Played through Minit Fun Racer yesterday and had a good time with it. It is basically an arcade take on the Minit formula where you start in a car with ten seconds on the clock and gain one each time you pick up a coin (once you buy the first upgrade from the shop), where your goal becomes either reaching the end of the race before time expires or one of the other two dozen or so optional missions you can choose from. Was good fun for the couple hours it took me to accomplish all the bits that interested me, by the end once you buy more upgrades it becomes about trying to smash into trashcans to give yourself a turbo boost (hitting three in immediate sequence basically causes you to rocket ahead at high speed with the duration extending if you can keep hitting more trash cans) while avoiding all the cars randomly scattered across the road which was enjoyable enough for as long as it asked of you.
I vote The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa
there’s a samuel beckett story describing people trapped in a situation something like one of those 70s rat overcrowding experiments and all it describes is how they endlessly circulate unable to ever really be comfortable without describing why any of it is happening or characterizing any individual, making that into a game could make for a pretty good depression simulator
a kitschy ufo 50 style samuel beckett depression minigame anthology could sell in the low dozens
been trying to cast a wider net and play more itch games from creators i don’t know.
in the last few days i’ve come across two different platformers that assert a “nonviolent” intention, but then they give their player characters abilities that are really just standard implementations of video game violence called other stuff
first was magic gear
the game makes a big deal out of the protagonist character being ‘pacifist’ in the opening cinematic, and the game does have a lot of stealth. but then you run into enemies that you lay your hands on with some sort of magical energy that destroys them. they’re robots, so maybe that’s what’s supposed to be different?
the attack is actually a big circle in front of the player character, which is a fun, not-quite-typical way for attack to work in a game like this.
but the whole conceit felt really pointless when i got to a big mega man-style boss fight where you have to deplete this robot’s health bar.
second is a demo for kind soul
in this one you’re a flightless jumping bat who is a ‘kind soul’ and can offer parts of its soul up to pacify violent monsters…
but it’s just a heart-shaped projectile that renders enemies permanently immobile.
it’s clever on one hand because if you ‘offer’ all the ‘parts of your soul’ then you die. so the health being the same limited resource as your weapon is interesting.
but it’s still just a weapon by another name.
it too has a big boss fight that takes a lot of hits. i was actually enjoying this game quite a bit—aesthetically it’s pretty neat, and there are some fun design ideas—but then it got to this boss fight that had platforming moments that were way more punishing and unforgiving of error than anything before that and it wore out its welcome pretty fast.
anyway, i dunno, i thought it was mildly interesting to have come across these two recent-ish releases (out of about six somewhat arbitrary choices of itch releases) with this shared conflicted view of ‘violence in video games.’ they implicitly treat violence as a problem to be imagined around for action/platformer game structures, but then they just narratively reframe traditional mechanics of violence. they seem to want to escape generic traditions they see as problematic, but can’t actually quite imagine the genre without them.
“happy days” could absolutely work as a video game. complete the warioware-like mundane tasks & rituals before you get buried by sand.
At first I was like
but then I was like
I guess I should read more Beckett… or maybe not… maybe once I have a healthier mental state.
So what you’re saying is.. there’s still room in the market for an actual non violent indie action game…
Finished Heavy Gear and installed the sequel
Mission design is genuinely great in terms of variety but the mech building mechanics are indeed too shallow, it is too easy to create an optimal robot for almost all missions (I had to swap from a fast robot to a heavy robot for the penultimate mission only).
I don’t know if the writing was meant to be funny or just sloppy but the characters in the fmv cutscenes kept saying they don’t even know what they’re fighting for or what the war is even about, and those stakes are never established for the player either. I literally never knew why there was a war or even who the opposing sides were.
The only clues I had were the bits of the tabletop rules I read years ago but its a war game setting so much like WH40k, there’s a war because there’s always some kind of border skirmish between any of the numerous factions.
Cool mech game if a bit silly and shallow. Pleasantly short. There’s also a tour of duty mode where I can go on procedurally generated missions and work for any faction in the game. It’s almost a proto roguelite, as you unlock more advanced robot parts with more mission victories. It was fun to mess around in for a bit but I’m eager to get to Heavy Gear 2.
Curious how Earthsiege et al fit into the PC mech game pantheon
Getting to the end of Nocturne. At a point where I’m thinking I oughta switch out my current party for the real high-end demons like Metatron and Beelzebub, but I forgot how to properly fuse them, so right now I’m just grinding and fusing demons in the compendium until I eventually stumble on something badass. Dante and Daisoujou are cool and all, but I need a third extremely overpowered character to not make me sweat when Ahriman lands a critical hit.
When I beat Nocturne i had a very suboptimal team and I was stuck in a war of attrition with the final boss that I very much started to lose so i just hit auto thinking it was all over and all I needed was one more punch. I don’t think I’ve ever been more relieved in my whole life
Inkle’s newest game, TR-49 is a database game that’s an extremely british take on borges. A great way to while away an afternoon
Really good interface and the way the game didn’t tutorialize me on how to use that interface allowed me to puzzle out how everything fit together in a satisfying manner. All the puzzles are fair, so much so that I anticipated a major plot beat and triggered one of the endings to the game in less than an hour, long before I knew what the game was actually about.
Bloodborne
getting close to the first boss and wondering whether i should go back and have another go at character creation (couldn’t get the hair the right shade due to the lighting, didn’t bother with any fine-tuning re: body proportions and face details, probably forgetting a few things)
worried that if i do, i’ll never be satisfied and just keep finding new problems and starting over like i always do
wasn’t The Lands of the Feudal Lords? I remember the Dark Unknown looks like a standing frog.
You are right, map is mislabeled, but it is a pretty good map of the feudal lords continent imo. I like that it’s not as squished as the official one!
booji your map postin is great, a beautiful and succinct demonstration of why doing your own cartography is pure joy
I am going based on the The Official Book of Ultima, which calls it The Lands of the Dark Unknown, though that book could be wrong because it is very 1990 games journalism in terms of quality.
For reference:
yeah, the official book of ultima has several mistakes in it and it’s kind of unreliable to begin with because richard garriott is full of shit lol. like for example he basically wrote roe r. adams iii out of history despite writing the entire history of britannia manual that comes with Ultima IV. here he is in the manual!
some people say he came up with the virtues too and I believe it because he’s one of the guys responsible for genius game wiz iv while garriott always came across like a manchild. hawkwind is roe’s OC. He is not mentioned a single time in the book lol
compare your map to the official paper map of the land of feudal lords. you got it spot on
i kind of like that, knowing the title, you can quickly figure out that he’s just written “lands of the feudal lords” in modern english, substituting latin letters with runes
the ultima runes get stuck in your brain for fucking years it’s a curse you’ll think you’ve forgotten but you remember one or two and then context causes the rest of it to come crashing back