Tag: video games

Late to the dance by like, 18 years

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, but apparently Netflix has announced plans for a Castlevania animated series that will be released later in 2017.

Too bad Simon Belmont has already been immortalized in animated form, since like 1989, on Captain N: The Game Master. 

Okay, I just really wanted a reason to post a picture of Captain N Simon Belmont.

Anyway, I’m a little dubious about this idea, since video game-based animated series are almost always starting on an uphill battle, and the fact that Castlevania hasn’t really been relevant since like… Symphony of the Night, depending on one’s interpretation and dedication to the litany of Pokévania games that were released for various Game Boy platforms.  A part of me thinks that the choice of Castlevania is like television producers wanting to do something, needing reputable source material, and someone in the room thinking “I know, I used to love Castlevania, the games were hard as shit, but I’m sure we could spin it into a story,” and then one or two people recognizing the name and concept and then an idea snowballs before everyone begins to blow each other.

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Love it but hate it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Nintendo reveals Switch, the gaming console that allows you to play games handheld as well as on television

The technology behind this is truly game breaking.  I’m very much in awe at Nintendo’s ambitions and forward thinking when it comes to the gaming industry.  Microsoft and Sony aren’t even remotely in the same stratosphere when it comes to competing with Nintendo visions, because they’re too busy fighting each other, churning out products that require a hundred updates a week with a video game occasionally playable.

I’d love to read or hear about the creative concepting behind Switch; and the moments when they realized that it wasn’t impossible to feasibly create something that could be played on televisions as well as through handheld capacity.  On top of that, it’s designed to be a very social gaming system, that allows for lots of multiplayers, as long as controllers are available.  It probably was something really inspirational to be a part of.

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The Pikachu Game stories, July 16-23

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Fucking milennials.  Haven’t they played an RPG before?  Don’t they understand that as players become more experienced, the difficult just might scale?  Haven’t they ever endured some video game grinding before??

This particular article, documenting the “agonizing” process in which The Pikachu Game has the audacity to scale and continuously add more and more experience requirements to hit higher levels, and all I really get out of it is that today’s video gamers simply don’t have the tenacity or patience to know what it’s like to achieve the next numbered level, once they’ve been through the trenches for a little bit.

Back in my day, we called it grinding, because that’s exactly what it feels like at times.  Gamers today are even luckier, with so many games having so many options to grind less, be it in-game XP boosters, pay-for-XP boosts, or even hiring a Chinese guy to grind out levels for you.  I still remember playing Final Fantasy IV, having to kill like 80,000 behemoths and red dragons in order to get to level 99, and they could beat your ass all the way from level 50 to even when you hit the 90s.

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Ho hum, another game championship, another Korean win

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

lol ESPN: Lee “Infiltration” Seon-woo wins EVO 2016’s Street Fighter V championship

First off, gaming has come a long way, seeing as how this particular story was broadcast on the front page of ESPN.com.   Not only can you read about the NFL’s collective dick getting sucked, Tom Brady, the New York Yankees and the NBA D-League, you can now occasionally get some articles about video games and video game events, like EVO and the League of Legends World Championships. (but very little about Major League Baseball outside of New York, Los Angeles or Boston)

Ultimately, the headline is not as cavalier as I try to make it sound, because at least as far as the Street Fighter scene is concerned, SF is a franchise that has mostly been dominated by Japan throughout the years.  There are guys all over the world who have made names for themselves, representing the United States, France, South Korea, and other countries, but typically when it comes to the EVO Championships, Japan has typically run the table on the Street Fighter franchise games.

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Chronicling The Pikachu Game stories seemed like a good idea

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Like many across the regions of the world in which the game has been released, I’ve been playing Pokemon Go.  Or as I like to refer to it as, The Pikachu Game.

I wish I could say that I was amongst the game’s elite already, but let’s be real here, I simply don’t have as much free time to play as much as I’d like to.  In fact, I can barely get the game to run for more than like 20 minutes at a time, because I keep crashing whenever I catch a pidgey or a zubat or whatever the things not actually Pikachu are.

Either way, I’m finding enjoyment from the game, and it’s actually a little fascinating, a little amusing, and a little bit cool that so many people are into it, and for once, I’m actually a part of the crowd, instead of being the contrarian hipster I can sometimes become, when it comes to something so mainstream.

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League of Payforachievements

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Since not all of my six readers are League of Legends players, much less gamers at all, I’ll try to kind of start with an analogy that those who have gamed at all within the better part of the last decade might understand.

Achievements, have become a pretty normal thing in today’s gaming landscape, with players getting little pop-up notifications in-game from their systems themselves, when they accomplish particular tasks in the games they are playing.  Ultimately, they’re utterly useless in the grand spectrum of most games, but their existence has created somewhat of a collecting hobby for those who game.

Some achievements are justly achieved by accomplishing monumental feats, like beating Mass Effect 2 on the hardest difficulty without dying once.  Others are as systematically simple as proceeding through the story, and getting an achievement for each notable storyline break point.  There are achievements of insanity, such as completing an entire Left 4 Dead 2 campaign only using a melee weapon.   There are achievements of futility, such as deliberately getting every single question wrong in a round of 1 vs. 100, and then there are achievements of everyone gets a trophy, such as simply starting a game.

The point is, achievements have become somewhat of a point of bragging among gamers, and one of the greatest accomplishments is getting a 100% of achievements earned in games, because usually every game has a good variety of achievements from layups to Hail Marys.  As in the case of XBOX Live, players’ stats have a running tally of how many games they get 100% success rate on, and for players like me, it’s something to be prideful of, to be able to prove just how little of a life I can sometimes have, when I obsess over trying to Boomer Bile over all four survivors in one hurl.

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Alone time

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I have no idea what I’m going to do when my brog is up and running again. Am I going to retroactively timestamp posts I made on the dates in which the impetus stories took place? Am I going to just post them in order as soon as things are up and running again? I don’t really know.

Frankly, I don’t know about a lot of things, and I’ve been feeling really vulnerable and uncertain about my life now, and for quite some time throughout, well, maybe all of this year. The lack of having my brog I think has given me an exorbitant amount of time to stay within my own head and think about things that probably need to be thought about, but I don’t really want to, mostly out of trepidation and anxiety.

For a site that has literally maybe six regular visitors, it means nothing to anyone really, except for me, and it’s got me dealing with some separation anxiety for my greatest and most dedicated hobby over the last 15 years. I imagine to some, it’s a place for me to spout off about opinions and veiled commentary about things in my life, which aren’t inaccurate statements, but honestly it’s a means for me to mentally vent and not just share my thoughts with those who want to read, but to kind of chronicle my thoughts and remind me that these are things that I’ve thought in my life.

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