#I have like no puzzle games or even like beat 'em ups that are simple

[norfre]

What video games would a 45 year old lady who's only ever played mahjong and solitaire like? Katamari? A Kirby game?

[19thperson]

19th's Steam Next Fest Impressions Oct 2024 Edition - Day 7

Day 1/Day 2/Day 3/Day 4/Day 5/Day 6

Today's the last day, but I may spend some time tomorrow checking out a couple demos that aren't taken down. Or not. Turns out doing 38 demos in 7 days is kinda exhausting. Anyways...

Threefold Recital

This may be the best game I've played this Next Fest.

First thing that charmed me was music. The game was using what felt like a track fit for an exciting emotional climax during the simple tutorial, and as the game went on, it kept that quality consistent.

Second was the lore and setting. Like the recent Nine Sols, it's mixing Chinese mythology with sci-fi in a really interesting way, even if this game is more directly mystical.

I even like the appropriately mythic sounding lore reason for furry characters. "In the distant past two hermits, an enlightened bhudhist monk and daoist priest, lived side by side, and would spend their time having vigorous debates. The nearby animals would listen in, and through osmosis grew enlightened enough to take human shape." It feels more thought out than just "for reasons of because."

Gameplay started a bit disappointing. The beginning was just a puzzle platformer, where you swapped between three characters that had different abilities. It felt less like solving puzzles and more just following directions. Use X character in Y slot. But that was just the prologue.

Once it moved to chapter 1 the game turned on its head. You played as only the wolf monk, who has the ability to "see lines of karma." On one hand he's basically Tsukihime Shiki, where if he cuts the lines of karma things break. On the other hand it also makes him basically a detective, instinctively seeing how people and objects relate to each other. And the game suddenly shifts to escaping a false charge and solving a robbery case.

It even has horrible ace attorney pun names. The case involves the To family, and the two brothers:

Toma To and Pota To.

Main complaints are technical. For some reason the edges of the screen were cut off, while items were sometimes hidden in those edges. Speech bubbles were also consistently misaligned.

Karate Survivor

Jackie Chan Vampire Survivor.

No Bones about this. This is better than the genre originator. Better than a lot of what I've played in this space.

Part of the appeal of Vampire Survivors is also part of its core design problem. At the start, you need to keep aim and spacing in mind, but after a certain point, you get enough firepower that you don't need to worry about it.

Here's not the case. You never stop worrying about spacing and enemy positioning. Because Its all melee weapon and hand to hand, you always need to keep people close to you to keep up your DPS.

Your upgrades include different moves that aim in different directions. If I put back to back a front kick and a downward crescent kick, I need to micro-position myself so both moves connect. In other words, I'm playin footsies!!! It's got real hitbox beat-em up energy!

My main issue is that the game puts things that should be part of the core kit as unlocks. Why do I need to throw X number of items to be able to kick small environmental hazards. Why do I need to do enough kicks to roll over tables?

Fear The Timeloop

Not Sure How To Feel About This One!

Resi 2 remake style over-the-shoulder survival horror. You play as a cop on the chase of a serial killer. You end up in a long abandoned hospital, and find yourself locked in a 15 minute time loop.

There's some interesting ideas here! Adding a strict time limit on roundabout survival horror mapping adds another layer of tension. The game also uses a limited save system, and says both that the saving may change the layout of the hospital and make enemies stronger, active disincentivizing.

the main problem is…I completed the demo in one loop. Partially due to the timer not ticking in menus and partially due to an item that gives you extra time.

I legitimately do not know how the titular time looping actually effects the game.

They never put the shifting map or harder enemies into practice. I only ran into one enemy.

The protag has no reason to suspect monsters at that point. So he just yells at this guy to freeze, unloads, and then says "GODDAMNIT WHY DIDN'T HE FREEZE"

Accurate.

voice acting is kind of all over the place. Protag is… servicable. There's a woman's voice in the hospital who… inserts a silly accent halfway through her speech. And your radio contact is just flat affect.

The accent woman might be a demon so her not showing any sense of tension about this whole situation is probably on purpose.

Morgan: Metal Detective

A girl goes out to her grandpa's small town after he dies, to attend the funeral and help clear out his house. While there, she is given his old metal detector. Thus starts a relaxing adventure about reuniting people with lost things and reviving a dying town.

Presentation felt weird but that might be because of my monitor. Another demo that, when told to go to superwide, ends up putting stuff offscreen. had to mess with the resolution and may have have squashed things.

The core gameplay of metal detecting seems… fine. It didn't really go deep. A lot of the map was blocked off and the demo had only one real quest. There was plenty of side junk to find though, and I can see this being relaxing.

The voice actors have a peppa-pig-ish "incredibly low energy british childrens show" delivery that makes me wonder if children are the primary demographic for this. I guess it works if so.

ReSetna

Scifi metroidvania set in a post-human world, inhabited by robots and ruled by the APEX AI system. Said world is falling into ruin because of a mysterious signal that turns 80% of robots hearing it mindlessly violent. You were created to find and destroy it.

I'm gonna be honest. Right now this is sauceless.

Lore wise we get nothing but "there are robots and things are fucked." not much of a sense of specificity so far.

Gameplay wise everything is functional but lacks juice. Compared to the gold standard of nine sols, the parry and dodge in this game feel… limp. Same with the hits.

The demo only had one upgrade and it wasn't gotten by beating a boss. you just go to a corner of the map and find it on the floor. At the end of the demo you fight a boss with a health bar twice as long as it should be and get nothing out of it.

Travel On, Pigeon!

Tyrhm game about a pigeon going out to see the world, a world that operates on Billie Jean rules.

The world is a grid, you move on the beat. Explore the level, find the souveneirs, and avoid the humans making their way downtown. It's as if crypt of the necrodancer was not a roguelite but something more simple and pac-man feeling.

It feels like it's on the edge of good but not there yet. But it might be my fault. The game asks you to calibrate it at the start, tapping on the beat. When things started to get desynched I couldn't tell if it was the fault of me losing the beat, or a fault of me poorly calibrating. recalibrating made things more confusing.

In other words, it needs a beat visualizer.

It feels like the game really came alive when it introduced spaces where you're supposed to tap on half notes, but it made the lack of the beat visualizer even more apparent.

[dumbfinntales]

So I just beat both of the Klonoa games and even got all the achievements, which was honestly pretty easy. Thank goodness you don’t need to get all the gems for 100%, if that had been the case I wouldn’t have even bothered.

But man what a chill and fun bunch of games! I don’t know why I place so much importance on Klonoa from my childhood, I didn’t play these games that much. But something about the first game especially really stuck with me. I still think the original titles (PS1 and PS2) are still worth revisiting, but I’d say that this collection is also a very competent way to experience these games.

Klonoa in its core is a puzzle platformer where you use your enemies as tools of traversal through the levels. You grab em’ you throw em’ and you wahoo, simple as. The second game experimented with more enemy types, but I wish there were more and that they would have been utilized in more ways. If you enjoyed the fist Klonoa game the second one is more of the same really. I do prefer the boss fights from the second game as they’re more interesting and each boss has at least two phases.

I wanna briefly talk about Klonoas design. I vastly prefer the way he looks in the first game. He’s small, adorable and I like his yellow cat eyes. In the second game he’s supposed to be older, but he loses that “adorable” factor and becomes akin to a wannabe Sonic character. His eyes are no longer yellow nor catlike and his cap is backwards, because that’s totally rad dude. At least his voice stays consistently cutesy. I don’t hate the second game Klonoa, he’s alright. I think giving him the first games eyes would make him look a bit more unique and improve the design, but that’s just me.

I can’t really tell which game I prefer from the collection. I might lean more towards the first game due to nostalgia and it’s much faster to replay, but the second game has some of the best levels in the series. I loved the carnival level especially and the maze of memories. I also really dig the villain in the second game, I just wish he had more of a presence y’know? Ghadius is your basic villain who wants to destroy everything for petty reasons. I don’t know, maybe he’s deeper than that, but I honestly didn’t pick up on it. The first game is simple and fun for the most part, but gets really tough later on. I do enjoy the challenge both games provide towards the end. I also prefer the first games secret level.

Anything I didn’t like? Well, in cut-scenes especially some of the animation is very janky and stiff, and sometimes there’s model clipping which was a little distracting. I also absolutely hated the design where you can miss out on collectibles. Some of them you can miss because you didn’t jump on time during an autoscrolling segment, and since this game has no “restart from checkpoint” option you have to either die or restart the level. There was one annoying collectible I missed and it was before a mini-boss, and I couldn’t go back to collect it because the game would restart in the mini-boss fight. Same with gems, you can miss them and have no other choice but to restart the whole level. That’s why I got 150 gems in like three levels across both games, haha.

Would I like to see more Klonoa in the future? Sure! I’m sure there is till plenty they could do with the franchise. It’s a fun time for all, so that’s all I have to say. This game gets a WAAAAH out of WAHOO!

[sandycookie]

So... did you like it?? General opinions? Fav moment? Tell me everything, I loved your ep 1 analisys :D

Well, my thoughts are still a bit scattered, but hey i'll dump a bunch of shit down here.

Glad you liked the nose hair clipper analysis! The production of my boredom stricken mind for sure :)

(Prepare for a rather big dump, if I do say so myself)

Ofc, Arcane has been one of the best shows i've watched, period. I wouldn't say it's my favorite (YHH has the spot), but it's getting there.

my favorite part of Arcane has to be the characters. All of them are so well written and detailed, even the side characters, that they all deserve deep dives. Best of all, I can't decide who I want to be my favorite. I love Jinx's antics, Vi's rough and tough demeanor, Caitlyn's stalwart sense of justice, Jayce being a pure hearted dumbass (ironic that from what I've heard, his LOL counterpart is an asshole), Viktor please stop overworking yourself, Ekko bringing epic drip to the table, Heimer being the old wise mentor who ends up being a boomer and it’s one of the best subversions of that troupe I've seen, etc. Yeah, I like all of em', but these are the characters that I can say are contenders for my favorite. Arcane wouldn’t be the same without any of these guys. 

I found that Arcane’s story manages to be complex while being easy to follow. Every story beat seemingly flows together perfectly.

 The runtime of each episode is used very well, and there wasn’t an episode where I felt that any thing really needed more time. 

And the animation?! This is movie quality! I love what they did with the character models especially. It's not low res like a video game character model would be (not those triple A titles ofc), but it's not like those high res character models you'd see from Disney and Pixar. It feels like something in the middle. And it's perfect. Best part of the style is how it all feels like a moving painting. As for the animation, it was a brilliant approach to mix 3D with 2D. The 3D allows for a lot more dynamic camera movements. Even simple camera movements like a shot rotating around a character is something that is absolute torture to animate with pure 2D (it's why AOT uses CGI backgrounds for certain scenes, why the Soul Eater OP is an insane technological wonder because it uses a 3D camera in pure 2D). And then by having things such as character eyes and special effects be 2D allows for a lot more character to shine through it. When it comes to 2D animation, you can pretty much draw anything, so long as you have the artistic ability. Plus, the 2D details aren't as expensive if you say, made them 3D. And it just looks really nice and it's just a gorgeous piece of eye-candy. And the little details too? gimme more. Also I learned that the scene where Vi and Caitlyn go into the brothel and then the ‘you’re hot, cupcake’ thing...apparently the wall slam wasn’t in the original script. it was added in by the animators. Welp, good job them. This is the first ship in a while that I think is rather neat. 

OH GOD THE WORLDBUILDING. I know nothing about LoL other than clicking constantly is engaging gameplay for a ton of ppl, Teemo is considered a menace, it’s got great cinematics and music, and somehow even I can tell this Seraphine person is for cash money and this KDA thingie. But guess what. I didn’t need to know anythingggggggg about LoL. Arcane’s worldbuilding is excellent and so subtle. There isn’t much use of exposition, rather, it leaves the viewer to piece together the little bits and pieces provided through environment and character dialogue and interaction. Arcane’s worldbuilding is soft, and it can be something hard to juggle lest you leave your viewer watching without knowing all of the pieces of the puzzle, but Arcane still manages to do a spectacular job in spite of that. On this, I really cannot give the background artists enough credit. The writers too, ofc, but god i cannot give the enviroments of Arcane in general enough praise. I’ll leave it at: how can something this amazing be crafted. Since I already talked about the nose hair clipper already, a small detail I really love is Caitlyn’s Enforcer uniform. She doesn’t have full sleeves and her thighs are exposed. Yes, this could just be fanservice. But this subtly conveys the privilege of Piltover even more. An Enforcer of all occupations, can show skin, when they should be covered and armed to the teeth. 

I’d also like to mention the voice actors. They blew it out of the park! Especially Jinx’s and Powder’s VA, those two are my favorite performances. Mostly because it sells that she needs a hug and emotional support to overcome the insane amount of trauma she’s had to live through. *cough* i’ll stop

I think one of my favorite moments in all of the series is when Jayce is about to give his speech. He wants Viktor up with him, but Viktor declines, and Jayce doesn’t do much to persuade him. Then, it’s time. Jayce drinks his coffee, and the scene ends with a coffee cup of his face slamming on a table, with Viktor in the frame covered up by it. This 1. Shows that Jayce is beginning to become disconnected from the core of Hextech, and how he’s becoming more of a public figure now 2. Viktor is the one who’s putting in the work on the science. The last one in particular is what I want to talk about. 

I view it as a allegory for how the company name of something is the one given praise to, and the creators themselves muttered in passing. Like, how often do you read or watch a review and when is it ever mentioning the creators outside of general credit? At least when it comes to the casual reviews on YT or something, yes. Not to mention how once you pitch a show or something and get that big company money, even though it’s your own creation, that company ‘owns’ it in a legal sense. IMO, I think that Hextech wouldn’t be anything without Viktor, and not just because he stopped Jayce from committing suicide. Viktor is the one who comes up with the equations and method to get the crystal to stabilize, and with that knowledge Viktor was most likely the main brain behind the safe-use Hextech gemstones, and Viktor was the one who was actively researching the Hexcore. Of course, Jayce is the one who built the foundation, but it was Viktor who went and gave it insulation, stone, and the finishing touch. Yet, it’s Jayce who owns Hextech, who is the public face of progress, who is filthy rich (well, ok, I’m sure Viktor made bank too), who everyone acknowledges. Viktor is always the partner, the back bone. 

But at least with Viktor, he isn’t abused, and he and Jayce are very close friends. And he isn’t being exploited. However, that moment really did help me sum whatever thoughts I had about that. 

Oh, and that ‘Get Jinxed’ scene? Fucking love it. Silco being an angry dad while Jinx just ignores him and vibes is amazing, not to mention it shows how Silco cares for Jinx both through the fact he doesn’t use physical force on her to get her attention (he stands in the background calling her name before silencing the record), and the look on his face when she hugs him. On Jinx’s part, it mostly just establishing what we already knew about her: chaotic, enjoys destruction, boom boom, and that she’s younger mentally (her age is ~17-18 for reference). But what it also does is show that she cares about Silco’s opinion of her. From when he yells about the enforcers to her reaction be an eager nod with a wide open mouthed smile especially. And the hug seals the deal. Yeah, Silco may have failed Jinx in multiple areas (her trauma for one, though it is obvious he does try to help, such as the ‘You need to let Powder die’ scene...I wouldn’t say he’s great at it. also it’s very likely the whole murderous chaotic thing was fed into by him), he does care for her immensely, putting her over Zaun’s independence, because he knows what it’s like to be betrayed. And then the last line of ‘You’re perfect.’...man. I’ll admit I was trying to convince myself that all Silco was doing was manipulating Jinx so he would have a nice destructive puppet. While, yeah, that is partially true IMO, he did have a genuine love for her. Silco is both a bad and great parent. I did like the scene where he talks with Vander’s statue. “There’s nothing more undoing than a daughter.”

Jayce is a really cool character. Like. I love what he functions as. Jayce himself? Not a bad guy at all. But he ain’t a politician. But against his wishes- d’oh! Council member now. His gradual shift in Act 2 is what really makes his character for me. At first, he uses his power to shut down the illegal act of the other Council members and high ranking families. But as we can see, that only works against him. It’s only because of Mel that he was able to stop opposition. However, that entire scene, where he gets more and more comfortable with shaking the hands of this greedy people is a begrudging acceptance I feel. In order to do good, Jayce must become a politician. And to be a politician, most of if not all the time, is to be slimy. I have more to say, but this whole thing is mostly just floating around my head in scenes begging to be put together. 

Finally...to end all of this: the theme of class division. I don’t have much to comment on it, because I feel by just watching Arcane you get a good enough idea of what you’re ultimately being told: privilege isn’t bad, but how often does it actually help? A lot of topsiders are ignorant to the struggles of Zaun, and indulge in their arts and sciences. And plenty of them have a lot of prejudice against the undercity, no matter how terribly founded those beliefs are, no matter if they’ve never met a person from there and stepped a foot in there. Yeah, it’s pretty obvious what the parallel here is: rich people and people stuck in poverty. The rich and privileged from birth look down upon the people who are born or fall down into poverty with a variety of reactions: but a common sentiment would be “I’m far better.” But are you? The man who plays with a children’s toy at a Council meeting? And then much of the time, the fault is put upon the people in poverty, not the system. To the eyes of the rich, the ones in poverty are in there because they are lazy, criminals, and deserve it for their actions. Meanwhile, while there are people where this is the case, a large part of it would be they systems and society created to allow this many people who merely were down on their luck be this poverty stricken. There’s a lot more to say about this, but I feel this topic is much to intricate to sum up in a paragraph or two. 

And there you go. These are most of my general thoughts on Arcane. 

[twinvictim]

your opinions on each of the post team silent games and a rating out of 10. hand 'em over

YEAHHHHHH FINALLY CATERING TO ME!!!

Uh really long post oops. for reference, my rating for the first 4 sh's are as follows

Sh1: 9/10 Sh2: 7/10 Sh3: 9/10 Sh4: 9.5/10

Silent Hill 0/Origins

overall score: 7/10

Alot of the games issues can of course be attributed to it being a psp game, and while i won't excuse everything bc of that, j have to be honest and say I think it had so much potential as a (very) late ps2 game. Not to mention, the game ON THE PSP functions as it should. (The ps2 port does fucking not tho..oops) ans you'll see that this is...a rarity post team silent.

The story has alot of potential, Travis as a character is interesting and sympathetic and j think his dynamic with alessa js super fascinating to dig into, both of them being abused children and there was alot of intrigue regarding his powers, the game feels like a smaller more watered down she, and for that I can't fault it too much. The weapons system isn't my favorite but the combat itself is reminiscent of 1 and 2 and I really like a good chunk of the monster design, there was clearly thought and care put into it, nurses and strughtjackets/lying figures be dammed. The unlockables are pretty cool though and alot of the environments look pretty cool for a psp game, hell i LOVE the theater level its super unique, I would love to see it in (actually functional) better graphics. I also think the puzzles are pretty solid, not hair pulling like sh1 even if they're not quite as clever as say sh3.

My biggest criticisms come from the reuse of sh1 characters (just alessa and Travis would've been fine, maybe dahlia and some more org characters would've been better) the bad ending being straight up bad writing. Not to mention they did the sh3 thing of "kill too many monsters and get the bad ending" which is...stupid. The foreshadowing of the butcher being? He's just kinda there, I like the lead up but it would be more interesting if the butcher represented something from those years between Travis' father dying and him being an adult. And while there's more replayability imo than sh2, it doesn't have difficulty sliders and that makes it kinda hard to come back to quite as often. Not to mention unlike sh1, 3or sh4 there's not as much horror focus and random events.

Overall, solid game its fun to play, very silent Hill and if you're willing to look past a few continuity errors and accept its a little different and slightly derrivitive at the same time, I like to say I had alot of fun with it and still do. (Maybe I just like Travis alot...idk)

Silent Hill: Homecoming

Overall score: 6/10

Once again most of the issues here are gonna be corporate fuck ups, but I'm also not gonna beat around the bush, this game isn't like...good. its bad actually. "But you gave it a 6/10?" Yeah bc its not NEARLY as bad as some other games I've.. experienced.

The negatives here are, many and vast, so let's run them down. Firstly the games performance is janky on console (ps3 at least) and abysmal/unplayable on PC, what with framerate issues that are detrimental to game play on pc and make the third boss impossible. That said on console it is completable and not even too terrible...usually. Scarletts boss fight however is terribly unbalanced and broken on all skews so :/. The combat is...functional but not anyone's favorite, it's difficult to use any actually strong weapon and you can pretty much strong arm ur ways through shit with just the knife (except scarletts first form..don't try it, it won't work) for some people this will be borening (not my opinion but w/e). Most of The puzzles...leave alot to be desired. I hate sliding block puzzles. Also no run button? At all?? No easy mode? Ok... also what is this.. wheel design for the inventory...im accidentally using my serum..what is serum also? And why is the item pickup noise like...bass boosted.

The character models look awful most of the time, and comically unfinished other times, some human models are just grotesque, (judge halloway, Adam shepherd, mayor Bartlett. .you get it) and yes...there are sexy nurses. Bc of course there are. (Whole ass out???) They did straight up have some terrible endings for this game (ph ending for one, the way you get the ufo? Hell the ufo ending is kinda boring. I like the in water ending here too but. Yeah.) the story has some, problems. To say the least.

However, while the performance is bad its not the worst I've played (on the ps3 once again..unplayable on pc) and I hardly noticed the framerate when I was just running around, I personally found the combat kinda fun, between trying to dodge accurately and still attack and not use all my health items (bc those and ammo are actually rare! Unlike some games...) it is kind of a challenge and reminds me of a much worse sh4. And hey, the health items both heal an understandable amount of health that i can easily read with a bar (unlike 1-3) and they're not a complete joke (unlike sh4...) i find the exploration really fun and sure the characters look shit but the environments are Fucking great. The church is one of my fav sections, short as jt might be and yes it stole the confessional scene but its pretty well written and acted I think. The monster design is pretty fucking rad too honestly, I like the schism, siam, I like the DESIGN of the needlers even if they make me so mad to fight, and hey the nurses and ph don't show up that much to be too aggregious. The boss monsters are also fantastic design wise, very unsettling and the boss rooms are interesting as well.

The story has problems but it also has alot of potential, the concept of people sacrificing ther children for silent Hill and being overcome by their own pain and guilt is pretty fucking cool, and alex is a good character they did a good job of giving him personality, ppl bitch about him being a soldier but a) he's not and b) soldiers are people too, and a sh game that could tackle toxic masculinity, be critical of the military, and also tackle abusive religeious parents is pretty intriguing, not to mentions themes of brotherly love that's complicated bc of how they clearly favored Josh . Sure, it misses the mark, but I like taking the potential and thinking about it bc its compelling to me. And like I said, i like alex alot.

Overall, bad game yes, but not the worst as it has enough good for me to honestly really enjoy it, besides it is pretty funny when it is bad. Don't play the pc port tho

Silent Hill Shattered Memories

Overall Score: 8/10

Unpopular opinion im sure but honestly? I find this game ALMOST on par with the team silent games. Its really that good, yes its a wii game, so this is my score taking into account the motion controls BTW.

For the good, man where do i start. Its BEAUTIFUL for a wii game and esp for a post team silent game, the graphics are nice and Constsitent, the environments are pretty and it has a pretty nice cold color pallet to contrast the warmer tones the series tends to skew towards. The acting and intrgrige are all on point and the WRITING is fantastic, its one of those games you play the first time not knowing the twist and play the second time picking up more and more clues and things that strengthen that twist so much more. Like sh2 its a simple story told in such a clever and interesting way that you'll probably be too invested to put it down, I beat it in one sitting in 6 hours bc i was so engrossed in the narrative. And the Puzzles man! The puzzles are phenomenal and fun to accomplish and there's even a little bit of variety in a few places on repeat playthroughs. The level of detail in this game is insane really, the things that change with the different psychology answers are pretty cool too and tho it all plays out relatively the same its still fun to see the different things you can get to happen. The gimmicks like the phone as an object, taking pictures, sneaking and zooming in, they're not too intrusive as to take away from the exploration or other game play but not completely useless and have some pretty fun Easter eggs too. The game plays sort of like a worse outlast with good puzzles and for that I do have to commend it. Oh and the fucking MUSIC is INCREDIBLE idk something ab this soundtrack has alot of heart put into it clearly.

Now, it's not perfect. The thing is, it is a WORSE outlast type game, in the running and hiding sense but well, the hiding is completely useless, its a run away game, which is ok, but I understand that people aren't gonna be a big fan of that when silent Hill has always balanced combat ad puzzles and exploration. The running segments are..aggravating, mostly bc its hard to figure out where to go, not to mention using motion controls that don't like to work half the time to fight the monsters off of you. Also, the monsters are not scarey in the slightest and the raw shock scream is actually enragaging if you've died one to many times, there's also...not really any penalty for dying. And once you're out for these running segments,there's no danger, no monsters, nothing to hide from despite having a hiding mechanic. Its not really a horror game more of a psycological thriller and I understand that the fact that its not horror can be disappointing. The psychology things might be a bit overhyped And yeah fine, the wii foreplay scene...well yeah its weird but it IS also funny as fuck.

That said, there's still alot thats good and alot thas unfair criticism lobbed at this game. Harry didn't have much of a personality in sh1 bc he's a ps1 character and sm really fleshed him out well, not to mention giving cybil some nice characterization, and they did some interesting things with dahlia and kaufmann. And Lisa.. well I'm gonna be honest I never found Lisa all that interesting in sh1..so it doesn't bother me that she's the way she is in this game. I know people hate the "horny" aspect of it but to be completely fair, YOU choose to make the game that way, don't answer in a sexual manner or look at boobs or anything else and you won't have an overly sexual game, its...literally that easy. Its given as an option for the play id they want to go for what is arguably another joke ending. (You cannot tell me sleeze and sirens is meant to be a real serious ending to the game. Cmon) and you can complain about the innacuuracies if you want but its a spin off, a retelling of the original game. Its not canon, and it didn't change the original game. It just took the ideas presented there and made them more human and lest fantastical, there's some supernatural elements but it takes a backseat to the human moments. And its honestly really cool.

Overall, great game, i reccomend it if you don't mind some slight jank with the motion controls and honestly? Look up directions on where to go for the running segments and you'll have a pretty good time overall.

Silent Hill Downpour

Overall score (so far): 7.5/10 *to be noted i haven't finished actually playing it yet but I know the basic plot and some of the details so I doubt it'll change

And so for the final silent Hill Game, I have to say, i don't think it deserves NEARLY the hatred it gets, there's alot about it that i find really cool and even fun and I think its a solid entry, a little better than origins in some parts and its downsides are both unfortunate and once again, mostly Konami's fault . That said, I'm also not gonna kid and say its a good game, just that I like it alot and we should be nicer to the last silent Hill game were probably ever gonna get.

Downpour has a pretty good, original story overall, there's alot to it, alot of intricacies and intrigue to it that honestly make it a pretty sold silent Hill game. Its different enough from the others to stand out but not super far removed from its themes and messages. I like that it doesn't try and lean into the cult aspect and tries to do something else with it, it doesn't try to explain silent Hill, but just use it to torment the characters, as it should be. There's tragedy ad human feelings here and some of them aren't the most...sensitive but they are pretty reasonable reactions id say. Playing as someone who's odds are stacked against him from the beginning as he's a prisoner is a cool way to open the game, someone convicted and you must discover if he is a good person or not. Themes of revenge explored more than in sh3 which is pretty cool. The environments look pretty nice, and i like the look of the otherworld, once again being unique with its cooler color pallet, but without the ice so it really feels like its own thing. The EXPLORATION is awesome with an actual open world which I think works well, there's alot to do in town (unlike sh1 and 0 on limiting hardware and 2 which just pretends you can explore to town but you cant) there's alot for cool little stories and sidequests to do, my favorite so far being the cinema (which has a section of ACTUAL fixed cameras like old Resident evils which is smth SH has never done and its super fucking cool!) And all the sidequess help strengthen murphy as a cheacter and argue for his innocence or complexites. The weapons system is pretty cool, picking up items and attacking with whatever you might find, finding cool Easter eggs with exploration and having fun noticing things. And it does honestly have the strongest side characters outside of SM. The puzzles are pretty solid and fun to figure out with some cool mechanics and the seperate difficulties is a great thing to bring back (actually done well like sh3) I also kind of like the method of triggering the night world/rain/monsters, and silent Hill really feels likes its constantly punishing Murphy, as it should. The music might not be Akira but its still pretty damn good, and fuck yall I like the Korn song, and you CAN press start and skip it yknow. (Thx tomm hewlit)

The negtitives tho, well they are there. For one it has the worst performance of any sh game outside of pc homecoming and like...the hd collection, the framerate like to shit itself alot lmao, its not usually detrimental bc I've played re2r with similar framerates but, yeah its not great. Not to mention while the models look better than hc they don't animate well or often at all, and the game has trouble loading in the models as fast as they should. The sound mixing could use...some work too, poor murph sounds like he's eating the mic. While I find the games exploration really fun, murphy also has the issue of not running very fast so it can be a little annoying to get back to a place you want to be when you can't run that fast, not to mention the loading times. The monster design is def the worst in the series, maybe on par w SM. Which is disappointing bc there's some pretty good moments here and there, but not nearly enough to make it scary and there's so much you can do with monsters with this premise. Also, the running sections in the otherworld are better than SM ad even more engaging than the brief ones in 2 and 3, but still, I'd prefer to do puzzles or fight a boss or smth. I will also say, the endings are, iffy while the main 2 endings are really good and Anne's bad ending as well as the joke ending are great, murphys bad endings are weird and ooc for the muphy you come to know in the game (even more so than Origins) plus, idk that the writers knew all that much about prison andbprison culture, nobody in a real prison would be mad ab Murphy killing a pedo (there's some racist implications here and there too which is. Unfortunate and disappointing. I like Howard and Robbie but they are a bit tropey, esp Howard) that said Anne is a compelling albeit unlikable character and thas pretty cool to see pulled off.

Overall, while it has downsides, I don't think Downpour is worthy of all the scorn it gets, this can have problems and you can point them out without disregarding the good parts and while it is unfortunate it doesn't run better and have some extras and didn't handle some things great, I still think its worth a playthrough, esp if you go out of your way to do the sidequests.

Bonus round

Book of memories is not a game I intend to play bc I don't wanna get a vita and can't imagine I'm missing much. It doesn't look bad pwr say but I'm not interested tbh

Fuck PT. :)

[cherrybombusa]

GROUP THREE  - THE CAROUSEL. FAILED.

PLAYERS:

THE HEARTBREAK KID - Casey Russell. THE ARTIST - Sloane Salt. THE CLASSIC - Libby Logan.

EARNED PERKS:

- PUZZLERS: Talk about minds of freakin’ steel! As the only group to solve the puzzle in ONE guess, Casey Russell, and Sloane Salt have both earned themselves a chance to go back and fix it! If a choice happens to go wrong for them in a future event, they will be allowed ONE do-over. Use it wisely! 

MEMORABLE MOMENTS:

- Casey fell on his face, and cost the group a time penalty on his run back from the Ferris Wheel. - The Gang only used one try in their puzzle, and succeeded!  - Sloane dropped the second key, and failed to disarm the Candy Girl’s bomb. The carousel was destroyed in the blast.  - As the one who dropped the key, Sloane was blamed for the destruction of the carousel, and arrested. On the bright side, she saved Libby and Casey from spending a night in jail... But this will come back to bite them all in-game.

When it was put there, he doesn’t know, but the note should be enough to make Casey’s heart skip. There, in the case of his instrument is a folded piece of paper. On its surface? A threat. “COME TO THE NEW CAROUSEL AT 7:30PM SHARP, OR YOUR SECRET IS MINE TO SPILL!” @caseyfm

When it was put there, she doesn’t know, but the note should be enough to make Sloane’s heart skip. There, hidden within her deck of tarot cards is a folded piece of paper. On its surface? A threat. “COME TO THE NEW CAROUSEL AT 7:30PM SHARP, OR YOUR SECRET IS MINE TO SPILL!” @saltofthcearth

When it was put there, she doesn’t know, but the note should be enough to make Libby’s heart skip. There, in her ride locker, is a folded piece of paper. On its surface? A threat. “COME TO THE NEW CAROUSEL AT 7:30PM SHARP, OR YOUR SECRET IS MINE TO SPILL!” @hellolibby​ 

THE NARRATOR: Reunions were supposed to be pleasant occasions, weren’t they? They were supposed to bring feelings of joy, and nostalgia; you were supposed to forget the awkward haze that had plagued your years of high school, and… pretend like the good old days were actually just that. Good. Absence did make the heart grow fonder and all that, didn’t it? 

Though, maybe it’s silly to wonder why this little reunion might not be so pleasant. The three of them - Casey, Libby, and Sloane - all walk up to the Carousel at the same time. They all meet each other’s eyes, and though nobody says it, everyone hears the same thought in their head. ‘Fuck.’

LIBBY: "So..." Libby's voice wavers dangerously - her hands shake, cast and all - but somehow she fights every urge she has within herself to run the other direction before chaos can unravel itself all around them. If the Candy Girl wanted them all here, then she doubted running away would be of much use. They were all trapped in Cherry… But this time, it wasn’t ‘small town syndrome’ keeping them back. "Probably safe to assume running into each other here isn't just a coincidence, right?"

SLOANE: There was an urge to reach out to the both of them and pull them in close that Sloane resisted, looking between Libby and Casey. So much for a lull in this Candy Girl's machinations, it seems a week was enough for her to plan something more. She swallowed thickly and then shook her head, folding her arms over her chest nervously. "Well, obviously I wouldn't be here if I didn't need to be." She motioned towards the Carousel. Talk about betraying her cause.

CASEY: Casey follows Sloane's gesture to the carousel. How did wooden horses somehow seem so menacing at night? It was thirty minutes before Mystic Cherry were due to perform and instead he was here about to do...? The sinking feeling in his gut tells him that this is going to lead to no good. "Yeah, this definitely isn't my idea of a warm up before a gig..." he mumbles, before his gaze falls on them both.

THE NARRATOR: There’s no clock to strike the time - nothing to let them know that 7:30-sharp has approached but the faint sound of Dean Hargrove’s voice in the distance is enough to let them know. They're all watching each other, but they can't help but flinch at the intrusion of the sound... And then, yet again ,when Hargrove is cut off by a voice that none of them quite recognize. They’re too far away to hear what the commotion is about, but somehow they know… Their night just took a turn for the worse.

It would have been impressive timing if it weren’t so fucking frightening, but at just that moment, their very own issue of the Cherry Bomb is dropped from the roof of the carousel, and onto it’s platform - near one of the old horses that looked a little too off-it’s-rocker. It’s clearly meant for them… It has to be. The only problem? The Gang is stuck, woefully, behind a locked fence.

There are a few ways to get to it, at least. They could always take their chances climbing the fence  to get inside of the Carousel; it doesn’t look that high.

Casey knows the guys who work here… They’re always leaving things lying around. Maybe it might be best to look around for a lanyard someone might have dropped.

 Then again, Libby has been treating the Boardwalk like a second home since she was just a kid, and she says there’s always another way in… Maybe they look for a hole in the fence?

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU MUST RETRIEVE THE CHERRY BOMB. DO YOU CLIMB THE GATE [SURVIVOR], LOOK FOR A LANYARD [PROBLEM SOLVING], OR LOOK FOR A HOLE IN THE FENCE [PERCEPTION]?

LIBBY:  "Come on, guys, Casey's right. What are the odds that someone didn't drop their key? It's the boardwalk." It's easy to tell when Libby is determined to get something done. For the first time that day, she ties her hair up in a high ponytail - she crinkles her nose as she scans the area. She probably looked a little too much like a 60’s witch from her favorite sick day show - but, she can’t help herself. Libby always felt a little smarter when she was acting like somebody else. "Sloane - you look over by the hot dog cart. Case, you should probably take the space behind the ride, and I'll... Look everywhere else. I guess.

THE NARRATOR: It’s really a wonder the boardwalk even stays open, considering how careless some of the employees can be, but after a few minutes of searching for a stray key, our little slice of the gang finds their hands on one. They unlock the gate with ease and all pile in toward the Carousel; eager to get their hands on that ominous little magazine.

The cover of the Cherry Bomb is collaged with photos of Lux, the inside? Crime scene photos. There’s no pictures of her body, of course - that would be crude, even for the Candy Girl… kind of. But images of the blood soaked into her carpet; still pictures of her bedroom, flaunting a life once lived, those are there. A shot of her suicide note, ‘I’m sorry, I love you,’ and all.

And right there, in the middle of the spread, like a centerfold? A note, written in Sharpie - just for our ragtag little slice of the gang.

CANDY GIRL: GET OUT,,, GET OUT, WHEREVER YOU’RE LOCKED!!!! NOT A FAN OF SMALL SPACES?? I’LL STICK YOU IN A BOX. SOMEONE IS MISSING, BUT I WON’T SAY WHO… FIND THE KEY, AND FIND OUT WHO.

BUT WATCH OUT, WATCH OUT! YOU’RE ON THE CLOCK! LET IT RUN OUT, AND THEY’LL STAY IN THE BOX. WILL THE TIDE COME IN? HMM, MAYBE IT WON’T. OR BETTER YET? MAYBE YOUR FRIENDS WILL FLOAT.

YOU’RE NOT LOCKED IN, BUT IT’S STILL ON YOU! FIND THE KEY, OR THIS FRIEND DIES TOO.

THE NARRATOR:  Oh...my. Now, that’s quite the predicament, isn’t it? I suppose we’re at least lucky that the Candy Girl leaves the rules simple, right? Find a key, and maybe she doesn’t kill one of your friends. Maybe.

MAKE A CHOICE: ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED AND LOCKED AWAY IN A BOX. YOU MUST FIND THE KEY TO SAVE THEM. DO YOU LOOK FOR CLUES [PROBLEM SOLVING], OR SEARCH FOR A KEY WILDLY [LUCK - HIGH RISK, HIGH REWARD]?

SLOANE:  Despite the rising heart rate that Sloane is sporting after looking through that shiny new issue of the Cherry Bomb and the revelation of this new note, she's standing tall, directing the other two. "Divide and conquer, like before. There have gotta be clues around here somewhere... she dropped this from the roof, maybe there's something else." Sloane's boots carry her around the perimeter of the Carousel as she searches for something, anything to give an indication of who is in the box and a way to find this damn key.

THE NARRATOR:  Look for clues. Good idea, Sloane! They split up, but maybe it's better that way.

Libby  stays focused on the sharpie scribbled riddle in the ‘zine while the other two search the operator’s booth up and down for something useful. Not so useful, but strange enough to take note of? A cherry red briefcase, shoved into one of the dusty, storage lockers. Not only that… but maybe there’s actually more to the note than they thought.

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU MUST FIGURE OUT THE PUZZLE. ADMIN EM IS HERE TO HELP, BUT MAYBE TRY THE WELCOME DESK TO START.

SLOANE: With shaky hands, Sloane reaches for the briefcase, after staring at the damn riddle for what felt like so long the words had ceased to make sense. She input their first attempt at cracking the code: 3142.

MAKE A CHOICE: SUCCESS!

THE NARRATOR: With the numbers all in the correct order, the briefcase pops open rather easily. They find a key, but along with it, our little gang sees a mess of wires, something that looks like a keyhole, a clock ticking down…. And a note.

CANDY GIRL:  ANOTHER SURPRISE  - AND THIS WILL BE FUN - I GOTTA GO, I GOTTA RUN! BUT BEFORE I DO, I PLANTED A BOMB! AND IT WILL BLOW UP WHEN THE TIMER SAYS ONE!  SO, FIND A NEW KEY, TRY OUT THE LOCK! SEE IF YOU CAN DISARM IT -  BEAT THE CLOCK! BUT IF YOU DON’T - AND YOU DON’T GO BOOM -  THEN ENJOY THE INTERROGATION ROOM!

WHERE TO FIND THE KEY? THAT’S A DIFFERENT STORY. I’M TALL, AND I’M ROUND, AND I’M SLOW, AND I’M BORING! I’M FAR AWAY, SO YOU’LL HAVE TO SPRINT, BUT IF YOU’RE RIGHT, YOU WON’T TAKE THE HIT. YOUR SECOND OPTION? MERRY GO ROUND! CLIMB ALL THE WAY UP! OR SOMEONE WILL DROWN. THE KEY COULD BE THERE, THE KEY COULD BE NOT… OH, WELL, FIND OUT! OR MAYBE YOU’LL ROT.

THE NARRATOR: Well, the threat is clear. They must solve the riddle, get the second key, and disarm the bomb before the timer runs out… if they don’t, the whole thing might be coming down. And they might just go down with it.

CASEY:  A bomb. They were now dealing with a bomb. The words barely have a chance to register in his mind before they're all scrambling to work out what the words on the paper mean and how to save their friend. With his heart still in his mouth, it barely feels like it has a moment to settle before he's spluttering out, "it has to be the ferris wheel, right?" Looking at both of his friends for their sign of agreement.

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU HAVE DECIDED TO GO TO THE FERRIS WHEEL. NOW YOU MUST DECIDE WHO SPRINTS THERE BEFORE THE TIMER RUNS OUT. [STRENGTH, FIGHTER, BRAVERY.]

CASEY: With the agreement of his friends - he's bolting off. Barely a thought running through his head other than the knowledge that he has to get to the ferris wheel before the timer ticks down to zero. Their friendship circle has suffered enough with Lux's death without adding in a casualty at the hands of Candy Girl. Scrambled together with the thought that he's lost enough family over the years, too. So, it's sheer brute force that gets him through the sprint, running like his own life depends on it because... well... it kinda does. With the ferris wheel in sight, he hopes he will make it in time.

THE NARRATOR: Heart racing, chest aching; adrenaline pulsing through his veins, but somehow  he finds the key hanging from the Ferris’ Wheel’s gate like a prize less than two minutes later. With that in his hands, he just has to sprint all the way back to the carousel to save his friends. 

It should be just as easy - it has to be - but maybe the pressure of getting back in time is getting to his head, because on the way back… Casey stumbles. It’s not it’s the wipeout of the century, but it certainly shaves some time off of that fucking timer in the briefcase. Not to mention some skin off of his face -- and is that blood dripping down his collar? Fuck. 

MAKE A CHOICE:  MODERATE SUCCESS. THE GANG HAS SUFFERED A TIME PENALTY DUE TO CASEY’S STUMBLE.

THE NARRATOR: They  have the key, and now they just have to disarm that fucking bomb. It seems simple enough… But it would probably be better if whoever did it was calm. Or good at problem solving. Or just… Really, really, really good at surviving bleak situations. Any takers?

MAKE A CHOICE: SOMEONE HAS TO DISARM THE BOMB [CALM, PROBLEM-SOLVING, SURVIVOR.]

SLOANE: Sloane has dealt with many a crisis, but none so bad as this one, when lives are on the line and there's a god damn bomb in a briefcase like they're in a cheesy 80s action flick. Taking a deep breath, she takes the key from Casey, worried eyes having to fight to not focus in on his injury. They don't have time. They have to do this. "I can do it." She assures them both, steadying her hands and clenching her jaw as she lifts the key towards the keyhole steadily. "Fuck it." She mutters as she tries the one they've retrieved.

THE NARRATOR:  Holy shit. Holy shit.

THE NARRATOR: I can believe this one is really happening.

THE NARRATOR: The three of them held their breath - Casey and Libby watched while Sloane went for the lock with only 30 seconds left on the timer… only to drop it.

It was the fumble of the century - the sound of the key falling into the hidden mechanisms of the carousel like a taunt - and as the clock counted down, they knew they only had one choice… 

The three of them took off running as hard as they could - their lives depended on it, after all - and though it was a mighty effort, they didn’t make it far enough not to be blown off of their feet. They all land in a pile together; beaten, broken… And absolutely fucked when only minutes later, the Boardwalk Police come running.

They expect for handcuffs to be thrown onto the three of them, but as Dean Hargrove comes running up behind them, he instructs them only to arrest Sloane.

He had known Casey and Libby since they were both kids, after all. They were his son’s best friends. How was he supposed to believe that they had something to do with this over the Salt girl? Libby and Casey try to protest, but it’s no use. Sloane is going with them to the police station, and… that’s that.

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU HAVE FAILED YOUR EVENT, BUT AT LEAST YOU FOUND THE FIRST KEY. YOUR FRIEND HAS A CHANCE.

[dizzydennis]

10 characters I’d still love to see in Smash:

It seems like some of the hype for newcomers has died down. However, I’m still excited at the potential fighters who may come. Here are a few that I would love to see join the ranks:

(1) Phoenix Wright (Ace Attorney) - I feel Phoenix is the best choice for a newcomer. He has a history with Nintendo, left his mark on gaming, and would be entirely unique. I even wrote out his potential moveset in a previous post. The potential for his stage would be amazing too, with Athena Cyke’s mood matrix being used to teleport from the courtroom to iconic cases. By a large margin, I’d love Phoenix to be in Smash Bros.

(2) Arle Nadja (Puyo Puyo) - I don’t believe puzzle games have been represented in Smash much. It’d be great to get Puyo Puyo into the fray with Arle. Since she’s the face of the franchise, she’d be a wonderful choice. She could throw puyos at enemies and use her spells like ice storm as special attacks. Her final smash could involve Puyo Puyo Fever. As for her stage, a simple one could be utilized to showcase other characters from the franchise and possibly puyos falling from above! With Puyo Puyo Tetris finally aiding in the popular of this series overseas, I think it would be a great choice. Of course, Jun Senoue’s amazing music would have to be included as well.

(3) Miles Tails Prower (Sonic the Hedgehog) - I’ve given up on the idea of Shadow being playable, (even though he would’ve made perfect sense as an echo Fighter). Tails would be a great choice. While some of his moves can be borrowed from Sonic, he could also use his arm cannon from Sonic Battle, dummy rings, bombs, T-pup and other devices from previous games. Of course, flight would be an aspect of his moves too. His final Smash could be similar to Samus’ where he gets into the Tornado-2 and lets off a huge laser blast. As for a stage, I think anything from the Dreamcast-era of Sonic would be good. It just needs to get away from the Green Hill aesthetic. He’d be a fun fit for a classic character that feels unique and yet familiar. I believe the Sonic series deserves more representation.

(4) Axel Stone (Streets of Rage) - I know this one is likely never going to happen, but Axel has appeared as a fan favorite for 4 out of his 4 games. He’s from a beat-em-up and so his moveset works perfectly for Smash. His new combos and attacks from Streets of Rage 4 would perfectly slide into Smash. His Grand Upper as a special makes so much sense. His stage could be based on the “streets” from the series, but it can also do the typical “elevator stage” that beat-em-ups are known for. This choice is more about a cool factor and one that could translate well, but Double Dragon would most likely get chosen over Streets of Rage.

(5) Blaze Fielding (Streets of Rage) - For the same reasons as Axel, Blaze would make an amazing addition. We wouldn’t need both, but I have been a fan of Blaze for many, many years. She has many attacks that would be so fun in Smash. However, I worry she might be considered too sexy for the game. There’s nothing wrong with that in principle, but Smash’s E10+ rating would beg to differ. It would be cool to have a strong female fighter like her though.

(6) Scorpion (Mortal Kombat) - Let’s get a bit crazy here. Mortal Kombat is a hugely iconic part of gaming as well. Mostly for its violence, of course. But if they can tone down Bayonetta, they can tone down Scorpion. His spear, vanishing attacks, and fire make a lot of sense for Smash Bros. His Final Smash could translate to a tame Fatality. His stage could be the Deadpool with acid pools of water draining health if you fall in. This would be a fun and wild choice. However, when you consider that the Mortal Kombat series is basically banned in Japan... this seems impossible. It’s still a cool idea regardless.

(7) Shantae (Shantae) - A fan favorite for many reasons. Considering Shantae got her start on the Gameboy Color and that many of her games are available on Nintendo platforms, she’d be a fun fit. Her transformations and hair attacks would work nicely in a match. She could have a lot of variety with her dances too. Her stage should incorporate the large bosses from her games as stage hazards. Again, she might be considered “too sexy,” but she’s already in the game as a Spirit, so let’s just go for it. Nothing wrong with beauty and power!

(8) Crash Bandicoot (Crash Bandicoot) - I’m actually not the biggest Crash fan. I like the games, but they’re just fine to me. However, I think Crash has so many cool abilities that he’d be a wonderful new fighter. He oozes with fun. From spinning, sliding, and using bazookas; he has it all. His stage could be a jungle stage where the famous boulder comes crashing through the stage. Perhaps a time machine could toss you between different scenarios. The potential is endless and Crash has more than earned a spot.

(9) Rayman (Rayman) - I am utterly shocked that Rayman has not been added into Smash yet. Considering how Ubisoft has worked with Mario and Star Fox in the past, this feels like it was set up to happen. Rayman has countless games that are fondly remembered and his abilities from his arms, to his projectiles, to his helicopter hair could work easily in Smash! It’d be cool to get a French character into the mix too. His stage could be the beautiful stages from Origins or Legends, but you could also do a callback to the original games. This one should definitely happen! Again, I’m shocked it hasn’t come true yet.

(10) Chibi Robo (Chibi Robo) - I don’t think this will happen. Nintendo did not do this series any favors and have left it for dead. However, they also did the same thing to ARMS, so perhaps it’s possible? Chibi Robo already has the gadgets to make a fun moveset. Not to mention that he can use his cord to attack. His stage would be a simple house with the many characters from his games being part of the chaos. I would love for this little guy to get it, but I doubt it. Still, Min Min being included fills me with some hope.

[aion-rsa]

15 Hardest PlayStation One Games of All-Time

https://ift.tt/3o3aW0n

The PlayStation is fondly remembered for its classic collection of revolutionary games, advancements in 3D technology, and CD player functionality that let you easily play the Men in Black soundtrack whenever you wanted. As you’ve probably guessed from the title of this article, though, it’s also the home of some of the hardest games of the ’90s.

The PlayStation may have helped move us out of the arcade era and its notorious difficulty levels, but with the challenges of 3D game design came a new set of in-game challenges that tested a generation of gamers in ways that they simply were not prepared for.

Even after we’ve grown accustomed to the machinations and expectations of 3D game design all these years later, I suspect that many modern gamers would struggle to beat the 15 hardest PlayStation One games ever.

15. Crash Bandicoot

One of the funniest things about the release of 2017’s Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy was watching everyone suddenly remember that the Crash Bandicoot games were absurdly difficult. 

Despite their linear design, the Crash Bandicoot games demanded a level of platforming perfection that proved to be elusive enough at a time when modern video game graphics, cameras, and controls made the remakes of the Crash Bandicoot games much more accessible but was nearly impossible to achieve in the early days of PlayStation gaming.

The later Crash Bandicoot games made things slightly easier, but the first title’s combination of intentionally challenging obstacles and a few questionable design decisions make it one of the most truly difficult games of its era.

14. Fear Effect

The original Fear Effect games are awkward to play today for a lot of reasons (casual racism and strange “softcore” cutscenes, for instance), but if you find yourself struggling to make it through these titles, it’s not just because they haven’t aged especially well. Fear Effect was an incredibly difficult game even for its time.

Essentially a blend of Resident Evil-like controls, point and click adventure puzzles, and awkward stealth sequences, Fear Effect is like a Hall of Fame for the most challenging and infuriating gameplay concepts of its era. 

Fear Effect 2 might even be harder than the first game, but the nod here goes to the original for featuring one of the most uniquely difficult gaming experiences the PlayStation has to offer. 

13. Driver

22 years after its release, I’m still convinced that Driver is a prank. How else can you explain developer Reflections Interactive’s decision to make this game’s tutorial mission one of the hardest levels in video game history?

Driver’s first level requires you to complete a series of complex maneuvers in a confined space while racing against a way too short time limit. To make matters worse, the game often fails to recognize when you’ve properly completed a maneuver, which means that you might not pass the test even if you’ve somehow mastered the game’s most complex movies the first time you’re ever asked to perform them. 

If you’re one of the many who has never beaten Driver’s opening level, you may be shocked to find that there are difficulty spikes later in the game that are even more difficult than its notorious opener. At least this game is still better than the sequel. 

12. Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey

Oddworld’s unique puzzles and strange core mechanics would have made it challenging enough for players just trying to figure out what’s expected of them, but this game goes one step further by employing some of the most unforgiving level design tactics in PlayStation history. 

Your margin for error in this game rarely rises above zero as gunfire and traps constantly threaten to end your fun. While that kind of unforgiving gameplay makes sense in something like a bullet hell title, it can be frustrating to work with in a puzzle game where your trial and error attempts are hindered by an additional series of wrong moves. 

Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssey is clearly meant to be a difficult game, but knowing that doesn’t make it feel any less unforgiving. 

11. Rayman

As strange as it may seem given the evolution of the franchise over the years, the original Rayman is by far one of the hardest games of the ‘90s and arguably one of the hardest platformer games ever made. 

Unlike other platformers that challenge you with rewarding gameplay that requires precision movements, most of Rayman’s challenges can be best described as “bulls***.” The slippery slopes and spiked pits spread generously throughout levels might kill you, but the game’s bizarre enemy spawning system that makes it practically impossible to anticipate their placement certainly will. 

If Rayman isn’t one of the hardest games ever made its certainty among the most frustrating. 

10. Vagrant Story

For years, fans have called Vagrant Story one of the most underrated PlayStation games and one of the most overlooked RPGs ever made. It deserves both those titles, but I think Vagrant Story also deserves to be remembered as an absurdly difficult epic. 

Initially, the challenge of Vagrant Story comes from learning its unique combat system that often leaves you feeling helpless. Even after you’ve made sense of the basics, Vagrant Story’s brutal bosses, clever traps, and even “basic” enemies will constantly make you wonder whether or not you can ever really master what this game throws at you. 

Like Dark Souls, Vagrant Story’s difficulty is very much part of what makes the game work as well as it does. Appreciating that doesn’t make the game any easier, though. 

9. Heart of Darkness

Never heard of Heart of Darkness? I’m not surprised. Even for its time, this was a relatively obscure title that is now fondly remembered for its visuals, excellent story, and interesting gameplay. Mostly, though, Heart of Darkness is remembered for its nearly unrivaled difficulty spikes.  

In fact, Heart of Darkness could give Driver a run for its money in the battle between games with the most absurdly difficult opening levels. Enemies swarm you in this opening section like you’re playing a bullet hell shooter, but the game controls like a particularly clunky FMV puzzler. Even if you know what you’re doing, it’s incredibly difficult to respond to the on-screen action in time. 

Things get slightly better from there, but I’d still say that most gamers will not have the patience for this game’s labyrinth levels, bewildering puzzles, and often painful controls. 

8. Blasto

To be fair to Blasto, this PS1 action game was probably released a generation before technology could properly support it. In another timeline, it might have turned out to be as good as the first Ratchet and Clank game. To be even fairer to Blasto, it starred the late Phil Hartman who always went above and beyond for everything he did, including the voice work for this game. 

With all of that out of the way, let’s focus on Blasto’s real reputation as one of the PS1’s most reliable sources of broken controllers. It’s bad enough that this game’s slow movements and dodgy camera make even basic sections challenging, but the fact that many levels have no barriers to speak of means you spend most of your time falling to your death while trying to complete even simple jumps. 

This is a truly painful gaming experience that snared many unsuspecting gamers with its charm and front-loaded good ideas. 

Read more

Games

15 Hardest Sega Genesis Games of All-Time

By Matthew Byrd

Games

15 Hardest SNES Games of All-Time

By Matthew Byrd

7. Einhander

While not the most difficult 2D shoot ‘em up ever made, Einhander was high-profile enough to lure in many early PS1 adopters who were completely unprepared for its retro difficulty level. 

Rather than throw as many enemies at you as possible and call it a day, Einhander increases the health pool of the average enemy while requiring you to navigate some truly devastating death zones. The impact of that design decision really comes thorugh in the game’s boss fights which task you with taking down massive foes who employ complex and shifting attack strategies. 

This is a truly great game that stands the test of time, but don’t let its looks and sounds convince you that Einhander is anything less than a classic example of “NES hard.” 

6. Irritating Stick

Yes, the game’s title gives its difficulty level away, but to truly appreciate how frustrating Irritating Stick is, you’ve got to play it for yourself. 

Irritating Stick is like a blend of Super Monkey Ball and the board game Operation. It requires you to guide a small ball through a series of themed mazes that leave you almost no room to safely maneuver. To make matters worse, you have to race against a constantly ticking clock that’s absurd restrictions essentially require you to truly master this game within a few levels. Of course, true mastery may not be possible for most players as each level seems to add a new wrinkle that makes you wonder how you will ever get through in time. 

Oh, and I have to give a special shout-out to the game’s announcer who screams “Watch out, you’re too close to the edge!” whenever you’re near the game’s barriers. Yes, I know I’m too close to the edge, now kindly leave me the **** alone. 

5. Incredible Crisis

Remember that scene in Metal Gear Solid when you had to mash the Circle button to survive the torture device until it felt like your wrist was going to break? Well, imagine that scene stretched out across most of a full game. That’s Incredible Crisis. 

Incredible Crisis is a collection of eclectic minigames that often require you to mash buttons as fast as humanly possible. Actually, I take that back. No human can be expected to survive this gauntlet of finger destroying terror. Oh, and if a minigame doesn’t require you to furiously mash buttons, that means it’s only going to destroy you in some other strange way. 

The bizarre set of skills required to beat this game means that it may even frustrate gamers who otherwise seek such challenges.

4. Tomb Raider 3

Yes, the first two Tomb Raider games are difficult. However, part of their challenge (especially today) stems from their ambitious design which was often ahead of what you could reasonably expect from video game technology at the time. 

Tomb Raider 3 is on a different (difficulty) level, though. Even if the game didn’t add a ridiculous number of spikes, boulders, pits, and traps waiting to end your run before you know they’re there, its bewildering level design that tried to recreate the experience of having no idea what you’re doing in the middle of a dark tomb has broken even diehard series fans. 

Despite its better moments and incredible pedigree, it’s genuinely hard to recommend this game to anyone but masochists. I genuinely don’t know if it’s possible to beat this game without a strategy guide or walkthrough. 

3. Nightmare Creatures

There’s a degree to which early PlayStation games were fundamentally unprepared to handle the challenges of 3D action/adventure game design. That means that any additional difficulties added to that underlying level of challenge make some games of that era nearly impossible to properly play today. 

I guess that’s just my way of saying that Nightmare Creatures is indeed the nightmare it bills itself as. What would already be a challenging romp through a hellish world of monsters is made that much worse by the presence of an adrenaline system that effectively serves as a time limit and forces you to kill enemies as quickly as possible despite often being unprepared for them in every conceivable way.

Some games throw you into the water to teach you how to swim. Nightmare Creatures holds your head under the water as you lean because it fundamentally doesn’t want you to succeed.

2. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins

The “fall” of the stealth genre from mainstream gaming in recent years has long disappointed genre fans who rank such games among their favorites of all-time. Yet, it has to be acknowledged that even the best stealth games were often difficult in a way that could immediately dissuade even tested gamers. 

While difficulty is a given in many stealth titles, Tenchu sometimes abuses the privilege by going out of your way to remind you that you are weak. Maybe it’s because many of us were just excited to play a game where we were a badass ninja assassin, but the way that Tenchu required you to play it safe and employ trial-and-error tactics to survive its various challenges left many burying their hands in their face as they tried to understand what they were doing wrong. 

Even after you appreciated Tenchu for what it was and even discovered what the game expected of you, it always found a way to force you to make that little mistake that would instantly end a run. 

1. King’s Field

Is it cliche to name a game from eventual Dark Souls developer FromSoftware as the hardest PS1 title ever? For the sake of argument, let’s say it is. That doesn’t change the fact that even Dark Souls veterans will find themselves surprised by how difficult this game truly is. 

King’s Field was pretty revolutionary for its time, which means that many gamers simply didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing when they booted up this title. What the most patient PS1 gamers discovered, though, is that King’s Field is basically a rough draft of Dark Souls combined with an especially difficult dungeon crawler. Even if the game’s ambitious 3D visuals and the jank they produce didn’t create additional challenges, this title’s brutal combat, a parade of traps, confounding controls, deliberately slow pace, and complete lack of direction even made hardcore PC RPG fans wonder what this game was and why it hated them so much.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

King’s Field doesn’t hate you, but it’s a testament to what the game was going for that it’s both clearly an early look at the next 25 years of gaming and a title that will likely still challenge generations to come.

The post 15 Hardest PlayStation One Games of All-Time appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[youngboy-oldmind]

ALBUM REVIEW- Scorpion

“Breakin' news in my life, I don't run to the blogs/ The only ones I wanna tell are the ones I can call/ They always ask, "Why let the story run if it's false?/ You know a wise man once said nothin' at all/ I'm exhausted and drained, I can't even pretend/ All these people takin' miles when you give 'em an inch/ All these followers but who gon' follow me to the end?/ I guess I'll make it to the end and I'ma find out then”

Scorpion, Drake’s eighth major release and 2018′s most streamed album of the year, can be summed up as an extremely mixed bag. With extremely high highs and very low lows, its difficult to reach a simple conclusive thought on this record. It’s not as bad as More Life or If You’re Reading This Its Too Late, but it definitely has clear weaknesses. If you have an hour and a half of free time (Yes, this album is 90 minutes), and you are a fan of Drake’s sound, then this album may appeal to you.

Drake pretty much established his sound in 2010 so I don’t expect to be blown away by a new release from him. Throughout his career, Drake generally utilizes syncopated rapping, pop-esque songs, spacey instrumentals, and hit-or-miss singing. Drake doesn’t deviate from this box on Scorpion either.

Like I mentioned, the high points on this record are very high. Everybody knows the hits that blew up from this record: “God’s Plan”, “Nice For What”, “In My Feelings”. Out of this bunch “Nice For What” is my favorite; I’ve always thought “God’s Plan” was overplayed and “In My Feelings” just isn’t good. High points on this album also include “Emotionless”, “Sandra’s Rose”, and the very strong outro track “March 14″.

The soulful production on “8 Out of 10″, “Sandra’s Rose”, and “Nice For What” stuck out on this project. Drake usually uses a more spacey, piano and bass sound, but when he decides to twist an old soul or R&B record, it usually ends up a strong track. 

Next, there’s a group of songs that are in the middle mostly because they sound empty. Whether Drake’s singing has very little emotion, the lyrics are bland, or the concept isn’t displayed in a compelling or interesting way. I don’t want to list all the songs that fit in this category, but there are a couple that embody one of each type of mid songs. “Is There More” is a low emotion, bland lyric song with a simple echoey beat that says very little. It’s not unlistenable though, just 100% neutral. He uses what I’ve termed as “reverse lyrics”. Reverse Lyrics are the type of bars that reference itself with a very simple punchline. For example:

“She said she puzzled, tryna put it together/

Said her head’s in the clouds, but I’m under the weather”

Those aren’t Drake’s lyrics, I just made those up as I’m writing this. But if you read this in his voice, it sounds like something he’d say, right? On the upside, Nai Palm’s singing on the tail end of this track was beautiful and deserved to be on a better song.

"Nonstop”, another mid track, is just Drake bragging and flexing in the most monotone voice imaginable. “Final Fantasy” sounds like a robot reading a script of bad smut and dirty talking. And while “Blue Tints” has more effort and emotion in his voice, this track feels like it was an extra from What a Time to Be Alive randomly thrown on this project.

There are few tracks where Drake’s singing is bad, but the worst is tied between “Jaded” and “Finesse”. I’ll give “Jaded” a slight upper hand because the instrumental is a little better. Drake’s singing on “Summer Games” wasn’t good either, but I was more distracted by the instrumental that sounds like background music in Tron: Legacy. Drake’s singing sometimes hits, but most of the time it sounds overly melodramatic and squeaky for someone who also consistently brags and acts tough.

I was very excited for “Don’t Matter To Me” solely because it featured the GOAT Michael Jackson. But I was greatly disappointed because it just sounds like a worse demo of “Passionfruit” with Jackson’s eerie vocals on the chorus and Drake’s mediocre singing in the verses.

I want to take a second to acknowledge “Ratchet Happy Birthday” because it left me the most conflicted on this record. The first half of the song sounded like someone was randomly pressing sound affect and snare buttons over Drake’s singing. But once the drum kicked in the second half, everything greatly improved and actually became very pleasant to listen to. And I audibly laughed at the “its your brrrr...” gunshot-rolled-tongue noise he made. If all this was intentionally comical and done on purpose, then I like this track.

Anything else on this project was either middle of the road or more of the same complaints I already mentioned. Drake could’ve cut out 20-25 minutes of this project and it wouldn’t change the final feel of this project. I think that speaks to how bloated and drawn out this project is. Besides a couple tracks, most of it is listenable and a portion is very good. Drake’s at his strongest when he’s talking about his personal life, and at his weakest when he’s monotone bragging or singing in a range too high for his voice. But most of this project is Drake staying in his comfort zone, making predictable, unambitious music. And because its Drake, it’s always going to sell.

Top 3 Tracks:

1) Sandra’s Rose

2) Nice For What

3) March 13

Overall Grade: C-

[fluffypeachwriting]

Aqours’ favourite video games hcs!

Happy 5th anniversary to Aqours and 10th anniversary to the whole Love Live series! The series is really special and close to my heart! Heres to many more happy years to come!

Here are some headcanons about the Aqours girls favourite game genres, and some ideas about specific games! (under a read more again) 

Chika definitely plays mobile gacha games, dedicating herself to saving for her favourite characters while resisting the temptation to spend gems on any cards she finds cute! She’d end up spending a lot of in-game currency on member slots, because she wants to treasure every card and character so she can look back on all the cards she’s earned from events and gacha! Even going as far as suggesting that Aqours do covers of her favourite songs from the games! I think she’d love Bandori, and Kokoro, Kasumi or Hina would be her favourite girls!

Riko may not be as well-versed in video games as some of the other girls, but would occasionally play games that don’t take too many hours at a time to play. She’d love Nintendogs, and be super enthusiastic about training them, while being cautious that they get enough play-time too. She’d name her dogs after the ones she knows in town and let her pug sit next to her while she shows them all to them! At some point she may even buy a Tamagotchi or something similar, to carry around with her and show everyone!

You would buy co-op games to play with the other girls, particularly party games like 1-2-Switch! A lot of her play-time would be spent practicing the mini-games she’s not so good with at home on her own or with her family so she can flex on everyone when the time comes! She wouldn’t be too bothered about who wins even though she’d be a natural at movement-based mini games, but she puts up a competitive front to hype everyone up! Whenever the girls would have a sleepover or a long journey, she’d bring games for everyone to play, but they’d end up making too much noise!

Ruby actually owns Pokémon Shield (from the Dengeki diary entries I think) which is adorable! Her favourite Pokémon would be any one she finds cute! Her goal would be to create a team that is both powerful and cute! Woolo would be her most treasured teammate, and ask if she can get merch when her birthday comes around, having plushies at her side while she plays! When new Pokémon are announced she’d be super hyped to find them in-game! She enjoys that there aren’t big time-limits on battles, so she can think about strategies and such, even if they confuse her a little.

Yoshiko seems like she’d enjoy dungeon crawler games, probably liking a shoot-em-up combat style. Many hours would be spend grinding levels so she can get the best equipment for her character, unlocking achievements to become the ultimate fallen angel gamer! She’d stay up until the sun rises playing games if she was allowed, but she’d get so into the game she’d probably yell unintentionally when she loses a battle, which would lead to an unhappy mother. I’d put The Binding of Isaac as a favourite, since the play-style and theming would be right up her alley but she’s just a year under the age rating so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Hanamaru would immerse herself in story-heavy, atmospheric games. She’d prefer more calm stories where you can take time to look around the game world and carry on at her own pace. Her favourite thing to do would be exploring every nook and cranny to find new dialogue from NPCs that aren’t that important but make the world feel real! I think she’d love Undertale despite finding the bullet hell sections super tricky! That wouldn’t stop her from having a fun time though!

Dia would prefer all kinds of puzzles games, to keep her mind active and in tip-top shape. The platform wouldn’t matter too much, having one or two on her phone and having physical puzzles at home. She’d look up all kinds of games to see what kind of games people come up with, her favourite series being the Professor Layton games, not expecting to get invested in the characters and then wanting to follow their adventures!

Mari still plays all kinds of old flash games in her free time, especially the ‘crappy’ ones, saying something like “I have to give all of them love, someone put their shiny effort into this!” if she was asked about it. Time would be spent hopping around from game to game, looking for old ones she can’t remember the name of, but some games like the Learn to Fly series would be ones she regularly comes back to for fun and nostalgia. However she’d stay away from flash horror games because, while she wouldn’t admit it, she still gets freaked out by them, and she’d rather have a fun time navigating a penguin through the air.

Kanan would play mobile games like Chika, but only play simple games she can quickly open between working or sneakily at school. Games like Crossy Road or Angry Birds would pique her attention as she constantly tries to beat her high score every time! She could be studying or diving while still being annoyed that she almost made it but got distracted at the last second. The other girls would notice this and find it funny that she gets so worked up over it! She’d try to work her way up the global leaderboards, and come running into the club room when she gets close to a top spot, earning cheers from her friends because they know how invested she is. Dia wouldn’t be too amused though…

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #448

Top Ten Moments in The Secret of Monkey Island

This week was one of those weeks where I had a list all ready to go, and then I discovered something that made me throw the whole lot in the bin and write something new in a hurry. And the thing that I discovered is that it is, approximately, the 30th birthday of my favourite videogame of all time, The Secret of Monkey Island.

When I was a kid, I’d go round my cousins’ house and play on their Spectrum or their C64. I played the usual 8-bit hits of the era; Dizzy, Ghostbusters, Skool Daze, that really weird and probably insanely offensive Spitting Image beat-em-up… then I got my Amiga around Christmas 1990, and I figured games would be more-or-less the same but with more colours. I was wrong.

I got two games in short succession that utterly changed my appreciation for the medium: Lemmings and Monkey Island. The first was funny, inventive, colourful and characterful; a fiendishly difficult puzzler that nevertheless made you want to come back for more, because you just fell in love with the Lemmings themselves. It was like nothing I’d seen before, and felt impossible. Monkey Island, on the other hand, was not only better, not only more my cup of tea gameplay wise, but just blew the doors of my perception of what games were and what they could do. It was like an interactive movie before that was even a term; a living cartoon where you were the main character. A funny, wordy, witty adventure story, full of gags and references that I didn’t quite get but that I knew were smart and humorous (and there was lots of daft humour in there that I did get, too). It wasn’t just a case of being able to talk to people – I’d done that in stuff like Skool Daze – but the ability to solve problems, to divine solutions; to work out that you can drug dogs by smearing meat with dubious petals. And even when do did something like that, the game was irreverent enough to put a disclaimer on screen assuring you that the dogs were only sleeping. It broke the fourth wall, and I was only just old enough to understand what that meant in narrative terms; this was a game about gaming, about stories and adventures. It was filled with movie references (George Lucas even makes a cameo!). It inspired me to write into Amiga Power for help with a particular puzzle, and they printed my letter, but by the time it came out about three months had passed and I’d solved the puzzle on my own.

Monkey Island was the first game that I loved as much as the cartoons I watched or the comics I read; Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck and the rest were the first gaming characters that I took to my heart in the same way as Bumblebee, Garfield, or Peter Venkman. I’ve said it before, but I’m not sure I’d love games the same way if I’d never played Monkey Island. It certainly changed the types of games I wanted to play; even though I’ve enjoyed my fair share of platformers, racing games, and shooters, it’s always the slower-paced narrative games that I come back to, the Fables and Mass Effects and Deus Exes of this world (even faster-paced games like Halo, Gears and Half-Life still grab me with their stories, as daft as they may sometimes be). Basically, Monkey Island made me a sucker for a dialogue tree.

Monkey Island was my gateway to a whole host of other LucasArts adventure games; Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango… Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer were among the first names of games creators that I ever knew (probably the very first, in all honesty, was Peter Molyneux – I am British after all). It was a window into a much larger world, one filled with choice, consequence, non-sequiturs, and rubber chickens with pullies in the middle.

Anyway, to celebrate Monkey Island, here are my Top Ten moments from the game. See you next year for the Monkey Island 2 list.

How to Get Ahead in Navigating: I’ve gone about it before, but this simple, daft joke – swapping a guide book for an actual navigator’s head – blew my mind as a kid. It forced me to think differently about puzzles and comedy and how to approach the game. For little old me, it was a revelation, and just desperately funny.

How Appropriate, You Fight Like a Cow: a discussion of Monkey can’t be had without talking about the innovative swordfights; a wholly successful attempt to replicate the verbal parrying of a classic Hollywood swordfight, the insult-riposte dynamic also reinforced the puzzle mechanics of the game. Sublime.

Order Hint Book: Monkey Island was the first adventure game I played, so I didn’t realise at the time how innovative its gameplay was, because you could never get hopelessly, game-ruiningly stuck, and nor could you die. Except at one point, when you drown, but even that is a hilarious gag that is easily avoidable. The control verbs changing from things like “Pick Up” to “Decompose” is just tremendous.

Use Staple Remover on Tremendous, Dangerous-Looking Yak: Monkey plays fast and loose with game conventions, sending itself up in the process; the moment when Guybrush enters a room and is hidden from view, undergoing a series of preposterous and expensive-sounding adventures, which you only know about because you can read his actions in the sentence line as if you were still controlling him (“use… gopher repellent… on another gopher…”), is a phenomenal piece of comedy stagecraft, a game parodying games parodying itself, using its own architecture to tell a joke (as well as being a play on the whole “noises off” style of gag in the first place).

Ask Me About Loom: like I say, I’d never played an adventure game before; I’d never heard of any LucasArts (sorry, Lucasfilm Games) titles, apart from maybe Maniac Mansion. So the bloke in the SCUMM Bar with his “Ask me about LOOM” badge, who launches into an intense sales spiel when you speak to him, didn’t make sense at first. But when it clicked, the very idea of a pirate in this game directly referencing another game was fourth-wall-breaking hilarious genius; happening right near the start of the game lets you know what you’re in for.

The Rock: when you get to Monkey Island, there’s a puzzle where you need to use a makeshift seesaw to catapult a boulder onto a tree (or something). If you line it up wrong, you can sink your own ship (and presumably drown your mutinous crew). The first time I played the game, this is what I did; there’s another great gag where castaway Herman Toothrot turns out to have a ship of his own. But the second time I played through, I didn’t sink my ship, and sailed back with my original crew. This blew my mind; whilst obviously not at Warren Spector levels of emergent game design, the fact that you could actually change what happened, to have a different experience to another player, was phenomenal, and another one of those watershed gaming moments for me.

Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates): the trio of loitering pirates are funny in and of themselves, with their breath mints and Pieces o’ Eight and minutes from a PTA meeting. But what I always found really funny was that they are literally called “Men of Low Moral Fibre (Pirates)”; that’s what it says in the sentence line when you hover your cursor over them (an aside: Monkey Island and Lemmings probably taught me how to use a mouse). Again it was the game using the structure of a game to tell a joke.

Rescuing Otis: this is what promoted me to write into Amiga Power back in the day: how the heck do you rescue Otis from the jail?! There are delightful red herrings regarding files and whatnot, but the eventual solution – juggling acidic grog from mug to mug as you make your way through the town to eventually pour it on his lock – was a rare moment of fast-paced tension in a relatively slow game. Solving it on my own made me feel so clever at a tender age. And it’s funny! So great!

A Rubber Chicken with a Pulley in the Middle: ah, my beloved rubber chicken. Found early on in the game and used in a couple of puzzles, I don’t think I quite grasped the silly brilliance of it; as a kid you’re just more accepting of the surreal. Why does a rubber chicken have a pulley? It’s basically just so you can zip-line across a chasm; it’s a wholly functional, boring plot device. But it’s also a rubber chicken. It’s sublime comic genius. And then you cook it! Madness!

The Voodoo Root: I’ve not even mentioned The Ghost Pirate LeChuck yet (if I’m honest his best “moments” are in the sequel) but the finale of the game, when you’ve distilled your Voodoo Root and you’re dispatching ghosts left right and centre, brilliantly marries an epic adventure action sequence with the point-and-click structure of the game itself. But then you fight LeChuck and he boots you around the island, until finally you crash land on a soft drinks dispenser, and finally defeat him with… a can of root beer. Cue fireworks and a strangely romantic ending. Is it as good as the ending of Monkey 2? No, but nothing is. Literally nothing, in the history of the universe.

Wow, there we are. I never had room for the dance steps, the recipe, finding the treasure, defeating the Sword Master, or Stan. Stan! I didn’t have room for Stan! See, that’s how good the game is; I barely mentioned one of the greatest gaming villains of all time, and I didn’t even get round to one of the medium’s funniest supporting characters. Blimey.

Man, I love The Secret of Monkey Island. Ron and the rest of you guys: you done good. Thanks for the memories.

[pootstablook]

Actually, i take that back.

This copy paste from my server will explain it all. Hey there @everyone The name is Pootstablook and i have an announcement to make. I'm going to stop doing anything undertale related from now on and move over to more original stuff, in other words, do the things i love doing the most. My motivation for Revenge and Rusted have pretty much sunk to the bottom, and i honestly don't want to work on those anymore. I had a good ride when it comes to Rusted and Revenge, heck even Undertale in general! But now it's just too much for me. I'm sorry for those who've been excited to see where these two are going, and i'm sad to say that i have to put an end to it. Abubakr, Aquirious, Draco, my entire team in general, i'm sorry for making you do all of this, i mean i really appreciated that you all wanted to work with me, and i'm sorry for drawing the line just like that. And since i'm doing all of this then i can atleast do something in return. I'm not going to give these au's to anyone, but i can reveal what i had in mind for it. From story to designs just so you can have an idea of what it's going to be like. Which is why i'm going to unlock #spoiler-newspaper . Anyways, i'm going to move over to my tavern server just so i can work on the things i love the most, and if any of you are interested then you're free to join it https://discord.gg/ZaGsXbk I'll say my final goodbye to this server when i'm done showing everything we've done for these two projects. Anyways, thank you all for listening. And since i mentioned that i’m going to give info about revenge here then i might aswell tell em here before i leave this blog and move on with another one. Act 1 Lore:  Once upon a time, a human child fell down to the sealed place known as the UNDERGROUND. This unknown human somehow survived the fall and started to explore this place, until they met a flower that'd sooner or later be their friend. But that's what most people will think that this human would do. In the end, this human started to kill every living being inside the underground to gain LOVE. What is LOVE you may ask? Well, a certain skeleton once said " When you have enough EXP, your LOVE increases. LOVE, too, is an acronym. It stands for Level of Violence.", at the end of the day, this human succeeded their goal to reach maximum LOVE. From the caretaker of the RUINS, the ROYAL GUARDS, their famous actor and even a lazy skeleton tried their best to stop this human. Some say that the monsters have won multiple times, and yet..... it felt like that the human never died. But there was one monster that didn't get their chance.... to help them. Papyrus the skeleton, a skeleton who've dreamt to become a part of the royal guard, and yet this kind soul wouldn't even hurt a fly. But, he got killed with a smile on his face. Papyrus still wants another chance to confront the human, but sadly he couldn't..... until.[[ACT 1]] We enter a void like area where monsters rests their souls after being brutally murdered. A place where monsters can do anything they want! Meet their loved ones, partake on a good game or two or even look at the floating islands grow bigger every day. But Papyrus didn't seem all that happy as he used to be. It seems like that something bothered him. His friend and his brother tried to ask what's wrong, but Papyrus couldn't explain it. Later that day, Papyrus started to hear voices coming from left to right. He started to get scared and thought that he was going insane! The voices became louder and louder, until the point where it was getting too much for Papyrus to handle. He collapsed into the ground and tried to speak with this mysterious voice, and surprise surprise, the mysterious voice responded to Papyrus. Rise and shine.... Papyrus Papyrus was confused for a second and had no idea what the voice was talking about. It then said. It seems like..... your soul...... has given up..... on you..... Papyrus looked up and saw a disturbing floating head infront of him. He didn't question it, in fact, he was amazed to see such thing. But then the voice kept on going.  Allow me.... to help you.... Out of curiosity, Papyrus asked what he meant with that. The floating head claimed that he knew what Papyrus wanted to do when it comes to the human, and apparently, he's willing to help him reach that goal. But that'd be impossible for him right? He's dead and most monsters think that there's no way out. But this mysterious head said that there was a way to get a second chance, and all he needed was Papyrus to cooperate with this mysterious being. He wanted to refuse it, but the thought of getting a second chance to confront the human once and for all was a tempting offer for Papyrus. So in the end, he accepted it and followed his orders to escape this realm. His objective was apparently simple, all he had to do is to find a FLOWER. A flowey? In a place like this? Thought Papyrus, but the head claimed that there was a flower in the darker section of this realm, where bad memories resides. Papyrus didn't like the thought of "Bad memories" but he's willing to risk it, after all, he's the GREAT PAPYRUS! and he's willing to take the chance to confront the human.  Papyrus had to use everything he had to go through these bad memories. Disturbing looking bone creatures, rolling meatballs, evil traplings, floating puzzle pieces and a dog? Were obstacles that Papyrus had to pass in order to complete his objective. At last, he finally found it, the FLOWER. Papyrus then asked what he's supposed to do with the flower? The figure responded with. You need to....... DESTROY IT........ Papyrus got shocked and refused immidiately, he didn't want to kill a flower just like that! But the figure told him that it's the only way to recieve his second chance to confront the human. Papyrus pondered for a second, he didn't really what to say or do at this point. But suddenly, this flower started to grow. Papyrus got startled that a small flower could grow so big in a matter of a second. The figure then said. Destroy it.... before it's too late.... Papyrus had no idea what he meant with "Too late", it's just a flower. Roots then grew on the ground and started to attack Papyrus. The flower's petals started to get more pointy and it started to grow thorns on its body. It then got a disturbing looking face that stared him down. Papyrus panicked and tried to calm it down. But words isn't the solution at this point, he had no choice but to listen to the figure's order.... to DESTROY IT.Once Papyrus hit a bone attack on the flowers face..... then everything went black. All he could hear was laughter. He then opened his eyes and noticed that he was back at his home at SNOWDIN. He decided to meet the human later than usual, and actually plan on how he's going to confront the human. But the voice was still there, and told him what exactly he had to do.... and without any hesitation, Papyrus listened and followed his orders. Papyrus is no longer himself anymore. Act 2 Lore:  Papyrus tried to prepare himself for the inevitable, he practised his attacks over and over to improve and ends up gaining new ones. How strange it was, that he've gained such power out of nowhere. In fact, he abused it a bit just to see what he's capable of. Since Papyrus didn't show up to the human as he used to before, then Sans took his place to confront them. Sans didn't even try to fight back, he's just telling the human about the consequences for killing innocent monsters to gain something that isn't even worth it. But his words didn't affect the human, and Sans' only option was to stall the human just so the monsters got more time to evacuate. Sans managed to get some time, but in the end..... he failed to stall them longer. He got weak when the human managed to hit a punch directly into Sans' stomach. Sans tried to tell the consequences yet again, he was hoping that some of his words could change the human's mind. But sadly, he failed. He got killed by recieving alot of hits from the human, and his last words was "Go get him..... brother.... wherever..... you are....". [[ACT 2]] The human finally arrived to the JUDGEMENT HALL and it seems like that they've got alot of LOVE, reaching over to Level 17, and yet something felt wrong when it comes to the human. Sans did a good thing when he stalled the human. The human proceeded to walk through the hall and hoped to kill their final victim, ASGORE. But someone was blocking their path. The bells started to ring and an ominous feeling started to go through the humans body. The monster that stood infront of them started to say. NYEH HEH HEH!! GREETINGS HUMAN!! I CAN SEE THAT YOU'RE SURPRISED TO SEE THE GREAT PAPYRUS HERE OUT OF ALL PLACES!! WELL.... AS YOU CAN SEE.... I AM HERE TO GIVE YOU AN OPTION. TWO IN FACT!! BUT BEFORE YOU CAN CHOOSE..... I WANT TO ASK YOU A QUESTION..... WHAT'S THE POINT OF KILLING? IS IT SOME SORT OF JOKE THAT I'M MISSING...? IT'S JUST SOMETHING THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND WITH YOU HUMAN.... AND I'D LIKE TO KNOW.... WHY...? I'M HERE FOR YOU!! AND I'M WILLING TO HELP AND LEARN YOU THAT IT'S WRONG!! SO... YOUR OPTIONS ARE.... LISTEN.... OR F-FA-FACE T-THE CONSEQUENCES The human didn't look amused at all and started to take a step forward. Papyrus backed up a bit out of fear. And yet he was brave enough to say.... ..... I SEE..... MY WORDS WON'T DO AT THIS POINT.... BUT.... I CAN MAKE A PROMISE..... AN EFFORT I'M WILLING TO TAKE.... TO CHANGE WHAT'S GOING ON INSIDE YOUR HEAD!! ... AND I WILL GIVE YOU.... A LESSON.... YOU'LL HARDLY FORGET. The battle has begun.  * PAPYRUS  35 ATK  50 DEF * The lesson has begun.   Act 3 Lore A wild battle between two monsters has begun. Papyrus tried his best to beat the human with all he got. He revealed his unknown powers to the human to the human in order to succeed to beat them and not letting them pass. From a regular blue soul attack.... to a gray one? This soul was known as the "Ping soul", a soul that'd put you back to into place every 3rd second. But after all of that.... Papyrus failed..... [[9999999]] His weapon split into two pieces, and the knife even managed to land a huge scratch on Papyrus' chest. Papyrus collapsed into the ground and started to cover his wound.... But after all of that.... Papyrus started to cry with a smile on his face. He then said. NYEH.... HEH... HEH... AFTER ALL OF THAT.... MY WORDS DIDN'T AFFECT YOU ONE BIT...... IT'S UPSETTING.... BUT I'M NOT MAD..... I STILL BELIEVE THAT THERE'S SOMETHING GOOD INSIDE YOU HUMAN..... I BELIEVE SO...... I KNOW..... SO.... At this point Papyrus would've fade away and return to the realm of the dead..... but.... something happened.... the particles that faded away from Papyrus' body started to come back..... but he twitched violently..... Oh dear.... it seems like our friend is out of commission... that's a shame The human watched the twitching corpse standing on his feet again with a smile..... After long years..... i finally have a body to walk around with..... and it's all thanks to you. The human had no idea what was going on, so they attempted to run towards the twitching corpse and put an end to it once and for all.... without success.... The corpse just took the knife away and shoved it violently into a pillar. Hehehe.... i can see.... that you're not fully done with me..... Then how about we play.... a little game.... The corpse started to laugh like a maniac and it's entire body started to change.[[ACT 3]] The corpse's body started to slowly fade away, piece after piece.... except for the head. The head remained whilst the entire area around started to get.... corrupted.... The head started to grow and grow.... until it was a disturbing floating head.... Human specimen.... I haven't been in this world for so long now..... but i can tell that you've killed alot of monsters.... you've certainly gained lots of LOVE.... NOW IT'S TIME TO PUT IT TO THE TEST!! A bunch of disturbing spinning Papyrus heads started to appear from left to right, they spewed out bones, the word NYEH and even.... meatballs? Papyrus was no longer with us.... A creature that is beyond our reality has taken over the poor soul's body.... and uses it as a puppet.... Now you're facing.... Corrupted Papyrus [[Act 1 sprites]]

[[Act 2 sprites]]

[[Act 3 sprites]]

Thank you all for joining my blog.

[entergamingxp]

Celebrating Blackness in Gaming’s Past, Present, and Future

June 9, 2020 2:30 PM EST

During times like this, it’s especially important to highlight and celebrate black heroes, casts, and developers themselves in video games.

With what’s been happening in the past and especially in light of current events, it’s important to reflect on the video games that have centered or been inclusive of black characters, as well as games led by black developers. Representation has been an ongoing conversation in video games (and other forms of media), and the desire for new stories told from the perspectives of diverse voices and backgrounds has only continued to grow.

In recent years, more games have been releasing that highlight black characters or have been created by black developers. A large chunk of those games are created by independent developers, who have far more creative freedom to craft the kinds of characters they would like to see in games. Even rarer are games led and published by black developers, with many of these narratives still being told by white creators.

But compared with the amount of white protagonists (and all or mostly white casts) that we often see in video games, there’s still so much work to be done. As we’ve been seeing in the past week, plenty of black creatives have been given the long-due spotlight to showcase their talents as opportunities from companies are finally opening up. I truly hope this will lead seeing more blackness reflected in both the games that we play and their internal development talent.

That said, there have been notable black characters and stories told through video games that are worth highlighting. Below, here are some of the most prominent games of the past several years that either star a black character, have a significant (as in mostly) black cast, or were made by black developers.

Telltale’s The Walking Dead

Many fans were enraptured by the first season of The Walking Dead, which introduced two lead black characters: Lee Everett and Clementine. Their relationship and overall story arc–backed by some seriously powerful writing–gave birth to one of the greatest narratives in gaming I have ever witnessed. After Lee’s death, seeing Clementine grow far too fast as she fights for survival while reconciling her perceived role in her father figure’s death is moving and harrowing. Most of all, Telltale’s The Walking Dead creates a sense of constant urgency and dread that completely sucks in the player and doesn’t let go until the very end.

Mafia III

Set in 1968 New Orleans, Mafia III follows the exploits of Lincoln Clay, a war veteran who aims to build a new criminal organization while seeking revenge on the Italian mob. The game holds an extremely uncompromising gaze at systematic racism while allowing for the black protagonist to empower himself and take back power from those who would strive to oppress him. The characters are compelling, and the setting and story of Mafia III offers a rare gaming experience that interweaves the experience of actual blackness in its narrative.

Chromatose

Chromatose is an upcoming indie title by a black lead developer going by the moniker Akabaka. A visual novel and JRPG blend influenced by Persona 3, it follows the protagonist as he awakens in a strange nightmare after a fall that should have ended his life. Amnesiac strangers are also trapped in this world for their own unique reasons. The haunting visuals filled with strong color contrast convey a tale filled with danger at every turn. Between a captivating and diverse cast, excellent monster designs, and a fast-paced battle system, Chromatose seems to be shaping up to be a gem of an indie game.

Watch Dogs 2

Watch Dogs 2 takes place in a fictionalized version of the San Francisco Bay Area and stars Marcus Holloway, a hacker who works with the hacking group DedSec to take down the city’s advanced surveillance system known as ctOS. Having the black hacker Marcus taking the lead role in this game adds a unique perspective on the plot that deals with fighting back in a system designed to strip away power and silence its citizens. Seeing him fight tirelessly and slowly gain traction against the city government is incredibly empowering and strengthens the overall narrative even more.

Murder By Numbers

For fans of the excellent Ace Attorney series comes an indie game with a similar approach to storytelling, over-the-top characters, and investigative gameplay. Murder By Numbers takes place in 1996 Los Angeles and stars Honor Mizrahi, an actress on a hit TV detective show. Unfortunately, her boss winds up dead just moments after he fires her and she finds herself forced to investigate his murder in order to secure her own innocence. Putting aside the harsh reality of black women being kicked out of their own careers, the game does well in emulating the fun and often ridiculous style of Ace Attorney while establishing its own charm. Much of that charm is attributed to Honor herself, who’s plucky, determined, and resourceful, as well as her interactions with her robot sidekick SCOUT. Murder By Numbers is a fun and lighthearted foray complimented by Picross-style puzzles that’s worth checking out.

Apex Legends

Seemingly (but officially unconfirmed) in response to the Overwatch controversy surrounding its lack of playable black women, the free-to-play Battle Royale game launched with two black women characters: Anita Williams and Ajay Che. Not only that, but these two were and still are front and center in the marketing of Apex Legends, which is very notable. While the game is light on lore (as games in this genre tend to be), both of them have very separate upbringings, personalities, and combat proficiencies. From what we know of them, they have well-fleshed-out motivations for why they fight. And I really love the touch that Ajay is a healer, an archetype you don’t tend to see associated with black women characters.

She Dreams Elsewhere

This indie title is a true rarity in that the entire party is black and stars a black woman protagonist. She Dreams Elsewhere is a surrealist adventure RPG where you traverse protagonist Thalia’s dreamscape along with her friends. She must come to grips with and confront her mental health conditions, and escape from a never-ending coma. One part Undertale, one part Persona, it’s a game made beautiful through its retro simplicity and haunting soundtrack that combines black music such as R&B, funk, and jazz. Not only do we have that level of diversity and culture, but the characters themselves–especially Thalia–are fleshed out and fully-developed. When pitted against the well-designed monsters using abilities grounded in reality, She Dreams Elsewhere truly ups the surrealism surrounding its setting and atmosphere.

EQQO

EQQO is a unique title, in terms of both its passive storytelling and gameplay, as well as the fact that it’s inspired by Ethiopian mythology. This game is the tale of a mother as she weaves a great story of her son born blind yet full of life and love. The puzzle-based exploration and gameplay is presented as a mythological legend slowly unfolding as the mother, playing as the narrator, tells it. Gorgeous orchestrated music complements the visuals in a harmony that gives even more depth to the narrative. Seeing this level of care and detail with a mythology that is rarely represented in gaming gives me hope that the future will bring more games like this one being created and given proper attention.

Cyberpunk 2077

It’s exceedingly rare to find a triple A title’s universe created by a black person, and yet the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 is just that exception. Mike Pondsmith is best known for his work for the publisher R. Talsorian Games, where he developed a majority of the company’s roleplaying game lines. His most recent project is the collaboration between himself and CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077, which takes place in his own Cyberpunk RPG universe. Pondsmith’s involvement in the video game’s development mostly focuses on the game world aspect and mechanics as well as his general input, such as shooting a bulletproof backpack to test just how a bullet would react with it; for implementing in the game properly, of course.

Streets of Rage 4

The triumphant return of the wildly popular 2D side scrolling beat-em-up franchise, Streets of Rage 4 stars a cast almost entirely of black/POC fighters including newcomer Cherry Hunter. Wood Oak City falls under the control of a new crime syndicate led by Mr. X’s children, the Y Twins, who are planning on brainwashing the city with the use of hypnotic music. The plot, while simple, is a great excuse to beat up some mooks and the character designs, animation, and music are phenomenal. Also that’s not to mention that Cherry, Floyd Iraia, and Cherry’s father Adam Hunter are featured very prominently on the cover and the general advertising. It’s great to see a beat-em-up starring so many cool black characters.

Earthnight

A love letter to classic fast-paced 2D platformers (think Sonic the Hedgehog), Earthnight uses the genre to tell a tale of a bleak dragon apocalypse where humans have been exiled to space, forced to live in orbit above the planet. Protagonists Sydney and Stanley team up one day and decide to skydive back to Earth, taking out as many dragons as they can along the way. The 2D animations are breathtaking; everything from the ripples in their clothing, to the fluidity of their general movements, to the colorful and insane monsters that can take up nearly the entire screen are stunning. It’s clear there was a lot of love and effort put into this game. I also need to mention how much I love Sydney’s design and the way she’s front and center in the trailers. How can you beat a game that lets you fight dragons because a little girl and a dude had enough?

Broken Age

Broken Age released back in 2014 and 2015 as two separate acts by Double Fine and starred protagonists Vella Tartine and Shay Volta (played by Masasa Moyo and Elijah Wood, respectively). While initially their narratives are completely separate from each other, as the story unfolds you realize how intertwined they really are. What makes the storytelling so satisfying is that because the protagonists are kept separate for so long, their individual character arcs can develop in a satisfying way without interfering in the overall story. Vella, the young black girl, in particular had a very strong and compelling story worth experiencing. In Broken Age, seeing her deal with traumatic events as she fought back against a seemingly unavoidable force of destruction made for an excellent real-life comparison to black struggle.

Here are some honorable mentions of other games featuring black/POC characters that, though they didn’t make my list, are worth checking out:

Assassin’s Creed Origins

Half-Life: Alyx

Afterparty

Treachery in Beatdown City

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider

Beyond Good and Evil

Remember Me

If you’re looking for more black indie talent, check out this Twitter thread as well as this one. For a huge directory of black game developers and their projects, check out the Black Game Developers website and consider supporting them.

And finally if you’re a Black, Asian, and/or Ethnic minority, Code Coven is offering scholarships for their Intro to Game Making Course, which will be open until June 10, 2020.

Are there any games or developers you know of that deserve a mention? Feel free to sound off in the comments!

June 9, 2020 2:30 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/celebrating-blackness-in-gamings-past-present-and-future/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=celebrating-blackness-in-gamings-past-present-and-future

[sazorak]

Every Game I Played in 2019, Ranked

 2019 sure was a year that happened where I happened to play some video games. Here’s the ones I played enough to form opinions, in a rough ranked order of preference.

It’s kind of weird that I’ve done this for five years now, but hey. I like to talk about things that I like / dislike. Hopefully you’ll empathize with my complaints, and give ones I enjoyed a try.

As a bonus, I also tweeted about the anime I watched and enjoyed this year.

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018

Orm & Cheep: Narrow Squeaks – 1985 – ZX Spectrum – ★

How far would you go for a joke? For the sake of a joke, I spent an hour beating an incomprehensible, shitty ZX Spectrum Game about Orm & Cheep, an 80s British children show I only know about from a Trash Night video making fun of it.

Orm & Cheep: Birthday Party – 1985 – ZX Spectrum – ★

… and also this one, though Birthday Party is marginally better than Narrow Squeaks. Marginally. Extremely marginally. Congratulations to Orm & Cheap: Birthday Party.

16. River City Girls – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

The style of River City Girls is great. I like a lot of what it’s doing in terms of look and sound. It’s just that… well, River City Ransom’s gameplay was interesting something-like 30 years ago. Gameplay wise, this game hasn’t evolved that much from OG RC Ransom. The combat certainly feels better, but as far as it controls… I can’t tell if it’s not taking advantage of modern controllers and just sticking too close to the original’s control scheme, or if side-scrolling beat-em-ups are themselves just so staid and dated these days that there’s not much to be done. I just wasn’t having much fun, and the RC Ransom progression of new techniques and stat boosting didn’t exactly make me want to keep going.

It’s a real shame because in terms of pure aesthetics and concept, the game is amazing. I just don’t actually enjoy playing it. Oh well!

15. Baba is You – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

The core gameplay concept of Baba is You is fantastic. The way you manipulate nouns and verbs to construct phrases that operate as equations in a physical environment is super interesting. The early goings of the game were quite fun.

The problem I have with this game is that when you hit a wall in it, that wall can sometimes be impenetrable. I found that Baba is You is at times too subtle with its attempt to “teach” you tricks or onboard you into approaches to puzzles; it’s possible to come to solutions without taking away the lesson the designer intended, which can make later puzzles basically impossible.

The difficulty curve feels all over the place; I was extremely high on this game early on, but after getting completely blocked moving forward for hours on end, with the only real recourse being to either look stuff up or stare at past puzzles to try to figure out what apparently crucial lesson I missed despite coming to my own solutions, I ultimately decided to just do something else.

14. Cadence of Hyrule – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

Zelda has great music. Crypt of the Necrodancer has pretty good rhythm-game action. Combine them, and you get… well, it turns out you get a pretty OK procedurally generated Zelda-game with Necrodancer mechanics, I suppose. The appeal is easy to understand, though I’m personally not sure I care much for the final product.

I enjoyed the original Necrodancer well enough as a simple run-based, short-ish rhythm dungeon crawler. The brevity of each given “run” (stemming in part from my own inadequate skill, I suppose) worked well with the style of gameplay, in that it never really became much of a chore.

Meanwhile, I enjoy Zelda as an extended puzzle adventure game where there’s an innate unthinking flow to the actions. I’m not typically thinking much about the moment-to-moment about the actual mechanics of the action; the brain’s desires flow directly to the motion on the screen, as it were.

Combining the two results in a Necrodancer experience that’s way too long, and a Zelda experience that is way harder to control. Add the fact that the procedurally generated world isn’t that interesting and I’m just rather lukewarm on this. Meh!

13. Super Robot Wars T – 2019 – PS4 – ★★★

It’s fantastic that Super Robot Wars is finally getting proper, high-quality localizations again. It felt like a dream to finally be able to play this franchise again after being forced to stop after the DS era. Playing through the rather roughly translated, and somewhat monotonous SRW OG: Moon Dwellers was good because the OG games tended to have the highest production values and narrative quality (missing out on 2nd OG may have also helped). SRW V was my first foray into the more recent non-OG games, and so shined as something rather fresh to me.

Two years on, and two Super Robot Wars releases later, it’s plain to see that Super Robot Wars’ current annual release cadence is not great. It results in incredibly repetitive, monotonous games that rely heavily on asset reuse— both between games, and even within the same game. Part of the problem is that the derivativeness doesn’t feel additive. It’s not like SRW T is SRW V + SRW X + New Stuff; it’s more that SRW T is a reskinned SRW V, with some heavy series-asset reuse to boot. I think it’d be a bit more tolerable if it felt like these games were building on each other, but every single one feels exactly as slight and mechanically weak.

Super Robot Wars’ combat have not been particularly good from a tactical sense for a long time now. The original OG games were probably the last time the combat was particularly interesting for me, as it presented an actual challenge and difficulty curve. Nowadays, they are entirely fanservice cakewalks, even on the hardest modes. Hell, they’ve apparently decided that increasing the difficulty of the game means you don’t get to chase the special challenge goals, which actually can paradoxically make portions of the hard-mode actually easier than the normal. Bizarre!

 I guess the idea is “well, folks are playing this to see the bits, so if it’s hard they won’t!” Which… I disagree? If the gameplay is deeply unsatisfying, why wouldn’t I just watch the damn series? Crossover shenanigans don’t mean much whey you don’t do much with it. Fanservice talking heads ain’t enough!

The addition of Cowboy Bebop and the return of GaoGaiGar and Gunbuster should have had me onboard. The series list for this game is fantastic. But what they do with it is so flat that about 30 chapters in, I just… stopped. It wasn’t worth it. I’d plainly seen all that it had to offer. Easy, slow, and repetitive gameplay isn’t appealing to me, even if I do get to see Spike Spiegel doing sky donuts to take out a Zaku.

Additionally: stop putting Nadesico in these games. The units are boring, the plot is boring. Stop devoting so much time to it! It sucks!!

12. Ape Out – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

Ape Out is a game where you’re a big ol’ gorilla murdering guys with guns while dope ass percussive jazz drums play to the action. It’s cool, it’s short, it could honestly probably do with being somewhat shorter, but whatever. I enjoyed it.

BattleTech – 2018 – Steam – ★★★★

Despite being famously a “mecha guy”, BattleTech has never really been my thing. While I’m not opposed to mecha-as-tank-analog, it’s not my primary focus in the genre; I like my robots to be fast, really. I like mecha getting into melee and fucking shit up. Mecha for me is a power fantasy. That’s not really BattleTech / MechWarrior’s thing. That all being said, I quite enjoyed my time with BattleTech, the PC-game rendition of the tabletop thing. It’s a neat turn-based tactical robot combat RPG with an interesting overarching campaign structure… to a point.

The first issue I had is pacing. While the game is turn-based, the combat and movement plays out in real-time. And given how lumbering these robots are, this means that a single mission can take aaaages. Think 45 minutes to an hour for a single mission. It took me about 20-30 hours to get to the campaign’s halfway point, which is when the game really started to sour on me.

The second issue is one of variance. Let me run you through the fundamental loop of the game. You are a mercenary captain that has a ship of mechs and mech pilots, and you fly around from planet to planet taking on jobs. You need money to pay for your ship to keep going, as well as to pay your pilots. It’s expensive to outfit your mechs, and severe damage to them can both REALLY eat into your budget and also take weeks in-game to repair. Missions are rated based on difficulty, and you are expected generally to field a greater “tonnage” of mechs in excess to that difficulty. This all plays out pretty well.

The game starts with you possessing mostly lighter mechs, and as you progress, you’re presented more and more missions in the campaign that require increasingly beefier mechs with more armor and more guns. Whereas in the tabletop game there’s presumably a kind of “point” system by which players are given a limited amount of tonnage that they can field on any given mission (for purposes of balance), there’s no such limit in the game; as such, you’re encouraged to field the four-ish beefiest robots you have, as they’re the most likely to kill everything fast while coming out with the least damage.

How do you get these beefy mechs? Well, you don’t buy them; instead, you’re aiming to kill opposing pilots and leave their robots as much intact as possible so that you can salvage or steal them. It’s kind of amusing; your entire gameplan after a point becomes “how the fuck do I shake this robot around a bunch such that its pilot dies???” It makes sense in practice, but if you think about it for even a second it comes across rather silly. Given you need good mechs to progress, you don’t have much other choice other than just running tonnnsss of missions and hoping you eventually get enough mech fragments to reconstruct some of your own. But beefy-ness isn’t the whole story, as some of the robots you can get just plain suck, regardless of their tonnage. You’re basically rolling dice again and again hoping a robot worthy of stealing shows up so you can kill its friends, and try to kill its pilot as gently as possible. You go through this cycle four times, across the four different weight-classes, until you’ve got what you need in terms of a team of class-appropriate mechs.

The fundamental lack of variety in what you field combines with every single mission really being “how do I kneecap everyone” instead of the given mission objective to make the game quite samey. Mission types don’t vary much, and the environments don’t constrain you all that much, either; the only ones that are particularly interesting are moons and Mars-like planets where your mechs’ ability to regulate their heat become much more constrained, which can necessitate loadout changes.  

I enjoyed the story enough for what it was, but honestly? After 30 hours, I was pretty much good. I had a good time with BattleTech, but I’d had my fill.

Mortal Kombat X – 2015 – Steam – ★★★★

In my ongoing adventure of playing the Mortal Kombat games for their goofy plot / story modes and nothing else, I played Mortal Kombat X. I’m not sure there’s much to talk about these other than “Hey I enjoy their dumb ongoing narrative; I wonder where they’ll go from here!”

11. Mortal Kombat XI – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

Ditto. The plot for these games are getting sillier and sillier, and the ending of XI may be the most ridiculous yet. In a good way.

10. Devil May Cry V – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

Character action games are heavily predicated on the question of “How do we spice the game up over time so that it stays interesting… without overwhelming the player?” Devil May Cry V’s answer is “well, we’ll slowly give them more characters with their own expanding skill sets, that’ll be neat!”

It is neat, but I’m not sure it was actually a good idea. The three protagonists all have extremely different move sets, meaning that the forced switches between them on a chapter-to-chapter basis results in you never really mastering any one of them. Each character has a ton of depth, but… take, for example, Nero, the “main” protagonist. He has a sub-mechanic involved with revving his motorcycle sword to boost damage. I never actually figured out how to get to work. Never really had to, because he had so many other mechanics that were also effective, and I never had much time with him alone to dial in the weird motorcycle thing.

DMCV also does probably my least favorite gameplay gimmick of “introduce new mechanics in a boss battle!” Like great, you gave me a whole new move set here, and are now going to rate me on my performance when you’ve never given me a chance to learn these skills? Oh wait, you’re giving me new mechanics in the final boss battle!?! Fuck off. That sucks!

Also, I think I’m an outlier, but I actually preferred playing as V, the control-three-characters-at-once-while-reading-a-book guy. Just felt like I dialed his move set in easier. Weird.

9. Untitled Goose Game – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

I’m not going to pretend that this is a deep game, or an enduring game, or even necessarily a great game. But I had a lot of fun with it, I have a lot of good memories thinking about it, and I am glad that so many people out there are now wrestling with the fact that birds can be both terrible and also good. Untitled Goose Game carries a powerful message about avian kind. You would do well to learn from it.

8. Super Mario Maker 2 – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

Mario Maker 2 is such an incremental upgrade to Mario Maker that it hardly feels like it earns that “2”. That being said: Mario Maker 1 is pretty darn good so it’s not like that’s all that bad. The additional mechanics and story mode are good, granted, but like… I had been wanting more than just Mario Maker 1.5.

As is, it was pretty easy to get bored with Mario Maker pretty quickly, given it was mostly a game I’d already played quite a bit before. The addition of the campaign held my interest for a fair amount of time, but I’m not exactly coming back to this all that often. Hopefully the content updates they seem to be rolling into it keep up.

7. Kind Worlds: Lo-Fi Beats to Write To – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

This is less a video game and more a sort of vague pen-pal application masquerading as a game, but man… the existence of this thing is neat. It’s just a program where folks write letters about their problems, and people send them stuff back. That’s it.  It’s kind of a sweet thing to just exist.

I’m not a person with what would one term especially Heavy Problems, but just going through other folks letters and giving them an encouraging word is itself nice.

6. The Outer Worlds – 2019 – Epic Game Store – ★★★★

Having been deeply disappointed with the quality of Fallout 4, I was very happy to see Obsidian come back to do their own Fallout-a-like. The Outer Worlds isn’t perfect; I wish it had a bit more of a bite, the gunplay was… fine, the environment design was kind of dull, and the gameplay loop did not outlast the length of the game itself. But I had a fun enough time with it.

That said, I think the dearth of me having much to say here sort of speaks to how… rather unambitious the writing and design ended up being. There’s not a ton to say about it. It’s more responsive than a Fallout 4, to be sure, but even that caps out at a point. It doesn’t necessarily offer much in the way of RPG-style different “paths” to develop your character in terms of who they are or how they behave, beyond the sort-of four-way axis of “grouch to nice” and “corporatist to socialist.” The skill tree ends up being pretty flat, and you can basically become a master of everything by the end.

Shruggo.

5. Pokémon Sword – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

Pokémon Sword/Shield is a bizarre thing— its design is constantly fighting against itself. There are tons of ease-of-use improvements– but it somehow has some of the worst online in the series. It gives you dozens of complex, half-explained systems— but also feels the need to hold your hand lest you get lost in its incredibly linear, dull story. It adds challenging Pokémon raid battles that you largely need to team up with other players to beat— but also has one of the most trivial progressions in the series. It has a huge and varied open “Wild Area” where you can catch hundreds of Pokémon before ever facing the first gym— but that wild area largely exists as a world unto its own separate from the traditional Pokémon “routes”. It doesn’t want to have a plot up until the very end when it decides that gee, I guess we have to, even if it makes no sense.

Let’s go into these in more detail.

Sword/Shield introduces a ton of gameplay improvements. Auto-saving, while problematic in places, is super useful. The ability to move Pokémon directly from the box to your party is great, and removes a lot of process headaches. Single hand controls are a godsend for both improved accessibility and general ease of use. Items are way easier to get, Pokemon are easier to raise, and this is probably the easiest game in the entire series to breed and raise “high tier” Pokemon for online battling.

On the other hand: despite your friend list being loaded into the game, you are forced to use a bizarre password system and request system that is super confusing and prone to issues. You cannot directly trade or battle or play with friends except through this, which occasionally results in headaches anytime someone uses the same four-digit password as you and your bud. The Max Raid battle system is super poorly explained in-game in terms of how you find and join others raids— I only divined it by a tweet someone made. They did away with the “GTS” trading system they had used for the past decade that allowed global Pokemon bartering, presumably in favor of encouraging more natural trades— but didn’t give any way to actually communicate with people in game what you want to trade for. It encourages more in-person interaction, but that’s once again playing into Game Freak’s obsession with the Japanese mode of gaming.

Sword/Shield perhaps has the most sheer amount of systems in any one of these games. It’s not necessarily all good, but in terms of “wow, you’re not babying us huh” it is at least interesting. There’s Pokemon that evolve based on absurd, never-explained conditions like “number of crits in a single battle”, “pass underneath this specific rock when they’re at low health”, “spin baby spin.” The wild area has tons of mechanical stuff that they let you explore without forcing your hand much, and they let you explore it freely without really railroading you. There’s a separate wild-area specific currency system based on raids / dens that you just stumble upon unprompted, really.

On the other hand, the core story progression of the game though… is perhaps the most infuriatingly patronizing thing I’ve experienced. Cutscenes happen every 15 seconds, often-times forcing your movement, and are almost of zero consequence beyond someone going HEY YOU SHOULD GO THAT WAY. The game is completely unwilling to let you get lost when going through the story. It’s constant, it’s unrelenting, it’s maddening. It literally made me mad.

Pokémon Raid battles are super interesting. The battles themselves aren’t necessarily hard, but the kinds of things they present— in terms of providing access to unique Pokémon, rare items, and the fact that they’re not as “rinse-and-repeat” as normal battles— gives the system and game increased longevity. It’s a pretty deep system, with meaningful rewards. A five-star battle is time consuming and you run the risk of failing, but if you pull it off you can get items like TRs, EXP candies, even bottle caps (super useful items that let you increase the baseline stat “DNA” of your Pokémon), and the captured Pokémon can have unique moves you’d normally have to breed and possess extremely high baseline stats. You can even get hidden secret abilities! Nice!

On the other hand: the core game progression is so piss easy and straight forward. The game’s leveling curve is all out of whack, in part because their introduction of a forced “always on” EXP share. In older games, you’d only get EXP from actively battling and beating a Pokemon in a fight, or having participated in a fight. Now, your whole team gets EXP just from being around, and you also get EXP from catching Pokemon, making curry, and all sorts of other small activities. All of this is fine or even good in the abstract as it makes raising stuff easier, but the game isn’t well balanced around it. Encounters don’t scale, which can result in you steamrolling the game if you engage with any of the game’s other systems prior to beating the game. I had to compensate by stretching my normal party of six into a party of 10, constantly swapping members out to keep the average level across the party down. Additionally, the only non-PVP reason to train and breed pokes, the Battle Tower, is so trivially easy this time that… why bother??

The wild area system is brilliant. A big criticism I’ve had with this series in the past is that the kinds of Pokemon any given player is bound to encounter and capture tend to be pretty similar. The limited amount of Pokemon that tend to be put on a traditional Pokemon route, and the limited means you have to encounter them (“hey I walk through the grass, we’ll see what pops up”) doesn’t trend towards players ending up with very different party compositions, just because there’s not a ton of options at any given point. The wild area completely tosses that out the window. As an open space, the types of things someone encounters will vary wildly— and it’s further varied by player-specific weather conditions that dynamically change the encounter tables. It completely opens up the kinds of Pokemon one can encounter early on, presenting hundreds of appropriately leveled options for players. It’s brilliant. The intermixing of both grass-only, overworld-visible, and raid-specific Pokemon also increases the range of encounters. It’s the accomplishment of the core Pokemon concept of “explore and find everything.” Finally.

On the other hand: the wild area is actually kind of boring to explore, visually speaking. It’s basically the Ocarina of Time field with sporadic patches of grass. There’s little actually diversity or mechanics to its exploration, especially when compared to the fact that… the game still has normal routes. They still behave as they always have, except that by the total remove of “Hidden Machine” mobility moves, the ability to explore geographically has been severely hampered. There’s no “gee, I can’t get there yet, guess I’ll have to come back later” except for a single mobility mechanic (the ability to go over the water, introduced very late in the game). It makes revisiting past areas mostly a box-checking exercise, and in general feels like an odd juxtaposition. They either should went all-in on the wild area or better merged the concepts together, because as is it feels… weird. Especially because the wild area could have done with being bigger and more diverse looking.

The game spends most of its time having no story at all, which is kind of boring. Juxtaposed with the railroading stuff where there’s still constant cutscenes with their mostly mediocre characters who don’t do all that much, it almost comes across as padding than anything. There are good characters (Piers and Marnie are the best, the gym leaders in general are good) but man do they try too hard to put Leon over.

But then at the end they introduce the story super quickly and it’s very dumb in a way that made me laugh out loud so congrats I guess.

All in all, I rather liked Sword/Shield. It’s no Sun/Moon— which innovated in tons of places and had an extremely charming story, cast, and progression— but the places that it innovates, and the ease-of-use improvements that they’ve put in the game, are great improvements to the baseline formula. While it’s caused a ton of drama online, the Pokédex and Pokémon Bank stuff are not huge impacts on my personal enjoyment of the game. It kind of stinks a bit, but the overall package is still quite good and fun. 

 The Legend of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Master Mode – 2017 – Switch – ★★★★★

Breath of the Wild was my favorite game the year it was released. The harder Master Mode is something that had interested me as something to check out for a replay, but I decided to wait until the shadow of my previous playthrough loomed somewhat less. Breath of the Wild is, after all, both a monumental game and also a monumentally large game. Going back to it for Master Mode would mean (by way of my own obsessive brain) 100%ing it all over again, which is extremely time consuming, even if I don’t go after the all the Koroks.

There was also this sort of reticence in my behind to confront the creeping suspicion I’ve had in my mind that some of the DLC additions have made the core game worse. Which, I would say… is probably somewhat the case. Certain DLC gear items extremely imbalance standard play and really fuck with the exploration of the game (specifically, Majora’s Mask basically making you not have to fight multiple enemy types). Still, I knew I could ignore those, and just focus down on the core experience of Master Mode: harder enemies, regenerating enemy health, and the introduction of floating platforms.

Turns out, BOTW is still fucking amazing, and while the additions Master Mode make aren’t essential, they do make for a fun second run of a fantastic game. The harder enemies make the early parts of that game WAY HARDER (making you really have to get good at using your bombs and stealth), and while that difficulty ramp doesn’t keep up throughout (which, honestly, the platforms are somewhat to blame as they make getting certain bits of higher-level loot earlier easier), it’s still just a great game to go back to.

Breath of the Wild remains my all-time favorite game. Hyped for BOTW2.

4. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★★

Sekiro is in a sense the purest expression of the Souls formula. Stripped away of the jolly co-op, the PVP, the stats, the equipment, and most customization to speak of, Sekiro asks the simple question: can you do this? Can you learn all the systems in this quite challenging game, and engage with it on its own terms?

In its mechanical simplicity, I found Sekiro to be my favorite game of that lineage, as it has allowed them to really polish the gameplay by its singular focus. It just feels amazing to stealth around and backstab dudes, parry everything, and triumph in nail-biting sword duels. While you do gain new skills and equipment (in the form of the ninja tools), they are just supplementing the fundamental systems of the game, rather than acting as diverging ones. So really, most of your time is spent not learning wholly new methods of combat, but instead improving your mastery of the core one.

And the feel of mastering that combat is incredible. By the end you feel unstoppable; normal enemies that would have been challenges early on are nothing. Even a lot of the bosses become trivial as-time goes on, bar the few ‘mastery test’ bosses interleaved throughout the progression. This isn’t some “hey I got more EXP and now over-level for everything!” thing, either; this is me, the human holding the controller getting skilled enough to become a Sekiro master. It’s an amazing feeling.

I beat every single boss in the game, including the hidden ones, and enjoyed the hell out of it.

3. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★★

I’m very much on the record as being a huge IGAvania partisan. I fuckin’ love the core loop of that permutation of the Metroidvania formula. Koji Igarashi no longer being able to make Castlevanias hurt me. A lot. Over a decade of time spanned between the last IGAvania game, Order of Ecclesia, and the release of Bloodstained. I was a bit worried.

Thank god Bloodstained is really, really, really good.

Bloodstained is extremely “one of those.” You move about a 2D interconnected world, collect items and abilities until you find the stuff that let you move forward in a new area. It’s kind of an eclectic hybrid of IGA’s past titles. The castle design feels very Aria of Sorrow. The shard mechanics feel close to Aria/Dawn of Sorrow’s soul system. The weapons feel very Symphony of the Night meets Portrait of Ruin. The overall mechanics of movement feel most akin to Order of Ecclesia. All in all: a good mix.

The game is massive. There’s so many weird one-off mechanics (something I appreciate), bizarre callbacks, goofs. There’s an in-depth alchemy system (mostly used for cooking, which is funny). The shard system is a bit boring in places— some shards are extremely simple and forgettable mechanically— but the shard leveling system is kind of hilarious in how broken it can become. The familiar system from SOTN is back and has been essentially perfected by making it a dedicated slot so you can just hang with a fairy or sword pal.

I wish the game had more enemy diversity, and the story left something to be desired. Many shards just aren’t very interesting. But the game is just so dang fun. The core gameplay loop is just so compelling, and the game just feels so dang good. I’m glad they took all the time to polish the gameplay feel because hooooooooooo boy.

Looking forward to those DLC characters for some additional playthroughs.

2. Outer Wilds – 2019 – Epic Game Store – ★★★★★

“Space exploration”, “cosmology”, “archeology”, and “sociology.” While these are certainly not the only fields that dominate much of my attention, they are some big ones. The Outer Wilds is a space exploration game where you explore the structure of a strange but exquisitely constructed solar system, and dig through the remains of a mysterious vanished alien species. Also, you’re stuck in a Majora’s Mask-like apocalyptic time loop ‘cuz the sun keeps exploding. Should probably find out why that’s happening.

I went into this game completely blind, entirely based on the way Austin Walker was raving about it on twitter. Austin’s interests in heady space shit is pretty similar to my own, and turns out? Worked out quite well for me. I blindly explored this solar system for about twenty hours over the course of a couple weeks, and came away from the experience misty eyed at the ending. Outer Wilds is fantastic.

It’s a surprisingly touching and cozy for a game that mostly about you going off into space on your own, all alone. And that’s because you’re not, really. Outer Wilds is less about the science of exploration and archeology and the meaning of it, why it matters even in the darkest moments. Why do we explore? Why does science matter, divorced from the parasite of industry and markets? What value does it give to us, to future generations?

The game is built on the notion that even as we individually wander, explore, and discover, we’re all together collectively building on something that may outlive us, even outlive our species, the pursuit of a collective knowledge that transcends personal enrichment and individual accomplishments.

You are but one a few alien explorers, each on their own adventure. As you adventure, you catch their signals as you cruise across space. The things you learn and do are further built on the relics and messages left behind by the Nomai, the species that came before. This sense of a personal and emotional connection in the act of discovery is the heart of this game. We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants; we’re holding hands with those before us and those after us to build a bridge to a future that we may not live to see.

It’s a positive message of hope in the face of oblivion. 

1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★★

I’ve been really on-and-off on Fire Emblem over the years. I first got in on the franchise with Awakening, which I rather liked for its anime-ass sensibilities— though not without criticism. I found the combat kind of obnoxious in its tendency to get muddied down in the Oops You Done Fucked Up, Time To Reset junk. It was too anime-ass in some places, not the least of which being its incredibly one-note characters who had little bearing on ongoing events so as to support the permadeath system without too much wasted effort on the developers’ part. Fates, the follow-up on Awakening, only amped up these criticisms, becoming convoluted, stupid, and kind of obnoxious to play.

I had hopes that Three Houses would be an improvement. Initial impressions made it seem way more serious, way more grounded, with a lot of improved systems. Turns out: it was better than I could have dared of expected or hoped. Three Houses isn’t improvement, or even innovation; it’s a revolution.

Three Houses is great. It’s long, it’s got so many different systems going on that I hardly know where to begin with describing it, but… it’s great. It’s the platonic ideal of what I’d like out of a Fire Emblem. Things feel like they matter. The setting feels weighty, the plot is actually good, and the characters are absolutely marvelous.  

No, it’s not perfect— its handling of representation could DEFINITELY be better. Some of the narrative is hokey as hell in places. Certain routes seem to have gotten more attention than others. The class-based specialization systems could do with more depth such that so many characters don’t end up mostly identically specialized to each other.

But… I found the combat extremely enjoyable.  The charge-based rewind mechanic removed the feel-bad gotchas of unanticipated troop appearances and bad rolls etc. The characters are fun, and they’re kept relevant all the whole way through via creative framing of events. The ability to roam an actual physical space via the monastery made the world feel more alive, and made everything feel more real.

The writing was actually interesting and nuanced, exploring things like faith, race, social classes, feudal politics, and romance. While the three routes are largely similar, it’s interesting just how different the underlying messages of each of them ends up being. I appreciate that in this game where you otherwise spend most of your time hanging around with nobles in a church ends just short of you rolling out the guillotines by the end.

This is a tactical RPG in 2019 that I have put something like 150+ hours into, having beaten only two of the four routes. I was, and still am, deeply invested in everything that is. I’ll probably go back to the other two routes when the final DLC is out next year.

SAKURAI, PUT EDELGARD IN SMASH

[johnnymundano]

Don’t Blink (2014)

Directed by Travis Oates

Written by Travis Oates

Music by Mike Verta

Country: United States

Language: English

Running Time: 92 minutes

CAST

Mena Suvari as Tracy

Zack Ward as Alex

Brian Austin Green as Jack

Joanne Kelly as Claire

Fiona Gubelmann as Ella

David de Lautour as Noah

Leif Gantvoort as Sam

Emelie O'Hara as Amelia

Curtiss Frisle as Lucas

Samantha Jacober as Charlotte

Robert Picardo as Man in Black

Don’t Blink is a remarkably entertaining entry in the puzzle movie genre. Unfortunately it’s very hard to say very much about it without spoiling it. But that’s life; full of challenges. As challenges go, trying to give the gist of Don’t Blink without spoiling it is a lot less intimidating than the one facing the typically photogenic friends In Don’t Blink. They have planned a trip to an isolated resort, and they might have planned it just a bit too precisely; when they arrive their cars are coasting on fumes. Which would be okay if anyone were on hand to unlock the fuel pump at the remote resort, but nobody is. Which would be okay if someone were in the tourist lodge, but nobody is. Meals have been left half-eaten and yet there’s no evidence of violence or struggle. What happened here to all the people, and will it happen to all the people who have just arrived and are now unable to leave?

Hmm, well, the answer to the latter is obviously yes, but the answer to the former is a little trickier. Obviously what happened to the absent people soon starts happening to the increasingly fearful friends, but what exactly did happen to the absent people? On the simplest, most literal level they disappeared. And soon the ranks of our appealingly vulnerable cast are similarly thinning. Characters can disappear at any time; the only apparent rule is they can only disappear when no one is looking at them. Don’t Blink, geddit? It’s kind of a sinister riff on Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell) in Mystery Men (1999), who was invisible as long as no one was looking at him. Obviously in that (very funny; much underrated) movie that was a joke, but in Don’t Blink it’s very far from a joke. Because in Don’t Blink the characters are like the discounts at a sofa warehouse closing down sale: once they’re gone they’re gone. (Or are they?)

The elegant simplicity of this device in no way prepared me for the complexity of the immersion it compels in the viewer. (Or compelled in this viewer; you might be bored to insensibility. I don’t know; I’m not psychic. If we were all the same clothes shopping would be a lot easier.) Don’t Blink is a bit of a sneaky beast, quietly replicating in the viewer a less threatening, far more entertaining, way the tension afflicting the tormented cast. Watching Don’t Blink very quickly becomes a game between yourself and the movie. Once you grasp the rules you can’t help trying to beat the movie at its own game. Trying to catch the next disappearance means you, yourself, daren’t blink. It’s very simple and very clever, and a great deal of fun. Careful though, those dice are loaded.

I had an enormously enjoyable time with Don’t Blink, and a lot of this is down to Travis Oates’ taut script and unfussy direction, but none of that would mean beans without the cast pulling their weight. Luckily for Don’t Blink  all of the cast are great. Mena Suvari is the *name* and she’s good, sure, but equally good are all the other actors who aren’t in movies about jizzing in pies and beauty in America. Given the premise, some get more screen time than others and so the ones who last longest naturally impress most, as the longer they last the smaller the cast and the greater the tension. And, as we all know from many, many, many (many) movies, characters under tension are always fun for actors to play.

Everyone rises to the edgy occasion but Zack Ward as Alex deserves special mention. He’s real firecracker and no mistake, it takes a while for his fuse to burn, but when he goes off..hooo boy, he pretty much owns the movie. Starting off as a bit testy but fairly reasonable, Alex soon smoothly morphs into an aggressive maniac. His befuddled belligerence probably fortuitously reflects many of the (understandable) reactions to a movie which so wilfully avoids any easy answers. It’s not hard to imagine Alex writing one star Amazon reviews of his own movie; “WTF! Total lame-o copout! Dude, get an ending. Lol!”, which would be ironic as Alex is given the only speech in the movie which even hints at the answer to the cinematic conundrum Don’t Blink presents.

Even with Alex’s speech, the solution may remain elusive and so, even after it ends, Don’t Blink may persist as an extraordinarily puzzling movie. For me the biggest puzzle is how Don’t Blink got made. Not because it is bad (it isn’t; it’s a very good little movie) but because it is so very much not what most audiences expect from a “puzzle movie”. That is, they expect a solution. Which is not unreasonable. However, they expect a definitive solution. A simple solution to boot. Something like - they are all dead; it’s aliens; it’s bees in cars; it’s your momma; whatever…More accurately then, Don’t Blink does have a solution to its set up, but it’s a more cerebral, definitely elliptical solution and  not the kind of solution audiences expect. Or want, maybe. Mind you, a lot of puzzle movies flop due to the disappointment of the newly revealed solution. All the fun of them is tucked away in the set up. Puzzle movies basically ask “What could possibly explain all these bizarre occurrences?” and then they belatedly answer “This”. And you go, “Oh, that. What’s for tea?” It’s not often the solution is as satisfying as the set up. Don’t Blink has a set up as entertaining, thrilling and puzzling as the best of the puzzle genre but it (arguably; I guess very arguably) also has a solution to match. Well, I thought so, but your mileage will definitely vary. If it really honks you off you can always write a one star review on Amazon. Tell ‘em Alex sent you.