Confirmed Kill: Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows

Hey guys, sorry for the delay on this post.  American Thanksgiving was last week and it wound up taking up a lot of my time.  Still, I had a great time, and I hope you all did too.  So, with that out of the way, let's move on!

Title: Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows

Original Release: September 17, 2015 (Multiple)

Finished Release: Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (Switch, 2017)

*Potential spoilers for Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope*

So let's just get this out of the way.  Yes, I'm reviewing the base Shovel Knight game and Plague of Shadows (and Specter of Torment) separately, and counting them as two separate finished games.  The reason for this is manifold, but I'll stick to two good reasons.

One, they came out more than a year apart, and each had pretty much their own separate development cycle.  And two, they're both full-length games in their own right.  In fact, I actually have a slightly longer playtime recorded in Plague of Shadows than Shovel of Hope.

And yes, it lets me inflate my "finished games" number for the year.

So anyway, let's talk about Plague of Shadows.  See, back during the development of the original Shovel Knight game, Yacht Club held a poll.  Fans could vote on the top three members of the Order of No Quarter they would like to see become playable characters.  The three winners would receive their own add-on story content, with full storylines and gameplay campaigns as DLC.

The winners, and subsequent DLC campaigns were:

#1 Specter Knight in Specter of Torment (which actually got released second)

#2 Plague Knight in Plague of Shadows (released first)

#3 King Knight in King of Cards (not yet released at the time of this writing)

Note: these are not the three I would have chosen.  I like all the characters in Shovel Knight, but it's kind of funny that none of these three choices are ones I would pick, even though I like all of them.  For those curious, the three I would pick would be Polar Knight, Treasure Knight, and Propeller Knight, not necessarily in that order.

Still, the three we got are still great characters in their own right, and who knows?  Maybe someday we'll get all of the Order as paid DLC.  But destiny dictates that we are here to discuss Plague of Shadows, so let's do just that.

As mentioned before, in Plague of Shadows you play as Plague Knight, one of the stage bosses that Shovel Knight goes up against in Shovel of Hope.  Plague Knight's story takes place alongside Shovel Knight's, but it's told from Plague's point of view.  The interesting thing about that is that Plague is A. crazy and B. not a little bit self-aggrandizing.  So it goes without saying that the events herein are embellished slightly, which basically serves as a way of explaining how, in this game, Plague Knight actually won his fight with Shovel Knight.

Anyway, Plague Knight is attempting to create a potion that will make him the most powerful person in the land.  Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately), the ingredients he needs for the potion are guarded by the other members of the Order of No Quarter, unbeknownst to the knights themselves.  And so Plague Knight, having little sense of loyalty or camaraderie, sets out to take down his compatriots and concoct his potion.  Things are, of course, more complicated, and we learn a bit more about how Plague Knight really feels along the way.

So the story here is just as quirky-yet-heartfelt as the original, if not moreso.  Shovel Knight is a great mostly-silent protagonist, but Plague has the advantage of getting to cut loose.  He's mildly psychotic and loves explosions (we'll come back to that), but this game adds a surprising amount of depth to him.  I won't say too much, but suffice it to say that, while he may be a psychopath, we learn here that he is not a sociopath.  Well, not completely, anyway.

Along with this new story comes a whole new supporting cast.  Some are new characters, some are returning, but nearly all of them are lovable.  In particular, one of my favorite minor characters from the original has a greatly expanded role in Plague Knight's story, and everything is the better for it.  We also get a bit of insight into the history and motivations of other lesser-used side characters.

So the story and characters are fun and great.  The graphics and audio, as well, are just as great as they were before.  There's a fair amount of reused assets as far as visuals go, but not to the point of it feeling boring.  The soundtrack is, as far as I could tell, more or less completely new.  I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the original, but it's still got more than a few good tunes.

Now let's talk about something serious.  Yacht Club could have played it safe.  They could have taken the easy way out.  Plague Knight could have just been "Shovel Knight with bombs."  I am happy to report that that is not the case.  Not at all.

Plague Knight feels and plays completely different from Shovel Knight.  And his bombs aren't just a fun little thing he has, they're intrinsic to him, as they honestly should be.  The bombs not only do damage, they're a major part of his movement controls, allowing you to use them in mid-air to slow your descent.  He also has a separate double jump, which Shovel Knight didn't have.

And the bombs themselves aren't just fun and practical, they're also customizable!  See, your basic bomb is made up of three parts: powder, casing, and fuse.  There are several kinds of each part, and they can be mixed and matched without limitation.  This leads to a certain amount of strategic assessment, wherein you'll get used to looking at a situation and quickly adjusting your bombs to overcome it.  I found it quite an enjoyable little system, and would sometimes change things up just for fun.

Now, it must be taken into consideration that the altered mechanics are a bit of a double-edged sword.  Plague Knight's controls, especially his jumping, are more complex and, compared to Shovel Knight's relatively simple controls, could lead to a more challenging experience for certain players.  

Movement here is quick and versatile, and opens up a bit more options for many given situations.  Unfortunately, they also feature a much steeper learning curve.  Add to this the fact that Plague Knight feels just that extra bit more fragile, and it ultimately leads to a more challenging experience overall.

For me this level of challenge wasn't insurmountable, and I enjoyed myself all along the way.  Some people, however, may not have a good time, especially if they prefer the relative simplicity of Shovel Knight.  It's a personal preference thing, and there's nothing wrong with not enjoying a more difficult game.

Either way, though, if you loved the original, Plague of Shadows is definitely a high-quality follow-up.  If Shovel of Hope didn't quite convince you that this is a world worth expanding, then this one definitely will.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - Permanent Waves (Rush, 1980)

Playing - Hollow Knight (2017)

Reading - Kamen Rider Spirits (2001)

Watching - Kamen Rider Drive (2014)

Confirmed Kill: Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope

Title: Shovel Knight: Shovel of Hope

Original Release: June 26, 2014 (Multiple)

Finished Release: Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove (Switch, 2017)

Earlier this year, I was one of the lucky few to acquire a Nintendo Switch on launch day.  Hell, going by the press zeitgeist at the time, I was one of the lucky fewer to have absolutely no problems with either my switch or the controllers.

So, it's a brand new game system, and what's the most important decision you have to make?  Well, that would be the first game to buy for it, of course.  For me, like most people (I would assume), that first game was a no-brainer: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, of which I bought the collector's edition.  It was a really good day.

But I wasn't quite satisfied.  I wanted to play the Switch, but not always something as big as Zelda.  Sometimes you want a snack.  So when it came time to buy a second game (and because Pocket Rumble still hasn't actually come out), I snatched up Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove.

I had been interested in Shovel Knight since I discovered the Kickstarter campaign for it... about six months after it ended.  What I saw honestly kind of blew me away.  I know it's old news by this point, but indie game development has really become something worth keeping your eye on.  And yes, I know indie studios had already been churning out great games for years by this point.  But Shovel Knight was different.

Shovel Knight was one of the first (if not the first) indie games that caught my eye as being more than just a collection of great game mechanics.  The team at Yacht Club Games were building a world.  They were crafting a great game with a fun throwback art style and a unique story, but the greatest hook of all was the character of Shovel Knight himself.

Creating an iconic character is an extremely difficult proposition.  Trust me, I've been trying for more than ten years to come up with one great character that I can truly count on.  But, whether by accident or design, Yacht Club had created one.  Shovel Knight is, in my mind, what Mario was in the '80s and '90s: a simple yet elegant character that could not only show what his game's genre could do, but could also rise beyond the game he's in and enter the mainstream, at least for gamers.  And no, he wasn't the first indie game character to do this, but to me he was the first to really blow the door open.

And now indie devs are taking the characters (and stories) in their games just as seriously as the mechanics of the games themselves.  And now we have great, dare I say iconic, characters all over the place: Owlboy, Hollow Knight, Slugcat, Flinthook, Cuphead, and wow they're all just two words shoved together.  But y'know what?  It's fine because I love them.  Again, I'm not saying Shovel Knight caused all this, but it was the first game that showed me that it could be done.

Anyway, enough of that.  So yeah, I had had my eye on Shovel Knight since its release, but had never managed to convince myself to go for it.  But then I discovered the Treasure Trove collection on Switch.  For those not in the know, Treasure Trove is as complete a Shovel Knight experience as you can get, with the base game and all current and future expansion content included.  Today I'll be focusing on the base campaign, recently renamed Shovel of Hope, with the other games getting reviews of their own because, quite frankly, they deserve it.  So how is it?

Well, let me get this out of the way immediately: if you have any interest in Shovel Knight and, preferably, access to a Nintendo Switch, go buy it right now.  I mean it, you've read enough of my rambling.  Seriously.  But hey, if you want to read more, far be it from me to deny you.

So what exactly is Shovel Knight?  Well, it's an 8-bit action platformer with light RPG mechanics and loads of secrets.  Basically, imagine you fused Mega Man with the Ducktales NES game.  And yes, I know that would give you the Darkwing Duck game for the same system, but imagine you used the Potara earrings instead of the fusion dance.  You'd get Shovel Knight.

We'll start with the story.  It's simple, maybe even basic... at first.  There's a bit more depth than you might expect, though a lot of it admittedly only shows itself in the expansion content.  Still, what's here is fun to see.

Shovel Knight and his (or her) partner (in more ways than one?) Shield Knight are treasure hunters, living exciting lives of high adventure.  All this changes, however, when exploring the mysterious Tower of Fate goes awry.  Shovel Knight barely escapes with his (or her) life, but Shield Knight isn't so lucky.  The Tower is sealed, and Shovel Knight, wrought with grief, gives up his heroic lifestyle.

Time passes, and in due time, the land is overrun by the foul monsters serving the Enchantress (or Enchanter) and a group of knights (all with a particular theme) called The Order of No Quarter.  With the land in jeopardy, and the Tower of Fate somehow involved, Shovel Knight has no choice but to once again take up his eponymous digging implement in the name of good.

Oh, and if you're wondering why my gender pronouns seem optional, it's because Yacht Club recently added a feature wherein you can choose the sex and gender of each and every principal character.  That means Shovel Knight, Shield Knight, the Enchantress, and all of the Order of No Quarter.  New opposite-sex designs were made for all of them, and the sex and gender options aren't even tied together.  Outside of being a big step forward for inclusion in video games (which it is), it's also just a really cool bit of customization.  I didn't actually use it in my game, since I wanted the experience as originally planned, but I'll never complain about options.

The presentation, both visually and aurally, are top-notch examples of what the game is trying to bring across.  I know that pixel graphics are a big point of contention these days, with a lot of people thinking it's been done to death.  I agree to a certain extent that the aesthetic might have become a bit too common, but Shovel Knight is an entirely different beast.  Yacht Club didn't decide to use 8-bit graphics because it's popular.  Instead, they set out to make an NES game, and that's exactly what they did.  Pretty much the entirety of the presentation seems to have been approached with an eye for accuracy to what the NES would have been capable of.

Okay, so it's meticulously thought-out throwback, sure, but is it actually appealing?  Well, I guess in the end it's going to come down to personal preference.  For me personally, it's amazing.  The color palette is bright and vibrant.  There's tons of little attention to detail, and the characters are all extremely charming.  There's not a single dud among the principal cast, and a lot of that is owed to the character sprites themselves.  They're all so quirky and unique and memorable.  And even a lot of the side characters stand out as being memorable in their own right.

Beyond that, the music and sound effects are spot-on.  Nearly all the tunes are catchy, and I found myself humming along quite a bit.  The sound effects are satisfying, sometimes silly, but just a real treat to listen to.

And after all that, we come to the gameplay.  And let me tell you, I was not disappointed in the slightest.  The controls are tight and responsive. Shovel Knight himself does what you tell him to do when you tell him to do it.  It's amazing, too, since it's a relatively simple control scheme: run, jump, shovel, subweapon.  It's pretty basic, and yet within that framework there's a surprising amount of complexity, especially when you add in all the different subweapons, which can sometimes dramatically change the way the game is played.  I don't know how else to say it, it all just feels right.

So yes, the basic campaign for Shovel Knight, retroactively named Shovel of Hope, is a massive success.  It hits every target it intends to and then some.  It is a perfect example of what a throwback game should be.  It pays homage to the games that came before it while simultaneously doing its own thing.  And it does all of it extremely well, and, more often than not, even manages to surpass the classics it seeks to emulate.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - Various

Playing - Hollow Knight (2017)

Reading - Kamen Rider Spirits (2001)

Watching - Kamen Rider Drive (2014)

Confirmed Kill: Game of Thrones: A Telltale Game Series

Title: Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series

Original Release: December 2, 2014 (Episode 1, Multiple)

Finished Release: Complete Series (PS3, 2015)

Note: I will do everything I can to keep from spoiling the first few seasons of Game of Thrones, but I'm putting a warning here just in case.  So yeah.  Warning.

Note 2: I know the TV series is based on a book series, but the game is based on the TV series.

Full disclosure: I am not the biggest fan of Game of Thrones.  That's not to say it's no good, it's actually (usually) quite good at what it is and what it does.  It's just not my cup of tea.  In point of fact, watching it actually stresses me out.  That said, I do occasionally watch huge swathes of the series all in one go, so that I can always be caught up to what happened... two seasons ago.

One thing I am a fan of, however, is Telltale Games.  I have been ever since the release of their first Sam & Max game.  Their first huge success was probably The Walking Dead game they made, and we basically have that to thank for the current trend of episodic storytelling in video games.  Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, but in my experience it can be, at least, a very engaging thing, if used correctly.

So yes, the fact that Telltale made a Game of Thrones series was an exciting prospect for me.  And it has one of my favorite things: new original characters you've never heard of in the main series, but are suddenly very important in the spin-off.  I'm not being facetious there, that really is one of my favorite things.  Maybe I'll talk about it someday.

In fact, it was my desire to play this game that eventually forced me to catch up to the show, at least to the point where the game takes place.  How does it hold up?  Let's find out.

The new characters in this case are the members of House Forrester, bannermen of House Stark from the TV series.  The Forresters have an important job: cultivating and harvesting ironwood trees.  Ironwood is really awesome wood, better than all other woods, and this job of theirs has to be where their name comes from.

Anyway, the Forresters aren't the only House around with ironwood trees.  Their biggest (and apparently only) competition in this regard are the Whitehills, another banner House to the Starks.  The Whitehills are also, also exclusively, awful people.  So yeah, Forresters good, Whitehills bad.  GoT it?

So the Forresters themselves are pretty cool, and not at all stand-ins for the Starks. /sarcasm

Okay, all kidding aside, they are generally a good bunch of characters.  But let's be honest with ourselves here: Gregor is Ned; Elissa is Catelyn; Rodrik is Robb (their names even start the same); Mira is Sansa; Ethan is Bran; Talia is Arya; and Ryon is Rickon (similar names again!).  No, they're not all exactly the same characters, and their fates are often quite different.  But they have the exact same number of kids, in exactly the same gender order.  To be fair, though, I actually can't quite remember who's older between Bran and Arya.  Apparently neither could the Telltale guys, since Ethan and Talia are twins.

Also, Jon Snow is missing from that list because the situation is a bit more complicated.  Asher is the second son of the Forrester family, and he's not a bastard.  He is in exile, making him kind of like the opposite of Jon in some ways.  He's also a lot less moody.  On the other hand, we have Gared Tuttle, who isn't a member of the family at all but rather the nephew of Duncan, castellan of House Forrester.  Gared also happens to be squire to Lord Gregor himself, and he's considered to be a member of House Forrester, for reasons I'm a little unclear about.  I don't want to spoil anything, but it's his story that ultimately winds up being a bit more like Jon's.  Hell, he even meets him!

And let's just get this out of the way right now: Gared Tuttle is, far and away, my favorite character in the series.  And I mean the entire series, TV show included.  Part of the reason for this is just his personality; he's just a down-to-earth dude always keeps moving forward no matter what life throws at him, because that's his duty.  The other reason for this is that he's a stone cold, capital "b" Badass.

See, throughout the game, every now and then, there are sections of gameplay that essentially play out as just a long series of action commands.  You know the ones: a circle (or B, whatever) shows up on the screen, you press it real quick, and you don't die.  Well, if you're consistently successful with the action commands, Gared's competence rises to Batman levels.  I'm dead serious here.   At one point in my game he single-handedly took on five or six dudes at once.  This is Game of Thrones, no one does that!  Hell, there's one section where he's fighting a dude, and doing everything he can to not kill the dude, dude dies anyway.

Gared Tuttle breathes death upon his enemies.

Anyway, I could go on about Gared all day.  What about the story?  Well, it's hard to talk about without giving things away.  Suffice it to say that it's definitely Game of Thrones.  Everything starts out more or less okay before completely falling apart. And then, every time it looks like the good guys are getting ahead, the omnipresent whim of the writers shows up to slap them back down like some sort of mean-spirited Master Hand (Crazy Hand?).

I'm kidding, mostly, but there is a definite sense of futility about the game.  And yes, that's true to the source, but the problem here is that you're not just watching it, you're living it.  After a while every single choice or branching dialog option became a source of stress, as I rendered the in-game timer obsolete by just pausing.  I would spend minutes at a time ruminating on what to say to any given character.  So, at the very least, it felt like I was in Game of Thrones.

The problem is that most of it was ultimately pointless.  Like Final Fantasy VI, this was a game that Rachel watched me play, and after sitting through however many hours of me mathing out every line of dialog, she finally just gave up and said "Remember, it's the illusion of choice."  And that's probably my biggest complaint.

Now don't get me wrong, there are definitely very big things that can be different from one play-through to the next.  Some characters live while others die, some become enemies instead of allies, and so on and so forth.  I imagine, if Telltale ever actually makes a second season, these big differences will have resounding effects therein.  And really this is more of a problem with me than with the game; I shouldn't have gotten so stressed over every single decision.  But hey, you can't help how you feel, right?

Oh, another, more objective issue, was the game's performance.  I played it on PS3 because that just happened to be what was at hand, and maybe that's why.  Either way, load times took forever; slowdown was not infrequent, nor was outright freezing; in one climactic cutscene the game's audio just completely gave up and went home early for the day.  Again, if I had played on a current-gen system, maybe these issues would have been mitigated, but that's not the case.

Still, Telltale's Game of Thrones is about as close as a video game can come to a perfect representation of the TV show.  If you like the series, if you like story-driven games, and if you can overlook hours of stress leading up to an ultimately unsatisfying cliffhanger for a second season that may never come, well, you'll probably love it.

And best of all: Gared Tuttle.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - Graceland (Paul Simon, 1986)

Playing - Yakuza 0 (2015)

Reading - Kamen Rider Spirits (2001)

Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

Confirmed Kill: Final Fantasy VI

Title: Final Fantasy VI

Original Release: April 2, 1994 (Super Famicom)

Finished Release: Final Fantasy III (SNES, 1994)

Here we are again, today with yet another piece of gaming history.  We've got a lot to get through today, so let's hop to it.

I love Final Fantasy, and have for a good twenty years now.  Final Fantasy VII on PC(!) was the first RPG I ever played.  It's pretty accurate to say that that game changed the world.  But we're not here to talk about that (maybe next year).  See, oddly enough, I had played every numbered Final Fantasy game, but only ever finished one (Final Fantasy IV on DS, for anyone curious).  All that changed last year.

In mid-2016, my wife and I moved out of her parents' house, into our own apartment.  Our roommate is a very old friend of my wife and her family.  Her name is Rachel, and she loves Final Fantasy, especially the games she played when she was a kid.  And she loves watching other people play the games she loves, and promising her that I'll play is enough pressure to actually make me do it.  All of this is to say that, since moving in here, the number of Final Fantasy games I've finished has increased from 1 to 5, and I might squeeze in one more before the year's out (no promises).

Two of the FF games I've finished recently, X and X-2, won't be discussed this year, since I finished them late last year.  I'm sure I'll talk about them at some point, though, since X is actually my favorite in the series.  No, instead, we're gonna be focusing today on Final Fantasy VI.  Or, as my SNES cartridge says, Final Fantasy III.

Okay, so you probably know the story, but just in case I'll tell it anyway.  To make a long and complicated story as short as possible, it goes thusly:  the first Final Fantasy came to North America relatively late in the life cycle of the NES, and the SNES was on its way.  Square made the decision to skip Final Fantasy II and III, both of which were on the Famicom (NES), and jump straight to the first game to be released on the Super Famicom (SNES), that being Final Fantasy IV.

However, to keep the numbering would cause a little confusion, so they changed the title of Final Fantasy IV to Final Fantasy II, thereby causing generations of confusion.  Then they also skipped the next game, Final Fantasy V, and jumped straight to VI.  And they changed its name to Final Fantasy III, and that's the version I played.

Holy frijoles.  Y'know, it's funny, I've known that story for years, yet trying to actually type it out gives me a headache.

ANYWAY, that's the game we're talking about.  Final Fantasy VI/III, for the Super Nintendo.  Let's get to it already.

I don't want to give too much of the story away for those who haven't experienced it before.  The basic gist is that you begin the game as Terra, a powerful mage who has been brainwashed into serving the tyrannical Gestahlian Empire.  In short order, however, she's freed from their clutches by a thief (treasure hunter!) by the name of Locke.  She joins a band of rebels, they fight against the Empire (yes, I know, just get past it), and there's tons of twists and turns along the way.

The story is actually pretty epic for its time, and it's a pretty engaging one to boot.  I knew some of the most major twists (but not all of them) going in, but a lot of the more minor turns in the story genuinely took me by surprise.  It's also fairly dark, and deals with some very mature themes such as genocide, suicide, and several different forms of love.  It plays out like a tragedy, although an ultimately hopeful one.

The ambition present in the game's storyline manages to bleed into other aspects of the game as well.  The character roster contains a whopping 14 possible permanent party members (still the largest in the series), with a couple short-term guest characters along the way.  The crazy thing is that pretty much all of them are likable, at least the ones that speak. The number of named villain characters is relatively small, but the world is packed with tons of tertiary and minor characters.

The world is large and filled with secrets, and (spoilers) about halfway through the game the map changes completely, and the story becomes totally nonlinear.  Unfortunately I actually found the second half of the game to be a bit of a disappointment compared to the first half.  This is actually indicative of my one and only real problem with the game, but I'll come back to that in a bit.

First, more praise.  The game is drop dead gorgeous.  I mean it.  This was near the end of the life of the SNES, and Square managed to squeeze every drop of power the tiny system could muster.  The character sprites are unique, vibrant, and expressive.  It may be kind of dumb to say "every character has a distinct look," but I'm not really sure how else to say it.  The sprites capture the characters perfectly.

The backgrounds are no slouch either.  Things are bright and vibrant when they need to be, dark and moody elsewise.  I mean, honestly, the game tends towards the dark. It's a mood thing, but there's still room for light, and I often found the lighting in the game to be very appealing to me.  There's also incidental art here and there, a castle or a mountain or what have you, and it feels like you're looking at a painting.  It's all just really nice to look at.

And then we have the music.  Holy mother, the music.  Bear with me as I digress.

I would never say that older automatically equals better.  I feel this way about pretty much everything, but video game music is a sticking point for me.  Have you noticed how much music in video games has changed?  It's all moody and atmospheric and "sweeping," whatever that means.  And it's generally fine and enjoyable, but it just isn't the same.

Seriously, I hate to be the guy saying "back then we had," but back then we had soundtracks full of tunes, songs for every character, themes for every level or dungeon or whatever.  I'm not saying it was better, necessarily, but it was definitely more memorable.  And FF6 is a perfect point for me to use to prove that it isn't just nostalgia talking.  See, I was unfamiliar with most of FF6's soundtrack.  I knew Terra's theme and Dancing Mad, and that was it.  It's now one of my favorite video game soundtracks of all time.

I'm really not trying to drag down "modern gaming" vs "classic gaming" or anything like that.  I love modern games, they're great.  And honestly, the type of music I'm complaining against is enjoyable in its own right.  All I'm saying is that I'd rather have music I can hum along with than music that's trying to pretend it's not even there.

Anyway, that's the music.  It's amazing.

And now, the hard part: the criticism.  See, the game isn't perfect.  As I mentioned earlier, I have one major complaint about the game as a whole.  It's ambitious for the sake of ambition.

It's a really difficult thing to say, but I think it's true.  As much as I like the characters, they aren't handled well.  I was going to say that there's too many, but I think it's more accurate to say that too many of them are almost useless.  There is a quantifiable "best party," which isn't all that unusual, but the disparity between the "best party" and nearly everyone else is ridiculous.  Say you somehow manage to acquire every party member (which I did, more on that later).  You end up with two characters you're stupid not to use (Sabin and Gogo), a few second-stringers, and everyone else.  Again, there are fourteen characters.

If you know your Dragon Ball Super, imagine this: in the latest tournament arc, instead of a team of ten, they use a team of 14 (bear with me), they start with Goku and Vegeta, then add Gohan, Gotenks, Piccolo, and the androids.  AND THEN EVERYONE ELSE IS YAJIROBE.  And those seven Yajirobes are on the team, expected to fight alongside everyone else.  What???

Okay, it's admittedly a bit of an exaggeration to say that everyone else is completely useless.  Hell, I used Locke and Setzer a lot just because I like them and I'm obstinate.  And yes, if you want to put the time into them, the other characters can become somewhat powerful in their own right, but there's absolutely no reason to do so.  I don't really want to go any further with this tangent, especially since this review is already getting away from me.  I will say that one character's special ability crashed my game.

I will also take a moment to complain about how convoluted it is just to get most of the characters.  Once the world opens up and becomes nonlinear, most of the characters are relegated to sidequests, in which you have to do something, sometimes simple sometimes complicated, in order to recruit them.  And by this point some of them have already been recruited once (or twice), and that's assuming you do everything correctly in the first half of the game.

Let me tell you a little story about an experience I had.  So, I'm working on the dungeon that serves as the halfway point of the game.  The dungeon is a massive pain in the neck, and it contains within it a pretty difficult boss fight, one which I was warned I would most likely be doing more than once.  Well, I beat the boss first try (through a lot of effort), continued on with the dungeon, zippity bop.  At the end of the dungeon, it gives you a choice to make.  I made the wrong choice, thus making it impossible to recruit one of the characters in the second half of the game.  One choice.  For a character whose recruitment requirements are already convoluted.

So, back to before the boss fight.  I beat it again, less trouble this time, get through the dungeon, make the correct choice, bam!  Oh, but I'm not standing in the right spot, so I get a game over. Okay!

SO, back to before the boss fight.  I beat it again, handily, get through the dungeon, make the right choice, stand in the right spot.  Now I can proceed with the game.

And it's stuff like that that I dislike about Final Fantasy VI.  It's oftentimes complicated for the sake of being complicated.  And the complications themselves are often pointless, ridiculous, or both.  I don't know how I ever would've figured out even half of it without Rachel's help.  She really knows her stuff.

In the latter half of the game, nearly all of the character sidequests are separate and optional, meaning that almost none of them relate to each other.  There's an odd exception here and there, but it's generally a small, admittedly sometimes great, side story about a particular character, unrelated to anything else.  And then you get that character as a sort of trophy for your party.  It's really unfortunate, especially when the first half of the game is so great, with stories that are intertwined and meaningful.

Again, sometimes these side stories are really great, but they're still optional, and they feel that way.  In order to beat the game, there are three characters you're required to have.  Three of fourteen.  Don't get me wrong, more characters makes the game easier, but that's not even a full party.  And, spoilers, Terra is not one of those characters.  Remember her?  The character we started the game with?

Still, these are my only complaints, and I only complain at all because of how strong the first half of the game is.  And the second half, while it may not live up to what came before, is still great more often than not.  My favorite part of the second half was actually hunting down and beating all the secret bosses (okay, not Doom Gaze).  And there is a certain satisfaction that comes along with having every character, even if the game doesn't really acknowledge it.

So yes, if you have any interest whatsoever, check out Final Fantasy VI (or III, if you prefer).  It's definitely worth your time.  Many people call it the greatest RPG on the SNES.  I don't personally agree with that.

Number 2, though?  Definitely.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - World of Ruin: Melancholy Music from Final Fantasy VI (TPR, 2016)

Playing - Yakuza 0 (2015)

Reading - Kamen Rider W: Futo Detective (2017)

Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

2 Confirmed Kills in 2017

Confirmed Kill: Mega Man 2

 Hello, hello, hello!  Welcome to the first entry in our year-end event, "Confirmed Kills!"

As I mentioned last week, every few days until New Year's (and possibly beyond) I'll be releasing a new review of a game I finished this year.  Keep in mind, these aren't necessarily games that came out in 2017, just games I finished for the first time.  If you're confused and want a more detailed explanation, you can get that right myah.  Otherwise, let's jump right in!

Title: Mega Man 2

Original Release: December 24, 1988 (Famicom/NES)

Finished Release: Mega Man Legacy Collection (3DS, 2015)

And so we begin with an absolute classic.  Lots of people with an opinion on such matters will tell you that the Mega Man series were the run'n'gun platformers to play on the NES.  In my opinion, those people would be correct.

I've always been a fan of Mega Man in general.  The series itself is just so simple and delightful, with still enough room for depth to make the stories engaging, if somewhat formulaic.  Unfortunately, half of the NES games came out before I was even born, and I was too young to appreciate the latter half.  That didn't stop me from falling in love with the successor series, Mega Man X, on the SNES.  Or the sequel series to that series, Mega Man Zero, on GBA.  Or the alternate universe series Mega Man Battle Network (also on GBA).  Seriously, there was a period of my life where I was ate up with Mega Man.  But I had never really experienced the originals.

I had tried them all, sure, but as a kid they were way too hard (and I had not yet developed an appreciation for 8-bit), so it would be a while before I tried in earnest.  But this time would be different.

I had recently picked up the Legacy Collection on 3DS, and I was determined that, this time around, I was definitely gonna beat the original Mega Man.  I didn't do that.  To be perfectly honest, I didn't really enjoy myself with it.  So I did some research, and popular opinion these days seems to be that you should start with Mega Man 2 and play the original game last.  So I played Mega Man 2.  And I beat it.  Which is why we're here talking about it.

And let me tell you, "popular opinion" was right on the money this time around, since Mega Man 2 has aged much better than its older brother.  For the record, I'm not attempting to belittle the original.  It's still a classic, and it would be impossible to overestimate its importance to gaming history.  But it's definitely showing its age, and that's all I'll say about it.

So, one of my biggest character flaws is that I get frustrated easily.  It's not an "always" thing, but I definitely have a history of giving up on things before I probably should.  After finishing Bloodborne (more on that later this month) I found myself more willing to play more challenging games, but before that it was rare that I put a lot of time into games that could be described as "hard."  Mega Man 2 is one of those games.

I can't really say why, except maybe to say that, while difficult, it isn't (usually) unfairly so.  It also demonstrates a mastery over its genre.  There's a reason these games are so well-remembered, and that's perfectly on display in Mega Man 2.  And all things considered, it's actually pretty forgiving for its day.  I mean, yeah, you're going to die a lot, but there are unlimited continues.  When you get a game over, you keep all of your progress but get kicked back to the stage select screen.  So, you can throw yourself back into the wall you've been trying to climb for the last two hours, or you can pick something else to work on.

The original release didn't feature any save capability, but rather a password system.  I can imagine this was a massive pain in the tenders back in the day, but the 3DS version makes it a non-issue.  Need to step away for a while?  Just close the system! Done.  And even if you have to quit the game for some reason, Legacy Collection features a save state system.  This way you can just save where you are and go play something that isn't going to punch you in the face for having the nerve to think you're good enough for it.

Speaking of which, I know the save state system is a point of contention within circles of "so-called" purists, seeing as how it allows you to bypass the need for a perfect run.  You can get past a particularly tough section once, save your game, and boom, you never have to get past it again. I don't really want to make any sort of strong statement about it.  I used the save state system, rarely, if for no other reason than convenience.  In the interest of full disclosure, I also used a boss guide I found online.  This did make some of the bosses laughably easy, but I still had to get to them.

As I said, I don't really want to make any sort of hard statement about whether games should be difficult or not.  But I will say this: everyone is going to have a different opinion on how much challenge they want in their games, and no one has the right to tell you that you're wrong for what you find fun.  Maybe you still play Mega Man 2 on NES to avoid even the possibility of saving your game.  Great, that's fine if that's what you want.  But maybe you play Mega Man 2 on 3DS and save the game after every single jump or enemy.  Good.  If that's what you want, and it makes the game fun for you, go for it.

Me, I'm somewhere in the middle.  I like to keep the experience as pure as possible, but I also know what I'll put up with, so I take it easy on myself from time to time.  Anyway, just do what makes it fun for you.  Hell, it's a single player game, who even cares?

Well, now that that tangent is past, I've realized I haven't even described what the game is like.  Maybe I assumed that everyone knows what these games are like, but I'll give a quick summary.

Basically, you play Mega Man.  He's a cute little robot decked out in blue armor.  His arms can turn into cannons that fire out energy pellets.  He can jump over things.  He's out to beat Dr. Wily and his evil Robot Masters, all of whom have special weapons of their own, which Mega Man acquires when he beats them.  Each Robot Master is at the end of a level with perilous jumps, enemies, and traps, which Mega Man has to overcome in order to get to them, and he can do these stages in any order.  Once all that is done, he attacks Dr. Wily's castle directly.  Also he's called Rockman in Japan.

See?  Couldn't be simpler, but it really is a great time.  Like I said before, the game has aged incredibly well, and it's just a fun little blast from the past.  If you have any interest in putting time into the series, this is definitely where you should start.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening: Scary Monsters (David Bowie, 1980)

Playing - Wolfenstein: The New Order (2015)

Reading - Kamen Rider W: Futo Detective (2017)

Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

1 Confirmed Kill in 2017

Upcoming Plans

Greetings, programs!  Sorry I've been away for so long, but Blogtober took more out of me than I anticipated.  Still, I've decided to take a brief break from my sabbatical to give a quick update on what you guys can expect to see here in the weeks to come.

To begin with, as I'm sure most of you are aware, the last couple months of the year are a busy time for pretty much everyone.  For starters, this Friday is my anniversary (five years and counting!), but that's just the beginning.  I have my second Thanksgiving in as many months, my birthday, Christmas and everything that goes into that, and the new year.

Add on to that the fact that my wife is changing jobs.  It's a better job, and thankfully she's moving from a shift-based schedule to a day job, Monday-to-Friday gig, which should add a lot of stability.  Still, a new job is stressful, and we're essentially changing our life around it, so the early days will involve a lot of getting used to things.

There's also just the fact that I'm lazy anyway.

But but but, this is actually all going somewhere positive, and I'll be getting to that presently.  I only bring it all up to explain why I won't have the kind of time I had in October.  And now we move on to the good news.

To me, the end of the year has pretty much always been about video games.  Not just because new games tend to come out then, but also because, as an only child with a lot of relatives that took Christmas pretty seriously, it usually meant receiving a host of them as gifts.  Also my birthday is exactly three weeks before Christmas, and I also got birthday presents.

I had a lot to do come New Year's.

However, as you may remember from the closing ceremonies of Blogtober, I've had a long history of not really finishing anything, and it might be video games that suffer the most from that.  To my own credit, though, the last couple of years have seen a serious upswing in the number of games that I actually finish.  And I have to say, this year I outdid myself.  I'm not saying I'm ripping through them left and right.  But, according to my records, I've finished an average of one game a month this year, which is extremely good for me.

But why is that important?  Well, because this is the subject of the next wave of reviews on the site.  For the next several weeks, all the way to the end of the year and possibly past it, I'm going to be rolling out reviews of every game I finished this year.  I'm pretty excited about it, but first let me go over the ground rules.

First, no mobile games or MMOs.  Not because I have anything against either type of game, just because they usually can't really be "finished."

Second, these aren't games that came out in 2017 and I beat them (though one and two fit that description).  No, this is any game that I beat for the first time in 2017.  Anything is fair game (as long as it's not discounted by point one.)

And third, when I say "finished" or "beaten," I don't mean "completed 100%."  I'm not a completionist by any stretch.  Instead the definition is a bit more vague.  Usually it just means I made it to the end credits, though I understand that there are certain games that aren't "finished" when you see the credits.  Basically, it's once the story is over.

I haven't decided on a set schedule or order yet (or a name for the "event"), but I'd like to get out two or three reviews a week, and they'll probably be vaguely in the order I finished them in.  Either way, it should be a lot of fun.

And there you go!  That's what you have to expect from me in the weeks to come.  I'm treating it as kind of a celebration of the fact that I'm slowly becoming a person that finishes things.  It's a relatively new aspect of my personality, one that I'm desperately trying to convince myself is positive.

Anyway, I'm gonna head back to kicking my feet up while I still can.  You can expect the first of the reviews to be up early next week.  Hopefully I'll have thought of a name by then.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (David Bowie, 1972)
Playing - Flinthook (2017)
Reading - Fist of the Blue Sky (2001)
Watching - Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973)

Blogtober Closing Ceremonies

Hey guys, welcome to the official final post of Blogtober.  Yes, this was supposed to go up yesterday, but I had a surprisingly difficult time writing it, for reasons I'll get into soon.  As mentioned previously, we won't be reviewing anything today, just reflecting on the month and how it all went.  But first we're going to talk a little bit about the origins of Blogtober.

I've wanted to be a writer for nearly twenty years.  I can vividly remember being in the fifth grade, right around the time I was first reading Harry Potter, and deciding that that was what I wanted to do with my life.  I don't recall any particular spark of inspiration or sudden burst of creativity, but I had started really getting into reading fantasy novels, and one day I just decided that I could add to that library.

I credit Harry Potter with making me want to write, but it was more probably a mishmash of all the things I was into at the time.  I do know that I was really into dragons.  I know this because my first writing project (that I can remember) consisted of me opening a Word document, typing The Amethyst Dragon in a fancy font, then closing it and never coming back.

As funny as that story is, it was an early indication of what would actually become a severe problem for me.  See, I don't finish things.  I've started hundreds of video games in my lifetime and finished maybe 10% of them.  I rarely finish reading books or comics series, and almost never finish watching TV series.  Hell, sometimes I don't even finish movies.

And I have never, ever completed a writing project.

I can't really say why because I can't really claim to know.  I mean, I know I have problems to work through.  As a kid I was diagnosed with ADHD, which can partially explain why I get distracted so easily.  I haven't been diagnosed with anything in my adult life, and I don't want to arbitrarily slap names on things, but I have symptoms of depression and sometimes-severe anxiety issues.  I used to work for Statistics Canada, but I suffered a nervous breakdown in spring of 2016, and I haven't been back to work since.  My wife Jessie works full-time and takes care of me, and I genuinely don't know what I would do without her.

The reason I bring all this up is to explain that this is the reason I created Blogtober.  I've wanted to start a blog for a long while now, and I figured it would be good for me to have something that I have to do.  Any other time I've come up with something I want to write, the only person I can disappoint is myself.  Here, though, if I don't deliver, everyone knows it.  I have to explain myself if I don't follow through.  I set up this situation because I wanted to force myself to write.  Has it worked?

Well, I've explained before that I've been doing these "watch a movie a day" lists every October since 2014, making this year number four.  This is also the first year in which I actually completed the list.  Blogtober is almost definitely the reason for that.  There were delays here and there, definitely, and sometimes I would put it off until the last minute.  But the fact still stands that, over 33 days, I wrote 33 movie reviews.  The only thing keeping the project from being complete was this post.  And I don't complete things.

At some point this became my mantra, a fact of life.  I'll never complete anything because I don't complete things.  I'm not good enough, I don't have what it takes, and no one would enjoy it anyway.  I don't know if people have been enjoying this, but what I do know is that I want to complete things.  I enjoy writing, and not just reviews of the things I like.  I want to tell people stories.   It's all I've ever wanted to do.  I have so many things in my head, fighting to get out, but none of them have ever been strong enough to overcome the wall of defeatism.

But I'm writing this now.  When this post is complete, the Blogtober project will be complete.  Earlier this year I wrote on a piece of paper "I will be published by October 31" as a sort of motivational tactic.  That didn't quite happen, but once this post is, well, posted, I will consider it a success.  I am genuinely afraid I'm going to have a heart attack right before I click "publish."  Let's drag it out a bit longer.  How was the month itself?

Well, Halloween wasn't quite what I wanted it to be.  October was a month of high stress levels for my wife and me, almost all of it from outside sources.  But we're almost on the other side, and I'm actually really glad I went through with this.  It was stressful, I put a lot of pressure on myself, sometimes to the point of making myself sick.  But it's over, and I didn't give up.  I did not give up.  I proved to myself that I can complete something, and go figure, I'm even happy with the quality.  Most of it isn't amazing, but I can do better and I know it.  Knowing you can do better is much nicer than knowing that you can't.

And what do you know?  I actually enjoyed most of the movies.  Yes, we had a few duds in the mix, but overall I'd say this year's list was a big success.  Phantasm continues to be a highlight of my year; I finally finished the Harry Potter movies; I got to watch again some of my favorites, like Hellraiser and Ghostbusters (both, and don't you forget it); and there were even some nice surprises, like Warm Bodies and Goosebumps.

Okay, so The Town that Dreaded Sundown was a massive disappointment.  I don't know what I expected from a TV movie from the 1970s, but it somehow failed to live up to even those expectations.  And yet it still wasn't as dull as Son of Dracula, which, wow, how even.  There were also, somehow, two separate movies that fall apart in the last ten minutes or so.  Let it never be underestimated the importance of a satisfying ending.

If anybody has been keeping up with Blogtober all along, feel free to let me know your thoughts.  Did you enjoy it?  Should I do it again next year?  If so, what are some movies you'd suggest for the list?  Either way, thanks for reading.

As for upcoming plans, things are a bit in flux right now.  Once I publish this post, I'm going to take a few days off and just veg out.  I have one more project I'd like to complete before the end of the year, but nothing is set in stone yet.

I would also like to eventually post some of my original fiction, once something is finished.  Blogtober has been a roller coaster ride of mixed emotions, but it has convinced me that I want to continue writing.  I just have to figure out the best way to do so.

Anyway, this brings Blogtober to a close.  If you've been here the whole time, and even if you haven't, I just want to thank you for taking the time to read my words.  It means a lot to me, and I hope you've found them entertaining thus far.  If not, thanks for your time anyway.  You've been here for something momentous: I finally finished something.  I can't tell you how happy I'll be to click "publish."

Assuming I survive.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - What We Saw From the Cheap Seats (Regina Spektor, 2012)
Playing - Super Mario Odyssey (2017)
Reading - The Complete Books of Blood (Clive Barker, 1984)
Watching - Kamen Rider Build (2017)

Blogtober Epilogue: I Think It Was Our Most Horrible Yet!

Hello again, and welcome back to our last review in this year's Blogtober!  It's sad to see Halloween gone for another year, but we're gonna try to focus on the future right now.

The November 1st movie is something of a yearly tradition for me.  With Halloween over and Christmas looming ahead, it can be difficult to transition straight from one holiday feeling to the next.  Luckily there's one movie that specifically helps with this problem.

THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993)

Blogtober Qualifications: Monsters, skeletons, the Boogeyman, a literal Halloweentown

Yeah, you knew what it'd be.

Halloween has come to a close for another year, and the residents of Halloweentown are celebrating all the work they put in this year.  For the record, Halloweentown seems to be an otherworldly place, the sole purpose of which is to bring Halloween to the world every year.

One resident of the town doesn't quite join in on the festivities, however: the Pumpkin King, Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon).  Jack, you see, is actually kind of depressed.  He's been at the Halloween game for a long time, and just doesn't feel the thrill of it anymore.  He desperately seeks a new experience.

Seemingly completely by chance, Jack discovers the existence of Christmastown, which is exactly what it sounds like.  This place is unlike anything Jack has ever seen, and he quickly becomes enamored with the idea of Christmas.  He returns to Halloweentown to share what he's learned and, before long, the townsfolk decide that it might be a good idea to make Christmas themselves this year...

So.  Yes.  There's a very real possibility that you've already seen this movie.  It wouldn't be too surprising, considering the fame it's garnered for itself over the past ten years or so.  Ironically, it was more of a cult movie for a good while.  I can vividly remember a time when I was the only person I knew that had even heard of it, much less liked it.

By now, though, it's exploded in popularity.  It's not quite as in vogue as it was a few years ago, when everybody was into it, but you still find merch and fanart everywhere.  The funny thing is, popular internet opinion seems to suggest that I should hate these "new fans."  I've been here since the beginning, but they're just jumping on a bandwagon, right?  How dare they come in so much later, suddenly the biggest fans in the world?

Now, I can understand this feeling.  When you have something that you care about, that everyone else ignores, you become that much more attached to it.  And then, if everyone else suddenly shows interest in that thing, it can cause some serious whiplash.  You tell yourself they don't really understand it.  That they're only interested now because it's become popular.  And worst of all, you become afraid that people will think that you are only interested now because it's become popular.  You wish you could wear some sort of badge that says "Longtime Fan" or something.  I get it, I do.  

The most recent thing this happened with for me was JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, when the new anime adaptation began a few years ago.  I had been a JoJo fan for years by that point, but now everyone was a JoJo fan.  On the one hand it's a good thing, right?  We're getting licensed games in North America!  Sure, I had already imported the Japanese version of the game, but I bought it again in English.  But now JoJo isn't "mine" anymore, is it?  It's not that thing that I can point to and go "Yes, this is mine.  You may not understand it, but it's mine."  I went through all those emotions I talked about in the previous paragraph.  But I came to a conclusion at the time, and I've tried to live by it ever since.

It is never a bad thing for the things you love to be getting appreciation.

Best case scenario, it takes off like gangbusters, they make new stuff, or just newly-released versions.  Maybe it'll get an awesome sequel or follow-up, or get adapted into a new medium, and maybe it'll all just rock.

Worst case scenario, they try to do what I just said, screw it up, and it goes away again.  Sure, it sucks, but you just ignore the bad stuff and continue loving what you love.  And I bet that thing now has more fans than it had before.

In the case of JoJo, we got a sweet new anime (which will hopefully debut a new season soon), the entire series is being released in English, finally (originally only Part 3 got an English release), and in awesome new hardbound versions, no less.  It's, honestly, a great time to be a fan of the series. 

So no, your pet fandom suddenly becoming bigger isn't really worth complaining about, as long as it's being respected.

Anyway, enough of that rabbit hole.  I'll talk about JoJo at length sometime in the future, I'm sure, maybe a full series retrospective.  But for now, let's get back to Nightmare Before Christmas.

Honestly, though, what needs to be said?  You've probably already seen it.  If you haven't, and you have any interest whatsoever, you should.  You probably at least know some of the songs, so you can go ahead and sing along.

I love stop-motion.  We currently live in what is essentially the renaissance of stop-motion movies.  Just look at all the great ones that have come out in the past decade: Coraline, Paranorman, Frankenweenie.  I haven't seen The Boxtrolls or Kubo & the Two Strings, but I plan to fix that quite soon.  And every single one of those movies has The Nightmare Before Christmas to thank.

And not just because a lot of them are made by the same people.  Nightmare was daring at the time, a dark fantasy that skewed towards older kids, created with what was essentially becoming an "obsolete" technology.  And yet, it became something special.  I wouldn't be surprised one bit if every single one of those movies I listed before were made possible because of Nightmare's surge in popularity.  Sure, Corpse Bride was lackluster, but it wasn't lackluster enough to derail the train.

And sure, most of those newer movies are better than Nightmare (not Corpse Bride), but none of them are anything like it.  There's honestly nothing else like it.  The world that it presents is unique, it's quirky, and it's dripping with Halloween feeling.  And then, AND THEN, we take the biggest risk of all: we completely abandon that and instead focus on Christmas, and the dichotomy of the two holidays being essentially right next to each other.

It asks a question that was honestly begging to be asked: What if Halloween tried to do the job of Christmas?  What would the most wonderful time of the year look like through the lens of the macabre?  It's a real treat to watch.

On top of that, this movie, in my mind at least, created the idea of different holidays having a soul and a presence of their very own.  It made Halloween and Christmas (and others) linchpins of the universe.  I'm sure that things "felt like" Halloween and Christmas before this movie, but this created the idea that it could be something tangible, something that we can take a little piece of in our hands and carry it with us.

The cast of characters is great.  Jack Skellington's design is top-notch, and it's funny when you realize that, in anything else, he'd be a villain.  And yet he's not; instead, he's a charismatic, passionate leader of the people who just wants to experience something great.  Sally (voiced by Catherine O'Hara) the patchwork doll is a surprisingly deep character, mischievous one minute and contemplative the next.  And Oogie Boogie (voiced by Ken Page) is a great villain, greedy, chaotic, and disgusting, but still fun to watch.  He also has a great villain song.

Speaking of songs, almost all of them are great.  There's one or two that don't quite hit the bar for me, but all of the rest are catchy and memorable.  If any song from this soundtrack starts playing, I will sing along with it, even the couple I'm not that big on.

Now, I don't want you coming away with the idea that I think this is a perfect movie, because it's not.  As I said before, the stop-motion genre (if you want to call it that) has produced some seriously, seriously good movies in the years since, and so it becomes more difficult to look past Nightmare's few flaws.  And yes, they're few, and they're minor, but they're there.

Still, Nightmare more than holds its own in the modern day stop-motion arena.  Hell, it may still be my favorite, even if it gets by just a bit on nostalgia. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you've never seen this movie, and you have any idea that it might be the kind of thing you enjoy, it is absolutely worth your time.

And with that, we bring to a close the final review of Blogtober.  We're still not quite done, though, because tomorrow I'll be writing one final post to end it.  It'll be a "closing ceremonies" of a sort, where I'll be reflecting on how this October went, what movies I liked the best, and just generally looking back on what it was like to work on this project, and what it meant to me.  If you've enjoyed listening to me ramble so far, I hope you'll join me again.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Multiple

Playing - Super Mario Odyssey (2017)

Reading - The Complete Books of Blood (Clive Barker, 1984)

Watching - Kamen Rider Kiva (2008)

Blogtober Chapter 31: Carly Beth, I'm Sorry, But This Face Is Your Face Now

Happy Halloween!  Okay, so it's mostly over now, but I hope your day went great.  I actually meant to have this post up earlier, but I had some other things going on (like procrastination). But it's here now!

Today's entry is a little special, because we aren't reviewing a movie, but a two-part episode of one of the two '90s horror shows for kids.  Yes, there were two horror shows for kids in the '90s.  Dang Mortal Kombat, corrupting our youth.

It's also a bit different because we don't have a poster or a DVD cover (though one exists) and we will instead be using a book cover.  Remember books?

Anyway, without further ado, let's hop to it.

GOOSEBUMPS: THE HAUNTED MASK PARTS 1 & 2 (1995)

Blogtober Qualifications: Halloween, masks, mean pranks, duck costumes???

Carly Beth Caldwell (Kathryn Long) is afraid of pretty much everything.  It doesn't help that everyone seems to love scaring her.  Also her mother made a plaster bust of Carly Beth's face in some vague crafts class, which, I mean, that has to be weird, right?  Also also, her mother bought Carly Beth a duck costume (???) for Halloween because of an offhand comment CB(as she will now be known) made earlier in the year.  I just...

Anyway, she's afraid of everything and the school kids love to prey on that because kids are horrible.  After a particularly mean-spirited prank involving a sandwich and a worm, CB decides that she's had enough.  "To Hell with the duck costume!" she proclaims (essentially), and she decides to put all of her savings ($30, not bad in '90s money) into the perfect horrific costume to scare everyone around.

Spoiler warning: things don't go so well.  She buys a scary mask from a new novelty shop that's just opened up.  Oh, and when I say "buys," I mean "steals, throwing the money behind her as a diversion while she runs away."  That's fine, though, cause the mask salesman is weird and creepy anyway.

To cut a long story short, CB puts on the mask, along with what are basically her normal clothes.  She also steals the plaster bust her mother made and uses it as some sort of scary totem.  She has a good time scaring people at first (and is actually pretty fun to watch), but it doesn't take long before she realizes that the mask is changing her.  Worse yet, she can't seem to take it off...

So something worth noting here is that, yes, I read the Goosebumps books and loved them.  My personal favorite of the books was Attack of the Mutant (which was later adapted into a badass PC game).  However, that being said, I never really watched the show.  This was mainly because it was never on at a convenient time where I lived.  There's also the fact that Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which played after school on my favorite channel (Nickelodeon, which would no longer be my favorite once I discovered Cartoon Network), filled my scary show quota well enough.  This may actually be the first time I've watched a full episode all the way through.

And honestly, I found it pretty enjoyable, all things considered.  I mean, it's not great, by any stretch.  Hell, it might not even be good, technically speaking.  But it's a lot more competent than I was expecting.

To put the old horse down right away, yes, the acting is pretty hokey.  But it's actually not as bad as you might think.

CB herself is a little wooden, but once she puts the mask on she's actually quite a treat to watch.  She seemed to be a bit less stiff behind the mask, and I enjoyed her antics.  It's also quite possible that it's a completely different person under the mask.  I did some research, but I couldn't find a definite answer either way.  I did find out that her actor, Kathryn Long, went on to become a professional ballerina.  That's genuinely pretty awesome, way to go.

Everyone else is actually fairly decent.  CB's best friend Sabrina (also played by a Kathryn, last name Short) is the weakest of the main kid actors, but

Wait, what?  The main character and her best friend are played by Kathryn Long and Kathryn Short?  How does that happen?  One of those castings had to be intentional, right?  Like they were picking between two girls for Sabrina and they had, say, Vernita Green and Kathryn Short.  And they were just "Well, it's obvious which one we pick, right?"

That is definitely what happened.  Moving on.

Honestly, the weakest acting job (from the named characters) would probably have to go to CB's mom.  Her name is Brenda Bazinet, and she's been in quite a few things since this, almost none of it noteworthy.  Still, I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she's just phoning it in here.  I mean, it's Goosebumps, who's even gonna see it?

Me, apparently.

So beyond all that, the story proceeds pretty much as you'd expect: kid does questionable things, bad things happen, kid learns lesson, twist ending.  Like I said, it's actually pretty enjoyable, but I wouldn't call it scary.  I mean, I know I'm an adult and everything, but I'm pretty sure there's only one scene in the whole two-parter that would scare even a child, and even that's a bit of a stretch.  Still, though, a good time, all told.

At the same time, there are a lot of little weird things that I noticed, and I'm going to rant about that now.  Enjoy.

So in the aforementioned worm sandwich scene, we're at the school lunch...yard... and everyone in the school is wearing a costume except the named characters.  At least two of these children are dressed as a clown.  Y'know, one of the old go-to costumes for any generic background kid.

Then there's the fact that everyone overreacts to the mask.  One mother and her children express an inordinate amount of distaste for the rubber visage.  CB then growls at the mother's daughter in order to scare her.  Because it's Halloween, right?  Well then the mother threatens to call the police.  Again, the crime is scaring someone on Halloween.

More mask shenanigans, people keep asking CB how she's "doing that with (her) voice," the implication being that her voice is somehow changing when the mask is on.  But it's literally just the actress (Long, Kathryn)... doing a slightly different voice?  Like, imagine a little girl imitating the Wicked Witch of the West, as they are wont to do.  It's just that.

For the record, the mask itself is just a rubber mask.  It's well-made, but you could grab something similar at any Party City.  I know it's a kids' show, but give me some glowing eyes or something.

We also have the strangest cliffhanger I've ever seen at the end of part one, and this is from a series infamous for bad cliffhangers.  Sabrina tells CB to take the mask off.  CB doesn't want to.  They awkwardly tussle over it.  To be continued.

Oh yeah, R.L. Stine himself keeps showing up to tell us how scary his story is, and it's like, dude, you must know better.

And finally, minor spoilers, but CB learns her lesson (I guess) and comes home, relieved to see her mother again.  Her mother asks her why she's home so late and what she's so upset about.  CB's response?

"Let's just say I learned a lot about myself tonight," or something along those lines.  And her mother just smiles and hugs her!

Okay, imagine this: you're a parent.  It's Halloween, and your teenage(?) daughter comes home late.  You have no idea where she's been, but she's clearly disheveled and in a fair amount of distress.  When asked about it, all she'll say is that she learned a lot about herself.  In what universe is the proper response smiles and hugs???

Anyway, I've digressed enough.  The point is that I actually enjoyed the show quite a bit.  Far as I can tell, this special basically created the TV series, so it's really not a surprise that the quality is high (again, relatively speaking).  If you have any nostalgic memories, or want to see what we got up to in the '90s, or just want some harmless spooky fun, definitely give it a watch.

And with that, Halloween comes to a close, but Blogtober is not quite over yet.  Tomorrow we have our epilogue, one final movie to help us transition from one season to the next.  Yeah, you've probably seen it, but it'll be a good time anyway.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - Dio: Holy Diver (1983)

Playing - Super Mario Odyssey (2017)

Reading - The Complete Books of Blood (Clive Barker, 1984)

Watching - Kamen Rider Kiva (2008)