Off My Mind

Now here's a set of films I haven't watched in quite some time and I'm trying to actually get some use out of my bonus Disney plus subscription so I sat down to watch these over the last week. If you want the quick version, these held up much better than I was expecting and even X-Men 3 which is the DMC2 of this series really isn't that bad with the benefit of perspective. Longer version: I'm not going to waste a thousand words talking about the X-Men franchise as a whole but it would be tricky to not talk about so I'll cover the basics and quickly move on. This series has definitely had its ups and downs, from the disaster that was Origins: Wolverine and the core plot never really changing over the course of nearly 20 years and the moon sized elephant in the room of why they never show up in MCU the X-Men universe has had a bumpy road. Couple that with the business side of things and who knows what kind of craziness is going to have to take place in order to ma

You could say I'm a little late to watching this movie. If you had asked me when this came out a couple of days ago I might have said 2015 or maybe a year before. When I looked at the release date on Prime to see 2010 I had that "wait that cannot be right even though you know it is" feeling. This film is eleven years old and the reason for me thinking it was more recent is perhaps the way social media has blown up over the last five or so years. Watching this film made me remember back to the time I thought it came out, believe it or not but in 2014/15 everyone you met wasn't obsessed with becoming a YouTuber or influencer. Come to think of it I don't think those terms had even been coined at the time, social media was definitely on the rise and quickly but it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now. Twitter for instance was still that thing that's "never going to be as big as Facebook" because it's just the status part of Facebook.   The film is s

The master collection has been out one week today, I have been playing it a lot. I will check my total game time before publishing this post. Against my better judgment it has brought me back to the world of streaming and YouTube on the daily and that is something after some time away has hit me how bad it is for me right now.  I still have things on my mind that I wanted to do but after some reflection on it I realised they are things I only really want to do because I know it's almost guaranteed nobody else will. That highlights the very specific obsession I have with this stuff, when it comes to NG I mainly want to do the things nobody else does only because nobody else does. Instead I should really focus on what it is I actually want to do. Which right now is play Bayonetta and get back to Super Meat Boy.  I don't want to get too negative on here but this entry is going to be similar to my off my minds in video form but the main thing that has both disappointed me and annoy

Devil May Cry 3 I have been playing through DMC3 this last week on the HD collection on the PS4. I finished DMC1 and that game just gets better and better every time I go back to it so thought I'd go through 3 again to see how it would go. DMC3 has not aged as well as I thought it would, it's not as if the game is terrible now but it certainly has some aspects about it that I'm not too fond of. When I think back to DMC3s release the sheer difficulty of it was like this giant wall to tear down and once you got over that came the next logical step and that was getting even better, to the point where taking a single hit made you restart a level. I did a lot of that during my years playing it back then and even to this day SS ranking that entire game is still one of my proudest gaming achievements, but coming back to it now that just doesn't have the same appeal it once did. After clearing my first run the flow of the game was coming back to me and by the time I wrapped up

Apart from NG of course, that always stays in my while playing list. I have been going through my backlog trying to pick out games I either moved away from too soon or just straight up forgot I owned or played before. One thing I will get into later is that when you have played enough games it's quite bizarre to feel like you forgot playing it.  Streets of Rage 4 Actually was stunned to realise this game released over a year ago. I feel like it's almost impossible to have grown up in the SNES / Mega Drive era and not played the old Streets of Rage games. Between 3 games in 1, bundles and pack ins it felt like you could talk to anyone and they would have played one of these at some point.  I finished SoR4 when it came out and was originally intending to put quite a bit of time into it. The scoring and combo system is awesome and definitely scratches that fighting game itch that I've had over the last year or so. The characters are varied and look great, the enemies are fun t

As much as I try, when NGB gets a hook on me it's hard to shake it off. I went back and further revised some strategies for Master Ninja after finishing that first run. A lot, and I mean a lot of this can be utilised on a single segment run as well which I just might do at some stage. The amount of optimasition from these two runs alone is pretty staggering. I'll group some of the chapters together as they really do depend on the one prior going well to get the fastest patterns.  Some of the bigger changes on this route were: - Only picking up 10 scarabs.  - No extra essence gained. - 3 additional saves. - Movement routing more specific.  Upon reflection I only think scarabs are worth it on a single segment run. I'd say go for 20 as you get a full restock of smoke bombs and one of each elixir and 20 isn't hard to get nor does it add a huge amount of time but will absolutely pay dividends in chapter 15. For segmented going forward I only think the scarab before the pleas

Let's just get to the whistle tickling details shall we. Mainly just ironing out strategies to see how far this could be pushed in theory. I am not going all out for this; insert "that's for the next guy" sound clip from mine and Al's commentary. I got the urge to really breakdown a proper route for MN and much like Normal I thought a good place to start would be to break up the run into segments and see how much of it can be applied to single segment.  If you're reading this then there is a very good chance you know the current twitch and youtube situation so this is just good old text from here. As of right now I have no plans to stream or make videos for any of this. That said, I do have all the raw footage of this first run, so you never know. Right now though, I cannot be arsed :)  Chapter 1 The kills here need some rethinking, there is a lot of essence available and it's very consistent to get to Murai with at least 10k. This will heavily alter the p

The strangest thing about this last month is how long it has felt, feels like it's been ages since I made a video or streamed. I guess that's normal when you make such a big change, I wouldn't say I am used to this yet at all. I am stilling playing games and yes, Ninja Gaiden is one of them. I even did a couple of speedruns a few weeks ago to test some stuff out without feeling the burden of having to post every little thought or do commentary for them. It was nice to go back to that feeling I had in 2005 when I was just busy playing and breaking things down entirely on my own. That's something I haven't done in a while. I'm working on another one as well which is quite a bit ahead of the last one I finished. I guess that feeling of solitude when it comes to playing NG is something I have gone so long without I forgot how much fun it was. It's not too different from the MKX days of literally spending hours in training mode in a single session just testing th

You know a game is old when you genuinely cannot remember the last time you played it. A safe bet would have been before Bioshock 2 came out which puts it close to 12 years ago but I’m not sure I actually replayed it before the sequel came out. I don’t know if it’s just the pace that life moves at in this day and age but I still consider Bioshock to be a somewhat recent release. Which makes very little sense because you could measure that time frame in console generations. That feeling is one I often find you experience when a game still feels like it holds its place even when playing it several years later. You think to yourself; “really, this game came out that long ago?” and in Bioshock’s case I certainly felt that both while playing it and once the credits rolled. It’s a game that certainly has a huge reputation and it did not disappoint upon revisiting. If anything I would say time has only benefited this game. The star of Bioshock for me has always been the setting, Rapture is on

It has certainly been a while since I put anything up on here. There are many reasons for that, main ones being the focus on YouTube and Twitch I have had over the last two years but now feels like the right time to get back to writing more. If you have been following me recently you know that I used to work in the games coverage business, I don’t use the phrase games journalism as it carries quite a lot of baggage these days. I wrote for a website that used to be called PlayerAffinity.com which was then later rebranded as EntertainmentFuse.com after I left. I worked there for a little over 3 years and even though it wasn’t a paid position I genuinely loved doing it. I wrote mainly features and reviews for the first year or so and eventually became a lead for the console department. I won’t go super in depth on this as I did a whole podcast covering this which is below if you would like to know more.    As you can imagine I used to love to write about the video games and i