Today's Notes 8/21/21: Went down to South Park to have myself a time

Good afternoon everybody,

Well last night's stream was certainly interesting as it relates to the South Park Trilogy on the original PlayStation.. and we used the PS3 for these shenanigans... and this will consist of a few mini-reviews.F

So first up was South Park, the first person shooter that was originally on the Nintendo 64 and then ported to the PlayStation. It's controls are pretty strange, with no use of the analog sticks on the PS3, so we're using the bumper buttons to aim up and down. It looks pretty good, but the draw distance is so short it's makes you wonder if the town of South Park is constantly surrounded by fog. We played through the first five stages, coming and so we got to see a lot of things, such as how the town is laid out and how far we're roaming from the start point, and since we were using Cartman, I assume the start point was his house. Enemies seem to pick up in variation as you progress, but I got really tired of shooting the turkeys, and the enemy A.I. tendency to charge and swarm the player makes me grateful that this game does indeed have a god-mod and provides infinite ammo. This game's biggest strength is the fully voiced cut-scenes, which serves as a nice way to progress the story along.

Next up with South Park: Chef's Luve Shack, which is your standard Puzzle / Party game, similar to the Jackbox Party collections you can find on Steam. This supports up to four players, but can be played solo, but it's a real drab experience. The trivia portion has also sorts of topics such as pop culture of things prior to 1999, science and historical trivia, plus South Park trivia (Guess DJ Slope of Slope's Game Room was wrong about that one). Chef's Luv Shack really shines with it's mini-games, several of which are based around actual things from the show such as Cartman riding a mechanic bull, the Chicken Lover and the kitty wanting Cartman's Pot Pie. Really would bet these would be a ton of fun with two or more people, but with Covid, I'm not bringing anyone here any time soon/

Lastly, South Park Rally... which has to be one of the worse games I've ever player, and probably the worst game of the year for me. First the one positive is that you can fully customize the controls, reassign the buttons to what feels natural to you... now beyond there, there is nothing positive about South Park Rally. It's standard 'race' mode, is a hit check 4 check points over the course of 3 laps, which is fine, Forza Horizon 4 has a lot of races like that... but with South Park Rally, you can take any route you want,  making it very easy to get turned around and loss. But get this you have to unlock any of the other game modes as you play the Championship mode. I've played my fair share of racing games, never have I seen it where they basically prevent you from trying to see what you might like playing. I was very disappointed in it to the point I just said the hell with it and threw in something else.

That something else was Vs, which came out in 1997. Published by THQ, this game looks good,, controls well and has a killer sound track. Now most people will remember Vs. based on the ads that featured Mia in most gaming magazines back in the mid-late 90s. Oddly enough it doesn't have a standard arcade mode, but it does have a Survivor and Challenge modes which kind of play like an arcade mode, with continues and such. The controls can be customized, to where you can bind combination inputs like Punch+Evade to one of the bumper buttons. I wouldn't mind dedicating more of a night to it to see how deep the Challenge or Survivor Mode actually is.

Anyway, here's the list of clips from last night!

• Virtua Fighter 2 was on PC... I own a copy! 
• DJ Pon 3 aka Vinyl Scratch Joins The Collection! 
• A Garrus T-Shirt: Raise Your Hand If You Haven't Been Killed Before 
• 
  It's something special.... 
• I've got snowballs of steel 
• I was expecting an explosion... 
• That was an actual question 
  
• Cartman Rides The Mechanical Bull 
• Beefcake! BEEFCAKE!!!!!. 
• Revenge is the proper answer... 
• They are coming right for us! 
• The butchering of a Mitch Hedberg joke...
• It appears we are in the lead... 
• He we actually did it... and crashed!
• Go Cartman Go! . 
• First Time Playing This
• The Disney Plus Joke From The Chat 
• That did not take long
• Get them in the corner!
• He's a business man and he's dressed like that?

 Following the stream we raided Oldish22 over at twitch.tv/oldish22 who was playing Final Fantasy XIV! He's a good due, and you should check him out when he's on!

We added a new Funko to the collection, from My Little Pony DJ Pon 3, aka Vinyl Scratch, which is #05 in the Funko My Little Pnny set. I am currently on the trail of a Doctor Whooves Vinyl Figure.

While organizing my book shelves yesterday morning, I found some odd games from the Windows 95/98 era... Triple Play 98, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Pitfall the Mayan Adventure & Virtua Fighter 2. VF2 was a great find because it does prove what I said that it was a a game I played on PC, and is why I play Pai. The version of Pitfall the Mayan Adventure is the one that came exclusive with IBM PC's back in the day. I am surprised at the retro buyers market for Jazz Jackrabbitt 2, but even more surprised that Epic you know the studio behind Fortnite, hasn't done anything with the franchise in over 20 years. Triple Play 98I remember playing better on a Windows 98 machine as opposed to a Windows 95 one, .

 

Today Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout lasted 34 minutes with an estimated calorie burn of 647 kcal, but we did an extra 17 minutes with an additional calorie burn of 315 kcal, so the total session was 51 minutes with a total estimated calorie burn of 963 kcal. The exercises for today with the high setting for Difficult Combos #1 #2 and #3 for the daily workout, and for the extra, we focused on the low setting for those same exercises, because there were achievements listed for performing those. Now these Difficult Combos certainly are harder than the standard variants, and its very easy to get crossed up based on what you has gotten use to seeing in terms of a pattern.

Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise Achievements

1. Triple Shooting Star: Acquire a 3-star rating in every workout (low)
2. Triple Supernova: Acquire a 3-star rating in every workout (high) 
3. Extreme Trainer Lv. 1: Acquire 28,000 point or more in Difficult Challenge Combo #1 (Low) 
4. Extreme Trainer Lv. 2: Acquire 28,000 point or more in Difficult Challenge Combo #2 (Low) 
5. Extreme Trainer Lv. 3: Acquire 28,000 point or more in Difficult Challenge Combo #3 (Low)  
6. Extreme Trainer Lv. 4: Acquire 56,000 point or more in Difficult Challenge Combo #1 (High)
7. Extreme Trainer Lv. 5: Acquire 56,000 point or more in Difficult Challenge Combo #2 (High) 
8. Extreme Trainer Lv. 6: Acquire 56,000 point or more in Difficult Challenge Combo #3 (High)  
9. Monster Weight Puncher Lv. 2: Reach a total punch count of 360,000 HITS
   

We're going to go back to using Lin every day at the trainer since the next closest achievement to get is Lin's Champion which is to train with Lin for over 50 hours, and we already put in 44 hours. Each of the other trainers I used for 17 hours or less, so they were each take a while to get to their respective champion achievements.  Regardless we're at 72% completion of the EX achievements thus far. 

For tonight's stream, we're back to Pokemon Let's Go Eevee as we head off to the Seafoam Islands, we got a battles in between plus there will be attempts to catch whatever Pokemon we can find! The higher we can push out levels the hopefully easier time we'll have with the elite four!

And on that note we'll see you later today over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!