A Week in Gaming #38: 9/19 – 9/25

What a busy and quick week this has been!  Filled with a variety of new and old games, tons of streaming, and a ton of college coursework, it’s a wonder I stop and breathe sometimes. Granted, this comes with pain, rage, apathy, et al, but overall I had a great past week.

At the advice of WanderingMind (whose blog I have linked to in the blogroll), I’m going to continue the format I started last week in contrast with the prior 36 weeks. So, here we go!

I’ll start with Monday as I can’t even remember what I played last Sunday. On Monday a box came from that jolly fellow Rarutos, filled with 17 games for the NES, SNES and N64. Two had nowhere to go for a home since they were not amongst the games claimed by myself and the 11 other people Rarutos gifted to, so they went up on the shelf. But 11 to 13 of the 15 he did send me I streamed that very day. I started with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition and proceeded to rock that to a quick Completion as both the Thunder Megazord and the MegaTigerzord. I loved the 16-bit Power Rangers games as a kid and this was a delightful romp back to that time.

As a fun side note, the engine they used in MMPR: TFE is the engine they later used in the SNES Gundam fighting games and as a basis for the future 2D Gundam fighters. Fun stuff, eh?

From there I proceeded to play from a selection that included Diddy Kong Racing. I’m in a love/hate relationship with this game. On one end, the visuals are great, the game is charming and the music is delicious. On the other hand, what difficulty bits there are to the game infuriate me. Such as how the enemies are magnetic track racers, and will always hit the “zippers” or on-track boosts to accelerate ahead. Couple this with having to go out of your way to get the eight Silver Coins on each stage and I’m pissed. I haven’t even gotten to the time trials and already I’m raging. Blood pressure spike ahoy. Still, a really fun game to be had.

I also managed to complete Math Blaster: Episode One for the SNES. Basically comes down to an elementary school-level edutainment game about math. Extremely short, it was divided up into three sections: First person shooting as you fly through space, then platforming vertically, then finishing with a platforming boss fight. Even at its hardest, the math was still easyish, but the platforming was a bit challenging. Good, short fun.

There was some brief failure at Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, a game I consider decent but by no means a challenger to the other fighting game of the night: Street Fighter Alpha 2. While I managed to get my ass kicked even as Noob Saibot in UMK3, I managed to rip through SFA2 as Dan to much success, complete with occasional kills using the Shinku Gadoken. Much awesome manly times.

I showed off some Sky Shark, a vertical scrolling shoot ’em up for the NES. Alternatively, we called it “Rapeface”, because the guy on the cover art is doing that face to a T. Frustrating but fun game, and I played it a lot during the week, to much rage and the eventual retiring of my FC Game Console, the stupid piece of shit. Advice: Play NES games, but only on a refurbished NES if you can’t get them on VC. The clone consoles are crap.

A brief jump into Tetris, the game that everyone knows, some time in a fun-but-difficult beat ’em up in Spider-Man & Venom: Separation Anxiety, a look into the apparently valuable StarCraft 64, frustration with more racing in Lego Racers, and then my stream ended. Great games, great times and I’m immensely thankful to Rarutos for being an altruist with some of his older games.

Later in the week, I streamed Air Fortress and then proceeded to rage-quit it. The first four stages of this Metroidish meets Shoot ’em Up game were fine and dandy, provided I had maps. The fifth stage though… shit got incredibly brutal. Too brutal. I know these games are Nintendo hard, but holy fuck guys… just no. That was one of the games I purged from my first Game Purge. The premise of the game was very fun but the difficulty spike and successive Brick-Wall I became stuck at just weren’t worth it.

I also played Pokemon Snap in my free time. So far, I like the premise: photo safari, collecting pokemon in photography. However, the game seems to be a bit.. boring as far as the premise goes. The execution is rather nice but it doesn’t have as much energy as I’d like. When I started yawning, I knew it was to turn it off, and this was at like 5pm. Fun stuff but… not really energetic or invigorating to play.

At times during the week, there was a ludicrous amount of Dynasty Warriors 5 XL had. I’ve managed to beat the Musou Modes of Zhang Jiao, Yuan Shao, Zhu Rong, Meng Huo, and Ling Tong. These were all rather easy to do, and I particularly enjoyed playing as Meng Huo and… surprisingly, Zhang Jiao. Yes, the latter is one of the worst, if not the worst, in the game. Yet between his C3 string, his hammed-up southern priest attitude, and the weird dancing he does at times, it was pretty fun. The two Nanman folk – Meng Huo and Zhu Rong – were very fun to play as not only for their characters or their stages, but also the excellent weapon drops I was getting with them in contrast with the other 3 (4 if we count Zhou Tai’s brief playtime). Still have a lot of Chinese soldiers left to kill in the Three Kingdoms, but dang nabbit I’m getting it done.

There was also a huge amount of Suikoden for PSN played this past week. Most of it was due to being on campus, or travel to and from, but I’m taking my sweet time with the game. I just entered the Lorimar region and I’ve clocked in 20 hours. For those that have played the game, that’s about the same amount of time you all took to BEAT the entire game. So, yes I’m lally-gagging, but I’m having fun. The portability is an incredible aspect of this version.

Lastly, we had my stream last night. Yes, I’m a stream whore. Seven hours of it went to completing Alone in the Dark on the PS2 and in a nutshell the game sucked. It was playable, wasn’t too frustrating, and was rather short.. but it still sucked. Really, the only two reasons I had for justifying why I finished the game were that I wanted to see what the hell the plot was going on about, and after spending so many hours in the game I wanted to finish it instead of quitting part-way through. Yet I’m still keeping it. It was bad… but in the bad kind of way that doesn’t make me want to get rid of it. Just keep it to show “Yes, this game is bad, don’t play it. I know, I’m a professional. I finished it.”

I raged some more at Diddy Kong Racing that night after a brief excursion into BreastRayne, which disappointed me since the “larger breasts” cheat didn’t even really work. Poo, that was the whole reason I streamed it for the chat. Curse you, BloodRayne developers, we wanted boobies.

Overall, it was a great week filled to the brim with various gaming experiences. With what’s supposed to be here this coming Tuesday, I can only imagine what new experiences are going to show their heads for the rest of the week. Though there was rage, I’m not really that mad at everything I’ve done. I still honestly like the games I played that I didn’t purge, I’m just finding it hard to acclimate to some, or to deal with the others.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time. o/