My wife took a good picture of this gal, so looks like a good time to share that recently we got a kitten =) Was a bit of an adventure because we bought her from a fairly sketchy guy and turned out that she had fleas — the first couple of days were full of washing, brushing and cleaning, hopefully we got all of these bastards =) Name’s Yuna (for now particular reason), she’s half-cuddly and half-overly-energetic, so far their relationships with our daughter are rather complicated =)
Endless Fear — the band from the glorious city of Voronezh, founded almost two decades ago, when the trees were bigger, grass greener and it was still allowed to drink alcohol in public.
It was founded by two lads who were still young and optimistic and simply wanted to play thrash metal. The band survived countless guitarists changes, survived the fact that one of the aforementioned lads moved 8000km away and had to be replaced — the other guy had to carry the weight of everything on his strong and broad shoulders (with the help of the others of course — the vocalist has been in the band since the very beginning, the guitarist has been there for more than a decade and the bassist has been a member for 8 years already — but still). Endless Fear survived no matter what and finally released a full-length album!
I may be biased but this is a great album! Pure thrash metal, without any compromises, slowdowns, “power ballads” — Slayer circa Reign in Blood would be proud! I’m super happy that the guys released it, have listened to it 37 times and will definitely listen to it more!
Available (almost) everywhere!
I have to get it off my chest — after the first 6 episodes I don’t really enjoy City the Animation. I had high hopes for this anime, I like it visually, but otherwise it’s kinda boring and all over the place. Every episode we watch I just sit there and hope that maybe this scene or that scene will finally make me smile — sometimes it does but more often it doesn’t. I haven’t read the manga, so don’t know if it’s the adaptation fault but City is not particularly funny, is not charming or cute and is not weird enough to justify the lack of everything else. I even went back to re-watch some episodes of Nichijou, to make sure it wasn’t just me who became old and grumpy (well, older and grumpier than I’ve always been) — and the show about Mai, Mio and Yuko is ten times funnier and cuter. Heh, I can’t even memorize the names of the characters in City the Animation. There’s still hope that it will surprise me in the second half of the season but yeah, so far it’s been a disappointment.
It’s been a while since I got another platinum trophy and, luckily, this one was pretty fun and not too hard =)
I really like Shantae Half Genie Hero and recently showed it to my daughter, turned out this is a perfect game for a 3 year old to watch. It’s pretty clear what’s going on, the transformations are super cute and there are no dialogues or endless battles like in JRPGs. So we finished the game once, then another time, then I got 100% completion, then decided that why not, I could go for the platinum.
The only tricky part of getting all the trophies is speed-running — you need to finish the game in less than 3 hours and then do 100% in less than 4. It’s doable in a single playthrough but I did them separately (sort of). The time limit is pretty generous and the only annoying part really is that 100% completion requires you to buy all magic upgrades and whatnot, so you have to farm gems, this is pretty boring. Other than that though I have to repeat myself, a great game with fun trophies.
I was looking forward to playing Stellar Blade but decided not to buy it at launch due to the outfits censorship controversy — basically it looked like some of the outfits in the game were made less revealing the last moment, the game on disc had uncensored versions but the mandatory day 1 patch would add some fabric here and there. I understand that it’s probably not a huge deal, but I’m not a fan of censorship and it definitely looked like that, even though the director of the game denied it and was claiming that it was the initial plan (I mean… even the icons for some of the censored outfits looked like their original versions, it definitely looked like the forced last minute change). I patiently waited for a sale, a few months later finally got it and recently finished the game. What can I say? Stellar Blade is very, very good and fun to play.
Like any game though it has some issues, so let me first mention what I didn’t like about it. The plot is probably the most obvious problem — it’s not bad per se, it’s just absolutely not interesting. You go from one place to another for some reasons, but by and large the whole story could be summed up as “go and defeat 4 big monsters to get their cores and access to the 5th big monster”. Exciting, right? Yeah, you find out at some point that humans are not really humans, and that monsters actually used to be humans… but it didn’t feel like a big deal.
The music in Stellar Blade is also relatively disappointing. Again, it’s not bad (except for the very annoying Wasteland theme), it’s just not very memorable and whereas it’s clearly inspired by Nier Automata it doesn’t reach its level.
Luckily, everything else in Stellar Blade is pretty good. Starting with the face (and the body) of the game — Eve. Having a sexy lady as a protagonist doesn’t automatically make the game amazing but it never hurts =) It also is a huge incentive to explore every nook and cranny in the game — there are about 40 costumes for Eve that are either hidden or given as a reward for doing something. I got almost all of them (I think I might’ve missed one and didn’t get the ones that are sold for fishing points, maybe in NG+) and it was worth every hour I spent on it.
Speaking of exploration — I actually liked how it was done here and the levels in general. Despite having the yellow paint, which apparently is a staple of modern level design, the game doesn’t hold your hand too much and you can get rewarded for trying things out (did you smash the walls with the crane on Eidos 7? =) ) Stellar Blade has four huge linear levels and two “open-world” ones. All of the linear levels, despite, well, being linear, are pretty explorable, they have little pockets with hidden stuff everywhere. The very first level, Eidos 7, is probably my favorite, it makes you feel that there’s something behind every corner. I initially wasn’t impressed by Wasteland, the first open location in the game, but it grew on me — it has several distinct parts and, overall, it doesn’t feel empty. The desert level on the other hand… is about what you’d expect. I enjoyed the game, I collected everything in it and explored every inch of every level — and the desert was the only place where I missed something and had to use the guide, it is way too big and boring.
The fights in Stellar Blade are not boring at all though =) Overall I’d say that combat here is somewhat close to new God Of War games — it’s not oversimplified or button mashy, you need learn how to perfect parry and evade, wait for your turn etc., but it’s also fairly forgiving, especially by the end when you have 8 health potions and 2 revivals at your disposal. The combination of normal attacks, beta and burst attacks and the pace they are given to you helps to keep combat fresh throughout the game as well. I think Shift Up hit the perfect spot with Stellar Blade’s difficulty — it’s hard but fair, and I didn’t get frustrated even when had to replay some of the boss fights a dozen of times.
I also have to mention how trophies are done in this game, I’d say that it’s that rare case that you are rewarded for exploring the world but don’t have to get annoyed trying to find that last goddamn chest. Most of the trophies you’ll get automatically if you play carefully enough and only two trophies are really missable, the camp one and the cans one. Yeah, technically you can miss the documents/boxes/costumes/fishing ones too, but it would mean that you weren’t going for them in the first place, Stellar Blade is very generous with how many items you can skip (for example, I think you only need to open 200 boxes out of roughly 350 in the game). It legit was fun the explore the levels and find all these boxes and documents (although I’d say that finding a document is more interesting that reading it). Though I’d like to complain about one of the cans, I bet almost everyone missed it — it’s buried in the sand in the desert and the drone doesn’t indicate the location at all. I guess you can get it by accidentally hitting it while shooting some enemies but yeah, it’s gimmicky.
To get all the trophies Stellar Blade requires at least two playthroughs, so I’ve been running through the game in NG+ now an debating whether I want to buy Nier Automata and Nikke DLCs =) So yeah, I enjoyed it quite a bit and, surprisingly, am still having fun playing it (and it’s a chance to try out the costumes I haven’t used yet, yay!) — Stellar Blade is a gameplay-first-don’t-forget-about-fanservice type of game, a bit old-school, for some it could feel a bit lukewarm — but I liked it and hope that Shift Up will make a sequel one day.
Now I have two characters in master rank! For people who’ve been playing Street Fighter for a while it’s nothing but I’m rather proud of myself =) Mai has to play very differently comparing to JP, so it was a steep learning curve for me — antiairing with a DP is a skill by itself and also with her it’s more important to learn meaties (with JP you pretty much always can open a portal and call it a day) and how to low-forward-drive-rush =) I don’t have any interest in playing Sagat or any character who’s already on the roster for now, so I guess I will be playing JP and Mai for the foreseeable future, hopefully will be able to stick around 1500MR.
Witch Watch is sometime pure comedy gold, sadly couldn’t find the clip from this episode and static pictures don’t full convey how hilarious this moment was =) “Less talking, more shoulders” is a phrase that I’m definitely going to use in daily life =)
Considering how long it takes for me to finish a JRPG now, I decided that I will be writing down my impressions and thoughts on Kuro 2 as I go, otherwise I will just forget everything by the time the game ends =)
I’m in the first chapter right now and so far it’s been all right. Marten Garden is your Reverie corridor and I’m okay with that — I think it will be pretty fun once combat opens up a little bit. Ah, speaking of combat immediately a small complaint — we are not given any explanation this time why we need to modify our obrments from scratch. Usually it’s “oh, it’s a new model, too bad — here, take this Attack 1 quartz to start things off”, but here we just have to deal with this for no reason. Fights feel to be a bit tougher than in the first game — I play on Nightmare difficulty again and already had to replay a couple of boss battles. SCraft spam is nerfed, now S-crafts go on a cooldown after you use it, but unfortunately we still have that nonsense introduced in the first game of the arc that seal/mute/blind etc statuses are not 100% effective. What I mean — in previous games it would take some luck to apply this status but once applied they’d work every turn for N turns. In Kuro even after you’ve applied, say, mute, there’s still some probability that the opponent might cast an art on its turn. Not the end of the world but I definitely don’t like it.
Field combat got a few tweaks to make it not as braindead as it was in Kuro 1 — there are chain attacks and magic attacks now, but overall it’s still very spammy and not especially fun.
Fishing is back! The minigame itself is okay, though I’m not sure yet if I like it more than what we had in Cold Steel 3 and 4.
The new locations I’ve seen so far are much better than what the first game had — they are more old-school and Trails-like and I’ve been enjoying them much more.
I’m happy to see Nadia again, wish she showed up without Swin but oh well. Agnes got a new default costume and it’s pretty nice, that’s about everything I can say about characters so far.
So yeah, so far the game looks promising. I know that the time-looping will probably suck and end up being a terrible idea but otherwise the second game off to a good start.
Not sure about the game yet but the opening is really good!
Oh boy, finally! Our local Canadian thrashers Sacrifice released a new album, just 15 or 16 years after “The Ones That I Condemn” =) The new album’s name is as plain as you can get but the songs are amazing. I wish there were more, 10 tracks is definitely not enough =)
The only real complaint I have is that I pre-ordered a physical edition of this album and was supposed to get it a month ago. However today Volume VI is already on Spotify and I still haven’t even gotten my shipping notification. Oh well.
Randomly generated stuff 