Play relevant month: Stardew Valley

For my final game of the year on this final day of the year, I present to you a game that sold a million copies and looks like a mix between a SNES game and something off an Amiga at best. A extremely simple and easy to play game that weirdly requires I blow the introductory paragraph on explaining what the game actually is. Simple to play, simple to learn, difficult to describe.

Stardew Valley is a bit more difficult to define because it does not generally fit into a large, well known genre. It gets compared to Harvest Moon, but what if you're like me and you've never played Harvest Moon? Ostensibly the game is classified as a low-key, low-seriousness farming simulator but addressing it as such is pretty disingenuous. Rather, Stardew Valley is a farming game that then wraps itself around a massive assortment of mini-games that interconnect. It's not a clicker game, though there is a lot of clicking, and it's not much of a simulator either. It's also not all that open-ended, and it feels like it has a lot of mechanics it actually does not.

Much like Axiom Verge last year, which was likely my favorite game of the year, Stardew Valley is a solo programmer project built from the ground up over several years of development. More so than Axiom Verge, it's also a critical and financial success, though not quite to the scale of something like Terraria I don't think? But pretty close, and pretty deserving on the most part.

It's a really weird game to review...

Play Relevant Month: Grim Dawn

I actually picked up Grim Dawn all the way back in early September, but sort of set it as my tertiary game, something to work my way through over the coming months. ARPGs are often long and take a considerable amount of time to truly review. There's actually several ARPGs out relatively recently I'm inclined to play, but Grim Dawn for whatever reason just looked like the best of the lot, though Victor Vran looks pretty good too.

Grim Dawn is the work of Crate Entertainment, which according to their wikipedia page appears to be an off-shoot or descendant of Iron Lore, whom produced Titan Quest for THQ quite a while ago. While I've owned Titan quest for ages, the game never appealed to me. I couldn't tell you why, but for a long time

Grim Dawn on the other hand was in one of the humble monthlies, and I think this is the game where I mathed it out and realized a full 12 month subscription (which gives a month free) essentially would have worked out as good enough to pick up. Since then, the monthly has actually been even better, with several excellent sidetitles to go with it. So you can sort of blame Grim Dawn from crate entertainment on convincing to me to buy into some crate-style entertainment...

Does that even count as a pun? I'm not even sure anymore.

Regardless, Grim Dawn is an isometric view style ARPG of a proper pedigree and the usual nonsense. Fantasy world overrun with nasties from other dimension, with zombies because zombies, loot because loot and "corruption". No prophecies, though, and mostly bad-ass characters who actually survived the apocalypse.

A review of the Sony Dual Shock 4 as a PC controller (without patching)

Among other things I bought on blackfriday - the only exciting one being a 144hz monitor at last (which was then promptly canceled as out of stock) - One of them was the Sony Playstation Dualshock 4, in some ridiculous colors. I bought it for my PC, which strikes me as odd. I also "bought" a steam link, airquotes, because it has sat in a box since it arrived. Turns out! We never bought a TV to go with it.

Regardless, the wireless on the DS4 reviewed as working well with the Steam Link, and I would like to get some use out of the link as a party game hub of sorts. But on top of that, Steam apparently added beta drivers for using the DS4 through Steam, so I thought I'd talk about my experiences with that for anyone looking to do so, and also on running it through other clients to see how those end up.

I guess this is a hardware / software review or something?

Holiday Card: Hade

At some point I stopped being able to do more card grinding games and moved onto actually playing games again. But Hade, Hade was the last of them. And Hade was a pretty good game to end on.

There isn't a great deal I can say about Hade, much of it is visually obvious. Hade is a single screen at a time puzzle game about bouncing 1 or more balls around a map to collect "hints". This might have common ground with other puzzle games, but I must admit I don't really have a lot of puzzle experience. Every couple of levels, Hade spins up the difficulty, and then settles back down as it introduces new mechanics. I got through maybe a quarter of the game and saw a good 10~ or so different mechanics in action, which would then generally build up to combining them together before adding something new and building back up once again.

The mechanics range simple directional changes, to pad that change direction depending on how you approach, to barriers, to one shot versions of all of this and extensions on the nature of several of these. There's a lot of variety. A couple of the levels do feel rather similar to earlier ones, but usually it feels like you're re-doing the earlier map with a more complex set of mechanics at your disposal.

Visually Hade is extremely simple. The audio cues are good, and the music track is a somber, gentle affair sort of going on the background. There's not a ton to say here, it's a simple puzzle game. I would recommend a 144hz VA panel for it, though. You really want those inky blacks. Yeah, buy a $300 monitor to play a $3 game.

What Hade does well, and what kept me playing far longer than any recent puzzle game I can bring to mind, is the fact Hade does not waste time. You open the game, navigate two menus to a puzzle, and then you're playing the puzzle. If you screw up, you reset with a click, you start with a click, everything is smooth and brisk. It's totally laser focused on puzzle action without any baggage dragging you down around it. I really found myself appreciating that, but ultimately, I started to dread the 'upswing' in the difficulty curve. You'd get a new mechanic and slam through three puzzles, then it started to get hard again. There's a great ah-ha moment, but it started to take me longer and longer.

Ultimately, I'm just not that big on puzzle games. Would I recommend Hade to people who like puzzle games? I want to say yes, but I might be wrong in that. I liked it, though.

Holiday Card: Pirate Pop Plus

There are various points in the nostalgia triggering spectrum that is gaming where gaming was, in a word, pretty ugly. Truly retro pixel art, that is, atari style is pretty hideous. Early 3D is pretty grim - I don't mean the sprite based faux-3d of Duke Nukem or Doom, but the shortly after those titles. But one of the true stand-outs for ugliness is the original gameboy.

I played many hours on the original Gameboy, so the four "color" LCD stylings of Pirate Pop Plus look fine to me. The faceplate, seen in the screenshots, adds to the effect and reminds me of playing Gameboy Color emulators (or whichever, the one Metroid Fusion was on) which is pretty pleasant. But I would totally understand if you took one look at these screenshots, turned three hundred sixty degrees and bubble-walked right out of the room.

Anyway, PPP is a rehash of a decade(s) old arcade game, Pang or Buster Bros or honestly who knows which? I can remember playing this game years back in the arcade, but I could never remember the name. Essentially, in this case, a pirate appears on screen and produces a bubble. When you hit the bubble with your harpoon, it pops in two or three smaller bubbles. Repeated down one size and once you've obliterated the bubble or take too long he's back again with another bubble. And repeat til you lose. PPP distinguishes itself with a world-flipping mechanic, in which the pirate appears at random and picks up, down, left or right to be the new down. Often he'll pick the direction you're already facing, but then you can shoot him in the ass.

PPP also has a currency system, in which gold coins drop and can be traded into a vendor for new characters, new music and then a lot of silly stuff that doesn't do overly much but is sort of fun. The cosmetic side is cute, but requires a lot of grinding that likely goes beyond how much fun you'll get out of the game. I had a good two hours with it, and I'd probably play it more, but I have so many games to work my way through you know how it is.

The gameplay on the most part is quite enjoyable. When the gravity gets flipped, you have a weird bonus round where you can 'land' on bubbles to pop them very quickly. If this happens at the right time, you can rack up quite a few bonus points, but it's also the most dangerous point. When you first touch the ground, you bounce, and you can't fire while you're in the air. The end result is a period of extreme vulnerability, which isn't much fun and is basically the main point I die at. The other thing is your spear can ONLY ever pop one bubble, which frankly isn't well thought out on the developer's part. You can end up in the later levels with piles of bubbles all clumped together and chain spearing just won't get through them all. Not sure why it doesn't linger for a split-second to pop multiple.

You can also run into an issue where you fire a spear as the pirate appears, and drive it into his rump while expecting to hit something else. End result is much the same.

In conclusion, I'd say PPP is good if the graphical style tickles your fancy. It's a fun little game with a little grind on the side to make it a bit more interesting. I do wish it had more power ups, or perhaps more interesting power ups as most of them are pretty dull. Definitely a lot better than, oh, quite a few titles I fired up while grinding cards only to find them utterly unplayable.

Holiday card: California Gold Rush

I really, really want to just slam on this game for being a complete non-game, but... But... as you can see above I played it for a full hour and I wouldn't say it was a bad hour, so how much criticism can I direct at it? I'm clearly not in the target audience, as Broforce to this game is as great a divide between games as you can possibly get. When you encounter a wolf in this game, Pedro runs away and his white slaver emerges from the fort to do a little gun dance to chase the wolf off.

We'll talk about Pedro in a moment.

Rush for Gold California, or Rush for California Gold or whatever the title is, is about white prospectors entering California to enslave Mexicans, trade gold for food at an exorbitant rate with rather stereotypical looking Native Americans who might resemble the tribe that historically lived in this area while freeing... Other white people. The introduction of the game is literally a white dude who is tied up to a tree with his Mexican "who is at your disposal for anything" yeah okay and he immediately begins giving you orders.

Oh, he phrases them as suggestions. I'm onto you, white guy in a suit. There's one time you should trust a white guy in a suit. Anyway once you get into the game, your "suggestion filled" overseer begins barking out orders which centre on essentially collecting scraps to then collect other scraps until your overseer is satisfied. Once he is satisfied, you are released to the map screen, where you're allocated stars which can build new dwellings for rich white people to move into. Usually rich white ladies. There's no mention of a whorehouse, but I'm sure that's just your "partner" who is constantly barking out orders and assigns tasks while doing no work just keeping that off the table so you don't get your fair cut.

You're out there fending off bears and wolves and he's in the back with some corset wearing broads? You ask him what he's doing and he's all, build a water pump, uh, mine me some coal, something something fish. Yeah this is all on the level. Probably tied up originally for failing to pay for all his whorin' and gamblin' debts.

he doesn't have the hat, no

And yeah Pedro. You can only hire one worker "skin" in this game, pun not intended, who is a humble Pedro. I don't know else to say here. Am I racist for thinking a guy looking like this guy is Mexican? Named Pedro? Pedro and his four identical brothers, Pedro, Pedro, Pedro and Pedro all bust their butts and you don't even feed them unless they're hacking underbrush down with a machete or mining a coal outcropping. Poor Pedro working the gold mine? Yeah you don't feed him.

Anyway this game is essentially a simple resource management game. Visually it's actually really nice looking, it reminds me of collecting resources on the map screen of HoMM4 or something. Just pretty sprites. There's some audio, including a woodpecker, normal music and pleasant sounds. And the Pedro brothers dance whenever you finish a task and release them from their perpetual unpaid labor. I suppose it's a children's game, and it's pretty soothing to play a couple minutes here or there in, but I'm not sure what you're teaching your children. Pedro does all the real work while some white guy in a suit sits back in town and barks out orders?

Sometimes you let wolves chase him around because he's unarmed. Only the white people are allowed guns. I really wish I had some Mexican food right now.

Play relevant month: Broforce

You can talk about the toxicity of hyper-masculinity if you want, but there's something truly epic about the 80s era of action hero. Banal, ridiculous and adorned with giant muscles alongside giant guns and often giant chins, this was the point where PC didn't quite come into the picture but film making had decided exactly how they wanted to do it. For better or worse.

Broforce is both a tribute and a homage to this lost, actually kind of tedious to watch era of film making. I don't know what Broforce originally intended to go about making, but as we'll explore, Broforce is about bros very much re-creating that action film charm. As an aside, bro in this case is both the name of all the characters - with such classics as Bronan, Brobocop and Ellen Ripbro - and a description of their bro-dentity. Bros are generally slanted toward male, but there are female bros, just as there are female action heroes.

I'm a bit disappointed there's no Brofee, but I guess she isn't distinctive enough? Ah c'mom, Pam Grier was awesome in that movie. Whatever!

Broforce succeeds because it doesn't worry about... To be frank, much of anything. It's a side-scrolling run and gun shooter, or a jumpnshootman as I like to refer to other games of this nature. But the elements that make Broforce different lies in the name. The bro. The bros. And the attitude of mayhem that may, in a way, fit the bro moniker just as well.

Bro-hem.

Witch cards will drop: Blazerush

Blazerush is an old standard of game that has, on the most part, gone out of style. I played RC Pro AM back when I was a wee tyke and I'm sure everyone has heard of Rock n Roll racing, which was in the news recently when some Russian studio tried to make a clone and launch it on steam. That got deleted off Steam pretty quickly.

Anyway, basically you drive cars with an overhead isometric perspective, but rendered in proper 3d as opposed to the classic sprites that make up the long ago champions of the genre. In this case, you choose a driver and with it a car, and then drive around vaguely sci-fi tracks with a variety of scenarios. The basic game mode of driving to win the race makes up about a third of scenarios, with 'king of the hill' style races and this weird game mode where you're trying to stay in the lead because there's a giant rolling machine chasing the race and also not fall off, and you score points as people crash. The latter makes for some really enjoyable gameplay; the former usually starts with an AI breaking into the lead and then you just restart because the other AIs will jump on you if you try to catch up.

The gameplay is less built around consistently holding down the lead and more consistently recovering your position as you, and other cars, tumble off the track or get exploded by power-ups. In this sense the game is relatively fun for a couple hours, but it didn't hold my attention long.

In terms of visuals and audio, it's a nice looking little title with a couple decent sounding tracks. Nothing impressive, but easy on the eyes with some cool car designs. In theory there's hovercars and rocket cars, but they don't perform all that differently and don't expect F-zero style speed out of the game. In fact, since the camera aims to fit all the cars on the screen at the same time, you'll never get much of a lead going in this game. If a car falls back far enough, it actually gets leap frogged forward. So the sense of speed is lost a little, and instead the game is as I said, mostly about constantly recovering and tumbling off the track. Even the power ups feel kinda pointless in this. You get a mix of boosts and weapons, but most of the weapons will only knock someone back a little bit. There's just not that far back to actually go, probably because the game is designed as a couch game. Which is good if you're playing it as such, but I never did and I don't think I'd take time out of a social gathering to play an updated RC pro am, you know?

Which is fine, but don't expect it to feel like a skill-based racing game. There's not really much to talk about, when it comes to Blazerush. It has lots of medals and badges and scoring, but none of them really seemed to do much of anything besides unlocking tracks. As long as I continued to do ok in events, I never even noticed tracks needing more medals to unlock, pardoning 1 track once. Because of the game's chaotic nature, I barely even noticed the different tracks anyway. The power ups and game mode are way more crucial than the design of the track.

Anyway, Blazerush isn't a great game by an metric, but it's a solid enough title to play for an afternoon as I did before getting bored with it. Like I said, you don't find much variety in the tracks, but on top of that they don't change all that much or really push the limit. You can't fall back that far or get that huge a lead anyway, so it doesn't make much difference in the end. The night levels looked cool, but they actually just made it harder to pick up power ups, which is already a luck based hassle to begin with. If you happen to see it in a bundle or have it from a bundle, it's fine for said afternoon. But nothing I'd seek out at full price.

Witch cards will drop: Ittle Dew

If you look at my Steam game playing history in terms of hours spent, I tend to gravitate toward somewhat less action-y, somewhat more think-y games but rarely all that think-y. I'm not a puzzle guy, not really, I lack patience. I always have. I do like turn based 4x games; the reason I haven't reviewed many (or any, I'd have to check) ends up with the feeling they eat time like no other. It's kinda hard to write about a game you should probably put a good hundred hours into to get a real feel for what it's like.

I do like puzzles in some games, though. I remember the sci-fi grounded puzzles in Dead Space really fondly. Clearing jams in the artificial gravity unit or life support wings were cool, generally unique ideas. But puzzle games themselves are generally the same thing repeated over and over. Push a block. Push a block. Now, push a block.

Generally, I think the biggest issue is one of general pacing - puzzle games tend to be sluggish and mistake the deliberate pace of the puzzle gameplay with something the game should have at all points in the production. It often feels like half the challenge is not getting bored out by having to slowly shove blocks around a room while your character moves at the speed of a waterborne slug.

Ittle Dew is a block pushing puzzle game. It was done by, previous to, the same individual(s) who put out Card City Nights, which was a pretty fun single player card game. It has the same tongue in cheek sense of humor and shares the same basic art style, albeit in a somewhat different setting than whatever you want to say CCN was in.

Witch cards will drop: Porradaria Upgrade

This game isn't any good, and neither was my reason for playing it.

I'm still putting time in to grind out games that have cards, that I want to play. I idle stinkers, but I can usually spare the five minutes to see if a game is worth playing. Porradaria, on the other hand, caught my eye because looking over the 'badges' page you can see black bars across some of the cards. I paused, staring at them in confusion. Was he censoring his own trading cards? What the...?

So yeah I installed and played it to figure out what kind of brazen nudity this greenlit game had managed to sneak through. For reference, there is nudity of various kinds in Steam, I think? The Witcher's cards are censored, although maybe they're not anymore, and I'm not sure how censored the Witcher 2 is. I'm pretty sure Huniepop is censored, but I don't own it, and I know from people's discussions in the SA Steam thread it has an uncensored version. But Path of Exile had some minor nudity (mostly statues, iirc) and many other games might have similar little bits hanging out. I feel like there was a horror game I played recently that had some nudity. Oh yeah, the ghost psychic in Fear 2 had her bits out.

That was chilling.

Personally, I don't think nudity is all that big of a deal. It can be effective in horror or in showing decadence, but those big black bars of censorship made me genuinely wonder what the deal with this game was. So, you know, a bad reasons to waste an hour of my life.

Inaccurately named: Gunpoint

I'm not a historian and I don't know when it happened, but at some point advertising took over the naming of things. Probably in the sixties, but probably like the 60s BC. A flashy name was worth more than actually, I don't know, describing the contents of the project. Thusly we have Gunpoint, a game in which I was shot about a hundred times but never held at Gunpoint, and only shot a singular person throughout the entire campaign. The developer straight up admits he came up with the name and built a game that got away from the name.

Your character is holding a gun on the box so... Actually I guess it's kind of a reverse spoiler or something... Well, whatever. Gunpoint is a puzzle game, a genre rarely recognized for its thrilling action-o-matic scenes. Actually it might be better described as a Noir detective ninja puzzle game, or maybe a spy thriller puzzle game. You're described as a spy, but you look more like a noir era detective. It's a spy game, basically, in that fantasy realm of spy games that I don't think we get that many of any more.

Well, there isn't a box. If there was a box, then he'd be holding a gun on the box. Or the tin, if you bought the hypothetical nonexistent collector's edition.

It's also a pixel art game. If you've been reading my reviews for a while, you probably realize I'm a little enamored with pixel art games. Good pixel art, mind you, which can be minimalist like Risk of Rain or incredibly detailed like Sonic Mania. There's lots of bad pixel art, lots and lots, people just taking the easy way out and making something "retro".

I wouldn't describe Gunpoint as retro. In fact, the juxtaposition of elements and ideas in Gunpoint are such that it really ends up defining itself by stringing together those elements into something that feels familiar but also unique.

Witch cards will drop: Blue Estate

Originally back in September, which I sometimes like to call Shootember, I was going to play through a mix and match of games that involve shooting. After playing Nuclear Throne, which definitely has quite a bit of shooting, technical problems and general apathy pushed me to play some other stuff. Blue Estate was on the list, having downloaded it after realizing it was something akin to a shooter without being a true FPS game.

Technically, I guess rail shooters are first person shooters, but with the rise of the first person shooter they went rapidly extinct with a handful of titles a year instead of being... Actually I guess they were never all that popular. The main difference between rail shooters and FPS games, to me, is actually less in the lack of movement and more what the lack of movement does to the game-play. Instead of being rewarded for careful placement and strategic play, it's basically all reaction time as your protagonist blunders into the line of fire over and over.

I honestly can't remember the last time I played a rail shooter and I definitely couldn't name one I thought was good or an exceptional product of the genre or whatever else. I'm not a great shot in real life and I'm not definitely not a great shot in this or in any other rail shooters. So we'll say this is one of those experiences where I find myself playing a game I'm not fundamentally suited toward playing, which is generally not an inspiring catalyst for a review.

On the other hand you've got to branch out and try different games, right? Even if all you end up doing is finding out you honestly don't like a given genre.

Witch cards will drop: Tower of Guns

Roguelites, which is a pretty vague half-genre description, spread to many different full genres and do many different things to those games. To my surprise, one of the genres that seems most easily adapted to roguelite behaviors is shooters the list of ones recommended to try is pretty short. I mean you have this one, Tower of Guns, and then you have that other one Ziggurat. Then I don't think much of any have come up as worthwhile.

You'd really think roguelites would prosper with FPS gameplay, given most if not all of the core elements are so easily transitioned over. Random drops, leveling, random events, levels assembled by quasi-procedural nonsense, FPSes can do all of this and maybe actually do it in fun ways. I don't know, maybe there's a literal ton of them, but I can think of like two indie FPS roguelites that don't fall on the list.

It's a little bit annoying that I keep running into roguelite games while doing this streak of reviews, but Tower of Guns I simply had installed from weeks or months ago and had forgotten about it. Recently, I picked up a used geforce 960 GTX, so I was looking at shooters I'd forgotten about and realized I actually had more than a few currently installed. Which is, you know, kind of silly. So I loaded this up and gave it a whirl.

Actually, though I guess I'll find a copy of Ziggurat eventually, maybe the reality is the problems with Tower of Guns highlight why FPS into roguelite is a bit difficult. Guess we'll see whenever that shows up in a bundle or whatever.

Witch cards will drop: Space Run

Tower defense games are, on the most part, one of the few genres I feel is always reliable. TD games are almost always "good" if they look good but inversely almost never "great" no matter how great they look on the surface. A handful I've played have really impressed me, but usually by stepping a measure outside the genre, though that often enough doesn't work so well either. The best example of a completely in genre TD is probably Defense Grid, while the best one working outside the genre is probably Orcs Must Die 2. Both of those have sequels I'm not all that eager to play, which shows just how tenuous the process can be.

Space Run is, without a doubt, completely in the genre of being a TD game. Oh, it tries to step out a little. The game is about running cargo along a straight 'space lane' or whatever you want to call it, which is a very linear track. As you go, various obstacles and enemies arrive, hover around your ship for a little and then sometimes wander off, fight you, or whatever else. If they're asteroids, sometimes they run into you, which is hurtful.

Your main character is the handsome and handsomely named Buck Mann, an everyman space jockey who owes money to the space mafia (which unfortunately does not include references to Black Shadow or Blue Bacchus)  and works as a space runner. Your partner is the android Addam12, who has 12 written on his forehead and is drawn in a manner that reminds me a little of Kryten of Red Dwarf but isn't voiced in quite a charming way. He's a beep boop robot, etc.

Buck Mann accepts jobs from various wacky characters; well, the first company you work with isn't all that wacky, but everyone afterward is increasingly strange. Then you're off to drive a spaceship in a straight line through space and tower defense your way through what may come.

Witch cards will drop: Steredenn

I spent way too much money in October (hint: Chicago is expensive) and now I need to get my ass in gear for the Christmas sale! And what place does one take one's ass for the Christmas sale: That's right, grinding on cards. While I idle most of the cruddier games that have cards, there's a ton of good, or at least good looking games that can be short reviewed for fun and cards. And everyone loves selling cards.

One advantage to playing a lot of games is getting to see the filtering of ideas, or even hypothetical parallel evolution. That is to say when designs are not influenced by each other, but rather arrive to the same design conclusion independently. It makes gaming feel a little less like closed individual systems and more like ecosystems of ideas, which almost makes it feeler grander in the way art likes to be played as. We're all aware of basic copying, of taking a basic "thing" from one game or a basic genre, like platformers in the 80s and FPSes in the 90s, but the more subtle cues and design hints make for a more interesting way to see games made.

And to mock their short-comings.

Steredenn has one of the oddest little names I've ever seen. Google's best translation is from Breton and it translates into Star. So the game is basically named Star. It's a simple name for what is ultimately a pretty simple game.

Anyway, Steredenn is a shmup of the side scrolling variety, built from the higher end level of pixel art where style and aesthetics are both emphasized. If the game has much of a story, well, I didn't notice. Instead - as games are wont to do in the modern indie paradigm - the game is a psuedo-roguelike, or roguelite, or something I'm tempted to call rougelite since we've fallen so far from the original design that boy is my face red.

Rougelites kinda drive me batty. Ha! Get it?

Witch cards will drop: Fire

So I think of myself as an individual who dislikes adventure games, but when I look back over the games I've played since starting up this blog, there are a pair of adventure games - Primordia and Morningstar - which I actually look back on positively. And that's my entire line of adventure games, right there, so maybe I'm wrong.

Or maybe those were just good games.

Fire is an adventure (puzzle/exploration) game set in a fantasy stone age world, along the lines of something like There was a Cave Man, or maybe a better example is Bonk's Adventure or the Flintstone's. I wish there was a Bonk's Adventure game on Steam, that would be good to review, since those games are acid trips. The game does not have english writing nor english dialogue, instead conveying information entirely through visual and more basic sounds than pure language. Though it does onga bonga blap blap at you as well, I guess. Basically, Fire is "in the stone age" through the lens of a drug high sliding in the wrong direction toward a bad trip.

The game's interesting hook is that complete lack of writing; puzzles are not really themed in any meaningful way as per the setting. The last section I bothered to finished had you feeding berries to creatures who looked like cartoon bushes, which would then allow them to play music. Once you lined up the tunes, and then spoke to cavemen in masks, the music would reduce them to meat. You then feed the meat to baby birds, who go back into their eggs and...

Well, you get the idea. Basically, it's not "the stone age", it's just goofy illogical puzzles without much in the way of explanation. The game cheats a little, even, using visual elements that convey speech or convey the meaning behind speech. Pictographs are still text, you know? Visually the game is a total thematic mess, it's pretty obvious the art team just didn't care and made whatever they felt like making. The music and audio, on the other hand, are just there to chill you out and provide gentle ambience while you play. Those are good, or at least, good at suiting what the game needs out of music. I don't think people play Adventure games to rock out while going through the puzzle sections or something.

Basically, the game is a generic puzzle/adventure thing, but entirely lacking any story or narrative structure. You appear on a screen, try to puzzle out the development logic and then you get a firefly that teleports you to the next level. The game's humor is utterly puerile, and the visuals are often weirdly off putting. There's just like, a frog anus or dinosaur brains or people being electrocuted to death to go with happy smiling flowers and dancing dudes who melt into meat. If it was trying to be cute, it would be cute, but instead it halfway tries to be cute and then slops over gore in the other direction.

Basically, I dislike this game, and at about the halfway point I shrugged my shoulders and stopped playing it. The puzzles are a mix of hunting pixels for what you're supposed to click on and then from there warping your brain to logic out puzzles that have so little to do with the setting. Maybe it's normal for adventure games to be so lacking flavor and story, I don't know, but it doesn't feel normal to me.

Belated hootemer: Starward Rogue

You ever get an idea of what a game is, and wanting that game, in your head? And then when you get said game, you realize you either had it wrong or were thinking of an entirely different title? And you're left in the possession of a game you're now trying to figure out if you even wanted? Well, here's Starward Rogue, and here's me.

Starward Rogue is an "Arcen title". If you've never heard of Arcen, they make a lot of weird games. That's sort of their thing. They're probably one of the most prolific indie developers. On a basic level I admit I feel affection toward Arcen, they try to do something different and keep trying. Some of their games are successes and some aren't, but that just makes them more endearing.

Which kinda makes Starward Rogue a little weird to review. Starward isn't an especially creative or unusual venture, and how I mixed it up with something else is very strange to me. In fact this game is almost a little ironic to review now, but it's just coincidentally a title that appeared in a humble monthly - albeit a humble monthly I didn't pay for, and instead got from a friend - which it has in bundle common with some other games I've been playing.

Anyway, the game is a completely top down roguelite or maybe even roguelike twin stick shooter. I'd say it is "simple" but the game manages to be extremely complex in spite of the fact it's a simple premise and it all kinda rolls from there. I'm putting it under shootember because bullets and shooting, man, bullets covering the screen.

Arcen style yo

Retro reviews: Phantasy Star II

Phantasy Star 2 was released in the odd period between the NES and SNES, where it felt like developers really weren't tapping the power of the Genesis at all. The original Final Fantasy is its immediate FF neighbor in the West, and while Phantasy Star 2 is visually more enticing than that, it is so much worse looking than FFIV. It's funny how these games are divided by years, but as a teenager, it never really connected how big the gaps in development were. Graphical quality was increasing in huge jumps, as both the technical development improved and the sprite art improved as well.

Actually it's kinda funny how people in the modern day have zero concept of the gaps between game releases. I read some complaint about how Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle (which is bad, don't get me wrong) made a guy "thankful" he had a SNES as a child. Alex Kidd predates the SNES by like, a year or something. You weren't playing Alex Kidd when the SNES was available, unless you rented it, at which point you were renting an old goofy Genesis game.

In spite of the fact I owned a Sega Genesis - a generation 1 model, in fact, bought almost on the day of release in North America- I never finished PS2. The game was rather unpleasant in terms of difficulty curve, as it never really became super obvious as a small child that 90% of RPG difficulty
could be mitigated with grinding and just drawing maps. The game is already far enough back that my only memory is getting the first new party member, and how awesome the box art is. It also seems to have nothing to do with anything, but hey, whatever. That art owns.

I really miss the era of non-anime box art for western releases of Japanese games. It went away sooner than later, but that is some trippy shit instead of the cool but kinda plain Japanese release art. Stuff like this dying out reminds me why I hate weebs.

RPGs on the SNES and Genesis were more expensive than their less memory equipped cartridge compatriots, owing to the necessity of adding additional physical media within their plastic prisons - the so-called 'battery backup' that actually really was. (I've read some games, however, had flash memory instead) As such, PS2 - and many of its ilk - weren't games my friends and I bought when I was young enough that this game was new, but rented. It's such a weird thing, remember how you'd basically "borrow" these games from a store and you'd often be praying weekend to weekend - or weeks apart - that someone didn't send your saved game off to oblivion.

Top Seven Zones I'd like to see remixed in Sonic Mania

I just can't stop talking about Sonic these days. I recently watched a video that presented the youtuber's personal picks for the top seven they'd like to see. It's a good video, feel free to watch it before I go over my picks.

And now, I use the break function, because reasons

I hate this game: Galak-Z

Under normal circumstances, I try to do two things with video games. The first is to try to appreciate the nuances of the production, understand that if something is bad it could be bad for a variety of reasons. Take Sonic Adventure 2. Sure, I disliked it, but Sonic in 3D is hard. And the game had lots of good points, stuff I enjoyed.

The other thing is to try to let my opinion relax, don't start screaming. But you know what? Sometimes, a game just makes me want to scream.

Galak-Z is a space shooter of the 360 degrees of motion sort. I haven't played anything like this in years, and I think the closest thing I could compare it to is probably Ur-Quan Masters. It's not a genre flush with new titles, and I don't think anything has come out in this space approaching the AAA category in generations of gamers. Galak-Z, in a lot of ways, attempts to bring the AAA appeal to this sort of game.

It starts out so well...

Facsimile souls: Lords of the Fallen

First things first, and I feel like I'm doing this a lot, Lords of the Fallen is spoken of as a clone of Dark Souls. I played a couple hours of Dark Souls in something like 2012, and found I hadn't quite gotten the hang of the xbox controller enough to enjoy it. I told myself I'd go back, once I felt like I did, and yeah that took years. I've been meaning to, but I've been rushing through a lot of games lately.

As an aside, this game has too many buttons. It amazes me, looking back on people mocking console players for babby controller sort of stuff. The xbox one controller here has something like twenty or whatever inputs, and when I first got my 360 controller I couldn't reliably hit the right button every time. There's just so many! You know how many buttons my precious Sega genesis had? A d-pad, a start button and then three. The SNES doubled that, but it didn't use the shoulder buttons often. I'm not sure when controller design blotted up to such numbers, but it's pretty impressive

Anyway, I don't strongly remember Dark Souls, but it's pretty evident right from the start that this game is attempting to copy a lot of elements of it. I mean more mechanical elements, gameplay and so forth, not stylistic choices. As such, it's sort of a RPG, although 'rolling person game' might be a better use of the acronym.

Unlike DS, Lords of the Fallen is specifically about one mang, and one mang only. Though you can customize your mang in various ways that as far as I can tell don't matter much to the experience, you play as HARKYN, a convicted criminal, possibly of the heretical iconoclast sort, possibly of the just a violent punchy man sort. Harkyn has made his way to the... Top of the world? A temple? A place where people are and it's cold? Anyway you're here to have sex with sexy ladies and dodge roll everywhere.

And there's like no ladies up here because it's a monastery. Er. Yes.