The World Ends With You

twewy

This post is in regards to the Nintendo DS version by the way; Couldn’t quite bring myself to spend $20 on an iPhone app. I find it difficult to sustain long term gameplay on my phone for multiple reasons, not limited to it being not the most comfortable gaming medium and somewhat distracting, given that a text, Facebook, email, or other miscellaneous notification will appear kind of often. I think ideally, games that consist of 5 to 10 minute sessions are ideal. Anyway, this tangent is better suited in another post.

I have been playing this game on-and-off as time permits and have come to enjoy it immensely. The World Ends with You is an action role-playing Nintendo DS (and iOS) game developed by Square Enix and Jupiter. It’s fairly non-traditional in that it is very stylized and takes place in modern day Shibuya. It’s a game that is saturated and obviously influence by Japanese youth culture, but not to an overwhelming extent. It’s an awesome and unique combination of style, music, and gameplay.

The combat occurs across both screens: Your partner on top and Neku on the bottom. In essence, you control both characters simultaneously. Neku is controlled by activating pins that you collect and level throughout the game. These pins are activated by tapping, slashing, drawing a circle, and so forth. Your partner is controlled by the d-pad as well as the face buttons. The combat kind of takes a while to get used to and is much easier as more pins are unlocks about an hour or so into the game. It’s a system that’s fairly easy to get into on a basic level but difficult to master. I am not sure I get the dual screen combat to be honest.

For the most part, you can leave your partner alone and let the AI control her while you focus on Neku, but her health (shared health bar) will drop rapidly if you do so. What usually works for me is to spam left or right (depending on which way she needs to face) on the d-pad while focusing on Neku, occasionally executing a combo on the top screen when Neku doesn’t need to dodge or avoid anything. It probably doesn’t help that some of the pin mechanics also seem finicky, especially if you pair pins with similar actions (it is difficult to determine what the game considers an upwards flick versus and upwards slash for example). Overall, it is an odd mish mash of novelty mechanics but it is unique feeling, fun, and to be honest, probably one of the only games that actually makes good use of the touch screen.

Hearthstone: Stuck at “Click to Start” Fix

Hearthstone 2013-10-30 18-01-58-741_0

Edit: Stuck at the screen above or stuck at the saloon door on a major Blizzard game content launch day? You can try the instructions below to see if they will help you, but unfortunately, the only reliable method that I have found of logging into the game once stuck at any loading screen is to wait until the severs are more stable.

The image above summarizes my first evening with the Hearthstone beta. If anyone else just got in the beta and is stuck at that screen because they cannot get back to the tutorial after soft locking or crashing out midway through, this solution was literally the only one that has worked for me:

  1. In the Battle.net client: Go to Hearthstone -> Options -> Game Settings and click ‘Reset User Options’ (for good measure, unsure if this step is necessary).
  2. Exit out of Hearthstone and the Battle.net client
  3. Enable hidden files and folders (Control Panel -> Folder options -> View)
  4. Navigate to C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local
  5. Delete both the ‘Blizzard’ and ‘Battle.net’ folders (both folders just seem to contain caching data and non critical information and are recreated when you launch the game).
  6. Start Hearthstone

This was written with Windows 7 in mind; On other Operating System I am sure both folders are located elsewhere. I’ve tried just about every other solution on the Hearthstone support forums including but not limited to: Setting the client to run in Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode, running the client with admin rights, deleting a different cache folder, logging into Hearthstone on a different machine.

Odds and Ends: October 3rd

Not so much gaming this week other than GTA on and off.

  • So apparently Valve filed a trademark for Half-Life 3? Popular speculation is that HL3 could be one of the native AAA titles for SteamOS but that, and really anything else, is just speculation at this point. Hell it could and likely to be honest, means absolutely nothing at all. I’ve been hurt before Valve. It’s most likely fake.
  • Without saying anything specific to spoil the episode: The Breaking Bad finale was quite satisfying. I am pleased with how the show concluded.
  • Cautiously excited about Mighty No. 9.
  • Cautiously disappointed with Thief 4 based on the bits and pieces that I have seen and heard. It kind of seems like it is turning into a generic third person action game with a stealth element which is exactly what I did not want from a thief game. I mean, I am sure it will be a decent game overall but as a pure stealth Thief game? Maybe not so much but we’ll see.
  • I have a strong feeling that GTA online is going to kind of suck for a bit until the servers stabilize. Prediction confirmed…
  • I had the most excellent day of airsoft Sunday despite my GoPro deciding to take a massive shit on me by only recording the first 16 minutes of footage (pretty sure I accidentally put a mostly discharged battery in, whoops). So no break dance fight footage for me. Sad panda.