Read SOFT & CUDDLY, a book about the game of the same name.
This is a book supposedly about the once controversial, now forgotten game Soft & Cuddly for the Spectrum, though really only about half the book is dedicated to the game; possibly because there really isn’t that much to say about it in the long run, as the game is quite boring once you get past the gruesome visuals.
Instead, the game largely focuses on the state of England that led to the creation of this title, and has a good bit of history about the Thatcher government, and the creation and release of the ZX Spectrum microcomputer.
Unfortunately, it’s let down by the author’s writing voice. It feels like they were trying to be as punk as this game, which makes it harder to recommend to people who are interested in the topics it covers. While I understand their anger over a lot of things discussed (I would be too), it’s expressed quite poorly and comes off as either cringey or tedious (or both) and I ended up forcing myself through the whole book. It’s a shame, because otherwise it’s a pretty good read.
Mirrors (1990) - this was recommended to me on the basis of “it’s a translated pc88 horror visual novel starring David Sylvain of Japan” which is all i needed to hear. i mean the photos are of Sylvain but in the game he’s “David Astley”, of the UK Indie group “Eleno Vision”, the other members of which are basically just the guys from Depeche Mode. they are just about to embark on their first european tour when david starts to have eerie prophetic dreams of a person who looks like himself killing people at night. just when he thinks he’s winning, when he’s broken every door, the ghosts of his life blow wilder than before.
i’m enjoying it so far, there’s a lot of fun and creative stuff going on with the photo textures (particularly the in-game concerts). it’s also pretty funny that the game itself is kind of exoticised european stuff seen from the perspective of japan considering it stars the guy from japan who spent a lot of time playing around with “eastern” imagery. in practice it can be kind of slow at points when you’re just wandering around various tourist hotspots in france or whatever but i do enjoy the kind of gabriel knight 2 semi-edutainment vibe this gives.
Subway Midnight (2021) - indulgent personal detail but as someone who’s been making 3d/2d cartoon horror games for the last 18 months i was pretty embarrassed to find out there’s been this 3d/2d cartoon horror game which has been in development for the past 3 years (although it seems to only have been announced recently). it is a very awkward feeling to feel like you’ve been ripping off something you didn’t even know existed. however after playing it i felt a bit better as they’re pretty different approaches. for one thing this game has no text and for another i had to upgrade my radeon card in order to play it, it’s a much more visually ambitious kind of production which plays around more with highend lighting and liquid simulation and etc to get some cool effects.
structurally it’s one of those games where the joke / suspense is in the back and forth between these repeating template areas and the different variations on them you encounter. every level is basically a train carriage but some of them are filled with dead fish, or boxes, or a single weird looking figure, or something is chasing you etc. the carriages seem to be split into loosely thematic groups (each haunted by a different ghost) but happily it also switches things up every so often by having weird once-off bits thrown in there without explanation that it doesn’t linger on.
on the other hand every so often i had the feeling of like Little Nightmares disease, where the game is anxious enough about being dismissed as just a style showcase that it goes too far in the other direction of like “check this out: physics!! tactility!! gamefeel!!” and then you the player have to do some rote stuff where you crank a wheel or pull on a chain to affect the environment or something. similarly you’re not just walking around endless subway cars, you’re physics walking around endless subway cars, which is the same thing except it makes everything feel like an ice level with that little slippy acceleration lag on things. maybe that’s my suffering graphics card. but it’s fun seeing all the different variations so far and i’m curious to see if it keeps escalating. i think i already knocked myself out of getting the good ending so will just proceed until i get murdered by the serial killer.
new work schedule is getting in the way of krav so I have picked up the copy of ring fit that my wife put down for when I can’t make it to the gym
I really like the level design and dislike almost every other part of the presentation – the “story” is obnoxious, the RPG exercise battles are dumb, but the branching sonic levels where you have to jump and shoot in different directions while jogging are great! wish there were just more of those
also I didn’t realize that forza doesn’t unlock for game pass until Tuesday wtf
It’s a pretty game, sort of a janky Moebius look to it. I think its graphics are a little overhyped though. The aesthetic might be a bit shallow and abstracted, spread a bit too thin over a huge game. But I dunno, it may surprise me as I explore further.
It has much better writing than it needs. It kind of snuck up on me! It’s sparse but every line is flavorful. I like the worldbuilding a lot. I really enjoyed its concept of a coming-of-age walkabout where every young adult spends a year or two just wandering all over the place and doing side-quests for people. Everyone knows about the tradition and recognizes what you’re up to, so wherever you go strangers will just ask you for random favors, and you’ve got nothing better to do so you indulge them and learn from it. Americorps should just be that.
The music is lovely, and it’s fun to hear a pop musician like Japanese Breakfast try her hand at an ambient zelda soundtrack.
Unfortunately, the game feels kind of unpleasant to play. The climbing physics are unpredictable and frustrating. The hoverbike is a core part of the game and story, but the driving is awful. Going over the slightest bump causes you to corkscrew around and flip over yourself, but that doesn’t even result in an interesting crash or anything. You just kind of slowly float back into driving position.
You can tell this was one of those tiny artgame projects that attracted way more attention and funding than expected and had to swell its scope rapidly to accommodate it. It’s trying to do a Breath of the Wild thing, but it doesn’t really get there. The landscapes are much too large and featureless and your bike is far too slow, so without any combat or other kind of gameplay tension, you end up kind of just zoning out as you drift between setpieces.
Some of those setpieces are pretty interesting though! And the quests you go on are fairly diverse and entertaining.
It’s a tentative recommendation from me, though I’ll probably only end up exploring a small percentage of it before I fall off it.
D-pad problems persist when trying to play high speed levels in Tetris Effect on Switch Lite, but otherwise, exploring a lot of the other modes is a good, chill time.
Knights of San Francisco is great, a fun little CYOA mobile phone game, with a surprisingly great soundtrack.
Also playing World End Syndrome which sure is a classical Japanese Visual Novel but I do appreciate the big budget production values. I’m hours in and it doesn’t seem too horny which is also nice. I’m finally through the fairly long prologue and the game has now opened up so I’m interested to see if it does anything interesting.
Oh and Supertype is finally fixed so the game’s UI doesn’t overlap with the Android UI soft keys so it’s playable again, and it is very much one of my favorite puzzle games of all time.
I really love G-string’s world and story but wish it was less fiddly. It’s platforming involves trusting a 2cm wide object floating in toxic death liquid/above a bottomless pit too often and many firefights felt too prolonged. Super good climate anxiety scifi setpieces helped by great music - the smog storm being the big highpoint. Overall a bit loose and plodding but tonally horrific which was probably it’s biggest achievement over Half-life 2, since it invites the comparison.
I gave Animal Crossing New Horizons a shot. Undeniably great aesthetic but I think that’s all I get out of it other than yelling when the bug I want gets away. I really want an in-depth bughunting/collection game; fishing and fossils are too laborious by comparison.
Based on the control scheme I figured the game would be relatively easy going but it is unusually fussy. Constant pressing A to progress anything, a shovel that has a mind of its own, and the vaulting pole should just be a contextual prompt. Ultimately boring and incompatible with my brain as I just saw everything in a mental quest list that had no tangible end-point other than to flood a desert island with curated things and people. The reading of Tom Nook as a satire of property economics would be great if the game really lent into the absurdity and complexity of the finances involved. The problem is there’s nothing the game has that I want (other than insects) and I have no patience to get to the later tools so the capitalism deflates. As soon as turnips were introduced as a cutesy version of stocks:
I picked up Ring Fit again to get back into an exercise routine - starting NG++. I’ve been playing this game for over a year but only at this point do they finally balance out the damage stats of every single exercise by offering level 4 versions that share the same stats. I had been thinking this is something they should introduce into the sequel but lo and behold it is actually in the game, just far too late.
The writers seem to acknowledge that very few people will play the game for this long and have started making the character dialogue very slightly meta presumably to either reward those who are persisting this far and/or check they are still paying attention. It’s still strange to me that Nintendo haven’t done much more with the controller. Given how successful the game was, I do wonder if a sequel or similar is in the works. There’s a lot that could be improved about the game and I’d love to see it actually manifest somewhere.
The game I keep coming back to is FFVII - and the progress still feels pretty breezy. I’m out of Midgar and am currently about to enter the Golden Saucer. I like how much of a horrible industrial nightmare the world is so far and that the party members on the bench are contextually given different lines/things to do in certain scenes.
I figure this must’ve been a really interesting gimmick at the time but there’s a fiddly minigame every 30 minutes that is always barely explained to the player. It kind of breaks me out of the adventure and makes it feel like I’m on a game show although I am impressed at how consistently they’ve been with delivering something new all the time even if it’s goofy. I’m not sure if there’s a name for it but it’s something I see in lots of Sakaguchi games, variety even at the cost of absurdity. It reminds me of how The Last Story puts a brake on the plot just so the characters can investigate a Scooby Doo mystery in a haunted mansion.
Materia swapping kills party experimentation entirely for me. It’s to the point where levelled materia seem more important than specific party member’s stats - like the materia are the real party members. There is no way I am swapping out materia manually every time I want to change a party member. I am basically consigning certain characters to the bench forever because I can never see them being viable with the small amount of materia I have to share at the moment. Let’s hope this strategy doesn’t come back to bite me
I find this interesting because I used to feel the same, but then I noticed that materia significantly influences my character’s stats, to the point that I can hobble a character by giving them too much magic (which makes their max HP and physical damage go down). FF7 is a pretty easy game so you don’t really run into many situations where the stats your materia gives/takes matters, but it’s VERY important on low-level playthroughs and challenging encounters to match materia to your character’s stats.
Also there’s a sub-menu of the materia menu (go all the way to the left at the materia screen) that allows you to swap your entire party’s materia at once, rather than just one person’s, and it includes pulling materia from benched characters. I’ve beaten the game 3 times and I just realized this on my most recent playthrough. OOPS.
The way I see it Ff7 was like… the first AAA prestige tour game. And random RPG battles were both what allowed a game of that scope to work on a console at the time (they’re relatively easy to implement and give absolute freedom to level designers), and what ultimately held the game back from Square’s point of view (they’re anthetical to AAA prestige for many reasons)
So the random RPG battles are still in, but there are much less of them than in FF1-6, difficulty is drastically lowered (« I didn’t notice you could equip materias until the final dungeon!! » ~your cousin’s friend) and the game is peppered with minigames to keep your attention going
Ninja Gaiden II is a video game that rewards intelligent mashing and kindly offers two flavors of camera control in boss fights, neither of which are helpful until you learn to accept the random nature of spite directed at the player at all times. You will win without ever knowing why and that’s alright! You’ll be back to enjoying each button press needed to slaughter monsters and goons before you know it! All that slickly-choreographed murder in the in-between will convince you why you (I) love it so…
Yall played this Hex game? I guess it’s by the people who made Pony Island, which I never played but I gather was ~meta~. This one is basically a point & click adventure starring different explicit vidcon protagonists in the context of being employees of a sort inside a computer-game-world. As you switch to each they have a flashback that is a simple p&c-based version of their character’s genre - platformer, RPG, fighting, whatever. Laid over top is this crummy, sarcastic aesthetic where everyone is passive-aggressively pissed off.
I dunno man. Not as hilarious or surprising as Undertale, not as kinetic or grungy as Hotline Miami, not as precise and exhaustive as Beginner’s Guide. Dunno what this game is for exactly. Maybe a Fortnite teen would think this is clever?
pony island was also like, a little bit too obvious and cynical about its clever conceit – it was fun but pretty thin and a little overlong (I think I stopped halfway and didn’t regret it)
did an entire darkwraith playthrough thinking I was gonna usher in the age of darkness. then I beat lord gwyn and touched the bonfire and accidentally started a new age of fire smdh
this is the first time I’ve ever actually finished DS1, I usually make it to the fourth lord soul and give up or just abandon my run
The creator has this 00s era Newgrounds/Gamer Comic sensibility and hasn’t really taken cues from similar indie games over the past 10+ years. It’s almost like a Madagascar situation where a game maker who cut his teeth on Newgrounds has been left to his own devices after that era died.
His whole meta-game, “what if Mario but twisted”, “the game is real life” schtick comes off as somewhat immature and by someone who doesn’t trust their games to justify themselves as games*. Undertale pulls this off way better since there’s a lot more meat to the game beyond the meta aspects.
I did like the fallout tactics part of the hex, for what it’s worth. Abusing mods to cheat your way through and then later losing the handicap was pretty clever.
*this is what killed Inscryption for me. He must have known the first part was a legitimately compelling experience and could be expanded to something great, but he couldn’t help but return to the same meta-game story he’s done twice before.
Inscryption is already him playing to his strengths and overcoming some weaknesses especially in the first part. Like, if you look at the credits the whole cabin’s basically unity asset flips with the notable exception of the masks and totems which he commissioned, and it really comes together through great lighting, and the card formats allows him to have his spriting style not be as noticeable in the grand scheme of things. And the subject of a cursed card game as an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation, with what that entails with rule changes and player interpretation, is a really neat transition from his previous take on the meta-game aspect, and the game part of the cabin is really good. Only the execution didn’t follow past that.
Yeah, the cabin version is the best, with the best puzzle room/card game balance, and the others are just “what if we remove actually important presentational elements of the cabin version”, which the new gimmicks can’t compensate for.
And then, of course, he had to bring back the videogame company from the Hex and the ARG stuff, and that was the least interesting stuff! The final twist of the ARG is even basically paraphrasing The Hex, only without the preceding emotional reveal.
But dang, he really has something incredible with that first act. Heck, even Leshy’s final game is the best and most emotional part of the ending. He’d really struck gold with that first version.
I do think Inscryption is a huge step up from The Hex before it falters and I hope the dev will continue to progress in that direction and get rid of more of his bad habits.
I bit the bullet on that Nickelodeon Smash game for $20 and uhhhhh, I dunno y’all.
It’s probably solid for that group of people who salivate over the whole core mechanics aspect of Smash, but I’m quickly realizing any love I have for Smash is from seeing a weird museum of game characters throw shit at each other.
Played a 20-game BlazBlue Central Fiction set against someone in Marina’s fighting game Discord server this morning. I haven’t played BlazBlue much since Continuum Shift on PS3 (the first fighting game I fell in love with), and this was the first time I’d ever played CF against a human opponent. I expected to lose every game but I shockingly ended up going 8-12.
I love so much about this game that it’s nice to finally be able to experience it “as intended” and it has really made me excited to have a rival I can play this largely dead game against while I wait out the rumoured rollback patch
