Long Card Road Home: Saturday Morning RPG

Nostalgia. Nostalgia never changes.

It's Steam sale time and me here at this blog is am playing many games to try to churn out the last few cards to sell during the sale. And by play, I mean idling games like this one and this one that I got from bundles. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm just not man enough to review visual novels.

Or play visual novels. I'm sorry. I'm just not strong enough. Not strong enough for this at all.

(I am totes buying that when it isn't that many cents. It just makes no sense to buy it now though.)

Anyway so unrelated to that I gave Saturday Morning RPG a try. The basic premise is its a "saturday morning cartoon" inspired RPG with a ton of QTEs in the combat system. I'm not sure if they still even show saturday morning cartoons, having not owned a TV or really watched much in the way of cartoons they'd show on saturday mornings (I really hope they don't show Rick and Morty to children, pls), but if they don't there was a point in time many whatever generation I am remember fondly when they would get a big box of disgusting carb laden cereal and then in a blissful sugar high watch advertising.

I mean saturday morning cartoons. Which were probably the first and purest convergence of media and product placement in history. I mean we all love Optimus Prime, but the dude was basically showing up to give us all 21 minutes of 'buy me! buy my friends! buy my enemies so you can hit them with my friends!' and having nostalgia for that is like looking back lustfully upon your real estate agent. But we can and we do, so here we are, with a RPG entirely centered around referencing that stuff.

a pun, I think

I don't think this game has even a hint of irony as Blood Dragon did, either. There is nothing all that meta, as best I can tell, about SM:RPG. It is really just supposed to be: here are references, do they amuse you? And it isn't especially aggressive or excited about them.

Well, I guess joining GIJOE, who are referred to as Private Johnson in game isn't exactly played straight.

ah hue hue hue hue heh

Long Card Road Home: Sweezy Gunner

Man, there's this thing. This thing, ok, where you start up a game and the opening FMV or intro cutscene or whatever you want to call it is just not the good. And your brain braces itself for suck and then ... Oh, wait no, this is actually not that bad. Hey, this is kinda cute and fun.

Sweezy Gunner is that thing.

question mark

The game starts off with a dreadful little cutscene that explains nothing and is weirdly jarring. The eponymous sweezy gunner itself, which is a sort of rolling tank thing with a face, is cute like thomas the tank engine. A sort of pleasant in the afternoon friendly rolling death machine. The pilot on the other hand is sort of a weird surly girl with a draconic stomach tattoo all out to say hi to the world talking to ... It doesn't matter. It is ideal we just forget it as quickly as possible.

I'm pretty sure I got Sweezy out of an indiegala bundle, and man oh man are indiegala bundles just a hot bed of card and card awful games. So expectations are cardly surprising at how low they are and the cutscene is a further lowering of expectations. But then the oddest thing happens.

Yeah. It is kinda cute and fun.

Long Card Road Home: Blood of the Werewolf

You ever play a game and think to yourself 'Man, I bet these people wish they made Castlevania?'

This is one of those games. I mean, it even has the medusa heads. Right off into the first level I start thinking - this jump arc is weird and it feels kinda floaty, and then the bats which act like medusa heads show up and I'm thinking oh god no this is going to be right into castlevania.

Then one of the loading screens read 'what a terrible night to have a curse' and my brain just starts screaming 'People who learned the wrong lesson from retro gaming! Wrong lesson! WRONG LESSON!' and then it just gets worse and worse. This game didn't get me to record setting install / uninstall, but man at moments it really did try hard. Nothing is ever going to beat Guardians of Graxia on that, though.

Keep beating it hard, Guardians of Graxia. Not even sure I'm remembering that game's name correctly, and I don't care, since anything with Graxia in the title is probably terrible anyway.

Blood of the Werewolf is a platformer in line with Castlevania by way of Super Meat Boy and whichever classic game had transforming between mother and werewolf mother. It also kinda makes me think of Megaman. Oh, no, it makes me think of Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. I was initially sort of interested in the game because part of my brain thinks the classy dame protagonist, who is also a werewolf, will not be exploded Super Meat Boy style. See, Super Meat Boy can be chewed up and exploded because he's a man of meat, and They Bleed Pixels was only a little disturbing since it is intentionally supposed to be some sort of occult dream. Blood of the Werewolf has a classy dame on the screen who is then violently exploded by a Sonic the hedgehog crusher trap.

I have to admit, maybe it makes me a big sexist moron, but seeing the lady I'm playing getting pulverized into a giant blood explosion kinda disturbs me a little. I know. I'm a bad person. I kinda thought this was going to be more artistic, less 'hey do you remember the platformers from the 80s' and I'm like "hey, I have ROMs of those, I beat them years ago I don't want anymore please stop"

Long Card Road Home: Risk of Rain

So platformers, roguelikes, let's talk these elements again. Because we didn't already discussed roguelike platformers back with Rogue Legacy, which is probably the game I've had the most fun with this year. Oh, and retro style graphics, those are a thing nowadays too right?

It's like a fucking holy trifecta of "this era's indies" or something. I mean seriously. This is entirely A Thing. If the AAA shooter slash "open world" is the top of the scene right now, then retro style platformer with roguelike elements is the bottom. Or the middle. The bottom is anime games. What if we took a novel ... ok .... and added vaguely animated pictures?!?

Anyway so, Risk of Rain is a retro styled, roguelike platformer hitting all of those bases and hitting them hard. In fact the retro style goes further back, giving it more of a visual style from the atari era, but with far far more pixels on screen. The basic story is you're on a spaceship, it crashes, and alongside it crashes a bunch of junk on the ship. You can loot and use this junk, which is where half the roguelike elements come in. Also levels.

On the other hand, as opposed to other platformers, this is a shooty platformer, although it relies more on cooldowns and placement than pure button mashing as opposed to the obvious comparison, that being Megaman. I always sort of wonder why there aren't more Megaman clones in this era, but I think it comes back to the same reason there aren't Sonic clones - It is much more difficult to do.

I haven't actually played a true roguelike in recent memory - I plan on playing TOME this year, after getting through more of my card games in time for the summer sale - but I am under the impression that the cooldowns system is more from roguelikes than I think. Regardless, RoR is a ... shooty platformer roguelike with four abilities per class and tons of items?

Or something?

Long Card Road Home: Chompy Chomp Chomp

So, like many bundle buying steam gamers, I wait til things get steam keys not desura keys and then maybe give them a shot. Or, more likely, I don't. But I do tend to input keys that pop up on my groupees page. Since I'm grinding cards this month, and this game had cards, I installed it right after inputting the key.

I always feel sort of soft on stuff I get through bundles. I paid like, pennies for all the hard work people put in but man sometimes games just aren't. Chompy chomp chomp isn't exactly in that category, but it is real close.

CCC, as I'm going to call it, is visually attractive. I like the art style, the little monsters running around and going bite bite is nice looking. Then ... That's it. The audio direction is cute, and fine, but the actual game is just a somewhat complex version of playing a children's game of tag. There is also a single player mode that allows you to play another version of tag.

There's nothing really wrong with the game, though the load times are a little high, but there's not much really to the game either. The basic principle is solid, and the single player is not a bad set of ideas either, but there just isn't that much content with overly too small maps and total reliance on playing with other people. If I were going to recommend a party game for small children, this game would work out well, but anyone older and Hoard or Sacred Citadels which I reviewed elsewhere are just going  to be better Big Picture Mode games.

I do sort of feel like the game just needed to be a touch more ambitious. Just a bit bigger map wise, a couple more mechanics, maybe some maps with some second or third floors, or teleporters - Just something to spice it up a little.

The little Chompies really are so cute though! Look at his little flesh-devouring face!

Long Card Road Home: Hero Siege

Over the last few months in spite of giving up on buying new games for a year, other than bundles, my badges page has continued to bloat over with a seemingly endless sea of games with cards just waiting to be dropped. So, for the month of June as we all await the summer sale, I'm going to work on my card back log. My cacklog. My ... wait, that sounds ...

I acquired Hero Siege from the ShinyLoot roguelikes bundle on Groupees a couple weeks ago. In retrospect, I probably should have taken them up on more of the games available in the bundle, but Hero Siege and TOME looked about the best of the lot. I haven't picked up TOME yet, since it doesn't have cards, but Hero Siege looked like an interesting game to give a shot after enjoying fellow 'roguelikes'. I don't think Hero Siege is, by any means, much of a roguelike. It does have some pretty random elements, and I have to admit there is a certain charm to the whole "id potions by jamming them down your throat" school of thought.

My first experience in Hero Siege was - and I'm not making this up - playing for what steam records as two minutes. I think about half that was puzzling at the weird you can buy gems menus (Is this a phone game?) and what not, then playing maybe thirty seconds. A prompt flashed up on screen to start the next wave, maybe, and then while I was figuring it out my character fell over dead. I have no idea why.

It is possible I stood on a trap or something, but it feels strange just how much stuff in this game one-shots you right from the get-go. The game actively doesn't really feel like it wants you to play it. Unsurprisingly this actually frames a great deal of my experience with the game!