You know what isn’t great?

I decided to make a post similar to my cross-buy topic except this time I'm just complaining about stuff... so probably not so different from that post. Obvious stuff like…

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Starlight Inception on PlayStation Vita

I have many fond memories of playing TIE Fighter when I was younger and it is still probably my all-time favorite Star Wars game. You’d think that it would have turned me onto other stuff like Wing Commander, but I actually never gave those a try. TIE Fighter is pretty much the only space combat “sim” that I have played but I still really enjoy the game type. It was just the other day when I was browsing the weekly PlayStation store update when I noticed that something called “Starlight Inception” had released on the Vita. I checked it out and apparently it was a successfully funded Kickstarter project and also released on the PC. Since I’ve been drifting more towards handheld gaming lately I was more interested in the Vita version so I reached out to Escape Hatch Entertainment and they were kind enough to drop us a review code. I can’t speak for the PC version of the game but these are my thoughts on the Vita version.

starlight inception space combatVisuals & Presentation

I knew that the Vita version was obviously going to be a downgrade visually but that doesn’t really bother me. TIE Fighter still looks great to me. The visuals are pretty rough, though. When walking around the interior of the main ship (which you do entirely too slow by the way) things look rather plain. However, after I actually got into my first mission I was pretty impressed by the space visuals and how everything looked. The game may not look as nice as its PC counterpart but it gets the job done. Honestly the only things I wish it had were a few particles here and there to give me the feeling that my ship is actually moving but that’s just me nitpicking.

The second mission was pretty awkward. You fly around near the surface of a city which had just recently suffered an explosive attack. The problem is that it mostly looks like a large gray wall with buildings sprouting up as if the view distance was incredibly short distance. I actually tried to find a youtube video of this scene for the PC version and after viewing it I kind of understand what they were doing for that mission. The problem is that pretty much all of the extra effects that actually make that scene work are missing from the Vita version. (more…)

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Weapon Shop de Omasse

This was a curious little title that showed up recently during a Nintendo direct. The concept is immediately interesting: You help run a weapons shop that rents out swords, axes,…

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A Link Between Worlds

We haven't had a traditional 2D Zelda in quite a while. I think the last one was Minish Cap. The DS Zelda games were fun, though many disagree with me…

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Playing the Pokemon X/Y Metagame

I have played almost every main-series Pokemon game but I have never delved into the deeply confusing metagame. Breeding and training perfect pokemon has always seemed to be an incredibly daunting task. You have to somehow keep track of hidden numbers and variables and try not to completely **** up your ‘mon in the process. You see people throw around terms like EV and IV and it doesn’t take long before you just say “Screw it” before you go level up whatever Pokemon looks cool, regardless of how bad its base stat supposedly is.

Fortunately they seemed to make the system a whole lot less frustrating this time around, which is great for simple people like me. When I found that out I decided to give it a try and see if I could breed something halfway decent. It was a very interesting process and I can’t imagine having to do it in past generations. Anyway, here’s what I did…

HeracrossPokeugenics

So the first thing I had to do was pick something to breed. I ended up landing on a Heracross because he looks like a happy badass and has an interesting Mega Evolution and new ability. The first thing I did was to catch one in the wild and drop it off in the Pokemon daycare with a Ditto, your all-purpose breeding Pokemon. My goal was to breed a Pokemon that had a very specific nature. Natures give a bonus to one stat and a penalty to another. There are also neutral natures that don’t do anything. I was specifically looking for a Jolly nature (+Speed/-Sp.Attack) but with 25 or something different natures it would take quite a while. Especially since you have to run around until an egg shows up and then run around even longer until it hatches. There are ways to speed up the process but it can still take forever. Eventually I gave up on the RNG and just found a bug pokemon in my bank that already had a Jolly nature and belonged in the same egg group as my Heracross. In order to pass down a nature you can have the parent hold an everstone. Makes the process so much simpler. (more…)

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