Anarchy Advent 2018!

It's September again, and you lot know what that means...

This is the third year I've done Anarchy Advent, so if you wish, feel free to acquaint yourselves with the previous years... 2016 and 2017...

What is Anarchy Advent?

Anarchy Advent is a 24-day countdown to my birthday, September 24th. So naturally it starts on August 31st and ends on September 23rd. During this time, I will post one UNIQUE piece of content every day to YouTube and where possible, related blog posts on here. By unique, I mean there would only be ONE review, ONE unboxing, ONE Charm Agony rant - in a sense, it's a way for me to challenge myself and try out new things.

While I'm posting this stuff, I also run a competition alongside it - in which the winners can win Steam games or vouchers towards Steam games (or other games on other formats, but thus far, nobody who has placed has asked!)

Competition Details

This year I've decided to narrow the brief somewhat. The last two years were general creativity competitions - and in a way, it still is - but you lot have a requirement set in stone this time.

MAKE MOG A BIRTHDAY CARD.

Whether you want to draw one, write a birthday poem, make a video e-card, write a birthday song or otherwise make a tribute to Mog Anarchy - that is your brief. Essentially, any form of creativity goes - art, music, writing, video, animation, sculpture, embroidery - whatever you're interested in!

The prizes will be games or credit to purchase games on a digital download service of your choice. Last year, the winners all opted for Steam games, but prizes can be arranged for Xbox Live, Playstation Network, Nintendo e-Shop, Amazon, Origin, iTunes etc.

Said prizes are...

• 1st place - a game or games from your chosen wishlist/format gifted up to the value of £15
• 2nd place - a game or games from your chosen wishlist/format gifted up to the value of £10
• 3rd place - a game or games from  your chosen wishlist/format gifted up to the value of £5

Competition runs from August 31st to September 22nd. The winner shall be announced on September 23rd - and I shall showcase all of the entries!

Terms & Conditions

• Entries must be submitted to me via DM on Twitter or via e-mail - please don't @ them to me, I'd like to keep them a secret from other entrants!
• Prizes are to be awarded in vouchers or download code only, no physical cash prize.
• Once you've submitted your entry, I can do with it what I wish, post it on my blog, Twitter, use it in videos or other content etc.
• If you need anything from me in order to complete your entry - like sheet music to my opening, the colour of my eyes, my shoe size, Jet's inside leg measurement - whatever - just let me know and I shall provide you with whatever you need.

Review: Doki Doki Literature Club!

This review will be as spoiler free as humanly possible - but Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that is best experienced totally blind - do bear that in mind. 

Also, the game opens with a disclaimer and discretion agreement - “this game is unsuitable for children or those who are easily disturbed,” - Doki Doki Literature Club touches upon some rather heavy subject matter, including mental health issues like depression and anxiety, self harming, suicide and themes of abuse. The script is so well written, that as a player who has personally experienced some of these topics first hand, they can hit very close to home - and while I hesitate to use this word, as the Internet has made a mockery of it - some parts can be triggering. So please exercise some caution.

Upon first glance, Doki Doki Literature Club presents itself as a cutesy light-hearted visual novel/dating simulator in which you play an unseen and unnamed male protagonist with 3 of 4 potential girls to attempt to woo. The visuals are heavily anime-inspired, complete with Japanese schoolgirls sporting brightly coloured hair, unnatural eye colours and suggestive school uniforms. However, this is a mere crust - the first “act” of the game is a total facade resting upon a heavy and incredibly dark and disturbing series of acts that explore the sort of themes a psychological horror game would.

The story itself is fairly simple - your childhood friend Sayori encourages you to join an after-school extra-curricular club - specifically, the literature club. You go along to humour her and meet the other 3 members - Natsuki, Yuri and the club president Monika. Bribed with cupcakes, flirty girls and offers to read new manga - you agree to join. The girls suggest the four of you begin writing poems to share with one another in an attempt to improve each others’ writing skills and confidence.

This introduces the poetry writing mechanic. Each night after attending the literature club - you're presented with this screen - in which you must click 20 different words to include in your poem. This is also how you begin to appeal and build a closer relationship with one of the specific girls - as each has their own preferences of the sort of vocabulary they like to read. 

Sayori enjoys bittersweet poetry, including emotional words and words relating to human connections - such as family, romance, promise, sadness and happiness. Natsuki likes cutesy words and themes and thus favours words like marshmallow, bouncy, kitty, puppy and candy. Yuri presents herself as the most experienced writer and thus prefers more elaborate words and words that touch on darker themes, such as contamination, suicide, graveyard, destruction and massacre.

Upon presenting whatever kind of poem you write to the other girls, they too will show you what they wrote - and as the story progresses, all of their writing becomes more intense and emotional, revealing the secrets of their home lives, their mental state and their true intentions. 

At the end of act 1 however, as all seems to be progressing well, one of the girls will commit suicide - and the game begins to act in very bizarre ways. It seems like one or more of the games’ characters has achieved self awareness and is physically deleting and altering the actual game files contained with YOUR OWN computer. Keep an eye on the games’ directory and you'll see files appearing and disappearing - and lines of text will be added to the games’ program log.

Act 2 is filled with weird visual glitches, distorted music and sound effects and corrupted text. Some lines of dialogue will even be outright changed and on occasion your mouse cursor will move on its own.

In addition, the overall theme of the game will now dramatically change - characters’ dialogue will include more profanity and out-of-character expressions. Sometimes you will be unable to read what they're saying, as they will instead spit out garbled lines of corrupted text.  Their facial expressions will often change too, behaving in truly inhuman and disturbing ways.

Interestingly, there are dozens of pre-programmed glitchy occurrences but not all players will experience them - as they may change depending on the choices you make and some have a small chance of even happening in the first place - ranging from a 33% chance to a minimum of 1% chance of an event even happening - allowing for each player to get a different experience.

Even more things happen outside of the game - as previously mentioned, the games’ directory will spew out random text files and images - some tech savvy players even opened the character files and decoded them into text or images. Some files at first glance simply contained garbled text characters - but were actually haunting messages encoded in base-64 or binary.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a rare example of a game that literally has no excuse NOT to be played. Why? It's available right now for download from its official website or via Steam for the low low price of FREE. That's right - you will receive around 3-5 hours of gameplay and some truly disturbing existential horror for literally nothing. So close this window, open your Steam client and get ready to witness some seriously fucked-up psychological horror, cold blooded existential dread and watch your computer get manipulated by in-game characters with nothing you can do about it.

"Look Into My Pies" Alternative Ending!

Did you know that "Look Into My Pies," A.K.A. "The Hypnosis Sketch" originally had a different ending? I wrote *this* ending first, and my two proofreaders said they felt Cat Chaos was too harsh, too mean in it. As a result I re-worked it and used a different ending.

However I did RECORD the original ending - so here it is!

I'll let you be the judge, which do you prefer, this ending, or the YouTube ending? Do you think Cat Chaos was too harsh, or does Charm deserve all the hilarious misfortunes he subjects her to?

Spyro 3: Year Of The Dragon - Funniest Dialogue

Today I’m going to share with you some of the funniest lines of dialogue from Spyro 3: The Year of the Dragon. Insomniac Games did an amazing job at making the original Spyro PS1 trilogy appeal to both kids and adults - and managed to include some genuinely funny dialogue without adding any adult humour to maintain its 3+ rating. One disclaimer though - this list is dialogue from the main game only - no cutscene dialogue - so unfortunately I shan’t be including this gem:

Why, you brazenly avaricious, duplicitous, larcenous ursine!

Tara
Not only is the character of Tara a full-on homage to Lara Croft - she even makes a mockery of the core gameplay of the original Tomb Raider series - “pressing switches” and “pushing boxes around” is literally all I can remember doing in the first games.

Sheila’s Haiku
The fact that all of the characters in Spooky Swamp speak in haiku is funny to begin with - but when Sheila comes out with this - I admit I LOL’d the first time I heard it. I just wasn’t expecting it!

Prince Azrael
All the way through Charmed Ridge, we’re made to believe that the Amy X Azrael scenario is a kidnapping or forced marriage - as it turns out, they’re in love and they’re eloping. What makes this scene even funnier is that Prince Azrael is a biker punk - check out his skull earring and motorbike!

Blue Hedgehog
Do I really need to explain this one? For some reason, we as gamers love it when references to other games show up, either as easter eggs, dialogue or just blatantly like Moneybags does here. It’s especially heartwarming when it’s not a negative reference to a character or series from a rival company.

Moneybags’ Haiku
The unique quirk of Spooky Swamp is that everybody there speaks in haiku - including the non-native NPCs like Sheila and Moneybags. Unlike Sheila however, Moneybags has a clear dislike of haiku, but ironically expresses this using the medium he claims to hate!

Happy Thoughts
Moneybags is such a sarcastic character in the 3rd iteration of Spyro - in the 2nd title, and his debut - he was more or less just a greedy scrooge-like character who was relatively nonplussed if Spyro were to refuse to pay his fees - as if to say, well it’s no skin off my nose if you can’t finish the game. In Spyro 3 however, he started taking things more personally and sometimes really came out with some zingers.

Hockey Players
Growing up, I used to go to watch a lot of live ice hockey games - so I knew they often got violent. Hearing Nancy say this so nonchalantly in an attempt to make Spyro feel guilty was just hilarious - though as this glorified escort quest was so bloody frustrating, watching her get whacked across the rink with a hockey stick made me LOL every time.

Another Sequel
A fine example of a developer poking fun at themselves here - and also a weird prediction for the future. At this point, Spyro was onto his 3rd main series game and was in development for a future installment, spin-offs and even crossovers with other franchises - a nice bit of foreshadowing and humour mixed together here, Insomniac.

Slick/Frozen Tongue
Hunter is my most-hated character from the Spyro universe - he’s cocky, overconfident and sometimes can be downright incompetent and obtuse for the sake of it - so seeing him get his comeuppance thanks to you failing is simply heart-warming. It’s also a really unique bet that the Yetis came up with - props to their creativity!

Someone So Purple
Not only is this quote borderline racist to purple-skinned beings, it’s also massively hypocritical - it’s being said by a PURPLE seal! Also, how does the colour of one’s skin affect one’s ability to perform tasks? Idiot seal.

Schooled 'Em
Hunter really knows how to embellish and elaborate, doesn’t he? This line is a vast improvement on his previous “dizzy one-toed sand Gnorcs” comment from a previous level. I really liked this quote and did my best to memorise it as a kid, I just thought it was genius.

Marco
In the vast majority of games, we as the protagonist are lead to believe that everything we do is for the greater good - that you couldn’t possibly be trying to reunite an estranged couple, one side of which wants nothing to do with the quest giver - and has even gone as far as to take out a restraining order!

Feel Really Cold
Another great example of programming in lines of dialogue that actually react in real-time to the things Spyro does and the changes that occur in-game. If you follow the clues to reach these gem barrels by freezing this NPC and using him as a step-stool, once he thaws, he expresses himself thusly.

Sorceress’ Butt
Oh dear Zoe. She has a point, The Sorceress is the most evil Spyro villain thus far - Gnasty Gnorc didn’t kill any dragons, he just froze them. Ripto didn’t hurt anybody, he just enslaved them. The Sorceress outright admits to planning to murder not just the dragons, but also the baby hatchlings - so insulting her appearance is sort of justified… Also, PEGI 3+ rating maintained eloquently.

Hip Hip Hooray
The Hummingbirds do their best to maintain a professional attitude to their CO and remain upright and represent the military as best as they can - but this soldier just couldn’t resist breaking the facade to express her joy.

Trampled
I really liked the attention to detail Spyro 3 added - such as characters having unique dialogue if you were to speak to them outside of the expected times - such as when they’re interacting with the world or its creatures. She has a point though - Spyro isn’t doing much to help this situation in reducing the risk she gets trampled by a water buffalo!

Moneybags Retires
One of the absolute best moments in Spyro 3 was when you got revenge on Moneybags and chased him around Midnight Mountain, flaming and charging him to get all of your extorted gems back. Spyro 2 did something similar, but just showed it through a non-interactive cutscene - Spyro 3 did it way better. To further cement his feeling of utter defeat, he resigns to retire to his most-disliked level and write haiku, which he also admitted to hating.

Cat Thing
Sometimes I forget that Hunter is a cheetah and thus is a member of the feline family. I love cats - so hearing cat-related jokes, puns and humour based around their species quirks is great. Hunter even follows through on this confession by never showing up in any underwater sections without first putting on a wetsuit to keep his fur dry!

Password
Another fine example of Moneybags being an absolute savage. I don’t even think this door even had a password, I think he was just acting as a greedy gatekeeper then rubbing your nose in it when you had no option but to cough up to get past him...

Kitchen Duty
Yep, clearly the seals found Bluto the Rhynoc as difficult as I did when I was a kid. I suffered numerous deaths at the hands of this cheating scumbag with his souped-up overpowered nuclear shark submarine. Yet when I did finally manage to destroy it using my naff little speedboat - oh, felt so good.

Kindergarten Guide - Buggs' Storyline

This is a little guide for the Steam title Kindergarten - it's a great little puzzle/logic/interactive story game, costs only £3.99 and will keep you entertained and scratching your head for hours. Many of the puzzles and characters' storylines require strict timing and succession of events - and I recommend you try your hardest to figure out the puzzles on your own before consulting my guide below.

With that being said, if you're pulling your hair out - here's the guide. Obviously, it contains SPOILERS.

(Click on the screenshots to enlarge them!)

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Before school starts:

• Withdraw at least $3.10 from your piggy bank. You will need to start a fight with Buggs, so ensure you have over $3.00.

• Take the lunch pass from your shelf. (You must've first completed Ms. Applegate's storyline for this to become available.)

Playground:

• Buggs will try to steal your money - accept his threat and give him half.

• Speak to Ms. Applegate and tell on Buggs. She will encourage you to start a fight with him then call for her help once he starts beating you up. Refuse. 

• Talk to Nugget until the option to ask about Billy comes up. Keep pressing him for information until you are sent to the Principal's office.

• In the Principal's office, admit to feeling sad about Billy. He will give you one of Nugget's special pills.

• Once you get back to the classroom, Ms. Applegate will offer to buy the pill from you for a dollar. Agree.

Morning time:

• Buggs will call you over and offer a partnership in which you will work together to murder Ms. Applegate. Agree to help him.

• Show Buggs your lunch pass as your method of getting Ms. Applegate alone.

• Go to Nugget's cubby and steal the nugget. (Don't worry, Ms. Applegate is too high on pills to notice you stealing this time.)

• Go to Jerome's cubby and steal the explosive device.

• Talk to Monty about arranging a distraction, then give him the explosive device. He will rig it up with a remote control.

• Show the device to Buggs, who will instruct you to stick it under a table.

• Stick it under the table at the top of the room where Lily and Jerome are sitting.

Lunch:

• At the start of lunch time, use your lunch pass to have lunch with Ms. Applegate.

• As she instructs you to take a bite from your (poisoned) Silly Meal, activate the distraction. The sound of the explosion will cause her to turn her back to you.

• While her back is turned, plunge Buggs' knife into her spine.

Recess:

• Talk to Buggs, who will order you to find a hiding place for the murder weapon, the knife.

•  Talk to Nugget and ask him if you can "contribute" a knife to the Nugget Cave.

• Remind Nugget that you two are friends by showing him your "Nugget of Friendship." Nugget will agree to let you dispose of the knife.

Show & Tell:

• As the Principal calls Buggs over, he will slip you Ms. Applegate's phone secretly. At the end of the day, he allows you to keep it.