Weekly Blog 7/2/23

Happy holiday week. Canada Day was yesterday for the people above the border and 4th of July for the US is coming up in a couple days. As for me, I don't have major plans to celebrate the holidays, but I do have some extra time off away from the main job and I've been using a lot of it to get caught up and get back into the swing of things on the Youtube end of things.

Videos and Streams

Where do I begin? I'm slowly getting back into the swing of streaming again. With finishing up my Pikmin 1 stream series yesterday. That last stretch of the game went by way faster than I was expecting. I finished early that I decided to show off all the optional bosses and jump into Pikmin 2 just to get a taste of it again. I would not expect to continue Pikmin 2 next week. I'm not ready to commit to a full playthrough on stream, as there's a couple one-off stream ideas I've been itching to explore, it's just a matter of deciding which to do first. The Pikmin 2 segment was so fun, I think I'm actually going to edit that into it's own video before editing down Pikmin 1. I already have a Pikmin 1 LP on the channel, meanwhile, that stream was the first time I've shared anything I've done in Pikmin 2 with Youtube. You can check out the VOD here.

Also been getting a lot of recording done with Pokemon XG with the hopes that I'll be able to fully commit to a biweekly upload schedule for it going into March. That being said, you'll still see a bit of it this month, but like I said last week, July's upload schedule is a bit all over the place. The Kirby Dream Land 2 stream is fully edited down into playthrough videos though so you can expect that to take up the back-half of the month. Hopefully I can squeeze in one more recording session in during my break because TBH everything I've record so far has been grinding and Mt. Battle because I was underlevel. I just got done using my well-earned battle coupons to optimize my team and I can't wait to show off the fruits of that labor with you all.

The biggest news to share though is the fact that I've finally gotten into releasing videos closer to a video essay-like format. Granted these first few were just of thoughts on the Nintendo Direct and were a much looser script, but I do have the script for other videos well along the way, and I'm going to shoot on doing one of those once a month. From what I've seen, the ones I've already released are doing pretty well, so I have high hopes once you start seeing the ones that I'm actually fully scripting in advance.

Game Creations and Mods

TBH, I've been so caught up in all the video work I've been doing the past week, I haven't really put any time into Dawn of Djinn. I'm still trying to figure out how to balance the two classes I've recently updated before moving onwards so it might be a bit before I have anything new to report.

I did want to take this moment to share that the Paper Mario modding community is doing their second annual Paper Mario Game Jam. You can find out more about it here...

Paper Mario Modding Jam 2 - itch.io

Mis

Everything else has been going by so fast, it's a bit of a blur. But I do at least remember that I've been doing quite a bit of gardening still and I've picked up some more Pokémon cards to open up on my own time. Sadly I still haven't been sleeping the greatest. You think between not having to get up for work and recently getting the AC boxes installed for the year, that sleep wouldn't be an issue. Yet for some reason, I've been waking up even earlier lately than before I was on vacation, hopefully that'll start getting better though.

Things in the garden have been coming in pretty well. I even weeded out the carrots which was a huge accomplishment for me personally with how overgrown that part of the garden was. Looks like the Zucchini is coming in, so it seems like there will be plenty to enjoy.

Trading cards on the other hand were quite a bit of an ordeal. A couple days ago I decided to finally step out of my comfort zone and drive to a couple card shops to try and sell my spares... ...sadly though, nobody wanted them, putting a bit of a damper on the whole outing. On the bright side, I did fine a nice shiny Eevee card. So I'm finally the owner of a shiny Pokémon card, and it's even part of the Pokémon Go set that I'm trying to complete... technically. It's a promo so it's not part of the main set, but it will definitely look great with the rest of the collection.

Also been playing quite a few games outside of recordings including B/W 2, Banjo Kazooie, and the Pikmin 4 demo...

Pikmin 4 Demo

As for my thoughts on the demo... kind of conflicted TBH. It's different to say the least, and I'm struggling to gaze how much I like it. In a nutshell, I've enjoyed the demo the more I've played it, but I feel like some changes are going to come at the cost of what makes Pikmin games fun to replay. It'll probably be fun in it's own way though.

There's a lot of new elements I enjoy, but also a lot that bother me, even if it's not to the point of getting in the way of the game's quality. Not a big fan of there now being a hub world, nor how things I used to be able to do in menus are now reinstated to NPCs in that hub area. I enjoy the concept of upgrades, but I'm not a big fan of how much they strip away from you, just to resell it as upgrades. It just doesn't feel good to be used to starting these games off with things like the charge ability, only to have to buy them back in this game. At least you get them pretty early and for cheap, but the concept still bothers me. I'm also conflicted with how the limit you can have on the field is an upgrade. It's more of struggling to get used to it rather than it flat out being good or bad. On one hand starting so low when you've always had an 100 cap since the beginning is jarring; on the other hand, it adds an element of restriction that the series has been lacking. Let's be honest, having a 100 Pikmin at once breaks the majority of challenge in the game. My problem is that it also limits how much I can muti-task, which is one of the most important elements of the game to me. Granted as the game opens up, I'm finding other ways to accomplish that, but I'm still not completely sold that the Pikmin limits are worth it yet.

Then again, this is just a demo, a small fraction of the game. This demo is so big it could be a small 5-10 dollar game all on its own. It's incredible how much gameplay you can squeeze out of it. That alone makes the entire game impressive, despite my criticisms. So we'll see when the full game comes out if I continue to warm up to the changes or not. I don't even feel done with it yet, despite hitting the in-game limit, I feel like I can squeeze a bit more gameplay out of it by taking on different dungeons and collecting different treasures than what I chose to do in the demo.