So Long and Thanks For All the Fish

It's been six years since I started writing this blog, and it best use was for me to look back on something I forgot I played and go "oh yeah, I did play that". The last couple years, I've tailed off and not written so many posts, and when I finish a game, it feels like I should update this page just because I've been semi-diligent about it for so long at this point. Well, that time is over. lol If you have enjoyed reading anything on here, cool, leave a comment. I'll continue working on my backlog for eternity, but as I'm toiling on things from the 80s, like I just finished Kings Quest II and Maniac Mansion, the reality is no one cares. *cue Vine of dude pushing his sister into pool* Thanks for reading, and I'll see ya on Twitch and Youtube, or you know, never is okay too. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Pony Island

Pony Island, man... It's weird, but I think I really like it. It's very meta, and if you don't want me spoiling surprises, just go play it. TLDR, it's short and worth it.

Aaaannnyyway, you boot up this game, and there's problems with the menu straight away. You have to solve a puzzle to fix the menu and get to what you think is the game. A game that's very simple. You're a pony. You're jumping over gates. It's terrible. Then the game creator gets pissed that you don't like their game, and starts throwing more stuff at you, making it more difficult. You start getting messages from someone that's trapped in this game, and SURPRISE BITCH, you're trapped too. They want to help you escape, and to do so, you have to erase three core files of the game.

These are blocked off by puzzles, more pony levels, and a pile of riddle me this. I enjoyed the fact that this game made me scribble down notes over the course of trying to find passwords, clues, and figure things out. I quit at one point when I couldn't figure something out, but I stopped playing maybe 30 seconds before I was like, nah, lemme try one more thing. It's intriguing, and you should definitely resist the urge to look anything up while playing. It's like 2.5 to 3 hours long. Don't cheat yourself.

As you progress, you find special powers hidden away in the code that the creator didn't want you to find. This allows you to get further in the game than they intend, so they have to code up new levels fast, which introduces more "bugs" which you can take advantage of. At one point, they tell you that they're not ready and you should take a break. I actually wanted to take a break about that time, but of course I won't now.

One of my favorite things in this game was how they tricked me at times. The game looks like it crashes at one point, and if you just X out of the modal, the little daemon you were fighting gives you a little wink. If you don't press the right thing, you're sent out to the desktop, and I did think it legit crashed. Probably the best bit of trickery was when one of these daemons asks you a bunch of questions. One of the things you're asked is to say something disgusting. I typed some smack about a jerk I know. At that point, a Steam chat notification pops up from a person I talk to regularly, repeating what I said and loling, asking if I'd been hacked. It definitely had me for a second. I was like, is there some spectate mode on this?! The hell! Good one, Pony Island.

You continue fighting the good fight and get your chance to escape and free all the other trapped souls in one final pony dashing, jumping, and shooting pony lasers level. You lose souls along the way as you get hit, and once you escape, you're told that unless you uninstall the game, the soul that has been helping you will remain trapped.

I had a good time. I deleted my saves without hesitation. What a weird and most excellent game.

Gunpoint

Gunpoint is hella good. It's a quick play at 3-4 hours. It has interesting mechanics where you rely on stealth and rewiring things like a lightswitch to a door, for instance, allowing you to KO guards with a swift door to the face as they patrol. You're a spy guy, and this spy guy got himself in a bit of a pickle where he looked like the prime suspect for a murder. The story starts with you needing to break into multiple buildings real quiet like and wipe the camera footage that puts you at the scene.

The gameplay consists of these building break-ins which are part face punch/pew pew, part puzzle. The story is told between missions via texts between you and clients. I really liked the story telling vehicle. It made them more than a cut scene. You had some agency. You could be a smarmy ass, a lying liar face, or a more standard brand of human. It was also a clever way to avoid having to do a bunch of additional art or animation to service the story.

Speaking of story, I really liked the writing. It was very humorous. There were even jokes sprinkled throughout the achievements and tutorial text. So do yourself a favor and actually read stuff.

Anyway, I dug it. If you like pixel-art sneaky, puzzle games of trickery, you will too.

Mini Metro

Mini Metro is a simple looking game in which you have to plan out a metro system with limited resources. As the game progresses, you get more and more stations that you need to connect, and more and more passengers which you have to account for.

The stations are indicated by various shapes, starting with circles, squares, and triangles. Each station will pop up riders indicated via the same shapes. A circle rider wants to get to a circle station, so based on how you set up your lines, it will take the appropriate train to get there. This gets more and more complicated as the stations invariably do not line up nicely, multiples of the same station type are clustered together, it randomly puts one station way out in BFE, and soon your poorly thought out lines look more and more like spaghetti.

There are many different levels which you can unlock by doing well in prior levels. Well, meaning you lasted many days and delivered more than 500 passengers, generally. Each level comes with their own challenges, like some cities have a lot of waterways and your limited number of tunnels or bridges available will make it a mad scramble just to keep things going once you run out. As more and more passengers get added, the possibility of any one station overcrowding is something you have to manage, either by adding new lines, more cars to your train, additional trains, or building an interchange which will speed up the loading of passengers.

The game runs on a weekly cycle, and at the end of every week, you'll get two options to pick between of these kinds of options. (An extra line, more tunnels, etc.)

Lots of times, I found myself moving trains and readjusting lines to alleviate problem areas just to live to see the weekend and possibly get saved by an extra rail line.

Overall, I've enjoyed it. It's kind of a soothing game to play. As there's no endgame, per se, I once again have to set my own parameters. I unlocked all the available levels, and that was enough for me. I came, I played, I got my $1 worth. Onto the next thing.

Land of Livia

Soooo...I read a blog post about why this guy couldn't give up working on his indie game. From the blog post, I found out that the app was called "Land of Livia" and it was supposed to be an RPG type mobile game that had a good story and had a free Prelude. This sounded like a pretty sweet deal, so I downloaded it.

I quickly realized that the description was a little...boasty.

They claimed that it had a good story, but more words doesn't necessarily equate to a good story. You start on your farm, a red dot on a green map, and there's a storm happening out in the ocean, which logically is the cause of your problems, right? So you're told about this red dot further down the road. Go there, you say. Cool. Wait 5 minutes for the travel time. You get there. What's available? An MMO style quest. There's wolves and they're prowling. And for some reason you need to kill them. This will take you 10 minutes. Press button to wait 10 minutes.

Oh dear God...

So this is the way things are. You go places which takes time or you complete quests, which takes time, or you listen at an inn which takes a lot of time. I was super not into any of this almost immediately, but the perplexing thing to me was that there were leaderboards and active chats with people who were obviously super into this. They would talk about where each other were from, where/in what quest to find certain items, and what sections were bugged. By the time I had noticed the leaderboard stuff, I was like 12th on it in some of the categories. There are not a ton of people playing this game, but some of them are ridiculously into it. The highest quest completer has done new/repeat quests over 1800 times. And it was because of my confusion of their fervor that I persisted at least until I finished the Prelude.

This app is nothing but grinding with time. You can't complete different quests without good enough gear, so you grind until you get a decent random drop. But grinding is just waiting. When you give up on getting gear that will make it a sure thing. You wait grind, hoping you'll land on the right side of the percentage of chance to beat the quest.

I'm SO over this game and I won't be plopping down the $3.99 to continue. Good luck to those who found joy in the wait. I surely did not.

Pokemon: Omega Ruby

I have been the absolute worst at playing new things lately. Well...new old things. I borrowed "Pokemon: Omega Ruby" from a friend and was therefore in kind of a hurry to finish it. However, I was more in a hurry to finish it because I was bored to death of the sameness of it all. I've only played a handful of Pokemon games, and I'm fairly certain die-hards are expecting not much deviation from the formula, so I very well may be in the minority to be annoyed by it.

You're a kid heading off to become a Pokemon trainer. Everybody thinks that's normal. Bye, possibly forever, kid. You have a friend that's a half step behind you and will battle you every time you complete some milestone. There's a group of adults with stupid plans that you have to foil. This time it's Team Magma. They want to awaken an ancient Pokemon. It's a bad idea. Everybody knows it. They'll figure it out after being beaten by a kid 42 times. Beat all the gyms. Go to the Pokemon League. Beat 5 people. Win. Roll credits.

The new bits, from the games I've played, were the ability to pick berries and plant berries, and the existence of secret hideout locations that were everywhere. I wasn't into that, so it didn't add a ton. They also added Pokemon-style beauty pageants you could participate in. I was also not into this. Everything else seemed very much standard, and after a while, it started to feel like homework.

I probably won't be playing anymore Pokemon games in the future, but if you're into replaying the same base storyline over and over, Omega Ruby is probably still your jam.

Thimbleweed Park

Thimbleweed Park is a delight. I am absolutely transported back to my childhood playing a point and click adventure.

It starts with a murder mystery near the town of Thimbleweed Park. You control two federal agents charged with solving this murder but who also have secret agendas of their own. You learn that the town is largely deserted after the Pillowtronics Factory burned down and its founder recently died. The town has descended into disrepair as a result of the fire, and the townspeople are definitely hiding something-a-reno. I'm looking at you Sheriff.

You later get access to other playable characters, Delores, an aspiring video game programmer; Ransome, the Insult Clown; and Franklin, a ghost with some unfinished business. Each of these characters have their own agendas and have their own puzzles to solve and also are used to solve the other characters' puzzles. Switching back and forth between them is nice because you're rarely in a position where you are completely stuck on all potential puzzles. So you can generally make progress of some kind and never want to rage quit or throw your computer off a cliff.

It's weird, though, but I like being stuck in an adventure game, to a degree. I like when they make me think outside the box. I like when I try a bunch of different things, many of which I thought was a damn good idea, but it's not quite the right one. I like when the actual solution makes me laugh. I'll throw an example at you. Quit reading if you want absolutely zero puzzle spoilers. I needed to get a book on the third level of a library, but the staircase was Out of Order, so sayeth the sign hanging on it. I thought maybe I needed to fix it myself. I did have wood available to me, but it was firewood, and I had no tools. There was a phone nearby. I thought perhaps I needed to call a repairman of some sort, so I looked through the many pages of the phone book. Nothing really fit the bill. On a lark, I just picked up the Out of Order sign, and I could then use the staircase. Ha! I felt incredibly pleased with this solution.

Some may give the adventure genre shit for this pick everything up that isn't nailed down approach, but to me, having a bunch of garbage in your inventory that has a purpose that will in time become clear makes carrying all that junk all the sweeter once you figure it out. And once you get stuck, the inevitable try using everything on everything else tactic gave me joy. I have heard people declare that a weakness of the genre, but one of my favorite ridiculous solutions of adventure games ever was in Sam and Max: Hit the Road where you use the broken golf ball retriever, combined with a severed hand, and a giant magnet and used this frankenobject on a giant ball of twine to find a lost mood ring while Max comments on how highly improbable that was to have worked.

One thing I really liked about this game was that they know how people who like adventure games think, so they'd use that to throw you off or they'd throw little Easter eggs in there for those long time fans of the genre. For example, I really enjoyed that due to my pick up everything not nailed down approach, I ended up with a severed head that looked like the Navigator head from Monkey Island. That alone made me smile, and I didn't really expect it to have a use. Later though, I came across one of those find your way through this non-navigable forest puzzles similar to that same Monkey Island puzzle the Navigator head was from, so I whipped it out. It did indeed lead the way, not to the location I needed to progress the storyline, but to the location of previously dug up treasure for "another game", which was Monkey Island. Yes. Yesyesyes.

Overall, I was just awash in nostalgia and grinning the whole time to have this new adventure game enter the arena. It is of the same family of games that I grew up with, love, and have played over and over and over. It makes me happy that as games continue to focus on better and better graphics that there are still people willing to make and people itching to play a funnily written pixel art game. I hope there are more to come. Ron Gilbert, I will play anything you make, sir.