Category Archives: archive blog

Blog: Blast That Gunk – 06/23/21

Dang, it happened again. Another weirdly specific “simulator” game has come into my life and completely dominated my free time. Of course I’m talking about the current front-runner for Game of the Year, PowerWash Simulator, a game that’s irrefutable evidence of the fact that we have jumped the shark when it comes to simulator ideas. But despite how objectively ridiculous it is that this game exists at all, I’m so grateful that it does.

There’s no hidden mechanics here or secrets to uncover (or are there?) in PowerWash Simulator, instead you’re literally just going from building to building and blasting the gunk off of everything that’s been gunk-ified. You earn cash for completing jobs, which you can spend on upgrading your power washer via different models of washer, attachments and cleaning solutions. From there, you load into the map of a structure and methodically blast the dirt and grime off of everything, and then (pardon the wordplay) rinse and repeat until there aren’t anymore jobs available.

Like most of these simulator games, there’s a fair bit of jank involved that really gets annoying when you’re pixel-hunting for the last speck of dirt on a surface. You can hit the TAB key and bring up your “dirt-vision” or whatever they’re calling it, but that doesn’t really help when the dirt is completely out of sight. A lot of grime is underneath things like ledges and windowsills, which can result in these moments where there dirt is lower than your character can physically get. Suddenly you’re trying to do trick shots with your hose to blast water off of surfaces you can’t fully see, and that’s really a momentum killer in PowerWash Simulator, a game I’m using to try and achieve a zen-like state of peace and calm.

I know I talk about these kinds of games fairly regularly, and I do so proudly because I genuinely enjoy some of these games and their representations of seemingly mundane occupations. I don’t know what part of my brain lights up when I start organizing or cleaning things in video games, but that part of my brain must be fairly dominant because I spent maybe six hours straight the other playing this game. PowerWash Simulator is an early access game that provides a soothing experience about blasting dirt into another dimension, and I absolutely adore it.

Blog: Me3 2021 – 06/16/21

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I feel like I just got slapped in the face with video games, which as well know can only mean that E3 has taken place once again. But don’t confuse that with Game Fest, a thing that I think started before E3 and is lasting long after it. We’ve got like a dozen game-focused events popping off all summer, so this whole thing is a lot clumsier than it normally is. It’s a mess that’s only gotten messier thanks to a certain pandemic, and will only get worse as E3 flails around trying to grasp at those precious last breaths of relevance. But until that day comes, I guess I’m gonna just keep looking at headlines and trailers and regurgitating that stuff back onto this site with that patented “Ari Spice,” which sounds grosser than I wanted it to, but oh well.

The oddest part about this whole clusterfuck of game announcements is that I’ve barely watched any of it. I don’t think as a hobbyist I can dedicate full days to sitting and watching press events about video games anymore, because it’s exhausting and unnecessary if we’re being honest with ourselves. Like, I didn’t need to watch whatever the hell Square Enix was doing this year, because I usually don’t tend to get grabbed by most of the games they make. I checked out that trailer for the Final Fantasy action game, Stranger of Paradise I believe is the subtitle to that one, and boy howdy did it look real dumb. They just kinda made the most generic looking protagonist who seems like he was pulled out of some middling 3rd person action game from the early 2000s, and said “good enough!” It truly reminds me of that terrible Shadow the Hedgehog game from the mid-2000s with how unnecessarily edgy it’s trying to be.

But whatever, maybe it’ll be great and I’ll be jealous of all the fun that everyone is having playing it. All I know for sure is that I’m really glad I didn’t have to sit through a press conference to see that, I’ve literally missed out on nothing by watching the trailer on YouTube a few days later with the exception of whatever tragedies were taking place in the live chat.

That’s kind of the beautiful side-effect of not checking or engaging with social media as much anymore, because I don’t feel this pressure to be on the cutting edge of what’s being announced or anything. The Bonus World isn’t a news site, and working my ass off to put up articles recapping conferences immediately after they end, doesn’t do anything for me or this site. So I’m just not bothering with it.

As far as actual E3 content goes, there will be some stuff that hits this week, but it’s not going to be anywhere near as comprehensive as it’s been in the past. I’m allowing myself to ease off the gas pedal a bit here, because I know that nobody is coming to The Bonus World for up to the minute game news. If that were the case, you’d be woefully out of touch with what the industry is up to and only know about weird simulator games I’m into at the moment. But that’s okay. I like the little slice of the internet that this site occupies, and I’m not going to overwork myself for literally no benefit.

So yeah, E3 is happening or already happened, I’m not sure anymore. And quite frankly, I’m happier this way.

Blog: Up Next – 06/09/21

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Existing in stark contrast to how I felt about games merely a few weeks ago, I’ve suddenly found myself with an overwhelming amount of games I want to play but haven’t made much time for just yet. Even worse is the fact that they didn’t miraculously appear on my various hard drives because I distinctly remember spending money on them, so I really should at least launch these games at some point. With that said, here are some of the games that are currently squatting on my hard drive, that I should probably address.

BIOMUTANT

I’ll just go ahead and just break the thesis of this blog immediately by saying that I’ve actually played some Biomutant already, a few hours worth if memory serves. I didn’t hate what I’ve played but I wasn’t necessarily blown away by it either. Although to be fair I did mostly just play through the terribly long and uninteresting tutorial, something that was apparently such a pain in the ass that the developers decided to address it, along with the overly mouthy narrator, in a patch.

I would hope that the patch also works on making the game look better when running on an Xbox Series S because at the time of writing this, it looks real rough. Honestly, if it wasn’t for how grimy the game looks on my particular console of choice, I’d probably be playing a lot more of Biomutant. Despite it not being a graphical powerhouse, Biomutant seems super interesting to me and is definitely something I’d like to spend more time with.

AN AIRPORT FOR ALIENS CURRENTLY RUN BY DOGS

Once again, I’ve already played a little bit of An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs so far and I can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing necessarily, because I’m not eager to play it because of how “good” it is, but I feel as if I owe to myself to play the entirety of any game with a title like An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.

From what I’ve played of it, it’s absolutely fucking bonkers and I love that about it. What I think I love most about the game is the fact that the airport is indeed run by dogs, but not in the way you’re thinking probably. Sure dogs are working the various information stalls, ticket booths and concession stands, but it’s literally just a bunch of high resolution JPEGs of dogs that stare at you constantly as if they were enemies out of the original Duke Nukem or something. It’s so good and so weird and I need to play more of it.

There’s a story going on, but to be completely honest, that trailer above does a much better job at telling a story than the game has thus far. So maybe I just need to play way more of it to get those good story beats.

THE MAGNIFICENT TRUFFLEPIGS

Described as a “first-person, romantic, metal-detecting game,” there was no reality in which The Magnificent Trufflepigs didn’t find its way into my Steam library somehow. I haven’t launched this game yet, but I’m so intrigued to find out what it’s all about. Are these pigs truly magnificent? Are they good at finding truffles or are they some sort of pig, truffle hybrid monstrosity that’s going to be hunting me down throughout the game? Can I pet a trufflepig? These are the questions I need to answer to maintain my journalistic integrity… probably.

But it heavily reminds me of one of my favorite narrative-focused games, Firewatch, which did a fantastic job of telling a compelling and gripping story with the backdrop of doing a mundane job. I guess I really like the concept of the ordinary being thrust into positions of the extraordinary, and hopefully this ridiculously titled game can deliver on that.

BACKBONE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTC6ZET43uM

Raccoon detective. RACCOON. DETECTIVE. What else do you want me to say about Backbone, the game about a raccoon detective? The trailer looks dope as hell, boasting a pretty spectacularly detailed pixel art style and a lot of other humanoid animals beating the shit out of the raccoon detective. I’m not crazy about that last detail because of my love for the colloquially titled, trash-pandas, but it probably makes sense in the context of the story. I bet it ends with the raccoon detective finding their utopia somewhere in a landfill or something though. Also, it’s on Gamepass, so I have no reason to not play it.

Yeah, so that’s pretty much what’s on the plate at this particular moment. I really wanna get through some of this stuff because I’m anticipating playing a lot of Dark Alliance when it comes out later this month, and I’d like to have less things to juggle by then. Maybe this time I’ll actually play these games instead of turn around in two months and wonder why they’re still on my hard drive, then delete them as unceremoniously as possible, just like I did with Outriders.

Blog: Achievements & Site Updates – 06/02/21

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There was a period of time, specifically before 2016 when I built my gaming computer, that I was deeply invested in the concept of Gamerscore and the achievement hunting that came along with it. I primarily played on Xbox and the Pavlovian response of hearing that delightful chime and getting a functionally useless reward that indicated I had unlocked an achievement was very exciting and fulfilling for me. But once I gravitated away from consoles and onto PC, I had to shake that particular monkey off of my back. Unfortunately for me and my sanity, I now own a modern Xbox console and have their subscription service which essentially just blasts me with new games every few weeks to play, keeping me planted squarely back on the achievement treadmill whether I like it or not.

My strategy at the time was to just play as many games as possible and just get whatever achievements I could without too much effort or time sunk into any single particular game. I didn’t approach achievement hunting from that angle nor would I actually ever call myself an achievement hunter, because I just like to bounce from game to game and that’s how I racked up several thousand points without actually trying that hard. That approach probably still would work, but I’m just a hair more discerning about how I spend my money these days and won’t just buy every game that stumbles onto the storefront. Besides, I gotta save that money to invest in more TTRPGs that I won’t ever play.

But now that I have an Xbox again and have set it up in a way that makes it easier and more accessible to use than launching a game through Steam, I’ve found that my achievement itches are starting back up. My current setup involves two different HDMI switches that gather all of my various console inputs into one output, and have that go through another switch that indicates which monitor it’ll display on. While I’m fairly certain that neither of these switches will pass through a 4K signal, making my television functionally useless, the convenience of being able to just hit a button on my second monitor and be instantly at my Xbox dashboard has really been the catalyst for why I’m primarily playing on console these days.

Even better is how inclusive the Xbox ecosystem has become, providing seamless integration between console and PC players which has meant that I’ve been able to play a lot more multiplayer games with people, regardless of where they’re actually playing. I’ve taken to testing that cross-play system a lot too by expressly playing on console while my friends are on PC, and I gotta give it up to Xbox for making the process as painless as possible. I’m certain that it’s only that easy because we’re all still utilizing parts of the Xbox ecosystem, something that undoubtedly has made things smoother than if I was trying to play with someone from a PS5 or something.

Regardless of the ease of use it really has been a lot of fun to casually chase achievements again, although I don’t appreciate how Xbox likes to rub it in your face about how much better your friends are at achievement hunting than you are. It makes me want to be way more competitive than I actually am, which is usually always cancelled out by my inherent laziness. But aside from the stupid achievement rat race, I’m surprisingly really enjoying playing on a console again for reasons that I don’t quite fully understand.

While we’re on the topic of laziness, I want to mention the lack of diverse content on the site recently. It’s kind of just been blogs for the past few weeks, and I’m sorry for that. Honestly, I’ve just kind of found it hard to be motivated to do anything, let alone this site, but I’m trying to get back into the swing of things. I have some ideas for new Master of Disasters and Gut Checks, so those should be materializing soon enough.

But as for things like my annual coverage of E3 or whatever the fuck is going on this summer, I do not know what it’s going to look like this year or even if something will come to fruition in terms of coverage. Much like last year, it’s still very weird out there, and the concept of covering E3 is both an exciting and confusing challenge to me. We’ll see what comes of it all, but I’ve got the wheels in the ol’ noggin spinning in the hopes something actionable and interesting will come out. That rarely works out for me, but maybe this time it’ll be different. Only time will tell.

Blog: Knockout City – 05/26/21

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It’s no secret that I’ve lost my passion for online competitive games as I’ve gotten older, but that doesn’t mean this old man isn’t still capable of stepping into the virtual ring and wreaking some havoc from time to time. While most people are playing those gun-shooting games I’ve opted to spend my time with EA’s newly released competitive dodge ball game, Knockout City, as opposed to the more murder-centric games people usually play. Much to my surprise, Knockout City is actually a pretty fun, albeit slim offering that was well worth the price of “free with Game Pass.”

Knockout City is a free-to-play game that hasn’t realized it’s a free-to-play game just yet, as it’s currently retailing at $20 on just about every modern platform. I’m sure in a few months we’ll get a full “announcement” about how EA is making the game more accessible or something by offering it for free, but we’re not there just yet. Rest assured though, with the amount of free-to-play trappings that are already in Knockout City, I can’t foresee a future where it doesn’t go free-to-play eventually.

But hey, this one’s different, because you’ll be hurling cosmic dodge balls at your opponents instead of bullets, which somehow doesn’t make eliminating an opponent any less grizzly as they ragdoll off the side of a skyscraper. You and your team of two other folks will face off in a best of three, round-based death-match, where the first team to score ten eliminations wins the round. These rounds go pretty quickly, which is exactly long enough for me to almost get sick of playing Knockout City, but instead stick around for another match.

Balls spawn in various spots around the map, with special themed ones randomly selected before you start a match that will also spawn in some of these locations. For instance, one of my matches had explosive balls that are pretty devastating no matter which team you’re on, a fact that I learned the hard way. You basically race to these locations to grab a ball, then sprint on into the location of the map that has turned into an impromptu killing field, where you will either become a dodge ball god or immediately get knocked unconscious.

What’s neat about the game is how deceptively simple it is. What sucks about it is how little you’re told about what everything does. There’s a tutorial that I suggest everyone play, but even that doesn’t cover some of the more advanced maneuvers that you’ll need to use in any given match. For instance, you can turn yourself into a ball that your teammates can throw. How you do this is never spelled out to you nor why you would do this, but I assure you that functionality exists. The same goes for passing the ball to teammates, which seems like a pretty important thing for me to know how to do, but alas, that also wasn’t covered in the tutorial.

It’s probably super simple like the rest of the controls in Knockout City though. When you have a ball, you can hold the right trigger to simultaneously automatically lock on to an opponent and charge up your shot, followed by releasing the trigger to heave the ball. But locking onto an enemy alerts them that they’re being locked onto, so you have to basically mess with them by playing with the timing of your release. Sure a fully charged shot would be devastating but that’s what they’re expecting, maybe an early release will throw them off enough that they mistime their catch attempt. It’s a fun little meta-layer that involves you playing mind games with your opponent, and I appreciated that.

Your enemies aren’t just helpless however, because by timing a grab with the left trigger you can catch the ball and immediately fire it back at an opponent. When that happens, it leads to a lot of Dragon Ball Z styled air battles where two people are just bouncing this dodge ball off of each other in midair until someone’s timing falters. It’s always really cool when you get into one of these back and forth battles because these were easily the most tense moments I experienced while playing. You can also tackle an opponent which will cause them to lose control of the ball, popping it into the air for all of the other anime dodge-ballers to have a chance at holding. That tackle is one of three different dodge actions you can take, all of which probably do something different that I just couldn’t decipher before writing this.

Knockout City is actually a lot of fun, but I just don’t know how long the legs on this thing are. It feels more substantial than something like a Fall Guys, but it also lacks any of the personality Fall Guys had as well. The game has this weird retro-futurism vibe to it that really does nothing for the experience as a whole, but it doesn’t detract from it either, so there’s that I suppose. If you’ve got Game Pass and want to check out Knockout City, I’d fully endorse that decision. However, if you’re asking if you should pay $20 bucks for it, I don’t know that I could stand by that decision, especially when we all know and have agreed that it’ll be free-to-play in a few months anyway.

Blog: Down on the Town – 05/19/21

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I initially planned on doing this two months ago, but time is an illusion at best these days and I just kind of missed it, but now seems as good as a time as any to talk about Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Like I said, this would’ve been more apt had it been the 1-year anniversary of its release, but I feel like the things I wanted to say then are still applicable a few months on. So with that said, I’d like to go over my brief love affair with the game and where our relationship stands today.

Like many people, I found that Animal Crossing: New Horizons hit right when I needed it to, providing a pleasant escape from the misery of the newly imposed lock-downs that swept across the globe. Despite how I feel about it today, I still maintain that Animal Crossing: New Horizons was one of the most important games I played during 2020, solely based on how it helped prop up my relationships with others. Yet here in 2021, I might be able to give the game a half hour of my time every two weeks or so, at best. Where did it all go wrong between me and Animal Crossing: New Horizons?

Well it probably has to do with the fact that nothing substantial has happened over the course of the year. Every seasonal event that was rolled out was underwhelming and immediately forgettable, leaving me yearning for the bigger content updates that would never actually come. The events for the most part, all followed a similar formula of “collect this thing so you can craft a different thing,” and that’s pretty underwhelming if you ask me. Sure it follows in the motif of the game itself, where crafting and building are kind of the cornerstones of the entire experience, but sometimes you want to do something that grants you a reward that isn’t a crafting recipe. I just find the Animal Crossing: New Horizons failed to ever do anything with the momentum it built up, as if no one at Nintendo had a plan for if the game actually sold well or something.

The core issue isn’t that the events are underwhelming however, the real issue is that nothing has changed in a meaningful way whatsoever. Sure new items have been injected into the game here and there, but outside of that and the terrible seasonal events, there hasn’t been any real reason for me to spend time on my little island paradise. There aren’t any new buildings or NPCs to interact with, nor have there been any new shops to spend my dragon’s hoard of money in. No new functionality has been added to the game outside of being able to go swimming and diving for clams or whatever, so I’ve just been in this, “why bother?” mentality with the it all. Hell, none of my townsfolk ever have anything interesting to say anymore either. Just like real life, in Animal Crossing: New Horizons I’m just kind of going through the motions.

It’s an absolute shame too considering that a lot of the good will and praise that people heaped onto Animal Crossing: New Horizons when the pandemic started has almost entirely evaporated into thin air. Everything I hear about the game itself these days falls into one of two buckets: Either it’s an event from last year coming back much to the chagrin of the people still actively playing it, or how Nintendo patched out a glitch that people found because they wouldn’t want the game to be too fun.

I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to list things I’d like to see added to the game, but at this point I’d take anything. The game has gotten so stagnant and dull that even just a new store or mechanic could entice me to check in on my animals who refuse to do any manual labor, instead opting to let the town get overrun by weeds before actual getting their hands dirty. I remember rumors of cooking systems and more in-depth interactable objects like in past entries of the series, none of which have actually come to pass. Honestly I was kind of hoping that Animal Crossing would inject more Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley elements into it for the people who really wanted to stick with the game. Give players more things to do on a mechanical level and stop being so punitive when it comes to doing simple shit like rearranging the layout of your town.

It just sucks to think about because Animal Crossing: New Horizons helped me transition from a relatively normal life to the one I’m currently living without falling too deep into a pit of despair. Its positive, bright and cheery atmosphere was truly the pick-me-up I needed during some of the rougher parts of the lockdown. It was a way for me to keep in touch with my partner who lived far away at the time, as well as friends and co-workers. It was a lifeline during an incredibly bleak period of time, and to see it just be ignored after being so influential and beloved in the gaming space is incredibly disheartening. I hope something new comes into play soon, but I’m really not holding my breath.

Blog: Dinoslayers – 05/12/21

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When I think about horde modes in video games, things like Call of Duty’s zombies modes and the aptly named horde mode from the Gears of War series spring to mind. While I’ve never really resonated with them at all, it’s impossible to deny how popular and successful these modes have been, so much so that there are games that are completely built around the concept itself like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Back 4 Blood. These games are not my jam at all, but somehow I’ve managed to spend a couple of hours with one of these styled games this past week. If you haven’t heard about Second Extinction yet, prepare to be informed by someone with a middling at best level of interest in the genre and an even shoddier level of knowledge about dinosaurs.

As the name might imply, Second Extinction is an objective-based horde-styled game where you and two of your buddies wander around a miserable planet, gunning down all sorts of mutated dinosaurs. In the early portions of the game you’ll mostly be shooting at raptors with a penchant for spin-kicking you, spitting poison at you, and turning invisible, just like I remember learning about in school. There are other, more interesting dinosaurs that will need a good bullet-ing as well, but the majority of what I faced early on were these shitty mutated raptors.

You choose a character to play as, each of which comes with their own suggested loadout of weapons and abilities but you can pretty much just make any character use any weapon you want, which is good considering you could end up like me and get fooled into using what can only be described as the “World’s Most Useless Sniper Rifle”. Not only is it hilariously inaccurate and ineffective, but the scope itself is fogged over and impossible to see through, making aiming through it bizarrely impractical. If you’re looking to play Second Extinction, do not use the sniper rifle.

My biggest complaint with Second Extinction was just how meandering the entire thing felt. I never quite knew what we were doing or why we were doing it, and some of the missions and objectives were either unclear, tedious as hell, or some combination of the two. But despite that we still had a pretty good time traipsing through the snowy landscape towards our next inscrutable goal, all the while utilizing our abilities and various equipment in something that resembled synergy. One friend would call in some ammo, while I would call in equipment or use a stun grenade or satchel charge to really stop a charging dino in its tracks. But it’s hard to tell if that’s something I can credit to the game or just to the fact that I like playing games with my friends.

I don’t think Second Extinction is a bad video game by any metric, and considering that it’s still in early access it certainly has a good foundation to build upon. My biggest hope is that the rough edges and bugs get taken care of, because the game is currently pretty buggy and crashy. Things like dead dinosaurs getting launched into the stratosphere can stay in the game, but the lack of any voice chat control in the game is wild. It must’ve taken us about an hour for us to figure out how to mute each other in the game so we could continue using Discord without hearing our voices doubled. Eventually we managed to mute ourselves through the Xbox app, but boy-howdy did that take way longer than it needed to. And maybe fixing that miserable sniper rifle could be something worth investing some time into.

But if you have Game Pass and two friends who are looking to do what the owners of Jurassic Park didn’t have the guts to, vis-à-vis just gunning down those rogue dinos, then I think Second Extinction might be worth checking out.

Blog: A Game of Chicken – 05/05/21

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There are moments in life when you’re absolutely positive that one thing will happen, yet against all odds, something entirely unexpected occurs. That’s basically the story of how I ended up purchasing an Xbox Series S in a nutshell. I recall months of following various Twitter accounts to clue me into stock drops at various retailers, only to see the “Out of Stock” message appear within seconds of clicking the link. I would have never expected to be able to purchase a next-generation console on a whim, but here we are, $325 later, and a new Xbox is on its way to me.

There was a few months where I was pursuing one of these plastic monoliths in a pretty obsessive way, but every time a notification would pop up on my phone and I clicked it, all I’d end up securing was a vast amount of disappointment. So one day I decided to scale back and just stop trying so hard. I stopped following every stock-checking Twitter account I had latched onto, turned off all notifications and moved on with my life. But I did continue to follow one account that posts deals from all across the gaming landscape and not just consoles. Turns out, that was right move.

I woke up the other morning and eventually got around to checking up on social media to see what horrors occurred in the world in the past 7 hours or so that was unconscious. I came across a post from this Twitter account that just indicated that Microsoft was selling the Xbox Series S on their site. Unfortunately that post was from 9 hours ago, so I probably missed out on it, but I figured I’d click anyway just to confirm it for myself.

The weirdest thing happened: The site didn’t say “Out of Stock” like it usually did, instead it just read, “Add to Cart,” which I earnestly assumed to be a glitch or something. Jokingly, I clicked it, all the while knowing that this would error out and show me the way out. But gosh dang-it, the site just sent me to the cart where one of these elusive consoles was just chilling and waiting for me. “This can’t happen,” I thought. “The listing went up last night, there’s just no way,” I continued to say as I signed into my PayPal account to finalize the purchase.

So I filled out all the information and pressed the final confirmation button, still fully expecting for this to not work. But lo-and-behold the transaction went through, and I was left sitting there, slack-jawed at the concept that I could, nine hours later, just purchase this console I wasn’t really looking to ever buy so easily. Surely an email would come in and say that my order couldn’t be completed or something, right? Nope, I have a tracking number and everything now and I still don’t believe that this actually happened.

*Finally, a “best value” option that’s actually the best value*

As of writing this, I don’t have the console just yet. It’ll allegedly arrive on the day this blog goes up, but that remains to be seen. This may not seem as buck-wild of a story as I think it is, but it’s important to contextualize it all with just how fanatical about finding a next-generation console I was. Maybe I just got lucky because no one is really frothing at the mouth for a Series S, but I literally don’t know if that’s even true or not, that’s just me spouting conjecture at this point. All I know is that I’m surprisingly excited to receive this thing, and terrified of the idea that it’s being shipped as is and not in a discreet box.

In preparation for my new toy, I’ve reorganized my entertainment center which was basically me unplugging the dust-covered Xbox 360 that was on it and chucking it into storage, as well as giving that severely neglected piece of furniture a good cleaning. I also decided to upgrade my Game Pass subscription from the overpriced PC only version, to the slightly more expensive Game Pass Ultimate, which upon further reflection, is an incredible deal. So yeah, that’s the story of how I played chicken with a website and lost so badly that I ended up $325 dollars poorer, but I do get one of them new-fangled viddy-James boxes out of it. Well, allegedly, I’m still not convinced it’s actually on its way to me. I’ll update this post either way when the time comes.

UPDATE: It’s actually here. Weird.

Blog: The Clack Track – 04/28/21

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The year is 2005 and I’m sitting in a darkened basement with my friends, huddled around the television with a PlayStation 2 hooked up to it. A bad cover of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man is playing in concert with the deafeningly loud clacking of plastic guitars with 5 differently colored buttons on them. We’re playing the newly released Guitar Hero, and for the moment things are good. That was a joy that so many people got to experience during the plastic instrument trend that loomed long over the entire gaming industry for so many years but would eventually fade, and those instruments would be tucked away, sold off, or thrown in the garbage. But for those of us who managed to find our old plastic guitars, there’s a reason to dust them off and rekindle that old flame, and that reason is Clone Hero.

Clone Hero is a free game that will rip that clacking sound right out of your memories and into 2021, allowing you to bring in charted songs from across all entries of Guitar Hero and Rock Band (although that’s almost certainly not legal), as well as a myriad of community created and mapped out songs for you to get carpal tunnel while playing. Clone Hero has been a wonderful way for me to rekindle my love of the rhythm game genre without a ton of work or effort. It’s basically dominated my week in terms of what I’m playing, doing or even thinking about.

I wrote about how desperately I wanted to revisit these games last year, but couldn’t because trying to buy a plastic instrument at the time (and currently as well) would involve a several hundred dollar investment which no one should be able to justify. But I recently did some spring cleaning and dug up my old Guitar Hero III wireless Les Paul guitar which still worked much to my surprise. After wiping away the decade old layer of dust on it and popping in some new batteries this thing was good to go, and my dream of playing a plastic guitar once again was closer to becoming a reality than ever before. If the actual guitars in my apartment could talk, I’m sure they’d be mighty pissed off about the fact that I’ve opted to play with a plastic facsimile of an instrument over the real thing, but they can’t so it’s all good.

For anyone who has the itch and a plastic guitar on hand, I can’t recommend Clone Hero enough. It’s still in some beta form, so there are some rough edges, but none of them were enough to dissuade me from spending every free moment I had on playing it. What’s really nice is how customizable everything in Clone Hero seems to be. From the backgrounds to the highways, from note effects to accessibility modifiers, you can tune Clone Hero to be whatever you want. For instance, by default the game is set to “No Fail” mode, which as you might imagine prevents you from ever failing a song. That’s good because like an idiot, I decided that because I used to be able to play a lot of songs on expert level over a decade ago, I could probably still do it now without any practice or warm up. Boy my wrist was not a fan of that decision, but I’m in charge of this flesh-vessel I call a body, not my wrist, so expert it is.

But that stance breaks real bad when you start to peruse community made content, because those people are pretty much only making songs that are playable on expert level, and also they hate you. The Clone Hero community doesn’t seem particularly tuned towards people who aren’t willing to permanently damage the ligaments in their wrists and maybe want to play on medium or even easy. No, instead almost all of the songs I saw were designed and charted in an effort to physically hurt you. Most of the custom content I played was filled with walls of notes that I’m going to deem impossible for any normal human, so that’s something to watch out for.

Community driven malice aside, I’m really enjoying my time with Clone Hero and can’t recommend it enough to anyone who wants to hear those clickity-clacks once more. It’s a low-effort way to experience the plastic instrument craze that dominated the gaming industry for nearly a decade, granted you have the hardware to actually make use of it. If you don’t, you could do the dumb thing and buy a plastic guitar for the price of a real one, or in reality you could probably just find one in the deepest darkest corners of your closet like I did. Either way, Clone Hero will do you up right.

Blog: TaleSpire’d – 04/21/21

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After a few years of getting increasingly obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons along with the entire concept of TTRPGs in general, one thing I’ve always wanted was a comprehensive tool or piece of software that could house my campaign in its entirety. Ideally I wanted a video game styled, easy to use virtual tabletop that could do everything from making maps to just playing a session within it. Most of these programs manage to excel at one thing while fumbling other elements of playing a TTRPG, but that won’t deter me from checking out a new one when it comes along. Enter TaleSpire.

TaleSpire was Kickstarter success that claimed to be “a beautiful way to play pen and paper RPGs online,” according to their campaign page, and from what they showed off it seemed like they weren’t just a bunch of talk. Last week TaleSpire finally entered early access on Steam and I eagerly pounced on it, hoping that this would finally be our new TTRPG platform of choice. However, I was quickly reminded of the fact that TaleSpire is in fact an early access product that still needed a lot of time before it would dethrone the other services we use.

TaleSpire has a ton of potential and I do look forward to seeing it evolve over time, but in its current state, it just feels a little too cumbersome for me to reliably run a game for my friends in. There’s a lot of layers and shortcuts that you kind of need to commit to memory in order to use TaleSpire at anything beyond a snail’s pace, but there’s just so much stuff going on and not a lot of tutorialization to help you navigate it all.

For instance, there are a few different modes you can swap between, from exploration mode, to build mode, cut-scene mode and initiative mode, all of which are pretty self-explanatory, but then there are different GM layers you can toggle on and off along with different triggers that can activate different events or hide certain elements of the map from your players. The tutorials give a broad, single paragraph overview of how these things can work, but they don’t do a great job at explaining how to actually make use of them. For instance, I have no clue how to trigger a cut-scene, but I know that it is possible considering there’s an entire mode literally called “cut-scene mode.”

I think that TaleSpire could really benefit from better tutorials that kind of launch you into scenarios so you can actually see how things work together, or at least give some premade maps for people to disassemble and see what gears are turning to accomplish what. As is, all I can really do is bash my head against it until I figure something out, but that could take a while.

I just feel as if I just don’t have enough information to properly understand how to operate TaleSpire as a whole. I suppose I could go out and look at the inevitable deluge of tutorial videos that people have surely made, but it just seems like a thing that should be explained in the software itself. I’m sure that stuff will be added in during development, so I’m not too worried about it at the moment. I really like what TaleSpire is doing and think it has a solid foundation to build off of, but the usability just isn’t there right now. If I as a DM can’t wrap my head around this software, then I can’t properly teach it to my players which would result in very slow and dragging sessions, which nobody wants.

But from just a, “hey this is fucking cool” standpoint, TaleSpire sure is nifty. Building out scenes is rewarding, albeit a bit clunky in places, but even with the modest amount of items currently available, you can make some really striking tableaus. Everything has this tilt-shifted look to it that really delivers on the promise of a true virtual tabletop. One of the stretch goals that was reached during the Kickstarter campaign was the ability to create your own miniatures inside of TaleSpire, which is a feature I’m very much looking forward to getting to tinker with. It’ll also go a long way in getting me to convince my players to migrate over to this new platform that unlike our current solution, isn’t free.

I also have some lingering questions about housing stats and character sheets just in case TaleSpire ever does become our platform of choice. I don’t know if that stuff will be able to be housed within TaleSpire or not, but it really should be because the biggest issue I have with TaleSpire at the moment isn’t actually the lack of information it gives me, but it’s the viability of this as anything more than a map making tool. I have to ask myself what this $25 product is offering my players and I that our current virtual tabletop isn’t providing us at the low price of free? That’s a big hurdle to have to clear, but hopefully as more people touch TaleSpire and give their feedback these things will change.

TaleSpire does have a ton of other cool little bells and whistles in it right now however, like the ability to fully customize the atmosphere of a map by tweaking the position of the sun, pumping up the fog, or even adjusting the exposure on the entire in the entire scene. There’s also a couple of really cool features they’ve promised would be added, such as the previously mentioned miniature customization and cyberpunk themed objects, but first and foremost I think the priority should be getting users educated so they can utilize what’s actually playable now. If I knew what I was doing in TaleSpire, I’d probably more willing to try and pitch other people on it, but until then I don’t think TaleSpire is going to be our new virtual tabletop. But hey, I look forward to changing my tune as it evolves throughout its early access period.