Tag: video games

An observation about the Final Fantasy VII remake

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t think I’ve made any secret that I think that Final Fantasy VII is probably one of the most overrated games in the history of the industry.  Personally, VI is still my favorite among all that I’ve played, followed closely by IV.  But all pale in comparison to Final Fantasy Tactics. 

Regardless, just because I thought it was overrated didn’t mean that I didn’t play it; of course I played it.  Did all the stuff that all players back in 1997 did, breed chocobos so you could get a golden one, which was the only way to get the Knights of the Round materia which basically put the rest of the game on easy mode thereafter.  I beat Emerald Weapon, but was never able to beat Ruby, but by then my interest had already waned and I didn’t feel any real need to bother and try. 

Needless to say, the game didn’t really leave a long lasting impression on me personally, and I was always fascinated to why so many people thought this was the pinnacle of video games, and continued to do so for literal decades afterward.

So imagine my general ambivalence-resentment at the nearly decade-long song and dance of a FFVII remake being developed and released, that ultimately dropped over the last year, to which I was disgusted to find out that even that was still just a portion of the game, which people basically had to pay a full price for a part of a game, and a remake at that.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to shit on everyone’s parade who was ecstatic for more FFVII, but I was pretty irritated at the general low-ambition business model of remaking an old game instead of trying to develop and tell new stories.

Recently, I’ve been getting video suggestions for FFVII remake videos on YouTube and because I’m now a parent with low tolerance for searching and wanting to instead be presented, I’ve watched several over the last few days, because I was seeing things and/or characters that I didn’t recognize from the original version, plus watching gameplay videos satiates any curiosity I might have about the way the game plays or looks without having to commit the money or the time investment into finding out personally.

Clearly, because the objective of the remake is to drag things out as long as possible so they can sell individual chapters of the game at full MSRPs over a window of time, the remake has definitely taken some liberties to flesh things out tremendously, and give a lot more spotlight to characters that were definitely more tertiary in the original than they are now.

But in the process of fleshing things out more thoroughly, I’ve noticed that the game has taken the time to really inject some more personality and character into the individual core characters as well, and 23 years of technological advancement has given the visuals the ability to interpret stuff like facial expression and body language to do all the talking that the dialogue might not have been able to do itself in 1997.

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New Father Brogging, #029

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It would have been pretty easy for me to do nothing but write about beer all month long and call it a day, but that would’ve been kind of a cop out as far as dutiful brogging is concerned.  Beer is nice, and I’ve been enjoying the fares from Deutschland, but there are still plenty of things on my mind that warrant words, no matter how much I may feel unmotivated to write about them, and when the day is over, it’s more important to me to write out my thoughts than to be lazy, even if it feels kind of forced; this is how seriously I take it to write, sometimes.

Anyway, in this new dad brog, there is one update and there is one observation.  As for the update, things have actually been going fairly smoothly since the last time I wrote about my adventures in fatherhood.  My daughter and I have a fairly consistent routine that’s been making life not too difficult for either of us for the most part, and the days are flying by like leaves in the winter air.  I wake up at 6:30~ish every single day, regardless of if it’s the weekend or not, mythical wife feeds baby, and then I entertain baby until first nap in which I then either really get to work, or if it’s the weekend I nap or sometimes get my jogging out of the way if I’m feeling up for it.  Our nanny takes care of kid for the next four hours on weekdays, or I spend time with her on weekends, and then it’s off to bed by 6:30~ish, to which mythical wife and I try to have some time for ourselves.  Repeat x infinity

However, as we’ve crossed the nine-month mark, naturally nothing stays the same forever, no matter how comfortable it’s been.  And in this particular case, whenever we run into any sort of issue, I can punch it into Google, and the precise query I intended to look up is automatically filled, reminding me that there has been absolutely nothing my kid has done or I have experienced, that millions of parents out there have not already seen.

As indicative in the photo above, that’s my child, standing in her crib.  As her little body and brain have been developing, she’s decided that immediate sleep isn’t something she necessarily needs anymore, and has decided to sit up, and pull herself up to her feet and just kind of hangout in her crib, instead of sleeping.  99% of the time, she’ll spit out her pacifier, piss herself off, and begin crying then wailing, then screaming, which prompts me to have to up and try to reset the whole scenario all over again, before she calms down, I walk out, and then she repeats it 3-4 times, burning us out in the process.

It seems evident that she herself is working things out and is playing a daily game of how many shenanigans she wants to pull in her crib between two naps and bed time, and how much she actually wants to sleep, because since behavior has begun, no two sleep sessions have been alike in how much she fights, how much she wanders around independently and how quick or long it takes before she actually goes out, and for parents like me that like routine it’s been occasionally frustrating.

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I want to like this more, but the jokes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Thirty years after WWF Wrestlefest is released in arcades, some company announces the release of RetroMania Wrestling, the “official” sequel to WrestleFest

As the title of this post says, I really want to like and be excited about this game more than I am, but there are just so many jokes and snark to unleash and get out of my system before I can resign myself to the fact that I’ll still probably impulse purchase this on Steam so that I can play with my brother and my bros.

When I was a kid, I loved Wrestlefest.  I almost always picked the Ultimate Warrior despite the fact that by then, I was already well on my way to being one of those contrarian mark types of wrestling fans and was a by far bigger fan of Mr. Perfect than I was the Warrior, but the cheapskate cheesing kid with very limited quarters didn’t like the fact that Mr. Perfect lacked many power moves, but most importantly the ability to drop a body slam, so there was no way to get cheap easy eliminations with Mr. Perfect when playing in the Royal Rumble mode.  One of my fondest memories of this game was being a such a master button masher, that no matter the fact that I had zero health in a Royal Rumble match, I would still kick out of every pinfall attempt, and I ended up outlasting two other human opponents, with me winning the rumble after back dropping the last human player out.

Hell, even as an adult, I loved Wrestlefest, and I installed Mame and got a rom of Wrestlefest, it was basically the greatest thing on the planet, that I could now play one of my favorite arcade games ever, with basically unlimited quarters, since credits could be added with the press of buttons.  I dabbled with all other characters I didn’t want to waste money with when I was a kid, and realized that the best player in the game was Sgt. Slaughter, who not only had good power moves, but an automatically initializing submission move in the cobra clutch, that anyone slapped into it had like a 20% chance of actually not tapping out of.

Needless to say, you’d think I would be over the moon that when a “sequel” was announced, I’d be more excited about it, especially since at first blush it’s basically the same game, just with different characters, settings and some modern polish.  But you hear the title, you see the roster, and realize that there’s obviously no legal affiliation with the WWE, and it kind of feels like something is missing, and the whole thing kind of comes off like a non-canonical fan-fiction of a production.

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The entertaining absurdity of baseball rules

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When mythical wife showed me a picture of the score of this game, my jaw kind of dropped.  It turns out that 29 runs is some sort of National League record, that I don’t really have the motivation to look up the finer details of.  All I know it’s not better than the 30-3 thrashing that the Texas Rangers dropped on the Baltimore Orioles some time ago, and doesn’t quite erase the stink of the 20-2 drubbing the Yankees dropped on the Braves in Turner Field’s final season.

But anyway, of course I’m entertained generally pleased by any Braves win, but it’s not the 29 runs scored that amused me the most, or the seven home runs they clubbed en route to their scoring barrage.  No, a nerd like me finds amusement in other parts of the box score, like the fact that the starting pitcher for the Braves, Tommy Milone, didn’t get the win for a game in which his offense dropped 29 runs on the opposition.

In fact, as satisfied as I am any time I see a W for the Braves, it’s actually very much a bad and concerning thing that Tommy Milone allowed eight runs to the Marlins.  It’s not every day that the Braves are going to score 29 runs, much less ten runs, much less five.  But lost in the pandemonium of the Braves blowing up on the Marlins is the fact that their own starter was pretty abysmal in his own right, and he absolutely did not deserve to get the win in this game, and I think the Braves did the usual Barves thing during the trade deadline, and went after a jobber like Milone to fill in their pitching rotation, instead of going after a starting pitcher that could really fortify their chances to capitalize on the short season.

Instead, the win goes to Grant Dayton, a reliever that I’ve never heard of which isn’t difficult considering how far off the baseball radar I’ve dropped off, but anyway, he gets the win, solely based on the rules of Major League Baseball which states that the pitcher on the mound while the team has the lead and finishes out the 5th inning, is the guy eligible for the win.

Basically, this is the equivalent of going into arcade, walking up to the six-player X-Men arcade game, where five other players are at Magneto, he’s already blinking red and close to death, and jumping in as Dazzler because nobody ever played Dazzler, hitting him once with your mutant power blast, and taking credit for beating Magneto.

That’s basically what Grant Dayton did.  By no fault of his own, of course though.  Tommy Milone sunk $7 worth of quarters into X-Men and stunk up the joint getting past the Blob, Juggernaut, Wendigo and White Queen, and needed a bunch of people to come carry him through the rest of the game, with Dayton getting the credit for beating the game.

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Father Time catches all eventually

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whereas Ken Masters is still hanging around the World Warrior tournament, wearing an UnderArmour compression shirt to hide the fact that he’s getting old and his physique is starting to sag, Chun Li has accepted the idea that after nearly 25 years, perhaps it was a good time to throw in the towel on fighting in the street and pursuing M. Bison and Shadowloo, and settling down with a real job.

Perhaps it was her side gig over the last quarter century, or maybe her accolades as a world-renown martial artist got her elevated so quickly, but instead of Kikokens and Lightning legs, Chun Li will instead be a VP for Lazada, a subsidiary company of some sort for Alibaba Group, the giant Amazon-like conglomerate based out of China.

Also, it turns out that Chun Li was a dude all along.  Cue the jokes about those gigantic thighs.

New Father Brogging, #006

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the most important things that I’ve learned as a first-time dad is that whenever you feel like you’re getting a grasp of raising a baby, behaviors will inevitably change and then you’re back into a position of knowing nothing all over again, and feeling helpless when your baby is reduced to crying and finding great difficulty at what may be causing your child distress.

When my baby is crying, it could be a variety of things that could be causing it; might be hunger, even if it might be improbably because she ate a full feed just 80 minutes ago, but a growth spurt could be in play, meaning she’ll want to eat pretty much every single hour.  Maybe it’s indigestion, to which there are only a few things that can actually bring her relief, like pressing her up against the warm body of a parent, or medicinally with gripe water or newborn anti-gas drops.  Maybe she needs to be burped more.  Maybe she’s cranky because she needs to take a nap.  Lately, she’s become cognizant to the discomfort of having a soiled diaper, something that hadn’t been the case in the first five weeks.  And sometimes, she just wants to be held by mom or dad.

The point is, there have been numerous times where I feel like I’ve identified a behavioral pattern, only to rely upon the knowledge of yesterday for today’s problems, and find out that everything has changed all over again, and then I’m left feeling dumbfounded and useless that I can’t figure out how to bring comfort to my own child.

I never once discounted the difficulty of parenting, for the first time much less, but as I expected it would be, parenting is not easy.  This does not deter me in the least bit, but I am just confirming that it’s about as difficult, and occasionally frustrating as I imagined it would be.  There’s nothing like changing a diaper, only for the kid to rip a wet fart and soil it seconds after being put on, only for an after shock to hit two minutes later, and make me throw my hands up at the frustrating of changing three diapers in the span of 120 seconds.

Ultimately I wouldn’t change a thing, and I’ll change a trillion diapers if I have to in order to raise my little girl right, but damn can I at least say there are times when I just have to say, what the fuck man?

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FEH’s game pass subscription is more like MEH

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I first heard that Fire Emblem: Heroes was introducing a monthly subscription “Feh Pass,” my initial reaction was more like, not mad… just disappointed.

I mean, there’s little reason to get mad about a gatcha game introducing more ways to make more money, because when the day is over, the ultimate goal of every gatcha game is to make money.  But like most F2P mobile games I ever come across, my goal is to always spend as little or no money at all.  At the very moment I’m writing this, I’ve played both Pokémon Go and Fire Emblem: Heroes consistently since their respective launch dates, and I’ve spent approximately a total of $14.99 in total.  Yet, I’ve gotten tons of enjoyment and have pretty stacked accounts in both games, mostly out of longevity, but the point is that I haven’t spent much money but still gotten just about all that I’ve wanted from them.

FEH has always kind of had kind of a pay2win methodology available at all times prior to the introduction of the Feh Pass, but it was still required to have some skill in the game’s mechanics, as well as the luck of the draw of actually getting the random characters that you’re aiming for.  But the Feh Pass, by virtue of giving those who pay for it an actual statistical stat boost, now un-levels the playing field, and truly becomes a game where you can buy superiority over players that do not.

However, I’m actually writing this after the launch of Feh Pass, and aside from the fact that I’ll always have this annoying glorified ad trying to get me to pay for a Feh Pass, in order to cash in on some rewards I’ve already fulfilled the requisite tasks for, it hasn’t really been all too intrusive to my every day playing of FEH.  I imagine that will change in time, as Feh Pass subscribers begin amassing more and more subscription exclusive character variants with stat boosts, and then I’ll start running into them in modes like Arena and Aether Raids, but for the time being, it hasn’t affected me yet.

Regardless of the inevitability of things like this, I’m still a little disappointed in FEH for going down this route.  It’s already basically the most lucrative mobile game in Nintendo’s portfolio, so to me this is like them just being greedy on top of being already greedy.  It’s not going to stop me from playing the game, but now I’ve got this automatic instant resentment for Feh Passers, and I’m looking forward to taking down these whales with my Klein+10 and three dancers cheese method.