Additional Notes: No, you can’t just play in your jeans … no, you really can’t… Select non-slippery shorts to keep that leg strap in place Why haven’t Ninty licensed special Ringfit shorts with a built in pocket for the joycon? Continue reading Gaming Donks: Fashion
A few weeks ago I caved and signed up for the ‘Switch Online’ service. Sitting in a PC gaming chair for the past few years has meant that I’ve never paid for an online console subscription so the concept was pretty foreign to me. What finally won me over was access to the virtual console NES & SNES games and the vague idea that I might try a few couch online games…
… what my wife and I have actually done is sink a chunk of time into Tetris 99. Or more accurately many many small chunks because Tetris 99 is one of those games that’s delightfully easy to pick up in a spare ten minutes. For anyone not familiar with the concept, Tetris 99 is a Battle Royale version of that iconic soviet puzzle game where 99 players battle it out to be the last one standing. Clearing rows is necessary, not only to keep you in the game, but it also sends those garbage rows (missing one square) to the bottom of a target’s board, pushing them closer to failure. The whole thing comes together to form a satisfying experience that I found, despite not really being much of a Tetris player, is very rewarding even if I’ve yet to claim a victory (4th place being my best performance at time of writing).
One of the cool things about Tetris 99 is that there are no instructions, which means that in order to discover the subtleties of the game (for example how back-to-backs or combos work) involves playing it lots or finding an online guide. This bring me neatly on to T-spins (which, if you’re like me and have only a passing knowledge of Tetris, you’re unlikely to have heard of). I was having a pretty good game. One thing that I did know about Tetris is that a ‘Tetris’ is the clearance of four lines with a single piece and represents the best move in the game… right? In Tetris 99 this sends 4 lines of garbage (not considering other bonuses) to your opponent and I’d had a solid number of them by the time I was finally wiped out. Curious to know how many I’d racked up I checked out my game stats. I noticed an entire stats section devoted to ‘T-Spins’… and was compelled to go away and find out what exactly a T-Spin is, and why I’d want to start filling those columns with numbers. Continue reading “Learning to T-Spin: ’89 to Tetris 99”
… just another starring role for a horse… Continue reading Gaming Donks: Equine-Bias
I haven’t played the recent reamake of Resident Evil 3… I probably will, but for now it’s not too high on my ‘to-play’ list. What I do know about it is that it looks visually stunning and gameplay reports have generally been good, but it is nonetheless still receiving a mixed response from the community. For me, the more action heavy focus has dampened my enthusiasm. What I have played recently is the REMake (AKA the Remake of ‘Resident Evil’ that was originally released for the Gamecube) in HD on Switch. It’s a game that I’ve played before, but a little while back it was on sale and I really just wanted to jump in to something familiar. Despite its age, the gradual journey through the Spencer estate has never looked so good and as a game it still holds up after all these years. It’s also one of the few remakes that’s almost unanimously considered to be an improvement over the original release. It almost seems as thought Capcom did the impossible with it, they took a classic, a genre-defining classic no-less, and only a few short years later remade it in to something better than the original outing, so maybe they could learn a few things from themselves in how to go about pulling this off. Continue reading “The REMake is the Pinnacle of Remakes, So Should Capcom Just Stop Doing Them?”
… I worry people don’t get my sense of humour… Continue reading Gaming Donks: Stealthy
Apologies to all you non-Resident-Evil-Fan-Readers out there, but this is a Resident Evil related post. A little while ago I was once again in a Resi-mood, to I picked the REmake up on the Switch. And yes, it’s a great game and probably one of the best remakes ever cashed-in-in-on by Capcom. So I picked my way through Chris’ and Jill’s scenarios and found myself mulling over the implications of each of these versions of events. More than that, I realised that considering events in the following games, and given the additional questions raised by Resident Evil Zero, It’s Jill’s scenario, and not Chris’, that must be canonical… and that it must’ve been pretty awkward when Chris found out…
“That’s some expensive carpet…” Chris Redfield thought as he tentatively explored the flooring with his socked left foot. He kicked the discarded combat boots to one side and stretched out his body as best he could whilst still technically remaining seated in the cold metal chair. Irons had been gone for hours and his final words before leaving the room had been “…don’t move…” Even so, Chris had just reached a conclusion in his internal debate and decided that boot removal was technically not moving. The Chief seeing his socks was preferable to spending another how-ever-many hours with aching feet. It already felt like a lifetime since the surviving members of S.T.A.R.S. had been manhandled in to separate rooms for a personal debriefing with Irons himself following that nightmare in the Mansion. Continue reading “Chris Redfield’s Awkward Debriefing”
