Monthly Archives: April 2018

Blog: Ya-Ya-Yakuza – 04/25/18

Video games, I play them from time to time. This past week I indulged in this hobby of mine and played a few video games.

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YAKUZA 6: THE SONG OF LIFE

There I was, investigating the scene of a hit & run, carefully observing my surroundings when I notice a man in the distance filming me. He’s been following me for a while. This can’t be good. But before I go any further with that, a different man is going to introduce me to the internet by putting me in a live-chat with a real woman who strips on camera. Then I think I’ll go and beat the shit out of someone by swinging a bicycle at them. But before any of that, I think I’ll go to the arcade and play a round of Virtua Fighter.

This is Yakuza 6, a game about tonal inconsistencies that sway from intensely serious to over the top hilarious. The main quest line is your dark and gritty crime movie, while most of the side quests are complete batshit insanity. For instance, I just watched two people fall down the stairs and then pretend they had a Freaky Friday body swapping scenario happen. This game is lunacy and I love it. I only wish the combat was a little better and less mashy, but it still manages to be fun and exciting despite that.

GOD OF WAR

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In stark contrast to Yakuza 6 there is God of War, the reboot/sequel I never knew I wanted. I’ve only put in a few hours with Kratos n’ son, but I can tell that I’m going to have a blast with it. The game is gorgeous, and heartfelt and plays phenomenally. It’s brutal in the way that God of War should be while also reinventing itself in a meaningful way.

The most damming thing I can say about God of War is that it is an incredibly daunting and draining experience. It has a tone and sticks to it almost always. The little bits of levity that are there are more than welcome, but I just found it hard to play it for hours on end without needing a break. That’s what Yakuza 6 does so well that GoW doesn’t (thus far). While I totally respect the story it’s telling, I don’t think I personally am able to spend large stretches of time with it. That’s why I’m going to finish up Yakuza before I dive back into God of War.

STREET FIGHTER II TURBO: HYPER FIGHTING

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So I bought a Super Nintendo Classic, it’s wonderful and I love it. I’ve touched a couple of games in it so far, but spent the most time with Street Fighter II. I bounce between this and Dragon Ball Fighter Z pretty consistently when I need a fighting game fix. There’s something pure about doing sweet uppercuts and launching sonic booms into Sagats mouth, that still holds up.

So that’s more or less what games have been in my rotation. Video games, it turns out, are still pretty fun.

Blog: Cover Letter – 04/18/18

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What you’re about to read was something a potential employer asked of its applicants. The prompt was simple and straightforward. I liked what I wrote a lot and figured it was worth sharing. So here it is:

“Please include your resume and a cover letter telling us what excites you about video games.”

These were the words used when asking for applicants for the [redacted] position you have available. From virtual reality, to the emergence of the battle royale genre, to tiny versions of classic consoles, there are dozens of things that are exciting me about games right now. But just like motion controls, these things rise and fall in the social consciousness and ultimately only make up one side of what is exciting about the games industry.

To me there is no other medium around that can deliver the kinds of experiences that games can. It can be as obvious as a fully realized world to explore, dense with the tiniest details that flesh out the setting you’re in. Or maybe it’s nailing that tangible feeling of wielding a weapon as you battle your way through another power fantasy. While I love these aspects of games there is something that is so much more rare, that when it happens it’s almost like a revelation.

Last year a game was released call Night in The Woods. On its surface, it was an adventure game that had a unique art style and featured anthropomorphic animals. I did not expect this game to be the one that would make me tear up and leave me emotionally exhausted. It was a game about trying to recapture the memories you had when you were younger and ultimately realizing that it isn’t possible. It’s about growing up and moving on, leaving the old behind and forging ahead into the unknown no matter how terrifying it seems because there is no other option. It’s a game about loss, acceptance and harsh realizations about yourself as well as the world around you.

Or maybe it’s just a game about some animals in their early twenties whining and complaining about their problems and being annoying.

But it can be both of those things, because games can be a million different things to a million different people. This game made me feel something that no book, movie or album ever did and resonated with me in a way that I hadn’t felt before. That is what’s most exciting to me about games. They are versatile and everyone is going to walk away from them with a different experience that is uniquely theirs.

Blog: PAX East – 04/11/18

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This past weekend, PAX East took place in Boston Massachusetts, a place where traffic laws are purely optional. A friend and myself took it upon ourselves to buy some Saturday passes and go to our first PAX ever.

Look, I get it, PAX is a big event that everyone goes to. I also am aware I went on the busiest day. It would be absurd to expect to play everything I wanted, when I wanted. I’m not stupid. But I was not prepared for how many times I would be at an actual standstill because people had suddenly lost the ability to walk.

It was a sea of people, and rarely did they ever feel like actually moving forward. I get that you want to stop and see stuff, that’s the point, but maybe move off to the side and don’t just hang out in the middle of the walkway doing your best cosplay of a wall. That was the kind of shit that really irked me.

But what didn’t bother me was the pure spectacle of the entire event. It’s kind of awe inspiring to be in a room of that many like-minded individuals, all there to celebrate games and the people involved in them. That part was genuinely cool and kept me going for most of the day.

I didn’t really get to play much of anything thanks to ridiculously long wait times, but that was fine. Would I have liked to actually have played Soul Calibur VI? Yes. But it was still cool to get to see it in action in the hands of real people. I got to check up on Ashen, a game I talked about in another blog about games that have been radio silent, so that was nice. One of the two demo stations kept going down constantly which was unfortunate, but I can confirm the game is real and totally exists and still looks rad.

Most of my day could be summarized by saying, “I saw a bunch of games that looked rad, but didn’t have the patience to wait and play a lot of them.”

I did manage to play a bit of Extinction, by Iron Galaxy. It’s part Shadow of the Colossus, part hack and slash, and part what I imagine Attack on Titan is. It looked pretty alright, but the guy who played before me bailed on a harder level and I had to go in there without any tutorialization and got my ass handed to me. So it wasn’t the best demo, but I’d certainly try the full version which is apparently out as of yesterday.

All things considered, PAX East was a hectic spectacle that I most certainly would attend again. Except this time I’d go on a Thursday or something and avoid the massive crowds.

Blog: Status Update! – 04/09/18

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Hey everybody, just wanted to check in and give you a little bit of an update as to what’s going on with The Bonus World and what we’re doing from here on out.

So we’ve been toying with some different ideas for content for a while now. As it stands, we stream just about everything we play, then I take that footage and cut it up into highlight videos to put up on YouTube every Tuesday and Thursday. That’s been fine for us for a while, but it definitely increased my workload a lot. It also has yielded minimal results.

So it’s time to readjust our approach.

If you’ve followed us for a while then you know that we jump between streaming platforms a lot. Usually we’re on YouTube and Mixer for different reasons, but it might be time to consolidate that and focus in on something. So we’re having discussions on what to do, it’s looking like Twitch at the moment, obviously. But you should follow us on Twitter in case something changes.

We won’t be pumping out scheduled videos anymore. It’s tough to turn this stuff around in a timely fashion. We’re going to be going back to posting stream archives on YouTube and producing a “Best Of” at the end of the month.

The blog is going to remain intact. I’m having fun doing it and would like to do it more if possible. Ideally I’d like to get some guest contributors in here occasionally, we haven’t done anything like that since last December.

Everything is in flux right now. Schedules are up in the air and time is definitely a factor. So follow us here and on Twitter for updates, and definitely follow us on Twitch and YouTube if you aren’t already.

Thanks everyone, we’ll see you around.

Blog: The Curious Case of Far Cry 5 – 04/04/18

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I haven’t played enough Far Cry 5 yet to really craft an opinion on it as a whole, but from the few hours that I’ve managed to dig into, I do have some thoughts.

Far Cry 5 is, just as its predecessors, a fun game to play. As long as you’re on board with the Far Cry formula of snapping necks, shooting dudes and getting animals to eat people, then I think you’ll have a good time with it. Aside from some leveling progression weirdness, most of the changes in Far Cry 5 are pretty well thought out and welcome.

The big talking points that I’ve seen a lot of players and outlets touch on is the story Far Cry 5 tries to tell. What could’ve been a game with something interesting to say turned out to be mostly tepid in its approach. Honestly though, I’m not too surprised by that. While Far Cry 5 was definitely in the position to make a statement, I never really believed or held out hope that it would.

That’s not to say that I’m not having fun with the game, but there is something that Far Cry 5 does that really doesn’t sit well with me. There is a really grim depiction of people from Montana or Montana-esque regions that it really leans into. I’ve only played like 4 or 5 hours so far, and I’ve already run into several major quests about someone talking about a truck or other vehicle that really meant a lot to them, and could change the tide of things.

It seems like a cartoon vision of Midwestern America and its citizens that is quite frankly, kind of gross. It says so much about how little Far Cry 5 thinks of these people. Like, I get it, “They love their trucks, how funny those rural folk are.” It all just feels like one giant Jeff Foxworthy bit most of the time.

While I’ve seen one or two characters so far that aren’t gigantic caricatures, for the most part I’m not too confident in the storytelling that’s yet to come. Like I said though, Far Cry 5 is fun to play, so I’m definitely going to see it through to the end, even if it partly is just to see how bad this can get.