Can't Sleep Again, So Here I Post

     Well I haven't been able to sleep again tonight, so I sat down and typed this up so I could promote another video on the YouTube channel.  Last night niether Madison nor I could sleep so we went for a drive.  I stopped periodically so we could catch so pokémon.

A Little Help For All You Pokémon Masters

Recently an new feature dropped for Pokémon GO, the ability to transfer from GO to Pokémon Home, and I found the internet very lacking on details of how exactly to make this transfer.  Also, the game itself seems light on explanations, so i dug around in the app, and have discovered the secrets of the Pokémon GO transfer process.

For those who just want a quick video tutorial, there is one right here from my youtube channel, the guy who sounds funny:

For those who aren't into listening to a guy who sounds like he has no formal speaking experience trying to bumble his way through a video tutorial, I have also prepared a purely text-based tutorial as well.

First thing you're going to have to do is to load up Pokemon GO.  

Once into GO, you can press the little pokéball down at the bottom, then go up to the top and press settings.

From there, scroll all the way down till you reach the bottom.  Your screen should look something like this:

Press the Pokémon HOME title and you should jump to this screen:

Now, the first time you arrive here the game will tell you you have to log in with your Nintendo account before you can transfer.  Tapping where it says Send Pokémon in the image above will take you to the Nintendo website, where you can log in.  You will then be brought back to the game, where you can now press Send Pokémon, and that will transfer you to something like this:

Now, this is where previous reveals about this process were a little lacking.  It was originally implied that you would have to pay coins per transfer, as well as being unable to transfer unless the pokémon was already in your HOME pokédex.  Turns out none of that is true, but it may be just a little more devious than that.  You see, you get transfer energy, and it takes a full week to restore the whole bar.  But it also doesn't take the whole bar to transfer, either.  What pokémon you are trying to send determines the amount of energy needed, and for most pocket monsters, you can send quite a few in a single week.  But shinies and mythic pokémon take a lot more.  As of posting this, I haven't been able to confirm it yet, but I suspect that a mythic monster takes an entire weeks worth of energy.  So to transfer your entire collection of 52 Celebi would take an entire year.  Unless you want to pay some real cash.

So, it turns out you can pay to transfer as well.  A full weeks worth of transfer energy can be purchased for about 1000 Pokécoins.  This translates to ruffly $10, so if it takes a full weeks worth of transfer energy to transfer a mythic, that's gonna be $10 a Celebi or Mew.

Now that we have the cost mechanics out of the way, you should be on a screen similar to this one: 

All of your pokémon available for transfer should be listed here, any that aren't available to transfer currently should be grayed out, like this:

Once you've made your selections, just tap the next button and follow your on-screen instructions to finalize the transfer, and you should be the happy owner of some powerful pokémon in Sword & Shield or the Let's GO games.  Happy hunting and better battles my friends, and I hope this tutorial helped any of you with questions.  Bye

Summer Slowdown

     It seems that summer 2020 is just all around terrible.  The west coast is on fire, the Rockies are frozen solid, and the east is having another resurgence of COVID-19.  So its little wonder that the lack of summer game releases and the continued delays of major titles have slipped under most people's radars.

     But as this is a gaming blog and most of what I've been able to do since February is play videogames, I'm a little saddened by the lack of new releases coming out for any platform right now.

     From long awaited titles like Beyond Good & Evil 2 still not making a 2020 deadline, to a launch title not making it to launch (and Halo Infinite being the only thing anyone was going to purchase a series X for), 2020 is the year of disappointment in the gaming sphere.  Everything including the number of games released on Stadia, to the lack of quality of life updates for Animal Crossing: New Horizons has let us down.

     I know that it is still September, and there are still three months to the rest of the year, and there is still Cyberpunk 2077.  But with that games history and the way this year is going I'm not holding my breath.  I just don't see any major players swooping in at the last minute to save the day, and I haven't heard any whispers in the æther of any sort of indie title that might be a light in the darkness.

     So as the heat here in the west fries  my brain and I succumb to the negative vibes of the worst year on record so far, I sign out saying that not even the greatest escapism mankind has created can hide the fear and anxiety building around the world, and that's pretty bad.

     

Weekend Rollback

     Doing these game streams for my son to have something to watch has really driven me to keep up a lot better with posting to my blog here.  I've got another video, hanging around the fifteen minute mark, ready to be viewed.  What I'm finding really interesting is just how easy it is to get fifteen minutes of streaming done.  I keep sitting down telling myself I've only got five minutes and I'll just do something quick, and then all of a sudden the video is three times longer than I expected.

     Now onto the topic today.  I've been trying to work with the equipment I have at the moment, so the videos are all mobile games so far, which got me thinking about good mobile games, or at least really popular ones, which led me to remembering Clash of Clans.  This title was once king of the land prior to titles like Fortnite, and about half a decade ago it seemed like everybody was playing Clash.  It even spawned a television show you could watch on Google Play, which I believe landed two seasons.  Still popular today, it sadly got eclipsed rapidly, as I said, by the ascension of Fortnite and PUBG.  Still, the RTS-like PVP battle-builder was revolutionary in its legitimizing mobile gaming, so I thought a quick video reminding older players, and introducing younger ones, was a great idea.  So here it is folks, an intro to Clash-of-Clans:

And Another One Down

     So, got a little free time this morning, real early, and recorded another let's play, this time for Kingdom Hearts Union Cross.  I honestly feel terrible that I haven't finished this game yet, but there are just so many levels that I could probably do two dozen videos on them.  I'll make sure to post them all if I do.

     Once again, this is just a shorter video intended to get some content up on the channel so my boy has some gaming TV to watch.  Though at this rate that might turn into something more, as he is still really excited about this project and wants more.

     Knowing that, I've set myself an initial goal to reach of recording a minimum of twenty four hours of content for the channel, and if I can accomplish that in a timely fashion, I may invest in more hardware for recording these videos, and may branch into trying to dig up gaming news as well.  Who knows, this may turn into a totally legitimate YouTube Channel.  Until then, I hope you enjoy my little videos.  Here's todays:

Starting a New Stream

     So my son demanded earlier today that I let him watch some let's play streams on YouTube, and he really wanted to watch some video game videos.  I told him he needed to wait until I could find something appropriate for him to watch.  Almost forty minutes later my son gave up waiting and went to play in his room, and I still hadn't found a gaming stream that was appropriate for his age.  This led to me thinking, 'hey, I have the skill and equipment to produce content, so I will.'

     So i sat down and recorded my first YouTube gaming stream, and now my son has something to watch.

     This first video is simple stream of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, and is just an introduction to this new project, really.  I hope you all enjoy it, and leave me a comment or message with any feedback or ideas.  Enjoy:

There's One Hundred and Fifty or More to See

     I really should have posted this one over a week ago when I first accomplished it, but I was able to actually collect all the first one-hundred and fifty-one original pokémon, including Mew (I had to break down and buy the last pokéball plus our local Wal-Mart had, as it turns out this is the only way to get Mew in Let's Go Pikachu or Eevee).  So, the first milestone of my epic quest to catch'em all is accomplished.  Now comes the hard part: filling in the rest.

     I've learned some things about the rest of the Pokémon Home pokédex.  You cannot trade pokémon of a mythic tier with anyone but a friend.  No GTC, no wonder box.  So any of the pokémon that can only be gotten from events like trade shows or the world championships, you can only trade from person to person.  This will make trading my Jirachis a little harder, but as I found out you can use Jirachi in Pokémon Sword & Shield, and they are a very competitive pokémon, I'm hoping that works in my favor.

     So wish me the best of luck and I'll update as soon as I can with the next big step in my journey to catch all the pokémon that are out there. 

A Sense of Urgency

     The first goal of my pokédex quest is to try and get a special Magearna by collecting all the 151 original pokémon from Kanto before a month has elapsed since starting my Pokémon Home account.  I was looking on the cellphone app today, and I started twenty days ago.  I have a short ten days to play through Let's Go Eevee (which arrived yesterday and my kids are loving), and to beat the Elite Four of Black 2 and transfer over all the pokémon I need from Diamond.

     This urgent push has left me desperate, and maybe I'm doing things I normally wouldn't, like moving my clock forward this morning so it was dark in the game so I could evolve a Sneasel into a Weavile to help beat Iris, the champion.  Or uninstalling and reinstalling Pokémon Dream Radar so I could catch a bunch of pokémon all over again.  They say desperate times call for desperate measures.  

     So, I'm up to 59 of the original pokémon registered to home, and I'm scrambling to catch them all.

The Great Pokémon Quest update

     So, I'm currently in a mad scramble to beat the elite four in Pokémon Black 2, as that is currently the lynch pin in my process of updating all the way from the Gameboy Advance games all the way up to the Switch.  I've honestly been playing almost nonstop since Wednesday, and my wife has been a little upset, leading me to put playing on hold for Mother's Day, and just take a break.  Consequently, I'm feeling a lot of stiffness and soreness in my left thumb, which I did attribute to the gardening I spent some time on while i waited for my 3DS to charge, but again, my wife pointed out that this was a side effect of playing too long.

     All this mad gaming marathon happened because I had no idea where I was at in my original Black 2 save, and I hadn't picked up the game in probably six years.  Fun fact I learned when doing this, though, is that Game Freak put in safeguards against overwriting you game save in Black and White 2, so the game would let you start a new game from the menu, but you couldn't save it to the cartridge unless you had done a manual wipe of the last save.  It gave me instructions on how to do a manual wipe, but I had to lose four hours of gameplay just to do it.

     I also played around seven hours of FireRed, as well, to capture a single Zapdos, (Let's Go Eevee hasn't arrived yet, so I'm seeing if i can get Zapdos transferred before it arrives).  He was the only legendary bird of Kanto I didn't have already on a GBA title, or Diamond where I've been storing the bulk of my old collection.  I must have traded him at some point, because all of the old saves had him in their pokédexes, Zapdos just wasn't saved in any of their boxes.

Gotta Catch'em All! (Pokémon Shield)

     My son got me sucked back in to the world of Pokémon recently with the release of Pokémon Shield.  He's been really competitive about the game, and very proud of the fact he's already beaten the elite four and I just got past the first gym.  But since we have been on shelter-in-place, my son has had to continue to do his schooling, while I have been unemployed.  He has had to watch on in horror as I have been catching up.

     And just to rub salt in that wound, I've been trying to figure out how to get some of the more powerful pokémon into my roster on Shield, which led me down a dark path of discovery.  There I learned that through some serious pokémon voodoo, you can trade up pokémon all the way from Ruby and Sapphire into the Pokémon Home app, in turn making the compatible pokémon available in Sword and Shield.

     I've now committed myself to a terrible task I share with you all now.  I propose that by 2021 I will have traded my way into a complete pokédex.  To achieve my goal is going to take a large number of games and quite a few trades.  So here's the list of titles I'll be using to try and accomplish this mission:

1) Pokémon Ruby

2) Pokémon Sapphire

3) Pokémon Emerald

4) Pokémon FireRed

5) Pokémon LeafGreen

6) Pokémon Colosseum

7) Pokémon Colosseum Bonus Disc

8) Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness

9) Pokémon Diamond

10) Pokémon Black 2

11) Pokémon Y

12) Pokémon Ultra Sun

13) Pokémon Shield

     Also, I'll be procuring Pokémon Let's Go Eevee to help make this process easier.  I'm going to see if I can accomplish all of this with just these titles, but I may need to add more to facilitate a faster transfer of legendaries.  Wish me luck, and I'll try and update as frequent as I can.

A Trainwreck You Can't Look Away From

     A trainwreck is always a disastrous thing, and not to make too light of that, I have to say that people who make a train simulation game should be very aware of that.  Imagine my surprise then, when I download the gorgeous looking TrainStation 2 for Android.  It only took me five minutes of game play to realize it was a flaming trainwreck of a game.

     When I had initially saw the commercials for this title, I was awed by the beautiful look of the trains, and the countryside you get to take them through (disclaimer: I am a sucker for trains).  I was excited by the possibility to set up and run trains down the tracks, figuring that even basic free-to-play mobile titles like this have a certain element of base building, to keep you vested in the growth of whatever group you are supporting, and to keep you dropping real cash into loot-box bin.

     But no, this game seems like it's developers know it is nothing more than just whale bait, so much so they don't waste any time on a real game tutorial, and within two minutes of starting just show you the shop and the in-game currency, telling you to just by new trains to get things done faster.  This nonchalant manner is illustrated best by how the whole game seems to be just dispatch train from home base, fetch quest resource, deliver resource, return to home station.  You don't get the opportunity to lay your own track, or decide the layout of your buildings, it's just buy a new train so you can fetch faster.

     And as I said in the disclaimer, i am a fan of locomotives, so when you offer me a train simulator, I want it to work, and I'll even play a bad one, if it seems well intentioned.  TrainStation 2 did not.  It felt immediately like a visual pandering of popular theme to get people to drop loads of money in microtransactions for nothing more than a battery drain.  Publisher Pixel Federation Games should get a clue, people don't enjoy an obvious rip off, and will find something better to play.

     I have to give this a 0/5 ⭐.  This game was lame, and I mean that like a wounded animal, in need of pity and possibly being put down.

     Well, that's all I've got to say on TrainStation 2, and I'll catch you all next time.  

Hidden Treasures of the Past

     So I was cleaning through my basement the other day and trying to get things organized, which led me to pull out all of the old totes and containers I keep my vintage gaming stuff in.  My kids wanted to know what the Super Game Boy did, so I pulled it out and showed them.  Now, mind you, I acquired my Super Game Boy very late in the consoles life, second hand, so I didn't use it much before the N64 and the Game Boy Advanced eclipsed all that older content.  And since the later of those systems was backwards compatable with Game Boy titles, I never saw much need to be tethered to a television screen.

     So imagine my surprise when the cartridge I inserted, Dragon Quest Monsters 2, Tara's Quest, loaded with images filling the sidebar to make up for the difference in pixel count between the SNES and the Game Boy.  And even more surprising, the image changed depending upon what part of the game i was in.  I remember the days of the Game Boy being limited by the amount of data that could be fit onto a cartridge, so every game tried to pack as much content in as possible.  To even use space for a couple of extra bitmaps was a luxury no developer could afford.  But here they were, and what delighted me more was they were artwork from Akira Toriyama, that I'd never seen before.

     This got me wondering what other titles had hidden images you could only see on the side-bar of the Super Game Boy.  I went through my personal collection and discovered that full half of the games my wife and I collected in our youth had hidden side bars.  And what's more, the Pokémon Trading Card Game Game even used these side bar images to track badge progress, making the image a functional part of the game!

     I'm totally enthralled with these surprises, and I want to seek out all of these gems.  Once I get my analog visual capture hardware set back up, I'm going to seek out all these games and set up a page of all the images and the games they're from.  Wish me luck.

     I'll keep you all updated, and see you soon.

They Showed Me Support!

     So, not really me, but a whole wide community of people got validated by Sega.  The massively popular Total War: Warhammer game is available to play on Steam for Linux, which is just amazing.  I'm not sure how many people reading this even know that Steam has a download client for Linux distros, but it is a real thing that really took off in the early 2010's and opened a lot of people up to the use of Linux as an alternative to Windows.
     Then, in the late 10's, Steam gave up on the concept of Steam Boxes and their own flavor Linux, SteamOS, and it seemed to many of us it would only be a matter of time till Steam gave up on Steam for Linux.  But games continued to get coded for Linux, and Steam for Linux chugged on, though without much attention from major studios.

     Now enter Sega and the total war: warhammer game.  I recieved a free copy from a Games Workshop promotion, and though I don't own a Windows PC at the moment, figured I should redeem it in case that changes soon.  Imagine my surprise when I redeemed my steam code and the game appeared on my games for Linux list.  I was so excited about it, honestly, I went straight into writing this article.  I mean, a major publisher like Sega, with a major property like Total War, and a license like Warhammer, available on Linux.  Even a decade ago I would have told you you were mad if you'd said this would happen.  I'm just glad I've seen a shift like this in my life.

     It really has seemed for the longest time that gaming on the PC was restricted solely to Windows, with even Mac having to scrape and play second fiddle.  To see the linux development environment explode in recent years, and more companies embrace this shift and release titles on Linux, its heartening to see people support a less controlling and more laser-focused ecosystem.  Steam Boxes may not have taken off like Valve originally envisioned, but I personally feel that all of gaming is bettered by the inclusion of a Linux download client.  And hopefully we will see more in kind from their major competitors, so the entire gaming culture can grow better together.

     I look forward to playing Total War: Wahammer on my Linux box, and I hope to see more major titles get this treatment soon.

Blitz for Prizes [Disney Emoji Blitz]

     Disney Emoji Blitz works off of a strange premise.  Play this game to earn upgrades to your phone's keyboard that add a huge number of new emojis.  All Disney, of course.  The game itself is a simple match-three drop game, so this is definitely geared to the casual-game Disney fan.  I'll be honest about it now, I do not fall into that category.  I'm a fan of Walt Disney, the animator, and I am a gamer, I'm just not the kind of person who goes nuts over everything Disney.  This game was not developed with me in mind.

     Now that if got that technical bit out of the way, here's my take on Disney Emoji Blitz:

     My first impressions on this game is that it's meant to get you right in and playing, but there is no way to stop the tutorial, so you have to play through the whole thing in one shot, which can take some time.  Mobile games aren't meant for someone who has time.  So this is something I feel needs a remedy.  Some ability in game to pause, and exit out, then restart from where you left off.  This can be achieved for the most part by cold closing from your phones open apps button, but having to use a shutdown method outside your program always feels like bad coding to me.

     The next thing I noticed when playing the game was the color.  This game uses the whole pallet of bright.  Just playing it cheered me up.  So this stands as plus.

     Past these first blushes, this game is a pretty standard connect three formula, with a timer to keep you on the edge of your seat.  Which is disappointing, but not unexpected.  This game was made to bank on a popular trend, and get a few Disney whales to drop a bunch of money into it while giving a huge number of Disney fans a collection of digital stickers to plaster around people's text conversations and market more Disney products.

     So all in all, this game lacks substance beyond a primal collecting itch, and doesnt really warrant a lot of attention.  I'd give it two out of five stars.  Here's to hoping Jam City will get a better one next time.

AFK Arena, A Beautiful Waste of Time [AFK Arena]

So, I am a gaming addict.  Not just video games, games in general, and I spend almost all of my time in some sort of escapism.  Mobile games make this even worse by allowing me to feel like I'm gaming, even when I'm not.  Case-in-point is the mobile title AFK Arena.

     AFK is a beautiful looking spectacle with cool and cute characters that seemed intentionally designed for cosplayers, and it has a decent, if forgettable, sound track.  Gameplay is where the game is really lacking, but for AFK, that's kind of the point.

     Probably more technically correct as AFS (away from screen), this game is designed from top to bottom to facilitate your laziness.  You can set the battles to auto-combat, you can skip raid battles after your first one for the day and just collect the rewards, you can mass gold and equipment just by waiting, along with player EXP.  You don't actually have to do anything.

     The largest gripe I have with this game though, after having played for almost a year, is the grind.  There is a point not long after starting where the drop rate of characters become absolutely debilitating, and progressing further in the game just stops.  If you don't pay, you just mindlessly throw yourself against the same battle over and over until you want to pull your hair out, or you get luck on a character draw.  And this is only getting worse with the addition of new characters.

     Over all this is a beautiful game, but I can't condone the underhanded money grab it becomes in-game.  It shouldn't take months tok progress a minimal amount in any video game, regardless of it revenue system.  I'd have to give this one a 2 out of 5.

FFRK Holiday Backdrop 2019

Here is 2019's Holiday Backdrop image.  I really love that every year we now get something different for the Holiday Backdrop, though I will still miss the first one.