The Spotlight is a monthly summary that encapsulates some of the more notable media experiences I’ve had over the past thirty days. From insights on games played, to articles worth checking out, and even cool stories from tabletop role-playing games, it all has a place in the Spotlight.

For the month of June, 2024, here’s what I’m shining the spotlight on.

Games

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip

Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is a weird little game where you step into the sandals of the titular Terry who simply wants to drive a car into space. This is an extremely weird game with humor that you’ll either love or hate, and if the premise of driving a car into space doesn’t do anything for you, then Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip isn’t for you. But if you’re still onboard then you’ll find a delightfully charming little game that’s chock-full of weird characters, ridiculous mini-games, and goofy quests that all result in getting the very valuable upgrade currency that Terry needs to get his car into space.

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends

While the name, Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends is an accurate description of the product, it’s a mouthful of a title that clumsily trips off the tongue. Regardless, in Rolling Hills you play as a little robot that runs a sushi shop in a comically small town. During the day you’ll roam around town and help the inhabitants of the town while also taking time to buy ingredients and furniture to upgrade your recipes and restaurant respectively. At night, you’ll activate your sushi machine and rush different plates of sushi to different tables depending on what each customer wants. In practice it’s just you bringing a pink plate to a person with a pink icon, a green to the person with a green icon, and so on and so forth. It’s very simplistic, isn’t very challenging, and is kind of a slog, but the loop was solid enough that I played the whole thing anyway, so there’s that.

Deliver Us Mars

Deliver Us Mars is an adventure game that tells a familiar story of humanity mucking up the Earth so bad that instead of fixing their problems they’d rather go get a fresh start on the ever-so-welcoming planet Mars. There’s more to it than that, but effectively the world government constructed three massive colony space ships called Arks that would transport folks to Mars and become hubs for colonizing the red planet.

In the story, your dad is this incredible scientist who more or less can save Earth with his impressive brain, but lost faith in the world governments and their ability to actually get something done. So depleted is his faith in humanity that he tried to smuggle you (his youngest daughter Kathy) onto one of the Arks and bail on Earth all together, but only he manages to make it onto the Ark. Years later, the government is running one last mission to recover the Arks, which happens to be headed up by Kathy’s sister, Claire, because there’s a chance the Arks could help save the environment of Earth.

What follows next is the story of the crew’s approach to Mars, exploration of the Arks, and the uncovering of the fate of the colonists who managed to escape Earth. While the story itself isn’t breaking new ground, it’s so wonderfully written and performed that I was captivated throughout my 8 hours of playtime.

The problem with Deliver Us Mars is that it isn’t a very good game. From mechanical issues like finicky controls, texture pop-in, and choppy frame rates, to core issues with its design like uninspired puzzles and bad graphics, Deliver Us Mars is kind of a slog to play and look at. Character models and animations are absolutely terrible, with several characters having hair and beards that clip through their skulls and hover off their scalps. It’s so unfortunately janky from top to bottom, which should really exemplify just how good the acting and writing are that I still marathoned the game. It’s just a shame that the graphical fidelity of this game actively undermines its brilliant acting performances.

Deliver Us Mars isn’t a good game, but it manages to tell an exceptionally engaging and effective story that is buoyed by the strength of its actors. I sincerely hope its upcoming sequel, Deliver Us Home sands down a lot of the rough edges because there’s something special about this series that could really flourish with some extra polish.

Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition

Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is a fine remaster of a very good game that doesn’t deserve the notoriety that’s been foisted upon it, due exclusively to the unknown status of its eventual sequel. It’s also a misnomer because the original game launched in 2003, so this would technically be the 21st anniversary, but I won’t kibbutz about it.

For the uninitiated, Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is a very good game that follows in the footsteps of games like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. It’s a third-person adventure game that sees you trekking around the world and completing various dungeons all in service of a plot that weirdly revolves around a government launching false-flag attacks on its people to tighten their control over the populous. Armed with a bow-staff and a camera, you’re out there bonking enemies to death, taking incriminating photos, and doing a weirdly high amount of sneaking around.

It’s a fun game that despite being remastered didn’t age super well. The combat is bad and the camera is miserable, retaining all the charm I remember from 3D adventure and platform games of the era. Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is probably less of a celebration of this very good game of yesteryear, and more of a way to gauge continued interest for Beyond Good & Evil 2, and if it’s worth continuing developing. That’s complete speculation obviously, but that’s my theory nonetheless. Regardless, Beyond Good & Evil – 20th Anniversary Edition is fairly priced at twenty bucks and a good way to play this classic game.

Watch List

The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel

This one required several viewing sessions, but getting such a detailed, first-hand account of a Disney World blunder is something I will always make time for. The blunder in question is the ill-fated Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser themed hotel, a promising concept with terrible, terrible execution. I had never heard of Jenny Nicholson up until this point, but if all of her content is as well-prepared, structured, and engaging as this video was, then I’ve got a lot in the queue.

Adventure Time

I had always heard people herald Adventure Time as an incredibly well-made and emotionally resonate show, but never really understood what they meant considering the first few seasons mostly adhere to fantastical fart jokes and rarely anything else. That’s not a bad thing on its face, but it was diametrically opposed to what I had heard about the show for so many years. Ready to uncover the truth for ourselves, my partner and I took the plunge and marathoned all 10 seasons of the show.

Ultimately, both views of Adventure Time are valid. The first few seasons occasionally peppered in impactful and lore-heavy episodes, but they were few and far between. It wasn’t until the end of the series that we’d get these multi-part episodes that expanded on the lore or just revealed an uncomfortable truth about the world. Eventually Adventure Time evolved into a show that we were so emotionally invested in. I really appreciated the stories it told and characters it developed while never sacrificing its sense of humor or whimsy. It’s a long series, but I’d gladly watch it all again.

Listening Party

Old Wives Tale – Young English

Arizona – Carter Vail

Call From You – Anxious

The Rest

The Best of the Summer Game Fest

Summer Game Fest was easily the biggest thing that happened this month, so I went ahead and wrote up a little list of some of the stuff that seemed interesting to me.

News

Since most of the news from this month comes from the Summer Game Fest, these headlines are very specifically not related to that event.

The Bonus World

Tag Archives: Rolling Hills: Make Sushi

The Spotlight – 05