The Sexy Adventures of Lonk and Epwna

I grew up in a strictly Segan household and was never a fan of Zelda. So when people played Zelda on the NES, I had Phantasy Star on my Master System. It was basically this...

Yuck!

compared to that...

Rawr!

And yes, in the SNES era Zelda fans had this...

Yawn!

But I had this here...

Fuck your Zelda.

Spare me the lectures on how I'm comparing apples to Phantasy Star - both games were console JRPGs available at the same time on their respective system. And I happen to prefer Phantasy Star, which was eventually punished by Sega for changing the entire franchise into something completely different, because they hate their fans and love to shit on the childhoods of everyone who loved Phantasy Star, Shining Force and Sonic, to name just a few.

I did have an N64 and played Ocarina of Time back in the day, which was absolutely amazing and nothing short of breathtaking for its time. It also had the worst fucking water temple in any Zelda game ever, which is why I never completed the damn game. I beat the temple, mind you, but I had absolutely zero motivation to ever touch this game again when I was done with that bit. So, while the Zelda games are certainly all great and well-loved by their fans and what have you, I simply didn't play most of them and completed zero. Just not my cup of tea.

Anyone else sense a butt?

But then I ran out of stuff to play on my 3DS. The Terraria update is still not here, I've finished the first Fire Emblem and refuse to buy the second one three times in order to get the complete story, I'm done with Bravely Default and Bravely Second bores me to tears. And then everyone went a bit nuts over Hyrule Warriors Legends, which is a huge Zelda-Allstars hack'n'slash thing, so I figured, eh, why the fuck not and grabbed it. It's got some pretty sweet music, too!

I've put a ton of hours into this game and it simply doesn't end! It has some 24 or so playable characters, a ridiculously long story mode and tons of additional game modes and features, so you can probably play this thing for as long as you live. Granted, every level is pretty much the same, but with some changing baddies and scenery, but the mindless button-mashing action is extremely satisfying on the go. It's quickly turning into one of my favourite games, even though I know next to nothing about most characters and I reeeeally don't care.

Okay, I won't lie - I probably had a boner for Midna and I don't give a fuck if you judge me. I know someone who flicks it to Star Trek porn fics, another acquaintance of mine dresses up in a bunny costume before sex and one of my friends wants to fuck a cartoon hedgehog. Looks like absolutely everybody is into weird shit and apparently potbellied midgets do it for me. Anyhow.

Claire watched me play Hyrule Warriors for awhile until she decided to have another go at Twilight Princess. Alas, the ol' Gamecube is at her family's place, so we had to fire up Dolphin in order to run the game. Twilight Princess has aged fairly well for a decade-old game, though most textures are incredibly muddy, even if you crank the game resolution all the way up to 4k. A low-quality texture is a low-quality texture, no matter what resolution you play on. So I looked into emulator texture modding and one thing lead to another and....

I used Dolphin quite a bit over the years, but my biggest concern was always running stuff like F-Zero GX and Smash Bros. at acceptable speeds. Or playing the Metroid Prime Trilogy with mouse and keyboard, which is actually pretty awesome when you get it to work. It's also a huge pain in the ass, because one configuration may be perfect for one game and totally break another, so I never spend any massive amount of time trying to actually finish any of these games.

Today, Dolphin runs on DX12 (kinda), it's faster and more stable than ever and there's even support for all sorts of post-processing effects. And yes, apparently you can insert custom textures into all your games to make them look a little less dated. Twilight Princess may not look "next gen" by any means, but it still looks hell of a lot better than it did back in the day.

And now I wait for the content strike from Nintendo.

So now I get to enjoy this old game with ambient occlusion, depth of field and all sorts of other fancy shit I won't pretend I understand, which all helps make the game a little less ugly. It's a bit of a mixed bag, as some of the more photo-realistic textures clash heavily with the surrounding lower-quality stuff. But it's still a big improvement.

The tree bark looks amazing, but that fern in front of it looks like total ass.

I'm also not a huge fan of how the whole thing is limited to 30 FPS even when you emulate it, but that's what I get for being a spoiled PC gamer. For what it counts, I'm enjoying the whole thing a little more than I enjoyed Ocarina back in the day. Though Midna is a total cunt, so far. Shame. She's pretty awesome in Hyrule Warriors, so maybe she'll become more likable in Twilight Princess as one progresses through the story. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and hang on to those rule34 bookmarks for now.

Speaking of all things gaming and HD, it looks like Youtube finally supports resolutions above 1080p at 60 FPS. In the past I could only choose between 60 FPS and resolutions greater than 1080p, but never both. Now I can have both, which should be a cool feature for upcoming Warframe videos. Bit rate still isn't ideal, there are some annoying artifacts and footage never looks as good as the actual game, but it's better than it was. Look!

In other news, Haggy beat me for the first ever time (well, first three times, really) on Street Fighter V. Counting all our matches in Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters XIII and SFV I've probably won 100 or more fights in a row. He switched characters to Laura and I have absolutely no idea when it's safe to attack, when I should defend or how to defend against Laura's attacks. Which is great, because this will finally force me to improve and learn something new. The first time we all played together in a lobby with 7 people I constantly had to queue back up at the end of the line after beating everybody, because people were getting tired of fighting me. Maybe this is finally gonna change things a bit. I'm happy he kept on practicing long and hard enough to finally get the hang of it. In a perfect world we'll get this friendly rivalry going where we'll take turns at who gets the upper hand, constantly forcing each other to learn new tricks. It's how I used to play Street Fighter 2 against my brother and it's really the best way to play any fighting game.

I only ever play one character, because I'm lazy. I could try and pick something else for a change, surprise him a bit and mix things up a little, but that's just not my style. I'm just gonna dick around with Ken some more until I get the upper hand again. This may take a while and I'm okay with that. It's about time I get a challenge and something to master. Wiping the floor with everybody is fun, but you learn nothing that way. This is where the real fun begins.

NaCl

Something incredible has happened. Something so awesome, I didn't have time to update this blog for a few weeks. Which is a shame, because it turns out I'm approaching 90,000 hits on here. I know, this is absolutely nothing compared to the really popular stuff floating around the internet, but it still feels like a small achievement, so let me have this. :P

If you're a regular to this blog, you may be aware that I have reached an age where most of my friends have become incredibly boring. They spend more time raising their kids instead of playing video games. And in those rare moments where they could be playing games, they need to ask their significant others' permission. The other day I was hoping to get a session on GTA V going and one of the answers I got was, "I could probably show up for a couple hours next Thursday." I'm not making this up. If I want to enjoy 2 or so hours of multiplayer with my friends, I'm forced to make an appointment. At this point it's a lot quicker and easier to see my dentist or general physician.

"I get the tank and blow up the helicopters while you steal the meth and we'll be out before the cops arrive!"

Fortunately for me, I have a close friend, whose guitar-teaching skills grant him access to an incredibly valuable resource: Millenials. As in, young folk with the time and energy all of my older friends sorely lack. These last couple of weeks I've been playing ALL THE GAMES with them, all the time, every day, for so many hours, holy fuck. Warframe, Street Fighter, Black Ops, I'm currently looking into Killing Floor 2 and we'll get 'round to trying GTA V eventually. Whoa.

I'm not the social type and I generally prefer playing by myself, but it feels nice to log on to Warframe to find a whole bunch of people online when looking at the alliance chat. People ask for help when farming certain things or want modding advice and it's fun to see how a bunch of newcomers get to experience Warframe for the first time in its current state. The game has changed so much in its 3 years of "open beta" and it's fun to see how folks experience the tutorial missions, see certain bosses or features like Archwing for the first time. I've got all my frames and mods and arcanes and very little reason to log on outside of special events, so it's nice to be able to help these guys. With that said, Digital Extremes keep releasing fun new content. I'm quite fond of the new Inaros frame.

Of course he's cheap. Inaros can blind enemies regardless of their level, then onehit them with a crappy dagger and the corresponding instakill mod. But he looks awesome, he's incredibly fun to play and stabbing stuff in the face is a nice contrast to my usual playstyle, which tends to be a little less subtle. And he's not Valkyr levels of "I can remain in god mode for as long as I want" cheap, either.

The main problem with Warframe is its endless game modes. Enemies keep gaining levels and will become stronger and stronger until you decide to leave a mission. Spend only 15 or 20 minutes in a mission and just about every warframe is ridiculously powerful with the right gear and modifications. Spend an hour inside a mission that gets harder and harder as you progress and balancing goes all over the place. Some warframes can kill enemies regardless of their level, other frames won't do a dent against armored baddies and have to skip certain battles completely if they don't want to die in a single hit. And yes, certain warframes will die as quickly as that, while others get ridiculously broken amounts of health, shields, armor or simply trigger invulnerability or invisibility at will.

You are by no means required to play any mission for that long, but people tend to judge a frame and its strength by how long they last in these endless game modes. And the balancing drama and constant tweaking, fixing and revamping will never end until the developers put level caps on enemy units. I really wish that was a thing, because right now all we have is an endless cycle of enemies, frames, weapons and mods becoming stronger and stronger with every update, trivializing the non-endless content more and more all the time. It's what ultimately ruined Diablo 3 for me - farm legendaries, push forward to a whole new level inside a nephalem rift, find updated, "ancient" versions of your legendaries which are even more powerful, advance to an even higher rift level, rinse, repeat. No end, no limit - and absolutely zero meaning. If you can just keep on going forever, characters and enemies getting infinitely stronger, then what's the fucking point? There is no real progress, no sense of achievement, you just keep on going. I fear Warframe may be headed in the same direction.

In other news, I've invested in one of these babies:

I may put a sticker on there to cover the face of that creepy fat guy.

We've reached a point in Street Fighter V, where things may be getting a little more... well, I don't want to say "serious", because we're simply a bunch of incredibly awful players. But for what it counts, we're rather competitive among ourselves. Until now I've been playing SFV using either my old Xbox 360 controller or even my keyboard. Because frankly, playing 2-3 casual hours of Street Fighter a week against a bunch of friends really doesn't require special hardware. But now I'm the only idiot who still isn't using a fight stick, fight pad, fight anything.

I don't want to knock the Xbox 360 controller, because it's amazing for a great variety of games. But its D-Pad isn't exactly great for fighting games, especially when it's covered in the sticky remains of your unborn children. Seriously, try Pinnacle Game Profiler with one, use the maximum endless rumble setting and tell me you're not having any impure thoughts. But while that makes the controller even more fun, it also means I'll accidentally jump when I want to throw a Hadoken, I'll eventually break a thumb when trying to launch a critical art and certain advanced combos are simply impossible to do outside of training mode.

I'm a lazy bastard. I use nothing but the most basic attacks and heavy normals, simply because it's a pain in the ass to do any more than that on a 360 controller and because, frankly, it's good enough for now. We've tried the new 8 player lobbies last night and actually managed to get a whole 7 people in there. It was a fun, mostly lag-free experience, spectator mode was incredible and the only problem I see about the whole thing is our current skill gap. I repeatedly had to manually return to the bottom of the queue, because I won every single match and people were getting tired of playing against me.

Make no mistake. I'm fully aware of the fact that these guys are all highly motivated and practicing hard and it's only a matter of time until they'll get better than me. I'm ruling on borrowed time, but I'll enjoy it and rub it in for as long as it lasts. And nobody said I had to make this easy for them, so all the more reason to look into my very first fight pad. Haggy pointed out the above pad to me and it looks and sounds like something designed just for me. Its design is somewhere between the Megadrive/Genesis and Saturn pad, which is what I've been using for Street Fighter for over a decade. The pad is 15% smaller, which should be about perfect for my small hands.
The one thing that worries me is how this thing is made by Mad Catz, which I've only known for their incredibly cheap, shitty hardware. And this video is somewhat troubling.

Now I get to watch all my friends as they fight each other and try to avoid fighting me. Yay, I think?

If you don't have the time to watch that link, it shows somebody who has managed to wreck about half a dozen or so Mad Catz fight pads, which all ended up with stuck buttons and/or broken D-Pads, most of which were beyond repair. Of course that guy might have been mashing his hardware like an ox, but buying one of those things feels like a bit of a gamble, especially since the amazon reviews were pretty mixed.

For now, I won't expect too much. Ideally, the pad will work and should last me for a while and it may help improve precision on my part. I honestly don't know, because some people make it sound like fight pads and sticks are infinitely better than regular controllers, which kind of implies that I should be experiencing a noticeable performance boost. On the other hand, it's still just a lump of overpriced plastic and there's only so much you can do with two extra face buttons and a slightly less awful d-pad. In a perfect world I'll jump when I want to jump and hadoken when I want to hadoken, but I'm not hoping for any 20 hit ultra combos outside of practice mode. We'll see.

I haven't bought any special peripherals for a game since Wing Commander: Prophecy and Crimson Skies. But I really like Street Fighter and now that I have a bunch of friends to play against pretty much every day, all of which already have their controllers and sticks, it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Now if only the damn thing would get here already!

Bravely Camelot Black Street Fighting Ops ARGH

There's so much gaming for me to do right now, I'm having a hard time getting all of this shit in order. Let's start with the fact that I'm now getting paid to play free 3DS games. I started playing Bravely Second a couple days before anyone actually buying the game and it was totally worth it. Okay, the story is a bit weaker than Bravely Default's, my favourite character is pretty much gone, the new music isn't anywhere near as good (new composer) and 50 percent of the game is recycled bosses, monsters, dungeons and classes from part one. So it's really Bravely Default 1.5, but it's still worth playing, because duh, more Bravely.

Also, I'm going through this phase again where I, despite never wanting to play another MMO again, am kinda hyped for an MMO. Camelot Unchained. In my defense, it's strictly pvp-based, features super complex character development, shitloads of awesome races and classes and zero raids, quests, dungeon tokens, reputation, experience or the grinding  thereof. Imagine TESO or GW2 without any of the pve content, but with large-scale battles actually being playable. Early alpha tests supposedly ran with some 2000 participants in one huge battle. I'll believe it when I see it - which I will, once the game goes into beta. I wrote an early preview about the game and then this happened:

Strangely, he did not offer penis enlargement or a cheap Rolex.

Mark freaking Jacobs contacted me, thanked me for the preview and offered to help me out with whatever I need in order to write future articles about the game. Look, I get it, the guy has spent a ton of money on this project, he's no longer with EA/Mythic and needs this game to succeed, so he's not exactly saying hi because I'm so awesome or anything. But how cool is it that he bothers to contact me personally? Now I've got messages from Mark Jacobs (Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning) and Dan Tudge (Dragon Age: Origins). Man, I gotta look into Shroud of the Avatar so I can add Lord British to the list! Oh yeah, I also got mail from some guy at Microsoft when I was the first one to ever release custom skins for that old space sim, Freelancer, but fuck that guy. I know famous people now! :P I'm only joking, shit like that is always incredible.

I'm still in love with the incredibly incomplete, overpriced Street Fighter V. I had a bunch of matches against some fat Lebanese guy the other day and afterwards we were so completely exhausted and satisfied, it felt like we spent two hours boning much more attractive versions of each other. The fighting system is so solid, so easy to get into and so incredibly fun, I could play this thing all day and night if I had the time. I don't really get to play it much because of work and all, but I finally bothered to get my ass out of rookie league, so there's that.

Now to get challenged by random Silver players, who will pound my LP right back to zero.

Last, and most certainly least, I've spent a few hours playing the free weekend trial of Black Ops III. I haven't bought another Call of Duty game since the abysmal pile of horseshit that was Ghosts (which I actually kinda like nowadays, because I enjoy shitty games). I skipped Advanced Warfare (until somebody gifted it to me, anyway), skipped Blops 3 after I hated the beta and then looked into the free weekend thingie, because of a certain pushy friend of mine, who keeps hyping this shitty game like it's crafted from angel's vaginas.

I still hated the game during the first few hours, because free weekends on CoD always mean blatant cheating, wallhacking and aimbotting. And call me paranoid, but if some guy racks up 50 kills without dying during the first three minutes or so of a match, then I start losing interest juuuust a little bit. And that was when I finally got the fucking game to run in the first place. Stupid thing launched in 4k every single time, with my mouse pointer being god knows where, so changing the resolution turned out to be the toughest challenge in any CoD game to date. At some point I tabbed out to check on Facebook and getting back in the game reset everything to 4k. Great. Also, every restart forces you to spend an eternity watching animated Treyarch and Activision logos, which CANNOT BE FUCKING SKIPPED! Why the fuck do developers and publishers feel the need to do this? We fucking know who makes these games, most of us don't freaking care and we sure as fuck don't need a 30something second reminder EVERY FUCKING TIME we boot up the stupid game!

I don't know what annoys me more. The user names in that lobby or the "texture" of whatever the fuck that thing is my character is farting on (all settings on maximum).

The game looks okay, texture resolution is a bit shit in some places, absolute garbage in others. And as with every CoD game, ever, obvious flaws and problems don't get fixed, developers half-ass their shit and then stop patching problems, because they're already working on the next fucking game. Case in point: The fucking weapon kill counters. If you think that idea is blatantly ripping off Counter Strike's StatTrack system, then you'd be correct. Except, Treyarch obviously don't fucking know how to pull it off, properly. Let's say you put a kill counter on your favourite gun in Black Ops 3, so you can see how many 12 year olds you've shot in the face. Behold:

Can you see the problem? Yeah. Been like that since release in November 2015, so I wouldn't hope for a fix in this life.

The game itself is okay for the tenner they charge for its standalone multiplayer. The guns have close to zero recoil, you can spray somebody on the other end of the map without sights and still hit them in the face if you keep at it for a few seconds and you can now add up to five attachments +sights to any gun. So if the guns don't all feel exactly the same in their default setting, try adding rapid fire, large magazines, heavy caliber and a thermal scope to any of them and keep telling yourself they still feel vastly different. Well, I suppose there's always shotguns and sniper rifles if you're that kinda guy.

You can also turn one of the playable characters into a white-haired anime chick and give her a sword, so guess what 50 percent of the teenagers on there are doing. And yes, there are playable characters now instead of generic soldiers. There's only a handful of them and players on both teams get to choose from the same pool of guys, which makes no conceivable sense, whatsoever. Why are all of these people both Black Ops and terrorists? Why am I the only one bothered by this? If you play the shitty Free2Play Ghost in the Shell shooter, your team will always be displayed as the characters from the anime, while the enemy team will always look like generic bad guys to you. Blops 3 couldn't do that?

I'm sure Jonny is a perfectly legit player.

What really bothers me is the return of ridiculously powerful killstreak rewards with added specialist powers. The last bunch of CoD games tried to make these rewards a little less powerful, preventing the already dominant players from blowing up the entire battlefield in two minutes. That shit is as devastating as ever in Blops 3 and on top of that you get to trigger a bunch of oneshot-killmoves on many of the playable characters, which you absolutely cannot counter or react to in any way. Yes, it's fun that I can activate a grenade launcher that clears an entire room after every five or so kills, but I'd gladly give up on weird shit like that if it meant people had to rely on their freaking guns to kill shit. Or swords, apparently, because knives are no longer black opsy enough or something.

Am I gonna buy the standalone multiplayer after the free weekend? I don't know. It's not a lot of money and this isn't the worst game I've ever played. But then they'll want another 20 or so for some stupid map pack, then another when they release one more a few months later, then they'll probably make this the first CoD in years to receive user-hosted servers at some point and I'd hafta spend another 30 or 40 to upgrade to the full version in order to access these servers. And then I will have paid another 100 or so Quid to Activision, only for them to release Modern Warfare 4 (maybe) or Ghosts 2 (probably not) or some WW2 rehash (most likely) this coming November (definitely). Or I could just not spend any money at all, because I'm very happy with Warframe and Street Fighter V.

Emulating ALL THE THINGS on my 3DS

Roughly two weeks ago I decided to trade what little I had left of my spare time and some semblance of a life for the 3DS version of Terraria. Stupid thing is so complete, it's got summoning, seasonal, lunar and solar events, all of the bosses up to and including the golem, as well as special portable boss Ocram... look, let's just say there's a shitload of stuff to do on there and many meals and many hours of sleep have been missed.

But finally, after way too many hours of play time on there, I had managed to get my hands on all the gear I ever wanted, I crafted my own mushroom biome for that stupid truffle NPC and I was just about ready to get bored of Terraria. That's when Claire shut down her 3DS in the middle of a multiplayer session she was hosting. At the exact same second where I tried to save my character. And the character got corrupted, was wiped out and never seen again. His progress, gear, piggy bank, everything wiped out. Sure, I still had my worlds and whatever treasures I stored there, but all of my most important stuff, as well as my pixellated alter ego, were eradicated for good.

Never forget.

What followed was the most retarded uninterrupted 15 hour grinding session. Any other game I would have just quit and moved on. Instead, I farmed heart crystals, chlorophyte ore, beat bosses more or less naked until I could forge some semi-decent gear until finally we went to fight Duke Fishron a hundred trillion times so I could get a new Tempest Staff. If you don't know wtf I'm talking about, let's just say I wanted the ability to summon sharknados and yes, that's totally a thing in Terraria.

Problem is, there's currently a bug in the 3DS version what prevents players from reforging the sharknado staff. So you'll have to take whatever stats and modifiers the game hands to you and put up with it. Now, the reasonable thing is to file a bug report, wait for a hotfix and reforge your shit then. Or you could do what I did, look into 3DS homebrew apps, install an inventory editor for Terraria and change the modifier on your weapon to the one you want by hand. Which is what I did. And while I was already there, I noticed how thanks to homebrew applications my 3DS could suddenly emulate just about every old console, ever. And Doom was suddenly installed on there, too.

Shining Motherfucking Force CD on my 3DS!

Sooo... not only am I back to where I was on Terraria, but now I also get to play all the Gameboy (advance, colour, barbecue, what the fuck ever), Game Gear, Master System, Megadrive, Mega CD, SNES, NES, C64, ZX Spectrum and PC-Engine/TG16 games I could eat in a lifetime all on the go whenever I fucking want.

Most people didn't like Golden Axe 3 much, but most people are pretty stupid.

I'm playing fucking Ninja Warriors Again on the SNES emulator with zero stutter, graphical glitches or audio problems. It's so close to the original cartridge, the only difference I can tell is a bunch of scantily-clad chicks I get to fight in the Japanese rom, which were removed in the EU version, because Nintendo and tits... well, you know.
Damn, I gotta get Primal Rage, Killer Instinct and Turtles in Time!

Alien Crush is one of the greatest pinball games ever made.

And yeah, I know, many great classics like Streets of Rage, Sonic and even abysmal garbage like Sonic Drift 2 are already available on the Nintendo eStore with added 3D and what have you. I just don't believe that many of these games are worth the 3-5 Quid Nintendo want you to pay for them. And why is there Sonic 2 but no Sonic 3 (& Knuckles)? Why are they selling the Game Gear version of Shining Force but not the Megadrive one or the Gameboy Advance remake? Why sell Streets of Rage but no Golden Axe?

We've bought some of these games on there, because come on - Streets of Rage 2 with wireless multiplayer? That's a total nobrainer! But you'd have to literally shell out hundreds in order to buy all the good virtual console titles on there and you'd still be missing large amounts of stuff. Why are PC-Engine/TG16 titles only offered in the Japanese eShop? I want my Cyber Core, Dragon Spirit and Tiger Heli, dammit!

Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap is a true GG/Master System gem.

So unless they decide to adjust the pricing for these ancient games to reasonable levels and fill some of the major holes in their online library, I'm gonna emulate the shit out of shit.
Oh hey, speaking of shit that's too expensive - those overpriced themes with sounds, music and wallpapers for your 3DS home menu? I can make my own now. I'd share a screenshot, but I'm not sure Blogger allows explicit content of that nature.

UPDATE: Got the NeoGeo to work. Portable Garou - Mark of the Wolves, here we go!

It's better to be pissed off than to be pissed on.

Street Fighter V - Incompletely Incredible

The wait is finally over and Street Fighter V is here. Well... parts of it. 16 fighters, a solid online mode, survival finally makes its return aaaand that about sums it up. Not a whole lot for 60 bucks, really. Yes, I get it, Capcom Cup and all  that, but releasing such an unfinished game to Average Joe with such a fat price tag attached seems rather greedy. In its current state, SFV doesn't even support most fightsticks, so enjoy playing that thing with your keyboard or Xbox controllers. After roughly a decade of playing Street Fighter with Genesis and Saturn controllers, I don't even mind. I bet lots of the folks who couldn't wait to preorder this game won't be so happy, though.

Ranked online matches are great. PS4 to PC cross platform play is a thing here and I don't get the massive input lag I'm used to from SFIV and King of Fighters XIII. At all. During my first two or so hours I've encountered one possible lag-switcher (guy who suddenly starts stuttering and teleporting all over the screen the moment the fight doesn't go his way) and one quitter (guy who disconnected when the fight didn't go his way). Playing online has been amazing aside from that and I'm actually holding up fairly well for now.

At least ten people out there suck harder than I do.

This game is turning out to be a real fountain of youth so far. I started off on a small win streak and felt my blood pumping like back in the days when I played at the arcade. Look, I have work to do, bills to pay and I don't think I'll ever get involved or obsessive enough to play on any serious competitive level, but it's nice how after just a few minutes with SFV things immediately feel like the 'good old days' again.

I'm fully aware of the fact that most of my victories are related to a) lots of newcomers and optimistic gamers, who think they're tough because they can beat the AI on normal difficulty and b) my fighting style, which has been described by others as "what the fuck is that asshole even doing?"
Of course it also helps how the vast majority of players haven't yet checked youtube or gamefaqs in order to copy and master a single 20hit combo for exactly one character, which they'll proceed to use over and over again. If controllers were a musical instrument, then lots of mediocre SF players would solely depend on those one or two bits of sheet music they've memorized. I prefer to improvise. It looks shit, but it gets the job done. Against other mediocre players, anyway.

Winning a ton of fight money for a shop that is not yet available.

Too bad the offline portion of the game isn't anywhere near as satisfying. Yes, the aforementioned survival mode, which has been strangely absent from SFIV, is finally back. Which is great, because survival has always been one of my favourite game modes in any fighting game. But while the AI seems competent enough on the hardest difficulty setting, most offline opposition feels almost entirely braindead until you actually get to that point.

On top of that, 'Story Mode' consists of two to four battles per character, which usually don't even last for more than one round. There is no difficulty setting here, the AI hardly fights back at all and literally five minutes later the fun is over. The rest of the story is supposed to be added in later as free DLC. Fair enough, but who the hell gives a crap about the story, anyway? Why not at least add an arcade mode? How is it possible for a fighting game to ship without a fucking arcade mode? What are people supposed to do until stoy mode ships, just play survival all day? I get it, it's 2016 and these games are meant to be played competitively, but what about total newcomers, who want to get the hang of things before facing the ridiculously fierce online community? The included tutorial is an absolute joke and won't do anything to help you learn how it's done.

If you want online opponents to eat foot, you could always wait for them to go AFK.

Right now, if you're more of a singleplayer kind of guy or you simply want to get the hang of things before you get eaten alive online, the amount of stuff you get to do on here can be summarized as, 'fuck all'.

I should be appalled by the utter lack of content, the relatively tiny roster of characters and the complete lack of costumes for all characters (except some preorder outfit for Chun Li). I've already seen preview images of alternate outfits, so why is the shop still locked? How do I get this shit? Why is nothing on there ever explained properly?

Nuking somebody through their ex combo is incredibly satisfying.

And looking at the Steam Store page, only 46% of user reviews right now are positive, so there must be more than a handful of people dissatisfied with this launch. And I so love to hate stuff! But you know what? I'm too busy having fun on here. If I keep going at this rate I should leave rookie league behind me within the hour. And I'll be sporting a semi the entire time. Rawr!

Portable Terraria, Pathfinder, Herolab

If there's one real life skill I've obtained by playing tabletop RPGs, it's filling out tax forms. I'm not joking. It's something I absolutely hate about pen & paper role-playing games, how you always have to calculate things like armor, attack roles, bonus damage, ability scores and all that sort of thing. This is especially true for games such as Pathfinder, if you're into all the advanced classes and archetypes, extra races, playable monster races (just look at those fucking gnolls up there!♥), ultimate magic & combat rule extensions, yada, yada, yada.

If you play any major pen & paper RPG out there, do yourself a favour and fucking get Hero Lab. Yes, the advanced version costs a bit of money, but it's so damn worth it, I don't know how I ever played anything without Hero Lab. Basically, it does all the math for you, lists all the available feats, traits and bonuses you can pick at level-ups, describes all the races, classes and items for you using the official rulebooks and it creates some fucking sweet character sheets to boot.

Claire doesn't min/max.

The one downside to Hero Lab (in case of Pathfinder) is how it only includes the basic rules and everything included in the beginner's box. If you want any of the advanced races, classes, archetypes, items and what have you, you'll either have to create those entries by hand or spend a little extra to activate each rulebook. We went with all the advanced options for magic, races and classes and paid $9,99 per rulebook, which is fine, considering you can use, read and play absolutely everything Pathfinder entirely for free using the Paizo website.
If you activate the licenses for said rulebooks, you can upgrade and enhance your characters with a few clicks. Bored of your tengu rogue? Maker her a shadowdancer. Not interested in your fighter's armor mastery? Pick the two-weapon-fighter archetype have him learn a whole lot of cool new abilities. Sure, you can read up on all of that stuff, memorize it and try and work out all the changes yourself, but if you're a lazy fuck like me, there's always Hero Lab.

I'd like to get a couple more pretty dice, some gnoll and tengu minifigures, we already have a ton of cardboard cutouts and dungeon tiles, but the actual game cost us nothing. So shelling out some 50 or 100 Dollars to get everything we need seems fair for a fun hobby. I've paid lots more for other P&P game boxes and collector's editions of AAA video games.
In other news, there was this...

I know I'm nearly five years late to the hype, but I never really cared for Minecraft, Terraria or any other "dig, craft, survive, enjoy the worst graphics ever" kind of games. Friends of mine watched stuff like the Minecraft Yogscast pretty much non-stop, but watching that shit put me to sleep. Hurray, you can punch blocks and turn them into stuff and then ugly zombies appear. I'll be over here on Warframe, where stuff looks awesome, thanks.

Datamining! Get it? Anyone? Aw...

Well, here's the thing. It's been an incredibly good month. I had a few extra pennies burning the proverbial hole in my pocket. I looked at the Nintendo eStore, bought awesome shit like Streets of Rage 2 3D, but I could still afford food afterwards, so clearly I wasn't doing it right. And Terraria received amazing reviews, people are fucking crazy about it, it sold 12 million times and fans seemed okay with the 3DS port. And while I wouldn't play ugly shit like that on my PC, it still looked like decent pooping entertainment. So I downloaded it to my handheld console. Fuck.

Day 1
Murdered some trees with an axe. Thank fuck I don't have to punch them. This isn't Minecraft, after all. It's Minecraft in 2D! Dug up some mud, because... look, I don't know. Built a little hut made of wood and mud. Waited for nightfall, fought back the zombies. I knew about this from the tutorial. Fuck you, zombies!

Day 2
Found a bunch of lead and copper. I can craft weapons, armor and basic furniture now. Do I want a lead toilet, a lead bath tub or a lead chain armor?

Day 3
Found a cactus. Cactus swords hit harder than copper swords. Cactus armor works better than lead armor. I have cactus doors and cactus furniture in my home now. Fuck mining ore, this is my world now. I am cactus.

Day 4
There's a huge-ass ocean blocking my progress towards the right edge of the screen. My character doesn't know how to swim and it's too large to just wade through it. Need to investigate further.

Day 5
Dug a massive system of little streams and tunnels near the giant body of water to drain it. I flooded huge parts of the underground section, but most of the ocean is gone now. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. Water isn't so scary after all. This game is great!

Day 6
Drowned. Fuck this game!

Day 7
My little hut is now an outpost. Cactus city. There's a nurse, some merchants and some generic help text NPC living there now. Where the fuck am I supposed to sleep with these assholes occupying my place?

Day 8
Cactus City was attacked by a giant floating eyeball. It grew teeth and ate my nurse. I killed the eyeball and forged a demon sword out of some weird ore it dropped. Whoa.

Day 9
Grabbed my demon sword, dug a tunnel towards the center of the earth and fought a bunch of creepy jungle monsters. My gear is shit. Jungle monsters kick my ass. Poison kicks my ass. Lava kicks my ass. Oh yeah, there's lava now.

Day 10
Found a strange naked girl near a pool of lava. Game labels her "lost girl", can't target her for attacks or anything. Maybe she's an NPC I'm supposed to resc...AAAAH! OW! YOU BITCH! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME YOU CUNT!?

Day 11
Secretly installed the game on Claire's 3DS. She'll be so happy and surprised! I'm just gonna sit next to her and encourage her to play some DS games. Surely she'll notice the new game.

Day 12
Claire ignores the giant giftbox-shaped icon on her screen, fires up Tomodachi Life and plays for 2 hours straight. Plays Peekaboo with a baby, buys bear outfits for her characters, feeds pudding to everyone. Then she spends an hour window-shopping in the Nintendo eShop, but doesn't buy anything.

Day 13
Claire finally found Terraria. She thanked me by asking how much money I wasted on this shit. I visit her world and she's a giant cactus. I'm so proud!

Day 14
There is no bronze or lead on Claire's world. She has tin and iron, instead. Where I mine sapphire she gets topaz. Her world is a huge desert full of vultures. There's also a dungeon. We talked to some old guy, then a giant monster named Skeletron appeared and ripped out our intestines. That was the actual onscreen death text.

Day 15
We stayed in bed and played Terraria all day. I gotta find more heart containers and mana star things. Found a goblin who sells rocket boots. I also have claws and boot spikes to help me climb. And a grappling hook. And a glowy amulet and a magic boomerang. Suddenly it's 5pm. We have one more hour until the store closes and I haven't even showered. We didn't eat or do any chores. Went to the toilet once, stayed there and played Terraria till my legs got numb.

The game is okay, I guess.

Enter Kirk

It's finally over. Crazy neighbour is gone. Gone, as in, moved out, not... you know. In the two or so years she has lived in the flat above me she attempted to commit suicide three times - that I know of. If you want the full soap opera experience, try dragging a naked, screaming, shivering lady to the car by her legs to have her stomach pumped out after she had overdosed on god knows how many pills for the second time that month. We had some interesting times with her when she got hammered and tried to kick down our door or when she held my hand and cried after I told her to fucking knock on my door the next time she decides to off herself, because it's probably wiser to just, you know, talk. I had all the bipolar fun, from her inviting me over for tea, chatting with me about curtains and work and animals and all sorts of things to her bitching about how disgusting I am for owning cats or whatever.

And the fuck noises. Dear god, the screaming fuck noises every night!

No more random attacks, family members of hers literally breaking down the door, 24/7 weed smoke, her sister's little kids stomping around the house at 7 in the morning, dubsteb parties till the sun comes up, zombie coughing, throwing up all night long, screaming fuck noises... nothing. Peace and quiet. And the place was rented out again literally one or two days after she had left! Can you believe it? I had no idea this area was so popular! I won't lie - I got more than a little paranoid when I noticed somebody was already moving in upstairs. Because things can (and usually will) always get worse.

So I saw this pair dragging bags and boxes and stuff into our house from across the street. Easily in their mid to high fourties, possibly older. She made a face that said, "I haven't enjoyed a man's touch in over a decade and I want the world to know!" I'm not even exaggerating. Have you ever looked at somebody's face and all the love was just gone? Hey, none of us walk through life smiling like idiots all the time, but some people are so done with your shit, they give you the chills when you just look at them. Great, just what I wanted.

You may not know or believe it, but you already own one of these.

They ran back and forth a few times, carrying bags full of clothes, as well as the obligatory blue Ikea plastic bag. It's one of those mythical rules of the universe like the one with the disappearing socks or constantly seeing that thing around your house until you actually fucking need it. Whenever somebody needs to move a lot of stuff from one place or another, there will be one of those massive, indestructible blue Ikea bags. They just materialize right there and then, they're amazing and they inspired D&Ds magical bags of holding and portable black holes. I'm not sure how the guys at Ikea manage to make them magically appear in every household around the globe, but it's damn fine marketing.

A big transporter came up the street and some Eastern-European gentlemen started carrying more stuff upstairs. Wow, they have money for that and move to this shithole? This is bad. People with enough money to let others do their work for them are usually assholes. Entitled, selfish assholes, who are better than everybody else. I can tell, I grew up with filthy rich parents.
One of the boxes had Avon written on it. Great. So Mrs. Frownyface had already reached that stage where she had to give her life some meaning by pyramid-scamming other middle-aged ladies into hoarding shitty cosmetics. She was probably way past the stage of giving up. Everybody is.

Avon. Because your friend/neighbour/aunt guilt-tripped you into buying our shit.

On the plus side, the Avon stage usually happens after the "I think a baby will save this relationship" stage. Besides, that well was probably in the process of drying up, anyway. So probably no toddlers upstairs. Still, I came running to the window whenever I heard children outside, hoping they wouldn't be our new neighbour's creepy offspring.
Lots of rumbling and banging. The furniture guys didn't seem overly proficient at what they were doing. "Eez too narrow", I heard one of them say. Surprisingly enough, there was no argument, no fighting. My father would have blown the fuck up on these guys, as entitled rich people do. Maybe they were just tired.

And then it went quiet. They were done moving in, the van drove off and there was nothing but silence. Nobody talking, arguing, stomping around upstairs, nobody walking through the corridor, sniffing, proclaiming, "Damn, I think they have cats/snakes/lizards/dead bodies down here!" And yes, we've been accused of hiding a decomposing corpse in our flat when the crazy lady had one of her bad days. Which is stupid, we keep the rotting bodies of our enemies on display right on the porch, as is the Viking tradition.

That'll teach them to deliver stupid 25% off pizza coupons! It's 50% or fuck off!

Later that day we decided to go out for some grocery shopping and that's when we ran into middle-aged guy and two teenagers. "Oh hi, I just moved in upstairs", he proclaimed as he shook my hand. Hang on a second. I just moved in? Singular? "Hope I wasn't too loud. Don't worry, I'll be quiet." The kids didn't say anything, as they were both "I'm gonna roll my eyes and hope for the ground to swallow me until my dad stops being a pussy in front of this creepy German" years old. "Don't worry about them, they don't live with me."
Okay. Wow. And just like that the guy had already apologized to me three times while all I ever managed to say was hello. And then I connected the dots as I went on my way to the shop.

I'm mostly talking out of my ass, because I've been watching these guys too much.

The lady who helped him move his shit must have been his brand new ex, who just kicked him out. She helped him shift his stuff, which could mean he fucked up so hard, she couldn't wait to get rid of him. But I think it's more likely that she ended the relationship and felt guilty enough about it to help him move his shit. And judging by how the guy introduced himself to me, it's reasonable to assume she has crushed a fair amount of his ego. I mean, I don't usually move in to a place and go all, "Hi, I'm so sorry you heard furniture noises, these kids are just visiting!" Nice of mommy to let the kids see him, ease them into the whole breakup thing. Get some space, see how they feel about one another after they had some time to think. While she's really just filing for divorce right the fuck now. In a nutshell, the new dude living upstairs is this guy:

So that's why we can hear him go BRRRRRMMMM around bedtime every night!

The wife left him, the kids are embarrassed of him, he lives in a crappy house with people almost two decades younger than him - it's a midlife crisis waiting to happen. And now we wait and find out whether he's the next neighbour I'll find after a suicide attempt or whether he'll knock on our door in his underwear at 3am one day to complain about the noise, only to park his ass on our sofa, play Halo and listen to a best of album of The Who until the sun comes up. I'm hoping for a the latter. I also hope he has a good sense of humour if he ever decides to look me up on Facebook and finds this blog. Please don't be a crazy axe-murderer! A couple years of gritty reality drama were exciting, but I'd like to go back to when my life was a cheesy 90s white trash sitcom, please.