It’s the one year anniversary of the Spotlight! Time really is — something, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like I’ve been running this feature for a year. The Spotlight has really helped make running The Bonus World feel manageable. So happy first birthday, Spotlight.

From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, here’s what I’m shining the Spotlight on for the month of February, 2025.

Path to Menzoberranzan

I’m probably going to mention this every month, but I’ve been working with a team that’s making a huge Baldur’s Gate 3 mod. It’s a whole new campaign set in the city of coin, Athkatla. The project is highly ambitious, boasting all new companions, a new set of worlds to explore, full voice acting and more.

I’ve been lucky enough to be brought on as a writer and have actually completed my first quest for the project, which is super exciting. The whole team is filled with super talented and passionate people who are happily volunteering their time and effort to make this project come to life.

You can follow the development on social media or on YouTube. There’s also a Discord to join if that’s more your thing. Check it out!

Sniper Elite: Resistance

Sniper Elite: Resistance is another one of those games. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel or do anything that you haven’t seen before in the series. It’s just another tried and true entry in a long running series of Nazi-sniping simulators for you and a friend.

Aside from level design, I really don’t think anything has changed since Sniper Elite 5, which is usually a pretty damming thing to say about a sequel or spinoff, but I have never once come to the Sniper Elite series for anything beyond shooting the bad guys. If you’re coming to Sniper Elite: Resistance for innovations in gameplay, you’ll be very disappointed. But if you just want to play a competent stealth-action game with a buddy, then you can’t go wrong with Sniper Elite: Resistance.

Clone Hero & the PDP Riffmaster

When I really think about it, the whole Guitar Hero and Rock Band milieu are responsible for some of my favorite gaming experiences ever. It’s why Clone Hero has become one of my most played games over the past few years, save for 2024 where my treasured Guitar Hero III, Les Paul guitar finally kicked the bucket. Luckily, the PDP Riffmaster was birthed into existence, allowing those of us stuck in the glory days of rhythm gaming a chance at another encore.

I love Clone Hero, this is already known. So what about this fancy new PDP Riffmaster guitar? While it’s nice to have a modern plastic guitar, I’ve found that the PDP Riffmaster is not my preferred type of rhythm game guitar. I feel like there are two main camps of plastic guitars: the Rock Band style ones with the mushy strum bar and buttons flush with the neck, and the Guitar Hero styled ones that have a clicky strum bar, and raised buttons off of the neck. I really like the latter, but the PDP Riffmaster is the former, so there’s an inherent difficulty in adjusting for me.

I often find myself overshooting buttons or mashing more than I need at any given time because there’s no tactile break between them. This issue only compounds on itself when you play harder songs. Also, I can’t tell if it’s me or not, but I swear that sometimes this thing isn’t reading my upward strokes (heh) properly, leading me to miss basic rhythm riffs that I can play on tempo in real life. I shouldn’t be missing as many notes as I am.

It might have something to do with the fact that, despite it saying on the box that it’s for the Xbox and PC, the PDP Riffmaster does not natively connect to the PC. It’s truly wild that I had to download a piece of third-party software just to connect this thing to my computer.

Lastly, while this isn’t a major issue, the PDP Riffmaster is very eager to tell you about how it folds in half for easy storage, which is a great idea on paper. The guitar folds at the neck, which is longer than the body itself, thus creating an impossible to store shaped object you now have to contend with. I can’t sit it up cause it’ll be resting on the headstock and will teeter over. I can’t lay it on its back because now the fret buttons are there. And I can’t lay it on the front because there’s a fucking whammy bar there. It’s easier to store when not folded, which defeats the purpose of it being foldable at all!

I like rhythm games enough to put up with the PDP Riffmaster. It’s not a terrible device, but it just has enough pain points that I don’t think I could recommend it to someone who didn’t already prefer the Rock Band style of guitar. I will continue to use it, complaining about it the whole time.

Update: As of publishing this, Gibson just announced a Les Paul-styled guitar. So that’s unfortunate timing for me.

Balatro

I get it now. I finally get it. Balatro shadow-dropped onto GamePass recently prompting me to give it a fair shake, and I fucking understand now. I don’t gamble, nor do I like card games, be they physical or digital. But man, Balatro has broken through and really made me a believer.

There’s some weird dopamine high that kicks in when you play a simple pair and get a x200 multiplier to your points because you’ve built such behemoth of a deck. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a game appeal to my desire to watch the numbers get bigger quite like Balatro has, save for maybe some idle games. But this? This? This is a fantastic game that is all I want to be playing at any given moment.

Avowed

Avowed is perfectly fine. It’s a very pretty looking game with incredibly fun combat and fun exploration, that’s completely mired by a story I feel like I already know the ending to. Maybe I’m being too harsh. Hell, I know I’m being too harsh. But I just haven’t felt compelled to return to Avowed since I’ve started it, and I really can’t put my finger on why that is.

Like I said, Avowed is excellent by most metrics, but it just hasn’t gotten its claws into me yet. So I think I’ll give it a few more hours and see where I’m at with it then.

The Simpsons

I’m well into the fourteenth season of The Simpsons, and I’m actually quite surprised at how long it took before the cracks actually started to show. In my mind, The Simpsons began their steep decline around season 11, but that isn’t the case. The episodes are a lot more uneven in quality than they were in previous seasons, but it’s still a good watch at this point.

It does feel like a storm is slowly rolling in, however. I know this is going to get rough, but I don’t know if the decline is gradual enough that I won’t realize until it’s too late that I’m in the decline, or if it’ll be painfully obvious. The far-fetched and overly contrived plot lines and frequent celebrity cameos are ramping up in an unwelcome way, but I think what’s really bugging me is Homer Simpson, himself.

Homer isn’t a character. Sure, he likes to drink, works at a power plant, and is generally an ignoramus, but outside of that he really isn’t anything, is he? Homer seems to just take on the worst position in every episode. He’s always the asshole who has to learn the lesson. Sometimes it’s handled well and Homer isn’t too abrasive, but often times he’s just the worst human being in the world. He’s Facebook incarnate, chock-full of the worst takes and opinions you’ll ever see.

If The Simpsons ever starts to redeem itself still remains to be seen, but I’m fairly certain this is going to get worse before it gets better. I’m going to do my best to stick this out. Wish me luck.

News

Nintendo Ditches Vouchers and Gold Points

Noted Asshole, Bobby Kotick, Alleges All Bad Press was Fake

Workers Tell Bobby Kotick to Suck a Fat One

Unity Slashes Jobs via a 5am Email

ESA Screams into the Trump Void About Tariffs

Warner Bros. Closes Monolith & More, Cancels Wonder Woman

Thanks for checking out The Spotlight. In lieu of doing game of the year stuff, we’ll be back at the end of March with another installment. Consider subscribing to The Bonus World so you can get an email updating you whenever we publish something new.

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.

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