Tag: video games

I went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday. He lives in the Russian district of the city, close to where I used to live in high school, so it was kinda nostalgic to walk around there.

He has a small, super friendly dog. The dog was really interested in my beer and constantly tried to sniff it and lick it. Later, someone actually gave the dog a drop of beer and after that it lost its interest in mine. I guess he didn’t like the taste, just the smell.

We played board games and video games, hours passed. I got way too drunk and lost control over what I was saying, telling some pretty cringe stories. At some point, me and another dude at the party left for another event – a night time gaming convention nearby.

The gaming convention was fun as hell. There was so much stuff to do and see there. I was really drawn to the stand that sold anime merchandise – a highlight for me that they had was a hand painted picture of Marin Kitagawa.

People always tell me when they visit my place that my walls are so empty – that I should put some pictures up. I thought about buying the waifu picture at the stand for decorating my home, but ended up not getting it.

They also had a bunch of figurines for sale – the most interesting ones being those of Rem, who is particularly relevant at the moment since the show she is from is currently airing another season. And she’s also a character in the mobile game I play daily.

The only souvenir I got in the end from that stand was a Bocchi keychain.

The event had many arcade machines, pc-s and consoles around for playing. Me and a friend played a few games of Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, which has been my favorite game ever since I played it for the first time in 2004, on my Nokia N-Gage with an emulator.

While playing that game there, I started at difficulty 5 and my friend at difficulty 1. I was too drunk for the speed and concentration it required and lost. So I kept reducing the difficulty each game, and finally won when we were playing on the same level. Later we came back to that machine, I was more sober, kept increasing the difficulty and managed to win up to difficulty 4. It was quite an experience, playing my favorite game for the first time on an arcade-like machine.

The event also had a cosplay competition. There were various cosplays from Genshin Impact and some other IP-s I don’t care about. And the highlight for me – a cosplay of OMGkawaiiAngel from Needy Streamer Overload. I loved that game – its protag is a girl with severe mental illness and personality disorders and drug addiction and you gotta manage her mental state to get through the game. All of which is relatable to me.

That cosplay was well executed. When the cosplayer stumbled on stage, it actually seemed in character, which was cute. I voted for her in the competition. But I wasn’t there when the competition results were announced so I still don’t know who won it.

Around the time I was in university I used to hang around with people every single day. I had energy to go to multiple social events in one night. Nowadays I meet people like once a month at best. But the amount of stuff experienced yesterday almost made me feel young again.

So. Have any suggestions what picture I should put up on my living room wall instead? Leave a comment if you do.

I have been studying Japanese for a few years now. Haven’t had too much progress. The rate of acquiring new kanji 漢字 and vocabulary is low, but the progress is steady and I’m slowly learning more. Meanwhile, I have a friend who got really good at Chinese, even got his master’s degree at it. I’m impressed he got so well into this totally different culture and language. So last week, to renew our bonds, we had a Chinese night out with him and another friend.

We had some food and beer at a Chinese restaurant that he is working for. Surprisingly, another of my old acquaintances was working there as a waitress. It kinda made me feel sad and nostalgic, that I’ve hung around with like a 1000 different people in the past, and now I don’t even remember their names anymore.

My half Chinese friend told us some stuff about Chinese culture – explained that the way you know someone is a real Chinese person is that they are spitting, farting and burping loudly in public. He added jokingly that this was exactly why he got into Chinese culture – because he felt that you should be able to do these things freely.

To finish off the meal, we had some shots of Chinese rice vodka. The guys warned me it would be horrible but I thought it was nothing too bad, so we continued the evening by going to a bar in town that actually specialized in that Chinese rice liquor and got some more shots of it there. I initially thought it was weird we have enough money in our small town that a bar as specific as that can function, but the place was actually extremely nice so I ended up getting why it can stay in business.

Finally we went to my place, it was sort of my house warming event for them since I moved a few months back. On the way, the half Chinese guy farted loudly, which confirmed that he is a real half Chinese person.

My whole life revolves around video games, so of course when we arrived here I instantly whipped out some controllers and put on Puyo Puyo Tetris. That game is a sort of a tradition for me, every time someone comes over I gotta play it with them. I win every time and feel ashamed that I put them through that, but traditions must be continued.

I felt like the half Chinese guy was not all that impressed with my videogameyness, but the other guy kinda saw the appeal in it. Overall it made me rethink my life for a moment – should my whole identity consist only of games or should I rather do something else with my time? But that thought faded soon.

---

I think that the best format to write blog posts is to end it with a surprise, a punch line. Otherwise it ends up feeling like the ending is abrupt, the post unfinished. But I didn’t manage it this time. So therefore, to make this more of an educational article than an entertaining one, I’ll give you, the reader, some more insight into Chinese culture – here is an illustrative picture of the booze mentioned before:

So far most of my blog posts have either been about me being afraid of dying or about gacha games. I’ll try my best to write one now that is about neither of them.

… I guess I already failed.

In other news, I tried a bunch of different gacha games I hadn’t tried before recently. Princess Connect Re:dive had a nice story but the gameplay mechanics were forgettable, and Epic Seven was just a straight up better version of Summoners War that I played for half a year. Still not sure what game to spend more of my time on.

So I started playing another gacha game on my phone recently. If you don’t know, gacha games are Japanese games with a super deep and fascinating loot box system. You pay tons of money to open loot boxes to get waifus, and the best waifus are rare, so you really gotta cough up the dough to get them.

And I already did. Cough up the dough, I mean. This game I’m currently playing is called Girls X Battle 2 and it’s pretty awesome. At first I thought it would be lame to pay real money for virtual waifus, but boy I was wrong and I ended up disappointing myself and my parents.

Basically the actual gameplay in Girls X Battle 2 is similar to any idle game – you just make numbers go bigger for the sake of making some more numbers go even bigger. And as these games work, at first you have solid gameplay for some hours, and then you hit a wall. And your credit card will help you breach the wall and keep playing.

There are three currencies needed to make your 12-year-old anime girls’ numbers go bigger – let’s call them “Cash”, “Booze” and “Drugs”. There’s also a premium currency, let’s call it “Diamonds”. So I just used some “Euros” to buy 30 million “Cash”, 30 million “Booze”, and I’m getting the “Drugs” by buying them in-game for “Cash” and “Diamonds”. So now my waifus have infinite power, and I still have around 15 million cash left.

Nice.

 

Anyway, I’m not sure how long I’m going to play it, but it is pretty solid fun. It has a lot of social features, and I like that the girls are voiced by actual famous voice actresses. For example the character on this picture is voiced by Chiwa Saito, who also voiced Senjougahara from Bakemonogatari.