ENTRY 06: 10/04/2023 - Writing, Gaming, Adventures

Greetings once again, dear reader. I’m back again to update this humble blog of mine. Overall, things are going alright, though if I’m being honest I’m not exactly within the blogging frame of mind at this exact moment. Feeling a little distracted, a little tired, a little off the ball.

That isn’t to say I’ve felt that way over the full course of today, or the course of the past few days. I’m just increasingly familiar with this feeling of low energy, and I’d say it’s half the reason I haven’t updated the website in a few days. But, I digress. Into the news.

Dropped by a local convention a couple days ago, picked up some neat stuff. These conventions have to be the best place to pick up exactly the sorts of nerd paraphernalia I love for cheap prices, they were practically throwing videogames at me. Picked up the latter two Crysis games, Guilty Gear XX, and Odin Sphere, as well as my next Gunpla model kit, a Char Custom Z’Gok.

Odin Sphere is turning out to be a real ripper of a videogame, it feels like it’s from an entire console generation after the PS2, where it finds its home. Real prestige gaming, there. I think I first heard of Odin Sphere in a PeanutButterGamer video from like, I dunno, 10 years ago or something like that. Never forgot about it, given the visual spectacle and music on display. Very happy to finally be digging into it.

My PS2 might be getting on in the years, though. Had a scare today when trying to save my game, and the dang save data corrupted on me. Had to dig up another memory card hoping I had enough space on one to save, luckily I found one. Gonna see if I can’t delete the corrupted data at my next opportunity, I hear that particularly resistant cases of corrupt save data can be deleted through Action Replay, which I just so happen to possess. I’ll have to look into that, there’s a few other instances of corrupt data on some of my other memory cards. Might also want to consider purchasing more, I’m running out of space.

As for the Crysis games, I’ve yet to play them. I remember hearing about them a decade ago, they were rather frequently discussed in videogame circles as good examples of the FPS genre of the PS3 era. Guess we’ll see how that shakes out.

Ah, and Guilty Gear. I’ve played a bit of the original on PS1 by way of emulation, but this version on the PS2 is a cut above. So many more characters, the music is kickass, and it has Bridget in it, which makes it pretty much a 10/10. Nobody told me she had a godsdamned grappling hook, though? That’s the craziest shit I ever seen in a fighting game.

Now I just need to force someone to actually play it with me…

In other news, me and the pals online are starting another friendly writing competition again. This time, the theme is a battle royale between each participant, with each writing a story where they try and come out on top in an epic death batle tournament not unlike the Hunger Games. Our deadline is the 15th of this month, I’m hoping I can put something somewhat complete together. I guess we’ll wait and see. In any case, I’m glad to have a writing project to work on again, and a challenging one, at that.

Still playing Metroid ROMhacks on the side, but more of my time has been taken up lately by my current mission of getting caught up with Adventure Time and its side series. My pals have been getting into that Fionna and Cake show, and what little I’ve seen of it through memes and screenshots has me intrigued, so I’m watching through the entire series up to that point so I can get the full experience.

As a kid, I had the opportunity to watch the show while it was on TV, but my mom (fairly, in my opinion) forbid us to watch it based on the commercials and adverts, which, in hindsight, painted the show in a really unflattering light, focusing on the toilet humor and gross-out scenes. It made the show look like every other C- and D-list cartoon with an emphasis on gross imagery and uncreative jokes that was out at the time, and in retrospect it feels like a lot of cartoons that came out after Adventure Time took more inspiration from those same commercials that made the show look so uninteresting than they did from the show’s actual content.

Visiting it for the first time years later, I’m impressed with how good it is, it’s gotten more than a few chuckles out of me. Very much a favorite, and I kind of regret not having watched it as a kid, I know I would have loved it. At least I got to see all of Gravity Falls, which also rules.

I think I’ll wrap up this blog entry here, I could go on to talk about some half-formed thoughts I have about my inexperience with particularly complex social interactions and difficult emotions, but that seems more like a Musings post kind of topic. Stay tuned, the website is still being worked on, but for now the above things have my focused attention. Happy spooky month, by the way!