Cris au Néant

Pokémon Champions has thoroughly overhauled the competitive scene. It has 186 species of Pokémon (all fully evolved), a severely limited selection of held items, the dreaded Item Clause (no two Pokémon on any team can hold the same item), and a simplified version of Effort Values. All Pokémon are set to Level 50 and can have 66 Stat Points distributed across their stats, with each stat limited to…

They say religion is devotionThree six five, every minute, every day Of all the Christian songs I listen to regularly, “Til the Day I Die” by TobyMac has the least demeaning thing to say about the term. As for the others… Leave religion at the doorRaise the roof and shake the floorLet’s get loud and let’s exploreJoy Unspeakable [by Mandisa] Come overthrow our systemsWe need a brand new…

February is a short month. Not much to blog for this one, least of all within the last hour. Part of it is being tired and, for undisclosed reasons, in a foul mood. So many recent snow days for where I live, as well. Star Rail version 4 is overwhelming. It was difficult to pass up Jing Yuan, Sparkle, Imbibitor Lunae, and Kafka in favor of Aventurine. Had some decent luck with Black Swan: a coin…

Honkai: Star Rail turned from “whatever” to “that one game with the girl who sounds like Neptune” and then from something I merely wanted to try out to a regular influence on my free time. At the time of writing, my playtime on the Epic Games version is over 900 hours, although this includes the amount of time I’ve left it idle to attend to another matter, usually food-related and sometimes even…

As much music as I bought over the past two years, I bought even more this year. Most of it was Christian as usual, although I somewhat loosely keep up with iTunes releases from Beat Saber and Erabareshi. I’ll start with Beat Saber because the 7th anniversary song “Danger” was released this year and I already touched upon it in February. Of course, this leaves OST Volume 8, which came out near…

Consider this a more ordinary / short / free-form blog post for the last hour of the month, while I don’t have anything in particular planned out. As of recently, Star Rail has a new mini-game called Currency Wars, which is similar to the Fate/stay night mini-game but with max-level characters and TCG-style preparation mechanics. It means plenty more unlockables, primarily Bond Links that can…

Pre-ordered within two days of release, picked up the night after release, completed the main story and caught Zygarde. I’d say it’s overall about as solid as Legends Arceus; while it lacks the location diversity and has no vehicular Pokémon or means of shiny hunting, it abounds with character diversity and brings its fair share of unique gameplay nuances, not to mention plenty of new Mega…

80 Warps, no coin flip loss—again, about average. I had 151 Warps’ worth of resources saved up, and I ended up with 71 Special Passes in reserve. Unfortunately, I did the Warps just after midnight EDT and consequently found out the hard way that a character’s “Date obtained” advances later than that; as such, that of Silver Wolf is one day before my birthday. That’s fine; it is my grandmother’s…

…because you just might get it all, as the Daughtry lyric goes. It confused me as a teenager, but now I think I get it to an extent. Early this month, I finally got the green light from Nintendo to buy a Switch 2 off their website—just the standard kind; I have no interest in Mario Kart World, let alone $50’s worth. I also purchased DK Bananza and Bravely Default, of course, and even though I…

Je suis un homme d’affaires. Mon travail, c’est la programmation. C’est quoi le temps libre? Ce que je passe en jouant aux jeux vidéo? En regardant quelques sites web? En cuisinant mes dîners? En conduisant lorsque j’écoute de la musique? Bien que la plupart de la musique que j’écoute, ce soit la musique chrétienne en anglais (que je chante), la musique des jeux vidéo, et la musique japonaise. Le…

As in, still playing Honkai: Star Rail. I did end up getting Anaxa (in reference to two months ago), who prefers to be called Anaxagoras even though the game does not, as well as The Herta and Aglaea. On the latter front, I got lucky with a coin flip loss in three ten-Warps, but neither for her nor for Anaxa did the final pull come easily. The Herta, by contrast, was a rather quick one, to the…

Seven years… It’s been about half that time since I bought a Quest 2 with the game, powered through Campaign mode, and continuously improved to the point of passing every freebie on Expert+ except the newest one and Power of the Saber Blade, in addition to getting a full combo on roughly 60% of them. It swiftly became my favorite game of all time and remains so to this day, despite my current…

This title is partly inspired by the Nintendo Switch 2 pre-order process. I never cared to subscribe to Switch Online, and I didn’t know I could register interest in the console without it until the week after the Nintendo Direct that touched upon the concept, which was clearly way too late for their “first-come, first-served” system.So, fast-forward to the 24th. I had received the day-before…

It’s been a long time since I last added an entry to this series. I’ve been thinking that I should approach it differently compared to how the latest entry turned out. For one thing, perhaps I’m being too restrictive with how aleatory the alliance gets. There are 1025 Pokémon in the National Pokédex, 38 fully evolved CAP creations, and 39 of their pre-evolutions. Let’s go all in with an upper…

Last month, I briefly touched upon Honkai: Star Rail, one of a fair few HoYoVerse games, and how one of its distinguishing factors is having a character whose English voice sounds like that of Neptune. First of all, her name is Silver Wolf, which I’m bound to remember from now on. Second of all, not only does she sound like Neptune, but she’s a fun-loving genius hacker* (and a stylish one at…

Not gonna lie, regarding the PC game platform Epic Games, it really does have some epic games. It offers freebies every so often, the only one of which I’ve ever played is Escape Academy (co-op), but that’s not the cursory topic of the month. One way I’ve been spending my time lately is on the free-to-play games that happen to be anime-style with gacha systems. Of course, with the amount I’ve…