2018 End Of Year Special: Talking Crap About Manga Rock’s Best New Releases

WOOOO, IT'S THE END OF THE YEAR. This year sure has been fun between me ranting on about how perfect Hellsing and Berserk is to me just crapping all over mainstream movie releases such as Greatest Showman and any Marvel movie. Now, this special was originally going to be me redoing my original Smite review since I felt like the current review is not representative of how crap the current game is but it started to feel heavily bias soon as I reached the end of it so I scrapped it. I ended up not knowing what I was going to do for the end of the year special but thankfully, Manga Rock came to my rescue. For those who don’t know what Manga Rock is, it is simply an app I use to keep track of my collection/backlog and read manga on my iPad and they often have collections of manga recommendations based on certain themes on their homepage and that’s how I find some of my manga for these reviews. So Manga Rock was promoting their “Top New Manga Releases Of 2018” and I can promise you, I have never heard of any of these mangas before and I thought why not I read them and review them. So let’s talk about the “top new releases” as dictated by a business.

First up we have “Drawing While Masturbating” and with a title like that, I have no idea how this flew under my radar but it only has two chapters at time of writing so it’s extremely new. The whole concept is that a female mangaka can’t draw properly if she isn’t masturbating while she does it. It’s just very cringy and unfunny erotic humour with no taste and what makes it worse is that we don’t see any of this. Sure, she is rubbing herself off but it’s always being covered and fully clothed. If you are going to base your manga on an erotic concept, at least make it more adult oriented because playing it safe is pointless. Go big or go home so stop with the blue balling and give me the good stuff. I have enough with this ball buster so let’s move on.

Next we have “Destroy All Of Humanity. It Can’t Be Regenerated” and if I was doing the whole award gimmick, I would give this manga the award of “Most Misleading Title Of The Year” because it has nothing to do with killing humanity. It’s about Magic The Gathering. Yes, Magic The Gathering. You know, the inferior alternative to YuGiOh. Ok, I joke and before you ask, I have played MTG for a short bit since we had players for it in my high school card game club. So the whole manga is pretty much about a high school boy and girl in the 90s playing MTG and it currently consists of a one shot and a proper first chapter. It certainly has the qualities of a card game manga except it doesn’t have the stupid anime hair and over the top card game battles. It feels a lot more grounded and while I can appreciate that, it’s just not for me. MTG never really grabbed me because even though I like the fact it is slower and more simple then YuGiOh, I preferred YGO anyway because it’s far more interesting and that applies to this manga. I suggest it if you are a fan of card game manga and/or MTG but if you are neither, it’s has nothing for you.

Jumping into the fantasy part of the review, we have “Kami-sama no iru Keshiki” and it’s a solid meh. Pretty much it’s a slice of life manga where we follow Toto, a novice god who is the god of small floating island called “Isle Island”. How redundant. It only has seven chapters and after reading four of those, I called it quits because it’s just so boring. I normally like slice of life manga, especially ones with gods in it but this is just bleh. It holds no entertainment value, the MC is bland, it looks bland and it also probably tastes bland as well. I just want to end the paragraph here because I am already bored with it. Read it if you want but I recommend not doing it. It’s not worth the ten minutes it takes to read this.

Moving onto something more promising, we have “Hitokui Dungeon e Youkoso!” with it being a slight improvement over the last manga we talked about but considering bar was lying on the ground already, that’s not saying much. I will admit I got more entertainment value out of its two chapters then Kami-sama’s four chapters but it feels like it was going down hill after chapter one. I feel like the only redeemable thing about this manga is the “adult content” which I will admit, was pretty steamy and doesn’t blueball you but story wise, its weak. It’s literally a half demon decides to make a town into a dungeon with the help of a succubus and I can promise you, this concept was done far better by “How To Build A Dungeon”. It only has a small handful of chapters but I feel like I have seen all this can offer. Just read How To Build A Dungeon, it delivers far more better on the dungeon gimmick and the erotic elements.

“Shougakusei ga Mama demo li desu ka?” is next and I will say I did like this one for a bit. The concept is simply MC’s mom gets reincarnated into a ten year old girl’s body and it’s just a nice fluffy manga about mother and son relationship with a bit of that awkwardness. It’s just very nice and I enjoyed this until I found out about the mangaka’s other works. This manga is by the guy who did “Kiss X Sis” and if you don’t know what that is, you are lucky because Kiss X Sis was borderline incest. Kiss X Sis was so close to incest and only avoided it by having the sisters be stepsisters and since this manga has a very similar set up, it just ruined it for me. Yeah, I’m letting that ruin it for me but it’s just so set up and I can’t get it out of my head. I still recommend this but just don’t let the idea of possible incest ruin this for you.

Next up is “Regarding That We Decided To Live In The Countryside With The Female Knight Who Came To Us” and quick side note but what is up with mangas having long ass names? Like, it seems like more and more modern manga have extremely long titles. What happened to having short and concise titles like “Toriko” and “Baki The Grappler”? Just a side rant. This manga is pretty much the reverse of reincarnation fantasy manga. Essentially, a female knight knight crosses over into our world, a single farmer then looks after her while they work on a farm. It’s pretty boring for the most part, there is certainly better manga you could and should be reading and you should do so.

So for the final one on the list that I bothered reading, “Do You Like The Otaku School Nurse?” and I like this one. I just find it relatable and quite funny. It just so simple and yet so relatable. It’s not stupid and over the top and possibly having incest. It’s just a middle schooler helping out the school nurse who is a otaku and as an otaku myself, I find it quite enjoyable. If anything, just read this one. If you had to read one of these things, read this one over the rest. It’s fun and I think you will enjoy it as much as I did.

So this a quick tack on review since I am finishing this review on the plane and I just put down “Hunter X Hunter” and you know what, we have a “World Trigger” problem. Ok, it’s not as boring as World Trigger but for me, it’s just not there. There was multiple times I wanted to put this down but I kept giving it the benefit of a doubt. What made me want to do this first was when they introduced a gourmet hunter and in that moment, I just wished I was reading Toriko because that’s more interesting. It did keep me in a trance for a quite bit but I ended up putting it down during Greed Island arc. It’s just the fact that they are supposed to be hunters but they aren’t hunting anything and they are just picking a fight with the equivalent of terrorists. They are called hunters but I haven’t seen them do any form of hunting yet. It just been fighting and fighting and I don’t think it delivers on its idea. It certainly doesn’t hurt to read it but I don’t think it can deliver on entertainment.

Ok, so that’s the end of the year special, I would like to thank you for reading and staying with my blog. Yes, I am talking to all three of you who reads the blog. I will probably do a proper thank you for the one year anniversary special which is next week at the time of posting this review, just don’t hold me to my word. I don’t know what I’m going to do for the one year anniversary special since I already used my favourite movie of all time and favourite game of all time so maybe an anime if I bother doing it but considering all the content I wrote while I was on holiday, it might just end up being a game or something. Who knows but I don’t so we will see. As per usual, you can find links in the side bar to my YouTube channel where I am posting YGO videos at the moment but I am working on doing other types of videos and you can only find my steam profile if you want to gift me something I can review or something on my Wishlist. Or you could just use it to stalk me and grief me in TF2 if you want. I’m not going to judge.

Poker At The Inventory Series: Gambling Isn't That Bad

Man, what a sad state of affairs. Tellatale Games has collapsed from their sheer incompetence and inability to do treat their workers properly and while people are mourning the loss of the final season of “The Walking Dead”, I’m going to talk about how I am going to miss the Poker Night series by Tellatale. That’s right, they could do more then push licensed narratives which are thinly veiled as games for the masses but in this case, they just took their existing licences and put them into a poker game. To its credit, the series is quite fun with a lot of character to go around and it’s a series that I keep going back to when I’m waiting for friends to play League with and I’m not in the mood for Ubermosh and while I’m not one for actual gambling, I do love playing card games with Poker being my fourth favourite type of card game with Cardfight Vanguard at third, Bullshit at second (because no one can outbluff me) and YuGiOh at first obviously but enough about my love for card games. Let’s talk about this somewhat acceptable form of gambling.

Poker Night is simple. Your goal is to win a standard game of Texas hold’em poker against four other players and the rounds keep going until someone wins the whole pot brought which is $50K in the first game and $100K in the second one. Each player starts the game with $10K ($20K in the second game) and normal poker rules apply. So what makes the game different? Well to begin with, this is strictly a single player game so there is no online competent and also, you are vsing other video game characters. Like in the first game, we have The Heavy, Strong Bad, Tychro and Max from “Sam and Max” while the manager is your dealer and for the second game, they bring in Samson from (I think) Venture Bros, Ash of Evil Dead fame, Sam (with Max) and Claptrap from Borderlands and if you don’t think that’s a good line up, you have Moxxi serving you drinks and Glados is your dealer. For me, these guys is what makes Poker Night fun. Without them, this would just be a very boring poker simulator but their presence in the series is what makes it different and they do have some good character chemistry.

Seeing these guys just acting like buddies while playing poker and being extremely meta about how the player is the silent type is fun to see. Each of these characters act like you would expect them and you actually can learn more about them from their character interactions even if you have no prior knowledge of their franchise. For example, I don’t even know who Tychro was but by the end of my experience with Poker Night, I know that he is intelligent, into some weird shit and just has the right amount of smugness to make me wanna punch him in the face. What also makes these characters enjoyable are the fact that they are constantly talking and having conversations about their franchises and their life outside of those franchises which makes it enjoyable if you are a fan of these characters and if you are not, it’s still very funny to watch, even if you can’t get all the references and their characters also extend into how they play in game.

Mechanically, the game is pretty much your standard two card poker game (unless you are playing Okoma, you weirdo) so there isn’t much to talk about but the characters is what makes it different. You see, each character behaves different in game and have tells in a way. So in Poker, a tell is usually some form of body language that can tell a player what another player is thinking such as if they are bluffing or they got a bad hand. Tellatale did add this to the series and they are very easy to spot since you can just go off of facial animations alone but if you are inept at telling different facial expressions, you can also go off by their personality since all the characters play like their own personality. For example, Sam is a detective with a smart ass attitude so you can expect him to be smart about his decisions and often play safe while someone like The Heavy is a dumbass who often gets frustrated so you can often tell when he got a good or bad hand and how he will often go with big raises when he does open the god hand. If you are observant, it becomes easy to cheese most of these matches by just either passing or bluffing because it becomes easy to do so but there is one thing that can ruin this and that’s chance.

Alright, I’m going to start with the complain train now but if you want me to talk about the graphics, they are fine. I do like how they tried to keep the same look the characters had from their original games for this series which does lead to some clashing styles but it’s not that much of a complaint. What I really want to talk about is how it feels rigged at times and I can promise you, it probably isn’t rigged but it doesn’t stop you from feeling like it is. This is more of an inherent thing because it’s natural to think something that being computer simulated is probably rigged and I swear it isn’t but it feels like it. Like, I recall getting a Straight Flush and somehow I lost some bull crap where everyone else pulled a royal flush out of their ass and this happened twice so far across my time spent with the series. It really does feel like it’s rigged at times and having that lurking behind you while you are playing the game isn’t good, especially when you are on a losing streak. What also doesn’t help is the fact is this is a gambling game and how am I supposed to recommend a gambling game? You either like or don’t like gambling and if you don’t, I can’t really recommend this game because it doesn’t offer that much outside of the gambling part when it comes to gameplay. If you really like some of the characters, I guess I could get away with recommending it then but you still need to play Poker in order to get these conversations which involve the characters and you might as well just google them at that point.

Recommending this is hard but I personally give it a 6/10. For five bucks on Steam, you are getting a good poker game with very interesting characters for a really cheap price and yes, it is five bucks on steam for both versions so next time you have spare change on your account, consider buying one of the two (after you buy all the editions of UBERMOSH that is). I personally recommend Two over One mainly because I enjoy those characters more and there is some more customisation options there plus if you play Borderlands 2, you can get some freebies for that and TF2. I’m also very sorry for disappearing again but usual excuse about finding job and blah blah blah. Also, I’m on holiday as I edit this so hopefully by the time I get back, I should have enough reviews to keep the blog going and leave me time to find a job. Next week is also a bit in the air but I’m considering doing a retrospective on League Of Legends maybe or maybe I will do a proper anime review, none of that brief mentioning here. As per usual, my channel is in the sidebar if you want to see me make and play crap YuGiOh decks and my steam profile if you want to be nice and send me games to review because I’m jobless and I don’t want to torrent games to review because pirating is wrong, everyone unless you are an actual pirate and if so, keep at it. Alestorm will probably sing about your exploits one day.