Monster Hunter Stories 2

At the moment everyone plays Pokémon Arceus, The proposal of the game made me want but while playing it, the gray and dull side of the graphics made me stop. At this time of year, with the bad weather, I want more colorful games.
Talking to my friends I was recommended Monster Hunter Stories 2.

For me, who only played Monster Hunter World alone (because the chat system sucks when you don’t use a microphone) it was a series of boring monster hunting quests. Of course I am aware that I did it in bad conditions and that it is surely a very good license.
In short at first sight, when I was told about Monster Hunter Stories, I said to myself that it was not for me, but in fact although the game takes place in the same universe as the main series, this Spin- off is very different.

The combat system:

Indeed we find ourselves here with a kind of Pokémon where the scenario would take a much more important place than usual. We are therefore in a turn-based RPG where the character fights monsters himself accompanied by a monster who fights at his side. The combat system is based on the principle of rock-paper-scissors. You can choose a Power, Speed or Technical type attack. Power beats skill, skill beats speed, and ultimately speed beats power. Our character can choose their attack type each turn, but each monster has an associated attack type. So you have to choose the right attack and the monster that best suits the opponent in front of you and change your strategy as needed during the fight, because opponents can also change your strategy.

There is a lot going on during fights in terms of animation and sometimes there are quick-time events; quite frankly it is not always clear what triggers what; the combat system is deep and looks complex, but remains simple and intuitive.

On the strategy side, it is possible to attack specific parts of the monsters or to use a specific weapon which will be more effective in a given situation. For example, when a monster is holding a rock in front of him as a shield, it’s best to switch weapons to a hammer to break his makeshift shield. At the end of the fight we are rewarded with loots.

Craft and exploration:

As in the main series, crafting is also central to the “Stories” experience. In addition to the pieces of monsters that we pick up after a fight, we can also pick up all kinds of plants, insects, ores and other resources in nature, which will be used to make weapons and armor, but also potions and others. objects that can be used during combat and in the exploration phases. Equipment crafting is simplified with a point system instead of absolutely requiring specific items. When we craft an armor, it is the whole that we craft and not each piece individually as in the main series.

To expand your team of monsters here you have to find eggs and then hatch them. Sometimes you can even come across a “Shiny” monster. During a fight, only one of our monsters is activated at a time, although we can interchange in the middle of the fight. What drives us to explore.
I have a lot of fun exploring the world of Monster Hunter Stories 2. We are a rider, a rider who can ride on the back of his monsters. We find open and visually rich landscapes where there are always monsters to fight, resources to pick up or secrets to discover. Some areas will only be accessible if you have the right monster activated. For example, some can jump, some can climb, and some can go in the water. We can come back at any time in the regions already explored if ever you do not have the right monster in your team at the moment. The teleportation points already discovered allow you to quickly move from one point to another in the world.

To conclude:

I am very far from having finished the game but I take a huge pleasure in playing it.

The game is very beautiful although there are some slowdowns (little annoying) on Nintendo Switch, which must be absent from the PC version;
There are plenty of things to do;
The story is interesting and although quite public it is not as childish as some Pokémon (no need to have played the first one to understand it);
A rich and interesting combat system without being too complex.
Exploration is super fun…

In short, if you ever don’t have a switch, that Pokémon Arceus bores you, does not interest you or simply if you like good RPGs, I strongly advise you to play Monster Hunter Stories 2. My only regret is not having played earlier.

Take care of yourself and your loved ones and see you soon!

The near future, a distorting mirror

Paint from Liz Hume : https://www.artstation.com/lizhume

From Andy Cline’s Ready Player One to Judge Dread to Black Mirror and Pacific Rim, near future works are endless.
Close anticipation is not a genre, it is an approach.
Common point of the corpus: the stories must take place in the near future. Something to get excited about and also often fuel the nightmare machine.

What is sience-fiction?

Science fiction is inextricably linked with anticipation. It is about imagining possible developments in science and technology in order to explore possible future possibilities. In their time, the forerunners of Mary Shelley (Frenkenstein), HG WELLS (The Time Machine) and Jules Vernes (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) marveled at the advances of their time to build wonderful philosophical stories. or terrifying. These, among others, invented speculative fiction. Imagining the future, even on the basis of facts and cutting-edge documentation, is still science fiction. SF is written in the conditional, not in the future, and always feeds on the context in which it is born. And too bad if its projections fall short of reality or become obsolete, sometimes in just a few years. Because even when they claim to talk about something else, the works are full of the mindset, values and knowledge of their time, and of their author. It always speaks of the present, and has effects in the present.

The case of near future.

The genres of the imagination, including fantasy and SF, are therefore always situated in relation to the real, and the works of near future undoubtedly hide this even less than the others: their plots are close to their context and time. of creation – and close to us who receive them. For the British writer J.G. Ballard, the near future would be a means of talking about the “true future”, the one that we “see approaching”, as opposed to hypothetical elsewhere, in eras and galaxies far, very distant. On the contrary, from space opera or mythical fantasy, the near future does not open the door to escape, it immediately announces “in not very long” and implies “right here”. Ballard himself was adapted (Crash by David Cronenberg).

In the continuity of Ballard, many works – novels, films, comic series, games – have placed their plots in a futuristic universe, without necessarily exploring a supposed immediate future. Problem: all fiction implies a distancing from reality. Near future works consciously break this convention with the help of a distorting mirror. Everything is familiar and so different.

But why are these works often so terrifying?

Seeing the future negatively, is it for ease? Where has the reassuring cocoon of our daily comfort gone? Do we no longer have the right to dream, to imagine? This is a crucial question. Most of the near-anticipation works outbid the existing, adding a small dose of dark futurism, freewheeling technology, eerie androids, triumphant capitalism, and permanent cops. Just what it takes to smash the glass in our comfort zone. The reassuring daily life becomes deadly, your intelligent vacuum cleaner seeks to kill you, a spaceship is planning its worrying shadow over the city, even it is absolutely necessary to chip or get vaccinated so as not to fall on the cost of law and order. . (get vaccinated guys, this is important)
In the preface to his full short stories, Ballard cautioned against this trend:

“The future […] is a dangerous, heavily mined area that tends to turn around to bite your ankles when you take a step forward. “

Too late the damage is done.
Many works anchored in the near future stage an imperceptible and perpetual shift where each technology, each authoritarian drift, each change in lifestyle or degree of global warming, testifies to the fact that nothing will ever be the same again. Rather than the completely reconfigured worlds of the post-apocalypse, where everything was destroyed and then recast, this is about the cycles of life and death of civilizations. The collapse is not imminent, it is immanent. History is on the move. It happens continuously.
In the fluctuations of a pandemic, the British series Years and Years, or through the words of Chuck in Fight Club:

«This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time”

Paradoxically, it is also this perpetual end of the known world that allows all hopes and allows utopias to flourish, however diffuse they may be. Dark futures fuel the emergence of new horizons, new battles to be waged and new hopes to be nourished. Suddenly utopias exist mainly to legitimize the fights waged against them. In reality, the great battle of imaginations, ideas and values is fought deep inside each of us. The fight is brutal, merciless, it spares none of our received ideas, our intuitions and our usual thinking patterns. And test what we think we know as the disgust, fear or revolt that arises over fiction becomes able to inspire us and spur us to action. For example, the treatment of aliens in District 9 strikes us as despicable, because it inevitably reminds us of the plight of refugees around the world. What is terrifying about this distorting mirror is less the distortion it conjures up than the fact that we recognize ourselves in it.

Wouldn’t Western studios be better today than Japanese studios at making Japanese games?

For a long time I didn’t have too much money so to play cheaply I got interested in emulation (not good) and I discovered a lot of games from the 90s.
With the announcement on March 10 of the tribute of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: turtle in time” with the game “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Sredder’s Revenge” by Dot Emu, I rethought the remake of “Panzer Dragoon” by a Polish studio, of “Street of Rage 4” and of “Monster boy Dragon’s Trap” by Lizard Cube (French studio) as well as the new opus “Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom” made by Game Atelier (another French studio), “Sonic Mania” by Head Cannon and PagodaWest Games (based in Los Angeles) …

Wouldn’t Western studios be better today than Japanese studios at making Japanese games?

How many Japanese licenses are sitting in boxes when Western fans are ready to buy sequels or remakes?

Act Raiser
Breath of Fire
Castlevania
Demon Crest
Final Fight
Megaman
Prehistorik Man
…

It’s as if the Japanese studios were unable to quantify the economic stakes of their catalog. Westerners have to go to Sega to make a new Alex Kid “Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX”.

The only ones that really have a heritage side to come to mind are Square Enix and Nintendo, which are the only ones to regularly offer remakes or sequels. I won’t quote Capcom, because they can make you the same Resident Evil 10 times, but other licenses like Megaman are completely forgotten when it was one of their far series. We arrive at 20 years of Megaman XD, one of the best-selling episodes on GBA and nothing planned.

Many Japanese companies do not manage to capitalize on their catalog because, either those who took care of these licenses had promotions, changed boxes or disappeared … and they do not ask themselves the question of saying :

“Wouldn’t people be happy to find this character again?”

Yet they have the numbers. Namco is well aware that Pac Man is very well known in the US just as Bandai-Namco knows they sell more Dragon Ball figures today there than in Japan.
So why only a few licenses like Mario, Dragon Ball, Final Fantasy and Resident Evil benefit from this resurrection?

Konami was surprised by the sales of Bomberman on Switch but it has been years, 10/15 years that the West has been asking for a new one!

One of the best-known Smash Bros jokes is that Nintendo treats Pac Man, Megaman, Sonic and Solid Snake better than their own publishers and sadly that’s true.

There is a real wealth management problem in Japan.

Maybe it is because they have a different way of thinking. For example when they do exhibitions on manga, what matters mainly is the final work, the manga and not the artist or the preparatory drawings.
In the West we hold a lot more or original boards and the research work of the creator of the comics which can sell very expensive at auction.

After Japan is a country regularly ravaged by earthquakes, where “everything” is regularly destroyed and to be rebuilt. Could their non-attachment come from there?

It can also come from Buddhism which is an important part of the foundations of Japanese culture. In its precepts it is said that nothing is eternal, that all is vain and that the beauty of things rests on their fleeting side.
Yet today, thanks to social media, the Japanese artists who made the pop culture of the 80s 90s realize the attachment there was for their works outside of Japan.

Kinu Nishimura, Illustrator who worked at Capcom alongside Akiman on a little known little series called Street Fighter, is now rediscovering some of her drawings thanks to Western enthusiasts who bought lots of old magazines and posted on their networks scans of illustrations including herself and Capcom had no more originals.

I don’t know if that will ever change there but in any case for me the return of thoses old licenses, whether thanks to a remake or a sequel, still enchants me.

Paper Mario in July and a Metroid soon?

Yesterday Nintendo, without warning, announced a new Paper Mario for July 17!
I really liked the Paper Mario of the Game Cube and a little less the following episodes but what I saw in the trailer made me want to play it.

I always liked everything that was papercraft, so origami makes my heart beat! (I have to find how to make the little Peach !!!)

The thing that shocked me the most was that for the first time in the series, we would be in an open world with the presence of several cities, and the presence of vehicles suggests that this would be vast.
And then there are dungeons !!! My heart is pounding so hard!

The end of the trailer killed me!
A Metroid teasing.
I discovered the series with the remake of the second opus on 3ds and since then I’m a fan! I did all the episodes on pc with emulation, apart Metroid Prime 3 and there I am, too hyped up. (if I could sew, I would love to cosplay Zero Suit Samus XD)

I doubt that we see Metroid Prime 4 anytime soon since its development had been rebooted not that long ago, but maybe we will soon have a release of Metroid prime trilogy on Switch to wait? *Fingers crossed*

My first time with video games!

Thanks to Eric for the music on the video.^^

I had to play video games once or twice before, I think I remember a game of Guitar Hero and Mario Party but it was very rare. It was mostly daddy and my brother who monopolized the console.
The moment I became a gamer was after my accident.

When I left the hospital, following the loss of my hearing and that of my mother, I fell into depression (anorexia, bulimia, black idea …). So I was interned in a “rest home” to help me. The days were long and monotonous. After a few days, Papa brought me a Nintendo DS with 3 games, which made my days in this sinister place: “Mario & Luigi: bowser’s inside story”, “Mario Kart”, but the one on which I spending the most time during my stay was:

Final Fantasy Tactics A2:

It’s a Tactics Rpg, a turn-based game that is very similar to a board game. I think that’s what hooked me at first, then it was the colorful and enchanting world that gave me a lot more.
My playing time was regulated by the medical staff, the fact that the game is composed of multiple small level was very practical. 🥰
I just had time to finish it before going home. A game that I loved, although I have to admit that the story is a little silly, but I think that at the moment I did it, it was exactly what I needed to empty my head.

Since then, I have been transformed into a geek, I developed a particular taste for Nintendo’s portable consoles and I became eager to learn more about video games in general.

And you, how did you become a Gamer?

First E3 conference: Google Stadia reaction.

I do not often talk about video games here but it’s a passion I’ve had since childhood. It’s been a few years now that we meet with friends at Mary and Daniel’s, my boyfriend’s best friends. Big house, fiber, huge TV and Thai food has all the meals, in short the paradise for the geek that we are all, fine to follow together the conferences of the E3 (a big event of video games, where are presented all the future developments).

Today, Google’s Stadia conference took place, but what is Stadia?

Stadia is google’s cloud gaming service, which allows you to play games that require a lot of resources on very weak devices. (Microsoft will also offer an equivalent service, Xcloud.)

But by what witchcraft?
The game is run on a server, equivalent to a mad PC, remote that just sends the video stream to the players. Very handy when like me we have a basic PC for classes and not necessarily want to buy a pc or console to play the last big games out. (ok I have access to a big pc via my boyfriend or my father)
It’s all well and good, but there are still questions:

What about latency? (the response time between the moment when you press a key and the moment when the action is done on the screen.) Normally, you press a button, the information goes to the machine that sends the video stream to the screen. Here the information sent by the button does not go to a machine that is a few meters but several kilometers.
What connection speed to enjoy? And yes you need a bastard connection (35Mb/s) to enjoy in 4k, but a connection 10Mb/s would play in 720p, and 20Mb/s for 1080p (full hd).
What price for games? We know nothing about it at the moment, for a service that feels like going out in November, it’s worrying.

But they have 2 types of subscription:

A “free” Stadia base where games are paid per unit, limited to 1080p with stereo sound
A “paid”, Stadia Pro at 12 euro per month with a number of free games per month, the first being Destiny 2 with all its extensions, and discounts on the purchase of other games.

Google offers a pre-order offer, for 129 euro they offer a chrome cast and a joypad, as well as 3 months of Stadia Pro and an early access to the service.

In either case if we stop his subscription, we keep access to our games. As long as talking about games they presented a hoist, including Baldur’s gate 3, I screamed, and it’s already my game of E3! Haha! I’m thrilled, even if in fact we have not seen much.

Speaking of games, the big problem is that at no time have we seen exclusivities, only multi support games that will surely be present at their main competitor, Microsoft and their Xcloud. With its Xbox branch, Microsoft will have all the multi support games while having its exclusivities like Halo, Forza and the games in preparation in the studios they bought recently.

Let’s wait for the Microsoft conference this weekend to see which offer will be the most interesting, and wait to see the first tests in real condition to see how cloud gaming works in everyday life to see if it’s really worth the cost.

A first look on Path of Exile from a Diablo lover.

If i was a cosplayer I’d love to make a cosplay of this beauty!!!

Diablo 2 was one of my first game ever. I played it with my dad cause the game scared me. Hey! Don’t judge me!!! I was only 9 or 10 years old!

It was scary but it was fascinating to fight demons with a character who gain power and power to destroy easily the monsters who kill you in a snap of fingers some time ago.

Since Diablo 3 is out I played all the seasons and I love this game so much but the internet and most of my friend tell me there is a way better game than Diablo 3, Path of Exile.

I just tried it, I only played 6 hours I’ll give you my first impressions.

The screen where you chose your character looks like the diablo 2 one. I’ll check all the character but they don’t have the same charisma than in Diablo. Well I laugh when i saw the Maraudeur have the same tatous than the Barbarian in Diablo 2. I took the Shadow, maybe because I have a soft spot for bad guys?

In this games, almost all the stuff have sockets. The spell depend of the gems you’ll put in it. Some gems can modify other gems. But can all the “classes” have the sames spells?

the characters are differentiated by their passive tree and this tree is just massive! o.O

With this two mechanics I see all the richness of the game and i know why my friend tell me this game is “better than” Diablo 3. But I think it could be ridiculously complex. This game will require a lot of investment where the fun of diablo is immediate.

Other point that I dont like about POE is the story. it so borring. The story of Diablo 3 is not way better but the staging is everything.

I will continue to see if PoE can break the spell that Diablo put on me since my childhood.