Tag: video games

Pokémon is what makes it funny

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Newsworthy: parkour hero scales four stories in like four seconds in order to rescue child hanging off of a ledge in Paris.  French president applauds his act of heroism and immediately expedites his pursuit of French citizenship and immediately offers him a job with the Paris fire brigade.  A wonderful story of bravery and a reward fitting of a hero who deserves it.

Brogworthy: child ended up in the precarious situation because his dad left him unsupervised so he could go to the market and play Pokémon Go on the way back.  Dad faces two years in prison for child neglect.  Because of Pokémon Go.

Even before it was revealed that dad was out being an idiot, this was still a fantastic story of a legitimate hero who did something extraordinary.  It’s a happy ending for all, because the kid didn’t fall to his death, and the Malian immigrant who scaled the building like Spider-Man to rescue the kid is instantly rewarded with the French citizenship he was aspiring to gain. 

There’s not much to talk about in a situation like this, and it’s easiest to simply marvel in the incredible feats of human bravery and feel like our collective faith in people can gain a point or two for such selfless courage.

But then it comes out that the kid was left unsupervised by a deadbeat of a father who went out to the market, and then decided to leisurely take his time coming back so that he could play some Pokémon Go.  Now, it’s something to brog about.

Full disclosure: I still play Pokémon Go.  It’s literally taking me an entire year to go from level 34 to 35, and there’s a litany of life milestones that I’m fairly confident that I’ll hit before I can get to the maximum level 40, and knowing my luck, Niantic, if they’re even still around in six years, will raise the max cap to like 50, and then I’ll be fucked and proclaim I’ll stop but then probably won’t anyway.

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The unnecessary aggravation of League of Legends

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s no secret that I tend to play a lot of old shit.  I played Left 4 Dead long after the heydays passed by, and the public servers were reduced to long queue times and dwindling players whom began to all look familiar as players gradually disappeared.  On my phone, I still play Pokémon Go and Fire Emblem Heroes despite the fact that the OCD generation of gamers have already flocked onto at least 2-3 other more recent and time/money sucking mobile games.  And, with some regularity, I am still playing League of Legends.

Oh, League of Legends.

I can’t honestly say that I believe that they’re still the world’s most played video game anymore, what with the Overwatch League really gaining momentum, and Fortnite seeming like today what my nightly L4D sessions were 8-9 years ago (really, that long ago?).  Despite my general interest in both games, I have an issue with first and third-person perspectives where they make me a little motion sick and it takes me some time and reps to break through until it doesn’t bother me, and despite the fact that I overcame them in the past with L4D, Resident Evil and Mass Effect titles, I just don’t really feel like investing the time yet to do it again.  So, I still continue to play League, which hasn’t totally alienated me like it pretty much has with all of my other friends and mythical gf, all of whom I used to play with on a very regular, nightly basis.

That is until my most recent losing streak, which hit eight games last night.  And put me in a really dejected, and salty mood, that lingered up until this morning, even after a night’s sleep.  The thing is, this isn’t even my worst losing streak ever (14 consecutive losses), but at the current combination of game interest and the stage of my life in general, this particular losing streak really left me feeling with a completely disillusioned feeling that I’ve completely wasted my time and debating on whether or not I should just stop cold turkey, and go find something more constructive to do with my time.

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Netflix’s Castlevania: the teasers of teasers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Blink, and you just might miss it; that’s how I felt after the fourth episode of Netflix’s animated Castlevania’s credits started rolling, and instead of the next episode in 3..2..1.. prompt, it was a preview for something else, signifying the end of the series.  Right there, it became abundantly clear that just four episodes were ordered with the intent to gauge interest and test the waters before a more comprehensive commitment would be made.  Which is kind of ironic in itself, since Netflix and online streaming services are typically the platforms in which longform series tend to get their chance to let viewers, and now they’re pulling the network-like process of short test runs to see if something is worth it.

But for what it’s worth, I liked it, and I was pleased to discover that more episodes have already been ordered.  Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse was always one of my favorites in the series, and based on the fact that Netflix’s series revolve around Trevor Belmont, Sypha Belnades and introduce Alucard, it’s pretty clear where the source material is coming from, which lit my fanboy’s enthusiasm upon realization.

It is interesting to see something based on a storyline from my childhood, but fleshed out and explained to me as an adult; the Castlevania canon tends to get a little convoluted, and I admit that I stopped playing the series outright in the midst of Symphony of the Night, because when I realized that I had to basically play the entire game over again in an upside-down castle I was like naw, fuck that, and haven’t really looked back at the games since.  But Castlevania III is a property that I was all too familiar with, so it was really easy to get into the Netflix show.

Back when I was a kid, there wasn’t much thought to the plot: Dracula is ruining shit, and Trevor Belmont shows up to fight against it.  The Netflix Castlevania fills in the gaps in the plot that an old NES cartridge either fails to deliver and/or nine-year olds simply can’t comprehend, and it’s way more compelling than when I was sitting on my ass plotting on how to avoid hits and whether or not I was going to take Grant on this journey or try to finish the game with Sypha (never took Alucard, because he sucked).  But I never thought to why Dracula is waging war on humanity in the first place, and why Trevor Belmont was needed to come save the day in the first place.

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I guess I can start winding down Fire Emblem Heroes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I got Hector this morning.  It’s like somewhere in the cosmic karmic connection between life and video games, Fire Emblem Heroes has caught wind of some genuine anxiety, and decided to stop being such a raging mutant cockblock and give me a little bit of a reprieve from the onslaughts of garbage that typically tends to be my luck when it comes to gatcha games.

However, that being said, I guess I can start assuming that the FEH train is probably coming to an end soon.  It’ll end up like Pokemon Go, and start getting lesser support as the developers start looking at the next project on the horizon, and me getting Hector and getting to unleash him on the pleebs is going to mean next to nothing on the near to distant future, because soon nobody will even be playing the game anymore except for like me and my one friend out in Maryland.

Whatever though, I’m still amazed that after all this time, I’ve finally got a Hector of my own now.  It’s only taken the better part of 600 orbs and a special promotional multiplier, but at least I can say that I now have the final piece of my theoretical all-tank team, anchored down by Hector that I’m going to unleash onto the arena and hope it will earn me way more AI wins than any other team I’ve fielded.

In fact, out of my last session of unloading orbs that I’ve hoarded, I actually fared out extremely well.  I ultimately made a total of 40 pulls, and yielded not just Hector, but also 5-star variants of Mia, Lute, Ike, bridal Cordelia and another archer Lyn, two of the more supposed broken characters in the game currently.  Six 5-stars out of 40 pulls actually isn’t that bad, but frankly, I’d have taken trash 39 times as long as I still yielded one Hector, because he’s pretty much the crown jewel unicorn of the game that I’ve been pining to get since I got my bearings on how the game operates.

Obviously this all means that the game is going downhill, but it doesn’t matter to me.  I’m the totem of perseverance, and I play the shit out of all the games that those with more fleeting attention spans abandon as soon as the next new shiny app is released, and with my Hector now in hand, I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of future with the game I can have now.

Pokemon Go Fuck the Rules

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Admittedly, one of the things I was really looking forward to on my trip to Seoul was that I would have the opportunity to catch a Farfetch’d in Pokemon Go.  Why am I even still playing this game? is this notable?  Because Farfetch’d is a regional exclusive Pokemon that’s exclusive to Asia, and Pokemon Go wasn’t even allowed in South Korea until literally like two weeks after I had left the fucking country last year.

So the only people who had Farfetch’ds were those who lived in Asian Pokemon Go countries, those who cheated and spoofed their IPs to look like they were in Asian Pokemon Go countries, or tryhards like me that traveled to other countries and actually tried to capitalize on the local Pikachus, wanting to fill their coffers with Pikachus with geostamps listing the places of the world they’ve been to while playing a kids game.

Anyway, during my first morning in Seoul, I went out on a walk because according to the Seoul Pokemon Go Map, I noticed that there was a Farfetch’d within a reasonable walking distance from where I was.  I needed to catch this motherfucker because I really wanted to knock this task off of my list as soon as possible, because I didn’t really want to be the asshole not seeing the world around him, because my face was buried in my phone; the irony of this statement is not lost on me, considering at any given time, 80% of the South Korean population has their faces buried in their phones.

So I get to the location where the Farfetch’d was noted to have spawned, and sure enough it spawned on my phone.  Through bated breath, I unloaded the full arsenal of raspberries and Ultra Pokeballs and hoped that I could catch it and it wouldn’t break free and run away.  It took three tries, but I secured the catch, and then I felt a tremendous amount of satisfaction at getting to be the ultimate tryhard that had just secured a regional exclusive in North America, Europe, and now Asia.

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Fire Emblem Heroes gatcha fail, October 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Because I apparently like being in abusive relationships, yes I’m still playing Fire Emblem: Heroes on my phone.  Mostly on account of the fact that I’m kind of OCD and I tend to do the same things every day, all the time, and playing FEH is kind of one of those said things that’s kind of engrained in my everyday activities.  For the matter, I’m still playing Pokémon Go on a fairly regular basis, mostly because I don’t even bother to help it.

But in regards to FEH, I still play because I have these pointless hopes of assembling perfect teams that can run roughshod throughout the game, be it in the arena or any of their rotating challenge modes, but in order to assemble what I believe to be perfect teams, I have to get the necessary characters in order to build them, which has been about as possible as making pigs fly, yet I still keep on trying.

Or, in the case of October, there are sometimes just characters that are released that I simply want, usually because most of the time they’re sexy anime wimmins that feed into my inner-15-year old that wants to fill my roster with gold five-star sexy women characters, so that one of my set teams can be “Sexy Team.”  And the crown jewel of the October Performing Arts roster to me, was the special green-class Azura, and I really wanted to get one.

But, because FEH has worse odds than winning at a slot machine, such a want was one that was going to be something with an extremely unlikely chance of happening, but it still wasn’t going to stop me from trying.

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Fire Emblem Heroes sucks jihadist balls

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I just needed to get this off my chest.

Much like someone in an abusive relationship, I’m still playing Fire Emblem Heroes, much like I’m still playing Pokémon Go.  They’re on my phone, they’re easy to play, and I’m often the type of person who sticks to things for the long hauls, despite my oft-occasional disdain for the games that I’m allowing to suck up my time.

Anyway, as far as FEH goes, I’ve made no secret about how I think the game’s gatchapon system is pretty much utter bullshit, and that it’s neigh impossible to get any of the most heralded characters in the game; Takumi, Azura, Hector, etc, etc.  Above all else, I covet a Hector, so that I can construct my ideal dream team of tanks with an Effie and a Draug, that can counter from anywhere and can slowly, but surely enclose on enemy units and eviscerate them. 

But in order to get there, I need a Hector.  Who’s basically a unicorn that I’m convinced doesn’t actually exist for players, and that anyone who has him is like a Chinese hacker or something who got him through illegal means.

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