After 143 Hours... We Finished Persona 5 Royal

Good morning everyone,

Last night's stream of Persona 5 Royal certainly saw me doing what the game said to do and 'Take My Time' when it came to trying to anticipate how much content was actually left, as I certainly wasn't rushing to finish the game, because I wanted to streak to last at least four hours. Turns out there was six hours worth of content left based around how I was choosing to handle the last trip into Mementos and doing other things (messing around with the Batting cages, spending time with some of the Confidants and unlocking stuff in the Thieves Den 

Now... let's talk about that battle against Maruki which is probably the most drawn out pain in the ass boss fight in the entire game with how many phases it had. Sure we got a HP and SP reset with each phase, but it was a battle that boiled down to 'But wait there's more...' when it came to obviously points of where it should have ended. We defeated Maruki's Persona... no wait... he evolves his Persona... then he gets eaten by his Persona... then it boils down to a fist fight... like really? The Holy Grail to Yaldabaoth boss fight wasn't nearly as padded as Maruki's was.

Now of course by the time we finished that fight it was 10:12 PM... but we didn't finish the game until 12:19 AM... because of all the cut scenes and extended dialog sequences I've managed to find pepped into the last stretches of time. Sure There's the time skips, but there is a lot to see, and when you are given time to roam around there are little nuggets and references one can find that serve as nice callbacks.And since I've been playing Persona 4 Arena, and seeing the 'Men In Black' involvement with characters from Persona 3... I'm betting those were who was chasing the Phantom Thieves at the very end.

Overall, Persona 5 Royal was an awesome experience and I look forward to playing it again on the Xbox side of things in 2023. 

Persona 5 Royal (PS4) Trophies

• Take Back the Future: Completed every Palace.
• The Path Chosen: Watched the ending.
• The Phenomenal Phantom Thief: Obtained all trophies.

Twitch Clips

• It's Showtime! The Defeat Of Jose!
• Boom... Headshot 
• Roses For Makoto 
  

During the stream we got a raid from Redneck_23 who was playing American Truck Simulator 19 over at twitch.tv/redneck_23!

For last night's raid, we dropped in on YrGamerBunni who was playing Halo: Infinite and Fortnite over at twitch.tv/yrgamerbunni! 

On a side note, Persona 5 Royal is only the 5th PlayStation title that I've gotten the Platinum Trophy for... the others being NCIS, WWE: Legends of WrestleMania, X-Men The Arcade Game and Sonic The Fighters.

There is a question of what will be featured on Friday's now... and the top two contenders are Dragon's Dogma and Persona 5 Strikers. We'll see what I end up deciding 

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout featured a brisk workout because I woke up super late. Still kept the daily streak going which was good.

While my fantasy baseball team had a great week last week, this weeks looks like it'll be a problem with Bryce Harper having to deal with a blister issue.

If you're looking for tools to help with streaming or communicating from home with work, check out what Xsplit offers over at Xsplit.com, use the promo code CASDEN to save 10% on your order! If you're looking for just general stuff, of course you can swing over to Amazon using my affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3L8N1Yj.      

For tonight's stream... well, it's back to Persona 4 Arena to continue going through the story mode of that game, which means sitting through the visual novel parts. Good news is I believe we can basically go through everyone's story straight through because we tackled Labrys's story last week. So we should be able to knock off at least three characters stories tonight.

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

Highlights for the week of May 30, 2021

 Here are highlights for the week of May 30, 2021 featuring all the games played over on http://twitch.tv/fredcasden! This week we featured Overwatch, Fitness Boxing 2 Rhythm & Exercise, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Tom Clancy's The Division, APBA Baseball For Windows, Star Trek Online, NCIS & DC Super Hero Girls: Teen Power!

Very Special Agent

Good afternoon everybody,

Yeah up rather early by my standards for a Saturday.

Last night's stream was focused on NCIS for the PlayStation 3. I first played and completed it way back in 2011 (which meant there were no trophies / achievements for me to unlock), and one could argue it is the perfect game for non-gamers who are fans of the TV series. Hell the game was designed to make use of the PlayStation Move controller, so it was as basic as basic can be all things considered. Now yes it is a collection of mini-games with fairly intuitive deductive reasoning puzzles that would take about 5 hours to complete, but when you consider the source material and the pacing of an actual NCIS episode, one could argue the game does a pretty damn good job of replicating that.

Perhaps the biggest strength of NCIS is the story, which connects all four episodes within the game into a tight, compact narrative with how everything ties together as more details fall into place. The character models are pretty much on point, everyone looks like the actors who play them on the show, but with that said, the biggest failing of NCIS to me, is the voice acting. David MaCallum & Robert Wagner Jr do play their roles of Doctor Mallard and Anthony DiNozzo Sr respectively, but for the rest of the main cast, there is a lot lost with pretty poor attempts at sound alikes, for example Erin Bennett doesn't even come close to sounding like Cote de Pablo when it comes to playing the role of Ziva David, and I'm not sure what Jeff Coopwood's tke on Leon Vance was, but he was no where near being able to matching the tone Rocky Carroll has when Vance has a tense conversation with Gibbs.

Still all and all it was a nice game to add to this year's tour, with it being the 23rd game we've beaten on stream and of course I do have some clips from last night to share as well.

Twitch Clip: The Camera Is Too High For Ziva

Twitch Clip: You Could Try To Hide From Abby Sciuto

Twitch Clip: Gibbs Scaling A Building

Twitch Clip: Do I Cut The Red Wire Or The Blue Wire?

Big thanks to LvStrkR for gifting me Trover Saves The Universe, and we'll be sure to feature it as soon as possible on a stream, more than likely that'll be this upcoming Friday.

Following the stream last night I put in some work on Power Rangers; Battle for The Grid, which has quite a few 'grind heavy' achievements, such as having an player level of 700 (which means getting every character currently in the game to at least level 30), playing 1000 ranked matches, etc. So considering this would be a long term project, I figure I might as well start chipping away at it. WHich meant I was reminded at how the match making in Battle for The Grid can result in a player being matched up against the same opponent several times in a row. Granted this could be do to the number of people playing at any given time, but still, it's rather silly that over the course of two hours last night I ended up facing the same person a dozen time. Still we knocked out one achievement.

1. Ranger: Reach player level 300

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session went 40 minutes, with an estimated calorie burn of 640 kcal. Today's exercises were the  Body Hook Combo, the Body Uppercut Combo, Uppercut Combo #2 (Set a new personal best on No Mercy Difficulty) and the Front-Back Step Combo. We had 2 missed actions and they both were Left Uppercuts from the Orthodox stance.  We're up to 96 out of 100 for the Martina's Best Friend achievement, so we should hit that on Monday. 

Not completely sure what we'll be playing tonight,I certainly have options, but it always comes down to what do I think would make for an interesting stream. I'll figure out something by 7 PM EST! And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Today's Notes 6/4/21: STO, APBA & Capcom

Good morning everybody,

It's Friday, and I'm scheduled for work, and as I check the assignment chart I see I do have work, so yay.

Last night's stream started with Star Trek Online, as we played through the two missions that came with the House United update last week, with the focus on seeing if there was any unique dialog based on my character being aligned with the Klingon Defense Force... and the answer to that is, no, there isn't. It's pretty disappointing to see that, but it makes sense as there were no real call backs to anything on the KDF side that was not apart of 'Age of Discovery' expansion three years ago. Now I'm curious on if there maybe is references to a Federation Captain being from the Discovery era, but I'm not going to check.

Of course we got some clips based on what happened with Star Trek Online last night, which I'll list here.

Twitch Clip: Kick Butt & Take Names!

Twitch Clip: It's Not A Leprechaun And It's Not A Tum-ah!

Twitch Clip: Accolade: Descendant Of Kahless

Also during last night's stream, we featured APBA Baseball For Windows. I use to play this a lot back in the 90s, and the last time I probably played it was the summer of 2001. It is a baseball simulator, complete with a radio style broadcast featuring Ernie Harwell. It will be a tough game to stream on Twitch, much like how Baseball Mogul was, because there really isn't anything special visually about it. I did copy the Box Score and Play-By-Play Script and posted it last night which you can see HERE.

And we also had a couple of clips from that part of the stream as well

Twitch Clip: APBA Baseball: A Failed Squeeze Play

Twitch Clip: APBA Baseball: Kruk Ties It at 2 with a Home Run!

Twitch Clip: APBA Baseball: Eisenreich Gives The Philles a 4-2 lead!

Follow the stream, I loaded up Capcom Arcade Stadium on the Xbox One to chase after one achievement, and if there was proof that this collection of classic video games was buggy as hell, this proved it. First here's the achievement.

1. Technician: Clear a game on the highest difficulty setting.

So it seems pretty straight forward right? But nope, because in addition to setting and beating one of the games on its highest difficulty, you have to make other adjustments to it. So thankfully I found a solution to getting this achievement that worked to get it accomplishment recognized by the game.

Play 1941: Counter Attack, set the game to its hardest difficult setting, set the difficulty increase rate to fastest, and set Enemy Firing speed to very fast. Once that is done, go ahead and play the game, beat it and the achievement should pop.

So now at this point as it pertains to Capcom Arcade Stadium, the remaining achievements are all about putting time in, as none can be done in a single note as they require a lot of actual game time being put in.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session went 28 minutes, with an estimated Calorie Burn of 459, and believe me I'm fully aware of the difference between when I can do 40+ minutes and when I'm limited to 30 minutes because of my work schedule. But we continue to exercise every day, and today's exercises were Beginner Combo #1, Defensive Combo #1 and Hook Combo #2... and it's during that last one where I had the one miss of the day, a straight punch from the south paw stance. We're also up to 93 out of 100 for the Martina's Best Friend achievement.

For tonight's stream we're jumping back to the PS3 era with NCIS, yes there was a video game based on the TV series of the same name. I've already 100% completed it several years ago, so this is more of me wanting to do something in the PS3 that's not to intense considering everything else I've been featuring on my night twitch stream. We'll get started around 6:30 PM Eastern.

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

Today's Notes 1/23/21

Good afternoon everybody,

Last night's stream of Saints Row The Third: Remastered continued my direct yet in-direct approach to playing it, which is doing all the side activities while trying to avoid as much as the main story as possible, this has meant that certain cut scenes were missed because I'm doing the activities as I come across them, so the Boss's first direct meetings with Kinzie and Angel are lost, which meant some things were done without context. Now yes, this approach is sort of how I played Saints Row IV Re-Elected and Saints Row Gat Out Of Hell last year , however unlike with those games, Saints: Row The Third: Remastered (and even in its original version) doesn't have a clear indication of what is and what isn't a major story mission. That said, we got 60% of the campaign done, over the course of three nights thus far... which means the achievement to get 30 hours of play time in, is probably more of a pain in the ass than it should be because of how efficient I am with Saints Row The Third in general.

As I was considering games to feature this year, my attention turned to a few things on my shelf, one being my copy of Xenosaga  for the Playstation 2, and while I can probably find copies of Xenosaga II on the cheap, the third game in the Trilogy, Xenosaga III is virtually impossible. Now I saw that there were hopes for a remastered collection to be put out, but those were dashed because Bandai Namco would rather do licensed fighting games than actually take a chance and revitalized original properties. I'm not kidding the reason Katsuhiro Harada of Bandai Namco basically said the concept of an HD remastered of the trilogy died in a profit analysis meeting, which is funny considering Bandai Namco has a long history of actually UNDERESTIMATING GLOBAL INTEREST.

That said, looking into the cost of having my old Playstation 3 repaired and ordering a refurbished one seems to be about even in terms of price. As much as I would not want to do business with GameStop, the fact that I could expand what I do on Twitch even further by having the option of using my PS3 library in addition to my PS2 and PS1 collection, to go along with things that are PC, Xbox and Switch exclusive would go along way in helping my channel stand out in terms of having so much variety in a retro sense. Besides how many people can say they would have the option of playing NCIS (yes there was a game based on the long running CBS series).

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session felt solid, as it went over 30 minutes (not counting stretching) and I felt like I actually did really well on step-forward and step-back movements, which as you know are things that just frustrate the hell out of me. Unlocked a couple of achievements, one was Welterweight Puncher Lv. 1 which was to reach a total punch count of 57,000 HITS, with my current total being 58,021, and the other being Sound Tester which was to have used all the in-game music at normal speed... and to finally get that I had to do a bonus set to select Boogie Wonderland as it was never appearing during daily work outs.

Tonight we'll be returning one last time to Zero Escape: 999 as we'll be going after the True Ending... which means I get to do all my running gags for this game in series one more time. I have all my notes, and I have a good idea of what doors to go through, doors 4 7 and 1, which probably will result in me having some puzzles I've never seen before outside of DaemonsW0lf's streams when she got the True Ending.

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