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Week In Review - 3/12/23

#JakeReviewsItch Week In Review Archives

This week's reviews:

🧡🧡🧡🧡🤍 Alien Life Lab 🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 All Haze Eve 🧡🧡🧡🧡🤍 All You Can Eat 🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 Alone With You 🧡🧡🧡🧡🤍 Alt-Frequencies 🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 Ambidangerous 🧡🧡🧡🤍🤍 Amelie

It's a week of messes! Steam is a mess! I am a mess! Even the Game of the Week is a mess!

Game of the Week

All You Can Eat is easily the best game I reviewed this week. Alt-Frequencies is the clear runner-up. Game of the Week, however, is a title that goes to the game that's still occupying my brain after the fact...

At the end of my Alien Life Lab review, I said it had a New Game+/Second Quest thing. I think I was wrong. I thought the game was telling me to play again, but this time there would be three aliens who would need to be rescued along the way. In reality, I think this secondary objective had been there from the start, and I just didn't notice. So I played it a second time. I talked to every space person I saw, some of whom followed me. I finished, and found that I'd only rescued 1/3. Rats. I'll probably never see the good ending, and that's okay. Each time I loaded the game, I thought, "I overrated this, right? It's sort of trash, isn't it? Do I like it ironically? And every time, I got sucked right back in to it. I like it more now than when I reviewed it. I like it as much or more than I like the turn-of-the-millennium shooters and immersive sims that it recalls—System Shock 2, Half-Life, Deus Ex...

It is a mess. It's easy to articulate its faults. There's just something about how thoroughly weird and unpretentious it is, though, and even after beating it twice in a week, it still rattles me. It pulls off jump scares just as well in open, brightly lit arenas as it does in darkened, twisting paths lined with squishy, organic matter. Oh, yes, the audio design. That's the real source of dread. Again, All You Can Eat is the game to play this week. It's currently the third-best reviewed game on this site. It pushes the adventure game genre in such an exciting direction that half of my review was just the repeated word, "Genius!" Alt-Frequencies is the most mainstream pick of the bunch, and not because it lacks fresh ideas and idiosyncrasies. It's currently the fourth-best reviewed game on this site. I have another game from Accidental Queens on the review docket for the week after next, and I am jazzed. That studio hasn't missed yet.

Alien Life Lab is stupid and weird. I can't stop thinking about it.

Steam Is Hot Air

Do you remember 2003? Do you remember Valve requiring some big, annoying launcher service for anyone who wanted to play Half-Life 2? If you don't, let me tell you: A lot of people wanted to play Half-Life 2, and a lot of them were not happy about downloading this "Steam" thing. They wanted you to check in online every time you launched a game???

I'd hoped to illustrate the vitriol with contemporary examples. Forum posts, IGN editorials; that kind of thing. Unfortunately, the best archival records I could find come from the creeps at Penny-Arcade. These guys are awful, and I'd rather not link to their site, but they had their finger on the pulse when it came to petty grievances. They were influencers. When Jerry "Tycho" Holkins wrote about being scared of a computer asking for credit card information or about local-multiplayer enthusiasts feeling infuriated because they couldn't connect to Steam from their local LAN café, he was capturing the whiny, online zeitgeist. I didn't have high-speed Internet or a computer capable of running Half-Life 2 in 2003, so that particular controversy didn't occupy much space on my radar. I do remember the first time I played Half-Life 2 at a friend's house. Launching the game seemed like a process, accompanied by a halfhearted rant from my friend that was aimed equally at Steam and the idiots who acted like this mildly obtrusive application was tantamount to a war crime. Let me jump forward and ask: What exactly was the Epic Games Store hullabaloo? Or maybe that should be is; not was. I still see people taking up arms over...something. There are a million valid reason to dislike and distrust Epic as a company, but as far as I can gather, the crusaders are angry that a big corporation threw around a lot of money to complete with another big corporation? I'm generally against impossibly wealthy corporations reshaping the world to their liking, but look consider how pathetic and unnecessary Ubisoft's and Electronic Arts' launchers are. Even with Epic snagging a exclusives and timed exclusives, have they made any kind of dent in Steam's monopoly? Let's talk about the danger of consolidated power.

I've mentioned before that when I play PC games, I use my third-party Switch Pro Controller whenever possible. It feels good. It was dirt cheap. It works for me. Or it did work for me, until a few months ago. Most modern games are prepared to encounter an Xbox controller. PlayStation controller support is not uncommon. Native Switch controller support, though? Forget it. In a recent update, Steam added full, official support for Steam controllers of all kinds...but not my controller. What had happily been accepted as a Switch Pro Controller one day was read as an Xbox controller the next. The Screen Capture Button that had never had any issues no longer does anything, because an Xbox 360 controller doesn't have that button, and apparently that's what I'm using. I lost rumble support on some games. The little surprises never end. And because Steam has historically been the PC's best bet for controller support, other launchers don't offer any competitive options. Go to any Reddit thread where people want to know how to make their controller work, and 9/10 replies are the same thing: Steam Big Picture Mode.

This is the most dramatic update in 20 years of Steam, and Valve just seems to be sinking deeper into the muck each day. If you haven't personally noticed any issues, look no further than the patch notes for proof that everything's in shambles, all the time. I encountered a bug where Big Picture Mode would make a sound like it was launching, and then it would just show my desktop. I found some suggestions online and got things working. Then, in the next update, they broke it all over again.

When it works, I don't have much beef with Steam. I prefer it to the old days of games installing wherever they pleased. I like that having an account that allows me to maintain my game library indefinitely, no matter how many times I replace my computer. Steam has been good to me.

But the naysayers were onto something. Digital Rights Management is only as good or as bad as the rights-holder chooses to be, and we all know how trustworthy and stable corporations are.

My Itch library may consist of "DRM-free" applications, but I'm depending on Itch to keep up its end. If the company folded tomorrow, there's no way I could download and back-up all my games.

I own games through GOG, Ubisoft, and Rockstar. Their launchers are fine, but I'm not comfortable making additional purchases on any service run by companies that (aLlEgEdLy) cover up systemic harassment and abuse. I have handfuls of games tied to this account or that. I'd obviously prefer to have them all in one place, but who can you trust? Can you ever really trust anyone?

Steam is still the best option. It's only real option, which is to say, we don't have options. It's working so far. Except when it's not. Can't wait to see what they break with the next patch.

Jake Reviews #JakeReviewsTwitch

Take a look at the tiny blue text at the bottom of this post. It appears on almost everything I post. But today, it's different. Today, it says, "#JakeReviewsItch" for the first time. I'm in my third month of posting at least once a day, and this is the first time I've noticed that my template has had a ridiculous typo all along. I remember writing "Twitch" when I meant "Itch" on the first day. I corrected it. It's something I've written and corrected many more times since then. I probably should have known to double check for it in my template as soon as I started using a template. I probably did. I probably deleted "Twitch" and wrote "Twitch" in its place. I've made changes to my format little by little since I started. Every day, I think, "I should shake it up. Question everything I'm doing. Tear it down and build something new. I should give scores out of 10, rather than five. Some of these 4/5s should be 3/5s, and some of these 3/5s should be 1/5; better adjust the whole scale. Tumblr isn't the right place for these reviews, anyway. How hard would it be to transfer to another site? And when am I going to write a post about everything wrong with my page?" Maybe it would be easier if I just committed to reviewing every single stream on Twitch

#JakeReviewsItch is a series of daily game reviews. You can learn more here. You can also browse past reviews…

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