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.

GTA Online - 100 Dollar Yacht

Approaching my new home away from home

They stand for everything that is right and wrong with GTA Online - the new yachts. No other player hangout is so full of cool features, so visually impressive or so fun to use. I couldn't wait to get my hands on one of these babies! You get to choose a paintjob, put some fancy lighting and a flag on there, give it a name and before you know it, you're aboard the Feckish Lobster, Germany.

Lobsters need love, too, you know

This thing comes with everything - suites with kingsize beds and bathrooms, free rocket launchers and other assorted weaponry, free respawning helicopter plus second helipad, a dinghy, a speedboat and four jetskis. There's also a bar and a hot tub, all fully interactive for you and whatever friends and crew you choose to invite. Random strangers may theoretically come for a visit, as well, which can be prohibited via the boat's togglable defense system. Sip drinks in your pool while the automatic anti air cannons keep those pesky invaders out.

Reeeally don't wanna stand up right now.

Wench! Canst thou quench mine thirst? Is... is that how people talk on RP servers?

All the fancy-shmancy extras aren't just limited to the yacht itself, either. Check out the helicopter you get with the Aquaruis yacht!

It's the overpriced carbon model, which costs 3 million ingame cash when ordered separately

Your passengers get champagne and free interwebz.

So do you need any of this stuff? I guess not. You don't need a speedboat, a chopper, your own bar floating on the ocean or the most epic hangout in any GTA game, ever. You can rent a tiny garage, cram a shitty compact car you found behind the strip club in there and play your missions that way. Heck, not even that is necessary - there are enough cars driving around in any mission, just go grab one as you see fit. The vast majority of them don't require boats or planes or helicopters. If they do, you'll get free ones for the duration of the mission. Not necessarily the colour or model you want, but they get the job done. Yachts are incredibly fun to use, to show off and to enjoy with friends, but they're luxury items. Heck, they're the very definition of luxury, no?

And how the fuck did I ever manage without one?

Here's the catch. The new yachts are so awesome and so ridiculously expensive, most average players will never get to own one. The smallest one starts at 6 million GTA Cash, the biggest one with all bells and whistles attached goes all the way up to 10,000,000. Ten. Fucking. Million.
Sure, you can make all that and then some, if you're one of the select few players with exactly three skilled friends, who will complete the required heist challenges with you. I've completed all the heists with my friends, some of them several times, but most of us have jobs, families, relationships and simply not enough time to go after all the hard modes, elite challenges, all the difficult stuff that grants extra cash. Most of the time it's fucking hard to even arrange for one or two days a week, where the four of us get to play together for two or three uninterrupted hours.
Of course you could always try random lobbies, play with random people and attempt to communicate with the ever-increasing Russian and Chinese community via voice chat, as there are no region or language settings for GTA Online's matchmaking. Good luck with that!

I only play with people I know and love. Which limits my pool of heist partners to about one person.

If you're not one of the lucky folks with reliable, talented heist partners, the only other viable way to farm some amount of cash is by playing missions. Depending on how long it takes you to complete a mission, they may net you anything from 7 to 20 grand. Complete something really, seriously fast and you get a tiny reward. If it takes you more than ten minutes to complete a mission, you'll receive more cash in the end. It doesn't even matter whether you're being stupid and getting lost or whether the mission itself is just more complex and time-consuming. The game doesn't care. The more time you spend, the more money you'll get, up to a limit somewhere around 21,000. That's it. If you try to grind them out at a decent speed, it's more realistic to expect around 15k per average mission completed.

So if you were hoping to buy an Aquarius yacht with all extras for 10 million GTA Cash, you'd have to play roughly 667 missions. And that's assuming you murder every opponent with your bare hands. Ammo, grenades, rockets and armor cost extra. Expecting to play at least 700 missions is probably more realistic here. And since every single mission is a rehash of the exact same "kill something and/or transport an item/vehicle/person somewhere", things may get a tiiiiny bit monotonous after a while.

And for Christmas you get to beat people up in SNOW!

Of course such odd design decisions don't happen by accident. They need to motivate people to give into microtransactions somehow, right? Well, about that...

Only 99,99 for 8 million in pretend money? Better buy two of them!

8,000,000 GTA Cash will set you back 100 Bucks. Which still isn't enough for the biggest yacht if you want all the extras. Think closer to 120 Dollars. In "microtransactions", for a game which costs around 60 Dollars. There's nothing micro about these payments, baby.
And again, yes, sure, I get it - you don't fucking need one of those things to play the game. But hey, remember when GTA was about enjoying all the damn vehicles, planes, tanks, dicking around with all the cool shit the game had to offer? Instead of putting everything behind a massive grind-/paywall? Oh right, that's when the game was still singleplayer only.

Turns out most people don't want to play GTA to grind levels or work towards some stupid car, tank, boat or yacht. And grinding missions is exactly that - it's work. Once you're required to play several hundred of them, it's way past the point of being a fucking chore. So when GTA announced multiplayer with regular free DLC packs, this is really not the thing I had hoped for.
Make an educated guess how hated these people still are in today's GTA lobbies:



In case you can't see or figure out what's going on in the above video, it shows a player using a cheat menu to drop tons of cash on random people. There are no dedicated servers on GTA, it's all Peer2Peer, so cheating via .dll injectors is relatively easy. And lots of people don't want any of that "free money", not just, because it's against the rules, but because you can absolutely get banned for having cash dropped on you.

Yeah, imagine that. Some asshat drops a ton of money on your character and you get banned and flagged as a cheater as a result. Except when you join public lobbies now that the yachts are here, you'll see people asking for cheaters to drop the money on them. They're aware of the risk, they just don't give a fuck, because they'd rather get flagged and maybe have their game account taken down for a while than spend the rest of their lives grinding out 700 missions. And suddenly cheaters are considered good guys by a big part of the community, who provide the players with money, because Rockstar are ripping everybody off. You may wanna rebalance those mission rewards or look into the prices for Shark Cards, Rockstar.

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.