EfreetEater

As a kid, I always identified heavily with the word "weird". I was always told that I was a "weird" kid. I liked monsters, Halloween, odd toys like The Incredible Crash Dummies , and magicians. I read books about Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and aliens from the library. I liked learning and going to school. I cared about the environment and wanted to include others in events and games fairly and equally. These are all still true things about me. Sometime in the year 2000, I first heard the name JoJo's Bizarre Adventure . "Bizarre" is of course often a synonym for "weird", and, even to a weird kid like me, this was such a weird name that I was intrigued. From what I remember,  JoJo's Bizarre Adventure  was first introduced to me as a video game for PlayStation that my friend Augustin had rented. I heard all about the colorful designs of the manga-based fighting game. This was a story that had not yet been introduced to a major...

Almost everybody likes talking about stuff they bought or acquired, me included. I'm hoping to have this as a irregular series, probably around twice a month. Recently, I haven't been buying a lot of games, mostly using my money to pay off debts, but here are some things I got in the last few weeks. Super Mario Bros. 3 and   The Uncanny X-Men were small impulse purchases I made when I went to a local pawn shop to pick up a boxed copy of Xexyz . That game had been snatched up, so I grabbed Mario and Bionic Commando , the latter being a game that I was not sure if I had. I ended up noticing that I already had it and returned to switch it with X-Men , a game that is considered pretty bad. Super Mario Bros. 3 is great of course, and it is one of the first games that I ever played (at a friend's house). It also came out in Japan exactly one year before I was born. Though I already had and completed the GBA version, it's nice to finally have the NES version too. Th...

For the second game of my Four in February, I decided to finally play The Bouncer . I remembered this game somewhat fondly as being an early, and perhaps misguided, PS2 release. I think it was the first game that my friend Shane had for PS2 (mine was Orphen: Scion of Sorcery ). The Bouncer  was developed by Dream Factory and published by Squaresoft. Dream Factory worked with Square earlier to develop fighting games Tobal No. 1 , Tobal 2 , and Ehrgeiz . Though the games are not really related (other than the two Tobal  games)  The Bouncer  is clearly a continuation of those works, a spiritual successor in some ways. The cover art to The Bouncer  shows the main character, Sion Barzahd, against a graffiti-covered wall. I like the nondescript little description around the game's logo. The European cover art follows the same design but substitutes the American releases photographic blue with a warm red. Both of these covers have the common issue that marred...

The first game I completed of my Four in February was Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein . This is a fighting game by Capcom that was released in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast in North America and 1999 in Japan. The game was first released in 1998 in arcades across the world. It's a sequel to Capcom's earlier Star Gladiator - Episode 1: Final Crusade , Capcom's first in-house 3D fighter. I had wanted to play Plasma Sword  for a long time, since I had Star Gladiator  but not a Dreamcast as a kid. It was the allure of the odd that drove me to it; Star Gladiator  was such an unknown game in my friend group, and I had never even seen the sequel.   The cover art to  Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein  is pretty great. There's the hero, Hayato, a colorful bubble, some designs of circuitry or windows in a spacecraft, and a huge title. The colors really make it look like a Dreamcast game, that vapory millennium orange and pink. The Japanese co...

Hey, how are you? This is my first blog post on here. My name is Richard, and I used to do a YouTube thing with this same name, but I decided to switch it up to a blog instead. I realized that I like writing better than making videos, and I also have a lot more skill in doing this. Welcome to the new EfreetEater blog. Have you heard about Four in February? It doesn't seem like it's particularly well known, being created in 2013 by writers at Kotaku and Joystiq. It's an initiative to complete four video games in February, as a lot of gamers don't get around to actually completing games that they own or play. There have been minor studies and amounts of research into this phenomenon, and basically, less than 50% of players tend to finish games. It seems that around 5% (or more) of owners don't even play the game that they own. I can say that I am certainly guilty of both of these as well. I own something like 2,000 physical video games and 500 digital games, but...