Summer Intermission

Summer isn't quite over yet, but I don't really have anything planned.  June and July were great!  There was Steam Summer Sales, E3, EVO, Summer Games Done Quick, and The 5th International for DotA 2.  This past month has been sort of a blur for me.  I've gotten back to working again and finished two remixes.  I'm still working on the The Guardian Legend Remix Album and hope to finish quickly and work on more.  The quality of my work certainly has gone up, but my work count has lowered.  I'm glad I'm improving, but I expect myself to produce more work than this.  I'm currently at 8 complete audio works, and that's very little for me.  My count of completed games have also been kind of low.  There's only 5 days left of this month and I'm still at 87 completed games.  I was hoping to go beyond 90 games by now since it's the summer, but that just hasn't been happening.  For one, Terraria got an update and I got caught up in playing that every night for about 2-3 weeks.  It's amazing how much content is added with no extra charge for that game.  So near the end of July, I've been burning through some games: Remember Me, Fighties, Sol Divide, Diadra Empty, Divinity: Dragon Commander, Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires, Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions Evolved, Lost Planet 2, UBERMOSH, Cosmic DJ, Xeodrifter, Senran Kagura: Bon Appétit!, and Dungeon Hearts.  I'm going to try to finish more in the following days.  Looking through my list of completed games this past month, I can't say I've enjoyed a really good game in a while.  The closest game I would say that I really enjoyed was Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires.  The game was unpolished, lower quality than the base game (DW8), didn't have English voice overs (even though they said there would be), etc.  The game was just so low on quality that it was shocking since almost every Dynasty Warriors game I've played was pretty top notch, even my least favorite one (Dynasty Warriors 6) looked pretty and played solid.  But perhaps it's because I've never played an Empires version of any DW that I had so much fun with it.  I got to create my own character (I made Hatsune Miku), use a variety of weapons and customize their specials, look, and speech.  I got to make my own choices to achieve the main goal of unifying Ancient China.  It was the closest thing to a "make your own adventure" Dynasty Warriors RPG-experience game I wanted.  I've only finished one campaign and I do want to play the other ones, but I'm kind of preoccupied with finishing more games for now.  At this point, I want to clear up more games so I can move onto other games I'm interested in playing.

Besides Terraria, what's also been kind of halting my progress of finishing games is the amount of fighting games I started playing again.  Every year after EVO, I get excited about playing fighting games again.  I've also been revisiting a lot of older fighting games and forgot how fast-paced some of the older Capcom fighting games were.  I also revisited the old MAME collection I bought back in 2006 and looked for all the fighting games to look for one in particular: The Last Blade.  That game was really beautiful.  And then I was reminded of a lot of fighting games I've played in the past such as Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Capcom vs. SNK 2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and some games I've never played before like Capcom Fighting Evolution.  I had a particular interest in that one since Ingrid (exclusive to CFE and SFA3 MAX on PSP) was hinted on Capcom Twitter to a possible return in Street Fighter V.  I finally tried CFE out and I have to say that she's kind of difficult to use.  Her moves have a lot of delay starting and ending, her projectile move is about arms reach length, and she feels kind of clunky.  But if she does end up returning in Street Fighter V, I'm fine with that.  I'll definitely play her and see if I'll warm up to her.  Besides that, I've been playing some King of Fighters 13 Steam Edition (which I mainly got to play with a friend, but he ended up not liking it) and Dead or Alive 5 Last Round on PC to try to improve on both games (which I generally don't bother doing since there's no one to really play with) as well as Ultra Street Fighter IV so I could play with another friend that has it.  I bought all 3 games during the Steam Summer Sale.  I already have 3 previous versions of all three games but ended up buying the latest ones on PC.  I kind of warmed up to the idea since I play on the PC more often than I do on consoles now (I mainly play consoles on Saturdays and Sundays).  I do admit that it's kind of fun to actually practice and try to get better at these games, but it is a bit lonely when I don't have friends willing to play it with me.  At the very least I have one friend to play Street Fighter with and I've improved because of how good he is.  But because I've been revisiting a lot of older fighting games, I've also run across a lot of old RPGs as well.  I missed a lot of great games during the PS1 days and there's a bunch of PS2 games I still haven't gotten around to playing yet.  So this has been the majority of my time taken when I'm not working which explains why I haven't been finishing any games.

Despite the plethora of games I already own that I'm trying to get around to playing, there's just so many games I'm looking forward to that's about to release already:

-Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold: The Fafnir Knight - Aug 4
-XBLAZE: Lost Memories - Aug 11
-Dungeon Travelers 2: The Royal Library & the Monster Seal - Aug 18
-Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - Aug 18 (Steam Version)
-Zombi - Aug 18
-Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Aug 20
-Amnesia: Memories - Aug 25
-Evoland 2: A Slight Case of Spacetime Continuum Disorder - Aug 25
-One Piece: Pirate Warrior 3 - Aug 28
-Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls - Sep 1
-Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai DX - Sep 8
-Sword Coast Legends - Sep 8
-Super Mario Maker - Sep 11
-Mighty No. 9 - Sep 15 (Delayed till next year)
-Senran Kagura 2: Deep Crimson - Sep 15  (Already pre-ordered; I can't wait!)
-Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Sep 15
-Persona 4: Dancing All Night - Sep 29
-Samurai Warriors 4-II - Sep 29
-Dengeki Bunko: Fighting Climax - Oct 6
-Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance - Oct 6
-The Legend of Legacy - Oct 13
-Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege - Oct 13 (Delayed till December 1)
-Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below - Oct 13
-Tales of Zestiria - Oct 20
-SUPERBEAT: XONiC - Oct 20
-Call of Duty: Black Ops III - Nov 6
-Fallout 4 - Nov 10
-Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5 - Nov 10
-Norn9: Var Commons - Nov 10
-Rodea the Sky Soldier - Nov 10
-Star Wars Battlefront - Nov 17
-Stella Glow - Nov 17
-The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Nov 17
-Code:Realize - Guardian of Rebirth - Nov 24
-Just Cause 3 - Dec 1
-Xenoblade Chronicles X - Dec 4

I'm happy that there's games to look forward to, but I'm sad that I'm falling farther behind in clearing up my backlog of games.  It's even worse now that I'm adding older games that I find on Steam and PSN on sale (Grandia 2 Anniversary Edition released on Steam 2 days ago).

As for job searching, I might have mentioned a possible job position available.  I finally got a response stating that it was indeed a Senior level position and wasn't listed as one because they weren't receiving any applicants when they labeled it as such.  There's nothing I can do but keep looking elsewhere.

EVO 2015 Hype!

This is the first year I sat down for all 3 days of EVO and watched all the streams intently rather than watching it on the side while I played games or doing something else.  There were 7 streams going on at once this time around for EVO rather than just 3 which made it that much harder to follow everything.  I mostly followed Super Smash Bros. 4 and really enjoyed the high level play and all the crazy new strategies players have found and utilized during the tournament.

As varied as the character selection was for Smash 4, I couldn't help but see the same few characters throughout the tournament.  At the very least, it wasn't filled with Diddy Kongs since he was the strongest character that everyone swarmed towards playing for a while.  Funny enough, that's exactly who Grand Champion of EVO 2015 chose to play to win the tournament:


12:38 for the final combo he pulled off to win the tournament.  This was the best winning moment in EVO this past weekend.  The grand final was pretty decisive, but the fact that he was able to pull off a long combo like that at such a high percentage is what made it amazing.

Persona 4 Arena Ultimax Finals actually finished on the first day.  I saw a lot of Margaret picks, which reminds me that I have yet to try her out yet ever since buying the DLC for it.  Despite being a dominant pick for players at EVO, it was Super Boy's Ken Amada pick that led to a decisive victory at the Grand Finals.  I found the Loser's Bracket Finals to be a lot more exciting as it was an extremely close game with great plays by both players.  Hagiwara was also wearing a shirt with the most adorable character which I had to look up and found out it was a IdolMaster character "Anna Mochizuki".




Tekken 7's Final was akin to last year's Final for BlazBlue where the competitor from the winner's bracket had so many chances to end the tournament as the winner, but lost it every time.  It's not nearly as close as it was for BlazBlue last year, but you can tell he was so close that he can taste victory.  Through all the missed chances and eventual defeat, he broke down and was inconsolable.  Even Katsuhiro Harada, Director/Producer of Tekken, went over and comforted the broken AO.  I feel bad for him since he was so close, but Nobi's win was well earned through the struggle of clawing his way to the grand finals from the Loser's bracket.  I really like how Tekken 7 is looking and can't wait for it to reach consoles in the States.


Killer Instinct was pretty fun to watch, as well.  There were some crazy comebacks and close games.  Rico Suave, who I remember watching play last year, climbed back to the grand finals from loser's bracket and chose characters that the commentators didn't feel were good match-ups and ended up winning the tournament.  I haven't been much interested in the newest Killer Instinct since it was Xbox One exclusive, but it looks like they're bringing it to PC now so I'm super excited.  Killer Instinct was one of my favorite fighting games back on the Super Nintendo.


I missed the Guilty Gear Xrd Finals since it was streaming too early, but I'll watch a recording.  I wanted to get Guilty Gear Xrd, but I heard they're already bringing a more definitive version out.  So I'm just waiting on that before I pick it up. Oh yeah, and this apparently happened:  I also missed the Mortal Kombat X Finals, but I didn't really care too much about it.  I kind of just want to play the game a little.  I'm not too interested in watching MKX.

Super Smash Bros. Melee was pretty nerve wrecking to watch.  Lots of great plays, a surprise Samus pick (for me at least), and some disappointing mistakes.  I was all for Mango winning a 3rd year at EVO, but he made some mistakes and SD (Self-Destruct) twice on the last round against HungryBox.  HungryBox was playing to win at EVO as he came in 2nd last year against Mango, but was denied by another Fox player Armada.  It was a great Finals to watch.  I really liked that match between Leffen and Plup (Fox vs. Samus).


Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is the game of comebacks where I saw a lot of crazy matches turn around with one character.  Sadly, I didn't recognize a single player that was in the top 8.  All the best players were knocked out before reaching Top 8 which goes to show how much the meta and new blood has changed the game in the past year.  The winner used a team composition of Sentinel, Hulk, and Haggar.  It's team Big Buff Dudes!  I didn't watch the finals for UMvC3 has intently as I was playing Heroes of the Storm with a friend while I was watching.


And finally, there's Ultra Street Fighter IV which was absolutely bonkers!  This might be the last year SF4 will be at EVO since Street Fighter V's development is coming along and is getting closer to finishing.  So stuff like this happened during Ultra Street Fighter IV's EVO:






Ultra Street Fighter IV Finals were great.


With the close of EVO 2015, so too does the trinity of Summer Events.  E3 was a bit underwhelming this year.  There were a lot of surprises like Fallout 4, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Shenmue 3, The Last Guardian making an appearance once more after a long hiatus, and some other sequel announcements like Dishonored 2; however, there wasn't anything that drew me in and got me excited like I would every E3 before.  Steam Summer Sales was also underwhelming with shady dealings in raising prices before the discount, getting rid of bundles or forcing bundles, and lackluster discounts.  There were even a few times where a game was supposed to go on sale but was switched out when the time came.  There were a lot of players I was expecting to see at the top 8 finals for EVO but didn't, but still watched some really exciting matches this year.  So I would say that EVO was the best event out of the three this year.  Although, I shouldn't complain about getting the games I did during Steam Summer Sale.  I'm slowly getting through them and enjoying the ones I'm playing thus far.  With all this done and behind me, it's time to get back to work.