Creative Christmas #11 – I Promise That …

It’s the final day of the year. So, it’s time to make promises what we shall try to accomplish next year. If we do this collab with LaterLevels again next year, I might be able to come up with an overall theme, but for now, I’ll stick with the theme I have been using. A random introduction where I talked about not having a theme and getting distracted by the question asked. Oh, I shouldn’t have revealed this until the end of the series? So, tomorrow will be the final question in this collab? Oh. Well, let’s first answer today’s question.

Midnight rolls around and it’s time to pick a New Year gaming resolution to see you through the next 12 months. What’s your choice for 2018?

If I’m allowed to make promises with myself of what I want to accomplish in 2018 in terms of gaming, I think I’m going to repeat something I said in my “10 games I look forward to playing in 2018” list.

I want to play a lot of games in my backlog. I do have a long backlog of games that I still want to play and/or beat. Thankfully, a few of those games get a port or a remake of a system that I own, or about to own. If you want to know more about that, read my previous article.

Will this mean that I stop collecting for a year? Not at all! I’m actually going to try and find copies of games I’m missing in a series. For example, I recently bought Skipper And Skeeto 3, since I didn’t own that game yet.

If you don’t know Skipper & Skeeto, I wouldn’t blame you. Since it’s a Danish edutainment title made by Ivanoff. The Belgian company Transposia brought this series to Belgium and the Netherlands. I live in Belgium, by the way.

So, in 2018 I’m going to continue to try and complete my Transposia collection. I have around 36 games already, but that’s far from complete. Since they brought so many games here to Belgium and the Netherlands, I can’t count them all.

Besides that, I’m going to try and finish the index I was working on. The last index I made from my collection dates back to three years ago. And since then, my collection has grown quite a lot. Besides that, it’s just a simple word document listing all the titles I own. I want to create something bigger, a sort of Excel sheet I can use to quickly filter if I own the game already or not.

But, that’s a project for when I find the time for it. If I would finish that, it would take quite a long time to produce and develop. Since I want to be able to also draw numbers out of that file and that means I need to set it up quite well or otherwise it will have wrong numbers.

Besides that, I’m planning to buy a Nintendo Switch in March 2018. While I’m a huge Nintendo fan, I wanted to wait a year to buy the Nintendo Switch.

The reason for that is, I wanted to see the system first build up a library of games I’m interested in before I went out and bought the system.

Now, I have a lot of titles I’m looking forward to being playing DooM and Xenoblade Chronicles 2. I’m actually tempted by buying The Legend Of Zelda – Breath of the Wild again for the Switch, to be able to take the game with me. But, on the other hand, I think my money would be the best spent elsewhere since the library of games for the Switch is large and other games deserve my attention.

You know, this is the curse of being a game blogger and (retro) game collector. I keep finding new games to play and enjoy, and I rarely finish them. Including some developer requests, I keep enjoying myself with those games quite a lot, but I don’t finish the games.

In conclusion, I want to create a database/index of my collection that I’m happy with. I’m also planning to buy a Switch in March of next year. Besides that, I’m planning to try and finish a lot of the games on my backlog that I still want to play or beat games that I haven’t finished yet.

So, I’m quite curious if I’ll be able to do all these things in 2018. Since I’m quite a busy fellow and I don’t always have the time to finish every game I started. Maybe I should try and do something about me being so curious to buy new games.

In any case, you will be able to continue to read my adventures through the land of video games by simply reading my blog and/or my twitter feed. So, thank you for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, take care and have a great rest of your day.

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First Impressions: Magical Starsign (DS) ~ An RPG that I like.

Wikipedia entry.

Thou shall not say anything bad about Magical Starsign. No, ehrm. Maybe, you can’t say anything bad about this game. Nope, that doesn’t feel like me. Ehrm, well, let’s do it the easy way then! Hello there reader, I’m NekoJonez and I am not good at writing an intro for this game. Well, that was cheesy. Hold on, why am I writing these thoughts actually down? My readers don’t have anything to do with this. If only I had magic to erase this. That would make that delete key so obsolete. Ha! You didn’t see that one coming didn’t you? Well, enough playing around. I realize that I play too many games at once and rarely ever finish one. Why I do try to change that fact, I started to play this game a while ago and I got distracted by other things and I never finished this one. I regretted it and thought here and there to restart this RPG and finish it. So, that’s what I’m doing now. Taking games I started and finish them before I look for new titles. And when I restarted this game, man was it adjusting to this. The oldschool DS RPG’s. Sure this game has some flaws but there is no perfect game out there. So, after this messy introduction, let’s talk about my first impressions with this game. 

Underrated

This game is an extremely underrated game. I can’t believe how few people know of this game. It’s an extremely well made game. Something I extremely like is that you can choose your play style at the start. Your character can be dark or light. And this will affect the gameplay an awful lot.

Also, the fact that I can rename all of the hero’s made this game have more value in my hart. Now all my characters have names of my fellow Arpegians and that makes the story more personal.

And speaking about the story. Man, is it written how I like my stories. You don’t get a whole boring backstory in how the magic got discovered and how the different planets work. No, it’s straight to the point. The tutorial though is badly written into the story but it works.

Also, this game isn’t your standard RPG. It brings in one element that makes the battles totally different. In this world, planets need to be in a certain area of the sun. When that happens, people with that kind of magic get a power boots. This makes battles so much different. You need to check your planets to know when it’s better to stay in a safe area or when you better use magic.

Also, the repeat button is one of the features I applaud the creators of this game for. It’s so useful. It makes battles more easy. Like you slowly getting back your MP, it makes the battles more interesting. Also, you see the enemy you are going to fight at the top screen. Nicely done.

Flawed

While I do feel like praising this game an awful lot, this game has several things that made me not liking this game as much as another RPG. One thing is the running. Since this RPG is released early in the DS lifespan, it shows of the touchscreen. And there they made a fatal flaw, nearly ALL buttons are for moving your characters. Your A,B,X and Y buttons are basically a 2nd D-Pad. And you nearly always run while using the touchscreen.

Graphically, this game is pretty. I like the design of the area’s and all the locations. The names of the planets and people make the game feel that more alive. But, in some area’s you don’t have a map of the area but you see the whole planet. This is a drawback in my opinion.

The sound effects are great expect one thing. The enemy sounds are either absent or too similar to all other enemies. I don’t like the sound design in this game very much. Like the cut scenes. They feel dated, even for the Nintendo DS. They are really out of place and they look a bit PS1-ish. They seem created with one timeline like there can’t be a rocket flying over the screen while having water coming out of the land.

Also something that brings the battles down is that you can’t look to what an item does in game. This is such a big pain in the but since you need to either remember or guess the right item to use in the fights. Thankfully, the fights aren’t annoying like every 10 steps. You actually get some decent time to explore the area.

Easy?

Is this game easy? Well, in a way it is. This game feels like it’s made for young teens. But, that doesn’t mean an experienced game can breeze through this. That isn’t the case at all. You really have to be on your guard since a few wrong moves and it could mean game over.

You can save nearly everywhere. And the fact that you have several slots to save in is for me another sign of a game aimed at families or the younger crowd. But I’m so glad that there are several save slots since now I can do the light and dark playthrough side by side. Or play one if I’m stuck in the other one.

But getting stuck in this game isn’t that easy to do. After some time, one of the characters will give you a hint that will help you a lot for progressing.

What I also like in this game is that this game doesn’t hold your hand in every step of the way. The only thing the tutorial does is learning the way of how the fighting system works. And for the rest, it’s your way to explore the mechanics of the game. But every useful thing said in the tutorial is in your diary.

To finish this article, I want to talk about the music. Which isn’t the best nor the worst point of this game. It isn’t memorable but it isn’t forgettable. It’s that kind of music that will be stuck in your head while playing the game and for a few days but after that, you will most likely forget it.

Oh and before I forget, for the people who have played this game. Feel free to leave your thoughts on the game and/or on this article in a comment.

So, that was my first impression article of this game. But wait, I’m also playing Elebits on my DS. Do you want to read what I think about that? Well, go to ButtonSmashers and read my article there. A link is here: Elebits – The adventures of Kai and Zero (DS) ~ Collect all the WATTS!