Podcast Episode 17 - Crowdfunding and Video Games

In the 17th episode of Game Time With Manny I talk a lot about crowdfunding and various video games that have come out of it. There are  a ton, but I focus on a select few.

I discuss what it takes to have a successful Kickstarter (Shovel Knight), and how to totally botch it (Mighty No. 9). People often don't know how much money and time it takes to create a video game, so I try to shed some light on that as well.

Memorable Melodies: Strike the Earth! from Shovel Knight

Song: Strike the Earth!

Game: Shovel Knight

Composer: Jake Kaufman

I was listening to some game of the year arguments over the past few days and heard people say that they are getting sick of new age chip tune music in video games. I definitely do not feel this way. To show my support for how awesome new age chip tunes can be I thought about what I could put up as a memorable melody. I loved the Undertale soundtrack, but I used a song from it far too recently.

That's when I remembered Shovel Knight. The moment I entered the first level of Shovel Knight and heard Strike the Earth I knew I was going to like the game. It's super energetic and gets you pumped up for the journey to come. Not all of the songs in the game are this upbeat, but they're all very good. Recently I've been way into upbeat chip tune music, so this one really gets me amped up.

What makes this even better is that I put this very song in the edition of Game Time where I talked about Shovel Knight. I thought it had amazing music then, and it still holds up now a few short months later. 

So no, I'm not sick of chip tune music. If it's all as good as this I'm totally down with it. Also if you haven't played Shovel Knight what the hell are you doing? It's available on basically every platform known to man at this point (PC, 3DS, Wii-U, PS4, Vita, and Xbox One).

Top Ten Games of 2015

The year has once again come to an end, which means I need to tell you what my top ten games of the year were. As always I will start at ten and work my way down to one. This year was savage, because there were a ton of great games that came out. I had a super hard time deciding what to put on my list and where to put it.

Keep in mind that these are my personal opinions.

10. Disgaea 5

I love the Disgaea series for its weird characters and insane grinding. However, Disgaea 5 just didn't do it for me like I thought it would. I still had a ton of fun, but the story dragged on for so long that I had lost interest by the time I got to the post game. The overall story was bland and predictable, but the characters held it up.

I may return to it again soon for some more leveling goodness.




9. Yakuza 5

After playing Yakuza 3 I fell in love with the franchise. The combat is a modern take on old school beat em' ups, and feels silky smooth. It's a ton of fun to run around Japan and beat the living hell out
of any thug that tries to take you on. The story in this one was hit or miss for me. Some parts were amazing, while other parts felt like needless filler. The good parts of the story definitely outweighed the bad though. The ending alone was worth playing through the entire game.



8. Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

Monster Hunter isn't the most accessible game, but 4 brings it much closer to where it should be. The fact that the game teaches you the basics now is a huge improvement. On top of that there are now more weapons and monster variations than ever before. Being able to jump and mount monsters also adds a whole new layer to an already mechanic heavy game. It's a dense franchise, but it rewards those who are willing to put in the time and learn.




7. Shovel Knight

Recently many games have been trying to capitalize on nostalgia by having a "retro" feel. Shovel Knight is one of the few games in this vein that feels genuine. It captures the retro feel while still managing to feel and play like a modern video game. It's challenging, but not so challenging that I felt like I needed to snap my controller in half!






6. Inazuma Eleven GO Chrono Stones

Anime soccer is my jam. I stream Chrono Stone every Wednesday and I still enjoy it. It's the Inazuma Eleven I love but with a lot more characters, moves, and general content. The story was insane in the best possible way, and some cool new characters were introduced. It doesn't do much to change the formula, but it adds enough content to justify its existence.




5. Splatoon

I love when Nintendo is willing to take risks. Somehow Splatoon manages to make me have fun in an online multiplayer focused game. Shooting and swimming around in ink is just plain fun. It helps that you don't have to chase down and shoot your opponents too. Even someone like me can aim at the floor and cover it with ink to contribute to the team. On top of the gameplay Splatoon is oozing with style. The clothing and music are incredible.




4. Rock Band 4

Rock Band 4 didn't really change much from its predecessor. In fact, it actually lost a lot of popular features. This is understandable considering that Harmonix doesn't have a major publisher behind them anymore. The fact that they were able to re-license almost all of the previous DLC for the franchise is bananas.

The reason this is on my list is because I have fun when I play Rock Band. I get together with my friends every Friday and rock out.



3. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

The Phantom Pain isn't much of a Metal Gear Solid game. Sure you play as Big Boss, but the insane story feel and long cinematics are all but gone. In their place is a game that plays very well. In a shocking turn of events the Phantom Pain plays like a modern video game and allows for a lot of possibilities. Anything you can think of trying you'll probably be able to do.

There is so much attention to detail in this game it's shocking. It's not hard to see why the game cost Konami so much money. They didn't think it was worth it, but I certainly did. Somehow Kojima was able to take the craziness missing from the story and implant it into the gameplay. This is a perfect way to end an amazing franchise!


2. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The world that CD Projekt Red manages to create in the Witcher 3 is vibrant and well realized. I've been getting sick of open world games for years now, but somehow the Witcher managed to make me forget all about that. It helps that when you come across a quest it matters. Even if you don't get a good reward the story itself is generally worth the trouble. That might be my favorite part of the game. There are things and people in every part of the world. It doesn't feel like the desolate wasteland that most open world games have become. Very few things you find will be happy though, because the world of the Witcher is beyond grim.

Combat is challenging when playing on the higher difficulties. You can't just go in and swing your sword around like a fool. You need to prepare potions and douse your sword in oils in order to take down monsters. Everything meshes together to make a cohesive package.


1. Undertale

When I finished Undertale I didn't know what to think. It took me a couple of days to realize that I loved almost everything about the game. Never before have I become so attached to characters in a
video game in such a short time. Undertale can be 100% completed in around six hours. Somehow that is enough time to feel like you're friends with fictional characters, There was a moment in Undertale that made me tear up, and there were multiple moments where I laughed out loud. It's rare for a video game to make me feel such real emotions and that's why Undertale is so special to me.

The game does a great job at subverting what you know about the RPG genre. Sure you can go berserk on an enemy and kill it, but you could also talk to it until it doesn't want to fight anymore. You don't have to kill anything and that's cool!

Above all else though, I will remember Undertale and that's the highest praise I can possibly give a game.

Game Time - April 2015

It's official, I'm playing too many video games at once. I am continuing to play Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate and Inazuma Eleven GO 2 Chrono Stones. I play Inazuma Eleven on stream every Wednesday. If you want to catch that head on over to www.twitch.tv/drac96

I am also continuing to play Bloodborne, but my feelings on it have shifted drastically. I am not having very much fun with it in the later sections of the game. I find it to be much more punishing in a bullshit way than the previous games in the Souls franchise. I'll end up doing a Game Time ID when I finish it. I'm still plucking away at it, but it will probably take me another month. I've been getting angry at it and have had to put it down several times...

I'm also playing Ori and the Blind Forest at a very slow pace, but that's not one of the games I'm going to talk about this month. The main "new" game I played was Mortal Kombat X. I played it very heavily the first few days after its release, but have not played it for at least a week as of this writing. It's a good fighting game with not enough content outside of the fighting to hold it down.

I've wanted to play Shovel Knight since its release and now I've finally done it. Never mind the fact that I bought it on the Wii-U and played twenty minutes of it. I don't count that. It was just released on the PS4 , Vita, PS3, and Xbox One. I purchased the Sony version and this time I actually played it! In fact, I liked it so much I did it in about three sittings. Man, Shovel Knight is a dope game.

The final game I'll be talking about this month is actually quite old. For some reason I started to think about the original Digimon World and determined that I needed to play it again. As a child I played it for a few hours and had no idea what was going on. The game seemed super lame at the time, but I now realize that it was actually super deep, unique, and original. It's insanely complex, but I'm having a blast figuring it out. I need to get back to playing it, so it's game time!

Mortal Kombat X

Note: Yes I realize most words are spelled with a K in this. That's how it's done in Mortal Kombat.

I've never been the worlds largest Mortal Kombat fan. Sure I've played almost all of them, but the series has never quite grabbed me like other fighting game franchises have. Well, that was until Mortal Kombat 9. That reboot brought me in and I played it a whole lot. It helped that I was living in college suite with friends who also played it a lot, because it was the time of the huge PSN outage. Outside of that though it had a ton of content to interact with. The story mode was a ridiculously well made retelling of MK 1-3, The challenge tower had hundreds of unique challenges, and there was a ton to unlock. Mortal Kombat X seems to have scaled that back quite a bit.

First I'll talk about the story. Once again the Mortal Kombat team has shown that they know how to make a fighting game story. You advance from one fight to the next with almost seamless transitions. Although they have now added in quick time events for absolutely no reason. So when you want to just be watching the story sequences you have to be constantly on the lookout for quick time events or you'll die. It detracts from the experience quite a bit, because you can never really feel at ease with paying full attention to the story. Now, I think the story of MKX was okay, but it was definitely not on par with MK9. I realize that MK9 was the retelling of three games, but the story of MKX feels super flat and by the end i was asking myself what the purpose of it all was? Not a whole lot happens. Sure, you get introduced to the new characters, but it all feels very low key. You get to learn all about Kenshi's son, Jax's daughter, Sonya and Johnny Cage's Daughter, and Kung Lao's descendant. They're all surprisingly well developed. There are a few other new characters was well, but most of them are overshadowed by the returning cast.

Everyone still picks Scorpion online...

In MK9 when I finished the story I went right into the challenge tower and started testing my luck. I was able to do that for a long time, but in MKX there was almost immediately nothing left for me to do. Well that;s not true. There is just nothing that I actually want to do. Instead of set challenges in a tower there are now multiple towers with varying objectives. The game throws random "Kombat Modifiers" at you and you have to persevere. There's never any rhyme or reason behind any of it, it's just a bunch of random toggles that the game is turning on and off. In one of the more frustrating towers I played the screen would flash black every few seconds like a strobe light. That's not challenging it's just super annoying. What really sucks is that the towers are truly random, because they cycle out on a daily and weekly basis.

Outside of that though you still have a ton of unlockables in the krypt, but it takes forever to earn any Koins. I have absolutely no desire to grind for koins and I'm certainly not going to pay an extra $20 to unlock everything. It almost feels as if the lack of koins you get was done on purpose to push the micro transaction aspect of the game. Hell, you can even buy tokens to do "easy" fatalities. You can pay real money to hold R2 and Square to do a fatality. Let me tell you, fatalities aren't that hard to do. I main Kenshi and his basic fatality is back, back, forward, back. I can literally push back and forth on the d-pad and it will come out. If you need to pay for a token to do that then you probably shouldn't be playing a video game in the first place.

The fatalities are brutal and easy to pull off.

With the rage out of the way I will say that the core fighting of the game is great. It feels much faster than MK9. For me faster fighting games tend to be more fun, so I enjoy the fighting quite a bit. What's even cooler is that each character has three variations. Each variation has a few of the same basic moves, but outside of that they have exclusive moves. This means that technically each character is viable, because if they're outmatched in a match-up one of their variations should be able to handle it. So now you don't have to stop using your favorite character if you're getting schooled and it makes everyone viable. That would be the case in an idea world if the game was balanced perfectly. As far as I've seen it seems to be fine, but I don't necessarily know how it actually is in competitive play.

So I played this game a few times and don't know if I will continue to do so. As you probably know by now I never really stick with fighting games long enough to get good at them. In this case no one I know other than my brother likes this game enough to keep playing it. That means that I don't really have anyone to play with locally who is around the same skill level as me. MK9 just seemed like a much more complete product for people who don't want to get super competitive.

Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight is a testament to what KickStarter games can be. A group of guys set out to make a love letter to 8-Bit platformers and they succeeded. I've seen numerous kick started games fail to live up to their original promise. Shovel Knight delivers exactly what it promised and it's incredible. The easiest way for me to describe Shovel Knight is that it's like Mega Man, Duck Tales, and Zelda all rolled into one. You play as the aforementioned Shovel Knight. He is a blue knight who weilds a shovel as a weapon! His best friend/girlfriend Shield Knight is taken from him while they are on a quest. She is believed to have been killed by an evil amulet. Crushed by the loss Shovel Knight decides to stop adventuring. During his absence the Evil Enchantress and her Order of no Quarter rise to power and are terrorizing the land. Shovel Knight decides that he must come out of retirement and defeat the evil that has overtaken his land!

You start the game and are immediately put into a stage. Shovel Knight has all the basic abilities you'd expect. He can run, jump, and kill enemies. As you may have guessed his shovel acts as his weapon. You can use it to hurt enemies and dig into the ground or walls. This is helpful for finding treasure and hidden areas. While jumping you can push down to have Shovel Knight pogo like Scrooge McDuck in Duck Tales. You can use the pogo attack to bounce on enemies and hurt them repeatedly, but it can also be used to make tough jumps as well. Other than that you can get special items similar to the powers from Mega Man that use magic to use. These items are not necessary, but you can buy them to help you out and complete optional levels.

This is the track from the first level of the game. It's amazing on every level!

Once you beat the first level the world map is opened up to you. It's a Super Mario World style map, so you can pick which level you want to go to. There are tons of optional levels, a few towns, and the Order of no Quarter levels. The town is useful for upgrading your health, magic, and buying items. There are also a few extra things you can do like turning in the collectible music sheets to the bard in order to get money. Other than that there are just a bunch of NPCs who will say random things to you. Later in the game there is also a town that sells armor and shovel upgrades, so you want to be collecting as much as possible.

The Order of no Quarter levels are where you'll be spending most of your time. They are similar to Mega Man levels in that they are themed around their boss. In addition they all have knight at the end of their names, just as all Mega Man bosses end with man. For example one of the early levels is King Knight and his level is themed around a castle filled with gold. One thing I like about these levels it that they're super long and quite challenging. They're not frustrating, but you do need a certain amount of skill to make your way through them. In order to ease the burden of dying there are various checkpoints throughout the levels. If you do die you'll go back to the last checkpoint you passed. Instead of losing a life as a penalty for death you'll lose a fraction of your money, which you can make your way back to and pick up if you want. However, if you want to prove how much of a badass you are then you can shatter the checkpoints for money. That means you won't be able to use it anymore.

The pogo attack is super handy.

Shovel Knight is the kind of game that needs to be experienced. If you have pretty much any modern console, or PC you owe it to yourself to play this game. The pixel art style and music mesh seamlessly to create a one of a kind throwback to the 8-bit games I used to love. I spent a majority of my time playing Shovel Knight with a stupid grin on my face that is coming back as I type this. I'm super excited that there is going to be DLC where you can play as Plague Knight coming out in the near future. I will definitely be down to play more Shovel Knight. Yacht Club games hit it out of the park with this one!

Digimon World

Recently I watched a video where someone was raving about how the original Digimon World was an amazing and original game. I did not remember the game quite as fondly as the madman in the video I was watching. Sadly I can't find the video I saw, but it did pique my interest, so I began looking up more on the game. What I found blew my mind. I guess Digimon World was a lot deeper than my childhood self could handle, so I decided it was time to give it another shot. Turns out Digimon World is an amazing game and I might need to make my own ranting and raving video about it!

The thing that upset me the most as a kid was that the game didn't follow the show. It was more based around the Digivice toys that were popular in Japan at the time. They came out in the U.S. as well, but were not nearly as popular. The intro shows two kids playing with their electronic Digimon toys and you as the main character look on in amazement. Later when he's home alone his Digivice glows and transports him to the digital world where he gets his very own Digimon. With very little explanation you're told that everything is not going super hot and you need to rebuild File City. That's pretty much the only stuff you're given to go on. Coming at this game now I have no idea how the hell anyone figured it out. Sure, some of the stuff is easy enough to figure out, but most of it is insane. I literally have a FAQ opened at all times while playing and I'll need to refer to it at least once every half hour!

Welcome to File City!

I know I'm talking this up, but it really is obtuse to start off with. So yeah, you've got your Digimon. Now what? Well, you need to train it so that it can take on enemies and you can explore the island. However, you have to worry about feeding it. In the beginning food is hard to come by. You get three pieces of meat a day in town, but other than that you need to forage for mushrooms outside the city. When your Digimon is hungry it will get a little bubble above its head with meat in it. After your Digimon has eaten it will eventually need to poop, which will be indicated by a thought bubble with poop in it. You then need to take your Digimon to a toilet so it can relieve itself. There are toilets scattered throughout the island. If you don't make it in time your Digimon will poop right on the ground, which isn't good. We'll get into why that isn't good later though.

The beginning of the game is super tedious, because all you can really do is train and scrounge for food. If you don't have a lot of food you can't venture very far and without training the enemies will trounce you. If you get beaten in battle three times your Digimon will literally die and you'll have to start training a new one from scratch. It's actually pretty brutal. In order to train the Digimon you take them to the Green Gym, which is on the outskirts of File City. There will be all kinds of signs, and each one if meant to boost a specific stat. You have Offense, Defense, Brains, Speed, HP, and MP to worry about. Each stat is self explanatory, except for brains. When your Digimon has high brains it will be more likely to learn new attacks in battle and will be able to accept more orders. When training you need to be careful that you don't make your Digimon too tired, because it can have negative consequences. So you need to rest every so often. Oh yeah, by the way there's an in game clock and a day night cycle. Each training session takes an hour, and each rest session takes an hour. At some point your Digimon will want to go to sleep, which passes six hours. When your Digimon goes to sleep is the only time you can save your game!

You need to feed your Digimon!

The purpose of training your Digimon is to get them strong, but you also want them to Digivolve so they look cool and get even stronger. This is where the game gets even more obtuse than it already is. In order to Digivolve into specific Digimon your Digimon must have certain stats and weight. Training, and pooping make them lose weight, while eating makes them gain weight. For example the other night I wanted to get the chamption level Digimon Leomon. In that case the Elecmon I was using needed to have at least 100 in Offense, Speed, and Brains. That sounds easy, but takes a crazy amount of training. On top of that you are only allowed one care mistake. That means can't miss feeding your Digimon, can't have them poop on the ground, can't train them too hard, and can't make them become sleep deprived. He also needed to be 20 pounds. The weight limit goes five pounds in either direction, so if my Elecmon had the stats, but weighed 14 or 26 pounds then I would get a terrible Digimon. See, because if you don't meet any requirements you get the terrible Numemon who has bad stats and eats poop (That's a real thing)! HOW WOULD YOU EVER KNOW THAT WITHOUT A FAQ!?

So once you figure out how the hell to digivolve your Digimon into something other than the terrible Numemon you then need to recruit people for File City. Out in the world you'll come into contact with Digimon who will fight you and then join the city, or join once you complete a quest for them. Once in the city they will serve a function such as an item shop clerk. You need to scour the land looking for these specific Digimon in order to bring prosperity to File City. You'd think that would be easy with a good Digimon, but much to my dismay your Digimon will eventually die of old age and then you need to train up another one. On top of that the game gives you no direction and you can explore anywhere at any time! It's a super fun game that has a lot of stuff you need to learn. With that said it's a highly original game that deserves more attention that it got.

The Hunt Begins Again?

I guess I'm going to keep playing Digimon World, because I have to see it through to its conclusion. Other than that the only full retail release I'll be purchasing in May is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Judging from the stuff I've seen on the game so far it seems like it's going to be a billion hours long. Hopefully I don't get tired of it like I did with Dragon Age Inquisition.

Well, it's been another month and I hope you enjoyed hearing me rave about Digimon World. I will see you all next month!