About a year ago, I released a blog post called “A Harmless Bit Of Self-Promotion” which covered much of the content that I’ve been producing as of late. However, besides a few things that I can’t talk about yet, something new that I’ve been trying lately is to stream myself playing games. Now that it’s been a couple of months, I thought now was as good a time as any to take a look at my current plans for streaming video games, how you can access the content I’ve already made and what you should expect in the future.
Let’s start, of course, with where and when you can find me streaming. I’m currently streaming games on Twitch every Sunday (or, if circumstances prevent me from doing so, Saturday) at around 2pm IST. I’m a variety streamer with the games I’m choosing to play being titles from my video game backlog with one caveat, I’m currently staying away from games with an excessively long playtime, as determined by HLTB, as I don’t want to spend too long playing a single game this early on as I think I can catch more people’s attention with a wider range of titles.
The three games I’ve streamed so far as of this article.
I remember the days when people would loudly declare “Single-player games are dead” and, thankfully, this has not come to pass. I touched on this well over a year ago when I compared the most popular games on Steam with the most popular games on the Steam Deck and found that single-player games were thriving on the handheld. As part of their Spring Sale, Valve have released a list of the top 100 games on the Steam Deck from March 2023 to March 2024 in order of highest daily active player count. While I certainly won’t be going through the entire list within this article, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the top played games on the Steam Deck last year, discuss some that stand out to me for one reason or another and why this list signals that single-player games have a long, healthy and prosperous future awaiting.
Let’s start with which games from this list that I’ve played on my Steam Deck within the past year, thus contributing to their ranking. Working from the bottom up, the first game from these top 100 that I played on my Steam Deck within the last year is Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. I had enjoyed the first game enough that, already owning the second due to Humble Bundle, I decided to give it a chance. I didn’t really feel like it did enough to distinguish itself from the original and, while certainly enjoyable in a braindead manner, I was more than ready for the end when I finally finished the game. I’d played Monster Hunter Rise before March of last year but I picked up the Sunbreak DLC this year and played through that recently. It was nice to return to Monster Hunter but I will say that I thought there was a bit too much repetition of monsters from the base game throughout although particularly at the beginning. Finally, the only other one I played on the Steam Deck in the past year was Vampire Survivors. I knew of this game for a long time but I got it as part of a charity bundle on Fanatical and decided that I should give it a shot. It has proven to be a surprisingly addictive experience and I love how the achievements continually unlock more and more content.
The top 22 games (it was the most I could fit and still have it be readable!)
As I write this article, it is just the day after the news of Akira Toriyama’s death and I’ve been contemplating my experience with his works. The impact he has had across numerous industries from manga to anime to video games and beyond has been immense but, understandably, many people only know him for Dragon Ball and perhaps Dragon Quest. Another series of his, Dr. Slump, is highly popular in Japan but, even though I think it’s better than Dragon Ball, there is no doubt that it’s relatively unknown in the West. However, his body of work is not restricted merely to those series and I thought I’d take a look at a few of Akira Toriyama’s titles that I’d consider to be much more obscure than Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump or Dragon Quest.
Akira Toriyama’s Manga Theater
Before we talk about any individual manga series, I think it’s important that we cover Akira Toriyama’s Manga Theater, a collection of short stories that Akira Toriyama released over the course of his career. Mostly consisting of stories told in a single chapter, they cover a wide variety of settings and are mostly comedic in nature. It’s also worth noting that several of the early stories inspired the characters and format of Dr. Slump, his first successful and long-running series.
For many years now, there’s been a TV series that I would love to see released on physical media in the West and that’s Thunderbolt Fantasy. Besides the fact that it’s a Japanese-Taiwanese coproduction, perhaps the aspect that will stand out the most to people is that it’s created using glove puppetry. This is augmented by several elements such as CGI but this visual style has always stood out to me as being wonderfully stylish and distinct. While the puppetry used in the show is Taiwanese, specifically that of Pili International Multimedia, it made me wonder about the history of Japanese puppet animation which I’ve found to be quite fascinating!
Well, it’s that time of year again! The Epic Games Store has released a new Year in Review for 2023 so I thought I’d write an article discussing it as well as some other information about the Epic Games Store. I admit that I was debating with myself on whether or not to write this post due to a concern that the information may grow repetitive with regards to previous articles covering the Epic Game Store’s Year in Reviews but I was buoyed by some other information we received regarding the Epic Games Store and decided that it was still worth covering. Without further ado then, let’s take a look at how the Epic Games Store is continuing to flounder so many years after its release.
Let’s start, of course, by looking at the new Year in Review and comparing it to the last one. I also do want to commend Epic Games for, if nothing else, their courage for continuing to do these Year in Reviews even when the results are sure to generate unfavourable headlines like the one above. Let’s start by looking at the aspects that are more favourable to Epic. Total PC users of the Epic Games Store has continued to grow with 270 million compared to the 230 million of last year. Monthly active users has also grown from 68 million to 75 million and, as a whole, revenue is up (more on that later). Their social media presence has also grown with an increase of 100,000 followers on Instagram, 300,000 followers on Twitter and a remarkable 444,000 on TikTok, that last one being a growth of 148%!
I remember thinking to myself, many years ago, about the concept of video games being exclusive to particular platforms and, for the first time, thought about how silly the mere concept was! “After all, Blu-ray discs don’t require specific players to function! Why should video games be any different?” were my thoughts and, while it isn’t quite as simple as that, we now see that the industry is beginning to think this as well. Therefore, I thought I might discuss video game exclusivity, why it’s dying and why that’s fantastic news!
For as long as the video game industry has existed, there have been games exclusive to particular platforms. Limitations were certainly a factor in this since many earlier games used Assembly language, a programming language which prevented programs from being released on multiple devices. This meant that the same game released on different platforms at the time were actually completely different titles and would have their own quirks and differences! However, the advent of high-level programming languages meant that titles were no longer restricted to specific hardware and could be released across multiple platforms. Despite this, we have seen video game exclusivity make its way into the present day with numerous titles artificially restricted due to contractual agreements. The idea was that video game exclusivity helped to move hardware by creating an artificial and, usually, unnecessary difference between platforms that would influence consumer decisions and spending.
Previously restricted to the DS/3DS, the games in the Apollo Justice Trilogy were released on multiple platforms this year.
I was recently recording for Victory Achieved Gaming, specifically Ori and the Blind Forest, when, among many other topics, Kathlynn and I began talking about Avatar: The Last Airbender due to the upcoming Netflix show. While it proved to be an interesting discussion, it did end up highlighting a particular difference between myself and other fans and, upon watching it again in editing, I thought it might be interesting to do an article where I share some of my opinions that diverge from the mainstream and briefly discuss why.
1. The Legend Of Korra Is Better Than Avatar: The Last Airbender
I might as well start with this opinion since I’ve already touched on it and is what ultimately inspired me to write this blog post. I personally believe Korra to be a superior show to The Last Airbender which is something that I’ve rarely heard, if at all, from other people. However, I do have reasons as to why I have this opinion. Firstly, I don’t think The Last Airbender is as great as everyone makes it out to be. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the show overall, but I have a few issues with it. I actually bounced off the show when I first tried to watch it, finding the humour too juvenile and overwhelming the drama of the first two episodes. I eventually came back to it and persevered which is when I ran into my second problem. The first season has quite a few episodes that seem standalone and not important to the overall story. This eventually turns out not to be the case but it takes almost the whole series to finally see their relevance. I was finally drawn into The Last Airbender in the second season but these blemishes as well as a few other issues mean that I’m not as enthusiastic about the show as some others are. In contrast, I was instantly enamoured with The Legend of Korra due to its tighter storytelling and, in my personal opinion, superior balancing of humour and drama. Additionally, The Legend of Korra took several concepts from the original series that I felt was underdeveloped and fleshed them out beautifully. I’m not saying that The Legend of Korra is without its flaws but they interfered far less with my enjoyment than they did with The Last Airbender. Thus, I personally love The Legend of Korra more, in some ways much more, than The Last Airbender. I may be merely one of very few who believe this but this is something that I believe in completely and unerringly.
I’ve been playing The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles recently and, upon encountering a certain character, I paused, staring at his name and thinking to myself “Is this that famous Japanese author I’ve heard about?” A cursory bit of research quickly confirmed my suspicion but I quickly found myself intrigued at his experience and the impact that he’s had on Japanese literature. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at Soseki Natsume, a man who’s often considered to be the most important author of the Meiji era.
Soseki Natsume was born in 1867, with his birth name being Kinnosuke Natsume, in a rapidly changing Japan which had only ended its policy of isolation, Sakoku, and was in the process of Westernisation and making contact with global powers. Soseki ended up learning the English language and began working as a teacher at several schools. At this time, Japan’s relations were rapidly growing, which would eventually lead to the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in 1902, and, in 1900, Soseki was chosen by the Japanese government to study English literature in Britain, making him the first Japanese to do so.
Ace Attorney was a franchise that I had little experience with in the past. I, of course, knew of the character Phoenix Wright and his trademark yell of “Objection!” but, beyond seeing a brief bit of gameplay at a friend’s house, I had never had the opportunity to play an Ace Attorney game. It was about a year ago when I first began playing the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, a compilation of the first three games in the series, and my experience with it led to an intense admiration for Ace Attorney as a whole. Therefore, I thought it worth doing an overview of the Ace Attorney franchise and why I’m excited to play more of the games in the future.
The very first Ace Attorney game, “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney”, came out for the Game Boy Advance in 2001 and was made with a small team of seven people over a period of ten months. Taking the role of Phoenix Wright, Ryuichi Naruhodo in the original Japanese, you must solve cases by collecting evidence before cross-examining witnesses in court and pointing out contradictions. Two sequels, “Justice for All” and “Trials and Tribulations”, were also released for the GBA in 2002 and 2004 respectively but it’s worth noting that these games were only released in Japan at the time. It wasn’t until 2005 when the first game saw an international release as a port to the Nintendo DS with added functionality and a brand new fifth case. The American release proved to be a surprising success, especially strange since visual novels were considered unpopular at the time, and eventually saw the other two games released internationally as well.
One thing that always surprises me is how numerous anime studios are significantly more discussed in Japan rather than the West and vice versa. This mainly comes down to the difference in taste with niche anime often proving to be more popular in the West than mainstream ones. Nonetheless, it’s always important to remember that fact, that a lot of the anime we consume is niche and that many mainstream titles are ignored, which is why I thought I might highlight Nippon Animation, a company that has proven to be one of the most important and impactful anime studios in the history of the medium, discussing some of their history as well as some particularly notable series from them.
Nippon Animation was founded in 1975 after Zuiyo Eizo, a studio founded in 1969, was split into Nippon Animation and Zuiyo. Zuiyo Eizo had been working on World Masterpiece Theater and Nippon Animation continued to work on these series. While this left arguably the most famous of all World Masterpiece Theater series, that being Heidi, Girl of the Alps in the hands of Zuiyo, Nippon Animation continued to work on World Masterpiece Theater from their founding to 1997 and then from 2007 to 2009, creating international hits such as A Dog of Flanders, Anne of Green Gables and Tales of Little Women to name only a few.
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