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.