xyzzysqrl

This was pretty good.

It starts off as a side-scrolling arcade space shooter, which has kind of clunky controls and doesn't feel very good to play, but that's okay because you promptly get shot down and your little bubble-headed astronaut dude has to use his teleport gun to solve puzzle screens.

Is there a name for the ... like, C64-style, ZX Spectrum-style, this-game-style, You Have To Win The Game-style, VVVVV-style "single screen platformer that connects to other single screen platformer areas and they all have pithy names at the top of the screen" genre? Because there should be something way the hell shorter than that.

Anyway you bop along finding items and solving puzzles, and then you fight the boss, and he's like "WE'LL SETTLE THIS IN SPACE!" and you go back to space and have to do more godawful space shooter until you win.

But all the parts in the MIDDLE are good, they're just sandwiched in kind of a bland wad of shooter gameplay. I had a fun time with this. Good music, good jumping. Thumbs up. It's like 99 cents, I can't complain.

...wow uh these got bleak.
Okay, kind of. There's still a somewhat lighthearted tone 'til the end, but...

...wow.

As these are parts 3 and 4 in a series, that's all I can say without spoilers. The puzzles are a bit more obtuse, things are a little scaled up, and an entire civilization is at stake.

I wonder if there'll be a Snail Trek: The Next Generation. Or Voyager, maybe. (Deep Shell 9?)

I say complete, but I've finished two story modes and played a bunch of Vs PC and the gatcha campaign mode. Still, I did finish story modes, I did get a credits roll.

First off: Killer Instinct in the 90s, in the arcades or on your N64: I hated it. Young Sqrl, blessed be those bad opinions, thought it was like Nintendo totally missing the point of Mortal Kombat and making a game where you just hammer buttons as fast as you can.

After playing this update... yeah the character designs are sorta edgy, yeah the game CAN come down to "mash as fast and hard as you can" if you have assists turned on...

...but you actually can play it like a real fighter. Or you can embrace the 90s, crank the (amazing, mostly Mick Gordon) soundtrack way up and just MASH IT OUT YEAAAAAHHHHHHHH ULTRAAAA COMBOOOOOOOOOOOOO

There's a lot to KI2013 now that it's "done". There's a weird gatcha-style campaign mode where you earn currency for buffs and try to stop an extradimensional gargoyle from conquering the world. There's two different story modes, there's a "create a shadow character" mode, there's obviously online multiplayer but who cares, and it's all wrapped up in a pretty strong package.

Fighting games are good actually, I guess.

So these were more ambitious but also had some interesting issues.

Paradox Lost is a metroidvania sort of game, big on exploring somewhat boxy maps. The gimmick is that your gun can warp you to the past, present, or future if you bounce a shot off a crystal and back into the gun. This in practice means you have to navigate between three maps that sort of resemble each other, and while this was a huge pain in the ass at the start of the game it eased back a little as the game progressed.

My biggest problem is that 100%ing does nothing. My second biggest problem is that the button bound to "view map" in Assassin's Creed Origins was here bound to "kill yourself", so I would suddenly drop dead because I got the urge to look at where I was. Oops.

These are slightly ironic issues, given the next game:

End of Line is a block-pushing, vaguely Lolo-esqe puzzler where your goal is for your little Mega Man style robot to die without being brought back by a repair device. In practice this means "smash all the devices" is high on your priority list, meaning "get to them first" is the basis of the puzzle screens.

Unfortunately, there are optional objectives, and it's very easy to miss one. The only thing you can do about that is to play the game over from the beginning again, or watch the 'good' ending on Youtube. I did the second one.

Retro Game Crunch is a package of seven retro-y NES-y-flavored video games bundled into a single launcher sold on Steam. At first I was going to consider the entire seven-game package as one game and only post about it once, but the two I've tried easily crossed the Manos Threshold(*) and were suitably playable games in their own right, so I figured I'd split them out to pad my game count for the year give them their appropriate due.

Of the two games I finished, Brains & Hearts is absolutely the lesser. A combative card game between Einstein and a robot in which you compete to make ascending or descending runs of numbers using at least one of your opponent's placed cards. It took me a while to work out how to win it, and I still don't think I could do it reliably, but I did declare victory once so yay for me.

The other game, Super Clew Land, is an exploration-style platformer with some ideas that feel a little underbaked but a good challenge all around. You begin as a sort of gel mass and eating lets you evolve your body (in a fixed way, no EVO shenanigans here) until you're at Peak Gelsquoosh Power. Then you flap around collecting things, fight a final boss, and win.

Eventually. That final boss is a toothsome heap of spikes and purple that slaughtered my goo-poo a few dozen times before I nailed him by dint of him just not using the moves that killed me so often. Took a little over an hour, so it was a well-invested bit of time.

I'll probably return to Retro Game Crunch a few more times. The games in here are good and fun.

* The Manos Threshold, strongly implied but not explicitly defined by a cute reader/blogger Celine, is the point in a game blogger's play when they reflect upon a topic, realize "I've written more about less than this, so I might as well..." and resign themselves to knocking out a couple paragraphs.

There is a split between what this game Is and what this game is About.

What this game Is, is a walking simulator in a very literal sense. Your character, transformed by a talking wolf into a ragged skeleton hobo (please just go with this), spends his days walking the hills and plains and streets of the United States of America. You can hitchhike or whistle to move faster.

Scattered all over the country are your resources: Stories and People. You collect the stories in the form of mini text-adventure vignettes which are limitedly interactive. Often you can affect the tone of these via choices, shifting a horror story into a comedy by noticing some detail, or vice versa. Once you have the Stories, you take them to the People. "Tell me a hopeful one." they say, and you dig through your notes to try to remember which tale has an uplifting ending.

If you use the stories enough, they grow in the telling to become stronger. Hit the people with enough Strong Stories and they'll open up to you, showing their true selves. You win by making all the people open up to you with their full tales.

So that's what the game Is.
What the game is About is America. Not our actual America right now, but an America that's timeless and eternal. Where events from the 1880s co-exist with the hippies of the 1970s and everything between, and where you can walk the cities and towns and find every wonderful, horrible, tragic and beautiful thing the people of this country can do and have done to, with, and because of each other.

Every story you collect has some roots, and you can watch them grow and become twisted and strange and unfamiliar in the telling. Every person you meet has a kernel of truth at their center, and you can follow their joys and their losses. Also there's a fricking ton of ghost stories, but if you read some old folklore you will realize that America has always been haunted as fuck, so that doesn't really scan as unauthentic to me.

The amount you enjoy this game, thus, is equal to the amount you can stand to sit and play an experimental text-heavy game that sometimes feels like infotainment but often just stares directly at what America does to people and has always done to them. Sometimes it's uplifting. Sometimes it's crushing. Sometimes it's just how life works out there.

Also the frame rate gets really choppy sometimes when you're walking around. That's sort of irritating.

[EDIT]: Also, if you're the anal-about-achievements type, please note that this game has an unobtainable achievement. One of the achievements is for finding the ACTUAL place, in-game, where the water tastes like wine and people have no problems and life is good and sweet all the time.

I suspect the intent of that achievement is the slow dawning realization that that place doesn't actually exist.

I have chosen to read it as that place instead being in Canada or Mexico, where you're not allowed to walk because of map boundaries.

The various games that come out of Aether Interactive have a couple of common threads. They like to explore digital personhood and what it means to exist in a nostalgic space long after it goes defunct. They like to pretend to be a thing, a BBS or an old Mac or a strange OS. They offer dense wads of philosophy side by side with heavy fictional worldbuilding and further worldbuilding INSIDE that worldbuilding, so you may find yourself reading the history of a fictional TV show and then dip further into reading fanfiction of the episodes of that TV show.

In my opinion, they also all have very loose inconclusive endings, but I find I don't care so much.

So this came with the month's Humble Bundle offerings, and because it offered me dense texty wads of chewy future-fiction I dove into it first. It was... strong? Good. I love anything that gives me a mixed media feel, from websites to PDFs to mocked-up chat programs to a nice little MP3 player going in the background.

Storywise... you're playing as yourself playing as an agent seeking to hunt down the leader of a synthetic modification movement. Artificial humans are installing serial ports to modify themselves away from humanity and link in a more machinelike way. Naturally this must be stopped because it's unnatural.

I think it won't surprise anyone to know that I was firmly on the synth side here.

So it turned into a strong tangle of metafiction with -- surprise -- a loose inconclusive ending. I'm glad I played it anyway. I would normally drop to spoilerspace but I don't know HOW I would even discuss this, even when it's spoilerspaced. Uh... welp.

The music was good too.

Well this is the most fucking esoteric thing I'm gonna play this year, I bet.

So over on Celine's blog, she suddenly pulled out a suite of ZZT games from 2003 that were part of a contest that was never formally judged. ... SURE WHY NOT, LET'S BE JUDGES ON THE INTERNET IN 2003.

I haven't played a ZZT game in over a decade so this oughta be fun. I don't even know what the community standards are.

OUTSIDER LOOSE IN THE VOTING BOOTH Y'ALL.

So my scale is like... 1/10 would be "you actually fell asleep on the keyboard and submitted an empty project file titled "AFGNDERP.ZZT" and 10/10 would be "This is almost like an actual game with the quality my teenage self remembers and you did it in a single day you badass."

Let's get judgmental.

( Here goes. )

I have no idea how I submit these scores. Presumably I just wait until someone comes by and checks my card. ... uh, Celine?

...anybody?

...well I'm gonna play some Code Red while I wait.

Okay this is...

This is a Flash/HTML5 game that's still in active development and I beat it with two classes out of three. (Thieves are hard.) So it's really dumb to put it up here, BUT given that both of the games I'm playing right now are like SUPER LONG...

Anyway uh. This is an in-progress roguelike where you wander around a small dungeon fighting things with your dice and your inventory. Your inventory is all stuff like "does damage based on the number of the dice" or "must use an odd-numbered dice, will poison the enemy for that number" or whatever.

Each class has a gimmick: The warrior leans hard on attack/defense items and little else, the thief is maybe the most "Technical" in that they can gather a billion fiddly little dinguses that let them add or subtract dice dots and convert damage to poison over time or whatever, and the inventor is a big ol' pain in the ass that HAS to convert an inventory item into a gadget at the end of every fight, so it's like a war of attrition between you and your inventory. Can you finish the dungeon before you get inspired by bullshit and convert your only weapon into a fucking paperweight?

I didn't enjoy the inventor much.

This is a pretty good game and it's getting better as more versions come out. I probably won't mention it again, but I really wanted to talk about it a little and point people over at the website while it's being worked on.

Next update adds a Mage class, so that should be neat.

After 76 hours (and one continue, curse you QTEs) I can put this one to bed. Yakuza 5 is BRAIN-EVAPORATINGLY huge as a game, with sections I never touched. Accordingly, I got about a 33% completion rate.

The Yakuza series continues to fascinate me, though. Stacks of plot upon plot upon plot, as people emerge from the shadows holding guns and IT'S YOU!! and then they get shot by other people who emerge from the shadows holding guns, and everyone grabs their left shoulder and tears their clothing off in a single mass so they can fist-fight shirtless.

This one had Haruka, adopted daughter of the long-suffering Kiryu Kazama, as a playable character who fought with dance battles. This was easily my absolute favorite thing in the entire game and I spent way too long building her up as an idol starlette. Kinda figures really.

Aside from that... just SO MUCH GAME in this, man. Hours and hours and hours...

One day I have to go back and replay the series from 0 to 6, except I feel like that may take the entire rest of my life to do, particularly if I want to 100% it.

Which ... I DUNNO. 76 hours feels like enough of a game to me.