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.