I'm trying to create a Game Time With Manny brand, but I feel like I'm all over the place. Over the past few weeks I've tried to consolidate quite a bit. I now have a Game Time With Manny Google+ page, which is linked to my YouTube channel. I'm going to try and post everything I do there.
On the Twitch front I've been streaming a lot lately too. I play a whole lot of Inazuma Eleven on my channel, and play fighting games with my friends every Thursday. I'll be doing mostly Inazuma Eleven until the end of March. Every stream is uploaded to YouTube after the fact for archiving purposes.
I've been tweeting a lot lately as well. I used to think Twitter was stupid, but it's actually very helpful for getting the word out. I tweet whenever I go live, which means that I don't clog up the blog with one sentence posts. Twitter is definitely a great tool that I need to utilize more often.
I don't know, I just wanted to type up a quick thing about what I've been doing lately. Definitely follow the Google+ page to see everything I have going on, and if you want to see me live stream following me on Twitter and/or Twitch would be your best options for that.
I'll be back in a few days with the February edition of game time.
January is always a slow month for new releases, and this is one January where I am totally okay with that. I have a lot of games in my ever increasing backlog... Good thing I'm not playing them and have opted to play a ton of old games instead!
So, as you may have noticed, I've been streaming a lot more often lately. I am trying as hard as possible to share my love for Inazuma Eleven. I streamed all the way through the first game in less than a week and now I've moved on to the second. You can always check that out at Www.twitch.tv/drac96
I'm still working my way through Sunset Overdrive, but my interest is waning as the game goes on. That's the only "new" game I've been playing. I've spent a lot of time replaying old games this month. I replayed Pokemon Snap a few nights ago, and have been going through the original Super Mario. However, I will be writing here about the Donkey Kong Country series. I had never beaten the second one before, but now I have.
To go along with my more frequent streaming I did a playthrough of the Grim Fandango Remaster. Even though I played through it a few months ago for Extra Life, I still felt the need to play through the Remaster twice this past week. On my first playthrough I just wanted to see what it was all about, so I went through the game to get all of the trophies and listen to the director's commentary. I then went through it again on stream and beat it in under five hours.
Buckle up, it's game time!
Sunset Overdrive
It's official. I have been stricken with open world fatigue. Open world games are cool, but there is rarely anything compelling to do in the large open world, and the mission structure is almost always boring. Sunset Overdrive isn't really any different.
Yes, it has a whole load of style, but I just can't really ever get into it. The game is at its best when you're traveling seamlessly throughout the world. In terms of movement it reminds me of Jet Set Radio Future, but without roller-blades. For some reason the main character has magical shoes that allow him to grind on all surfaces, and he can inexplicably dash through the air. To me that's the best part of the game. The movement mechanics feel great, and make me as a player feel like I'm doing some legitimately cool stuff.
Traversing the world is fun, but shooting isn't.
Where it falls apart for me is that it is just another third-person shooter that takes place in an open world. Insomniac is great at creating zany weapons, but in the end you're still just shooting energy drink crazed monsters (basically zombies) with guns. It's even more frustrating, because almost every mission is a fetch quest, or deals with defending a single point. That sucks.
It's a shame the gameplay makes me feel this way, because I think Insomiac had some great ideas. The movement is amazing, and the world is filled with color and interesting characters. Normally these kinds of games keep me occupied, but I'm just getting a bit tired of them. I haven't played it in a few weeks, so hopefully when I boot it up later toady I'll feel refreshed. If not, I'll just have to take a break from open world games. It doesn't help that almost every release in recent memory has been open world...
Donkey Kong Country
During the SNES era I didn't personally own a lot of games, but I did rent a whole lot of them. I remember renting Donkey Kong Country one and two quite often. I personally was able to beat the first game, but never got a chance to do the second. For Christmas one year I was given Donkey Kong Country 3, which I still have now. I was also able to complete that.
New Years Eve Noukeo, Landers, and I were going to try and complete all three games on stream. However, Landers got sick, so we didn't go through with it. A few weeks later Landers and I decided to sit down and try to play through them all. We beat the first two games, but it took us nearly ten hours. We then went through the third game another day and that probably took us around two hours.
This isn't your Grandpa's Donkey Kong!
Just as I remember, these games are fairly difficult. Donkey King Country 2 is especially devious. The first two games took us a long time, because we weren't used to how the series handled at that point. If we did another run through, I'm sure we could do it much faster.
Prior to these play sessions I didn't like Donkey Kong Country 2 very much, but I've come around to it now. The music in it is incredible, possibly moreso than the other two entries in the series, which also have great music composed by Dave Wise. In fact, I'm listening to the song Klomp's Romp from the first stage of the game as I type this!
I feel that this series gets a lot of undeserved flak. People seem to think that the platforming hasn't aged well, and that the graphics look terrible. I still think the graphics look good, and they were top notch for their time. It's even more impressive when you think about how all three games were made within such a short time frame. The platforming is still some of the most satisfying I've ever played as well. It's something that's easy to learn, but hard to master. The series certainly ramps up in difficulty too. The first game starts easy and gets very hard. The second game starts easy and then immediately becomes punishingly difficult. We lost around thirty lives on a single level. After that we really had to step up our game. By the time we got to the third game I couldn't tell if it was much easier, or if your skills had just evolved from playing two.
This series is one that I have very fond memories of, and it was nice to see that reality matched up with my nostalgia for once. We're still planning on streaming it sometime, but we don't have any solid plans yet.
Grim Fandango Remastered
I'll say it before and I'll say it again, Grim Fandango is one of the greatest video games ever made. There are two games I attribute my continued video game obsession with, and they are The Ocarina of Time, and Grim Fandango. I first played Grim Fandango when I was around ten years old. It came out in 1998, and I played it a few years later. I was obsessed with Manuel Calavera and his journey through the Land of the Dead.
My dad worked in a computer store, and I would visit him there all the time and play a bunch of games. They mostly built computers and sold components, but they always had a shelf of software. It rarely ever sold, so the same games would mostly be there. One box that always caught my eye was Grim Fandango. Eventually I convinced them to let me play it, and I ended up with a burned copy of Grim Fandango. My dad left that job, but eventually went back to it a few years later. When he returned Grim Fandango was still there, and they decided to just give it to me. Sadly, I don't have the box, but I do have the original game discs.
I love all Grim Fandango related art.
It's been seventeen years since the game's original release, and now it has been remastered. The original publisher LucasArts was shut down when Disney acquired Lucasfilm. In a recent deal brokered by Sony the studio headed by Grim Fandango's writer Tim Schafer was given permission to remaster the game.
While I've played Grim Fandango countless times, many people have not. To make matters even worse it doesn't run easily on modern PCs. It only works, because fans have made programs and patches to get it to run. However, now anyone with a modern PC, PS4, or Vita can get in on the action. I've seen a lot of people complaining about this as a "lazy" port, but that's just plain wrong. As someone who's played this game recently I can tell you that the character models look a whole lot better. A whole bunch of lighting was added, you can play in 16:9, there are new camera-related controls, and director's commentary. Most important of all it's now available to many people in an easily approachable format.
I still think this would be the coolest tattoo ever.
I can't stress enough how much I think people should play this game. It is legitimately one of the best video game narratives I have experienced, which is helped by the fact that it's 90% narrative! The whole world comes together so well. Hell, it had incredible voice acting even in 1998! If you haven't checked this game out, you definitely should. At the very least you should watch my Extra Life stream where I played it.
Let the Hunt Begin!
There may have been no new games this month, there will be one in February. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate comes out on February 13th. Due to GameStop sucking, I won't be getting it until at least the 23rd. I won't get into it, but there's some stupid reason that they had to order the Monster Hunter 4 New 3DS bundle through their website. So I had to pay in full and get screwed on shipping!
I don't really care when I get it, because I'll get plenty of use out of it no matter when it comes. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate was my first entry into the series and I played it for almost 400 hours. This game has more content, and new mechanics! I bet I'll play it for even longer than Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. I'm very excited.
Next month be prepared for some serious Monster Hunter 4 talk. See you guys next time.
