TPA 76

Today is a bit different, I'm staying home to avoid the snow. Yesterday, I fishtailed my way home at night with a bunch of idiots who thought they could drive better than me. And faster than me. I''ve now got three days off which is bad because I need more work and I just don't like it when I'm by myself that long. I need company. 

I finished another game on my list, Promise Mascot Agency. It's a silly game made by Brits about a Japanese yakuza who has to manage a mascot agency to raise money for his boss. After transporting a large amount of money goes poorly, the protagonist Michi is forced to move to an island where a curse resides that kills any gang member that sets foot on the island. There you meet Pinky, a mascot in the shape of a severed finger. Ironic since you severed your pinky finger as a symbol of recompense. Thus begins a long, twenty plus hours game where you drive around getting new jobs and helping the residents with their various tasks. But the onlhy way you get around is via a truck you can upgrade with the most ridiculous attachments. From a booster to spring loaded jump, to a boat motor and a set of glider wings, you've got the main forms of transportation covered. There's even a rail grinder you can use on the train tracks or the guard rails. And as a bonus, you can launch Pinky from the back of your truck at trash and barriers. All this is to find mascots to send to jobs around town. If an incident occurs, you can use these hero cards in a card battle mini game. It's an optional side activity that I enjoyed. And there's the fantastic sound track. I have no idea what they are saying in the songs but it's beautiful. Almost makes me wish I had studied more Japanese. The game ends on a strange finale with lots and lots of explanations and dialogue that makes me feel the ending was rushed. You play one final card game with extra points that guarantee your win. It comes off as a little bit of a letdown after driving for so long and using the strange upgrades. I would have preferred a chase or a driving competition but I didn't get that. Instead I got almost a half hour of expositon that I mostly skipped because I understood most of the plot. If not for this mediocre ending, I think I would have given the game a perfect score. As it is, the game sits in my rare "KA" selection of games for "Kick Ass." (Don't tell my parents I have that kind of category). But despite all that, I loved this game. I even went back and completed a few more post game quests, although I was eager to get to the next game on my list. I believe that a gamer has only completed a game when he knows the world inside and out without the map. Something is imprinted in their brain that causes them to know where to go by instinct. It comes only after hours of playing the same game and falling in love with the world. I played GTA 5 for hours but I couldn't tell you where anything is. Granted, Promise Mascot has a smaller map but that only makes it more interesting. The developers made sure that you would invest your driving into the game's world with targets to hit with Pinky and items to collect. It's a collectathon in the best way that makes me want to play it again. And maybe I will a year or so from now. Right now, I've got other games to play and plenty of time to do them in. But first, a little break. 

I remember as a kid there was one other site I visited besides homestar runner. That was Game Trailers, an information site that hoasted a wealth of videos. Like an online library for video game information. I always sought out new info on upcoming games but when I was done, I looked at the rest of videos that the site hosted. There was a series made by a user that talked about all the features each old game console boasted. They were a cheap series made by a guy who either didn't care or was obviously autistic. He'd list the unimportant things like how many cords the console had or the number of buttons. No one cared about that kind of info and the videos soon disappeared into obscurity. The facinating part of the series was just how many video game consoles were out there. I knew of a few of them, but the uploader also put out videos about gaming PCs, of which there were hundreds. Old piece of crap PCs that played floppy disk games that were more primitive than anything that Atari put out. And worse still was the educational games they made because PCs weren't known for gaming at the time. These were the early days of game videos, today there's thousands of these kinds of people on Youtube. That reminds me of another series called Pach Attack Named after the host, Michael Pachter, he would look at games from a financial point of view which was neat for the time. Most gaming videos were about older games or upcoming reviews. Pachter came at it from his own POV which was refreshing. He'd answer questions he got via email with his usual greetings towards the audience with "Hello Babies." It was always amusing to come home and listen to him talk about the industry. I remember he got into some hot water over criticizing the people who hated the ending to Mass Effect 3. The game had a poor conclusion to the series which upset fans and drove out the two head designers into other businesses. Pachter isolated the issue as the massive negative feedback the developers recieved on somethat that wasn't entirely their fault. Since then the developer, Bioware, has seen flop after flop in terms of games. Pachter receieved a bunch of angry comments and down votes on his video but he stuck to his guns. I didn't fully agree with him either but I hadn't played the game series but I knew about the drama behind it. Then there was two others the site introduced me to, The Angry Video Game Nerd and his host site, Screwattack. AVGN was created by James Rolfe which I should go into more detail in a later post. All I'll say right now is that his angry humor got me through college. But Screwattack hosted various other videos about games, one of which was called the Video Game Vault. In each episode they would take a brief minute look at a good or bad video game from the NES era. I learned about games I never heard of or couldn't afford because they were so expensive. There were other shows that I can barely remember. This was still the days of Youtube demanding that each video only be less than ten minutes long. Today, that's the minimum for an essay. But back then, it was good to have a bit sized bit of entertainment before going off to do something else. 

So, what happened to these companies? AVGN is mostly retired because he has a pair of daughters to take care of but he still uploads from time to time. Screwattack was bought out and the head of the company, Stuttering Craig, went to do his own thing. I think there was a nasty fallout between him in the team but I have no proof of that, just suspicions. And one day, the owner of Gametrailers decided the whole site was to be shut down. All of the blue, one day the site didn't work. Now the original people who worked on the video reviews reformed into Easy Allies which I follow. They don't have the near amount of attention they used to have but they have the same voice actor who had this pleasant mellow voice that identified their reviews from the rest. I'm sure there's a lesson in here somewhere but I just wanted to talk about my past influences.