Whole lot of things

Good afternoon everyone,

Last night's stream of Overwatch certainly was interesting with a lot of overly aggressive matches, some suspect new comers and other craziness. There was one Lucio who seemingly got their 'Soundwave' back faster than usual, keeping in mind, all matches were just Quick Play bouts, and it didn't help they appeared to be a smurf. So his bony ass got reported as so as something was noticed.

Big thanks to BangBangBang713 for joining in on several matches, always awesome to play with members of the community! Picked up one play of the game as D.va, and got in a few matches as her, Moira and Mei this evening, and I did use Reinhardt for part of one match and Tracer as a back fill in another.

For the raid we dropped in on Redneck_23 who was just doing a Just Chatting stream over on twitch.tv/redneck_23!

Twitch Clip Links

1.  The Focus Was Real
2.  I'm on fire... first one way and then the other
3.  A Nice Wall

For today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout lasted 31 minutes with Weaving Combo #2, Straight Combo #1 and Beginner Combo #2 for an estimated calorie burn of 482 kcal.

Messed around more with Moral Kombat IX to earn some basic achievements, we'll most likely dedicate time to the Story Mode this week, maybe for Saturday's stream perhaps.

Mortal Kombat Achievements

• Complet-ality: Perform 1 of each type of "-ality"
• Finish Him?: Perform any fighter's hidden finishing move
• Tag, You're It!: Perform and land a Tag Combo
• Robots Rule!: Win Arcade Tag Ladder with robot Sektor and Cyrax

Capcom officially announced Street Fighter VI, and here's hoping it's not just limited to the PlayStation side of the console market. That was easily the biggest drawback about Street Fighter V. That said, I'm more excited for the Capcom Fighting Collection  that will be coming out this summer, which will include every Darkstalkers game, plus other stuff like Red Earth, Cyberbots, Super Puzzle Fighter II, Pocket Fighter and the Anniversary edition of Hyper Street Fighter II.

 We added a few things to X-Box side of heavy considerations for streaming in the future

• Light Fairytale Episode 1 & 2
• The Adventures of Elena Temple: Definitive Edition
• Doctor Who: The Lonely Assassins 
• Binary Domain
• Dead of Alive 1 Ultimate
• Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate
• Dead or Alive 3 Ultimate

Elena Temple is a retro styled platformer, Heard Binary Domain was a lot like Gears of War, so that could be interesting, of course the Dead or Alive Ultimate versions of the first three games that were on the original X-Box is more for easy completion. Light Fairytale is an episodic turn-based JRPG that apparently didn't do well enough to warrant the series continuing... and the Doctor Who game is another odd-ball licensed by the BBC instead of giving the franchise a proper video game experience.

That is something that always bugged me, outside of the 11th Doctor era, there has not been much of note for the Doctor Who franchise in the realm of video games. To be honest, the show does lend itself more towards the point and click adventure style of video game, which we got with the Doctor Who: Adventure Games, but there was a fairly decent action platformer as well with Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock, and I believe the last major release was your basic Candy Crush styled game in the form of Doctor Who: Infinity. 

For tonight's stream we're going to start up Tell Me Why, which is a narrative driven game developed by DONTNOD. I've heard good things about it, and I figure this might take two, at the most three streams to finish.

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

 

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone,

I know some folks set off for traveling yesterday, and so I hope everyone made it where they wanted to be for today's holiday!

Last night's stream was a variety night,  featuring four games, and it would've been five, if the UK exclusive, Extreme Ghostbusters; The Ultimate Invasion, would've displayed properly. Oh well.

Anyway, the first game we featured was WWF SmackDown, which was released back in March of 2000 for the PlayStation. Relearning how to play this took some time, as it's fast pace brawler. Sure the matches on normal difficulty would take a few minutes, the biggest issue is figuring out how to stun the opponents to hit the finishers. We did matches with everyone on the roster, mostly singles matches, but also a couple of tag team bouts. Now does it hold up after 20 years... kind of. It is a relic of its time in terms of how it looks, but it's still a fun game.

Next was Marvel Super Heroes, and this was the Japan-region version I picked up last year. Originally released in arcades in October of 1995, the PlayStation got its version in September of 1997. On 'normal' speed, the game is sluggish as hell, but on Turbo its plays really well. We did a few arcade runs, and tried out different characters. My main for this is still Psylocke, as she has a nice variety of moves that fit my frantic play-style. Does it hold up, yes it does, the a.i. may be cheap at times, but it certainly has a nostalgia factor to it.

We spent some time playing Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub-Zero, originally released for the PlayStation in October of 1997... I swear this game is basically what inspired Bloodborne and similar games for its ass-backwards controls and the need to be perfect on everything you do. Don't get me wrong, it is a good looking back,and the cut-scenes are hilarious with the bad acting... but the controls are what hold it back. The button layout is to mimic that of the Mortal Kombat III, and its so against the grain, there is a reason why this game has the level of infamy that it does. I mean you have a button that you need to press to turn around for crying out loud.

Finally the nigh concluded with Capcom Fighting Evolution... the game that is said to be the reason why Capcom did not make a fighting game until Street Fighter IV.... and I don't see why. Sure there is  very uneven look to the game since the sprites from Street Fighter III, Red Earth, Street FIghter Alpha III and Darkstalkers were all ripped from their games, why the sprites for Street Fighter II were basically brand new. Game play wise its solid, Sakura plays as I expect her to, even if her sprite standing next say Chun Li is a clear indicator that this was not exactly a polished product in terms of its presentation. The a.i. is also pretty wonky, as some times its just standing there waiting to get punched and other times it's a tooth and nail fight to the death.

Following the stream we raided ThisGuyTom who was playing Overwatch over at twitch.tv/thisguytom! 

Twitch Clip Links

• The Boss Man Slam!
• Psi-Thrust For The WIn! 
• I was over confident
• That was effective
  

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout featured Left-Right Step Combo, Double Combo #2 and Advanced Combo #2 for a duration of 31 minutes and an estimated calorie burn of 554 kcal.

My brother and his family tested negative after recently catching Covid, so that is some very good news.

Question) You're in a car, headed north and you see a red fire engine to your right and a fence to your left. There's a horse in front of you and a helicopter behind you. What do you do?

Answer) Put down your drink and carefully get off the merry go round!

My off-stream Final Fantasy XIV adventures, saw me focus on what is the YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse Questline, namely to deal with the third alliance raid, following the two that were seen on Thursday's stream. Needless to say it gets very metaphysical in terms of the plot... and I can safely say I'm glad I got that third raid done because I'm very unwilling to want to deal with it again. I've seen some bullshit AOE attacks in the two months of playing Final Fantasy XIV, but having to worry about attacks coming from behind is just insanity!

For tonight's stream, we may just do another variety night, as we'll get back to the normal routine on Sunday's stream. 

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

Highlights for The Week 4/25/21

  Here are highlights of all the games featured this week over on my twitch channel (http://twitch.tv/fredcasden). This week we featured Overwatch, Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, 3 on 3 NHL Arcade, Sonic CD, Tom Clancy's The Division, Star Trek Online, ARMS, ECW Hardcore Revolution, Tekken 3, Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout, Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors & ESPN Major League Baseball!

Today's Notes 5/1/21

Good afternoon everybody,

Last night turned into a night of variety with four different games being featured.All four games were for the original PlayStation

First up was ECW Hardcore Revolution, which is where we spent the first half of the stream, messing around with 1 on 1 matches, death matches, tag team matches and the barbed wired match. It was amazing how much about the roster of characters I remember, from Mike Awesome being ECW Champion at the time of the game being released to Dawn Marie's last name being Bytch... and yes it was spelled B-Y-T-C-H, as a play on Tammy Lynn Sytch. Remembering game had the nuclear styled input for doing basic moves meant a lot of button mashing to figure out what did what, but thankfully, a lot of combinations were universal, only with different results. I was surprised at how smooth the game felt after not playing it in nearly 20 years,

Twitch Clip: The Taz-Mission Is Locked In

Next, probably the big highlight of the night was Tekken 3, and this is the only Tekken game in the series I have ever played not counting Street Fighter X Tekken. Remembering how to play this was certainly difficult, since I just jumped right into Arcade mode using Xiaoyu on the games default difficulty.... and it took me nearly 20 minutes to get through it... which was a bit embarrassing considering there are 10 fights with 40 second time limit rounds where one has to win 2 out 3 rounds to advance to the next fight. Meaning a superior player could probably get through Tekken 3's arcade mode in about 5 minutes, maybe even less. Also messed around with the Survival, Tekken Ball and Tekken Force modes, the stand out of that being Tekken Ball because once I remembered how to play that it meant getting wins were pretty easy.

Twitch Clip: Wrecking True Orge!

Now for the low-light of the night, Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout... now last week we played Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22 which is considered by many to be the worse fighting game of all time, but Final Bout was worse as it feels completely sluggish with some of the largest input delays I've ever seen for any game. Trying to get a feel for the controls to figure out things was frustrating. Now from what I understand, to consider 'finishing' the game is to go through every single fighter in the 1P vs COM mode, which means figuring out how move more than just a couple of steps when pressing forward is going to be important if I want to attempt that.

Twitch Clip: We did.... something

We closed out last night with Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors and after messing with Final Bout, Darkstalkers was a breath of fresh air, a classic 2D fighter with awesome characters and animations, with button inputs not being delayed by a day and half. Since all it has is an arcade mode, went through it as Morrigian, and despite several losses along the way, we conquered it. Too bad there was no way to save anything to a memory card for this game, would like to keep track of my high scores. Ah well.

Twitch Clip: A Round Ending 9 hit combo!

Today we've officially added Apocalypse to my collection, published by Activision in the late 90s for the PlayStation, this is game is known best for featuring a very disinterested Bruce Willis who was originally supposed to be voicing a side-character. This game will be good for a laugh to see if we can do anything with it in terms of game play. And hey, you can use the analog sticks with it! Neat!

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, as we have officially thrown 200,000 punches since switching over from the original game in December! Between the 2 games I've thrown 400,000 punches since July of 2020. As for the daily session, it was about 38 minutes, so we needed to do some more in the Free Exercise portion to get me over 1000 estimated calories burned for a Saturday!

Tonight we'll be starting the playoffs within ESPB Major League Baseball for the PlayStation 2, as my version of the 2004 Phillies begin to quest for the World Series. I think we'll do the format of playing every other game, this would give me the best shot of getting through hopefully the Division Series and League Championship series tonight.

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

Today's Note 11/22/20

Good afternoon everybody...

Woke up super late today, but this is more understandable as I ended up trying to figure out what would it take to get my old Playstation 3, and what it does is when it powers up, the green light turns yellow then red. With what I read there might be a hardware failure within the consoles motherboard. ... The most common reason for Montherboard errors in Consoles is caused by overheating. And if I remember right, I ran the PS3 real damn hard back in 2012-2014. So probably I will end up either looking to get it fixed or finding one on the secondary market at some point. 

Did do a Fitness Boxing session, solid workout, nothing too out of the ordinary. but we're getting closer to fully unlocking all the customization options for the trainers while also being physically active!

Last night's stream started with Twitch Sings, and we did a nice mix of solos and duets, actually finished doing all my favorite songs on expert, and I started to try and do songs I've never heard of... and yeah that didn't go well. particularly when I was reminded at how much 90s R&B sucks!  

On the plus side, we test out, live on stream hooking up my old Playstation 2 Slim, and my biggest concern with it is how warm it gets considering there is next to no ventilation on the PS2-S. The positive side it works, looks and sounded decent, not sure how to switch it from being 16:9 visual output to 4:3 but hell, it was cool. All my memory cards still had saves and amazingly enough I still have nearly every game I have a save file for, with the exception of Street Fighter Anniversary Collection and Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution. That said, we were successful in running a PS1 game on the PS2 through my Elgato Capture Card, and so that means we'll be able expand things out a bit more than I thought.

So the PS1 game we ran last night for bit was Darkstalkers: The Knight Warriors, and fuck me, I can't remember the last time I played a fighting game that didn't allow for use of the analog sticks, but trying to remember how to play it was an experience. I'm also reminded  of how small and uncomfortable the PS2 controllers feel for a fighting game when you're limited to trying with doing down-forwards, down-backs with a D-Pad.

On the other hand, the PS2 game we tested out was Marvel Vs Capcom 2... and good lord how many hours did I sink into that game back in the day, just the scores on the leaderboard are silly as hell. But since the memory card still had my save, it means I have all the characters unlocked. And since I could use the analog stick with it, that means remembering how to play and do supers and stuff cam pretty natually. As usual Sakura ends up being my main because Sakura is BAE (she is my main in Street Fighter Alpha 2 and 3 as well). 

Tonight of course we'll be playing Overwatch, I already have the new Symmetra Skin so hopefully if anyone needs wins we'll be able to get them the victories needed to get the new skin. Tomorrow we'll be returning to Kingdom Hearts with Chains of Memories, to continue that saga

Best of the Week 11/15-21/2020

Here are the best moments from my twitch channel from over the week of November 15 to 21, 2020, which featured Overwatch, Fitness Boxing, Animal Crossing New Horizons, Super Mario Bros 35, Mass Effect, The Division 2, Star Trek Online, Twitch Sings, Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors and Marvel Vs Capcom 2! Be sure to come over to twitch.tv/fredcasden for daily streams!