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Blog: Later Alligator – 09/25/19

This past week, I had the absolute pleasure of playing a game about a paranoid alligator who was convinced that his family was plotting to kill him. If that sentence hasn’t scared you off, then allow me to introduce you to Later Alligator, one of the most charming games I’ve played this year.

In Later Alligator you play as an unnamed alligator in a suit who has been tasked with helping a paranoid alligator named Pat, figure out what his family is planning to do to him at an event they have planned for the night. Through talking with him and his family members, along with playing a bespoke mini-game for each of them, you start to piece together the not-so-mysterious, mystery.

You’re never deducing anything in Later Alligator, instead you’re playing these little mini-games that if you’re successful in, will get the family member in question to spill a detail about the event planned for the night. The mini-games range from playing a claw game, to protecting a sleeping baby from getting possessed by ghosts, to the bane of my existence: slide puzzles. The mini-games themselves are scattershot in terms of quality, but they’re usually charming and easy enough for it to never really be a problem.

Where this point-and-click adventure really shines however, is through its characters. Every gator you meet with is some relative of Pat’s, all with a piece of the puzzle as to what his fate for the evening will be. One of my personal favorites is Pat’s father, Two Tone Tony, who is mid-existential crisis and desperately trying to cover it up with bad jokes and a badass new grill that he doesn’t quite know how to work.

Aside from one or two mini-games, there weren’t any real times I felt challenged or like I had to solve anything. Later Alligator kind of holds your hand the whole way through, allowing you to focus more on the wonderful characters, as opposed to offering up a mechanically challenging experience. The only thing you really need to manage is time. You start at 10 in the morning and have until 8pm to do as much investigating as possible before the event itself is underway. The time crunch really kicks in when you fail a mini-game because each retry will cost you 15 in-game minutes that can really add up.

Later Alligator is the kind of game that I really enjoy, but know that it’s a hard sell to make for most people. It only took me about two hours to beat, but if you want to grab all the collectibles and play all the mini-games, it could probably be double that. But I had a very good time exploring the world, meeting its inhabitants and admiring the gorgeous art and animation. So if you’re in the mood for a lighthearted and chill adventure game that wont take up too much of your time and has a great aesthetic, look no further than Later Alligator.

Blog: Apple Arcade – 09/18/19

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Apple Arcade is only a few days away from being released to the public alongside iOS13, but for those of us in the beta branch of iOS, the service became available to play around with earlier this week. So I did what any reasonable person would do, and downloaded a smattering of games, deleted a bunch of stuff from my phone when I learned I quickly ran out of hard drive space, and played a couple of titles.

But alongside just downloading the games, I took advantage of the new feature to pair a Bluetooth controller to my phone, and tried these games out with my PS4 controller. Here’s just a bit of the bangers I tried out.

SAYONARA WILD HEARTS

I’ll begin with one of the most aesthetically pleasing games I got to try out, because I’m apparently naturally drawn to pastels and neon. Sayanora Wild Hearts is a game about… something. I think someone’s heart was broken so hard that the universe was impacted by it, and the only way to fix everything is to surf through Tron or something. But the important thing is that you control a lady who cosmically skateboards through space collecting coins and hearts while pulling off some sweet ballet kick-flips in the process.

It’s more exciting than it sounds, I swear. I only played about 3 levels to start with, but I don’t think it’s a rhythm game as much as it is a game with a rad look and killer soundtrack that you just kind of experience. I might be too early into it to understand the actual mechanics of the game, primarily if there’s a win or lose state to the game, or if you truly are just letting it all wash over you.

Whatever the case may be, I’m certainly going to try out more of Sayanora Wild Hearts when I get the chance. It’s made a great first impression, and I’m exceedingly curious about where the gameplay goes from here.

OCEANHORN 2Oceanhorn 2 follows in the footsteps of Oceanhorn in that it too is doing its best Zelda game impression. While the first game was an ode to the top-down Zelda games, this one is a 3D action game, much like Ocarina of Time or Windwaker. But despite wearing its inspiration on its sleeve, Oceanhorn 2 seems like a genuinely competent version of what it pulls from.

You’ve got your dungeons, your annoying mob enemies that shouldn’t be as much of a threat as they are, you’ve got a sword, a shield and plenty of puzzles involving you putting a thing on a pressure plate.

Oceanhorn 2 however, is the only game where I dealt with some weird input issues while using my controller. The camera would occasionally start to swirl, my character would start sprinting without me telling them to, and sometimes they’d just swing their sword at what I assume is a ghost I couldn’t see.

But despite those minor quibbles, my main issue is that I don’t think I’d want to play this on a cellphone. I kept looking over at my Switch, wishing I could play it there, or cast it to my TV or something. The game itself seems great, but not suited for cellphone gaming.

WHAT THE GOLF?

You know what’s a weird thing about me? I like golf games. Seriously, I think they can be a lot of fun and calming in the right scenario. Sometimes you want that slow paced, methodical experience, and I think a good golf game can deliver that

What the Golf? is absolutely is not that game. It’s way better. The first level has you do the standard, “hit ball into hole” thing, except they just want you to hit the flag to complete a level. Then level two comes in and suddenly you’re just hurling the golf club at the flag. This kind of keeps going until I found myself launching couches, cats and even houses at the hole. Sometimes I was one ball, sometimes I was 50.

What the Golf? is this absurdist take on golf which easily was the highlight of Apple Arcade for me thus far. I would buy this game outright if Apple Arcade didn’t already have me covered on that front.

GRINDSTONE

Grindstone is a puzzle game where you’re tasked with climbing a mountain, using tons of little critters as your stepping stones. By which I mean you’re killing a bunch of little creatures to fulfill your murder quota while collecting scraps and currency you can use to craft better items and abilities.

I went into Grindstone thinking it would be a nifty looking, “match 3” game like Bejeweled, but instead you’re chaining as many same colored enemies together, allowing you to blaze a path through them. You need to find the most effective route to clear out the most of these little guys as you can. But soon you learn that by collecting a titular grindstone, you get to change the color of the enemy you can kill in that turn.

Some enemies will attack you if you stop in their radius, or some obstacles require you to build up a chain of enemies before you can clear through them. There’s a lot going on here, and I can easily see this game getting super challenging in the later levels when you need to manage several mechanics at once. But as it is, I’m really enjoying it.

SKATE CITY

Skate City is exactly what you might think it is from the title. It’s a 2D skateboarding game that boast chill vibes, and smooth tunes while letting you effortlessly pull of various flips, spins and grinds.

Tricks are controlled using either the analog sticks or virtual analog sticks on the screen. For this game, I decided to see how viable it was without a controller. Turns out, you’re really gonna want one for this game. The touch controls aren’t awful, but having to juggle between mushing your thumb on different parts of the screen to accelerate, spin and do a trick make it a little clunky.

But if you’ve got the controller and want just a chill-ass skate session, Skate City is probably one of the best skateboarding games I’ve played on my phone, which admittedly isn’t saying much. It’s good, trust me.

So those are more or less, the first games I managed to spend any real time with. I’ve got to say though, Apple Arcade as a product is actually really winning me over. I haven’t really come across any games that have actively repelled me away. There are some genres of game on the service that I know aren’t for me, but all of the games themselves look pretty polished from my quick glance of what was available.

Although in classic App Store fashion, discoverability among this subset of iOS games is still kind of a hassle. There aren’t any genre categories to browse or even a straight alphabetical list to peruse, which kind of seems to defeat the whole point of Apple Arcade in the first place.

My limited impression of Apple Arcade is based on the handful of games I got to play, but so fa I find myself more drawn to the games that aren’t trying to provide a “console” experience. I like a certain kind of game on my phone, and playing something like Oceanhorn 2 on an iPhone screen just doesn’t seem like anything I want to do.

Apple Arcade launches on Friday, September 20th for iOS for $4.99 a month and later this year on iPad. There was a free one month trial I took advantage of that should be available when the service launches.

Blog: NBA 2K20 is a Bummer – 09/11/19

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I’ve always been a fan of the NBA 2K games since I first played NBA 2K back on the Dreamcast. The promise of a realistic simulation of the only sport I really care about was obviously alluring, and the in more recent years, the video game itself was the catalyst for me following its real life counterpart again. That’s why it’s such a shame that this latest entry in the series is so underwhelming and broken that it’s hard for me to want to play more of it until the inevitable patches hit.

I know not a lot of my readers have a big familiarity with the NBA 2K games, so I’ll do my best to summarize some of the core systems in place. Like most sports games these days, you can choose between a variety of modes from creating a player and taking them through their career, to playing as a general manager of a team, to whatever their card collecting mode that I never touch is about. Normally I stick to the franchise mode, where you pick a team or teams, and just run them through the years managing trades and contracts, along with playing the games too.

This year I decided to try out the career mode, which tasked me with creating a virtual version of myself and taking him through climbing the ranks as a college player with the hopes of getting drafted in the NBA. The story itself is all over the place, having your player decide to look Idris Elba (no, really) in the eyes and say that he isn’t going to play in the championship game, because a player I’ve never met on my team got injured and lost their scholarship. By the time I ended the pre-NBA story mode, I was a first round draft pick that got selected by the New York Knicks.

Now here’s where the game part gets in the way. NBA 2K launched in a hilariously broken state with players reporting a wide variety of glitches and bugs ranging from funny, to game breaking. Some people noticed their player names weren’t showing up on their NBA jerseys, animation glitches that allowed their opponents to just break the rules of basketball to suit their needs, and a whole lot of server issues that led to lost progress.

That last one is made all the worse when you take into account the VC, or virtual currency that runs the game. VC is money that you either earn in game or pay for with real money that allows you to upgrade your stats and buy clothes and shoes for your character. To spend any of this VC, the game pings the 2K servers and authorizes the transaction to make sure you haven’t done anything unsavory. What that meant for players though, was that loading screens, purchasing, and earning, were all reliant on the servers holding up. They did not. That meant a lot of people weren’t getting any money for their games, or losing cash because the servers messed up the transaction. It was a real bummer.

2K has since patched the game to fix some of these loading issues, but while not as egregious as it was at launch, some of these problems still persist. I’ve also encountered a new one that makes playing the game, all the more laborious. As a player, you’ll need to attend practice and complete drills to upgrade your players badges. Badges are like perks that help you do things that aren’t explicitly stat related, or boost you over what your stats dictate. A badge can enable you to see where a rebound where land when a missed shot is put up, or make driving the lane easier for you. In these drills, you gain a 1 to 3 star rating depending on how good you’ve done. But with a new glitch in the progression system, getting a 3 star rating just subtracts your score from your total progression, so the better you do, the more experience you lose. It’s made progressing normally impossible, to the point where I don’t even want to touch the mode until they fix it.

On top of all that, there’s just the abundance of things trying to get you to spend money in the game. We’ve all seen the slot machines and “gambling” hooks that 2K themselves showed off in a promotional pre-release video, but there’s just stuff everywhere in the career mode encouraging you to spend real money. Not to mention your player is so easily outmatched by everyone in the NBA that you’ll basically be demoralized into paying for VC to boost your stats.

It’s all such a shame because the actual game part of NBA 2K20 is fun. Sure it’s got some weird animation glitches that pop up once in a while, but otherwise the act of playing basketball is still fun. My main issues with NBA 2K20 are that the modes I mostly play, the franchise mode, has not been touched in any meaningful way since last year, and all the gross micro-transaction stuff that is always in the series. I’m sure I’ll end up putting in another few hundred hours into the game like I always do, but man, I wish they’d shake up the formula a little bit.

Blog: Games, Again! – 09/04/19

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Every year we wait for that time at the end of August when John Madden bestows his latest sports simulation upon us, marking the beginning of video game season. This year the harvest has been bountiful and immediate. What I’m saying is that a lot of games came out recently and I’d like to talk about what I’ve been playing.

CONTROL

Holy shit Control, holy shit. I’ve been very lukewarm on past Remedy offerings like Alan Wake and Quantum Break, but Control seems like the culmination of everything they’ve learned from producing those games. Control takes place inside of a secret federal building that specializes in messing with forces they don’t understand. Surprise, surprise, things go sideways and it’s up to you to fix it all, I think. I haven’t finished it yet, so things are bound to change.

There are so many things I love about Control already. The Federal Bureau of Control, otherwise known as The Oldest House, otherwise known as the place where the game takes place in, is a constantly shifting office building with plenty of HR posters, memos about book clubs, and training videos in it to make the whole place feel grounded despite the fact that inter-dimensional creatures are hijacking the bodies of the employees and trying to gun you down. The whole place is just so interesting to wander around in and explore.

The combat is no slouch either. You have a gun that can change forms on the fly into either a pistol, a shotgun, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen assault rifles and more referenced in some collectibles. On top of the cool gun though, you very quickly get the power to use telekinesis to hurl just about everything that isn’t nailed to the ground at your opponents.

I could go on for a long time about Control, but I’ll save that for a different article. The last thing I’ll say about it is that while I love the story, combat, tone and world building that’s going on, things like performance and load times are certainly areas that could be improved. Having to deal with minute long load times whenever you take the elevator or happen to fall in a bottomless pit (standard office building stuff) it’s made all the worse by the painfully slow loading bar.

REMNANT: FROM THE ASHES

Let’s be incredibly reductive here for a moment and say that Remnant: From the Ashes is basically an easier to understand and play Dark Souls game with an emphasis on guns and multiplayer. But make no mistake, this game is brutal if you’re playing it solo. That’s why I initially bounced off of it for a bit until a friend picked up the game as well. Now I can easily see why people are speaking so highly of Remnant: From the Ashes, because quite frankly, it’s good.

Like I mentioned before, Remnant: From the Ashes really wants you to play alongside a friend or preferably two. A lot of the bosses and other enemies use the simple tactic of running at you in an attempt to outnumber you, and it works when you’re alone. But with a friend, we were basically the SWAT team if they had to fight horrible nightmare creatures that look like sick trees.

There’s a lot going on in Remnant: From the Ashes, from level randomization to upgrading and crafting equipment, to the general strangeness of the world itself. I’m only a few hours in, but I’m looking forward to continuing my adventurers. I’ll just be sure to grab a buddy before I do.

KNIGHTS AND BIKES

Knights and Bikes is mostly an adventure game with a lot of mediocre combat and slight puzzle-solving sprinkled on top of it. You play as one of two girls on a small island that I think is in the general area of England based on the liberal usage of the letter “U” in their words. It also is about an ancient curse that only they can stop because none of the adults on the island actually believes in it.

The game is a cooperative focused affair with the option of playing solo where you’ll have to switch on the fly between the girls to harness their unique abilities. At the point I’m at in the game, so far one girl has the ability to throw a Frisbee to attack at range, and the other has a ground pound. I’ve heard there are more abilities that get unlocked as you make your way through the game.

I’m not too far in but I can safely say that it’s charming as hell. The characters are fun and interesting so far, and the presentation is delightful, even if some of the graphical elements occasionally get in the way of your basic movement.

At the point I’m at in Knights and Bikes, the two girls have arrived at the city on the island where I’m sure things will start to kick off in a major way. While I am interested to see where the game goes, I don’t know when I’ll get back to it. The previously mentioned two games have kind of consumed all of my free gaming time, and Knights and Bikes just didn’t hook me in hard enough to make me want to rush back to it.

But here’s the thing, there’s a goose that follows you around named Captain Honkers who I love more than anything. So I’ll go back to Knights and Bikes just to kick it with Cappy Honk-Honk.

I’m actually a little overwhelmed with how many games have just hit in such a short period of time, and it doesn’t show much sign of slowing down anytime soon. That being said, it’s a good time to play games, and a less good time to be broke.

Blog: You Can’t Go Home Again – 08/28/19

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It would be generous to say that I have any experience with World of Warcraft considering I’ve only played it for about a week almost a decade ago. But while the fervor around the 15 year-old game has waned in popularity from time to time, it hasn’t stopped people from losing their minds over the release of World of Warcraft Classic.

From the time when WoW Classic was announced to its recent release, I’ve gone through varying degrees of confusion about the desire people have to jump back into a game from 2004, with all of its quirks and hiccups intact. But now, days after it’s dropped, I think I get it.

Like I said, I have basically no experience with WoW Classic nor any desire to get in there and see what all the fuss is about. I just figure that considering most of my friends have fallen prey to its wiles, I should at least pay some attention to the arc of this whole experience and try to get some insight into people’s excitement.

I asked some of my friends if they were genuinely excited to play WoW Classic as a game, or if they were actually just trying to chase those feelings and memories associated with it. Most of them agreed that the latter was the primary driving force for them, which is evidenced by the fact that suddenly, people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade started popping up and coming together to plan out their game nights. It’s kind of incredible when you think about it. It’s really the only game I can think of that has the cultural cache to become the equivalent of a high school reunion.

I was in high school when World of Warcraft burst onto the scene, taking the world by storm. At the time, the only MMO I was playing was Star Wars Galaxies, and that was purely motivated by my love of the movies along with a dash of peer pressure. I enjoyed playing it with those people at that moment in time, but if it was suddenly announced that Star Wars Galaxies was getting a faithful re-release that encapsulated everything about the game at that time, I don’t think I would care that much.

I know that’s just me though, as evidenced by the mass of players bombarding the WoW Classic servers. I’m not writing this with the intention of raining on the parade of anybody who is having a great time with the game. Chase your bliss. But for me, the way I felt when I played games with other people back then, are relegated to pleasant memories now. Sure I miss the carefree days where I could play games online with my friends till 3 in the morning, but those days are gone, and that’s okay. I did that when I had the time to do it, and I don’t regret it.

If you’re playing WoW Classic, I hope you’re enjoying it. It has to be this time capsule of a game that evokes so many memories, and that’s wonderful. A similar situation is soon to crop up with me and the Halo games when they start getting released on PC sometime this year. Yeah, it’s going to be fun to dive back into those games and play them again, but I know I’m not going to stick with them the way I did when they initially released. I must have over a thousand hours in Halo 2 alone, but when it drops on PC, I know I’m never going to come close to even a tenth of that.

My point is that these games are like looking through a photo album or something. You get that burst of positivity and warmth while the memories flood back in, and then you turn the page and keep going. I’m glad that Blizzard released WoW Classic, allowing so many people to come and visit Azeroth in just the way they remember it, but it’s never going to feel the same as the first time you had to kill 100 boars in hopes of getting 10 tusks.

Blog: Actual Human Physics – 08/21/19

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On numerous occasions I’ve mentioned my particular fondness for physics-based wackiness, but looking through the history of this site I don’t think I’ve actually talked about one of my favorite examples of that. If you haven’t heard of it, allow me to put Human Fall Flat on your radar, because it’s damn good fun.

Human Fall Flat isn’t a new game. It was released a little over 3 years ago on PC, but eventually made its way to just about every platform out there. In Human Fall Flat, you play as a little blob person who must traverse through various levels filled with puzzles and platforming challenges. At face value it doesn’t sound particularly exciting, but it’s the wild physics that you’ll be battling that makes things interesting.

Puzzles usually require you figuring out how to hit a switch, breaking through a wall, piloting a vehicle or just maneuvering through tricky terrain. All of this is made more exciting as you’re trying to reign in the wily physics or preferably, exploiting them to break the level and circumvent the obstacle entirely.

It’s a goofy experience that only gets better when you get your friends in on the chaos. The game supports 2 players locally (on PC at least) and up to 8 players via online play. I’ve played through this game both single player and with another person, and I cannot fathom what kind of shit show it turns into with 8 people.

And “shit show” might actually be the most accurate descriptor of Human Fall Flat because of just how bonkers things can get. You might find yourself flying through the air, or flipping a vehicle with your bare hands or something because the physics went bonkers. But that’s what I love about the game. I can solve the puzzles and traverse the obstacles as intended in a pretty quick fashion, but it’s when you decide to go off the beaten path that Human Fall Flat really shines. It really is a case of, “if you think you can do it, you probably can.”

The problem is that there’s only a handful of official levels in the game at the moment that offer limited replay value. Creating a level filled with puzzles and branching paths can’t be easy, so this isn’t me complaining as much as it is me yearning for more stuff to fool around with. Luckily there’s Steam Workshop support which has enabled people to create their own nightmarish levels for me to bang my head against. I think I’ve downloaded about 20 levels at this point, and have only been able to conquer about half of them, which is fine because it’s more game for to play and I wont grouse about that. But here’s a tip for you custom level makers out there: put some fucking checkpoints in your levels.

The unfortunate truth is that Human Fall Flat is one of those games that when you see it, it’ll either click with you or not. While writing this, it was announced that a new level was coming to the game come August 27th, so that’s something to look forward to. I can’t properly express my love for this game without showing it off to people or letting them get their hands on it, but if you get the opportunity to try it, please do.

Blog: Everyone Needs to Calm Down – 08/14/19

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Late last year the Epic Games Launcher was released to much cynicism and side eyeing from the gaming audience, myself included. I won’t lie, I was very skeptical of the product and in some regards I still am, but I’m ultimately glad to see that there’s some real competition in the PC games marketplace for once. My issues with the Epic Games Launcher are mostly directed towards the very limited feature set which to be fair, they’re working on, but most of the anger and vitriol amidst the discourse revolves around how “aggressive” Epic appears when lining up exclusives.

A few months ago, Metro Exodus was gearing up for its PC release on Steam. It had been available for pre-order on Steam for quite a while and people were eager to play it. Weeks before it launched however, it was announced that the game would be a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. The Steam pre-orders would be honored and activated on release day, but people were not happy with the abrupt jump to this new platform. I’m guessing that was the start of everyone getting angry with the platform in general. Even I thought it was a questionable move, but I also had no intention to play Metro Exodus, so I moved on.

Since then, Epic has been courting developers of all sizes, encouraging them to release on their platform and enjoy a healthier cut of profits from sales. There should be no question that developers should get paid for the work they put into making these games, and if there’s a platform out there that better facilitates that, then it’s an easy decision to make.

But the internet is still a nightmare emporium where people will take any reason to raise their pitchforks and try to ruin the lives of others. That’s where Ooblets comes in. Ooblets is a game that appears to be mixing the elements of Animal Crossing and Pokemon together into one colorfully charming experience. Unfortunately, this post isn’t about how excited I am to check the game out (which I am), instead it’s about how on July 31st the studio behind the game announced that they were signing a deal with the Epic Games Store for a few reasons, income being the primary motivator. Let’s be clear, an indie studio doing what they have to in order to get paid more for there work is not something we should be grousing about. Developers need money to survive, and if the Epic Games Store is offering them a bigger cut alongside of a signing bonus, they should take that opportunity.

I bet you can guess what happened next. See, the team behind Ooblets put out a pretty hilarious and snarky blog post outlining the decision, while also making fun of how much people on the internet lose their minds when they hear about Epic grabbing another exclusive. I thought it was pretty hilarious but the internet did not. The internet found it so unfunny in fact, that they responded in some pretty shitty ways including racial slurs and death threats. You know, completely rational responses to a video game going to another store.

WARNING: If you want to see some of the garbage people have said, it’s here, but there’s some really horrific stuff in there, so click at your own risk.

So here we are in the aftermath of all of this, left with yet another tragic example of targeted hate campaigns over the stupidest and most inconsequential shit. The amount of hatred and anger over this move should seem unbelievable, but unfortunately the internet continues to remain a smoldering crater full of mutants with keyboards. I don’t have the solution to this problem, I can only encourage people to spare a thought for the people behind the product. It isn’t worth getting so wound up over a game that you verbally assault someone or threaten them. Nothing should prompt you to be that kind of person, especially not a video game.

It’s a shame that the developers and their insanely charming game have to be associated with this nonsense and I hope the developers are able to rise above the noise and push on. I’ve been interested in Ooblets for quite a while now and fully intended on playing it, regardless of what storefront it eventually wound up on.

Maybe it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around how to install a new launcher. Maybe they don’t like having two whole icons on their desktop for game related things. Those excuses are bullshit. None of it is worth threatening people. Get the fuck over yourselves.

Blog: A Hike I Like – 08/07/19

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Last week, a delightful little game was released on Steam called A Short Hike. It’s about your character, an anthropomorphic bird lady, who decided to get away from it all and head out to the mountains with her aunt. Your goal is simple: make your way to the top of the tallest mountain so you can get cellphone reception. At first blush it seems pretty absurd, but very quickly you find that you’re expecting an extremely important phone call from a family member.

So you head off through the woods to find a way up to the peak of the mountain. Naturally, it wouldn’t be as simple as just going there. You lack the physical capabilities to properly scale said mountain when you start out. Soon after that realization, you encounter a mechanic that quite simply put, is a stamina meter. You need to collect these golden feathers that expand your capacity for physical activity. Whether it be climbing, running or flying, the feathers are the key to your success.

In total, you’ll need about 7 or 8 feathers to make the journey up. The way you get more of them is through completing side quests through the quirky side characters that pop up along the way, buying them, or just straight up finding them in the wild. It’s all pretty straightforward in terms of gameplay mechanics.

The characters are written well enough, with some genuinely chuckle-worthy moments sprinkled throughout their dialogue, but there isn’t any real characterization going on here. By the time I got to the climax of the game, I didn’t find myself too attached to the main character and her quest to really feel the weight of it.

While the story is a little bit of a bummer, A Short Hike has a style to it that I personally really enjoyed, but I could imagine some people would hate. Everything is overly pixelated, almost to the point of being completely overtaken by a mosaic effect. It’s like someone took a GameBoy Advance game and blew it up to a modern resolution. While that may sound odd, when it’s paired with the wonderful art direction and color palette the game boasts, it comes together pretty well.

A Short Hike isn’t just a clever name though. It’s a very short game, taking me only about an hour to beat. I did a few side quests and explored a bunch before I decided to make my way to the peak of the mountain to see where the story went. Once I got the scene up there and made my way back to the starting area, I accidentally triggered an event that resulted in the game ending and credits rolling. The game didn’t make it terribly clear that this was going to happen, but it is what it is.

I enjoyed A Short Hike for what it was, even if there wasn’t much there. It’s a calming and pleasant game that’s decent way to kill an hour or two. It’s out on Steam now for $7.99.

Blog: Junk Food Games – 07/31/19

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I found myself with a ton of free time this past weekend which enabled me to take a shallow dive into my ever expanding backlog. There were plenty of games from me to pick from, but I decided to make good on a goof I made over a year ago. I’m of course referring to the smash-hit, mega viral video sensation that took the world by storm; my video about the time I rented Uncharted: The Lost Legacy from a Redbox, and it didn’t work.

While I think the video was worth the $3 rental fee I paid, I actually did want to play the game. Now we’re here in 2019, over a year from that hilarious video, and almost 2 years from the release of the game itself, and I finally found some time to blast through it.

I really enjoy the Uncharted games, not because they’re such a joy to control or anything, but because they’re just fun blockbuster movies I get to play through. The over-the-top action, pseudo-historical, Indiana Jones-esque series has always been a consistently fun experience, and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is no exception. In fact, it might just be the best in the series.

I could go into detail about what makes this entry so good, but that isn’t what this post is about. What I really want to talk about is how I put the Uncharted games into the same category I would a Marvel movie. They’re these high-intensity, big and expensive adventures that get me psyched out of my mind. Sometimes they leave a longer impact, (Endgame, never forget) but most of the time it’s just this exciting thing I get to be a part of for a few hours.

I won’t remember the details about Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in a few months, but I will remember how much fun I had with it. So it got me thinking about some other “junk food” games I turn to when I want to turn my mind off. In all fairness I think I’ve covered that pretty well on this site, turning to various “simulator” games, the NBA 2K series, and Cities Skylines, to name a few, but I’m always looking for a game that allows me to just turn my brain off for a while and just go for a cool ride.

Sometimes you want a game you can lose yourself in for 20 to 30 hours, fully immersing yourself in the world and what you’re doing. Then sometimes you just want to play a game where you’re firing rockets up at attacking helicopters while you’re riding on the roof of a train. Turns out, I’m looking for more of the latter these days.

Blog: Time to Unwind – 07/24/19

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Since a few days ago when I posted my piece on the first few hours with Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, I can’t say that I’ve played much else. That isn’t because I’m so head over heels for the game, rather, I just haven’t played anything that’s really revved my engine as of late.

I feel like I write something like this every few months, where I can’t find something to hook me in and keep me occupied. Ultimate Alliance 3 has been more or less, my go to game as of late, but even with that game I can feel myself losing a little steam with. It isn’t a bad thing though. In fact, it’s given me a lot more time to focus on some of my other hobbies.

I’ve been really diving headfirst into writing, specifically working on making my Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’ve been running for a while, really fleshed out and fully formed. From designing quests, to fully realizing the NPCs and settings, all the way to making maps, I’ve been very creatively fulfilled by this in a way I haven’t been in a long time.

This is basically what I’ve been up to

Outside of that, I’m playing music again. Not in any real serious capacity, but I’ve started composing some tracks and recording them with the little equipment I have. I’ve been listening to some D&D podcasts where they create music to help heighten the tension or portray the right mood, and while I’m not looking to integrate my music into my campaign, I think it’s a fun challenge to give myself a tone and try to make a song that represents that.

But yeah, not really doing much in the way of gaming lately. It feels like I’m in this summer lull where most of the games coming out just aren’t resonating with me in any meaningful way. I’m still working through Ultimate Alliance 3 and occasionally plucking away at Super Mario Maker 2, but that’s about it for the time being.