Christmas has come and gone and I hope you had a wonderful time with those you love! Also, I hope you were on the nice list! Here’s a few of the nerdier things I got underneath my tree this year!
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Merry Christmas from In Third Person!
Wishing you a Merry Christmas! Hope you got all the gifts you were hoping for and I hope you get to spend a lot of great quality time with those you love on this special day!
My Favourite Nintendo Hipster Games
“Super Mario is alright. The Legend of Zelda had a few hits. But have you played Electroplankton?!”
– Hypothetical Nintendo hipster
Nintendo makes some of the biggest and most successful games in the history of mankind. But not everything they make is a hit among the greater populace. From the aforementioned abstract instruments of Electroplankton, to the eShop exclusive Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, to my brother who is still holding his breath for a new Elite Beat Agents, they do release games that fly well below the radar.
Here’s my list of Nintendo hipster faves. What under-the-radar Nintendo games are you a fan of?
Streaming and My Lip Sync Battle
Having pushed my existing streaming setup to the limit, I decided to take the next step by purchasing a graphics card. Doing so would ease the burden on my CPU and ideally allow me to stream higher quality video without my computer melting. At first, it seemed like it was working just fine. But then, a more nefarious issue began happening that has been racking my brain and wrecking my streams for the past month.
My Ongoing Battle with Online Game Shopping While Weighing the Value of Money vs. Time
A few years back, video games in Canada got a 20% price hike in response to the falling dollar. It fundamentally changed the way I shop for games. I almost never pay full-price for a new game anymore. Instead, I’ll use trade-ins to offset the cost, while banking heavily on annual E3 pre-order deals that range from $20-30 off new games.
While I love the idea of saving money, I’m eating the cost elsewhere. The last five games I’ve ordered online have really made me question whether the savings was worth it at all.
Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu/Let’s Go Eevee and the Thrill of the Fight
My experience with the Pokemon franchise has been one largely devoid of PvP. I never touched it in Pokemon X or Pokemon Ultra Moon, the two mainline games I played prior to Let’s Go Pikachu/Let’s Go Eevee. Pokemon Go will be getting a form of PvP soon, but it’s been absent from that game for over two years. The only times I’ve engaged with it were during random instances where I’ve fooled around in Pokemon Stadium on the Nintendo 64 with the default Pokemon.
Taking on Kris from Double Jump the other night in a few Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu/Let’s Go Eevee battles was an eye-opening experience. Even with just the handful of matches we played that night, it gave me a greater appreciation for the franchise’s battle system and how exciting it can be to go head-to-head with another human.
Debating the Merits of Buying an Arcade 1UP Street Fighter II Arcade Machine
There are no shortage of reasons for not owning an arcade machine. They’re expensive. They take up a lot of space. Unless you’re hacking it to run MAME and taking away the “purity” of the original game, their functions are pretty limited. They’re a pain to maintain. The list goes on.
But if I were to ever own an arcade machine…just one…it would be a Street Fighter II cabinet. One of the most symbolic machines in all of arcade culture, I have vivid memories of that game blowing my mind when I first saw it and spent too many quarters playing it over the years. Best of all, it’s still a great game worth playing today.
Arcade 1Up caught my eye when they announced a few months back that they were releasing new Street Fighter II machines. Having now stumbled across them at my local Walmart, my mind is in a tizzy trying to figure out if this is the time to finally make a lifelong dream of mine come true. In order to sort my feelings out, I’m going to write out both sides of the argument and see where I land at the end.
Games I Was Late to the Party For
Keeping up with the latest and greatest in games is an unrealistic task for most. With so many new games hitting every week and prices that make it difficult to obtain everything you want, certain games will slip through the cracks. There are also games that weren’t on your radar at the time of release that make their way to the top of your priority list later on. Whatever the case may be, we all inevitably get to some games after the zeitgeist has moved on.
Here’s a list of games that originally slipped by that I finally got around to.
Story in Games: A Tale of Two Nintendo Fans
A little while back, I was watching Kris from Double Jump stream Deltarune. At a certain point, our conversation hit a big fork in the road. When it comes to what you enjoy more out of games, are you in it for gameplay or story? Though the true answer for everyone probably lies somewhere in the middle, I slant heavily towards gameplay, and she slants heavily towards story. Thinking back, it makes a lot of sense for why our taste in games is so different.
But then it got me thinking about the common ground we do have: Nintendo. How do we have this company’s work in common when we want very different things out of our games?
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and the Quest to Minimize My Backlog
November 15, 2004. I was in the midst of my first year in college. Was also working a part-time job as a stock boy at a pharmacy. On that day, I bought Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, the sequel to my favourite Metroid game.
November 15, 2018. Exactly 14 years later, and I still haven’t played the game. I don’t remember why I didn’t play it when I bought it, but it only got harder to fit it into my rotation the further away I got.
In Third Person 