I talk about games

More specifically, how Sega could make a new Sonic RPG, reuse the create an avatar feature, include throwback, and give Pokémon a big kick up the arse. Let's pretend this game exists.

You know how Dr. Eggman creates robots, or badniks? What if they went rogue? All his past creations too. They broke free of his programming and just went wild? Now, imagine that world a few years later. The badniks were tamed by the people. They can self replicate, but nobody knows how. Used as pets, labour, and most importantly, competitive fighting. There were rumours of some of the boss badniks out there too. But nobody has ever found them. Also, Eggman has just disappeared.

You wake up as your avatar and your goal is to be the best robot fighter. So your enroll to the league. You get given one robot to start with. A Crabmeat, Buzzbomber, or a Chopper. You have a mini battle with the other two to learn about type advantages. You can get the other two later in the story as gifts for completing tasks.

You then get approached by Tails. He wants you to document every badnik. He's always been very unsure about all this, and he wants you to capture one of every kind so he can see if something is up. He gives you a means to caught them, and control them. Probably a hacking device that can get upgraded, as well as a pda with a blank sheet. Basically a pokedex. It'll tell you what game they were first met, some basic info, and most importantly, locations to find them, and their encounter rate.

You then have to go around the worlds and search for clues, capturing robots, while also keeping some for training and fighting. You meet other characters who are in the tournament who test you. Kind of like gym battles. Team Chaotix would be your biggest rivals.

You meet Sonic, and Knuckles too. Now they have tracked down boss badniks, and have suspicions that they are after chaos emeralds. They're destroying the land and it's not good. They work with you and help you track down, and capture the bosses. The bosses can be summoned like the rides in Sun/Moon.

Over time, you uncover a signal that alerts Sonic to his greatest fear. Metal Sonic is out there. You also discover new badnik blueprints, which is suspicious. Turns out, Eggman was hiding the whole time. He successfully has infiltrated every home with badniks, and once he has gathered all the emeralds will turn them back on and take over. You invade his lab, in the sky of course, and overthrow him. Destroy his control mechanism, and he gets arrested. That'll be the first roll credits.

You the have the end game stuff, which is the tournament final 8, collecting everything, which becomes a lot easier now you have beat Eggman and updated the pda with a tracker for every undiscovered badnik. You then also learn of the location of every Metal Sonic incarnation. MechaKnuckles, and the Tails Doll, as well as Omochao, and Emerl.

Combat would be turn based, but your speed stat influences how quick your recharge would be. You can't fight the robots, or bosses directly because you're not Sonic, Tails, etc. However, they can be used as summons for a massive attack. Basically Z-moves. One per battle, and each one needs to recharge. The more major characters and boss badniks you meet and beat, or help, the more different summons you unlock. Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles (Maybe Amy, Shadow, and Rouge) can get upgraded attacks.

The capturing will give you a choice at first whether you want to send it to research, or keep in your personal collection for battling. That way you have insentive to catch them all for unlocks, but only keep the ones you like. The unlocks would be cosmetic choices for you, and badniks. New paint jobs, and accessories that you can place wherever. And yes, you can give each badnik a nickname.

They level up and get stronger via upgrading attacks, speed, defences, and mods. Mods need parts of badniks you've fought and destroyed, so you're encouraged to fight as many things as you can. There wouldn't be evolutions or breeding, but you can mod attacks from similar badniks. Like giving Chopper the ring sapper ability from those piranha bots in Sonic 3. Or Crabmeat burst fire, or a claw launching ability, or the shield from the crabs in Sonic 2. There will be a chao garden kinda deal for everything you sent to Tails for research too.

You're also encouraged to get a large diverse team, because if one of your badniks get destroyed, you need to send it for repairs to Tails, and that takes them out of a few battles. You can also buy repair kits to restore them immediately. You're given a few at the start. If you run out of fighting badniks, you have to pay a ring penalty to Tails to work extra hard to fix them immediately.

Metal Gear Solid is one of my favourite games. I know it very well, and still have my original PS1 discs. I'm currently replaying it and having such a good time. There's one thing that always had me curious though. Decoy Octopus. How would you have fought him, and defeated him?

Don't get me wrong, how they handled it in the game was brilliant. But I'd have liked it if there was a challenge involved when facing him in game. So, here's how I'd do the encounter with him.

I'd have had a dialogue tree when talking to the "DARPA Chief" in the cell. Snake would either share or withhold information from the chief. All unknowing to the player that you were talking to Octopus. They'll think they're trying to reassure the DARPA chief into cooperating. The more information you give that might help Foxhound, including what your mission is, where you'd be heading, what you know about Foxhound from the briefings menu before the game starts (which could make the boss fight easier to win or lose depending on how much you've read), and who you're seeking out, would influence how guarded and boobytrapped the area would be, and also the bosses will protect their weaknesses better because they know what you know about them. If you decided to keep everything classified, or feed false information, then the enemies would have been on usual patrols, and bosses would take you less seriously, causing them to get careless.

I'm okay with upgrading your tools. I'd be okay with maintaining them for a boost to effectiveness for the first few hits. Watering cans have better range. Axes yield more wood, shovels bash rocks and get a better chance of iron etc. But to have them break is stupid. It's frustrating. It takes the fun out of grinding for fish and bugs. On top of a limited inventory. Those two extra rows were necessary, given all the crap you need to carry with you.

This is further made more frustrating with this damn egg event. THE FUCKING PETALS SHOULD NOT BREAK MY GODDAMN NET! The eggs frequency waste so much of my tool's life too. On top of that, I have 6 spots wasted by collecting eggs. On top of the spots needed for iron, twigs, and various wood types.

You know what would have made this a little bit better? If your stored items at home could count towards crafting, if you're indoors. But no. The game can't do that. But you can access your wardrobe. Yaaaaaaaay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm having such a good time with Animal Crossing. It's made this isolation thing that little bit more wholesome, and I love sharing items and visiting my friend's islands. But the tools should not break. It's ruining the fun for me, and I can't be the only one annoyed by this.

I'd give the game a C+

I decided to put my opinions on the internet. RIP me. Link below.

This list is based on characters I know, so if a few are missing, it’s because I’ve never seen them in anything, or they’re completely unmemorable. I ranked them based on design, their personalities, and how they have been used in the games/cartoons over time.

Look at her lips. They are ridiculously tiny. It's slightly unsettling.

I hate how Hunter's voice went from Andy Dwyer to generic dudebro. It's harder for me to like him. In fact, a lot of the voice acting of minor characters sound a little flat. For example, on the orb challenge where you super charge the idols, the end speech by Stella was theatrical as heck in the original. Now it's sounds like a line read. I feel like all the voicing effort went into the first game. I've yet to play 3 though, so I'll hold my judgement.

So I had a bit of fun with Farcry 5. It is flawed, and very repetitive in places, but as I don’t buy all the Farcry games, or any other Ubisoft titles, it didn’t bother me so much. The last game I played of theirs was Farcry 3, and Assassin’s Creed 2, so I wasn’t over exposed and exhausted from the Ubisoft experience.

Then I got to the “ending”… there may be slight spoilers ahead, so forgive me. I’ll try to keep it as vague as possible.

Basically, once you kill the three henchmen, you get to meet and fight the big bad. The fight is…. underwhelming. But you get the feeling that something else is coming. You watch the cutscene where you win and…. there’s an explosion? Shit seems to have gone wrong. You, your police buddies, and the big bad get away in a car. But right at the exit point you crash. They appear to be dead… except the big bad. He takes you to the bunker and…. he’s talking about some nonsense (spoiler; I didn’t care enough about the story to pay full attention. But it’s pretty much all people are terrible and you will be judged yadda yadda yadda)…and then the game just ends. It. Just ended.

Now. Two things could be true here. The first, and most likely is that it’s going to be concluded with a dlc chapter. Or, they just really fucked up with the ending. I don’t think that’s likely. So here’s why the first option is terrible.

1. If you bought this game on of around release, which at this time of writing I assume that everybody has, you have bought an unfinished product. This not in my feels so cheap, it completely undervalued every moment leading up to this “climax”. You just spend hours going around liberating the same tired ads camps, destroying shit, driving around shit, collecting pointless shit, fishing, hunting, flying, sailing, swimming, drug tripping, bear petting, redneck exploding, perk upgrading, etc…. for a cop out limp Dick ending. But wait. The epilogue is coming.

2. DLC endings are bullshit cash grabs. Fuck every game publisher who pulls this shit. Fuck WB Games and Shadow of War. Fuck Ubisoft. And fuck you if you actively support it. Games like Farcry do not need to be a live service with a never ending story… because it’s a. A solo campaign, and b. You know a sequel is coming that’s totally unconnected other than by tired bland formula. Live service models work for online mmo style games, or games like Overwatch. They are there for the multiplayer experience. They evolve over time, and grow with the community. They’re not perfect, but they don’t pretend to be a complete experience because their experience is seasonal. Far cry has a beginning, middle and…. pay wall. For a full priced AAA game, this is dirty.

3. I covered this in point 1, but it’s worth noting again. Everything you just did has no satisfying conclusion. I don’t want to grind for the rest of the story stuff now. I sure as shit won’t be getting the dlc. I put off buying God of War so I could play this with a friend on co-op. We had a lot of fun. But We both agreed that this ending was so unsatisfactory. Moreso than Metal Gear Solid 5’s ending.

So…. to summarise. I don’t know if I could recommend this game to anybody. If you just wanna waste time. I suppose this will work. There’s far better games out there that fill the same hold though. Skyrim. Fallout 4. Hell, Farcry 3 has more heart in it than this. I’m sad. This is very disappointing.

I'm a huge fan of the Metal Gear Solid franchise... That is, before Konami did a Konami, and we all know that Konami is the worst. It saddens me that I will not be getting Metal Gear Survive, but at the same time, I know that without Hideo Kojima, it's not going to be a huge loss.

What does interest me, however, is how they're doing the zombie-like thing in a Metal Gear universe. I think they're going about it the wrong way. In fact, Kojima himself already had the core concept of this down in an earlier game. This next section will have some gameplay spoilers so you've been warned. Go play the games. Seriously, I think they're fantastic.

Metal Gear Solid 3 has a boss encounter with a guy known as The Sorrow. The difficulty of this boss is dependant on how many enemies you've killed vs how many you just incapacitated. If you've killed few, there will be less enemy ghosts you'll face in this fight. Subsequently, the more you kill, the more ghosts will try to stop you. Are they ghosts? Visions? Ghosts is easier to explain. It also depends on how they die. If you maim their limbs before they pass, they'll limp. If they're eaten by a vulture, and you in turn eat said vulture, they'll say something like 'you ate me'. But spookier. But this idea of everything you've killed coming back to haunt you would work perfectly for a new game plus mode.

This would only work if both Metal Gear Solid, and/or Metal Gear Solid 4 had a remake on the same system, and one which the saved data files could talk to one another.

Think about it. Shadow Moses. The events shortly after MGS1, or during that one mission in MGS4. You have to go back for reconnisanse and covering Foxhound's tracks. Now, depending on how you played the game, every enemy you killed is now a shambling husk of their former self. Undead. Seemingly invincible. In the same areas you killed them. The DARPA chief, Baker, The bosses, too. Back to haunt you in the decaying ruins of the base. Hell, Ocelot's severed arm could be crawling around like that thing on the Addams Family. And depending on the ending you got, a zombie corpse of Meryl towards the end.

Granted, it would be as silly as Red Dead's zombie dlc, and would have required incredible foresight from the developers years before it could be put into place, unless it was a new game plus bonus mode. It's definitely more in tone with the campy, yet serious, nature of Kojima's previous offerings than what Konami are currently squatting and straining out. You can't eat Kojima's idea and expect to shit out a sequel of the same quality or praise no matter what little nuggets may or may not be hidden inside. Not everyone wants to be a video game proctologist.

First of all, I'm absolutely in love with this series of let's plays. It has the right amount of danger, shenanigans, and progress to keep the audience (I.e. me) engaged.

It has got me thinking though about one thing that could make the experience more interesting. The whole Nug Club thing they have going on would actually make a great mechanic for the game, or any survival and scavenge game (If it doesn't already exist in other games).

'How would this work?', I hear you say. Basically your inventory would have one trinket slot. This item space would be for small totems, such as a golden nugget, rabbit's foot, zombie hand, dog tags, bottle cap etc. Basically, anything that isn't a weapon or a resource. It would be attributed to a skill, which when it's increased, would affect the percentage chance of something happening.

For example, a gold nugget would slightly increase your chances of getting minerals in chests and looting. Bottle caps would increase your chances of finding beverages. Dogtags makes ammo and weapons more effective. Zombie parts make you less detectable by hordes, but also scare animals easier. Rabbit's foot helps you get raw materials from animals easier at the expense of being easier to find.