January 2022 Entry:
The first month of 2022 felt slow, but a lot happened. And if I haven't mentioned it before, I started adding game purchases to the MISC section.
MISC=========================
- New snack bought; Rule Breaker Cookies (01.03). All flavors were good. Highly recommend them.
- Saw someone mention this in a Discord post and looked in on it. Chicken Police - Paint it RED! was a GameStop exclusive. Learning of the game came around the time I got my $5 coupon and the game also went on sale (01.04). Picked up my copy for $12 at the same GameStop I got Little Nightmares II (sale and coupon again). As of typing this, it is scheduled to be played in September.
- Finally got to check out SMOOSH (01.08). Prior to that, G and Rannchan picked me up to go eat ramen. Then it was off to SMOOSH for dessert and it was great. Went to GameStop after as G picked up his own copy of Chicken Police, ha. It was a great spending time with friends in person.
- My talented cousin finished my new emotes (01.13). This set's theme was cartoons. One idea had to be nixxed. Be Kind was actually planned to be in the form of the Batman logo, but it just wouldn't work or come off as readable. However, they all turned out great and I'm glad to see others using them.
- For the new year, I decided to not use sleep medicine. I had to rely heavily on it for December. I did well for January, but needed to use it after beating The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles: Adventures (01.16). I was very drained after that (more details later). I drank the medicine a few more times in the month, but thankfully have not had to rely on it like last month.
- Ring Fit was tough this month. Had the worst start I could recall (01.18). Not only was the heater making things warmer than normal, but this was coming off being tired from The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles. Within 5 minutes, I was already needing to take a break. I also hit the highest bpm I've ever had. And then towards the end of the month, I hit a snag with older sidequests (01.28). They're tougher, requiring more precision (don't collect gold coins, don't stop moving, etc). I had been cleaning up a good chunk of them up until this point. Now I'm skipping to any that are doable. I'll come back to them, but I didn't expect this type of difficulty and accuracy.
- Bought some amiibo from an old high school friend (01.23). I actually forgot he was showing up that morning until he messaged me, ha. It was good seeing him and catching up for a few minutes. Thanks for Lucario and Greninja.
- After a conversation on stream, I decided to take my old strategy guides out from a shelf to make them easier to access (01.28). We definitely had more, but those are most likely long gone whether they're lost or someone borrowed them and I don't speak with them anymore.
- Met up with Triple S to make a trade (01.30). There were a few games from my newly acquired games he was interested in. He had a few as well. We met to get some boba and catch up on that rainy day. He walked away with Dragon Quest IV, Dragon Quest VIII, Mad World, and Xenoblade Chronicles X. I walked away with Hot Shots Golf and BIT.TRIP COMPLETE and cash.
- Castlevania Anniversary Collection (01.30)
- Round 22 of free Prime content is done. I watched Magic Knight Rayearth for the first time. Always knew of the series and what the main characters looked like. Season 1 wasn't bad. Was very formulaic with the issue being resolved by the end of the episode. I didn't like how it ended though. Season 2 was disappointing. I get that they wanted to try something different by not being formulaic like season 1 and by introducing more characters. But there were so many...and almost everyone ended up in love with someone. In the end, I'm glad to have watched it, but it didn't meet my expectations (if any). I know I would have enjoyed it more had I watched it when it originally released though. Presea was my favorite character. And I actually knew 2 of the theme songs prior to watching this (thanks old school anime cassette tape full of random intro and outro songs).
WRESTLING=====================
- Day 1 was a fun PLE (01.01). Good matches and crazy outcomes. Nice way to start the year.
- New Year's Evil 2022 was good (01.04). More changing of the guard. Curious of how things will carry on from this point. I know most are negative on NXT 2.0, but I'm still optimistic. It's different, but it's good.
- Royal Rumble 2022 was fun (01.29). While I agree that the men's Rumble match was the low point of the night, I really enjoyed the rest of the card. Rollins VS Reigns was match of the night and the women's Rumble had great moments (Hardcore Country!).
H.E.R.========================
- Meetings happened. I won't get too detailed on those, but progress is happening even if I had decided to slow things down immensely. But I'll still fill this section with stories.
I do remember an incident happening at home a few years ago. It's happened a lot, but my mom opens my mail. It's usually the medical things and she'd state that she thought it was for her and not read who it was addressed to. After so many years of it happening, I snapped and clearly stated to look at who it's for instead of assuming. I tweeted shortly after that even though it should be understood, I don't like anyone opening my mail. Either later that same day or the next day at work, I see that a bunch of packages were left unopened as they were addressed to me. I feel like someone read my tweet and let others know that it bothers me when others open my mail. I get it, but those were supplies for the company, not anything personal. I think I let them know it's okay to open the packages as it's most likely going to be stuff for the company unless I specifically said something. But I have an idea of who might have read that tweet and I do thank them for being courteous in that way.
But yeah...never open anyone else's personal mail. Not even family members.
GAMES=========================
- 1 Like, 1 Video Game Answer. I don't normally participate in these, but I went through the list and was able to come up with the majority of the answers. I didn't think it would get that many Likes, but it got up to 19, which was cool to see.
- Shout out to GToTheNextLevel for gifting me the code for Space Invaders Forever (01.02). 3 games in one, but unfortunately one could only be played in handheld mode (still showed it off). Pretty good game to start the year off with.
- Demo Showcase 79 (01.03)
- City Connection (01.05)
- Returned to RPG Maker MV Player to play Kingdom of Neandria (01.07). I received an email from someone asking to check out what they made in RPG Maker. They linked a site and it detailed how many hours he spent creating it etc. We exchanged a few emails and cemented a day for him to be there as I played the entire game, which was around 8 hours. It was cool hearing some behind the scenes tidbits from him as well as me spotting a few glitches or mistakes, which he took note of. Definitely a fine example of the kind of game you can create with RPG Maker. Highly recommend anyone try it out. It's free.
- Finally played TERRORHYTHM (TRRT) (01.09). I actually bought it for 10 cents a couple years ago and kept pushing it back. Well...it's the worst game I've played this year. The rhythm part of the game was absent and the controls weren't responsive. Chat was figuring out that the game reviewed poorly and reflected all the gripes I had with it. On the bright side, we had about a 30 minute chat once we were done. Definitely pass on this game.
- Watch G4's Frosk talk about sexism in gaming (01.11). Good stuff.
- The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles: Adventures was great (01.11-01.16). Number-wise, they were probably the highest for the month in terms of viewers. It was fun doing voices and the story was excellent. I can see why this became a lot of people's favorite Ace Attorney game. Game-wise, I didn't like Sholmes' deductions as they were a waste of time. He gets everything wrong and you have to see him get it wrong again as you correct him. That could have been streamlined better.
Unfortunately, this did take one stream longer than expected with 6. The 5th stream lost half an hour as the power went out for 10 seconds and my old computer needed half an hour to boot back up. And the finale ended up running closer to 9 hours. Had the power not gone out in stream 5, stream 6 would have been under 8 and a half hours. But yes...6 days in a row of doing voices for 8 hours. That's 48 hours. That's the longest I've ever streamed concurrently. By the time we got the final Not Guilty verdict, I was ready for it to be over and Ace Attorney games don't wrap things up quickly. I had to request that chat not gift anything as they celebrated with a hype train, but I wasn't in the mood. I was thankful, but drained because it all hit me at the same time. And my mood was not reflective of how I felt about the game because I enjoyed it a lot. I was just done.
I was to play the sequel the next month, but I need time away from it. Plus I'm not going to do another voiceless visual novel for that long in a row. The plan for the sequel is 2 streams on, 1 off until we're done. That should work especially since the sequel is longer. I don't think I'll do that for voiced visual novels or RPGs for now so those can still be tackled the same way.
- Played a favorite from Demo Showcase 65; 9 Monkeys of Shaolin (01.19). Originally this was planned to be 2 streams to complete, which wouldn't have been tough, but that second stream would have just been grinding for skill points to fill out all the skill trees. While I enjoyed the game, I didn't have it in me to try and do that. Not bad for a one-off, but definitely recommend it on sale. Added another Demo Showcase in place of that second stream.
- Demo Showcase 80 (01.20)
- Path to Mnemosyne was a game I knew about thanks to The Budget Gamer (01.22). He's not doing videos anymore, but thankfully I learned of a few games because of him. The game itself was amazing to look at. The art was what drew me to it in the first place. Puzzles were tough at times. And we ran into a glitch at the end where a collectible wasn't popping up. Restarted it to see if it would come back and it didn't. In the end, I formulated a plan for what to do as we paused. When we unpaused, the item appeared, ha.
- Short stream with Comic Coloring Book, our free-to-play game of the month (01.24). Would have gone longer there were more in chat to influence how we colored things. Thankfully anyone was there as I would have finished it too fast.
- Demo Showcase 81 (01.26)
- Viewer's Choice stream with Ninja Village (01.27). Discord voted between 4 different Kairosoft simulation games that were favorites of previous Demo Showcases. Chat got to help with some decisions, but ultimately most became characters (chose long/short range and weapons). It was pretty good, but got tough as our forces were simply low in numbers and it takes a lot of money to raise them. I wouldn't mind returning to this.
- And our N64 game of the month that turned into another Viewer's Choice was Winback: Covert Operations (01.29-01.30). Shout out to SNERDAPERDS who was the first person to spend channel points on the "Choose a Game to Play on a Future Stream" redemption. He came in part way through the first stream and did it, ha. It's because of him playing Winback on his stream that I was more interested in it. But I really enjoyed Winback. I was surprised with how well the controls were. It wasn't perfect, but it's a nice gem on the N64 library.
ETC=========================
- TaeYeon - Can't Control Myself (MV)
- BoA - Sweet Impact
There was a reason I went through a bunch of old dances I used to know. My body couldn't help but move around to them. But when it came to Sweet Impact, I had to hold back a few tears in the middle of the dance. That specific performance from one of her concerts is my absolute favorite. Muscle memory kicked in and I could recall about 85% of it. It felt amazing.
That's a wrap on January 2022. Thanks for reading. Thank you for your support. Be cool and be kind.
"Reprise the theme song and roll the credits."
