The Spotlight is a monthly summary that encapsulates some of the more notable media experiences I’ve had over the past thirty days. From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, it all has a place in the Spotlight.
Fair word of warning: this month has been very hectic and most of my time has been spent coordinating and executing a move to a different apartment. So this may not be the most comprehensive Spotlight we’ve had.
For the month of September, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.
Games
Astro Bot
An absolute delight from top to bottom. Looks amazing, feels great to move around and use all of the powers. Soundtrack is great. Excellent fan service. Not terribly challenging. Pretty forgiving checkpoints. No real penalty or lose state.
I’ve never really considered myself overly attached to the legacy of the PlayStation brand for a number of reasons, but I’ve grown up alongside of this brand and its characters and can absolutely appreciate aspects of its history. Astro Bot isn’t just one of the best 3D platformers I’ve played, but it’s also a love letter to (and possibly the greatest advertising vehicle for) the PlayStation, its games, hardware, and the many characters associated with its consoles.
I don’t want to belabor the point here, but Astro Bot is an absolute delight to play even if you’re not necessarily nostalgic for the PlayStation brand itself. The platforming is excellent, the soundtrack is great, it’s beautiful to look at, and the levels and boss fights are all fantastic.
It all gets even better if you have an affinity for the PlayStation brand itself. The story of Astro Bot is that you and hundreds of other bots decked out in popular PlayStation character outfits, are flying through space in their spaceship, which is a PS5, when they are attacked by a real nasty alien who knocks them out of the sky and scatters the characters and PS5 components throughout the galaxy. You are literally tasked with saving PlayStation characters and rebuilding a PlayStation 5 in Astro Bot, and while you could look at that as a shameless and gross advertisement you’re paying to experience, I would urge you to look at it like I see it, which is a wonderful celebration of the PlayStation brand.
Star Wars Outlaws
I really want to like Star Wars Outlaws, and I feel like in a few months I’ll be able to do that. As it is right now though, the game is far too buggy for me to want to spend anymore time with. While I’m curious about the story and enjoy the simplistic, if at times uninspired, gameplay loop, the entire experience feels rocky at best.
I’ve encountered a lot of bugs and weird glitches that have hampered my progress, but I also think the stealth system in general is just kind of busted at the moment. You get spotted through walls and cover elements too often to feel confident in the moves you have to make, and more frustratingly, even when you do manage to be completely stealthy about something, you’re still liable to be punished for it as if you were caught.
Star Wars Outlaws is big on its faction system, but it doesn’t feel great when you manage to stealthily double cross a gang without ever being detected, only to still lose reputation with them when you complete the mission. If no one saw me during that whole mission, then why am I still suffering the consequences? As it is, the system de-incentivizes being stealthy, and pushes you to be more willing to blast your way through everything cause it doesn’t matter.
It’s unfortunate, but hopefully Ubisoft will do what they do and fix their busted games further down the line. That’s when I’ll check back in.
NBA 2K25
There is a dark secret to The Bonus World that I think you should know now: Every single one of these articles should include whatever the newest version of the NBA 2K series is out, in them. This series, and now NBA 2K25, are by and large my most played games. They are my comfort food. They’re the thing I do when I’m watching a TV show in another monitor or listening to a podcast. NBA 2K25 is no different.
This is a basketball game like every one of them that came before. It feels really good to play and looks great. It’s also chock full of modes that are filled with some of the most predatory micro-transactions I’ve ever seen. The game throws pop-up ads for in-game currency up on its main screen, and uses the same button for selecting a game mode to buy whatever is on the pop-up. It’s so slimy and evil. I don’t play those modes and I don’t give this game more money than I need to. But I play hundreds of hours of the franchise modes, which more than justifies the base purchase price for me.
The Plucky Squire
The Plucky Squire is a visually stunning game with some truly cool ideas that’s unfortunately marred by tons of technical issues and downright baffling game design. You play as the titular squire as they run through an adventure they’ve completed many times in the past, because The Plucky Squire is actually a children’s book. As things come to a crescendo in the expected adventure, the main villain reveals his disdain with always failing and being defeated, and then launching your ass straight out of the book and into the physical world.
From there, you’ll split your time between the “real” world, and the newly written version of the book where the villain wins, spanning the world and helping its inhabitants. Between slashing goblins with your sword, you’ll occasionally come across larger areas that can’t be traversed in their current state. Written on the ground are passages from the very book you’re inside of, that you can remove words from and swap them with other words from other passages.
For instance, an early puzzle had a large boulder blocking the exit and a passage beside it that more or less said the same thing. Elsewhere on the map, there was a passage about a small frog that I could remove the “small” descriptor from, and replace the “large” in the boulder description with to instantly shrink the size of the boulder, allowing me passage to the next screen.
Unfortunately, The Plucky Squire has zero faith in you as a player to figure out any puzzle solution on your own, let alone even remember the plot of the game from screen to screen. The Plucky Squire frequently over-explains itself to the point of being pandering. Just as any gameplay momentum is built up, you are quite literally frozen in place to listen to some dialogue from the narrator, or your traveling companions, or some random NPC, or just to be shown a sweeping shot of the entire map so you can really appreciate it. I wouldn’t even call it excessive hand-holding, rather, it’s more like The Plucky Squire jammed its fingers in my nose and is pulling me through every aspect of the game so I don’t have to think about anything for too long.
Oh, and the cherry on top of it all is that the game is so buggy and broken that I’ve repeatedly lost progress from having to reload saves because a puzzle suddenly just stopped working. I’ve also encountered several crashes, each of which cost me more time, and one that, as of writing this, still prohibits me from finishing the game. Without spoiling anything, I died in the final boss battle which caused the game to crash, and whenever I open the game and try to continue, the game crashes instead.
The Plucky Squire is such a bummer and I really wish it was better. But it is an inherently flawed game that even bug fixes and patches can’t truly repair. There is no real reason to play this game, and I hate that I’m saying that.
UFO 50
I have been waiting for UFO 50 to come out for what feels like an eternity. It’s a collection of 50 games made by a fictional game company in the mid to late 80s, that was actually made by a handful of indie developers over the course of nearly a decade. I still haven’t played all of the games yet, but what I can say is that old games were infuriatingly obtuse and I’m not as good as I once was at them. That being said, I absolutely adore this game and everything it’s doing, and I hope I find at least one game that truly hooks me.
I’ll have more to say about UFO 50 next month… hopefully.
Watch List
The Good Place
Wonderful show that manages to hit both comedic and dramatic highs. I was severely skeptical of the end of season 1, and I’m still kind of angry about it. Kind of made the first season feel like a waste of time, even though they make good on it in the later seasons. It’s a very good show from top to bottom, despite the few issues I had with how they were telling their story.
New Girl
I’ve never watched New Girl before, and if it weren’t for the prodding from my partner, I probably would have bailed after the first 3 episodes. I found the characters to all be generally unlikable and I did not care about any of them.
By the end of the first season, however, I get what everyone sees in this show. Now in the third season, I still have some serious concerns about the writing and the character’s motivations, but I’m hopeful that things turn around soon.
Listening Party
Sastanàqqàm – Tinariwen (+IO:I)
Just – Radiohead
Money for Nothing – Dire Straits
The Rest
Moving
Seriously, fuck moving. I’m so exhausted and worn down.
News
Concord Gets Pruned
Days Gone Director is a Baby
“Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps” Says ex-Sony President
Sony Reveals a Console for Rich People
An Entire Game Studio Quits
Baldur’s Gate 3 Modder Shows Off Custom Maps, and Surprisingly No Sex Mods
“Not Enough Ads Yet” – Says Sony, as Ads are Dynamically Inserted Into PS5 Home Screen
Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. We’ll be back at the end of October with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.
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