empty cardboard boxes or nothing at all even though you pay them? And it turns out the place hasn't changed one bit. Have a look at Smash Bros. over at Amazon:

It was 25 Quid a week ago. Thanks, Christmas!

Meanwhile on eBay:

Should I buy the overpriced one or the one that was clearly stolen?

Great. On eBay I can either pay AAA PC Game money on a fucking handheld game or I can save half a Quid, but get my game second hand, with no box, manual or fucking anything it originally came with. Who throws out the fucking protective cases these games come with?

And yes, I did see the seller offering a brand new Smash Bros. for 25 Quid, but they're located in Australia, selling the Austalian version of the game, which takes up to 3 weeks for delivery. The fine print mentions additional fees when the game goes through customs.

And you had better be fucking patient if you want to buy a *New* 3DS XL on eBay. As in, the 2015 version, not the one from 2013. Let's see what happens if we search for New 3DS XL, shall we?

The first page of results is much bigger than this - I have highlighted the only two matches.

Of course this is as much Nintendo's fault as it is eBay's - out of well over a dozen results on the first page, only two actually show the new 3DS XL, the rest is different stuff I didn't want to buy. You have to blame Nintendo for giving their product such a retarded name, but it doesn't change the fact that it makes shopping for one on eBay a massive pain in the dick. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, possibly because you're shopping for a friend, relative, child or whatever, you may well end up buying the outdated 2013 model - possibly at the exact same price of the newer, better 2015 version. Gee, thanks so much, eBay!

So I set up an eBay account, linked my PayPal with it, got ripped off (the current exchange rate is 72 Pence per Euro, PayPal gives you 69), bought articles from 4 different sellers, all of which stated, "Item will be dispatched today if you order within the next XX minutes." They all took my money straight away, they all gave me a positive rating (mkay), none of them, not one, have sent out the item today.

Instead, I get a message from one of the sellers:

Okay, I had to give all that information to eBay and even more than that to PayPal and have it all verified, but whatever. I gave him my name and phone number and told him I cannot re-send him my email address, because eBay disallows that in private messages. Try it for yourself - you'll get an error message, telling you to remove the email address. Here's the guy's response:

Because apparently my landline isn't good enough and it's somehow my problem that he doesn't trust new eBay accounts without user ratings. Any real shop  that accepts PayPal would have sent me my stuff by now. Meanwhile, this guy wants my blood type, a stool sample and all my favourite sexual positions. So I replied like a dickbag:

So the guy finally called me on my landline and confirmed the purchase. After he accepted my fucking payment. The item is still not marked as 'sent', but he has given me a super positive review, because he's probably afraid I might send him a negative one for being annoying.

I hope this concludes today's entry and I'll just receive all my stuff sometime this week and that'll be the end of that. Next time I'm gonna get my money out of an ATM, pay it into my bank account and shop through Amazon, because eBay is outdated, frustrating, tedious horsefuck.

-Cat

UPDATE, 24 hours later

I have paid for each and every item yesterday (07 Dec). Today, only one out of four items has been dispatched. The remaining three items, all of which are supposed to arrive between tomorrow and Thursday, are still with the seller. Ironically, the one item which has actually been put in the mail is not due until Thursday or Friday.

UPDATE, 48 hours after payment

The games have now been dispatched. So tomorrow we should be sitting on two chargers, two copies of Smash and no 3DS. Nice.

UPDATE - Day Four

3DS was paid for and the order was confirmed on Monday. The mail man delivered this in the morning:

Couple hours later he showed up with this:

Well then! Time to charge my brand new 3DS and try out this sweet, sweet game!

UPDATE - Day Six:
Still no 3DS. The seller told me they should get here next Tuesday. Really? He said he put them in the mail on Wednesday morning and, like me, he's located in the UK. Okay then. Let's wait for Tuesday. I coulda just taken all my money out of an ATM, put it in the bank, ordered through Amazon, saved some money and a lot of time by now.