Yeah, for me I enjoy the process/technical aspects the most. So if I have viewers or not, I’m getting what I want out of it. 
Twitch definitely is at a stage, like Youtube, where getting viewers is harder, but at the same time there are legit opportunities to make it big for those that do. So many people get into streaming because they think they can make it big, but the ones that do make it generally either are really good and persistent or lucky and enjoy streaming for its own sake.
We have 2 new Xbox 360 games. One of them is already kinda completed. The other is about 40% done.
New Games:
Chime
Banjo Tooie
Chime is often compared with Lumines. A puzzle game that is rhythm based. There is time attack mode and free mode. There are 5 songs you can play in those modes. After that there isn’t much you can do. I already unlocked all the 5 songs. You can 100% the songs if you want more value out of the game. Since I have more than enough games on my plate, I decided to leave it be for now. The price also reflects the length of the game btw, it was around 400 microsoft points. It’s a fun game but you’ve kind of seen it all after 2 playthroughs.
Banjo Tooie is the sequel of Banjo Kazooie. You might remember my impressions of that game a while ago. I was very positive about that game. The sequel seems to be more of the same, yet different. What is apparent from the start is that the sequel tries to be bigger and better. Makes sense, right? However…Banjo Kazooie is structured like Super Mario 64 if my memory serves me right. You had paintings you could jump to and you go visit worlds. This game has open world elements to it. All the levels are connected in a huge hubworld and every world is much larger in size. You can also use a train to travel through worlds after a while. There is always an instant transport mode, so I’m not sure what’s the point of having a train besides it being a neat idea. In addition…the game has mini-games that are fun and well designed so far. There are sections where you play as a first person shooter, that surprised me in a game like that. You control new characters and Banjo and Kazooie both have many different moves. You can even split the two now and use them for puzzles. Both Banjo games are big on exploration and finding objects. They’re both good at it. I love exploring and coming back later with new power ups.
Based on what I’ve played so far. Technically and gameplay wise Banjo Tooie seems to be the better game, but I still seem to have more fond memories of Banjo Kazooie. That game is more memorable and it has more catchy music. Banjo Tooie also has lots of humour and it really is a great game. It’s definitely worth playing and finding it better for other reasons. I still have about 60% left to experience, it might still end up being my favourite out of the two.
I’m playing Dragon Quest 2 and Tales of Graces F. I’m nearing the end for both. I couldn’t for the life of me understand what to do at the point I’m at in DQ2, lol. I wish it had a current objective log or something. I have to find the last crest, the Star Crest, then I’ll be one step closer to the final dungeon. I’m also nearing the end in Graces. I had fought the hardest boss in the game. The fight with Kurt. He was so cheap. I had to put it on easy to stand a chance, and I still had trouble with him.
I’ve been focusing on Banjo Tooie.
5 worlds out of 9 have been explored, but not fully. There are still many objects to collect in those worlds. You learn new moves and skills in every world, let’s say between 2-4 in each world. Often times you can’t collect many objects or explore fully on your first playthrough. This encourages the player to continue to the next worlds more quickly than expected in order to learn as many skills as possible and then explore the worlds with less restrictions.
The worlds are seriously huge…you have many instant transportation pods even within one world. I love exploring one large world and having connected worlds, but I felt a bit overwhelmed for a while. Or…maybe I should put it differently, it felt like a chore to see everything a world has to offer to get an idea of how large it is.
On the other hand…it’s really impressive that a N64 platformer has that. It seems like it was ahead of its time. The themes of the worlds are also very interesting and not your typical fire world, ice world etc. You have an amusement park, atlantis that is connected with a town, an underground mine etc. There is always a lot to experience and it has been very fresh.
I’ve been warming up a lot to the game recently. This kind of game structure is totally my thing. Usually I tend to focus exclusively on those type of games until they’re complete or near completion.
oof, oh man Valestein Castle is possibly the best dungeon in any Ys game ever, everything about it is just so good
So yeah, I beat Infamous: Second Son, figured I’d at least post about it here too. First thing I wanna say? Better open world game than MGSV. I liked that none of the structure of the side missions were used for the main missions to pad out the game. With maybe one or two exceptions, I barely had to do any of the side missions either! I liked that exploration and objectives on the map were tied directly into upgrading your powers. You get tangible rewards just for playing the game! So smart. Hell, I even liked the touchpad and motion controls. I haven’t seen them used in a PS4 game before and it was actually a novel experience. I also super liked the soundtrack, that part was the biggest surprise.
Of course, I did have a few issues with it. The choices were all really bad. There’s no reason to make opposite color choices once you start down a path, both mechanically and logically. Smoke powers get outclassed by every other subsequent power. Since you can just use a different power I guess it’s fine, it just sucks that it remains useless for the majority of the game. The framerate can take a dive sometimes, not enough to bother me I suppose but it would definitely drop below 30.
All in all though? Still a pretty damn good game. If I had to give it a number score, I’d say 8/10. My favorite power was neon and I was thinking about buying the DLC, but for $15 I think I’ll just wait and see if it goes on sale.
that’s obs the best power, though smoke is sometimes best because of the subdue upgrades
i wish they’d had more freedom with the story progression the characters were pretty good, very nice writing and acting all around, and they could have done a lot with them if they had paced the game to prioritize the story over the gameplay from time to time
Oh yeah, I liked the story too. I know basically nothing about the previous games and it didn’t feel like I needed to. One minor complaint that I just remembered was that it was sometimes difficult to know what’s supposed to be a climbable surface. It doesn’t come up often, pretty much the only times I can recall it being an issue is on the space needle and at the end of the game. I got stuck for like 20 minutes trying to figure out what to do with Fetch standing around with her thumb up her ass and Edgar just floating in the background. I thought maybe I had sequence broke it somehow. Nope, I was just supposed to grab onto this antenna bit and know that I was supposed to climb up it. You don’t have to do this in game enough for them to not give you any cues.
Orchids to Dust is pretty and completely lacking in gameplay. Even in a walking simulator I expect some kind of progression.
what did you choose at the end? i found a dead astronaut and didn’t expect to turn into a tree
personally i found the ending revelation very poignant, very life affirming in a sense, that when you’re playing you’re unknowingly exploring the remains of other players, and in a weird sense they are also helping you navigate what is at the end of the day a virtual cemetery
thanks for taking the suggestion btw
There is a choice? I played it twice and ended up suffocating both times. Finding other corpses was a nice touch, but I didn’t find a way to interact with the world.
you can choose to take your helmet off or not, right? i assumed taking it off would make you grow into a tree, and not taking it off would make you a regular corpse
Really? I totally missed that feature.
I finished Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The world is huge compared to Dear Esther and there is no run button. It looks and sounds incredible, but you really have to be in the right mood to enjoy it.
We have one completed game and continuing with another game that has already been mentioned before.
Completed Game
Banjo Tooie
To be fair, it’s not really completed as far as defeating the final boss goes. I tried doing that but ended up having enough and watching the ending on youtube. I could have defeated the boss with some tries, but I really had my fill with this game.
It’s not bad by any means. It’s a great game in fact. It’s rather me feeling odd lately when it comes to games. In many ways, while way ahead of its time, it is also still a N64 game. With that you can expect controls and gameplay design that feel outdated while still very functional.
Me quitting this game has a lot to do with what you will see in my backlog thread.
Currently Playing
Soul Sacrifice Delta
I had the pleasure of trying co-op (ad-hoc) for the first time. This is the reason why I’m playing this sooner than expected. The performance of co-op has been very smooth. The missions themselves have been very short and easy. We’ve also had some easy archfiends (bosses). You can say this preview shows how good co-op will get.
I’m also getting into the game again. Soon I’ll get hooked on it like before. Only this time it will be better. Everything about Delta is better than the original version.
Silent Hill 3
It isn’t the first “mature” horror narrative in games and it wasn’t the last. But it’s probably the best, even 13 years later. Often overlooked, as both 1 and 2 contain more jarring and forceful narrative devices, the third Silent Hill is the peak of the series, narratively, while never as overtly shocking as its predecessors. It uses narrative to work out the edges of the mysterious little city of Silent Hill, while intertwining its back-story into the first game’s events with a degree of patience and space unique to games. The narrative, while hugely important, resists the typically modern habit of locking the player into short bursts of guided gameplay. Silent Hill 3’s levels are mazes of locked doors, oppressive enemies and puzzles, nearly all of which feed back into the narrative. Consider the game’s first major puzzle: to advance, one must re-order the works of Shakespeare. Nearly all them contain elements of sacrifice and betrayal from within the family, and none of this is unintentional. The game’s environments, especially the shifted environments, are rich with a gruesome but important psychological meaning. Each level and obstacle within the game feeds back into the game’s narrative elements.
Beyond that, there’s the simple impact of the game’s elements: the steady, ever-building hiss of radio static telling the player, “It’s near you, it’s always near you.” While Resident Evil was, at the end of the day, about surprise, Silent Hill was always about suffocating dread, about removing hope, removing safety from every corner and room in the game. You are never not fragile. Your weapons will always feel flimsy in the arms of Heather. Her swing of an iron bar looks flimsy, because it will always be the flimsy swing of an untrained 20-something young woman. The sound and the areas often feel gray and unwelcoming before transitioning into the vivid, rusted, bloody nightmare worlds the series is most famous for. The sound is already an unsettling mixture of inhuman sighs and static distortion, doubly so when the game flips the switch on its world, and then the real dread settles in. This isn’t horror through shock or cliché, it’s horror through narrative, through mechanics, and, most importantly, through the very design of its world. Silent Hill always puts you in the position of a normal person, never an ex-combatant or a superman, and then subjects that person to a world that defies logic and sanity. It’s often said, though it’s rarely true, that they don’t make them like this anymore. But in Silent Hill 3’s case, it’s absolutely true.
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The opening scene of Final Fantasy Type-0 HD is filled with impenetrable nonsense about crystals and misspellings of words like “academy” and “tech”. The tone starts out refreshingly dark and violent, but soon it is replaced by lecture halls and miniskirts.
There are 14 protagonists in your class and you can switch between them quite freely. The combat system seems pretty basic. The real-time controls have a turn-based feel to them when you are locked into longer animations. I hope it will be less talky once I’m past the tutorial area.
Did you complete the game?
@archnemesis I’m looking forward to your impressions of FF Type 0 as you clear more of the game.
As mentioned in the other thread, I’m played a bit more of Banjo Tooie. AND I decided to start on the next xbox 360 game.
New Game
Infinite Undiscovery
It has been a while since I’ve played a game like this one. A Jrpg and one that is more similar to the Jrpgs that I used to get into on the PS1/PS2. A Jrpg from a well known name and one that you can feel straight away as you start the game. Infinite Undiscovery is published by Square Enix, but it’s developed by tri-Ace, from Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile etc.
You’re welcomed with a nice FMV and Motoi Sakuraba soundtrack that is in great shape. The game starts right away with gameplay and the pacing of the story is quick. 2D artwork reminds me of Valkyrie Profile and characters have been interesting and varied so far.
The game seems to be an action RPG where you fight monsters in the field. You have limited control over other party members through connect mode, but you only control one character for the most part.
I’ve played the game for about an hour and a half. That’s not enough to go deeply into it. So far I really like what I’m seeing. It’s like meeting up with an old friend again. I wasn’t expecting much of it due to the rather negative impressions I have read about it, but now I’m looking forward to it.
We have a game completed properly this time.
Completed Game
Banjo Tooie
Alright…I went back to collect almost everything and managed to defeat the last boss. I missed 1 jiggie and 1 cheat page due to 1 mini-game that seems to be way too annoying to give it a serious try. I read how it’s very difficult from impressions, so I decided to spare my sanity XD
Here’s the thing with this game…it is a classic. Just like Banjo Kazooie. It can easily be seen as one of the best games of its generation. Only…it has more flaws than Banjo Kazooie because it tries to be more diverse with its controls and mini-games. Its flaws are common, they also belong to that generation.
One of the new ways to play the game would be the first person sections. There are moments where the game automatically switches to first person view and you have to shoot things like a real first person shooter. The problem with that is the aiming. You can’t aim somewhere and leave the left stick. If you leave the left stick…the position returns to its default position, making it very annoying for precise aiming. Then there is no laser with aiming…you can use Kazooie head as an indicator of where you’re aiming, but it takes time to get used to it. Personally…I get dizzy and feel sick in first person view sometimes. The camera can be too fast. I used to have that a lot with first person shooter games around that time, this game also has some of that.
The controls during the water section can be irritating when you’re transforming into a torpedo or using Kazooie alone.
The game also has some weird logic with some of its puzzles and it’s overly precise with what’s required of you in order to clear certain puzzles. I searched the net for the last objects that I had to find. I didn’t feel bad about it. Especially after realizing how I would have wasted a long time if I didn’t do that.
Its positives are very good though. The game is charming with its characters and world. The writing is very self-aware and the worlds are connected nicely to one another. Exploration is incredibly important in this game. That’s where most of my hours went 
It’s a very ambitious game. The levels are huuuuuge. Banjo and Kazooie have many moves and skills. That surprised me.
Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie are both good games. It’s hard to pick a favorite. They are structured a bit differently. One is more linear and the other is more open world. I’m looking forward to the third Banjo game now!
