Amazing Games And Horrible Puns Are Always Out There... Somewhere

One of my favorite undiscovered gems is called Out There Somewhere, as you could probably guess by the name. I found this beauty while perusing steam during one of its amazing sales, and happened to stumble upon this game at quite the nice price, so I picked it up. When I got around to playing it, which I'm honestly not sure when, it was pretty fun. Albeit relatively short, it definitely provides a fun experience, with even a little bit of replayability.

So, what is this game about? You're a space explorer who has been shot down and crash landed on an unknown planet, and now you must traverse the planet to find a way to fix it so you can get back to your journey. The gameplay itself is mostly puzzle platforming, with a bit of enemy combat and 2 sequences of mild bullet hell, one at the very beginning, and one at the very end. Very nice soundtrack, fun puzzles, challenging boss fight, overall just a great quick game.

As for the replayability aspect I mentioned earlier, this is mainly for collecting a few secrets, doing achievement hunting, or speedrunning. Some people may not find any of these replay worthy, but I know that these things can definitely be quite a value.

The best part about the game however? Well, you'll have to play to find out. That's something I won't spoil for you. However, it is a line that is worth the full price of the game.

Dang And Grandpa

Do you like mysteries? Do you like anime? Do you like psychotic teddy bears and death? Then I have the game for you. Introducing... Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. Danganronpa is a game where a bunch of high school students find themselves trapped in a school, with some psychotic teddy bear pulling the strings and making them kill each other. Pretty fun premise, right? What if I told you it gets even better?

Danganronpa is a franchise consisting of about 4 games plus an anime, which I plan on reviewing all eventually. So we start (naturally) at the beginning, with the first installment, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. This game has a lot of ups, but it does have some downs. I'll be describing its mechanics, the story, and then, well, anything else that doesn't really fit in.

So, what is this game really? How do you play? To answer your question, it's mostly a visual novel, with the occasional puzzle and other mystery-themed minigames. The game has mainly 2 parts: the story part, and the trial part. The story part consists of the aforementioned visual novel style, while as the trial part does have some of that, the core of it is something different.

What are class trials? Put simply, they are trials which the students attend (involuntarily) to figure out who the killer is. Every chapter contains a killer (otherwise where would the story be?), and your job is to find who it is via the trials. The main mechanic here is a game where words will fly across the screen, and you have to find the correct weak point to shoot with the correct bullet. At its roots, it's pretty simple, however some of these mysteries can take a bit of brainpower to solve, and sometimes you'll end up just looking it up or just trying every possible combo. There are a few other mini-modes in the trials, however, which are a fill-in-the-blank comic, a rythym game, and a... spelling game. Obviously, not the best selection minus maybe the rythym one, but it works, as the comic has some fun art in it, and the spelling game... well, maybe not for that one.

So, for those who are curious, how is the story itself? It is a story based game after all, so buying it if it has a sucky plot would pretty much be a waste of money. Fear not, for this game has an excellent plot and shows outstanding execution of the story mountain. The setting is described quite well with a quick but interesting prologue, as you get to learn about this fascinating world that contains people with extraordinary talents. The action in the game does a great job of building up for the climax, each trial better than the last, with even crazier plot twists. Even the introductory trial has a pretty neat twist! The climax is definitely great, with an epic final battle with the main antagonist, solving many of the games presented questions with outrageous, absolutely crazy answers. The falling action definitely does its job of, well, leading everyone to the resolution, which is a great finish for the game, yet leaves you with a few minor questions, that will, of course, be discovered in later installments.

What about the rest of the game? The characters are quite the cast, each with their own unique personality, backstory, views, and secrets. How about a secret mode where instead of killing each other, you micro manage all the students in a weird little rpg/dating mode? It even has quite a fair amount of replayability, as it will take a while to actually complete it all the way through. Extras, you say? With the in game Monocoins you get, you can also purchase some of your favorite tracks, art, clips, events, and more!

So, I said Danganronpa had some bad. And it's true. However, it's only one thing. But its bad enough to put a damper on the whole experience. Allow me to rant.

Fuck purple words. Taking time out of my reading to press buttons, go through the same dialogue MULTIPLE times, and fucking like, it's just so tedious to always do. It practically ruins the first chapter because they use it SO FUCKING MUCH. If it's a story game, and I'm supposed to know the information anyways, don't hide it behind some stupid button press other than the main button. It's not even for like  multiple endings, or different paths. It's a stupid hurdle that blocks your progress.

They removed the purple words in later games so thank god. Overall, great game, 8/10 needs less purple words.

The Final Album In The Starbomb Trylogy

Starbomb finally released their new (and unfortunately probably final) album after over 5 years. And I have to say, it's pretty damn good. However, something has arisen that was even a shock to me. The Tryforce is actually the worst starbomb album out of their 3 album discography. Crazy, right? Allow me to explain.

The Tryforce is one of Starbomb's most mixed bags of jams to this day. Their debut album was fucking tasty as fuck, with their worst songs only being moderately average. Their second album was definitely a sequel, introducing new concepts and a new span of games to sing and joke about. In some aspects, this amplified the humor and tastiness, but in other aspects it hurt the album as a whole. And now, 5 years later, we arrive here. Despite the fact this is the worst Starbomb album of the 3, The Tryforce brought out some of the best ever songs in the entire Starbomb discography, such as Vegeta's Serenade. Unfortunately, other aspects made the album's overall quality somewhat... diminished.

What made the album end up being bad? It was one of the top selling albums on the itunes store, how could it have been bad? Short answer: it wasn't bad. Just because it's worse in comparison to something else doesn't mean it's bad. So why am I saying it was the worst? Time to finally explain in a lot more detail.

One of the core aspects of Starbomb's songs is the humor, which is often found in the lyrics. This album has the worst case of any starbomb song in the music-louder-than-the-lyrics-itis. Take, for example, Filling In The Name Of. When you first listen to it, you can barely understand what's going on until the music stops completely and you overhear the word 'Tetris'. Cool, it's a Tetris song. But what even is going on? Unless you have amazing lyric deciphering skills, or you google the lyrics, you probably won't have a clue. When you do get it, it's pretty humorous. But until then, its just a lot of noise. This would be excusable if this noise was tasty, which it isn't.

Some of the main features you'll always find in a Starbomb album are an intro and outro. This usually involves Arin making a goofy rap, and making some jokes as they talk to their fans. The intro was... not that great. The finish of the "Butts Are Nuts" rap was really disappointing. Along with that, the humor from all other intros and outros was almost nonexistant. The outro, was once again, kinda disappointing, for the same exact reasons.
Another recurrence is the Simple Plot song. And I just have to ask, how could they do this to Talking Video Games? These are normally the BEST songs on the albums, being an extremely tasty and ear pleasing combination of music, jokes, arin's raps, and dan's harmonic choruses. This... had none of that. The jokes were ok at best, the choruses were lacking, and the main singing wasn't great either, nor was the music itself. The best thing about the song was jerking off into pancakes. Other than that, all the humor was, like I said, just... okay.

One final aspect of Starbomb was introduced back in Player Select, and that would be the short comedy skits. The ones from the first one contained a bit of music, even if there wasn't that much, and were pretty funny. The ones from The Tryforce were terrible. And it hurts me to bash one of my favorite bands like this, but the two skits from this album flat out sucked. The first one was extremely repetitive, no music, and only about 6/10 humor. The second one was just arin rapping. There wasn't humor. Normally, that's not a problem, but this is a comedy band. Plus, rap without music just kinda sucks. Sure, the rap itself was pretty ok, but... I highly doubt it was a good enough concept to be on the album. There were so many other things it could be, tastier, funnier, but no, they stuck with this.

Also, the lady who was featured in This Song Sucks and Hardest Fucking Game In The World really decreased the quality of those songs. 'Sexy music' did NOT set the mood, in fact it did quite the opposite, it turned me off to the entire album for a quick while, thinking this was how the entire album was going to be. And I really didn't need to hear her moan. Twice.

Ok, I've mentioned plenty of reasons why The Tryforce lacked badly in some areas. Now, here are the reasons why it's still pretty great.

Vegeta's Serenade. A perfect and beautiful harmony of jokes, Arin's singing, Dan's singing, and instruments. I don't often give out a 10/10 to anything, except when I jokingly do so for a quick dumb laugh or whatever with some friends. But this song, this fucking masterpiece deserves it. I'm honestly really sad that this may be Starbomb's final release, because I loved how pleasing Arin's voice was in this. Normally, he raps. This time, he sung, and it was fucking amazing. Please, Starbomb, I need more of that. The world needs more of that.

TWRP helped in the production of this album, and it helped a fuck ton. Welcome to the Mario Party was actually really good thanks to them (plus Arin's tasty rapping, surprisingly well pulled off, not usually a fan of that kind of rapping), as well as how they saved the Intro a bit. Other than that, I didn't discern any super noticable places where TWRP made it clear they did that part or whatever, so I can't give that many specific mentions to them, but they did great.

And just, overall, anything that I haven't mentioned specifically was up to usual starbomb standards: pretty tasty. And yes, I'm including Donkey Kong Joonyer. Everyone seems to hate this song, but I found it pretty funny and pretty tasty. The instruments in this album really went next level, from the chorus of Blowing the Payload to the introduction of the newest pokemon Saxuffalo.

So, overall, The Tryforce was a less than average album, due to its grab bag feel. However, where they didn't fail, they succeeded pretty damn well, leaving it to not suck as an album. I'm gonna miss you, Starbomb. I wish for your return.

Sorry for the late post, it's been crazy with robotics and school and work and everything, to a point I almost forgot this existed. I'm going to try to do better at staying active here. Sorry again, and I hope you enjoyed my review.