Talk About Wednesdaymania 320 lol

In Which Wait... This Isn't The Right Image?!

I can explain.

So... Tuesday. I'm writing this (technically) on Tuesday.

It's Taco Tuesday.

It's also Cinco de Mayo.

I'm not Mexican, but I do love an excuse to load up on beef & cheese in a taco shell...

But that's not the reason it's my Saturday image on a Wednesday while I talk about Tuesday!

Simply put, time lacks meaning right now.

So since it was/is Cinco de Mayo, we watched some AAA matches and some WWF Super Astros. Don't know what Super Astros is? It's the Spanish-language version of Superstars, basically. One of the episodes we saw was right after Over the Edge, so they were discussing Owen Hart and his unfortunate end constantly.

The matches on Super Astros were incredible. Lots of Super Loco, El Merenguero, Papi Chulo, and most fascinating of all: Tons of Minis. I have nothing but admiration and respect for the Minis of WWF. They put on insanely good matches with greater consistency than any of the other talent, and at the end of the day, they worked so much harder than they had to. I wish they'd have put Minis back into the mix, because while Hornswoggle was fun, he wasn't enough. Not when Max Mini and Mini Nova and El Torito were all running around.

Love me some crazy wrestling!

The AAA Matches are on their YouTube channel, so if you want to watch a clown and a dragon totally wreck the Lucha Bros in style, you go find that! There's also an intense, bloody match with Blue Demon Jr involving blading, bleeding, and a ball-peen hammer. It was a bit hard to watch in places, but insanely good. Seriously, go check out the AAA YouTube page!

So that explains the Wednesdaymania, right? And it happened on a Tuesday, so that's Talk About Tuesday... why video games?

Because I set up the N64 in my room today and set up my laptop so that I could have my partner watch me play through Resident Evil 2 on the N64... because I don't have a streaming setup and I don't have any way of streaming a legit N64 game via the internet.

It was a blast, so if you have a loved one who you like to play video games near, definitely set something like that up. We used the Facebook video chat feature, and it took a bit of fiddling with my overhead light, the window shade, and the angle of my laptop's camera to get everything to work. Then we worked on my unfamiliarity with N64 controls.

I used to play N64 games over at my cousins' place in the 90s and early 00s. We played a lot of the original Smash Bros, Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Snap, and... actually, yeah that's it.

I played fifteen seconds of the demo for Ocarina of Time in a store once?

But yeah, I have very very little experience with any other N64 games.  And Resident Evil 2 has Tank Controls. Thank goodness I had put in both the invincibility cheat and the infinite ammo cheat, because I was running in circles constantly in the beginning. See, I couldn't figure out how the Tank Controls worked. I suuuuuuuuucked at first. And then my partner patiently walked me through the panic that was setting in (I was afraid I'd broken either the game or controller) and we made it all the way past the Spade Key! I'm lowkey not looking forward to the dogs...

But yeah, today was spend mostly clearing out space for me to play the game (I should get a chair...) and then playing the game! Then I went downstairs and ate tacos, and then I came back up to watch a bunch of great wrestling.

So that was today/yesterday.

I hope you guys are having a productive and/or safe Corona Season.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 302: Merge Flowers vs Zombies

In Which I May Have Been Duped

If, like me, you've been a PC gamer most of your life, you've likely come across a game called Plants Vs Zombies, a strategic tower defense game by PopCap. If you've played it, you'll know it's both ridiculous and addictive, so imagine if you saw something that had a shockingly similar name but a slightly different gameplay style on Google Play for free? You'd probably check it out, right?

Well, I did.

I legit thought it was an offshoot for about... five minutes.

Similar style to Plants vs Zombies, too...

Within a few minutes, I realized that, despite the cosmetic similarities, and the fact that both games have you defending your home from hordes of the undead using only horticulture, they're not actually from the same company.

For one, Crazy Dave never shows up, and he's maybe the best part of Plants Vs Zombies, so I was very disappoint.

Still, Merge Flowers vs Zombies is a pretty decent game, and it's forgiving enough that I can play it distracted.

It's also bananas

You have a lawn with limited space. You know how to instantly crossbreed two plants to make a new kind of plant. You have a ton of ads to watch for bonuses and extra plants.

Yeah, this game is basically just a blatant cash-grab. As fun as it is, it has a new ad for you to watch every five seconds (maximum!) and you can't get too far too quickly without sinking in hours watching the same six ads over and over and over and over and over.... and over again.

You can ignore the ads, of course, and just wait for new plants to auto-spawn, but that takes a lot longer than watching a 15-30 second ad.

It's merge-style gameplay, so you drag and drop a plant on top of its double (if you have one) on your board to upgrade it to the next level of plant. Different plants have different abilities (massive damage, freezing, slowing, poison, etc). The more merges you make the more damage your plants do, and so on and so forth. It's an incredibly basic game with no surprises.

The lack of surprises is this game's strength - you don't have to do some clever combination of things to unlock the next part of the game, it's straightforward and tells you what you need to do to win from the very beginning. When you fail a level, you still get a (small) reward for trying. There are drones carrying extra plants that you can click on and watch an ad to get those plants on your grid (they seem to buffer, so if you're out of room but want the extra plants, go for it). The hordes of zombies are consistent and simple.

Basically, this is an excellent waiting-room or airport game - something to play if you've got time but need your attention elsewhere.

As a standalone "I want to play video games" kind of game, however, it's not quite like Plants vs Zombies, and I'm surprised they haven't been sued.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC