#Anonymous Puzzler originals

[anonymouspuzzler]

Hey Buck can you tell me a joke?

[anonymouspuzzler]

every time I see this guy I think "oh he and Davey would get on great I think" and then I think "it is for the greater good of the world that they never meet."

Eddie bio

[kinsie]

Overly Belated Game Impressions from PAX Aus 2018

Every year I go to PAX Aus with some close friends to check out the Incredible Future of Games that everyone else already checked out six months ago. This is usually coupled with checking out some wonderfully well-preserved old games and hardware, along with some typically wonderfully weird indie stuff I've never heard about before. Every year, I've written up a little review of things I've played (or watched get played) on an old private forum some friends maintain, but this year, I've figured, fuck it, I might as well post it publicly, right?

Not Indie Games

Super Smash Bros Ultimate sure is a Smash game. That's not a bad thing, but since this was the same demo build from E3 (so before the Castlevania reveals) there wasn't a huge amount of surprises - just a damn good fightfest. Amusingly, the demo booths were split into two groups - For Fun (items on, Switch Pro Controller) and For Glory (items off, the new Gamecube controllers). New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe has a nonsensical name and spawned an even more nonsensical meme. The demo had six levels to play - three from the base game, three from the Luigi expansion - with both the new and old characters to play. It doesn't look like anyone other than Toadette can get the meme crown, meaning players using that character won't have to jostle for powerups in multiplayer. I didn't play Pokemon Let's Go Eevee because the queue was like 90 minutes long, but my friend braved it and gave it a resounding "ehhhh" with a hand gesture resembling a teetering see-saw. Apparently the co-op stuff wasn’t available in the demo, either, which concerned my friend since that was specifically what he was interested in.

V-Rally 4 looks nice aesthetically, but the gameplay seems pretty "eh". The name seems to be about the most interesting part. Dragonball FighterZ for Switch seems like a pretty decent port. I don’t know much about the source material or original game, but it ran fast and I didn't notice any obvious hitching or whatever.

Luigi's Mansion for Nintendo 3DS is... a 3DS port of the Gamecube launch title. It ran at a solid 30fps... a whole lot better than I recall Luigi's Mansion 2/Dark Moon running, but I was also using a vanilla 3DS for that game while the demo units at PAX were New models.

Indie Stuff

The Xbox Adaptive Controller was present as part of a demo setup for a version of One More Line. I wasn't expecting to have to push the Big Novelty Button as hard as I did, I thought it'd be a lighter touch for some reason. Although I know the button kinda isn't the point of the thing...

Supertrucks Offroad is a PC adaption of a mobile take on old top-down racing games. There's promise here, but the current handling and physics leave a lot to be desired. Hopefully it continues to develop and evolve.

Infinity Heroes is a card game with some simplified mechanics and animated versions of all the card graphics. Has potential, but still plenty of rough edges and pre-alpha grit to sand out.

Metal Wolf Chaos XD sure is a port of an Xbox game. It feels pretty well done, all things considered - the framerate is great, the controls are responsive, and the English subtitles are sometimes even connected to what's being said by the characters!

Ghoul Britannia: Land of Hope and Gorey is a point-and-click adventure game that, unexpectedly, uses a Fallout-esque isometric perspective instead of the usual side-on.

Table of Tales is a VR tabletop RPG where you control an entire party of Scoundrels by moving pieces around a constantly-changing board and playing ability cards. Since it was a VR game, there was a long sign-up queue to play, so the developers set up a little booth where Arbitrix, the game's DM (and, incidentally, a mechanical talking bird), would cheerfully explain the game for you. He said my goatee was perfect for a pirate adventure. It was probably intended as a compliment.

Supermarket Shriek is very similar to a game I prototyped years ago, except it's got a Supermarket Sweep theme and shrieking goats. Also, it's actually getting finished and has more than one level, which is another differentiator. Use the shoulder triggers to make the characters inside a shopping trolley scream their lungs out, propelling the trolley and allowing you to steer it through silly retail-themed obstacle courses.

You probably think, based on the squat protagonist and camera angle, that Tunic is a riff on Zelda: A Link to the Past. Surprise! It's actually a riff on Zelda: Ocarina of Time! The combat is very similar, with a dodge/roll button and Z-targeting (although I guess it's more RT-targeting now) that jumps to the next enemy upon beating your current one. I can't say enough nice things about the graphics... One thing that's interesting is that the entire game is in a fictional language. This includes stuff like the pause menu!

Dash Blitz is a pretty amateurish attempt at a Smash-esque platform fighter. The "feel" just isn't there, sadly.

Nom Nom Apocalypse is a top-down dual-stick roguelite about fighting off food monsters. It looks pretty interesting, but sadly I didn’t get to go back and give it a hands-on look.

Henry Mosse and the Wormhole Conspiracy is a good old-fashioned point and click adventure. The graphics are wonderfully drawn in a cartoon style, but they suffer from really puppet-y animation like an old Flash cartoon, and it breaks my heart.

No Moss Studios bought along Beam Team, a couch co-op game about fighting a giant donut that I didn’t get to try, as well as a collection of weird little Patreon-funded oddities like Sprout Up, a simple little mobile game about weaving through vines, and My Magpie, a bird-aiding simulator of sorts. 

Little Reaper is a platformer with a fun movement twist in that you can throw your scythe - which travels in an arc like a hammer in Mario - and teleport to where it lands. I'll have to give this a closer look.

Mars Underground is an Earthbound-esque RPG-style adventure game with a Groundhog Day-style conceit of being stuck in a time-loop. I can't really say it struck me, to be honest.

Scout's Honor is a co-op party game where four players team up to set-up a camp-site in a limited amount of time while dealing with hazards and such. It looks kinda cute, reminds me of Overcooked a bit.

Ice Caves of Europa is a rather odd-controlling game where you pilot a hover-drone controlled by an artificial intelligence. This one probably takes a bit more time to wrap your head around than a convention center allows.

Introspect looks really cool - a Shadow of the Colossus-style boss rush with an emphasis on movement tricks and agility. I didn't get to play it while I was there, but the developers were handing out download codes for the show floor build. It seems pretty fun, although it still needs a good deal of polish.

Soundfall is a dual-stick rhythm-shooter where you have to get to the end of a course before the song ends, with rewards for shooting and slashing to the beat ala Crypt of the NecroDancer. One to watch. 

Ticket to Earth is a tactical strategy RPG ala Fire Emblem with a tile-matching mechanic that makes how you move to your enemies even more important by limiting your movement and charging your special abilities. The comic artwork is nice, although the talking heads only seem to have one or two facial expressions.

Nova Flow is a first-person speedrunner that reminds me of a blend of Mirror's Edge's DLC maps and that one paint game that got incorporated into Portal 2. One of the demo levels was apparently one of the hardest levels in the game, and the developer was quite impressed at my getting within inches of completing it before the demo timer ran out...

Dawnblade seems to be an attempt at doing the whole Diablo thing on a phone, with the player hacking their way through short, pre-made maps. Visually, it looks like any of a million other games riffing off of Warcraft 3, and it seems to have some weird mobile game trappings like a stamina system to limit the amount of time you can play in a period of time.

Little Bit Lost is a survival game where you've been shrunk down to the point where ants tower over you and are powerful monsters. This one felt real early. It has promise, but needs a lot of polish to truly deliver on it.

Rogue Singularity is a 3D platformer with procgen levels. The feel didn't gel with me, and I can't really say I liked it all that much. It didn't help that the Switch port I played seemed to lack anti-aliasing entirely, giving the entire scene an unpleasant jagged look.

Ashen looks utterly fascinating - an open-world Souls-esque action RPG with Journey-style "passive" co-op where you can occasionally meet other, anonymous players out in the world and either help them or leave them to their fate. It looks really pretty.

Speaking Simulator is a hilarious puzzler where you have to manually operate a human mouth in order to say Entirely Normal Phrases in order to convince people that you are absolutely a human and not a murder robot in disguise.

Untitled Goose Game had a massive queue that I was absolutely not going to fuck with. :(

yeop

[spicynbachili1]

Agony, one of the worst games of the year, gets its Unrated version and a Switch port

Back to hell after five months in limbo

Agony was [checks thesaurus.com for synonyms for “agony”] pure misery, torment, and despondency. I started reviewing it and then just stopped halfway through. I respect my own time too much to continue hating every frustrating second I spend with this game. Although, apparently the entirety of my intro to the pseudo-review was simply “Agony sucks.” I stand by this wholeheartedly.

At least I got this video out of it:

Today, five months after its hellish release, Agony tries again. Developer Madmind Studio has launched Agony Unrated — a new version of the game that allegedly doesn’t make the compromises the original did. Here’s Madmind’s bullet-point list of changes:

Improved quality of character models and textures

New types of threats – Traps

New types of environmental threats

New types of static opponents

A new, more extensive and useful character development system

Volumetric lighting

Normal Mode and Hard Mode with more opponents and puzzles

Completely new type of environment – the Forest, added to the procedurally generated Agony Mode, which now also includes additional traps and boss fights

8 different endings in the Story Mode

Possibility to follow the story mode as a Sukkub

Sukkub Mode and Agony Mode are unlocked at the first start of the game

Many new, uncensored scenes

Black and red image filter, inspired by the Agony trailers

World map and minimap

The possibility of setting up a fire and killing some opponents as a martyr

Sacrificial altars

New and modified paths for the player

Numerous technical improvements to the basic version of the game and much more

There are a few definite positives here. The maps will certainly help keep Agony from being so disorienting and confusing. The “technical improvements” mean it’s hopefully not such a choppy trainwreck. But Agony is a bad game not for a series of minor but compounding issues, but for flaws that make up its very foundation. This stealth-survival puzzler jumble is poorly designed in almost every aspect. Don’t expect any amount of reworking to definitively save it.

Madmind laid the blame for Agony‘s awful reception at the feet of one trusted team member. Destructoid received an anonymous tip a while back from a Polish reader about Madmind’s public statement to its publisher and investors. The developer says it followed its most experienced designer’s suggestions about gameplay direction, while completely ignoring feedback from testers. That is, supposedly, how Agony ended up so far removed from what crowdfunding backers originally thought it was going to be.

Here are relevant portions of that explanation, run through Google Translate:

Agony in the initial assumptions was to be a small production, scheduled for about 5 hours of gameplay. In order to better match the console player, we extended the story mode from 5 to 10 hours. This resulted in artificial extension of the game, in the form of additional puzzles, difficult tasks and poorly explained gameplay mechanics. An additional factor turned out to be the entrustment of game design, the most experienced person in the Madmind Studio team, and its complete trust — which we regret today.

Madmind Studio, as a small team, had problems with completing such a large game, an appropriate, interesting content that would surprise players at every turn.

Suggesting the opinions of the players about the Kickstarter demo, and comments on the gameplay videos published by us (about 45 minutes of play), we believed that the direction we were heading was right, ignoring the feedback from the test teams, to which we had access through PlayWay SA, which additionally clearly signaled to us that we should make gameplay changes, and think about the release date of the game. However, Madmind Studio decided not to load the release date, believing that the game will be well received by the target group of players. The person responsible for the Agony game design is no longer a member of the Madmind team. 

So, Madmind’s best attempt at course-correcting has released today on Steam. Previous owners are upgraded to Agony Unrated at no charge. The developer has also halved the original price and launched this new version for $15.

The PC version is apparently free of censorship because it’s an entirely different title rather than a straight update. That means it has all the distasteful and objectionable cutscenes that were forced out of Agony. (The exclusion of these scenes wouldn’t make a top ten list of things that Agony fucked up.)

That’s not the case for the console versions. PlayStation and Xbox aren’t going to let that content get patched into Agony. However, Madmind mentions that there’s the longshot possibility that it’ll be able to release a limited edition physical version of Agony Unrated that has an “Adults Only” rating, and it’ll have those cutscenes.

Lastly, in a true twist, Madmind also announces a Switch port for Agony which is scheduled to release before the end of the year. Even with titles like Doom and Wolfenstein II and Binding of Isaac on Switch, it’s tough to not still have a hangover notion from previous generations that Nintendo is the family-friendly platform. If that image hasn’t already been erased, Agony will shatter it. As a bonus, it should be fun to see how the Switch runs Agony — especially considering it was kind of a mess on capable PCs when it first launched.

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        from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/agony-one-of-the-worst-games-of-the-year-gets-its-unrated-version-and-a-switch-port/

[anonymouspuzzler]

it's bisexual visibility day And hispanic heritage month. he's too powerful

[anonymouspuzzler]

starting a @heartbreakgulch x @villain-coded-comic thread because there's been uh. a few of these. that i've drawn. thanks again to @strangegutz & company for letting me play with their tuoys

[anonymouspuzzler]

Can we see Minnies rat?

The Rat

[anonymouspuzzler]

i'm like 99% sure i never posted this comic so you'll have to forgive me if i did. slow startup old laptop ass boyfriend. thanks as always @strangegutz for the tuoys

[anonymouspuzzler]

Men(TM) from today

[anonymouspuzzler]

was digging trying to find more heartbreak coded comics i wanted to post instead found this truly peak drawing of The Girls. so you have to look at The Girls while i look for more comics

(square at left is mine, Zo at right is @dollie-hearts', and the inimitable Sal is @s3rnielsen's)

[anonymouspuzzler]

bringing over the Buck Armstrong Chappell Roan Saga (read: like 3 tweets) because it's crucial for you all to know this man will fold like a house of cards when confronted with any expression of Longing for him to project onto

[anonymouspuzzler]

What does Pride month look like in the Villain Trio household? Also, happy pride :]

Oh Y'know

[anonymouspuzzler]

after weeks of telling myself i would do it finally drew Buck and Davey as this vintage photo of a SanFran queer couple. they deserve the world forever I think

[anonymouspuzzler]

A Very Special @heartbreakgulch x @villain-coded-comic : Bulkhead & Black-Eyes Origins

(separating this out from my other crossover comics cause I kinda wanna keep adding to it over time i got Ideas please enjoy Part One for now)

[anonymouspuzzler]

a ton more @heartbreakgulch x @villain-coded-comic stuff because i have uhhh Problems It Appears. thank you @strangegutz for letting me play with your tuoys. and also featuring one zo by @dollie-hearts thank you bon i love zo forever &ever

[anonymouspuzzler]

rough sketch ass comic of the Very Early Trio Days. every single one of them has something wrong with them it rules.

(+bonus Later On Davey Eddie Talk:) (thanks as always @strangegutz for the loaner on this Guy)