05
Jan
2020

Why did you put down the Vita?

categories: personal; word count: 471 words

Because that’s what you did, Sony. You put it down like Susan the horse from Doctor Who.

When I found out that Sony was going to discontinue the Vita last year and that they were not going to manufacture any more games for it, I was extremely perplexed for a number of reasons, some personal.

Not only is the Vita a reigning household favorite for the simple fact that it is a mobile console, meaning that we can take it with us as needed — and as wanted — wherever we are, and wherever we want to go, but it was Sony’s most recent mobile console. And if they were going to discontinue it, Sony wouldn’t have a mobile console, meaning that the only game developer to have a mobile console… would be Nintendo, with the Nintendo Switch. This meant that Sony would be conceding the entire mobile console market to Nintendo. Was this really the most tactical thing for them to do when there was no word of a new mobile console even waiting in the wings? Not so much as a peep of anything new in development? Seriously, Sony?

We here at the Bub Club, as I like to put it, take our consoles seriously. We take our mobile consoles even more seriously. (And the fact that I call them mobile consoles pays homage to the fact that I am a Doctor Who fan, or a Whovian as some people like to put it. Sometimes I straight up call them mobiles. Sometimes I straight up call cell phones mobiles. That’s the overwhelmingly British lineage in me talking from across the pond, courtesy of Ancestry and 23andMe. I knew there was a reason that I liked the shows that I did as much as I did.) We don’t throw consoles away when they still function, and we replace parts and consoles when they don’t function to make them still function. We frequent pawn shops as needed, and we still have a functioning Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo. Who says blowing into a cartridge isn’t fun for the whole family? I mean, I’m an asthmatic, so I have one of my kids do it for me, but I mean, my kids know what blowing into a cartridge is like because I’m a good parent and my goal is clearly raising them right here…

Frankly, though, I got a lot of enjoyment out of games that came out on the Vita, and Bub has enjoyed a lot of them as well. So for Sony to completely discontinue the Vita like this and take themselves out of the mobile console market is, at least to me, incredibly foolish. This concedes the whole mobile console market to Nintendo. Do they even care that this affects their bottom line and their revenue, or does it not bother them?

04
Jan
2020

Christmas break 2019, in a nutshell.

categories: holidays; word count: 410 words

· get a 256GB microSD card for the boys’ Nintendo Switch as an early Christmas present
· find for some reason that it does not consistently want to load past a certain point
· have to load the entire Nintendo Switch from scratch because it almost fails, but for some reason… does not
· able to recover everything with the 128GB microSD card, which is nearly 100% full with Bub’s games
· have to fix an issue with this website’s hosting, which I should finally be done with

Seriously, with the errors that the Nintendo Switch had begun to give me at one point, I thought that I would have to replace it because it had begun to fail. But then miraculously, after doing everything to save it that I had already done all over again, it begins to work with the smaller microSD card when it hadn’t even been doing that before. Mobile consoles help keep Bub from having meltdowns because they can go wherever he goes, especially when I know that we’re going to have to commute somewhere and stay there for awhile… I can just bring the charger with us if needed, find a power outlet, and explain the situation to anyone who would like me to explain the situation to them. Because I honestly do not mind doing so. Trust me, I don’t…

The only reason I haven’t brought it with us when Bub has come with me to neurology appointments is because I do not want to exacerbate, or set off, someone’s epilepsy, migraines, or other neurological condition while we are sitting there in the waiting room and have him get upset because he knows that we packed the console and games with us and that he was not being given access, even if it was for reason.

I am just fine “giving myself migraines” for my own child, but won’t do something like that to someone else.

The fact that we got a microSD card that actually seems to function on the day of Christmas, though, has been absolutely great! I didn’t begin to load it until the afternoon of Christmas, though. But that was because I didn’t know about it until the afternoon of Christmas. The one that wound up… wanting to work on everything but the Nintendo Switch itself was one that I knew about before Christmas, if this makes sense.

I suppose we can use the other microSD and adapter to keep files backed up from the computer.

03
Jan
2020

Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within

categories: survival horror; word count: 375 words

In Japan, this game is known as Clock Tower: Ghost Head, for clarification.

A lot of people didn’t like this game because of the fact that it is a point-and-click survival horror game, but it was one of my first introductions to the survival horror genre as a child, and I managed to play it all the way through to the A ending (which is the best ending that you can get in the game, meaning that you played it all the way through). The one thing that stood out to me, and made the entire game worth it, was managing to get that far and realizing that you were actually playing the role of the antagonist without becoming aware until the very end. Without ever becoming aware until events at the end of the game forced her to become aware, Alyssa Hale was one of two “cursed babies” born to the Maxwell line, and she and her sibling were initially buried with the intent to kill them and stop the curse until who for all intents and purposes became her father, Allen, digs the children up and realizes that one of them is still alive. He raises Alyssa as his daughter. Alyssa, having the split personality of Mr. Bates — who could have been the soul of the baby who didn’t make it transplanted into her body, or just a side effect of the “Maxwell curse”, even though this is never explained — is the antagonist of the game, and although she is one of very few survivors at the end since her “father figure” shoots her biological father and demands that she escape the building that they are in before it explodes, she still manages to survive in spite of everything that happened.

One of the other redeeming things is the stellar soundtrack, especially what rolls if you get the A ending.

If you’re willing to put up with an old game that has some peculiar… semantics about it, especially the whole point-and-click bit, the fact that it strayed so far from the usual survival horror narrative actually does make it a good game. You just have to be willing to put up with the fact that for today’s graphics, it is an old game.

02
Jan
2020

The 3rd Birthday

categories: RPGs; word count: 546 words

Parasite Eve was one of the greatest games of the decade, even though it was released in an era where we praised pixelated graphics and regarded them as being some of the absolute best for their time (isn’t it funny how things change over the course of several decades?). It also had one of the best ending songs I’ve ever heard, not to mention some awesome remixes. It really paid homage to the novel that inspired it, and the movie that came out afterward actually wasn’t half bad. Everything that paid homage did so in a great way.

The sequel to it that came out in 1999 was a bit dustier than the original, but when you have something that groundbreaking to live up to, you honestly can’t — or shouldn’t, for that matter — expect it to be as perfect as the title that came before it. But it was still a good game in its own right. The graphics were more polished, the storyline was still decent, and the tweaks that had been made to the battle engine still made for a compelling game that made you want to play all the way through to the end. And just like the game that came before it, the soundtrack was brilliant. The end song doesn’t quite have the punch that “Somnia Memorias” did, but “Gentle Rays” is still an extremely good song in its own right, and you can tell listening to the songs in Parasite Eve II that a lot of time and effort was put into the soundtrack. Things were still good.

Sadly, all I can say that I liked about The 3rd Birthday was the soundtrack. I played it for completion’s sake, having been an enthusiastic fan of Parasite Eve, wanting to finish the series out when I found out that a new game in the franchise was finally coming out. And when I played through it, all I felt like I was getting was fanservice, the “Parasite Eve label” slapped on a game that desperately tried to bring back old-school fans of the franchise to a game with better, newer graphics, a sharp soundtrack, and perhaps the world’s worst plot (seriously, read up on it if you haven’t already played it or spoiled it for yourself… the plot has so many holes it’s practically Swiss cheese, and it is that bad). You can listen to the soundtrack here if you’d like, as to me, that is the only redeeming quality that the game has. It became a shoot ’em up that tried way too hard to pull old-school fans in to the game, which dismayed those who liked the franchise for what it was, and the fanservice was — is, depending on whether you’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater at this point — incredibly over the top. For Christ’s sake, the more damage Aya takes during battles, the more holes you see in her clothing, and this is done in so obvious a way that you can tell it was intentionally done. Jesus…

I don’t want any more sequels if this is literally how they are going to be handled. I don’t. Just stop them here.

(And the irony? Because the game’s supposed to be an RPG, that’s the category I put it in.)

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