Allow me to tell you what truly makes me an ogre...
It happened about two years ago now. I was trying to finish up some chores before work, and all I had left was to send a load of laundry through the wash. I tossed my clothes in and sat down to eat, putting my headphones on to watch Korone play Super Mario Bros. I was 33-years-old at the time. I am not proud of this. However, about ten or fifteen minutes into the video I could hear my washing machine still filling up through my headset. Weird, it should have topped off and started by now...
I flooded my apartment. There was water absolutely everywhere. It had seeped through the walls and was moving into my bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen, and had already covered the adjacent bathroom. All because I was too focused on a vtuber playing Mario. I had to have a service come out to tear up my carpets, cut out and replace the lower portion of drywall around the laundry room, and set up giant fans to air everything out. For the span of about a week my apartment was in total disarray, and it was during this time I decided to take my N64 into my spare room (the only place that remained largely undamaged) to keep myself occupied.
I did not play Ogre Battle 64 under the best conditions. I was confined to a small room and forced to run the N64 through my Retrotink to a 720p TV that the scaler apparently didn't play nice with, resulting in a stretched image that I could not correct no matter what I tried. What little audio I could hear over the surrounding noise was piped through shitty tinny-sounding speakers, and the space around me felt positively moist. Still, what else was I going to do?
Ogre Battle 64 is an interesting game, but it's also one I barely comprehend given the circumstances I experienced it in. Unlike Tactics Ogre, it plays closer to a fusion of traditional JRPG and RTS, with the player sending troops to various capture points on an overworld map and engaging enemy units whenever the two meet. It feels like much of the game is played from the unit management screen, tweaking each character's weapon sets and fiddling with classes, and similar to Tactics Ogre your team composition is everything, though you are a bit less able to anticipate what specific units your soldiers will chance upon. Battles themselves happen very quickly and in waves, and there's a certain sense of tension when you have a unit far out from your base or any captured strongholds while running low on health.
Solid setup, but where it started to fall apart for me was trying to wrap my head around how damage is factored. Sometimes I'd do plenty, other times it seems I was putting out piddly single-digit strikes and getting my shit rocked. I'll admit, my difficulty understanding Ogre Battle's nuances might be primarily due to the fact that I had someone in the next room hacking up my dry wall and cutting new baseboards with a portable fucking table saw. But in my experience with the larger Ogre series, I've also just come to appreciate that there's a certain obtuseness to how they operate. There's also a lot of depth and were I in a better state I probably could have found some fun ways to exploit the game.
After having the carpets cleaned, the washer and dryer back in their place, and expenses paid, life finally felt like it was going back to normal. I still don't understand Ogre Battle 64, though. I also don't watch vtubers anymore. Accursed beasts, every one. Ogres, some might say.
It happened about two years ago now. I was trying to finish up some chores before work, and all I had left was to send a load of laundry through the wash. I tossed my clothes in and sat down to eat, putting my headphones on to watch Korone play Super Mario Bros. I was 33-years-old at the time. I am not proud of this. However, about ten or fifteen minutes into the video I could hear my washing machine still filling up through my headset. Weird, it should have topped off and started by now...
I flooded my apartment. There was water absolutely everywhere. It had seeped through the walls and was moving into my bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen, and had already covered the adjacent bathroom. All because I was too focused on a vtuber playing Mario. I had to have a service come out to tear up my carpets, cut out and replace the lower portion of drywall around the laundry room, and set up giant fans to air everything out. For the span of about a week my apartment was in total disarray, and it was during this time I decided to take my N64 into my spare room (the only place that remained largely undamaged) to keep myself occupied.
I did not play Ogre Battle 64 under the best conditions. I was confined to a small room and forced to run the N64 through my Retrotink to a 720p TV that the scaler apparently didn't play nice with, resulting in a stretched image that I could not correct no matter what I tried. What little audio I could hear over the surrounding noise was piped through shitty tinny-sounding speakers, and the space around me felt positively moist. Still, what else was I going to do?
Ogre Battle 64 is an interesting game, but it's also one I barely comprehend given the circumstances I experienced it in. Unlike Tactics Ogre, it plays closer to a fusion of traditional JRPG and RTS, with the player sending troops to various capture points on an overworld map and engaging enemy units whenever the two meet. It feels like much of the game is played from the unit management screen, tweaking each character's weapon sets and fiddling with classes, and similar to Tactics Ogre your team composition is everything, though you are a bit less able to anticipate what specific units your soldiers will chance upon. Battles themselves happen very quickly and in waves, and there's a certain sense of tension when you have a unit far out from your base or any captured strongholds while running low on health.
Solid setup, but where it started to fall apart for me was trying to wrap my head around how damage is factored. Sometimes I'd do plenty, other times it seems I was putting out piddly single-digit strikes and getting my shit rocked. I'll admit, my difficulty understanding Ogre Battle's nuances might be primarily due to the fact that I had someone in the next room hacking up my dry wall and cutting new baseboards with a portable fucking table saw. But in my experience with the larger Ogre series, I've also just come to appreciate that there's a certain obtuseness to how they operate. There's also a lot of depth and were I in a better state I probably could have found some fun ways to exploit the game.
After having the carpets cleaned, the washer and dryer back in their place, and expenses paid, life finally felt like it was going back to normal. I still don't understand Ogre Battle 64, though. I also don't watch vtubers anymore. Accursed beasts, every one. Ogres, some might say.
Weatherby
1 year ago