Drowning in games

I’m still trying to finish up games I picked up during the Steam Winter Sale and plan to get back into console and handheld games and finish up games I’ve started 2-5 years ago.  Some of the most interesting games I’ve played and finished these past two months are: Ghosts ‘n Goblins Resurrection, Huntdown, Vagante, My Friend Pedro, and Lost Ruins.  I picked up Monster Hunter Rise at launch in hopes of playing it co-op with friends.  But everyone was progressing so quickly on their solo runs that I became discouraged to play it.  I still plan on playing when I can, but I haven’t played it nearly as much as I was hoping as I’ve been working through that backlog.  Despite knowing the amount of games releasing these next few months, I still ended up picking up a few games during the Lunar New Year’s sale.  Two games were actually not part of the sale, but were launched with a discount: Alina of the Arena and Blade Assault.

I played the demo of Alina of the Arena a month before its launch to Early Access and really enjoyed the game loop.  It’s a strategy, deck-building rogue-like that has Alina fighting a gauntlet of enemies.  While I do enjoy the game and have played nearly 10 hours of it, I never got past the 2^nd arena and am really struggling with the boss.  No matter how broken or overpowered I felt, the boss proved to be more broken and overpowered every time.  Blade Assault is an Action-Platformer Rogue-like where I’m facing a similar problem of not being able to progress because of the sheer difficulty.  It’s because of the seemingly unreasonable difficulty of Rogue-likes that I have been avoiding them more over the years despite it being one of my favorite sub-genres.  I enjoy both games, but the time it takes to get a little bit better or amount of runs it took to get lucky with perks and items is making it harder to justify spending more time on them when I’m trying to finish more games.

One free game that I’ve been waiting for nearly a decade for finally released.  Lost Ark is a top-down MMORPG that has the action and slick animations of a Diablo-like.  I played that for a bit before being distracted by two other big games.  The other two big games I picked up are Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 2 and The King of Fighters XV.  I’ve barely touched Gunvolt Chronicles 2 and have only played the prologue and first level so far.  KOFXV, on the other hand, I’ve put in 32 hours already.  I was thinking of skipping KOFXV so that I can focus my money and time on Elden Ring, but I ultimately decided to pick up KOFXV for the reason that I really want to make an actual effort to finally learn how to play a KOF game and hoping to take advantage of playing it online at launch where there will be the most amount of players while Elden Ring is mostly a single-player experience and will undoubtedly have more players in the long term anyways.  While I haven’t played online against other players this past week and a half yet, I’ve made a lot of progress learning how combos, system mechanics, and team building works.  It feels so exciting that I’m finally understanding KOF and playing at a semi-competent level.  But even KOFXV had to take a backseat with my time this week.

Steam Next Fest started this week where tons of developers and publishers release demos of their up and coming games for people to try out and give feedback.  I’ve spent most of my time with that this past week and played a lot of disappointing games while running into a handful of extremely promising ones.  I think Neon White has been the most impressive demo I’ve played so far.  It was announced last year during a Nintendo Direct and for an entire year I thought it was a first-person shooter rogue-like.  But playing the demo, I realized it was a precision-platformer.  I’ve played quite a few 3D, first-person perspective precision-platformers in the past, but none with as much style, story and personality as Neon White.  I’m definitely looking forward to it.

There was also a demo for Phantom Breaker Omnia which I felt conflicted about.  I was already excited for the game to begin with.  Phantom Breaker is a 2D Fighter I’ve waited nearly 11 years for someone to localize to North America.  But what made me not want to play the demo was possibly enjoying it way too much and wanting to pick it up at launch.  The problem with that scenario is that I’m already picking up quite a bit of games and the release of Phantom Breaker Omnia is, unfortunately, a day before Persona 4 Arena Ultimax.  The last time I bought two fighting games together was one was barely touched and thus wasn’t worth the price I put down for it.  Well, the opposite happened.  Phantom Breaker Omnia definitely got some improvements from previous iterations, but its base gameplay is still kind of janky and unrefined.  I knew it wasn’t going to be incredible, but I didn’t realize just how rigid and clunky the game was going to feel, especially compared to the beat-em-up spinoff Phantom Breaker Battlegrounds.  Still, I did find it enjoyable with the amount of characters, stages, and system mechanics it’ll have for the full game.  What the demo helped me decide was that I wasn’t going to pick it up at launch as even $40 is too steep of a price for a game I won’t be playing with friends, won’t have much of an active online community game, and possibly won’t have much time to play yet.  I’m super happy it’s finally coming to America, and I really do want to support it.  If no other games were coming out, I’d probably put down the $40 for it.  But for now, I might not decide to pick it up until it’s down to $20 or so.

Besides that, the one other demo that really stuck out to me was GhostLore.  It’s a Diablo-like that focuses on East-Asian folklore.  Based on how rough and basic the user-interface looked, I was expecting a truly janky game.  But to my surprise, it looks pretty good, animation is smooth, combat felt satisfying, and character building sounds interesting.  Some things did feel a bit unpolished such as spells not signifying there isn’t enough mana to cast or odd collision detection, but overall it seems like a game that I would definitely enjoy.

So besides some of the games I got from Steam Winter Sale, the biggest distractions I have right now are Monster Hunter Rise, Lost Ark, Gunvolt Chronicles 2, and The King of Fighters XV.  Because of this, I’ve had to skip out on: Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Dynasty Warriors 9: Empires, and Elden Ring.  And next month, I’m going to have to skip out on Babylon’s Fall, Triangle Strategy, Phantom Breaker: Omnia, Stranger Of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin, GhostWire: Tokyo, and Kirby and the Forgotten Land so I can focus my time on Persona 4 Arena Ultimax and pick up Tiny Tina’s Wonderland.  Things are going pretty well for videogames this quarter.  As for world news, I don’t even really want to talk about it.  Within the past week, Russia has declared war with Ukraine and has already invaded.  It’s depressing.

I was supposed to get back into productivity by doing piano recordings this month, but I still feel like I’m drowning in games and still want to clear some more before I do.  With Phantom Breaker: Omnia releasing in two weeks, I’ve been listening to the music to the original game and feel compelled to do a remix for one of the tracks.  There’s a lot I want to do this year, but I don’t have much of a plan or schedule for it right now.  Return to music projects, language learning, watching animé, improving on fighting games, and reading books are among them.  One step at a time, I suppose.

New Year's Resolution 2022

2021 was unlike any other year I’ve experienced in the past 11 years.  A lot of plans went accordingly while others were thrown out altogether.  With the threat of the COVID-19 virus still prevalent in the world, we were still reluctant to go out anywhere for the first half of 2021.  It has been both an interesting year and a painful year in 2021.

I started the year purchasing an Oculus Quest 2 and delving into Virtual Reality games.  I expected it to be a fun little distraction I could partake in.  But VR turned out to be a life changing experience for me.  Having been home for the past 11 years, the sudden and constant flow of stimulation from being in new environments and new experiences did wonders for my mental health.  I expected VR to be more of something I did alone, but I quickly learned that a lot of VR games can be played online with friends.  Having my friends standing next to me, even as fictional virtual characters, brought me closer to them than any other videogame was capable of doing in the past.  Another huge surprise was how much physical exertion was required to play some of these VR games.  I was playing VR everyday for nearly 2 months before I cut down on the time I spent with a headset on.  I found a balance between working out on Ring Fit Adventure and playing games in VR for exercise and I managed to drop to the weight I was at coming out of college.  It has since gone back up a little ever since we started going out to eat again.

Early March, I learned about Moses McCormick's (also known as 老鼠 - lǎoshǔ 'Mouse') passing.  As mentioned in the post that month, he was a polyglot Youtuber that surprised people by speaking their native language to them.  I enjoyed his videos and respected his ability to learn so many different languages, and thus saddened by his passing.  Around that time, I was playing VR Chat and tried to look for Japanese players to practice speaking Japanese with.  What I eventually found were players from around the world ALSO trying to practice Japanese but also spoke different languages.  I met people from France, Germany, South Korea, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Russia all wanting to learn Japanese.  So with those two events in mind, it inspired me to start learning different languages.  Throughout April, I focused on learning Korean, practicing guitar, and exercising.  It was also around this time that Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 came out and I was studying on how to get better on the two.  I actually forgot that it was within this past year that I learned new setups on Tetris and learned how to do a GTR setup on Puyo Puyo.  While it sounds silly to learn such unpractical skills, it was fulfilling and was proud I made progress in getting better at those two games.  I eventually made progress in practicing guitar and recorded a cover/arrangement.

While I did not mention it in my posts in May and June, I think I’m willing to talk a little about it.  In May, we received news that a close family friend of ours had a sudden heart attack and passed away.  It was shocking and heart breaking.  He lived in China and with the travel restrictions in place due to the pandemic, we wouldn’t be able to go pay our respects to him if we wanted to.  Then less than a month later, my aunt passed away from an aggressive form of cancer.  The following months were difficult, and a lot happened in between, though that’s as much as I want to say on the matter.

It was around this time that my family and I got vaccinated and started slowly going out more again.  I saw friends and family I haven’t seen in a long time.  I finally got to see my sister, who I haven’t seen in 2.5 years.  We’ve never been apart that long our whole lives.  I was practicing a lot of Guilty Gear Strive at this time and it was the first time I felt like I was getting somewhere in learning and improving in a fighting game.

The past few months have been kind of a blur as I spent half a year learning a piano piece.  I finally learned the whole piece, but it required dropping everything else I was doing.  Because of this, I didn’t work on any large audio projects for the entirety of 2021.  No remixes, no compositions, only one recording of playing guitar and the recording I did for piano was so poor that I didn’t even count it.  I’m still trying to get better at playing the piece before I record it again.  I forgot to mention that I drew something in 2021.  It’s been an interesting year since I tried to do a lot of things I normally don’t do or haven’t done in a long time: drawing, practicing guitar and piano, learning new languages, and putting actual time and effort into learning a fighting game.

In any case, it’s time to see what resolutions were actually fulfill and which ones weren’t.

Reflection of 2021’s Resolutions:

1) Work on even more original music.  2020 is the most amount of original work I’ve ever created in a year and they were far greater than the remixes I made in the same year.

-I never had time to work on anything in 2021 because I put so much time and effort into learning a guitar track and a piano piece.  This was a resolution I made back in 2018: learn one difficult piece on piano and one hard track on guitar.  I really put in the effort this year and learned how to play Awe of She (Dizzy’s Theme) from Guilty Gear X on guitar and Chopin’s Op. 9 No. 2 Nocturne on piano.  I spent around 3-4 months on guitar and 5-6 months on piano.

2) Mix in new activities this year.  I haven’t watched animé in years and I managed to watch through 19 shows over the summer in 2020.  It was such an incredible feeling watching animé again and changing up my daily routine.  I also created one drawing.  I’d like to do more of that this year: read more books, watch more anime, draw more, practice more musical instruments, and work on other non-music related projects.

- This was my whole year, essentially.  I got into VR and lost a lot of weight.  I created one new drawing.  I was learning and studying eight languages.  I learned a hard guitar track.  I learned and improved on Tetris and Puyo Puyo.  I put in the time and effort to learning and improving Guilty Gear Strive and Melty Blood Type Lumina where it’s the first time I felt like I was getting anywhere in a fighting game.  And then I learned how to play Chopin’s Nocturne, something I’ve wanted to do my whole life.  I got swept up in everything I did in 2021 and concentrated more on what I wanted rather than what I needed.  It felt very liberating from my own conscious of always trying to work towards my career.  I do feel sad that I didn’t make any time for watching animé or reading books.

3) Find even more ways for self-improvement.  Each day, I strive to better myself as a person in body and mind.  I’ve been doing pretty well with taking care of my health, and I think I still have plenty of room for improvement.  I made new discoveries on mixing and mastering in music production.  I’ve been trying to improve in fighting games the past 2 years and I want to get better (and Guilty Gear Strive releases in April).  Maybe fulfilling resolution #2 will allow me to learn new things or gain new experiences.

-Yes, 2021 was a year I spent a lot of time on self-improvement.  I can’t remember if everything I was able to do in 2021 was actually planned or if I was saying in general that I wanted to “learn new things or gain new experiences”.

4) Apply for jobs.  I have enough work to compile a new portfolio.  I’m ready.

-I had zero motivation to look for and apply for jobs in 2021.  We were still in lockdown in the beginning of the year, and I honestly wasn’t expecting to spend so much time on practicing guitar and piano.

5) Control yourself!  I can’t believe I’m making this my resolution once more, and I’ll probably fail considering how many games I’m (now, after seeing what’s in store for 2021 shown at the Videogame Awards) looking forward to this year.  But if possible: spend less money, finish more games than acquired, and reduce that backlog!

-I was doing so well throughout the year…In 2020, I finished 141 games and acquired 184 games.  In 2021, I finished 150 games but acquired 217 games.  The three factors that caused this was: I bought a lot of new VR games after getting the Oculus Quest 2, I subscribed to Humble Choice for a year because of a discount offer for new customers, and a lot of the games I wanted to get all came out in the last few months.  Needless to say, I utterly failed on this resolution.

So I did exceedingly well on two of the resolutions, but absolutely failed on three of them.  It was a year filled with unexpected turn of events and focusing on self-improvement rather than moving forward in life.  So in 2022, I need to take what I've learned and experienced in 2021 and channel it towards what I want to achieve this upcoming year.

My Resolutions for 2022:

1) Get back to working on projects.  I have a lot planned.

2) Continue learning languages.  Focus on Chinese and Japanese.

3) Watch Animé, read books.  I want to do more of this.

4) Update resumé and portfolio.  I really need to make that first step, again.

5) Play more fun games.  I seemed to have played a lot of mediocre games in 2021.

Honestly, I have no motivation to work at the moment.  I’m still burnt out from learning Chopin’s Nocturne in the past half year and all I can think about right now is playing some videogames and I feel like I haven’t been doing that, even though I clearly have.  Going back into language learning, watching animé and reading books also sound nice, but I think I’ll eventually get around to working on recording piano arrangements first since I’ve been practicing piano lately.  Moving forward with videogames this year, I think I should play more quality games, console games, and handheld games instead of playing so many small PC games and mobile games.  Judging from the past two years, I think it’d be prudent of us to move forward with caution rather than optimism.  Please be kind to us, 2022.