I haven’t posted a blog entry since March, and it’s not because I forgot to do so. Okay, it’s not entirely because of that. Whenever I sit down to write for anything other than an article, I wonder why I’m not working on an article. I enjoy personally chronicling my journey through life and the arts, but my articles also contain my background on anything I’m covering. There’s a sense that I’m exponentially increasing my workload through redundancy.

Is that rational? I don’t know. ‘Course, my stint with Old School Gamer Magazine also cuts into my time. There’s so much I want to experience, and it feels like seconds into minutes into hours just vanish into the ether. You know what I’m talking about.

And frankly, are my blog posts even popular enough to justify continuing? If these are relevant to you, please let me know, because I otherwise have no indication of how valued they are. If I’m going off hits alone, the blog posts don’t measure up to the articles. I expect that. What I want to know is what people are actively reading and looking forward to. With no other metrics, I have to believe my decision to move away from blog posting is optimal.

With that out of the way, let me see if I can remember how I used to do this shiz.

Personal Life

Single and More-or-Less Ready to Mingle

I’ve mentioned her before, so it seems “right” to close the book on this: my previous relationship ended a couple months ago. No big, inciting incident or anything; we had just been growing distant for a while. I felt it was coming, but it made me sad all the same. I did care about her.

What does this mean for you, reader? Well, nothing, provided you’re not interested in dating me (and fair enough, there). I just implied I was in a relationship in previous posts, now I’m not, so I’m making sure that’s corrected. Simple as. There’s a greater practicality when concerning people in my personal life sometimes read my site, too. No one uses Facebook anymore to check relationship statuses. Not that randos are entitled to every detail of anyone’s personal life, but a simple “single/not single” factoid is harmless enough, I suppose. Christina Hendricks has to know my options are open!

It stung a bit when my automatic calendar reminders on my phone pointed out that our second-year anniversary landed just a month or two after the breakup. My fault for not diligently scrubbing those, but damn! She was also a great source of feedback on articles prior to publishing. C’est la vie. I’m sad, but old enough to know there’s no point in pretending that life doesn’t go on, regardless.

Cat +1

I got a new cat, bringing my pet stats to two felines and one le epic doge. The ‘lil one is a four-year-old calico. She’s predominately black-furred with light-orange patches. My favorite trait of hers is an orange spot around the right side of her mouth, giving her the appearance of having a partial chocolate milk mustache. She’s supes cute.

While sequestering her and my old girl as per advice I’d received, I visited her once or twice a day for the usual affection, and I guess that left a strong impression. Since given full reign of the house, she’s been glued to me and spends most of the day in my room. Whenever she’s not with me, I’m on constant alert for a “mrrow” outside my door letting me know she wants in. She’s pretty low-maintenance. As she lounges around, she just occasionally starts barking and stretching for attention, sometimes kneading me for a bit before restarting her AI subroutine. She trills constantly, and I have no idea what the heck she’s saying.

Unfortunately, she and my old cat are still fighting like cats and cats. It’s not as bad as the beginning. I would occasionally hear them cross paths and hissing would be predicated by my (presumably) new cat screaming bloody murder. It’s funny that they can have so much contempt for each other, as they’re very similar behaviorally. My new cat in particular is still checking around every corner to make sure the old cat isn’t there before moving, but at the same time, it’s obvious she can’t help her curiosity and likes to spy on her. One time, my old cat was eating from her bowl and my new cat stealthily ran up behind her, sniffed her tail, then bolted as my old cat turned around and looked confused.

The dynamic generally seems to be that my old cat is the gatekeeper and aggressor, but I’ve seen for myself that this isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes the new cat is the first one to hiss. Neither of the two appear willing to let an entire interaction go without conflict. No one can be the “bigger cat.” Hopefully, things continue improving as they have been and the fights totally dissipate.

Professional Life

No big changes here, for now. My work with Old School Gamer Magazine has been great. I try to remember to post on the site when new articles go live, but it can be difficult at times, because schedules don’t align between my submission deadline, the digital version publishing, and the physical print run. The easiest way to not miss anything I write is to get an OSGM subscription. A digital-only subscription can help you keep the cost affordable!

Site Updates

There’ve been probably a fair bit of updates since my last blog post, but at the very least, the bulk of those ought to be visible just from the front page. I’ve increased my output a little bit, so there could be some stuff you haven’t read yet. Movie review imports have slowed down, but I am running low on the number of reviews even worth importing. That’s kind of a good thing, since it suggests I’m close to being done with the whole process.

As usual, nearly a hundred extensive reviews have been sitting in my drafts, but I’ve been forcing myself to push more out as opposed to having them forever languish. The Street Fighter comic review was a bit of a turning point, because sourcing images was a huge pain in the ass. If I were to evenly distribute visuals throughout the text, I would’ve had to seek out about five times as many pictures. I chose to prioritize my writing and publish the article before my interest on the subject waned. I write my best, by far, when I’m inspired on a topic. No shock there, but that’s why I’m conscious about not having articles take too long despite my paradoxical urge for comprehensiveness.

I’ve also cleaned up some overdue .css across the site. For now, that’s mostly been condensing page elements while expanding others. I received some helpful feedback from a more tech-savvy fellow, and if you’re noticing larger breaks between paragraphs, that’s why. I don’t care for the increased padding between text headings, but I haven’t hashed out a way to make an exception for those, yet. I know the function exists, but the WordPress builder by default just has a blanket option for spacing between page elements. If paragraphs have more spacing between them, so does everything else, etc.

Guides

Oh, and don’t forget to check out my guides from time to time. They’ve helped serve as an outlet for some of my mechanical thoughts on games. Getting cogent information on games in text format these days can be a fucking nightmare, and I relish in contributing to any change. I also have a diploma in technical writing, so I’m extremely sensitive to ambiguous phrasing and seek to communicate precise instructions on absolutely everything.

Depending on how experienced you are with English, you might be surprised to the extent of which so many things are poorly explained and open themselves up to potential misinterpretation. And of everyone affected by an issue, only a fraction of a percent of them even give feedback, so lackluster instructions rarely receive updates.

I may not have guides for every game, but you can be sure as Hell that the information you’re looking for won’t be preceded by twenty paragraphs explaining what a Nintendo is. And there’s always merit to not having to skip around a goddamn YouTube video. If I notice info on a game is low-quality, or I just have my own thoughts to share, I’ll pump a guide out until I’m bored of it.

Media Log

Oh, lord. I’m just going to focus on my immediate fixations instead of trying to recap everything I’ve been into since March.

I’m on the twilight of a Bomberman fixation, of all things. A friend and I started going through the Super Bomberman Collection on Switch 2. Did I mention I have a Switch 2 now? That same friend generously offered to buy me one, and I shamelessly couldn’t turn him down. I don’t make a lot of money, folks.

I’ve really enjoyed my Switch 2, if just for the greater screen size and processing power for Switch 1 games. I don’t own many Switch 2-exclusive games yet, and there aren’t that many out there that I’m into. That will change, of course. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave looks to be another solid entry, though I confess I’d like to know if Koei Tecmo is writing the story, if nothing else. That’d put some concerns at ease.

Bomberman

Anyway, Bomberman. We ran through Super Bomberman in one sitting. Great game. Always will be. If you’ve lived a Super Bomberman-less life thus far, change that. It’s a short playthrough with unlimited continues. You will have fun, and it’s still one of the best Bomberman experiences out there, as my recent trysts have confirmed.

Some of this marathon has been covered already in my review for Super Bomberman 3. Big letdown, that one. It’s not an affront to God or anything, but considering the subseries name it bears, one has to wonder where so many principles from the first Super Bomberman went. Super Bomberman 4 has been a somewhat smoother experience so far, but similarly lacks the spark of SB1.

My Bomberman hunger was unsated between our co-op sessions, so I struck out on my own with other titles. Bomberman Tournament has sat on my backlog longer than most, so I spent about a week or two playing through it. A solid little Zelda clone, if unremarkable. In my drafted review, I criticized it as mostly feeling like a standard Bomberman game with more locked doors and keys, and I stand by that. The novelty of its genre mix doesn’t last or amount to much. I found it entertaining, but mostly perfunctory. I still can’t help but be curious about the two other Bomberman RPGs waiting for me to play.

I dabbled with Bomberman Max 2: Red Challenger. I had this game growing up, and I think I did everything in it shy of collecting all Charaboms. Part of my revisit was to correct that, but it quickly dawned on me that I had no knowledge of how to get a true 100%.

Do you trade Charaboms? How does that work? You can only get each one once, so your total number of Charaboms should remain static and your collection forever unfulfilled. You can also only fuse each Charabom once, so where do you get fodder for alternate combinations?

This is the kind of shit I write guides for. I’m sure the minutiae exists on the internet, but no one has sat down and said, “okay, nerds, this is how you get everything in Bomberman Max 2.” This is too much commitment for me right now. The game seems decent, but I’m putting it off for when I have more gusto.

I started Bomberman Land Touch! because it got good reviews on release but I never played it. I confess, I find it somewhat dull. I’m not ideologically against minigame compilations, but these mostly don’t inspire me, and the typical fascist impulse of DS games to force you to use the touch screen for everything is obviously on display.

A touch screen minigame? Fine, whatever. But having to tap the bottom screen to move Bomberman on the overworld? Hell no, dawg. Why is moving my hand the length of the bottom screen to reverse direction preferable to sliding my thumb across a D-pad? It’s not. That’s the answer. There could have been multiple control schemes, but the idea that the touch screen wasn’t intrinsically preferable is an alien one to many DS-era developers. Maybe Mario held their family members hostage. I dunno.

Bomberman (2005) on DS stands almost in defiance of any innovation. I picked it up because I (correctly) assumed it would be a short playthrough. I have a review for it that’s nearing completion, so more on it then. Its sequel, Bomberman 2, hasn’t gripped me as much despite its many improvements. I think I might just be bombed-out for the time being.

Visual Novel Ventures

When an English patch for the original Super Famicom version of Banshee’s Last Cry dropped, I felt compelled to check it out. That led to me playing its predecessor Otogirisou, and beginning the unrelated visual novel Metal Slader Glory. Jury’s out on MSG, but Banshee was quite the treat. It’s super tedious trying to find all the different endings because of the forced text progression, but there’s absolutely extras in there worth seeking out.

Otogirisou struggles to hit those highs. Its reliance on sprite backgrounds instead of photographs like in Banshee may sound preferable, but the result is a lack of unique or detailed images to depict its events. There are many things described that you wish you could see, but most backgrounds are just images of hallways or walls. No, really. The horror heavily relies on generational curses and ancestral shame, which doesn’t land for me, personally. I haven’t seen as many alternate endings in Otogirisou as Banshee, but I’m not as confident in how far Chunsoft will take them.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

I’ve been back on the grind after Master Duel added a glut of cards I’ve been interested in. I’ve long anticipated the Fairy Tail support wave, but I hate to say that I think the archetype still needs some work. The individual card quality of the new cards is quite good, but there needed to be more effort put into making the lesser Fairy Tail monsters provide some kind of value to their strategy. Since they lean more towards field control than anything else, I’m shocked the new support didn’t give them a Continuous Trap. I feel that they should have more ways to do normal summons and swap different Fairy Tail names in and out of the field. Currently, Fairy Tail relies heavily on Magistus as a crutch, and I think that’s a shame.

A completely unexpected interest emerged in the form of GMX, an archetype I’m not sure I knew existed prior to its debut in MD. With multiple main-deck monster Types, GMX attempt to bridge the virtually prehistoric “dinoslop” deck to broader plays. I was smitten by how cool their Fusions looked; so much so that I gave into playing a generic dinosaur combo deck for the first time ever.

GMX is a rough place to start, it turns out. The archetype has many traits of modern design: one-card starters to play past disruption, chain-blocking effects, etc. They also have a good grind game with numerous ways to access the deck, GY, and banished cards to reuse resources. GMX cards all read as pretty good, yet they seem to struggle finding representation. Why?

My first impressions are that they struggle to gain card advantage. Dinosaurs can search out monsters better than almost anything else can, but they usually do so by trading one-to-one in card economy. This makes dinosaurs reliant on their individual card value, but they’re very slow to receive cards that keep them up with current power levels.

GMX, being recent, had a chance of fixing this, but their boss monsters just don’t do enough. Only one of them has a way to interact with the opponent on their turn, with the others generally being extenders. COMPREX ought to be intimidating, but GMX can’t protect itself from its field-wiping effect, and I still can’t figure out how you’re expected to consistently trigger its burn effect that requires it to be fused from five dinosaurs. GMX main deck monsters aren’t dinosaurs (except for one). Are you expected to use your Fusions and thus burn even more precious resources?

GMX uses too many cards for too little payoff. They desperately need protection, any draw power, and another way to interact with opponents. That sounds like a lot, but they search so easily that all of this can be done with one card. It’s entirely possible that GMX is made meta-viable in the near future, but will Konami care enough, or is this just another archetype sacrificed for the Genesys format?

Headin’ Out

I hope you enjoyed catchin’ up. I have some stuff to do, and as always, writing this blog post took longer than expected! Please let me know if you think it’s worth my time. In any case, continue checking the main page for a number of upcoming articles I have planned! Thank you for reading!