8bitdo got them hooks in me,

I took advantage of the Black Friday sale and got myself yet another 8bitdo Pro 2 controller, specifically for my Switch and Switch 2 when that finally makes it out.

I bought the Famicom themed controller a couple years ago and fell in love with it instantly, and now that I am getting back into playing games on my brand new 50-inch TV. I use that one specifically with the Steam Deck now, but the new PSX colored one is for the Switch (don't try and make it make sense). 

Playstation in color, but with the Nintendo ABXY button layout, six-axis motion control, the most perfect D-pad ever, all in extremely comfortable form factor. 

Advrik's Top Ten of 2024: Gaming

 Every year, I like to go back and create a little top-ten list of the games, movies, or books that I have ingested over the year. I may have to smudge the timeframe a bit here, going back to the previous December for some titles, as there's always this game or movie I get for Christmas that I like to include on these lists.

Visions of Mana (Deck)

When they announced this at last year's Game Awards, my jaw dropped. As a lifelong fan of the Mana series, having started with Secret of Mana and going on to have that game influence me GREATLY, I was naturally going to be all over Visions. It'd been over ten years since we got the last mainline game in the series and even longer since a game in the series was a straight-up action adventure RPG with proper level and story progression.

And it was absolutely worth the wait. Fantastic music. An intriguing story that never felt like it overstayed its welcome. Beautiful world and graphics. Fun gameplay. Interesting characters. It tied the series together in ways that I simply had not expected. And the soundtrack! Oh man, the soundtrack was INCREDIBLE, and it was all thanks to having Hiroki Kikuta back at the helm to direct its composition, and the other composers working under him for the project all hit it home. I'm actually listening to it right now as I type this.

Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition (Deck)

I know what you're probably thinking, and honestly, I don't care. My lists aren't strictly limited to games that came out in that particular year. Instead, they're lists consisting of games, be they replayed or first experiences, that I played that calendar year. And it is for that reason that I am including Final Fantasy XV here.

While nowhere near perfect, the game played like night and day compared to the mess that it was when it first launched on the PS4 several years back. And while there was very little Square-Enix could do to save it from the drab, lifeless open world that games of that era (and even today) found themselves in, the combat had improved in several ways, and plus, being able to focus on the game in the handheld form factor on the Deck helped in whittling away the stupidly long road trip segments that you were forced to endure between each new area.

I still have many complaints about the game even now, but I definitely enjoyed it far more than I ever did when the game first came out, which is saying something, considering it was the title that almost took me out of the hobby altogether.

Bayonetta 3 (Switch)

Hoo boy, where do I even begin with this masterpiece? I made my glorious return to the Nintendo Switch this year after realizing that the Deck had hit its ceiling in terms of what it's going to be able to play, and with the Switch 2 just off on the horizon, I wanted to get back into the Nintendo landscape and pick up the games I skipped over the past two years in favor of putting everything I could into the Deck.

I am so extremely grateful that I never got this game spoiled for me. Easily the best in the trilogy in terms of difficulty, story, and the overall package. It did things I hadn't expected, and was pleasantly surprised by all throughout. And then the ending happened and nearly destroyed me.

I hope this gets a performance patch or something for the coming Switch 2, as I would love to experience it again on the big screen with better resolution.

Curse Crackers: For Whom the Belle Tolls (Deck)

I had played their previous Zelda-like game called Prodigal and enjoyed it a fair amount. Heaps of content, great characterization, and a deep, lore-filled world. Plus, the Gameboy Color aesthetics were really charming, even though I never personally owned a Gameboy Color (went right to GBA after my OG). So when I saw that the same dev also had an acrobatic platformer in the same vein, naturally, I jumped on it.

What an experience THAT was, let me tell you. Colorgrave took Super Mario World and turned up the volume so high that it broke off, then still kept going until the machinery inside started breaking from all the twisting. Curse Crackers is fast, funny, and a hefty challenge at times if you're going for all of the collectibles and achievements. Lots of post-game content, side quests, hidden levels, and whatnot. This dev has cracked the code to how to make an excellent all-around game, and I wish more devs would pay attention.

The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (Switch)

                                     

If you had told me last year that I'd not only be including not one but two Switch games on this year's Top Ten but that one of them would also be Tears of the Kingdom, I would have... Well, I would have entertained the idea. 

When rumors started heavily circulating that the Switch 2 was just a few months away from being revealed, I started looking back at my Switch and wondering if I should pick it up again and play some of the games that I'd missed since gravitating to my Steam Deck. Tears of the Kingdom was the first (of about seven!) new Switch game I picked up once this initiative got started, and let me tell you, I do not regret it.

I was only mildly impressed by Breath of the Wild. I loved the music, the sense of exploration, and the honestly decent story for a big, lifeless, open world game, and TotK carries all of that over while expanding on all of it, the story especially. The game just clicked with me far more than BotW EVER did. I loved it so much that, had it been condensed into a conventional linear Zelda game, it would have been my favorite game in the series, hands down.

Dawn of the Monsters (Deck)

Aptly named Dawn of the Monsters as it's another piece in the evergrowing flood of kaiju-related media in recent years, dating back to the 2014 American Godzilla movie, a move that had revitalized not only the Godzilla name but the infatuation with giant monsters as a whole.

Dawn of the Monsters is a Beat-Em Up of gigantic proportions from Wayforward Studio. It combines aspects from the greats such as Godzilla, Power Rangers, and Ultraman while throwing in its own little twists and turns. The story was mildly interesting, and the combat was powerful and had just enough variety and interesting mechanics that it never got TOO repetitive, as games in this genre tend to be.

I'd be all in on a sequel should they choose to produce one.

Gravity Circuit (Deck)

Even though Mega Man's absence is greatly missed in this day and age, the advent of the independent developer scene has made the disappearance of everyone's favorite Blue Bomber sting a little less. Between Gravity Circuit and Berserk Boy, Mega Man-like fans are eating well nowadays.

Gravity Circuit has probably come closest to actually filling that niche for me personally. The gameplay, while looking very NES/Gameboy Color in nature, plays like Mega Man X with mild beat-em-up mechanics. It has the tried and true level select featured in most, if not all, Mega Man games, a colorful array of bosses, and fun level design. It never got tiring even once.

Coral Island (Deck)

There was no way I was going to go through the year without including at least one farm life sim on my list, so when I started boiling the list down, it settled on a tie between Sun Haven and Coral Island. Both with their flaws, but both deliver on every aspect I look for in my farming life simulators.

In the end, I settled on Coral Island as it had the ever so slightly cozier feel to it and less dependence on Maker tables, a trend in recent farming sims after the advent of Stardew Valley that has become rather disgusting. And while I am not a fan of the art style in Coral Island and most of the villagers seem like they would be insufferable to live in such a small town with, that's the sort of thing I like in games like this. I don't want my neighbors to all be super likable, regardless of what their personality is supposed to dictate to me.

I haven't played Coral Island for a while now, but it has sense received SEVERAL quality of life and content updates in that time, so when I do finally go back, I'll be starting a new farm and experiencing it all fresh.

Resident Evil 4 Remake (Deck)

I did not and still do not like the original Resident Evil 4. I didn't play IT when it was first released either, and even though I did eventually warm up to it enough to give it a run-through, I just wasn't wowed by it. 

The remake, on the other hand, took all the best parts of the game and improved on them while stripping a lot, if not all, of the level design and segments of the game that I despised. It subverted expectations much like the RE2 remake did at every turn, which kept things interesting as you never knew what was going to be different.

Sonic Frontiers (Deck)

Now, how's that for the unexpected? Not only did I play more than a single open world game this year, but both of them I enjoyed enough to feature them on my top ten list! 

I picked Frontiers up in a Sonic rush back in September and played through it in a week, putting in close to 40 hours in the end. And while it did have the usual Sonic Team jank when it came time to play the game like a modern Sonic game, the open-world stuff was actually fun and well-built, which puts the Boost gameplay found in the actual Sonic levels in a deep, gross contrast as those are poorly done, filled with cheap deaths and glitches galore.

ReCollection :: The Origin of Memoria, my Animal Crossing town name

Advrik art by AWD : https://vgen.co/awd

Before delving into the rest of the events that transpired today in Memoria, I first want to go over a little bit of history of where the Memoria name originates from and why, all of a sudden, I decided to up and retire my launch day town of Brickhedge with its rich history and (now) strong ties to the story I'm currently writing.

So to begin, Memoria began its life in the Nintendo 3DS iteration of Animal Crossing, otherwise known as New Leaf. It had been a new lease on life for the franchise after the previous Wii title, City Folk, stagnated with the fanbase (I personally loved it, but whatever). During the lead-up to the game's release, I took to my now-defunct Tumblr blog, which had been solely dedicated to my Animal Crossing ramblings, throwing out possible names for my town in the forthcoming title. 

Eventually, I settled on something that resonated with my personality and my interests, and that was short enough to fit in any one of the game's allotted character total for a town name.

After much pondering in the following days, I did finally settle on something that, as previously mentioned, was perfectly in line with the Me.

Thus, Memoria was born. Lifted directly from the final dungeon of Final Fantasy IX, my favorite game in that particular series and one of my favorite games of all time, period. Memoria was the game's final dungeon, and it only existed as a result of the cumulation of the thoughts and memories of every living being that had ever lived. A concept that I loved and had felt that, given the amount of time and personalization that goes into an Animal Crossing game, it would be the perfect fit for my New Leaf town. But not just New Leaf, but for the name of every town I create in every future (or past) Animal Crossing game to come.

Much like Oldhill became the go-to name for my farms in farming sims, Memoria was poised to be the name I'd use for Animal Crossing going forward. No more wracking my brain to come up with something new and fresh for each new game. Simply, Memoria.

But New Horizons was hit with an unexpected new(and much welcomed) addition to the game's already growing list of changes that benefitted the player: Increased town name character limit! That's right, for the first time ever, we weren't limited to eight characters and could go wild. So I took the plunge and used a town name that I had come up with for a story around that time, but failed to get it off the ground until this past spring. Brickhedge had become my March 20, 2020 launch day town name, bucking the trend of a go-to name before it even started.

But that all changed yesterday. With the pandemic and other unpleasant events having happened leading up to and during the life of New Horizons, the town had been left with an unsettling blemish that, for the first time ever, caused me to stop playing a current Animal Crossing game. Now granted, I had put a good 1600+ hours into it and had played it for two years straight by that point, but I've found myself unable to return to Brickhedge now. A ghost hangs over that town that, thankfully, hasn't followed the name to Last Tail where it's used as the central storytelling location.

So there it is, the history of Memoria! A name that would go on to appear as a town at the center of a seperate series of stories that is currently in the middle of a massive overhaul/remake that can be read in its defunct state on my old Booksie account!

PLAYING WITH POWER, a multi-part Nintendo-centric ReCollection [Part 5]

 

Been getting some late 90s, early 00s nostalgia here in the last few days. Namely because, like the ocean, my nostalgia courses through me as waves. Sometimes, the tide is high, and I find myself spiraling all the way back to the early to mid-90s; other times, it's low, and I tend to drift towards the latter end of that decade into the first five or so years of the new millennium. Either way, no matter the tide, nostalgia is a feeling that dominates my interests on any given day and is probably the only thing keeping me going nowadays. Well, that and the ever-present idea that a new Animal Crossing game is always slated for the next new Nintendo hardware.

So, that said, we're going back to 1997. The year before the Pokemon craze hit the world. The year before Zelda 64 was released as 'Zelda: Ocarina of Time'. The year before we were given an interesting and unfairly hated rendition of Godzilla.

In 1997, I was still predominately using my Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, but the itch for new hardware had finally festered into a full-blown seeping sore as the concept of new console generations slowly began to become a thing in that little brain of mine. Going to rental stores and seeing what new 16-bit games were being offered alongside the likes of the budding assortment of CD-based games lining the same shelves always filled me with a sense of wonder and longing. Here were these strange, elongated video game cases that were unlike the cardboard and clamshell boxes of the 16-bit era. The sense of mystery about the console the games belonged to and the question of how I might even go about getting one.

I initially had looked longingly at the Sega Saturn. Particularly because it was its version of Mega Man 8 that adorned the shelves of Movie Max that always had me stop and pause as I made my way to the Sega Genesis or SNES games. That flashy cover art, the bright and colorful screenshots on the back. I wanted to play it so badly, but I was an understanding child, if nothing else, so I never made a fuss about wanting to upgrade with my parents.

That was, until the ads for the Nintendo 64 and its flagship title, 'Super Mario 64' started airing on TV.

Now granted the N64 had been out for some time by early 1997, but for whatever reason it hadn't been something that I immediately took notice to as Movie Max didn't immediately offer Nintendo 64 games right away, and when they did finally show up for rent at Blowout Video, the rental store within Super K-Mart, they didn't even have Mario 64 as a title, but oddly enough, they did have Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball 6, an import that wouldn't even play on American consoles. It was as weird as Movie Max later offering the Japanese version of Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout as a rental, which somehow DID work sometimes on my Playstation, but that's not important to the story.

So, the Nintendo 64 was out in the open and running wide by early 1997 in my town. I remember going to both K-Mart and Walmart and seeing the consoles sitting behind glass lock-up cases, longing to touch one or, better yet, take one home with me. While that would happen later through a series of events that I am still unclear of to this day, I did get to rent a console from a friend of my father's rental store(The same guy gave us a copy of Mortal Kombat II for the SNES eventually), which is what I want to talk about now. 

My first experiences with the next generation.

I don't remember the date exactly, but the timeframe had it around early 1997, possibly March or April, somewhere in there. My father had surprised me a rental version of the Nintendo 64 along with Mario 64 and Mortal Kombat Trilogy. It was brought home in one of those huge plastic cases that we just used to refer to as "camcorder cases," as that's what we always used them for. It had been lined with a thick foam to nest the control deck, the various hookups, and one of the strangest controllers to ever be produced.

Nintendo's lived a pretty comfy life up until this moment. The Super Nintendo and Gameboy had been an unstoppable duo in the gaming sphere, but the Nintendo 64, while remembered fondly by many, would mark the beginning of a bumpy future for the company as developers began to jump ship in favor of the Sony Playstation and its CD-based format. While I favored Nintendo greatly as a kid, the Nintendo 64 never really succeeded in getting its hooks in me quite like the Playstation did, which I got that very same year. And thinking about it now, I can only really think that it was the lack of RPGs for the N64 that had helped it sidle into its place in my gaming history as second fiddle, the only Nintendo console in my entire existence to ever be as such.

For the few days(and long nights) that I got to spend with the Nintendo 64, I was in a state of mind that felt otherworldly. I took to the jump from 2D to 3D with ease as I'm sure most kids had. I wonder if adults of the time ever had issues making the leap?

That first night, I had stayed up probably close to 4am just hammering away at Super Mario 64. Not really making any real progress but rather exploring the new sense of freedom that the third dimension offered. Tossing baby penguins off of mountains, discovering secret moves and just trying to see what I could really do with this seemingly infinite amount of possibilities presented by this strange, foreign realm.

And the whole while, I'd had a big old bowl of Corn Pops sitting beside me. Back when they still offered it in the foil bags, making the junk hit differently than other similar cereals. Nowadays, if I am sitting down to eat that rare bowl of cereal and it just so happens to be Corn Pops, my mind will immediately whisk me away to those late nights in 1997, Nintendo 64 controller in hand and Mario drowning at the bottom of  Dire Dire Docks as I was too scared to swim back up to the surface after freeing the giant eel.

Later that summer, nearing my birthday, I would actually come into posession of my very own Nintendo 64 along with a brand new copy of Mario Kart 64... and then a Playstation that Christmas, but that is an entirely different ReCollection.

The Nintendo 64 era will be concluded in the next entry!

Mario & Luigi: Brothership - Five Hour Mark Impressions

I'm venturing back into the preview/review territory again as I want to add more content to my blog that isn't just written art or random thoughts that are too long-winded for Bluesky, and what better way than to kick such new content off than with some early game impressions of the newest entry in the Mario and Luigi series, subtitle Brothership!

This is my first legit entry in the Mario and Luigi series. For whatever reason, I never bothered with any Mario RPG outside of THE Super Mario RPG for the SNES. Paper Mario included despite my having played several games inspired by it, but that's neither here nor there right now. 

Mario and Luigi Brothership has the titular characters setting sales in the electrically-themed world of Concordia. The hub world being the Shipshape, a drifting island that is, you guessed it, shaped like a ship. You get to set your course for the ship to take by directing it to follow currents that gradually open up more and more routes as you progress the story. And along these routes, you will drift past more islands and even reefs as part of an on-going side quest.

It's a neat concept and is tied to in-game time, meaning that the Shipshape is always moving along. Now I can't claim to know if there are advancements to come that sort of streamline this later on the game, but at the point I am in, if you aren't actively watching the little map in the top left corner and are waiting to drift pass a certain new island, you could potentially miss your chance at landing there if you don't get back to the cannon on the Shapeship in time, meaning you would then be waiting for the ship to sail back around again. It's a minor frustration that really could only be an issue if you aren't paying attention, but it's a problem just the same. 

Moving on to the battle system: This is really good stuff. The Mario RPG, regardless of the series, has always been based around timing buttons presses to buff attacks or avoid attacks, and Brothership is no exception. The brothers' attacks are animated beautifully and are carried out with a buttery smoothness that betrays the game's 30fps framerate. Combat is fun, snappy and more than just simply hitting Confirm on a menu item and then watching the turn play out. Attack and Defense rounds require your attention at all times, whether it be timing the A or B button just right or figuring out when the best time to jump over an enemy's attack so that you not only avoid taking damage, but dump additional damage on to your for in the process.

Don't have much to say at the moment regarding the overall story as it really hasn't done much yet, but the dialogue is genuinely funny and had had me laughing out loud more than a times already. It alone would keep me playing, but coupling that on top of a really fun battle system? Easy 40+ hours I'm going to clock into this. 

PLAYING WITH POWER, a multi-part Nintendo-centric ReCollection [Part 4]

 

It's time to wrap up 1994 with the remainder of the video games that found their way into my budding gaming library. My life as a video game enthusiast officially began with the Super Nintendo and later the Sega Genesis, both consoles giving me the absolute best gaming memories and delivering titles and franchises that I still play to this day.

So here we are, the stunning conclusion to 1994!

Mega Man deserves his own ReCollection entirely as there is a LOT of ground to cover there, but as par the course for the entries in this particular ReCollection series, I'm only going to go over just a sliver of my history with the game.

So, Mega Man X was a game that "Santa" had left for me along with the Super Gameboy and one other game. The majority of what I got that Christmas was Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers stuff, which had just hit its second season and had introduced the White Ranger and his Tigerzord. 
Mega Man X was the catalyst for a whole slew of different things for me, from an even greater interest in the Mega Man series to filming myself playing the games on an old camcorder to even narrating my runs of the game. Heck, I still have the very first VHS recording of the game to this day, cleaned and backed up digitally for extra preservation measures.

The funny story about this one is that I had mastered how to fight the final boss down to the point of knowing when, where, and how to dash through his AOE attacks. Initial encounters with him had me trying out various weapons to no effect, which led me to assume that ALL special weapons were useless against him, leading me to fight him with just the charged buster alone. That's one pip of energy per charged shot. The fact that I had done this at such an age (and that I failed to try every single weapon against him) still astonishes me to this day.

Gradius III was the other SNES game that I received that year, and while it was something I definitely tried my hand at more than a number of times, the Shoot-em-Up genre just wasn't something that ever clicked with me. Now, my father, on the other hand, had made runs through the game on numerous occasions, and it was by watching him that I only ever actually got to see the end of the game.

That wraps it up for 1994 and the Christmas Gameboy Story. The next entry will leap ahead a couple of years to 1997 and the advent of the Nintendo 64, so stick around!

I'm a Pokemon Trainer :: Chapter 1: How I Won My First Battle

 Spring 1999, somewhere outside Viridian Forest

Pokedex: 1/1025

The distant cries of a flock of Spearow stirred me from my slumber after a rougher-than-expected night of sleep. Having never camped before a day in my life, to say that I had been ill-prepared would have been an understatement. At eleven years old, I’d always been a “In by dark, game all night” sort of kid, so not only had the pocket tent I brought with me been hastily put together the moment the daylight began to fade but actually getting to sleep felt like an impossibility in the face of the fear I’d felt.

I had finally begun my Pokemon adventure with my companion Rockruff at my side. Having just a month prior went through the whole thing at Professor Oak’s. Now, a full day into my adventure, I was feeling, you could say, out of my element. I’d been a shy kid and always had my parents do my talking for me whenever we went anywhere, but now I was having to not only do all of the talking myself but actually approach other people for Pokemon battles. Thankfully, Jen, being the ever-present companion that he was rapidly becoming, would bark at other trainers to get their attention, prompting them to approach me for a batter. Of course, I’d grow out of it eventually, but that wouldn’t be for some time to come.

It's gonna be a Super weekend!

I finally bit the bullet and ordered one of those region free copies of the original Super Mario Bros. movie from 1993 in preparation for Mario & Luigi weekend! 

I loved this movie as a kid and I love it as an adult. Anyone taking Mario Bros and somehow turning it into what they did should lauded as a hero. 

Bayonetta 3

Might possibly be my new favorite character action game now. The shear amount of variety in the gameplay, the absurd over the top set pieces and boss battles, multiverse madness and bombastic soundtrack all make for one heck of a package that, when considering it's extended development time, has been well worth the wait.

The only grievance I have with it is Viola. I do not like her character or how she plays. A tiny blemish on an otherwise marvelous work of art.