Highlight for the Week of May 2, 2021

Here are highlights of all the games featured over on http://twitch.tv/fredcasden for the week of May 2, 2021. This week we featured Overwatch, Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise, Nancy Drew Dossier: Resorting to Danger, MLB The Show 21, Tom Clancy's The Division, Monster Hunter Rise, Star Trek Online, ECW Anarchy Rulz, Virginia and ESPN Major League Baseball!

Today's Notes 5/8/21

Good evening everybody,

I did not get up till about 3 PM Today, but I have a good excuse this time, I was up till 5 AM this morning, because after last night's stream I got into another round of going through stuff to see what I could find, what I would keep and what's getting tossed.

So first, last night's stream, we played a little indie game called Virginia. The reason was that earlier in the week long time friend of the channel, ShadowStrkr24 was going to gift me the game, but turns out I already had it. So while I was trying to figure out what to do last night I remembered I said we would play Virginia because he said it was short game beginning to end, and he was right, it took about 2 hours. Virginia is purely a cinematic game, with very limited game play involvement, to the point where all the achievements seem purely accidental to come across. It does has an awesome musical score and is a gorgeous game, though what the hell a lot of the symbolism meant in the game was lost on me. 

Twitch Clip: Can We Get Some Service?

Twitch Clip: What The Hell Is A Buffalo Doing Here?!

Twitch Clip: How The Hell DId You Get In Here?

Twitch Clip: Of Course It's Aliens

Following that, we jumped back to the PlayStation One era with ECW Anarchy Rulz, and boy does this game reflect the turmoil ECW was under in mid-2000, with the massive roster turnover, in fact one of the biggest rivalries in ECW in 2000 was Masato Tanaka versus Mike Awesome, but only Tanaka was in Anarchy Rulz and and Awesome was in Hardcore Revolutin while both men had highlights in each games video intro. Game play wise it is more streamlined than ECW Hardcore Revolution and probably is the most 'realistic' North America made wrestling game in terms of how you can only perform more impactful moves based on the 'health' of your opponent but that results in the matches going on forever. Case in point, as a joke I set a Tornando Death Match for a time limit of 40 minutes, where I was using Tommy Dreamer, my CPU partner was the Sandman and the opponents were CW Anderson and Billy Wiles.... the match ended up going the full 40 minutes. 

Twitch Clip: Dreamer WIns With A Diamond Cutter? 

Twitch Clip: The Only Way A Rhodes Is Gonna Get Over Is If They Wear Polka Dots! 

Twitch Clip: Who Booked This Crap? I Did!

Now as I said at the start last night I went through some more stuff, finding things to throw out, but things that I found were pretty cool, including my near complete set of the Star Trek The Next Generation novels, more computer game manuals, several games from the Windows 95/98 era including Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider II, Triple Play 97 and NBA Live 98. While the Tomb Raider games have seen re-release in modern times, if I could get the later two games to work it would be pretty awesome in regards to featuring classic sports games.

For Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session, the daily was 40 minutes plus we did an addition 30 with Free Exercises. This resulted in a new personal best with punches thrown of 2922 and a new exercise duration time of 1 hour 10 minute 49 sections. Best Friend Achievement for Bernardo saw a big jump to 78 points... so if I'm getting 3 points for the daily workout, I wonder what are the qualifications for each point in Free Exercise mode. 

For tonight's stream we'll be wrapping up ESPN Major League Baseball on the PlaySation 2 with the World Series between my Philadelphia Phillies facing the Boston Red Sox. We'll be playing each game, so there is a good chance we're going to sweep the Red Sox in four games!

So on that though 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 Notes 4/30/21

 Good morning everybody,

Well last night's stream ended up indeed being split, first of course was Star Trek Online, where we knocked out a series of endeavors with Sorra, which lead to a couple of humorous moments, such as me quoting General Chang from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and then riffing on Another One Bites The Dust, plus we started breaking in a new ship under Zagreus. We spent some time in the Badlands as well as the Dyson Sphere and just did random stuff.

(Note to self: I really need to remember to hyperlink clips for every post lol)

Twitch Clip: Another One Rescued.... to the beat of Another One Bites The Dust

The second half of the stream was focused on playing ARMS for the Nintendo Switch, and needless to say its fun as hell. The tutorial does a really good job of breaking things down for new players to understand, it's kind of like the arcade version of Punch-Out in many ways. Of course the only character I was remotely familiar with was Min-Min, who as you may know, is kind of my main when ever I choose to load up Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. We went through the 'arcade' mode, to see what the base game is like, including some of the mini-games... then things went nuts when I went into online mode and played against other players, I actually ended up winning a couple of matches. The online play was really super smooth, no noticeably lag, and the variety of different game types really impressed me. I love the two-vs-two system, where it's just chaos trying to keep track of which opponent I want to focus on while staying in range my my partner. 

Twitch Clip: Hey I Won!

Super windy outside today, opened the door and the force of win was just pushing it to stay closed as if saying 'no you stay in side' 

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was really easy going, only 25 minutes as we pushed past my personal high scores for a month. It's really rare when I see the daily set give two 3 minute sets, one to open and one to close, so I do feel a little eager for more, but considering how I pushed myself this month with how my weight kept fluctuating around the 250-251 mark, taking it easy seemed like the right thing to do.

For Tonight's stream we'll be jumping back to the PlayStation One era with ECW Hardcore Revolution, the first of two ECW games published by Acclaim after they lost the WWF license to THQ. Hardcore Revolution was practically a reskin of WWF Attitude, and thus a nuclear launch code is needed to do just about every type of move in the game. So tonight is gonna be interesting to say the least.

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

Today's Notes 4/24/21

Good evening everybody,

Yup I totally slept in today, granted I didn't hit the sack till about 4:30 AM, and didn't get up till 3 PM, but hey I'm here aren't I? 

Anyway last night's stream was focused on games from the PlayStation One era and obviously these were games I have not played in probably 15-17 years.

First up was Rival Schools: United By Fate, as we went through the arcade mode on Disc 1 with Sakura and Hinata, and we did not get the good ending because I didn't realize you need to get through Raizo and his partner by using a team up super. We then messed around with the stuff on Disc 2 (or the Evolution Disc) which included a variety of different game modes and I still had my original save file so trying to to beat my old high scores was an interesting challenge.

Next up with Knockout Kings, EA Sports first venture into boxing video games, and we messed around with fights in all three weight classes (Heavyweight, Middleweight and Lightweight) as well as the slugfest mode. I ended up winning the first two fights using Muhammad Ali and Oscar De La Hoya in their respective weight classes, but lost as Floyd Mayweather and Butterbean (in the slugfest mode). I did find myself trying to use the combos I often see as apart of Fitness Boxing 2 with all the button presses, but I can safely say Knockout Kings was very unresponsive at times.

Lastly, and the real highlight from last night, we messed around with Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22, a game which I have never beaten, even on its easiest setting. But the stars were aligned, as I made up my mind I was going to 'get good', picked Android 18 and we went through the 1P vs COM mode, beating every other character in the game. It may have taken me an hour to do so, because I took my share of loses, but we got through it and best part is I got footage to prove it. Since there are no unlockable victory endings, I'm counting Dragon Ball Z Ultimate Battle 22 as a finished game for this years tour.

Following the stream I messed around with MLB The Show 21 and got the call up from Triple H to join the Phillies main roster, earning the Welcome To The Show Achievement. Since I was playing nightly after the streams, and playing every game I was starting, it took me about a week from the when the game went live last Friday for pre-order purchasers. A lot of folks have done it faster by simulating seasons, which is a cop out I think.

Todays Fitness Boxing 2 Daily workout was only 38 minutes.... so I did an extra 30 minutes in Free Training and boy do my legs feel it! It paid off as we're up to 99 points for the Sophie's Best Friend achievement, which we'll get tomorrow, so we'll have a new trainer starting with Monday's session. I also set new personal bests today with punches thrown (2802), estimated calorie burn (1147.05) and exercise duration (1 hour 9 minutes 14 seconds)

Added Legends of Wrestling II for the PlayStation 2 to my collection today, I did have this game years ago, but traded it in and tracking down a copy at a fair price took awhile. Also found a copy of the manual for ECW Anarchy Rulz, too bad I couldn't find the original jewel case with the back cover. Ah well.

For tonight's stream we'll be wrapping up the 2004 season in ESPN Major League Baseball, playing the Saturday Night games of each week. We'll get started with this at about 7 PM EST because I want to get a shower and have dinner first!

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

Today's Notes 4/22/21

Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream of The Division was solid, as most of it was spent with me wandering around the first few areas, finding collectables and doing side missions and stuff, while trying to avoid getting killed. We were joined by Iceman in the later half of the stream, with him using a secondary character so I wouldn't be downed too many times due to the game's infamous armor scaling bug. Probably next Wednesday's stream will be more of the same when it comes to progression with this game.

Found a copy of ECW Anarchy Rulz for the PlayStation One, and while it didn't come with the original instruction booklet, I probably remember how to play it because I did have it at one point, but traded it in when that was a thing to do. I already had ECW Hardcore Revolution in my collection, so adding Anarchy Rulz was just to complete the set. Maybe I can steal an idea from legendary YouTuber MaxamillionDood and do a character legacy, maybe using Tommy Dreamer in all the games I have that he appears in, which are just six games (the 2 ECW games, WWE Smackdown vs RAW 2008-10 and RetroMania).

I went looking to see if I could find a decent looking DVD / CD tower, and fuck me, the only things I find are the wired styled slot in ones, awkward wall mounted versions and things that require more assembly that a Lego set. This is why I miss places like Tower Records, could just go and pick something like that up no problem.

Did some more MLB The Show 21's Road to the Show off stream last night, finishing up my first season stuck in Triple A and without simulating anything, and getting the 'invite' to be at Spring Training for the Phillies. If my player can make the club out of Spring Training, I'll have the final achievement unlocked for the Road to the Show campaign.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was pretty good, the Sophie's Best Friend achievement is up to 91 points, so if that keeps pace with 3 points a day, it should wrap up by Sunday. Granted last time I said that I ended up having to use Hiro on a Monday. Also, going by the length of the workouts, I should just about match the output I did last week overall. Of course it all depends on what tomorrow's session has involved, as the week of Fitness Boxing 2 run Saturdays to Fridays.

Tonight's stream will be split between Star Trek Online and Hades, the reason being, as you know, is that STO just doesn't have the content for me to justify a full stream, as the Task Force Operations are just not fun to do, and Space Combat just get down right boring if done so much. Hades will be brought in for the second half of the stream.

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