TurboGrafx 16 Mini Part 2

J.J. & Jeff

I don't know what to make of this game. It's a very bizarre platformer where you're supposed to be detectives solving some kind of case. The action involves - and if you never heard of this game I am not making this up - kicking street lights to get fruit out of them, getting crapped on by birds, finding actual crap in breakable walls, meeting strangers in bathrooms to resume health, kicking your partner's ass whose always hiding out in a costume for whatever reason, and I'm sure a shitload of crazier stuff in the later levels. I don't care for the controls, nor the gameplay in general. It's a shame, because it has such a goofy aesthetic, but it's clearly a product of late 80s platforming that should remain in the bygone era.

Lords of Thunder

I really want to like this game. It has great graphics, action, music, gameplay. You can choose whatever stage you want and you can select from four different armors: Water, Earth, Wind, and Fire. Each armor has its own offensive style. The problem with the game for me, though, is that its one life and three continues. It means I don't have the patience for it. If I ever feel like playing this game, I'm going to have to save state the hell out of it. Also, I don't like the fact that you basically have to die to spend your collected gems in order to buy shields and bombs instead of gathering them out in the field like most shooters do. Maybe if the game was a little more forgiving and had a better system of progressing, it could hold my attention but nowadays, I don't have time for games like these anymore.

Note: This is the first Super CD Rom game I came across, and the animation was different this time, still showing a cart being inserted, but then showed a CD drive spinning up. I really like the little touches.

Military Madness

Fans of Advance Wars would probably like this game. It's a turn-based strategy game where you pit units together and they enter into a little animation as they battle each other. It has all the other elements of strategy games such as terrain advantages, capturing bases. etc. It's a bit too primitive for my taste these days, but if I had the time for it, I'd definitely play more of it. It also had some weird math I didn't quite get as I had the clear advantage in terms of offensive attack, defense, and terrain advantage and yet still lost more tanks than the enemy did when it attacked me. Oh well.

Moto Roader

Dear god, what a bad game. So, this is a top down racer like Micro Machines and RC Pro Am, but nowhere near as good as either. There's some depth to be had in this game for sure, but the thing is, there's this really annoying mechanic where if you're lagging behind the pack, you're slingshotted forward in order to catch up to them, but very frequently at your detriment. You're also put at a severe disadvantage early on by not having enough money to afford decent car parts, so the competition is already ahead of you right out of the gate. This means you're ostensibly behind and always being flung forward. I didn't even bother to try to select any other modes. That's how done I am with this game.

Neutopia

This is unabashedly a Legend of Zelda clone. And well, it's not really a good one, either. My issue is the combat. You can only thrust forward and you have to line yourself up very carefully or you'll miss and get hit, and the game's very chintzy with health power ups and gold. A health potion costs two hundred gold, and I barely had more than that when I finished the first dungeon. As Zelda clones go, I guess it's not entirely bad. I just have to get used to the combat, but it also has an annoying alarm when you get down to low life that I really can't stand.  I'm curious to see what the other dungeons look like, although I wasn't impressed with the first one at all. I'll probably return to this game if I play my Mini again.

Neutopia II

This one's a little more playable. The graphics and animation are improved, as should be for a sequel, plus I can move diagonally and attack diagonally, but there's still no swipe of the sword, just the forward thrust like in the first game. The formula of the game starts out the same as well. Check caves to talk to people. Waste bombs to break open caves to talk to people who tell you things you already know. Find the hidden room where the girl heals you before the dungeon. Head to the first dungeon, find the crystal ball, the key, the bronze armor, kill the boss and get the relic. Also, it has a low life alarm as well, but it's not nearly as obnoxious as the first game. I think the first dungeon was better designed, and it had a better boss as well. I'd probably return to this game to finish if I ever get around to finishing the first.

New Adventure Island

The only Adventure Island I played was Super Adventure Island, and from my memory, it's far superior to this game. The thing about SAI that stood out to me was just how great the music was. I was hoping the music would at least be as catchy as SAI, but it's not. Still, it's one of the better platformers I've played on the T-16 Mini so far. It's fast and has somewhat decent controls, but it's also pretty damn hard. Maybe it's not that hard, and my old school gaming skills simply aren't existent anymore, but yeah, I save stated the hell out of this. I'm enjoying it, so I'm going to add it to my list of games to beat.

Ninja Spirit

So far, this is my favorite game on the Mini. As someone who loves Shinobi, I really do appreciate a good ninja game, and what makes this game so damn fun is the spirits you get to help you out. Think of support drones in a space shooter. It's a combination of a side-scrolling hack 'n' slash and shoot 'em up and the three levels I've been through so far have been great. The bosses themselves are really cool as well. Man, I just love jumping, which he can do really high, and have my spirits attacking where I used to be filling the screen with projectiles. The only thing about the game, though, is that performance starts suffering once you got too much going on. But us old schoolers appreciate frame rate dropping in shoot 'em ups as a blessing. I'm definitely going to return to this game to finish it!

More to come. As always, thanks for reading!

TurboGrafx 16 Mini Part 1

Many many months ago, Konami decided that it was going to join in on the trend of scaling down classic consoles by announcing the TurboGrafx 16 Mini. It was supposed to launch March 19th, just a day before the world release of Nintendo's biggest Switch title of the year, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the factory manufacturing it had to close, so it was delayed. Originally, Amazon had forecast its new release date somewhere in January of next year, but luckily, it didn't take nearly that long. It arrived today, so lets start talking about!

If you read my blogs on the Sega Genesis Mini, you'll know that I did it in parts. I spen at little time each day with a handful of games until I played each one. I'll be doing the same here. So let's start with talking about the physical aspect.

Now, as far as Mini consoles goes, this is the largest of the five I own (NES, SNES, PSOne, Genesis, T-16). It's about as wide, maybe wider, than the NES and SNES side by side, and about as thick. I never owned a T-16 until many many years after it went defunct when I bough a brand new Turbo Duo off eBay for a few hundred dollars, so I have no idea just how big the original T-16 was.

The first thing I noticed after taking it out of the box was the back cover. It's a removable plastic shell where you thread your HDMI and power cable through, and I believe the original console had this as well. Regardless, I hate it. It's cumbersome, and I wish they forwent this bit of nostalgia and just let me plug the cords directly into the back. Speaking of cords, I was disappointed to learn that it uses a different USB power cord than my other Mini systems, which means I'll have to keep the other one nearby instead of keeping this one in its box.

The controller also feels nice and solid. It's been many years since I held my Duo controller, but based on my very sketchy memory, it seems to be a 1:1 replication. Select and Run buttons are soft. I and II buttons are clicky, and the turbo toggles are nice and firm. That's the one thing I always appreciated about the T-16 was having built in turbo toggles as a standard in their controllers.  Now, let's turn it on!

The first thing you'll be greeted with when you turn the system on is the language select. You're given six languages: English by default, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Once you select your language, you're brought into a nicely presented game select screen with some catchy 16-bit music. The game covers look like they're rendered as CD boxes, but maybe that's how the game cards came in? It's been too long for me to remember. You can also sort the titles by the year they were released, alphabetically, or by game format. There's also two different game select screens: one for US TurboGrafx games and the other for EU/Japanese PC Engine games, which has its own music. Lastly, you can select the menu graphics when you're in the PC Engine side of things to either PC Engine (which is white) or PC Engine Core Grafx (which is black). It's really nice to see a way to customize your game select screen for a mini console.

With all that said, I'm going to start my way alphabetically through the T-16 games and then go into the PC Engine games. Let's begin!

Note: When I started my first game, I was treated to a nice little animation of the game cart being inserted into the machine. Really cool!

Air Zonk

So the first to get played is Air Zonk! What happens when Bonk gets bored and decides to go airborne and turn himself into a shoot 'em up? You get Air Zonk! Now these cartoony shooters are the type of shooters I really love. Full of charm, clever power ups, colorful cartoony bosses. I also love the friends system that lets you get drone support in the form of another cartoon character or transforms you completely. It's a hard game, though. I ended up using save states several times just to get to level three. When I return to my T-16 Mini, I'm going to make it a point to finish this game. Really a lot of fun! I love Hudson Soft's work!

Alien Crush

When I was shopping for a Turbo Duo, I was asking a friend of mine which games I should get with it, and Alien Crush was one of them. I don't remember if I actually did play it back then, but as the game stands now, it's a decent 16-bit pinball game. It only has one board so far that I know of, but there's a lot going on with it. It has two levels, and each has at least a couple bonus levels that you can find and start racking up bonus points. I played a few times, stopping after getting a score of over 3.5 mil. There's also a couple different music tracks you can select, and they're both pretty good. The thing is, it could be my imagination, but I think I detected some input lag as the flippers seemed just a little sluggish. I got used to it over time, and could probably get a much higher score if I played it again.

Blazing Lasers

This was another game recommended to me by my same friend. I do remember playing this game on my Duo, and I remember it being pretty hard. I don't think I really got very far at it, probably due to a lack of patience, but ah, the miracle of playing on mini systems: save states! So I used a few and kept on going. I stopped after Stage 3, because I felt like I could spend the whole day playing this game until I beat it. There's always a sign of playing a good space shooter, and that's when you get those "Holy shit, how did I survive that!" moments, and I've had a few in just the first three stages. I love the game's variety of weapons and support systems. Music and graphics are pretty solid for a game of its time as well. Just a very good game overall.

Bomberman '93

What can I say? It's Bomberman. Drop bombs. Blow up walls. Don't get caught in your own explosion. Obviously, it looks better than the NES game, but from what I can remember, the SNES version is the far superior version. Better graphics, better sound. Probably better controls. I played through the first world and killed what looked like a teleporting goomba wizard. It had a cute little picture at the end of it. What's interesting is that in the title screen, there's the option to play COM-LINK. Not surprisingly, COM-LINK doesn't work since I'm pretty sure there's no way to connect two T-16 minis together. So, you're stuck at a screen that shows two Bombermans connecting each other's TurboGrafx Expresses together, which I thought was pretty cute.

Bonk's Revenge

I just noticed something. Aside from Air Zonk, this is the only Bonk game on here. Mario is Nintendo. Sonic is Sega. Bonk is NEC. You would have thought that there'd be at least two of the mainstay Bonk games. Now, I remember the first Bonk as a kid, and I'm not sure I ever played any of the others. I own Bonk 3, but I don't think I ever played it. I have to stay, this is not really my kind of platformer. Mario has really spoiled me when it comes to platformers, and in my opinion, Bonk just doesn't have what it takes precision-wise to be a fun platformer. For instance, I hate the timing on the springy flowers. I get very frustrated with them! I know Bonk is adored by many old school gamers, but I guess he never clicked with me. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with him like I did with Mario and Sonic. Who knows? Maybe I'll come back to it and give it another shot.

Note: So, watching the demo mode run, I happened to notice it does have what looks like the first Bonk, but it's Japanese on the PC Engine side, and it's called PC Genjin? Yeah, weird. Anyway, I'll get to that later when I start playing the PC Engine games.

Cadash

This is one I'm just not going to bother with again. It's a side scrolling action RPG, which is actually a port of an arcade game, so the cheap gameplay actually makes sense. You have to endure many a cheap shot. Very early on when you enter the cave, there's a slope you have to go down and there are skeletons coming up. Well, I could not figure out any safe way to engage them, and the game spawns off-screen enemies, so there are skeletons coming from where I left. I could go back up the slope and and fight off the skeleton that came up at me, but there'd only be another on the way back down. I tried with all four characters and ended up meeting the same fate. I thought, "Naw, couldn't be me. Couldn't be this bad, can I?" So I go look up a gameplay video on YouTube, and the player's solution? Get hit and just keep moving. Wow... fucking... wow. Fuck this game.

Chew Man Fu

So I'm guessing the "chew" part of the title indicates these giant colored balls I'm moving around is gum. If that's the case, you're using your kung fu to take out baddies by kicking giant balls of gum at them. The ultimate goal is to roll all four different colored gumballs onto the respective colored tiles. Once you manage that, a new level begins. In a way, I can kinda see Bomberman influence in this game, which makes sense as a it's a Hudson Soft title. I actually had a lot of fun with this game as I enjoy the puzzle element of moving things around while not getting cornered.

Dungeon Explorer 

Dungeon Explorer, as its title suggests, is pretty generic. It's a top down dungeon crawler where you can select from a surprisingly large number of jobs, and then you proceed to get overwhelmed by enemies pretty quickly. I think it's designed to be played primarily with other people, which makes playing by yourself rather disadvantageous and ultimately not that much fun. Plus, the music's rather obnoxious and doesn't really fit the style of the game very well, and the text is just atrocious. "The bridge to Water Castle is broken. Come back after more battle." Also, they spell gnome "knome", which I'm not sure if they did that on purpose or if it was a mistranslation. Anyway, I won't be coming back to this one.

There will be more to come. I'll try to do eight games per entry  Thanks for reading!

The Newest Update for AC:NH Illustrates a Major Problem With Patching Games

Animal Crossing: New Horizons 1.2 update is here, and we're all excited! This brings us the return of Redd and his shifty art dealing schemes. Leif also returns selling a wide selection of flowers and shrubbery. We have new events as well, such as Nature Day and more. The museum will also see an art exhibit expansion after you donate your first painting. Truly, lots to be excited about!  However...

There is a downside to this patch. As most of us know, there's a time traveling mechanic in AC:NH, a mechanic that has existed in every AC game before. It lets you reverse time to go back and catch fish and bugs you may have missed, as well as jump ahead in case you can't wait for fish and bugs to arrive. This is great for the players who don't have the time to play the game the way it's intended due to busy schedules and time restraints. What time traveling also does, unfortunately, is let people abuse it to get filthy stinking rich.

Enter the time travelers. One way to get rich is to keep time traveling to the next month after you amass 20 million bells and then you'll earn 99K bells in interest just for signing on. For some reason, Nintendo saw this as a major problem, so they have reduced the interest rate considerably. Now, you can earn no more than 10K bells every month. For starters, 99K bells was only a pittance for those who already had 20 million+ in their bank accounts, but it was a nice bonus just for signing on at the beginning of every month. What makes matter worse is that people weren't evening utilizing time traveling for that purpose. They were using it to skip ahead for better turnip prices.

The other thing I noticed was that the peacock butterfly spawn rate has been reduced. When I first started the game, the moment I got some hybrid flowers, I noticed peacock butterflies spawning around them, and I also noticed they spawned a lot. I found out I could make round 80K in a half hour's time, and I was able to very quickly pay off my home loans and my bridges/inclines and start saving for spending money later. But now, it seems the spawn rate has been reduced and I'm not the only one to have noticed this. This really sucks, because I designed a garden for the sole purpose of farming butterflies.

I know there are better ways to make money than relying on monthly interest and gathering butterflies, but the latter was at least a great way for starting players to make money quickly. I just don't understand why these changes needed to be made in the first place. Why should Nintendo care if someone wants to make money really fast so they can get more enjoyment out of the game sooner? Let them play the game how they want. They spent 60 dollars on your game. They should be afforded that right.

These two changes illustrate the problem of patching games after release. People will argue that this is a necessary evil for the purposes of balancing, but to me, there's no such thing as balancing. Whenever you adjust something in a game, it affects something else for someone else. "Balancing" is a very popular thing in patches for fighters and MMORPGs and I've seen many discussions boil over regarding things breaking as a result of things being fixed. I expect things like these to happen in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Final Fantasy XIV, but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I'd see "balancing" happening in Animal Crossing of all games.

Again, even though 99K bells a month isn't much for people who already have 20 million, what does that actually accomplish? It's not going to stop time travelers, because they aren't time traveling for the interest anyway. All it does is remove a nice little bonus for the legit players. And why take away a quick source of income in terms of quickly reappearing butterflies, especially since there are far better ways of making bells later on? It just makes the start of the game more of a slog for new players. These were changes that simply didn't need to made because there was no benefit to the player whatsoever. You can be rest assure that Nintendo will be changing other things in the game in the future as well.

Oh, I forgot to mention. To make up for not making a million+ in interest a year, Nintendo gave us a bell bag rug. It's a permanent reminder of how much money I lose at the start of every month (which again isn't much, but still). Anyway, I'm very happy about the rest of the update. I just needed a quick vent about the "balancing" changes to get it off my chest. As always, thanks for reading!

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Still a Long Way Away from the Perfect Game

When we think of long running Nintendo franchises, we tend to think of Mario and Zelda. Star Fox and Samus. Donkey Kong and Kirby.  But there's one franchise of Nintendo's that's been around nearly 20 years - in fact, today marks the series' 19th anniversary - that doesn't have any platform jumping, shooting, smashing, slashing, or sucking up baddies and stealing their powers. This long running franchise of Nintendo's decided to take things at a very leisurely pace, spending the first few weeks, even months, having the player slave away at fishing, catching bugs, selling fruit, even trading turnips all to pay off one dubious raccoon. This series is Animal Crossing. 

Animal Crossing, as mentioned earlier, began its life 19 years ago to the date on the Nintendo GameCube and was unlike any game Nintendo released before. A simulation game where you were human but surrounded by anthropomorphic villagers, you began life instantaneously in debt. You had a museum to contribute to, trees to plant, relationships to build, and special events to attend to as you very slowly worked towards everyone's virtual and real life dream of owning your own home.  As the series evolved, we saw installments grace the DS, the Wii and the 3DS each bringing their own new improvements and innovations. (We don't talk about Amiibo Festival for the Wii U...)  

We didn't really see a major reworking of game mechanics until New Leaf on the 3DS, though, and even then, it wasn't too long until the usual trapping began to show. Now Animal Crossing has released for the Switch in the form of New Horizons and introduced many, many improvements to the franchise.  Yet, all the new improvements have only illustrated just how far this franchise still has yet to go to become the perfect life simulator.  

There's so much to talk about in terms of quality of life improvements that quite honestly, I have no idea where to start.  Let me just begin talking about what I left off doing in the game as I had to dock my Switch to charge. 

Terraforming

A brand new mechanic introduced in New Horizons lets us make cliffs, create ponds, rivers and waterfalls, and paths of varying textures all at will, and all for free. You'd think this would be amazing to play with, and for the most part it is, but it's not without its drawbacks. For starters, let's talk about how long it takes should you have any major landscaping projects you want to undergo. 

Let's say you have to chip away into an upper tier. You can only clear one square at a time instead of holding down the A button and just pushing your way through the cliff, as if you were moving furniture. Next, there's an issue with cutting terrain at the precise angles. For waterscaping, it's impossible to make a perfect V. You'll either take a square chunk out of the land, or slice an adjacent square of land in half, but if you want the other size of a V you're carving, that point will either be filled in the next time you hit the A button, or a square chunk of land will be removed. I was trying to terraform a Triforce pond and although you can still make it out, it's nowhere near the level of perfection I wanted. As far as making waterfalls, you cannot make waterfalls round the corners, which is a shame as that would make for some really cool waterscaping.  

Relocation

I kinda wanted to put this under Terraforming, as it involves moving things around your island, but it's not using the terraforming app, so I decided to give it its own section. So a new feature with New Horizons is moving your buildings around. You're given the ability to place any building wherever you want (accept for the Resident Center, which is anchored in place for all eternity). If you're not happy where a building is, you can relocate it, but it's not as simple as a drag and drop. 

Before I continue, I want to talk about how AWESOME it is to be able to very easily redecorate your house in New Horizons. Supposedly taken from the 3DS's Happy Home Designer, which I don't consider to be a mainstay Animal Crossing game, you can enter a mode in your house that lets you move everything around your rooms from the floor to the walls with ease. You can even move multiple items at a time, which make decorating SO EASY. But then you go outside, see all the work you need to do on your island... and slowly revert back into your home, pull the curtains and succumb to an anxiety attack....

Because that's how I feel right now trying to redo my island. I was up late last night fretting over trying to get my land prepared to accommodate a bridge and make sure it wouldn't interfere with the relocation of one my neighbor's homes. Before I knew there was a limit on bridges, I had already built the allotted eight. My plan is to move all my residents around my resident center to creat a neighborhood, but that involves relocating six residents, three buildings (at 50k a pop, so that's 450k in relocation fees) and destroying and rebuilding four bridges, as I'm building a moat around the resident center. I know it takes a day to move a building, but it also takes a day to destroy a bridge, and then another day to build it again where I want. 

It'll take around nine or 10 days to get everything done the way I want. So now, I'm left with an unorganized mess, and I don't even want visitors over right now. So when I think of how easy it is to move things around in my house compared to how painful it is to move anything on my island, I get highly discouraged. But, I committed myself to it, so I'm going to see it through. I just hope that Nintendo patches in a map editor mode like they did with their home editor. It would alleviate a lot of headaches. I also get that some might say it's not realistic to be able to move buildings around at the drop of a hat, but let's be honest here. This game is far from realistic. I mean, you can put a giant Godzilla statue in your pocket and create mountains and rivers at will. Come on...

Crafting and Storage

New to New Horizons is the crafting element. Also new to New Horizons is built-in storage in your room. Now, you no longer need to throw a dresser or a refrigerator in your room to access your storage; it's readily available anywhere in the house and greatly increases with each upgrade to your home. Both of these elements need work, though.

So let's talk about crafting. Crafting is a lot of fun, I'll admit. You can make a lot of things on your own without spending a single bell at the store, all from resource gathering. It's cool to be able to make something no one else can, especially if it's a unique item not found in stores. The one major gripe I have is the fact that you can only craft one item at a time. Batch crafting is something that NEEDS to be implemented as soon as Nintendo can do it, because if you've ever tried to craft 30 fish baits, you know how tedious it gets. Hell, after the Bunny Day event was over, I had so many eggs, I crafted over 330k bells worth of Bunny Day furniture. Just try to imagine how long THAT took!  Batch crafting: MAKE IT HAPPEN!

As for storage, yes it's readily available within your house, but it came at a weird trade off. Now, every piece of functional furniture that you used to use for storage, such as a freezer, now serves the purpose of being a closet to change your clothing. Why anyone would be changing in their freezer is beyond me; it's just nonsensical. So what I would like to do is for Nintendo to revert the storage items' original purpose back to accessing storage for one major reason: setting storage items outside of your house. Today, I made a cool 5.6 million bells selling bugs to Flick, but it was a very long and tedious process going back and forth to the house. You can also only select one item at a time to remove from storage, so I would also appreciate letting us select multiple items from storage at once. But imagine how much easier it would be to drop a storage item next to Flick, pull out forty bugs at once, and then sell them with Flick standing right next to you. Wash, rinse, repeat. 

Bring Back New Leaf Components 

It's obvious that New Horizons feels like a major extension of New Leaf, because New Leaf had an island you could visit whereas New Horizons is one major island. Yet, we're left in disbelief as one of New Leaf's most awesome features, swimming, was left at the bottom of the ocean. If you don't know by now, yes, you can no longer swim and dive in New Leaf. This means no hunting for sea cucumbers, anemones and anything else on the sea floor. This also means no more cool wet suits. 

Although you can visit separate "mystery islands" (I'll talk about those later), they aren't like the island in New Leaf. For one, you can't travel to one with a friend. Because of that, you can't also partake in mini games with your friends. Multiplayer is still here in New Horizons, but without anything to really DO together like in New Leaf, it gets boring after a while. We NEED mini games to return.

What I also don't get is why the foreign exotic fruits like durian, lychee, persimmons and bananas have not returned. I really enjoyed having a wider variety of fruits, so to see New Horizons revert back to the original six was disappointing. Maybe we'll see them return? What I would also love to see the return of is the megaphone. It was so handy to call out a villager and hear them call back so you'd get an idea of where they were. In fact, just gives us a real time display of where they're moving on our mini map. That would be ideal. Also, give us back the credit card. That was so handy!

Make the Mystery Islands Worth Something Each Trip

Now, I can kinda understand that some people will be happy the way the mystery islands work, as it's all random, so landing on Tarantula Island will be very exciting, but there are too many islands that just aren't interesting at all. These plain islands offer nothing new in the way of flora or fauna, and a string of bad luck will see players waste tons of Nook Miles tickets. After the first several waves of Nook Miles milestones are achieved, miles come in very slowly in the form of tasks, and sometimes it can take an hour just to get enough miles to get one ticket. I see this area of the game as needing a lot of improvement, because something good should always be given when that much time is spent gathering miles. I'm not saying every island should be Money Rock Island or Tarantula Island, but you should at least land on a foreign fruit island for your troubles. 

Let Us Change the Camera Angle

I know this might seem like a big ask, but it's time. It's just time. They let us look all around in our room, so why not all around our island? At least we have a more overhead view, but still, the camera options in this game is very limited for a franchise that's almost 20 years old. It would be really nice to look around all your trees to make sure you didn't miss a fossil spot or a piece of fruit that fell. If  we don't get any new camera options, at least make things transparent when we're behind them. 

Give Us More Inventory Space

Ok, now I'll admit this one is just plain greedy. The game starts you out with 20 slots, which is five more than any other AC game and after your second upgrade, you're up to 40. That is a LOT of inventory space, but I still find myself running out of space when I'm doing chores. I plant a LOT of fruit, and I never have the space to carry it all in one trip, and it's annoying to have to stop what you're doing, haul everything to the store to free up space, and then remember where you left off. True, this is done far less with 40 slots than in older games with 15, but it's still happening, and when your franchise is improving, you don't want inconveniences to lessen; you want them gone.  

There's a few ways to alleviate this. One would be to let everything stack to 99 like weeds. It's weird to me that fruit only stack at 10, but wood can stack at 30 and fence pallets stack at 50. You're telling me I can hold FIFTY pallets of fencing in one slot, but only TEN fruit?  

So you can see that if one thing can stack at 99, then it's possible for everything to stack at 99, and yes, I mean everything. "But not fish!  Surely, not fish!"  Yes, fish, too. Why? Because those sea shells you're picking up, they're alive, and they stack. You can stack corals, and sea dollars and giant clams. You can stack flowers, weeds, fruit. These are all living, so why not make bugs and fish stackable as well?  Don't believe me? Play an MMORPG. I think it would help pacify everyone's anger about wasting so much space with sea bass.

Make Sea Bass Extinct

But seriously, back to inventory. Another way to increase inventory is to give us a tool box. We now have more tools in New Horizons than we do any other Animal Crossing game. In fact, we have more tools than we have spaces in our tool ring, which should also be upgraded. You have your shovel, axe, stone axe if you're looking not to chop down trees, fishing rod, net, slingshot, watering can, umbrella, musical instruments, party favors, ladder, pole vault and lastly, the magical wand. If you decide to carry one of everything, that's three inventory slots used up just in tools. Having a tool box - or utility box, or even utility belt - take just one space would be a godsend. Or you know, the new backpacks we can wear should hold more stuff too... 

Implement Better Planning With Events

Let's be honest here.  The last two events, Bunny Day and the Fishing Tournament, were not that good. Bunny Day was such an atrocity, Nintendo had to patch in measures to tone down the number of eggs spawning. I got so many eggs and recipes the first couple of days, I had everything I needed, so I had ten more days of coming across eggs I didn't want. Maybe when one of the game's core mechanics is resource gathering, don't replace people's main sources of income with bunny eggs so much? It would have been better to just do special tasks for Zippy or Zipper or Zippideedodah and then he'll give you the recipe to make instead of searching for balloon after balloon to only get 30 more sky eggs.  

The fishing tournament was also lackluster. To begin with, it wasn't really a fishing tournament. It was just spamming the same "fish as many times as you can in three minutes" over and over again. I spent several hours doing this to get all the "swag" and sadly, I wasn't even impressed by it. There were a lot of different pieces of furniture missing from the set, like a table or a record player or something. I was disappointed with most of the stuff he was handing out, so I'd like to see more thought put into better seasonal items that's worth more of the player's time. ALSO, it was a BAD idea to do this while the Bunny Day event was still going on. You shouldn't be pulling up water eggs when you're under a time limit to catch fish.  Real bonehead move there. And the countless interactions with C.J. brings me to my next point.

Let Us Skip Repetitive Dialogue

I swear, one of the worst things about the fishing tournament was having to keep interacting with C.J. After you caught your fish, you had to talk to him THREE more times to start the next tournament. It didn't need to be split up into three separate conversations, and once you're having a conversation, if it's dialogue you've already seen, you should be able to just skip right over it. This goes beyond C.J. This applies to every damned denizen on the island. So much time is wasted in the shop, with Blathers, talking to Nook, your villagers about Bunny Day. We really don't need to see the same chatter each and every time!

Let the Net Catch Multiple Bugs at the Same Time

This would definitely come in handy. How many times have you seen a bug you wanted, went for it and swung, but another bug got in the way and your prize flew away? Or what about the time you were on Tarantula Island and were able to sneak up on two tarantulas and caught one only for the other to bite you? I mean, we see the net pass through both (or even three bugs) at the same time, and we know that in real life, a net would catch those bugs at once, so why not just let us catch multiple bugs at the same time?

Rework the Tool Durability System

What I really want is just no more damn breakable tools, but I get why they're there, and like the breakable weapons in Breath of the Wild, they're never going to go away. But, we should at least be given a durability meter or some sign that our tools are going to break. I remember in the older Animal Crossing games, you actually saw your axes start chipping before they broke. And well, the real prize are the golden tools, and I'm sorry, but golden tools should simply not break at all. Gold ore is SCARCE. I can go a whole week without finding one. You think I'm going to waste these things on tools that will eventually break? Either let those golden tools become unbreakable, or boost the drop rate of gold ore.

Provide More Interactivity With More Items

I'm sure we've all come across awesome items that didn't do much, or even do anything at all. I would love to see more thought and effort put into making more items do stuff. For instance, I spent 5k Nook Miles on a pool that I can't even wade in. I know this may be a lot to ask considering no one knows how many items are even in the game, but I'm hoping that they're at least thinking of making more items do things in future patches. I don't ever want to sell a cool looking item just because it doesn't do anything.

Give Us Rideable Items

How many times have you gotten a bike that you would love to ride? It's time. We should be able to ride bikes and scooters around our islands. Or hell, even a go-kart. I'm not asking to go fast. I mean, we don't even need to go faster than running speed, but I would love to have some kind of locomotion in Animal Crossing. Speaking of locomotion, how about a train? I would LOVE to have a train where you could lay out the tracks wherever you want. 

Get Rid of the 20 Percent Tax on the Dropbox at Nook's Cranny

This one gets me. When I first started the game, I LOVED being able to come to Nook and sell anything I got any time of the day. God, I remember the old days of the first Animal Crossing where I stored all my fish in the basement when I got off work, because the store closed before I got home, and I would wake up and quickly sell my fish the next day before I went back to work. But when Nook upgraded his tent into a resident center and diverted commerce to Nook's Cranny, hours of operation returned, which was disappointing.  

Yet, there was good news. There was a drop box you could deposit items in and have them sold off hours, but the store took a 20 percent fee. For what?! Considering you have so much storage in your house now, you might as well just store everything and sell it the next day when the store's open again. This penalizes players who can't play during prime hours and since the game starts out with the store open 24/7, it really should stay open 24/7.

Well, there you have it. I'm sure I've forgotten a few things and will probably think of them a few minutes after I post this, but I got a lot off my chest. Now, before anyone gets upset over me criticizing their beloved Animal Crossing, let me just say that I've been playing the hell out of it and really enjoy it so far, but I've always been the type to see improvement in everything. The fact that New Horizons has done so many quality of life enhancements is testament to the fact that they can keep improving the game, and should so since we live in the days of post-launch patches and expansions. I'm sure we'll see a few of these things and other improvements no one thought of in upcoming patches. This is just a list of things I'd love to see myself. 

Anyway, thank you all for reading. I know this was a long one, so extra special thanks for that.

This Generation of Gaming Is The Worst, and This Proves It

Mario Kart Tour has somehow taken home the award of Racing Game of the Year over Crash Team Racing.

I mean, I could fill up this blog post with nothing but these gifs, because I'm literally at a loss of words here.  (sorry, trying to curtail my improper usage of literally)  But... HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?  How does a microtransaction riddled mess of a mobile game like Mario Kart Tour trump a legendary and faithfully remastered kart racer like Crash Team Racing?  I mean, Mario Kart Tour isn't even a fleshed out game! I'm not going to go into detail about why I don't think Mario Kart Tour is a good game.  You can read my thoughts on it here.

Somebody's palm got greased at the DICE awards.  That's the only thing I can think of.  There's not  a single rational person in the world that would dare give this... thing... Racing Game of the Year without being incentivized.  It's no where in the same league as CTR.  It's so far out of its league, it would need 100 Hubble telescopes perfectly aligned at their maximum distances to even see a glimpse of the galaxy that Crash Team Racing is a part of.

This is just one of the many, the plethora,the litany of offenses that have occurred during this generation of gaming that makes me feel this is the worst.  The continuous onslaught of microtransactions and DLC, the lack of support of Xbox One, the boldface lies that from one Blizzard CEO's mouth, battle royale being shoehorned into every multiplayer game... and the ruination of beloved Nintendo franchises thanks to mobile games.

And since I'm talking about Nintendo mobile games, let me say that after three years of playing Fire Emblem Heroes, I finally quit due to the FEH Pass.  I mean, I get that these free mobile games need to make money somehow, but weren't they already making millions from a small group of whales?  Apparently, that wasn't enough.  If the FEH Pass was just for a few exclusives characters and whatnot, I probably wouldn't have minded, but when I read that subscribers get a +2 bonus to all their stats, that's where I drew the line.  Now, it became pay to win more than ever.  I will not stand for it. 

And people who already dump hundreds and thousands of dollars a month on orbs are now expected to pay 120 dollars a year to keep all the new perks.. it's just insulting.  I don't get it.  Why can't people say no to this shit? No one wants to spend a flat 10 dollars on Super Mario Run, but will spend 120 a year on a FEH Pass, 60 dollars a year on MKT's Gold Pass and 120 dollars a year on AC:PC subs?  

I guess it would be easy to blame the publishers for making this the worst generation of gaming, but the blame doesn't entirely fall on them.  It falls on the consumers who fall into these traps as well.  You could try to argue with me about how companies spend millions of dollars on psychological research to manipulate people out of their hard-earned money, but everyone can say no.  You CHOOSE to buy shit.  You KNOW you buy shit.  So yeah, if you buy into these shitty mobile games, you're part of the problem as well, and so is DICE for even putting Mario Kart Tour up for Racing Game of the Year. 

RNG Is Not Fun and Needs to END!

See what I'm doing here?  I'm opening a chest trying to get a rare item, a gear seed, in Trials of Mana.  If I don't get it, I reload the previous quick save and try again.  It's called save scumming, and I'm doing it over and over again.  It's very mundane, but it's something you need to do if you want to get the best gear in the game.  Then, once you get a gear seed, you have to go to an inn and grow it in a flower pot, only the item and order you grow them in are predetermined.  To break that order, you have to sleep and save at the inn and try again to get something different.  You can't just quick save and reload like I've been doing here.  Then I got to do this all over again when I'm hunting for my items I need to change to my final class.

Trials of Mana is the third game in the Collection of Mana.  The previous title was Secret of Mana, and I had to do something similar in that game as well.  In the final level, the Mana Fortress, there were specific enemies you had to kill that had a chance of dropping a weapon orb you needed in order to forge the weapon to its final form.  Once I found an enemy I was looking for, I saved, killed it and if no weapon chest spawned, I reloaded and killed it again.  When the chest spawned, I saved, opened it and if I didn't get the orb, reloaded and tried again.

Between Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana, I must have wasted hours, maybe at least 15 give or take a few, trying to get all this equipment. But I know what you're thinking.  There wasn't quick save scumming back then, so I should be fortunate, right?  Right.  And that's the thing.  Imagine doing this back in the 90s.  You didn't get what you wanted so you had to keep wandering around looking for another enemy in the hopes of dropping the chest, and then dropping the item you needed.  All that extra wandering around and fighting would waste even more of your time.  But if you're roughly my age reading this, you'll have been in high school back when these games were out, and when you were a teenager, you didn't have to worry about wasting time playing games.  You might have only got one every month or so, so spending time farming for shit like this probably didn't bother you.

But we're adults now.  We have jobs and careers.  Families.  We shouldn't be spending time dealing with RNG; we should be having fun with our games.  I'm also hard-pressed to believe that people dealing with RNG are convinced they actually enjoy this.  I also know what you're thinking.  "But Lucas, these are old games!  Why complain about them?"  Because RNG hasn't gone away.  The act of killing something over and over again is still prevalent in RPGs and MMOs today.  In fact, some games rely heavily on low drop rates to keep their active player base still hooked.

Take Final Fantasy XIV for instance.  There's so much RNG in that game that it's annoying.  Let's also first talk about one of the basic stats of RPGs in general and that's hit rate. It's just hilarious to me to see a hulking warrior with a giant sword swing it right through a massive enemy and then be met with text popping up out of nowhere saying "Miss".  What's the point in that?  Anyway, one thing I tried once and never again was raiding.  In raiding, you're met with a bunch of people, sometimes people you've never played before, and then you tackle a massive objective or series of objectives and then hope that the RNG gods drop an item, and then you have to hope it's an item your class needs.  THEN, you have to pray to the RNG gods again that you can roll high enough in the group to get it.  If not, try again.  In some games, if you do get it, you have to wait a full week to get another one, where you're once again subject to the possibility of not getting anything.  I wasted enough hours doing this ONCE.  I can't imagine how people find this fun to keep doing this for YEARS...

I also remember when I was doing my relic quest line.  One such portion of it involved getting these anima pieces that only showed up in certain zones.  In order to get them, you had to participate in the game's group events called FATEs and do them over, and over, and over, and OVER again.  They were not guaranteed drops to everyone in the party.  Just because one person got it didn't mean the other seven would.  There were times where I would spends hours with one group just to see new people show up, get their drops after a few FATEs and then leave.  Then, when I finally got my drop for that zone, hours later, it was having to do it again in 11 more zones.  You'd also be lucky enough to get a full group who was efficient enough to chain them.  If you were in a zone that wasn't populated, you might as well move on to another one that was, or you'd be at it for days.  Even after people complained to SE enough to get them to increase the drop rates, you could still end up spending an hour or two trying to get one. 

And then there was a phase of the relic quest where you had to meld stat-based materia to your weapon.  Because everyone was doing this quest at the same time, that meant the demand for materia skyrocketed, so the price did as well.  Depending on the server you were on, you would end up spending several millions of gil on materia.  The problem wasn't obtaining the materia, because there were other ways to obtain it without buying it (but be prepared to invest serious time).  It was having to meld it into the weapon at certain stages where you had lower rates of success.  Yes, a quest has you buying expensive items to try to fit into your weapon, only to have them break so you buy more... WHY IS THIS FUN?!

But it isn't just the raiding and relic questing where RNG is problematic.  It also affects farming and gathering.  For instance, if you want to be self-sufficient as a crafter, you need to gather your own materials.  In FFXIV, this involves hunting, harvesting and mining.  When you kill monsters, you have a chance to get an animal product such as bone or skin.  Skins for many animals tend to have a lower drop rate than anything else.  I used to kill 10-15 animals sometimes before I'd get a skin, and that's just preposterous to me.  I mean, you kill an animal, and you can't get a single skin from their entire carcass, which is entirely wrapped in skin?  What kind of sense does that make?  I can't believe there are people that actually defend this.  I once heard the argument that sometimes you don't get skins because you mutilate the carcass too much. So, if I kill 10 animals in the EXACT SAME WAY, I can only get one perfectly good skin?  Still doesn't make any sense.

Harvesting and mining both have percentages of success every time you swing your axe or pick.  But just like fighting a monster, you see your tool strike an object and sometimes you come up with nothing.  But why is it like this?  Why do you have to deal with RNG when your character is clearly striking a rock?  I don't even want to think about all the hours I wasted dealing with misses when I was trying to gather items.

For crafting, there are many different abilities crafters use to increase the progress of their items.  Every step an action is taken, the durability lowers and based on the percentage achieved before the final step, an item will either be crafted or destroyed.  If destroyed, there's a chance materials will be salvaged to try again.  I've never liked the RNG for crafting systems, because sometimes you're relying on a move that gives you 90% success, and then it will fail.  When you're trying to make a high level item, and EVERY step is crucial, having a 90% success rate fail on you is enormously frustrating.  I haven't played FFXIV in a while and I've heard they've implemented changes to make it not so miserable, so it may not be like that anymore, but still... it's annoying.  Like, why do you need RNG to successfully make orange juice?  What's so random about that!?

Now, if you're an FFXI vet, I know what you're thinking.  "You FFXIV players have it SO easy!"  Which is true.  I only played FFXI for a couple of years, so I don't know how many quality of life changes they've implemented, but I remember the early days were rough.  I never gathered or crafted, but I was familiar with notorious monsters and their rare drops.  It wasn't like monster spawns in FFXIV, where it would show up and everyone could participate if they just got there in time.  No, the battle system in FFXI was strictly party vs monster (or one-on-one if playing solo).  I wasted SO much time hunting notorious monsters and very rarely got anything from it, because here's what happens.  A spawn window opens up, and people arrive to one of several spawn positions.  Then, it's a matter of when and where that mob will spawn.  THEN, it's a matter of who's lucky enough to tag the mob and claim the fight.  Most of the time, people have scripts and will automatically attack targets the moment they spawn. THEN, it's being lucky enough to actually get the drop you want.  Hours can be wasted just waiting for the damned thing to pop.  Just imagine what you could have done with your life instead!

People will say, "But that's how it's always been!  RNG has been a part of RPGs since tabletop games!"  True.  I get rolling for strength and dexterity checks and all that.  For stat based players, sure, that makes sense (although in table top games you can simply imagine your knight swinging and whiffing at an orc, but seeing an attack visually connect and still missing is disconnecting) but why does it have to affect everything else?  Why can't we be guaranteed a tiger skin for killing tigers that actually have skin? Why do we have to kill the same mobs over and over again only to have our inventories stuffed with objects and gear that our characters can't use?  Essentially, why waste our time?

And then people will say, "But if you don't put the work in, how will you feel rewarded?"  I HATE that argument.  DETEST IT!  I WISH I had all the free time the people who use this argument have, because I don't HAVE that time.  I want to play and move on with the game's story, not spend a weekend killing the same damn monster for one damn drop.  I'd like to move on and play other games, but here I am, STILL trying to get a stupid weapon orb or a shard to open up a dungeon.  When you say "but you should put the work in a game," I wonder if you know what the purpose of a game is.  We work too hard in real life as it is.  We work to make money.  We work to clean and fix our houses.  We work to get our kids up for school in the morning, while also going to school ourselves.  We work to hold our families together.  Games are ESCAPES from work and should never feel like work itself.  Yes, it's great to be rewarded for your work, but not when your TIME is being wasted.  Dying a hundred times to a boss in Sekiro and finally beating him, that's work. Trying to figure out how to take down an AT-AT in Battlefront without getting blown up, that's work. Killing the same god damned rat in an RPG just to get a piece of an upgrade you need, that's not work; that's a chore.  That's time wasted. That's insanity.

The point I'm making is that RNG for drops is becoming antiquated.  Video games are evolving in so many areas so quickly, it's hard to keep up.  The "But that's how it's always been" excuse is no longer valid.  Just about every video game franchise from Mario to Assassin's Creed (which is a bad example, as the new ACs have RNG themselves now) has made a tremendous amount of changes to make their games more enjoyable.  As it stands, they only thing RNG is good for is to extend a player's playtime and in some games, annoy them to the point that they pull out their credit cards and just buy whatever they're trying to get. Please, developers, respect our time.

Mario Kart Poor... Two Weeks Later

So yeah, I still don't like Mario Kart Tour.  I did say I was going to try to stick with it to see if it got any better, and I was curious to see what the new tracks would be, but ultimately I found the game not to be worth it, and I uninstalled it from my phone.  It's the only Nintendo mobile game that I've done that with.  All the other titles have been at least fair and enjoyable on a free to play basis, but since this game has a competitive spirit, the only way you're going to consistently win is if you pay.  Only the top tier people get all the rewards, and they only stay that way from either extreme luck, or paying for pipe pulls.  It's very discouraging.

So what made me uninstall it?  Well, what I was afraid was going to happen happened.  The game tells you that each tour lasts two weeks, but I thought that maybe they meant from a competition standpoint.  No, when the new tour arrives, it flat out replaces the current tour, tracks and all.  Can you imagine in a normal Mario Kart game cups disappearing when you complete new ones?! This means that some of the special characters, karts and gliders aren't actually required on some tracks for bonuses meaning you have to start all over in your search for new gear.  If you paid for increased chances to get what you needed last tour, you need to do that yet again.  I mean, it's not surprising.  That's how mobile games keep their audience play....err... paying. 

It bothers me, though, because I'm a bit of completionist. I got all gold cups in every Mario Kart game I've played, and I spent hours trying to get all five stars on some of the tracks last tour only to see all that progress wiped away.  Infuriating.  Also, this new tour has apparently gotten much harder.  The AI has gotten more aggressive and the new track selection has some tracks that just don't translate well to MKT's mobile style of gameplay.  One such track, Neo Bowser, is so hard to navigate through all the S curves that I just don't see anyone doing well unless they master the drift only control method, which I can't.  To me, drift only is far worse than normal.

Anyway, I just had a much harder time getting first place in general.  Some tracks, though, I was able to have top tier bonuses because of my previous gear, and there was so many opportunities to rack up bonus points, it didn't even matter what rank I placed. One race, I got almost 10k points.  And that's another problem. There's so much inconsistency in the track selection.  The Kalimari Desert offers almost no opportunities for chaining combos because of how the track is laid out.  There's lots of straightaways and short turns that don't allow for much drifting.  If they actually added more bumps and ramps and whatnot, like they've done with other tracks, it would be more fun.  As it stands, it just smells of laziness. 

I also decided to try the Gold Pass free trial, and sadly, it didn't help much.  I appreciated all the extra rubies I got, as well as some gear, but it didn't help me much in the long run.  When I pulled from the pipe with all the new rubies I received, I got two back to back Baby Peaches, which I already had, and three repeat gliders.  This game's drop rate is even worse than Fire Emblem Heroes!  The new gear I got was seldom required for most of the tracks that I needed to complete, and the ones that were I ended up not using them because I had other gear that had higher point values.  Of course, I could fix that if the game would just let me grind XP on them, but I can't because of the daily caps. Daily caps in games that are designed to keep you playing are

 

I'm just tired of this game.  I'm frustrated with this game.  It makes me angry that one of my favorite franchises has been reduced to this mess.  I get mad that other people are really enjoying it, because I can't figure out what the draw is.  I even read a post from someone that said they had more fun with this than Mario Kart 8! (maybe trolling?)   I can't understand why people would rather spends loads of money on mobile shit versus actually buying a real gaming device with real games.  To each their own, I get it.  I just feel like right now, I'm stuck in some kind of video game Idiocracy that while I want quality games on mobile, which IS a thing, everyone's just happy playing Ow, My Balls!

I was hoping I could have lasted long enough to see what the multiplayer would be like, but I'm sure it wouldn't be any better than what's available now.  Most multiplayer I've played in mobile games suffer from latency, and considering Nintendo still  has issues in their Switch online games, I'm willing to bet there will be issues with MKT's multiplayer as well.  I'm also sure that multiplayer will benefit those who pay and sub to the Gold Pass.  I can't see multiplayer being a level playing field when the single player already begs you so hard for more money. I'm just hoping against hope that they include battle mode, because if they do, I might as least go back and try that, but then I had another thought.  Top tier characters get three items per item box.  Bottom tier only get one.  Can you imagine Battle Mode with that system?  Those who never got top tier characters wouldn't stand a chance!  So yeah, maybe it's better if I don't come back for the multiplayer.  I'll just be pissed off again.