13 Points on Kentucky Route Zero - Cardboard Computer - 2013 [PC]

1. I've got to say there's a lot to unpack with Kentucky Route Zero. It is both emotionally poignant and thoughtfully experimental in its design. It's a game destined to be a critics darling while still being actually good to play. Buy it now and read my last twelve points while you wait for it to download.

2. Kentucky Route Zero was released episodically but presented in its final form, it reminds me quite a bit of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath both structurally and thematically. There is an overarching narrative surrounding a group of people on a journey away from a community ravaged by unfettered industry interspersed w/ short vignettes that flesh out its setting w/o being directly related to the story being told.

3. The main narrative is a bit of a hero's quest but especially as you dig into later episodes that aspect begins to fade. You initially control the game's protagonist, Conway, in his attempt to deliver a load of antique goods to a strange, unknown address but as the world unfolds itself, you begin to control other characters, often w/in the same scene. It goes as far as to let you control both sides of a conversation at times.

4. This lends a dream-like sense of control that melds well w/ the surreal version of rural Kentucky in which the game is set. Kentucky Route Zero adds plenty of otherworldly elements but they feel more like exaggerations than outright fabrications. 

5. At one point, for example, Conway injures his leg goes into debt seeking treatment. Afterwards, he says the leg doesn't feel like it's his anymore and it turns into a skeleton leg. You don't literally lose a body part because you can't afford but losing a piece of your life to debt is real enough.

6. Actually, sometimes you do literally lose a body part because you can't afford medical treatment.

7. Debt in general looms large in Kentucky Route Zero, specifically debt used to entangle and exploit working people. People are driven by their debt to the local coal mine, to the power company and to the local distillery. The local distillery also happens to be housed in an old church, drawing the parallel between the use of religion and the use of substances to placate the masses.

8. Wait. Is there a Marxist theme here? Holy smokes, are they even allowed to do that in video games!? Call the police!

9. So, like I said, this is basically The Grapes of Wrath. I guess Marxist isn't quite right. Kentucky Route Zero doesn't really come at you w/ solutions but it isn't shy about showing its characters being victimized by capitalist enterprise.

10. Also in line with The Grapes of Wrath, you find the people in this strange area of Kentucky have learned to survive only by relying on each other. For however hard these people have been squeezed, you find friendly, generous faces at pretty much every turn, people who are willing to go out of their way for you just because you're a person.

11. I personally found this element comforting and comfort is much needed when exploring a world as nakedly cruel as that of Kentucky Route Zero. The kindness shown was the one thing in the game that felt concrete and like something that could exist in our own world unchanged.

12. I initially played this during the democratic primary in 2019 and wrote much of this review throughout the COVID-19 crisis and Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. As our world takes on an edge of unrealness and our own cruelties are laid bare to see, the world of Kentucky Route Zero begins to feel like less and less of an exaggeration.

13. Kentucky Route Zero is most definitely a game for people who spend time thinking about games but it never loses sight of its message and is all the more affecting for it. It uses sometimes unorthodox mechanics but always in the service of world building and telling its story. The end result is something both engaging and accessible, easy to get into but with layers of meaning rooted deeply in both gameplay in presentation. I hope you did start downloading it before you read this review and I hope you do play it.

13 Points on The Outer Worlds - Obsidian Entertainment - 2019 [PC]

1. If you have been waiting for some other developer to pick up Bethesda's reins and make a game in the style of the great Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, Obsidian is that developer and The Outer Worlds is that game.

2. Given Obsidian developed a golden age, Bethesda-sanctioned Fallout release, this isn't surprising. Still, I was nervous they'd mess it all up. Who wouldn't be?

3. The Outer Worlds looks an awful lot like it was developed on the same engine as Fallout 4 to me but it's actually made in Unreal. I'm just throwing this out as a bit of trivia because, obviously, nobody actually cares about this kind of stuff.

4. The setting here is a series of planets that's are run by giant corporations who are working people literally to death in order to preserve an opulent way of life for the upper classes.

5. It is unfortunate but sometimes I interact w/ people on the internet and I get the feeling some folks seem to really want to ignore the anti-capitalist themes inherent The Outer Worlds setting in spite of them being presented here in a method that could charitably described as ham-fisted and totally obvious. "Well, it's not against capitalism," these people say to God and me on the internet, "It just against large corporations running the government and exploiting people." Law's sake, people, think about this for like fifteen seconds. You are driving me freaking crazy!

6. (Law's sake is a favorite minced oath in The Outer Worlds and me using it in this review is unequivocally hilarious.)

7. As far as gameplay, I reckon it's fine. Combat is fine. There is a paper-rock-scissors thing w/ various elemental abilities. You can craft improvements for your equipment. You get a bullet-time slowdown ability which you can use if you like. I dunno... If you are familiar w/ video games, this is one.

8. Where The Outer World's really excels is in creating a world which feels concrete and consistent and that appears to have a history that goes way deeper than what you are given. As much as it is a game, it is a make-believe place where you can go and just be, the sort of thing you want to linger over a while even if you are not making progress to some specific goal.

9. You get a choice of a few companions you can ring w/ you. They all have backstories and goals of their own which is pretty neat. It also hearkens back to the first two Fallout games where bringing along a companion or two was effectively easy mode.

10. This is not truly an open world game. It is a series of open areas that you travel between from time to time. All this really means is if you want to go to a location on a  different planet, you have to fast travel to your ship, fast travel to the other planet then fast travel to the location you want to get to. I found this a bit annoying but I guess this increases immersion for some people.

11. The Outer Worlds is built from the ground up to be played through from the beginning multiple times. You cannot hedge your bets the whole game and get all the different endings from a save point a half-hour from the end . Playing through in a normal manner--as in not going and exploring every nook and cranny and talking to every NPC multiple times for the sake of it--you inevitably miss out on giant swatches of game's universe. Fortunately, a playthrough is not terribly long and they are varied enough that going through many times does not feel like a chore.

12. Going back to the anti-capitalist themes I mentioned in point 5, towards the end of the game, there is an argument presented that the capitalists are maybe not all the way in the wrong so maybe it is not so cut and dry. Then again, this argument is presented to you by chief lord of all capitalists so maybe you it is cut and dry and people are lying to you. Seriously, think about this for like fifteen seconds.

13. The Outer Worlds works on multiple levels. It's fun to play moment to moment. It's interesting to explore all the various pathways and alternative outcomes if you so chose. And if you want to pay attention, it examines our current society by exaggerating it (less than some would like to admit) and showing how things might end up if we keep heading the way we are heading. In short, it is a good video game and it's good science fiction. You should play it.

13 Points on A Normal Lost Phone - Accidental Queens - 2017 [PC]

1. As you might expect from the title, the phone in this A Normal Lost Phone is not actually normal. It is a phone that tells you a story.

2. I would argue this is an RPG. The role you play is the kind of creepy asshole who goes through a stranger's phone. I mean, seriously, respect people's privacy. Throw the phone at the mayor's house if you want to do something fun w/ it.

3. This said, w/o going homeland security on some rando, there would not be much of a game here--though I suppose a responsibly disposing of an old phone simulator game would not be the strangest thing out there.

4. It is kind of hard to discuss this w/o at least hinting at spoiling the game's big reveal but there's a trigger warning at the beginning that there will be anti-LGBTQ language involved so I think it's fair enough to let you all know that the game's protagonist, Sam, isn't a straight cis male and not everyone knows this.

5. As you initially start to go through Sam's phone, you are funneled toward reading texts and from this, you can figure out passwords and such to gain access to other apps, which give you hints at how to access the next round of new things and so on.

6. Not gonna lie: I just looked up most of the passwords online when it came to it. Fiddling w/ getting them in right or looking through stuff you've already read struck me as tedious more so than satisfying. I think the game could have added some automatic note-taking of some sort or a system that gave you options like try your birthday or try your address or whatever.

7. Poking through a phone is a pretty effective perspective from which to tell a story. It's very personal and yet not colored in the same way as, say, an intimate conversation w/ that person would be.

8. As compelling as it is, perhaps a coming out story is not the story to tell in this way. Or, in any case, A Normal Lost Phone goes too far in this matter. Eventually, in order to progress, you start using the phone to send people messages that reveal personal details about Sam. Nobody does this aside from the kind of creepy asshole you are apparently supposed to roleplay as.

9. It ultimately feels as much like a missed opportunity as much as anything. Why not make the person you are roll playing as Sam's father or someone? Why not make the player come face to face w/ the fact that what they are doing is wrong?

10. The thing is this overstepping is never pointed out as such. It is not dwelled on or even pointed out that you violating a person's privacy. You go through the motions like you are solving a puzzle in a Professor Layton game or something. I suppose if you can take for granted that your snooping is not meant to be seen as malicious in this context you can then unashamedly learn about Sam's life and story.

11.  At this point though, you have reduced the framing device of looking through someone's phone to a simple gimmick and then what's the point. I did think it was cool though that the in-game music game from just playing songs on the phone's music app though.

12. Sam's story is quite touching for what it's worth. It is a step by step of a person finding themselves but then having to leave much of what they know behind in doing so. It feels directly relatable even if you have not experienced what Sam has.

13. As I started writing this, I did not expect such a large number of these thirteen points to be about the lost phone gimmick but, I dunno, I suppose that's the name of the game so it makes sense. I will say, despite my reservations about it, I enjoyed A Normal Lost Phone and it was a good use of the couple of hours it took to play it. It makes me a little uneasy but it's not a bad game to play.

13 Points on Halo: Combat Evolved - Bungie - 2001 [Microsoft Xbox]

1. Halo: Combat Evolved is a groundbreaking game from the early 2000s, primarily loved for its multiplayer experience. I'm reviewing its single player campaign in 2019. I can't explain how my life got to this point.

2. You can actually still play multiplayer if you really want. You need to either play couch co-op, which requires friends you don't have and a couch, or you can play online which requires a complex process to simulate a local area network over the internet and friends you don't have.

3. It's the single player campaign of a multi-player focused game so we're not talking Bioshock in terms of environmental storytelling but the combat mechanics are exceptional and it's extremely important historically so definitely worth a run through.

4. You play as a space marine in a special suit of armor that makes you kick ass real good. You have an AI companion named Cortana who now wants to use all your PC's idle processor cycles to send personal information about your family to Microsoft.

5. Your enemies are an alliance consisting of every non-human sentient species that you see in game. No human is on their side and not one of them sides w/ the humans. People suck, I guess.

6. Combat is a high point, it being what has evolved after all. The specific smoothness of how you move in Halo makes it feel like a thoroughly modern shooter. This said, the original Xbox controller has only one set of shoulder buttons and so some controls are mapped in weird spots. I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to aim down sites and accidentally threw a grenade.

7. The middle of Halo drags a lot. It starts to feel like every time you fight your way through a string of similar looking metal tunnels, enemies are going to respawn and you will have to fight your way right back out of that string of similar looking metal tunnels.

8. About two thirds of the way through though, a wrinkle in the story appears that amps up the tense atmosphere and pulls you through the rest of the game. W/ this wrinkle, you run into enemy types that use the same weapons as you do. You can always pick up the alien weapons in the game but the only place you ever find ammunition for the human weapons is at crash sites or whatever pre-set area the developers chose to have that ammunition in. Having enemies show up all of sudden where you start feeling like you no longer have to preserve ammunition for your favorite gun mixes up the gameplay nicely at a critical juncture.

9. Changing the difficulty improves enemy AI in addition to changing how tough they are, which is awesome, but I found myself wishing for some more granular difficulty settings. I got kinda sick of some of the bullet-spongey enemies at higher levels but didn't necessarily want to make them less aggressive and more stupid to lower their HP.

10. It is possible to auto-save yourself into a really bad situation. You can get stuck w/ low HP and low ammo and if you're stuck, you're stuck. You can't drop the difficulty temporarily to get out of a pickle so you have to restart the level unless you can find a way to cheese yourself out of your conundrum.

11. And, yeah, cheesing the AI is 101-level science in this game. Even on higher difficulties, it can be pretty easy to attract attention then run away to string enemies out and pick them off a few at a time. In fairness, doing this is sometimes how I got myself auto-saved into really bad situations.

12. The theme to Halo is an iconic piece of music but most of the in-game soundtrack is forgettable. Great sound design mostly makes up for this. Directional sound worked beautifully through stereo speakers and some of the enemy yelps are pretty much hilarious.

13. Playing through Halo for the first time now is hardly the ideal way to experience it but I suppose that and memories is what we are stuck w/. If it came out today, I'd tell you the story is decent, the controls are great, the combat is varied enough that it's only boring sometimes and it looks like an original Xbox game. After playing through the story once, I think this is destined to remain on my shelf for all eternity or until I make friends, whichever comes first.

13 Points on Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins - TT Fusion - 2013 [Nintendo 3DS]

1. In 2009, Rockstar released Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS and proved that by adjusting perspective, you could successfully bring your open world sandbox game onto a lower powered handed and still provide the player w/ a compelling experience. W/ Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins, TT Fusion proved this approach still worked in 2013.

2. Just kidding. This game is terrible.

3. Most reviews focus on the game's technical issues--notably the chugging frame rates and extreme sprite pop-in--but I think this overlooks a greater problem: The Chase Begins is unceasingly boring from start to finish.

4. This said, its technical issues do merit some further mention. In addition to the performance issues, nearly all the voiced dialogue that made the Wii U and other versions of this seems so lively was removed and cut scenes are compressed to a messy blur along the lines of 2006 YouTube. It's also the only game on 3DS that crashed so hard on me that I had to restart the entire console.

5. My favorite overall glitch though is one where some particular sound gets stuck in an infinite loop, turning the cheerful Lego setting into a sonic hellscape where the wails of a long grieving man can be heard in every corner of the city.

6. I would like for someone other than me to do some serious journalistic research into how exactly things went wrong on the development of this game. The Chase Begins is so half-baked you just have to wonder if maybe they originally intended to port the entire Wii U release of Lego City Undercover to 3DS then realized at the eleventh hour that they couldn't and so had to slap something together for whatever release date.

7. I think this uses the same exact map as the home console releases at least but I quite frankly don't care because every square inch of this map is unceasingly boring.

8. Following the main quest, you essentially just walk from one boring map marker to the next occasionally doing some boring driving, some boring fighting or solving a boring puzzle. This is all in between boring cut scenes.

9. You can die, crash your car or otherwise fail in many ways but there is never any setback for doing this at all. You literally re-appear in the exact spot you died completely healthy and with a brand new car. Real life should be like this!

10. The only real challenge is the platforming. It's not actually hard but the crappy camera makes it a challenge not to chuck your 3DS through a window. During some of the few moments in this where I was not bored, I was frustrated because I had to re-climb the same wall for the fifth time and try a slightly different angle on the joystick to make a particular jump.

11. The combat in The Chase Begins is even more remarkably boring than anything else. You can stand there idly pressing a singular button and you win automatically because you are literally invincible. Throwing someone off a ledge significantly reduces the amount of time you spend doing this and it's pretty hard to get these tosses lined up just right so, ultimately, I found this very slightly satisfying to do correctly.

12. This has the exact same soundtrack as the Wii U, which is awesome. They seem to use oddly little of the music though. As the songs played during the end credits, I kept wondering why they use more of these songs more often. In game, you hear basically the combat music and the loading screen music.

13. A lot of the problems w/ this are a problem w/ all Lego games. It is designed as if in order to appeal to kids, it has to be devoid of challenge. I think this is a wrong-headed approach to making a game for a general audience but most Lego games get away w/ it because the moment-to-moment presentation is so charming. You reduce that quality and polish and you are left w/ a real dud. This is what Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins is: everything bad about Lego games w/o most of what makes them good.

13 Points on Cookie Clicker - Julien Thiennot - 2016 [Browser]

1. Okay folks, here is how you stop yourself from playing Cookie Clicker on a Windows PC:

Run Notepad as an administrator, go to file > open
Open C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add this line to the end of the file: 127.0.0.1 orteil.dashnet.org
Save and restart your browser

2. Congratulations on your newfound freedom. Go and actually get something done!

3. To be fair, while Cookie Clicker seems to have been designed by a mad psychologists to maximize addictive potential, the only way it makes money is through ad revenue and not by hammering you w/ endless microtransactions. There are no loot boxes or other types of gambling, just an endless and effective gameplay loop.

4. Your goal is to make as many cookies as possible. By making cookies, you are able to buy buildings and upgrades to allow you to make more cookies, which allow you to buy more buildings and upgrades and so on. This is really no different than Diablo at its core. You do a thing to get better at doing a thing just for the sake of it.

5. While this gets called an idle game, it only really is until it dawns on you that your most effective strategy is to get as many bonus-providing random drops as you can. You will at first be excited to leave it running overnight to see how many cookies you build up but eventually that just becomes downtime where you can't get the random drops.

6. You do thankfully get options to play less actively but it is never as lucrative as getting a lucky couple drops in a row, where you can gain days worth of cookies in a few seconds.

7. So you keep it open in a browser window all the time.

8. You get an upgrade at some point where a sound lets you know there's been a random drop in the open browser window even if you're not actually looking at it at the moment. At this point, the game is only nominally in the background and whatever you might have been looking at in another tab is secondary to keeping an ear open to listen for that little sound.

9. The sound is a bell which is appropriate for the Pavlovian tab-switching response it evokes.

10. As far as the actual idle aspect of the game--buying buildings and upgrades to those buildings to make cookies to buy more buildings and upgrades--it's wonderful. You would not care so much about getting the random drops were it not.

11. You see, not only do you buy buildings to make cookies and then buy upgrades to those buildings, you also buy upgrades that allow one building type to improve a different building type. This is just the beginning. You get achievements that let you make more cookies. You can give up all your cookies and start afresh w/ which gives you additional upgrades. You have mini games that improve your output cookie output.

12. This is to say, finding an optimal strategy to Cookie Clicker involves serious mathematics and that's awesome.

13. I am not kidding about having to block Cookie Clicker in my hosts file but I really don't hold that against it. By giving me a reason to think about math instead of doing my actual job, it really added a nice layer to my day-to-day. Eventually, I just needed the mindspace back. It's a real classic of the genre so give it a go sometime--just not when you have a deadline approaching.

13 Points on Infinifactory - Zachtronics - 2015 [PC]

1. I have started and never really gotten into a couple of Zachtronics games in the past but now that I've let Infinifactory get its hooks into me, I think I'll have to revisit them all again. This game is great and you should play it.

2. This frequently gets described as a puzzle game but that's not quite right. You solve problems more so than puzzles. Puzzles normally end w/ elegant solutions. Infinifactory gets ugly.

3. Your task is to build constructions of block shaped elements that are then used to assemble other block shaped elements into multi-block shaped elements. It reminds me quite a bit of making automated machines w/ redstone in Minecraft.

4. Number 3 makes sense as apparently Infinifactory's predecessor, Infiniminer, was a huge inspiration for Minecraft. I didn't know this until now. I'm sorry.

5. The setup here is there's a bunch of evil aliens making you engineer the stuff described in number 3. You learn more of your situation through audio logs you find laying around because this is a video game and that's just how it's done.

6. You are not actively involved in plot development aside from beating each stage. Everything interesting goes down off screen and you find out about it through the setting. This is fine. The plot serves the purpose of creating a tenser atmosphere and that is all it needs to do.

7. Number 6 being said, Infinifactory does reward you w/ quite a bit more depth and nuance than you'd typically expect from what is basically an excuse plot, especially as you push into later levels. It builds a realistic feeling world when all is said and done.

8. You are also rated vs. other players on various criteria such as how many blocks you've used and the footprint of your structure. You put a lot effort into the solutions you've build so this little bit of incentive is enough to really push you to coming up w/ better ideas.

9. Honestly though, while it is satisfying to come up w/ solutions that are clever and elegant top to bottom, the best thing is when when of your ideas doesn't quite work and you have to slap together hackneyed fixes that take longer than it would have to just redo the whole thing from scratch and you wind up w/ hilarious monstrosities that people will ignore when you incessantly post them on social media.

10. Speaking of, this has a animated .gif exporter and it's awesome.

11. The magic here is that there is no definitive solution to any of the problems you're presented w/ so any way that you might figure it out is equally valid. Once curious thing that you'll find if you go looking for other folks' solutions to the same problems is you'll frequently be surprised by how common some of what seems like your clever solutions prove to be and vice versa.

12. This game is much longer than you might initially think so if you are just trying to get through it, maybe don't spend too much time refining your earliest solutions until you see how much there actually is to offer. The later problems are more interesting anyway.

13. Infinifactory feels quite a lot like designing circuit boards or writing code but being good at it has no practical application so it's fun instead of being something you can make money at. As such, this is a good game for those days when you want to exercise your mind w/o the man breathing down your freaking neck. Go for it.

13 Points on SimCity (SNES) - Nintendo - 1991 [Nintendo SNES]

1. SimCity on SNES is indeed just another version of SimCity but it's really kind of in a league of its own compared to the numerous versions for various personal computers. It's both fun to play in its own right and a nifty curio for fans of the franchise.

2. On a personal note, I grew up w/ Sega Genesis as my lone sixteen bit console and SimCity was the one title my Super Nintendo friends had that I coveted (until the release of Street Fighter II). This is in spite of the fact that I had both the DOS version of SimCity and SimCity 2000 at the time.

3. There is one reason for this: the monster attacks on the SNES version were freaking Bowser.

4. If you are somehow not familiar w/ SimCity, here is how it goes: you need to build power plants, transportation and zones for residential, industrial... You know what, screw it. You know how SimCity works. If you don't, that's cool. Just pretend you do. I'll never know.

5. The coolest thing about this SNES version of SimCity is buildings sometimes take up multiple placed zone tiles. In most other version, every building is a perfect square. It gives a bit more variety to your cityscape.

6. Just kidding. The coolest thing about this is the monster attacks were freaking Bowser.

7. While the cities for the DOS version of SimCity were the kind of thing you might spend a week or at least a few sessions on, the SNES version has much smaller maps and you often feel like you get you've explored whatever idea you had for your city as much as you can in a few hours. There are advantages to both, I say, so I don't mean for this to come across as a negative.

8. Speaking of maps, there's ten thousand to chose from but they are all static and cannot be modified at all either before your start or after you begin playing. If you browse through them, it takes an annoyingly long moment between each one so the best thing to do is just look up a list online and pick from there.

9. Realistically, after looking into it, you are going to pick one of a few maps w/ lots of continuous land that allow you to build the cities w/ the largest populations. You will find these on lists maintained by SNES SimCity's online community.

10. SNES SimCity's online community is even more obsessed than normal SimCity fans about creating the highest populations possible. This is in part because the multi-tile buildings mentioned in point 5, allow for an exploit that lets you stack zones and pack in a lot more than you could otherwise.

11. There are a variety of special buildings you get for reaching certain city-size goals. This reminds me quite a lot of the reward structures you get in SimCity 2000 only here they have specific, clearly stated, tangible positive effects. Many of these were Nintendo themed just like the how the monster attacks are freaking Bowser.

12. On a functional note, playing this w/ a controller feels really good. The graphics here are kind of blocky and ugly to be honest but credit goes to Nintendo for giving this very PC-like PC game a very smooth transition to console.

13. The SNES port is very far from being the definitive version of SimCity but... Just kidding. It is the definitive version. The monster attacks are freaking Bowser.

13 Points on Sword of Mana - Square Enix/Brownie Brown - 2003 [Nintendo GBA]

1. It is apparently impossible to write about Sword of Mana w/o mentioning it's a remake of the Game Boy non-classic Final Fantasy Adventure but I will do my best not to.

2. Since I have not yet mentioned what this game is a remake of, it will not surprise you at all that the game play here in no way resembles a Final Fantasy game. It seems to be an attempt at a Legend of Zelda type experience--and, yes, it's only an attempt.

3. It feels more like a straight-up bit-era RPG that has real-time combat awkwardly overlaid. Your character always moves w/ this sort of stiffness that's fine when combat is always dealt w/ in a separate battle sequence but doesn't work w/ real-time fighting. In theory, there's lots of depth to the combat system. In practice, I just mashed attack towards enemies that were easy enough to kill and ran past the ones who weren't.

4. This is pretty representative of the quality of Sword of Mana as a whole. There's a lot of good ideas here but everything lacks polish to such a degree that it ends up being a few things that are done well poking from behind a wall of mediocrity. Honestly, I can already tell this review is going to just be a list of things that annoyed me about this game and I'm not even going to fight it.

5. To get it out of the way, the music is rocking and awesome and I love it. Now, let's hop aboard the complain train!

6. You play most of the time w/ a various NPC companions. They are, of course, supposed to be helpful and, of course, they are not. Let's just say that when one of mine walked into a pit of lava and just stood there until he died, it did not surprise me even slightly.

7. There are a ton of different weapon types and different kinds of elemental magic but the GBA does not offer enough buttons to access to all this stuff easily so you are forced to pause the game and go through multiple levels of menu in order to switch things out. It's cool that various enemies and obstacles require a certain weapon or spells to deal w/ but having to dive into a menu every time you run across these things gets grating after a while.

8. Graphics look technically great and will pull at the wee nostalgia strings of those who are fond of 90s RPGs but I found I missed all kinds of important details and got stuck a few times just because it was too difficult to discern a wall w/ a small crack in it from the hundreds of nearly identical wall sections near by.

9. There is a day and night cycle that doesn't matter at all. I mean there are different enemies depending what time it is and sometimes there's obstacles that can only be passed at a certain time of day but you can just walk back and forth between screens until it's the time of day you want so it's more annoying than anything.

10. Save points are scattered haphazardly throughout the land. They are normally fairly frequent but there are some pretty long stretches w/o one which is a big problem for a handheld game. Also, they love placing them such that you have to rewatch the cut scenes before boss battles over and over if you don't win the first try.

11. Number 10 is not a problem because most of the bosses are trivially easy, aside from one that is strong against literally every single weapon type. What the hell? I just loved having to take down a 600+ hit point boss a couple hit points at a time. Sorry I didn't do a magic-based build that was completely useless against everything but this one boss.

12. There's some puzzle solving invovled here but the puzzles are like, "find each switch and hit it." They went as far as to copy the classic Zelda trope of having to hit switches from mine carts on tracks and it was still just an exercise in hitting every single possible switch.

13. For all my complaining, Sword of Mana is actually a pretty good game. There's a ton of complexity and build options for your character, lots of side content and two playable characters that change the way the story is told depending on who you picked to play. Nearly every single moment of it though is marred by some oversight or another. If you are not hitting five buttons to switch weapons, you are hitting five buttons to switch spells or having to hit the same button five times in an attempt to find the correct spot to jump over a wall. Writing this here in mid 2019, I wonder just who the audience to this game might still be. It is certainly not a must-play classic. It is not really a hidden gem for action RPG or handheld nerds and there's tons of better options if you are just looking for something fun to play. I suppose if you are some sort of GBA or Square Enix completest, this might be worth playing but otherwise I am just not sure it's worth your time.

13 Points on Her Story - Sam Barlow - 2015 [PC]

1. I whole heatedly recommend playing this game even though there are an absolute ton of issues w/ it. Watching the trailers kind of gave me flashbacks to Night Trap and other horrible full motion video games back in the 90s but this is much more than just a novelty.

2. The reason for number 1 is Viva Seifert's acting, very strictly. It was a performance that required a heroic amount of subtlety to even be decent and she made it great.

3. Honestly, the rave reviews for Her Story's writing are more indicative of how low the writing bar is set in gaming than it is of the writing actually being good. This is really about made for TV level. Sure there are some interesting bits but it's nothing fans of the mystery genre don't see a hundred times a year.

4. I only realized number 3 after thinking about the game quite a bit after playing. The reason for this is number 2.

5. It is worth emphasizing that this is the kind of game you will think about quite a bit after playing.

6. Though the gameplay is not at all the same, I feel like this fits in the with the walking sim genre in terms of feel. The difference is instead of wandering around and discovering little bits and bobs about the story in the manner of, say, Dear Esther, you input searches into a database program and the story is revealed to you through the videos that come up.

7. This was way more engaging than any walking sim I've ever played. To explain this, I will simply point you once again to number 2.

8. As a story telling medium, this type of game really works but I think it could have been done a lot better. It only took me an hour or maybe an hour and a half to figure out essentially everything important but it took me four hours to finish the game.

9. Number 8 brings us to the essential problem with this style of story telling, which is that it kind of inherently can't have a planned climactic moment. Maybe it's your hundredth search that gives you the big reveal, maybe it's the second. Her Story seemed to try to get around this by having many small reveals but the problem remains that you may find all the good stuff early on and then find yourself watching unimportant garbage for the next hour or two.

10. This game doesn't really end. After a while, you basically get an option to say you don't want to play anymore and then when you quit, the credits roll. This is again kinda the same problem as 8 and 9.

11. This does not wrap up everything in a neat little package for you when it's done. The ending such as it is is intentionally ambiguous. If that bothers you, grow up.

12. I went and rewatched the videos in order after playing and I do think the story works better as it was presented than it would have been in a more traditional manner. I don't think this is quite so ground breaking as some of its little marketing blurbs would have you believe but, you know, almost.

13. It is worth emphasizing that Her Story is good enough that I wanted to go back and rewatch everything immediately after playing. See again: number 2.

13 Points on Squidlit - Squidlit Ink. - 2018 [PC]

1. Squidlit seeks to recreate the Game Boy experience on hardware that is much more expensive and powerful. You might think this is kind of dumb but it's a good time so hold your tongue.

2. I think a lot of people w/ this goal might just go ahead and build an Game Boy homebrew to play on emulators. I like the idea of just making it a playable Windows game that holds to the same limitations. It's much more accessible. Only dorks download Game Boy homebrew to play on emulators. Cool people like us just want to click a button and have things work after waiting for a download and install.

3. I actually think the developers stuck a little too much to what Game Boy games are really like. Specifically, there is no way to save your progress. It's a super short game but this is still no fun to find this out by surprise. I dunno... I guess what I'm saying is don't start this if you expect a pizza to be delivered in fifteen minutes.

4. In Squidlit, you play as a squidlit, which is a small land-walking squid. You can jump and shoot ink downward at enemies. It's a simple control scheme but it's enough.

5. At the game's outset, you talk to the first character you see and are given a quest. Unsurprisingly, this quest involves a lot of jumping and shooting ink downward at enemies, while traveling towards the right side of your screen.

6. I am very impressed by the shades of green they use here. I feel like many Game Boy emulators and such never get the greens quite right but Squidlit does. W/o a non-backlit screen, you never really get Game Boy games looking just so but this comes as close as anything I've seen. In all seriousness, I think Squidlit is worth playing simply to experience this greenness sublime.

7. The sound too is Game Boy correct. The developers said they used Little Sound DJ to make it so this makes sense. They also took pains to not use too many sound channels at once when using sound effects. I am of the mind that you can take some liberties w/ this stuff when making bit-era throwbacks but I do appreciate the attention to detail.

8. It helps that the music is excellent and it seems to get better as the game goes on.

9. Actually, in general, Squidlit gets better as it goes on. It's one of those games where you can tell the developers built the levels in the order they occur. The early levels are pretty plain and straighforward but the last levels start to have some cool puzzle solving elements.

10. I wish the puzzle solving would have started at the level it was at at the end of the game and progressed from there. Squidlit only started feeling really engaging once that element was there.

11. The boss battles are really cool. Each one breaks from standard gameplay and provides a nice change of pace. My favorite is really the first one though, which is a side scrolling shmup type boss that I believe is a reference to Tatanga in Super Mario Land.

12. The story of Squidlit is told completely through on screen text and most of it is skip-able when you have to replay the first half of the game after you closed it halfway through. It's a light-hearted and a bit silly take on the hero's quest. Pretty standard fare for the style of game and well done.

13. It might seem like I'm focusing a bit too much on the Game Boy-ness of Squidlit but that's really its whole pitch. The developers set out to make a Game Boy game on PC and sure as sunshine they did it. It's fun and quick to play in addition to being a neato curiosity so definitely worth checking out if you are inclined to check such things out.

13 Points on Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate - Chunsoft - 2016 [PlayStation Vita]

 1. The title of this game is so long that it has just got to be some kind of joke. Calling it Shiren the Wanderer doesn't differentiate from its predecessors and The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate is still too much. I am going to call it Tower of Fortune from here on out. I don't have time for this shit.


2. For some reason, I feel compelled to pretend to enjoy games that stick w/ the unforgiving mechanics of traditional Roguelikes. Any you know what? I will pretend to enjoy Tower of Fortune. It is a role playing game after all. I will play the roll of blog-based game reviewer who enjoys traditional Roguelikes. It's 2019; we've all given up on having friends anyway.

3. The reason I feel compelled to pretend to like it is because it's hard and if I don't like it, it means I give up easily--and I don't want to be the kind of person who gives up easily. When you go online to look up tips though, you find all sorts of forum denizens complaining it's too easy. These forum denizens can pound sand.

4. Really, difficulty is the chief appeal of Tower of Fortune, specifically difficulty by way of complexity. If you don't lose, you don't get to get to start one more hour plus long run five minutes before you meant to go to bed. Whether I'm pretending to like it or not, it is a serious time sink.

5. This is the kind of game that will get frequently described as not holding your hand but there is actually an optional tutorial dungeon that is probably one of the most massive tutorial sections in the grand history of gaming. The tutorial here is longer than most games and thoroughly covers all of its myriad of mechanics if you are willing to stick around for the whole thing. I reckon it doesn't make you hold its hand but it will hold your hand a damn lot if you want it to.

6. Realistically, most people will do what I did, which is play a few rounds of the tutorial dungeon after each death before trying again. There are occasional a-ha! moments that will help your through sticking points in your progress and each level of the tutorial grants you useful items for your next try, making it is doubly rewarding to put some time into it.

7. While we are at it, there's actually even more otpional content that's longer than most games. There is a super hard bonus dungeon that's longer than most games. There is a dungeon which is a Rogue-ified version of Minesweeper that's longer than most games. If your main criteria for selecting a game is how many hours it will give you, you've found yourself a winner in Tower of Fortune. Like I said, a serious time sink.

8. When you first start playing the main game, you will find yourself cursing all the cheap deaths, little things that get you that are just bad luck. It's infuriating. After you learn all the millions of little tricks you can do to keep yourself ready for any situation, the cheap deaths stop happening. Obviously, the RNG gods smile upon those who are persistent. Or, maybe it is that game-length tutorial dungeon coming into play and your earlier deaths could have been avoided through skillful play.

9. If you try to just hack through, you will fail. Enemies respawn so you could try to grind up your character and then breeze through but there is a hunger system and limited food on each level so doing this will also cause you to fail. There are methods for keeping some of your gear after you die but even w/ the best gear, you need to pay attention to detail or you will fail.

10. "Losing is fun," as any Dwarf Fortress fan will tell you.

11. The one huge downside of having procedurally generated gameplay such as in this or any Roguelike is that, sometimes, when you have a best ever run or even when you win, you cannot help but feel like maybe you got some help from good luck. You pretty much have to beat it multiple times to prove you've mastered it. It is, indeed, a serious time sink.

12. As far as music and graphics, Tower of Fortune has them. Given that the game this genre is named after is just a bunch of ASCII characters on a black background, this makes it considerably more accessible that many similar things. It looks like a bit-era RPG w/ rather pretty pixel graphics and all the game's systems are effectively communicated visibly. I don't really think you get into something like this if you are looking for a cinematic masterpiece so that's good enough. The music happens to be excellent though.

13. I am not entirely joking about pretending to like this. Tower of Fortune is initially impenetrable and can seem endless, the game equivalent of picking up Finnegan's Wake. I'd only recommend to someone who has expressed some interest in it or who has said they like something similar. Given this fits in such a niche genre, that is actually something of a high compliment. It is for people who like things that are often considered negatives. It is obtuse and frustrating. You can put hours into it and get nowhere. Game designers generally bend over backwards to prevent their games from having these qualities which gives a game designed specifically to have them a certain infection old-timey charm.

13 Points on Shadow of the Colossus - Team Ico - 2005 [Sony PlayStation 2]

1. The word colossus just has a weird number of S's and L's in it to me so I am sure I'll get it wrong a few times here. Bear w/ me, people.

2. From the opening sequence, Shadow of the Colossus seeks to sprawl out along the lines of motion picture epics like 2001 or The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It is not so much setting or plot but intent. Shadow of the Colossus is a dyed in the wool masterpiece. It aims high and pulls no punches.

3. You play as an unnamed wanderer. You cross a barren land on horseback, carrying the corpse of a woman w/ you. After arriving at a temple, you lay her across the alter and demand its resident god bring her back to life. In exchange for this, you are bid to destroy sixteen colossi in the surrounding area. This is all you are given at the outset. No names. No history. Nothing.

4. In fact, if I had to pick one word to define what sets Shadow of the Colossus apart from typical video games, that would be it: nothing. Broad swatches of gameplay are just riding your horse. The distance, the absence of anything, becomes a character unto itself. Even during battles, you will spend a lot of time avoiding attacks and making no absolute progress in terms of depleting your enemy's energy meter. 

5. I mentioned The Good, The Bad and the Ugly earlier because the lighting gives the landscape here a decidedly western feel. The image of the hot sun you might have gotten from lens flares in film is here done w/ bloom. The effect makes you instinctively squint your eyes.

6. Shadow of the Colossus's age has put some rough edges on it graphical presentation but it nevertheless remains impressive due to its sheer scope. Sure, you can see some straight edges on some polygonal models but it nevertheless renders an enormous and believable world where you simply don't notice small problems because the whole of it is so well done.

7. The sound design needs no such qualifier. Effects are weighty and substantial. Music waxes and wanes w/ the action, often fading away entirely and allowing the environmental sounds to form their own soundtrack.

8. Some actions and the camera controls are mapped in a what is now a non-standard way by default. Thankfully, the controls are remappable but even once that's done, the camera has a nasty habit of trying to undo any adjustments you make, often leaving you w/o the visual information you need. Additionally, when you go to aim an arrow, you do not automatically aim where the camera is looking but straight ahead of where the character model is pointed.

9. A bit of this awkwardness is necessary. If running up the back of these colossi was as effortless as parkour in Assassin's Creed, the tension of the battles would be utterly lost. Still, I wasn't exactly screaming from mountain tops what a great game this was when I had to redo minutes of gameplay because I missed a blind jump.

10. Because Shadow of Colossus relies so much on its sense of space, a bit of aimlessness is also necessary. Beyond being given basic instructions and the occasional hint from on high, you are going on very little. Oftentimes, it took me twenty minutes or more to figure out how to even damage some of the colossi and some of the battles took me over an hour. Once you've played through a few times, I'd imagine you could beat the whole game in a single sitting but the first time through involves plenty of tense, frustrating moments where you can't tell if you are trying to do the wrong thing or attempting the correct action and failing. I imagine this quite well mirrors the nameless protagonist's perspective.

11. This is how I think the game really shines. What you are tasked w/ is something unlike anyone has ever actually done--how many of us has ever attempted to resurrect the dead?--but through adroit use of image, sound and gameplay, you experience the same emotions as the character you control.

12. The only possible misstep Shadow of the Colossus makes aside from minor complaints is the inclusion of a few cut scenes that explain some backstory partway. They serve only to make explicit what the game had thus far managed to do very well implicitly. The colossi feel as if they are made of the land itself and you cannot ignore the reality that you are going against nature. To have a few dudes show up and explain this to you seems redundant at best.

13. Shadow of the Colossus is frequently held up as a prime example of video games as art. I don't actually think presenting itself as a work of art was all that notable for a game even in 2005 but doing so in a game so strictly action oriented and w/ so little direct storytelling makes for a unique and captivating experience. I also spelled colossus correctly every time, I think, but double check me on that.

13 Points on Goats on a Bridge - Cabygon - 2015 [PC]

1. This is sort of a two player co-op game where you rage and hate your partner every step of the way. Only in this case, the devs make you be your own partner.

2. The devs are fuckers.

3. I hate myself.

4. This is seriously addictive and fun. It divides your brain and half and it feels weird and somehow makes you want your brain want your brain to feel like that even more.

5. The controls are pretty solid. I like using an Xbox controller better than the keyboard controls but keyboard controls had one advantage which was that it was much harder to accidentally go on a diagonal.

6. Graphics are bright and cute as is the music but this in no way alleviates the rage you feel when you get your hands mixed up and the one half of your brain goes to the wrong side of your head and left becomes right and right is wrong.

7. You can bump resolutions on this game all the way up to 4k and it actually makes it look a lot more clean and nice. The downside of this is the text boxes get too small to read.

8. You can't read them when you are playing anyway because you are too busy trying to figure out why the goat on the right is on the left and why when there's only one goat left, you lose.

9. I still feel cross-eyed twenty minutes after my last session but my eyes are straight as arrows. It is my brain that is crossed.

10. There are equipment upgrades but I never could quite figure out if they were only cosmetic.

11. The camera angle in this is kinda wonky by design. You are supposed to take two goats simultaneously at the same or similar rate of speed down their own individual bridges. If you get them too far apart--which is easier but not what you're supposed to do--the camera angle gets a bit too wide to see what's going on. This encourages you to play the more challenging way by making the more challenging way less challenging than the less challenging way.

12. This is the devs' first game, which they kind of wear on their sleeve a bit. It is a pretty well polished game in my opinion but there are a few things that irritated me here and there. After landing a jump or sliding under an obstacle, it seemed to take a metric hair too long to be able to jump or slide under an obstacle again. Sometimes the wonky camera angle by design seems to be a little wonky not by design. Also there are a few blind sections which seem to be there intentionally but feel unnecessary given this is a pretty hard game otherwise.

13. Holy crap, I have never played a game that infected my dreams w/ weird psychic gameplay remnants in shorter sessions than this. It is basically a legal kind of drug where you pay good money to be feel very confused and yell all your best curse words for reasons those around you do not understand.

13 Points on A Dark Room - Doublespeak Games - 2013 [Browser]

1. A Dark Room is not actually the rudimentary idle clicker game it initially seems to be.

2. You could be forgiven for thinking that though as the opening minutes of gameplay consist exclusively of clicking on buttons in order to get more buttons to click, which matches well to what seems to be the goal of collecting resources in order to be able to collect more resources.

3. Text prompts appear to the side of the play area which bring to mind the status messages you get when playing the original Rogue. Over time, these begin to tell the story of your encampment, which starts as the titular dark room and gradually blossoms into a village. Random wanderers. Eventually, you start getting an image of the bleak, destroyed world in which A Dark Room is set.

4. The only graphical elements are ASCII characters and some very simple effects but in spite of or perhaps because of this, A Dark Room manages to be quite evocative. I found images of ragged survivors and savage battles dancing though my head as I played. One advantage of such limited graphics is they never get in the way of your imagination.

5. Another advantage is you can play this at work w/o being totally obvious about it.

6. As mentioned, this appears to be an idle clicker on first glance. From there, it branches out into a management sim and then keeps branching from there. The next step is into a Roguelite adventure and switching between this and resource management will be how you spend the bulk of your time playing.

7. Essentially, you use the resources your encampment produces to supply your exploration. As you explore, you discover things that allow you to harvest additional resources that let you explore further. It's a good loop.

8. There's some combat as you explore. You click on various actions all of which are on cooldown timers until you win or die. If you die, you lose the consumable items you happen to be carrying which can sting a bit but it's easy enough to get back on your feet. You can also die buy running out of food or water--which took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out so please don't tell anyone I told you that.

9. You do acquire resources if you just leave this running in a browser but there is some material that is very helpful in the end game that can only practically be had by going out and finding it while you're exploring so that keeps the gameplay experience pretty active.

10. On a similar note, if you keep your resource management under control, there is very little waiting around. For some of the more expensive structures, it may take some time to build up resources but you can generally keep it such that you have what you need to do some exploring in the meantime.

11. As you scratching out a living and then building a larger and more productive village, aspects of the game's wasteland begin to reveal themselves slowly. You don't get so much a story as a world that unfolds before you. Many hints to the true nature of your situation require a pretty close reading of the text and so are easily missed. The game doesn't lean to heavily on its story though so don't worry you're missing anything too important.

12. You eventually find a thing that let's you finish the game. You are scored at this point based on the amount of resources you've produced. I am not sure if the developer has weighed in on this specifically but the community surrounding A Dark Room tends to play by the rule that lower scores are better since they mean you've been more efficient in your quest. Do what you want though. Nobody cares.

13.  A Dark Room presents a huge depth of play and touches on tons of different genres while keeping to a graphical style used by the only the most ancient of PC games. It's engaging while still being the kind of thing you can just keep open in a browser tab to come back to when you get a chance. It works really well on many levels and something about it just strikes me as creative and refreshing. Definitely a must play game.

13 Points on The Long Dark - Hinterland Games - 2017 [PC]

1. The Long Dark begins w/ a disclaimer that it's no substitute for survival training. Don't get me wrong, The Long Dark provides some harrowing moments but how a person could mistake its mechanics for realism is beyond me. You can't permanently heal a sprained ankle by taking an aspirin. If you have to be told that, maybe consider playing a different game.

2. The Long Dark contains a story mode which they have given its own title: Wintermute. It provides an interesting twist on game play vs. a straight survival sim.

3. Actually, Wintermute is a bit like the story campaign in a Call of Duty game. A lot of time and effort was put into it but it sometimes comes across as an extended tutorial. This is in part because, as of this writing, only two of five episodes are released. You don't need to play it at all if your main interest is playing survival games and you'll get a full experience from The Long Dark even if you skip it.

4. Even unfinished, Wintermute is a pretty substantial game in its own right. The two episodes span several distinct areas, all of which have substantial content on their own, and you will have to use most of your survival skills to get through it.

5. The Long Dark's wilderness feels cold and beautiful and its lovely artstyle is possibly its greatest appeal. It is naturalistic but slightly abstracted. Snowflakes and sunlight play together in broad brushstrokes that bring to mind Claude Monet at times. The one exception to this is the actual characters in games who have skin of pure titanium white w/ bright cherry blossom cheeks and noses. I get this is a stylistic choice to convey the coldness of the environment but it just looks goofy to me.

6. Sound design fits the mood perfectly. It's mutedly wintery.

7. In any mode, the survival aspects are more or less the same. You start out largely unclothed and w/o any food of water and you set out immediately to rectify this situation. You find shelter, build fires, and find and craft food, clothing and shelter. Inventory is limited so successful strategies seem to push you towards building supply caches throughout the landscape so you can explore further and further w/o putting yourself at extreme risk.

8. The one thing that stands out is the incredible importance of wood and other fuels. They are not only critical to keeping you warm--esp. early on before you find or make warmer clothes--but also your source of potable water and safe food. It's heavy too so if you want to bring along a supply for safety's sake, it takes a huge hit on your inventory space. (In the Wintermute story mode, this aspect is nerfed somewhat by NPCs who have infinitely burning fires where you can stop in, have a nap and eat a snack at little cost to yourself.)

9. Actually, inventory generally has a huge impact on everything. If you go carrying every tool and weapon you can think of, you are not going to carry anything you can gather using those tools. Because when you pick what tools you bring, you are also pick what you are going out to do and that gives you a bit of purpose in the day-to-day business of not starving to death. Also, inventory weight impacts your movement speed and how much you have to eat. No matter how little you carry, you can't jump at all, which leads to you getting stuck in the terrain occasionally. Good times, good times.

10. As far as story, Wintermute has one. Your estranged wife comes to you asking her to do her a favor which, as you'd expect, leads to you crashing an airplane and losing her. Then you have to do fetch quests for NPCs until you find her. The main appeal is not in your own story line but discovering the history of the remote Canadian island you've crashed on and the greater world it exists in.

11. Developers, Hinterland Games, have redone Wintermute once at this point to make it more open but looking at the game now, I'm not sure what they might have done. Each area is open to do as you please in theory but the story is progressed by doing tasks in order for NPCs. There are lots of opportunities for player driven solutions to problems that arise but they are seldom taken. For example, there's a major plot line involving a supernatural killer bear and there is one exact specific way this must go down. There is no option to trap the bear or befriend the bear or avoid the bear entirely. An NPC instructs you exactly what to do and you do it. It's not bad as it is but having the story railroaded to such a degree clashes w/ the more open ended nature of the survival mechanics.

12. There's a variety of difficulty modes which range from just finding everything you need hanging out all over the place to getting almost nothing. The various maps you can play also substantially impact how difficult the game is. All these options, ironically, kind of make me wish there was even more granularity. It'd be fun to play on a map w/ tons of easy-to-find shelters but almost no food available w/o hunting or one where guns and ammo are plentiful but so is bloodthirsty wildlife. It just seems like even though they've done a lot here, there's a lot more they could do.

13.The Long Dark is ultimately worth playing as The Long Dark and also as Wintermute. The experiences are related but distinct and both are compelling in their own right. I do hope in the future, the two styles of play could meet more in the middle to make for some ultimate version of Wintermute but you could easily view either mode as bonus content to whichever mode you prefer now so I can't really count that against it.

13 Points on GENDERWRECKED - Ryan Rose Aceae and Heather Flowers - 2018 [PC]

1. Given this game being called Genderwrecked, the fact that the developers stylize it in all caps and replace the Ds in the logo w/ vampire mouth vaginas, I figured it was going to be somewhat angrier in tone than it was. It's actually a nice game that makes you feel good. What a disappointment!

2. What's not a surprise is this game deals w/ gender issues. It takes a particular focus on genders involving more than one part of male-female binary or outside of it entirely.

3. The best thing about Genderwrecked is its sense of humor. It's not really laugh-out-loud funny but still sincerely thoughtful and clever at every turn. In an indie world where lots of indie games try to be indie funny, it's refreshing to find one that actually indie is.

4. The style of humor used is what is commonly called dad jokes and it is actually called that in game. You would think they'd find some gender neutral term for dad jokes like groaners or something but calling them dad jokes actually becomes story relevant at one point. This is some motherfucking science, people.

4. The gameplay is essentially the part of Shin Megami Tensei games where you talk to the monsters and try to convince them to join their party w/o all the being bored to death by million year long dungeons and confusing plot lines--and definitely w/o Atlus's troubling treatment of trans-people.

5. Okay, that's a bit of a stretch but all you do is talk to monsters. It's a visual novel.

6. The post-appocalypse world depicted mostly looks like ASCII art done in contrasting shades of the same color. Monsters are hand-drawn and intricate. The focus is clearly on the monsters, which makes sense. Some are twisted and grotesque to the point of being silly. Others are just silly. It's all a lot of fun.

7. In contrast to the rather loud visuals, the soundscape is sparse and harrowing. It is an endless, layered drone that straddles the border between ambiance and music.

8. These two elements play off each other well. The goofy monsters are disarming but the disquieting soundtrack keeps you from feeling too comfortable. Genderwrecked is not dealing w/ an easy subject so you don't want to breeze through it too happily. You need to take time and think.

9. Your choice in Genderwrecked is limited to three basic options. You can fight, talk to or kiss the monsters. After the first one, I opted to kiss absolutely everyone. It worked out great and was liberating in ways you could not imagine. Definitely, definitely will be kissing as many things as possible in video games from here on out.

10. Whatever option you chose, you interact w/ each monster in an attempt to learn more about its gender identity. Your mission, you see, is to learn the meaning of gender in this post-apocalyptic world. Why that is your mission is never explained. I guess someone just decided it had to be done and you were close by.

11. The game starts you out w/ a monster that feels it has no gender and moves you on through to monsters that have a clear idea of what their gender is, ones that don't feel the current norms adequately describe them and so on. It runs the gamut and that is the point. Importantly, none of the monsters seem to feel pushed into a gender role. They explore the idea w/ you and come to their own conclusions.

12. This gets to why Genderwrecked tends to give you a fuzzy feeling. Gender issues are felt most poignantly by people who are frequently dehumanized for where they fall on the spectrum. In making the characters that face the same challenges actual monsters, the developers, Ryan Rose Aceae and Heather Flowers, had to strike a precarious balance---which they did in a way that seems both somehow both effortless and well considered. This makes it feel like you can do the same in real life. It feels good to not be judgemental.

13. Genderwrecked was a surprise to me. I was expecting something personal in a specific way, a "this is my experience" kind of game, but it's not that at all. It examines a more universal experience  and succeeds quite admirably in tying in an individuals relationship w/ their gender to all the other aspects of themselves.

13 Points on WarioWare Gold - Nintendo - 2018 [Nintendo 3DS]

1. If ever there has been a Nintendo game that stinks of low effort, WarioWare Gold is it. I am having a hard time giving enough of a crap about it to write this review. Suffice to say, had I arbitrarily decided to do 14 Points reviews, it would be too much effort for this game. Thankfully, I picked 13 so now you have to read this shit. You're welcome. Now pay me.

2. Okay, I'm being a bit harsh. WarioWare Gold is fun enough, it could just use some polish--a lot of polish, esp. in the main story mode.

3. Really, micro games kinda feel low effort by design so I'm not sure what I'm on about. You throw together some new assets and whatever IPs you are lucky enough to own. Make a couple hundred games that are two seconds long. Bam, done. I actually love this stuff so I'm just complaining in order to hear my voice echo in the void.

4. The way these kind of games work is you have to keep a myriad of different tiny games in your head and they come at you in rapid succession and it feels good to think fast and remember what you have to do for game after game after game. When done right, this establishes an addictive flow and getting on a good run gives that same rush as hitting a new high score in an arcade game.

5. WarioWare Gold's main story mode does not have this flow. That is why I complained into the void about it earlier. There are overlong (though admittedly skippable) cut scenes before each round of games and the little segments between each game take just a little too long and some of the games make you sit there and wait once completed. It is hard to explain in concrete terms but it just feels a little off and it's annoying.

6. It doesn't help that the cut scenes, while fully voiced, are cheaply animated, making you wonder why they put them in at all if they weren't going to do them right. They aren't funny and don't add anything.

7. Event this wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the story mode also functions as an entirely unnecessary tutorial and they force you to complete it to unlock WarioWare Gold's other modes.You spend a lot of time just hoping you don't screw up so you don't have to play through that set of games again.

8. There is a little more unlocking to do once the story mode is finished but it's thankfully mostly really quick. The extra modes serve up the meat of the game and were what kept me sinking time into it after an initial bumpy start.

9. The micro games themselves are actually just fine. It is a mashup of games that worked in previous WarioWare games so, you know, nothing new under the sun but there is something to be said w/ going w/ the tried and true. They all work well enough and only very rarely feel unfair or even difficult on their own. The challenge is in how they string together.

10. Stringing them together differently is what the extra modes do differently. It is always the same games. There's a ton of variation though and a lot of it is really fun. You can, for example, play just one game over and over. You can play a mix of games in their hardest versions. There's modes where you control how fast the games go by tilting your system. One where Wario throws distractions at you. Another where you don't get any times between games. And more than that. Pretty much every one of the modes induced me to play through more than a few times to at least get to point where I was no longer doing better every single time. Some of them pushed into serious white knuckle, one-more-try over and over territory.

11. You are rewarded for getting high scores and such by getting various unlockables such as terrible videos you never want to watch and things like that. Some of the stuff is okay--like additional mini-games--but really what keeps you playing is the little endorphin rush you get from beating your high score.

12. Outside of the story mode, you can always pick what kind of games you play. The ones where you turn the system side to side can be a bother on airplanes or public transit so it's nice to be able to avoid those specifically.

13. Unless you have only have one of the really crap version of WarioWare like WarioWare: Snapped, it kind of hard to justify a purchase of WarioWare Gold unless you are just crazy for playing 2D only games on your 3DS. It is admittedly a hell of a lot of fun once you get past the annoying story mode but it really adds nothing exciting to the equation at all. I typically try to avoid judging games based on price but this really seems better suited to being a budget downloadable title rather than a full-priced retail release. It goes as far as to wear the fact that its a rehash of old favorites on its sleeve and, really, just doesn't end up being too impressive a collection as a result.

13 Points on Velocity 2x - FuturLab - 2014 [PlayStation Vita]

1. Velocity 2x is a speedrunner's fever dream. Other people will like it too.

2. This is the second game in the series but I am hoping the 2x in the title refers to the fact that there are two genres in one game here: a vertical scrolling shmup and a  2D platformer.

3. Both playstyles have similar mechanics in spite of being much different genres. You can always hold a button to move faster. You always have the option to shoot in the direction of the second analog stick. You can always eleport to avoid enemies or get to new areas. It feels natural and seamless to switch between the different ways to play.

4. The thing that ties these together is speed... errr, velocity (2x). No matter which type of section you are in, movement feels fluid and fast in much the same way. It very quickly reaches the point where most actions are second nature and flow freely in spite of quite a few mechanics being at play. In short, the double genre mashup works because the controls for both are excellent.

5. Volocity 2x doesn't try to knock you on your butt w/ its technical fidelity but its graphics are nevertheless stylish and effective. Bright, bold colors not only set the futuristic tone in this deep space setting but help enemies and collectables stand out from the background.

6. There are nevertheless some sections where one tiny collectable is easy to miss and this does wind up having a negative effect on gameplay esp. as you reach your way toward the end game.

7. The plot is delivered through still frame images w/ text. It is simple but it works. The art really shines here and after several dozen sets of just a few images a piece, the tale of a repressed race overthrowing their oppressors w/ the help of a lone human woman feels full and real in spite of only serving the gameplay purpose of breaking up the pace.

8. So, as stated, this game plays fast. It encourages you to play fast by outside means like scoring you on completion time and internet leader boards but, more so than that, it just feels right to try to scurry through. I wish they would have stuck more w/ the latter method.

9. The scoring on each level relates to how many collectables you get, how many enemies you kill and how fast you go. You unlock additional levels by scoring enough on previous levels. This is easy enough for about the first three hours. After that, it's pretty easy to pick up some extra points to keep things going for a while but eventually most players are going to hit a wall. Then you've got to grind.

10. And I don't mean idly grind away like you do in an RPG. This is white knuckle, no mistakes, try after try grinding like speedrunners do. It's satisfying as hell to but it seems kinda cheap they wall off end game content w/ this stuff.

11. The issue is this expectation for near perfection isn't given to you at the outset. You have to more or less memorize most of these levels but you can get so far ahead in the game before you realize this that you've forgotten anything about the first bunch of levels and so have to go back and start relearning from scratch. It would be much better just to set the bar higher initially if that is what you are going to do.

12. This is made worse by the fact that the levels get fairly long by midway through the game. To have to repeat a five minute level yet again because you missed one or two tiny collectables (see number 6) is incredibly frustrating.

13. So, yeah, I complained a lot about the progress wall but the reason it sticks out so much is that Velocity 2x is otherwise just so much fun. I actively like and enjoy grinding these levels for fast times and high scores, it just sticks in my craw that I have to. Maybe I am just acting like a spoiled teenager, I dunno... Go start your own blog about how I act like a spoiled teenager if that is the case. Otherwise, go play Velocity 2x. It's a blast and half. Plus it's two games in one, making for a total of three blasts. I can do math. You should play this game.

13 Points on Old Man's Journey - Broken Rules - 2017 [PC]

1. Old Man's Journey is one of those games you'll probably start and finish in the same sitting. Or at least over the course of a weekend. Or maybe it will take you a month to play through a game that's under two hours long. I don't know. Maybe you're dumb. Maybe you have almost no free time. There's a lot of factors at play here.

2. The setup is you are an old man and you go on a journey. It's not just a clever title. You are sitting on your stoop and a courier comes up on a bicycle and gives you a letter. You read it, pop inside to grab your things--suspiciously already packed--and get going.

3. The mechanics of Old Man's Journey are simple enough but never explained at all. You click on various parts of the the landscape and can stretch it about into different shapes.  You click on a spot to have the old man to journey to it. You can also click on sheep to make them move to another patch of grass. That's it.

4. Controls on this for PC are mouse only which is kind of  bummer.

5. This could be considered a really slow platformer where you contort the ground rather than jump. The piece of land you are standing on cannot be moved so you are forced to puzzle your way through what order you need to visit the platforms.

6. Eventually, there are waterfalls you can slide down, sheep that must be clicked on and wheels you need to roll around to knock over barriers. It adds a satisfying bit of progression.

7. Even w/ these additions, at no point does Old Man's Journey ever get hard. This shit is casual. Deal w/ it.

8. Given gameplay is not much of a challenge, exploration has to be a reward unto itself for Old Man's Journey to work. We are not talking a massive chunk of gaming here so this is more than enough to pull you through the whole thing.

9. It works because it's just so pretty. The hand painted look builds a sentimental feeling which jibes well w/ the whole idea of an old man going on a journey.

10. The wonderful scntfc composed soundtrack does much the same. It has the strummed acoustic instrument sounds you'd likely expect from such an endeavor but adds unexpected electronic elements that nevertheless blend in seamlessly. Like all of his scores, it's well worth checking out even if you don't play the game.

11. The story here is really more backstory. All that happens in game is you walk around. As you do, you run into sights that remind you of your past after each major section. You are rewarded w/ a mostly still image from your past. You are left to your own devices to piece the specifics of your history together.

12. Some of the turns in this history surprised me. Your journeying old man is not entirely w/o flaws and his lonely situation at the outset is not something that simply happened to him. This old man is, frankly, pretty much a dickhead. It makes everything a lot more interesting in the end.

13. It may sound like faint praise but Old Man's Journey is sparing in its use of your time and energy but delivers handsomely on what effort you do put into it. It may I also be faint praise to say that if you look at this game, realize it's a light puzzle game w/ great art assets and think you'll like it, you almost certainly will. Go ahead and give this a whirl if you run across a free evening sometime. I is pretty straightforward in what it promises and it delivers.