Yay Sonic! Fuck Octopath Traveler!

Ugh. I'm having one of those days again. You know, where the world and all the people in it just get on your nuts a bit too much. Starting with all those YouTube "celebrities", who now fart out Warframe videos around the clock, even though none of them actually ever played the game for more than five minutes. Warframe is completely burying Destiny 2 right now, TennoCon 2018 got people more hyped for the game than ever before, it's the 'golden age' of Warframe and its popularity is turning into a bit of a meme right now. So of course you get all the YouTube parasites milking the absolute fuck out of it.

There are a few decent videos out there. AngryJoe's TennoCon coverage is fun enough, especially since he doesn't pretend he's a die-hard fan, who is playing the game non-stop. SkillUp's TennoCon interviews are absolutely worth watching. And then you get a bunch of maggots without a single creative bone in their bodies, who just blatantly copy just about everything everyone else says in their videos, steal a bit of random gameplay from other YouTubers without asking for permission or giving credit, all for that sweet, sweet ad revenue for farting out a quick, lazy video praising a game they don't really know anything about, but heyho, it's trending and people are gonna click it.
You know, cunts like Cleanprincegaming, who stole several minutes of my Warframe gameplay straight from my channel, never asked my permission, didn't bother to give credit for ANY of the footage he's using in his shitty video and then go rake in that sweet, sweet cash from their 500k subscribers, you lazy, talentless bastard!

Or even lazier folks such as Downward Thrust, who crapped all over Warframe in one of his videos for clicks until people checked on his account and called him out on the fact that he barely played the game for five minutes. After TennoCon he went and made another video, explaining that he has played "over 50 hours across multiple accounts" (yeah, right), saying he was wrong and he actually enjoys the game now and "he cannot really explain why". I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Warframe is currently more popular than tits and YouTube is absolutely flooded with videos telling people why they need to play Warframe. And 90% of them just repeat the same thing and use other people's gameplay. I fucking hate YouTube.

Speaking of things I fucking hate...

In other news - Octopath Traveler. I read some 90something % reviews claiming this game is an absolute love letter to old console jRPGs and what have you. Uh-huh, great. I'm a bit surprised I seem to be the only person on the planet who is bothred by the INSANE amount of depth of field effects, which turn everything that is ever so slightly in the fore- or background into a blurry, awful mess. Or the fact that the game might just tell you that the character, whose story you'd like to continue, requires you to grind for another ten levels, before you're strong enough to continue said story. But hey, how about you play some other freaking character's story instead? Damn you, Square Enix! Why are you letting me choose from all those characters, if you're forcing me to play every single one of them, anyway, with the only alternative being tedious, monotonous grind?

The voice-acting, where present, is great. The music is phenomenal. I absolutely hate the visuals, though people are already begging for remakes of older Final Fantasy titles and Chrono Trigger, so apparently true beauty lies in the eye of the idiot who doesn't know any better. There's also no interesting story here, no surprise twists or any characters, who aren't absolute clichés of themselves. But if that and the weird visual style don't bother you and you want to experience all of the 8 stories in a single playthrough anyway, then you'll probably enjoy this one and that's okay. It's okay to be wrong. I forgive you.

It gets worse.

Gekido is currently on offer in the Switch eShop, so I bought and instantly regretted it. The cutscenes are entirely devoid of sound, the controls are crap, level-design is unnecessarily labyrinthian, confusing and full of bottomless pits and other annoying shit and the fighting... well, Streets of Rage it ain't. I can forgive a button-masher for being a button masher if it's at least somewhat fun and satisying to beat the crap out of your enemies, but Gekido just overwhelms you with sheer numbers of bad guys, which just spawn all over the place at random moments. Sometimes they drop orbs for you to collect, which may result in something like a temporary power-up or a speed boost or they may just reverse your controls or completely remove your ability to attack for a few seconds, because who doesn't want to be rewarded with power-downs for defeating a bunch of bad guys?

Who wants some pork?

Then there's Agatha Knife, a game, which probably rubbed some vegans and religious types the wrong way. Agatha is the butcher's daughter and she's facing a bit of a dilemma: she loves animals, but she also loves meat. She butchers the animals to help her mother sell the meat, but she doesn't want the animals to be sad and scared when they have to die.

And that's when Agatha learns about religion. A made-up deity and a set of rules to give people something to believe in and to help the inventor of said religion achieve personal gain. The game's wording, not mine. So Agatha goes and invents Carnivorism and teaches it to her animals, so they'll be okay with the whole getting butchered thing. It's a pretty dark, cynical little point & click adventure, which is exactly why I like it.

And of course...

I love Doom on the Switch so I got Wolfenstein. There's nothing that hasn't already been said about how impressive this port is. That said, yeah, it's a blurry mess, up to a point where it can get difficult to even see who is shooting at you, because everything gets so muddy, especially in handheld mode. It's amazing how much we're willing to forgive when you add "...and you can play it whilst taking a shit" to a game's title.

Speaking of shooty stuff, Fortnite now has motion controls on the Switch. I absolutely hate Fortnite, but I also have moments where I absolutely love it, because I'm hanging out in the eye of the storm with the last five or so players. I don't think I'll ever really get into it, but it costs nothing, it looks and plays alright, I'm not gonna complain.

Encore Mode is the best way to play Sonic Mania.

Then there's Sonic Mania Plus. It adds Ray and Mighty as playable characters. Not entirely sure what the point of Ray is, seeing as he glides like Knuckles, but is ten times harder to control and doesn't scale any walls. Mighty reflects projectiles and survives spikes, what with him being an armadillo and all. He's a lot more fun to play than he was in Knuckles Chaotix on the 32x.

Most importantly though - Encore Mode. Play two characters at a time, with one of them being controlled by the AI and you can switch back and forth between them at anytime. Get one of them killed and they'll instantly be replaced by one of the other three guys, if you've unlocked them in a fun new pinball minigame, which replaces the fucking awful blue spheres bonus stage. Stages get slightly altered colour-palettes, bonus stage rings have been moved, the 3D bonus stages are now a bit more challenging and run at a locked 60 FPS on Switch. To me it's easily the most satisfying way to play Sonic Mania. Of course things would be even more fun if Encore had "1.5 player coop" like Sonic & Tails mode, so I'm crossing all available fingers and toes this might get added in the future.

Still waiting for the release of Titan Quest on Switch. According to reviews, the console ports so far have been broken, buggy and surprisingly incomplete (apparently, the latest expansion is simply not present at all). Sooo... I'm trying to curb that enthusiasm a bit. But I've been craving a hack'n'slay title on the Switch for as long as I had one, so it's about damn time I'm getting one! I'll drag Claire into it for some jolly cooperation. Though, if all else fails, I'll just have to soro it. You know, like on Warframe.