Really, me and my SO dropped this several months back, but that's neither here nor there. Just reminded to talk about my thoughts on this, Uhm,

I appreciate the spirit of this moreso than the end nature of it. My partner and I had a blast playing it, and the whole Honey I Shrunk the Kids aesthetic is perfect. I loved all the little minigames, the cutesy charm, all the cooperative puzzles. It's a return to this form of gameplay style from what feels like very yesteryear. If any lesson is learned from this game's acclaim, it's that there should absolutely be more of this.

I just wish the end result here was something I could champion. We ended up dropping it largely from its surrounding noxious energy. The main conceit of this couple being entrapped together fantastically to just reignite their fire for, largely implied, the kids' sake, just made us lose all of the vibes at once. Every attempt to reopen the game was spent on trying to ignore that, but it didn't really go very far. We got about a couple hours in before it became too much to tolerate, especially since the absolutely brutal incompatibilities regarding one of the two just reminded one of us of our ex. It feels like a useless story to me? It's definitely not coming from a bad state of mind, and like, it's genuine, it's earnest! But it feels almost shaming to partners who aren't working out together. All for more people going to couples therapy to see if their issues truly aren't fixable but I don't like this general idea at all, it's so "makes up a couple". Couldn't help but doctor out a story in my head that starts with this same idea but ends up taking it in a direction that commentates that maybe at the end of it some things aren't fixable and requires splitting, a far more realistic notion to takeaway that finishes off with a note that has them separating after all, with a bittersweet understanding of what they've learned from their incompatibility, rather than some, to be blunt, sickening notion of THINK OF THE KID!! GOTTA FORCE YOUR TOTAL SPARK OF LOVE (that for most people in this situation, won't be there anymore) BY MAKING UP COOP STYLE.

Honestly it's worse than the writing. We laughed together at a couple jokes, my partner found the two much much more obnoxious from sentence to sentence than me, but I'm used to it. The smarmy totally shouty couple vibe isn't like a complete mismatch for what everything here is going for. That's the most charitable I'll get with it though haha.

I'll say it takes two is good when we get the much more ambitious polycule sequel it takes three.

Do people who complain about "lack of directions" have a right to breathable air? And how does such a staggering concentration of stupidity not cause their brain to collapse into itself? The universe is truly full of mysteries.

Anyway. I could complain about how the disconnect between the grand scale of the story and the toy model scale of the solar system and its planets never stops being a bit jarring, constantly reminding you that you're "just" playing a game; or about how you can only really play it once, since completion almost necessarily implies solving all of its mysteries; but these aren't really issues, these are necessities of its design, every detail in the game being so meticulously crafted, everything being at the same time so completely open-ended yet with each new path being discovered at a pace so smooth that it's only after you've finished it that you can fully appreciate the effort that went into setting up how the game reveals itself. Will inevitably be lumped into some generic, grossly inadequate "puzzle" category because of how it requires mental effort over reflexes or dexterity, but there aren't any real puzzles in it - there are problems to be solved. How do I reach that place? How do I get past this obstacle? The answers aren't in some arbitrary minigame that creates a bridge from point A to point B for you to walk through, point B was always available from the start and you just needed the correct pieces of knowledge to figure that out - and as you make progress you start to notice just how far from each other these points can be, and yet how within reach they are, and that's the beauty of it. The universe is truly full of mysteries.

marisa gaming

100th Black Market (Touhou 18.5) is a new official touhou spinoff danmaku shooter where the player challenges a selection of wave-based stages and bosses with cards that they have purchased and equipped from the main menu shop. You can also purchase cards between each wave using bullet money that appears from using magic circles and grazing bullets.

100th Black Market was clearly designed with roguelites as an inspiration, and as such there is quite a heavy emphasis on RNG and repeat play of stages. With each stage being done individually, Black Market feels a bit more relaxed than the usual touhou fare, and generally speaking the game is pretty much as hard as you want it to be depending on which cards you are using and how much you're willing to grind.

That may be a problem for some people though, and it is for me too to an extent. Black Market is gonna take you quite a bit of grinding to beat unless you're a god gamer so that you can get good enough cards to survive in the later stages. Enemy waves are fairly generic and all based around timing out repeating enemy formations, so it can get repetitive. 100% completion from collecting all of the cards will take you a long time regardless of how good you are at the game, especially because certain bosses may not appear often for you when playing.

Overall I like the ideas of 100th Black Market and it is quite an addictive, fresh feeling game while it lasts, but the grindiness and repetition of the gameplay is a big problem. In a way I prefer this game over UM regardless of the flaws.

burial rites for the exiled and forgotten. what else can i do to save these people?

painterly in a way that eludes a lot of similarly inclined first-person shooters, genuinely really striking images presented here and accompanied with an eerie soundscape. it’s shackled to linearity both in rhythm and in how it opts to supply the player with resources, which admittedly may not have earned it the warmth it deserved back in 2009, but there’s an appreciated pointedness to its pace which perfectly accompanies its relatively short runtime. frankness is ultimately its greatest asset; most of the nonlinearity here is deployed through the vignettes comprising its narrative, portraying the north wind’s genuine tragedy with a leanness & brevity that underlines the humanity of its limited cast. as your journey shifts from something seemingly corporeal to metaphysical and impressionistic, it is this comfort with being construed as folkloric which allows its final moments to not only register as meaningful, but to provide this unexpected & poignant catharsis. really loved it.

Didn't grew up with a PS1.
Didn't grew up with Crash.
Didn't grew up with racing games.
Didn't grew up with hot italian gay rats.

And it still made me feel nostalgic. What a timeless classic.

i was expecting a lot better due to the game being so notable but it was very whatever. hits never felt like they mattered, and the flying mechanic never worked the way i wanted it to. all of the redesigns are really good tho, and i think the writing was really fun, especially the meiling boss. voice acting was ok.
dropping a half star because the horrible hd filter is on by default and you cant change it without having to manually patch it yourself. that filter is so fucking hideous no matter what game its used in why the fuck do devs keep including it, let alone turning it on by default???

An excellent combination of two pillars of what makes Touhou great; music and frantic split second decision making, with an extremely cute and appealing aesthetic, fantastic arrangements and remixes of Touhou tracks and a brilliantly satisfying to learn difficulty curve makes this one of the best Touhou fangames I've ever played.

If you're familiar with Crypt of the Necrodancer, you already have a decent baseline on what the gameplay of this is like, but kept in a player confined grid much like a Megaman Battle Network. Unlike Crypt and Megaman BN though, you're given a wealth of movement options to dodge incoming danmaku and you're absolutely forced to learn how to use these options effectively, the game quickly punishes you for not respecting diagonal directions and using the charge move to propel yourself two spaces and the feeling of exhilaration when you manage to pull off a long chain of complex on the fly decisions WHILE keeping to a beat of a banger song, AND juggling hitting enemies by being in the same row as them is a potent combination that rewards players with an equal mix of adrenaline and satisfaction.

If a review is a reflection of one's experience with a game, then it only makes sense that my review of Feather Park is a retrospective of my role on it as the sole composer and sound designer.

Since 2012, my raison d'etre was "I want to write music for video games!", and despite hanging around hobbyist circles around it for years, I never really had a real finished game to my name. I could name multiple factors - mental health, poor family life, most likely undiagnosed conditions, so on - but I've watched friends, acquaintances and strangers start from the same sort of place I began at and move on to do the very gigs I would have dreamed to score.

It always crushed me, and I'd be lying if I said I've overcome it for good with this one game. Still, the fact that I can say with complete integrity that "I wrote music for a game!" means a lot to me, as does the fact that Feather Park was the first thing to really break me out of my shell, my mental blockade of not being able to write and complete original music since my last gig, one October ago.

I'll get the gameplay out of the way first. It's a simple game jam game made in two weeks for the 2022 Cozy Autumn Game Jam - you explore a simple overworld (about eight screens), control this hat-wearing bird around to meet other animals, play their minigames or solve miscellaneous tasks to cheer them up and make friends with them. There's no text, and everything's conveyed through audiovisual context, meaning that my role as sound designer was probably a tiny bit more important than usual.

The rock-paper-scissors minigame, for example: you're supposed to figure out which the other animal is going to choose, then deliberately lose to them and give them the win.
With the deadline looming ahead of me (I'd put off sound effects for the most part until the last day of the jam) and reusing sound effects across multiple contexts being the only seemingly viable way to get everything done, maybe it was a little ham-fisted that I gave a stereotypical "incorrect" sound effect for when you, the player, win the game of rock-paper-scissors. Or maybe it's not, and maybe it was helpful that I laid it on thick that actually, winning against this creature is a bad thing.

There aren't any real answers when it comes to sound design, I think - just personal opinions and justifications on how you think your opinions will impact others' experiences. That open-endedness definitely stumped me for a lot of the more abstract sound effects: how do you represent a heart icon popping up, for example?

Music being my primary avenue, not sound, I ended up representing most of the abstract sound effects with musical elements - a jingle on mallet percussions for the heart icon, a guitar slide for question mark popups, and so on. I tend to do this kind of psuedo-Mickey Mousing a lot (my original plan was to have the main character's footsteps sync in time with the music to play a little xylophone sound, but it was too complicated), and it worked out for a silly, cozy cartoony game like this, but I wonder how I'll fare for a game that needs less of that and more synthesized, sci-fi sounds.

Getting to implement the sound effects myself within the game engine definitely helped, though, and it was a learning experience I value a lot. The developer, Jon Topielski, was happy to get me set up with the engine he was using so that I could go into the project myself in order to implement, test and tweak the sounds without going through a game of telephone. (He's a swell guy, really! I can't thank him enough for how everything turned out in the end!)

Not only did this save a lot of time avoiding said telephone game, but it meant I got to be a lot more hands-on in deciding how exactly these sounds were going to play. I felt like a real part of the game development experience, and - if I could do it once, I definitely can and would love to do it again!
Being able to say "I can do sound effects and implementation for your game" is bound to be an asset.

I guess that leaves the music. Following some mental health crises between September and March, and burnout both as a person and as a musician that had accumulated since all the way back in 2018, I spent most of the past year not really directly working on music. Most of what I did do was small experiments, tiny transcriptions and arrangements, mainly to justify the questionable amounts of money I was putting into music creation software as a means of coping with my ennui and anxiety.

It relieves me that just about every single purchase went a long way into helping this soundtrack come to life. Besides some stock percussion, and my live instruments, every single instrument in the soundtrack was from a purchase within the past year: the alto flutes in the main theme; the brush drums in both overworld and minigame themes; the jazz guitar whose sheer character lent itself so obviously to interesting chords that ended up being the backbone to the main theme; the horns on the minigame theme that I still think was the best possible value for something of its quality; even notation software I chose to write the ending theme on instead of on Logic to save myself from writing an entire grand staff piece solely on a piano roll; all of it.

It contextualizes my purchases as an investment, something I've committed to so that I can now just focus on getting the music written the way I want to instead of coveting over tiny, negligible upgrades because I'd chosen to cheap out on my equipment. As long as music's being made with them, I think I'll be alright - and especially as long as I'm writing music for video games with them just like I have here.

I guess I could tell my ten-years-ago self now:

"Hey! You know how you've always wanted to write music for a game? I've done it!"

"It took you so long? And it's just a non-commercial game jam game?"

"I know. I fear I might have taken too long to get here all the time. But I've gotten at least to where I have so far, so from here, I might as well appreciate what progress I've made and promise to myself to go further, as far as I can, and be proud of where I get."

"..."

In April 2013, my nine-years-ago self recorded a record scratch sample. I don't remember where I recorded it from, but I know that I could dig for a higher-quality version of the same sample in one of my virtual synths. On September 22th, I briefly considered doing that - but it would take too much time to look for when a version of the sample was right there in my hands already.

Was this a present I made to myself nine years ago, like a time capsule? A little something to make my life just a tiny bit easier down the road? Who knows. I had no idea where my life was going to be in nine years, and I definitely couldn't imagine it would be where it is now.

"Thanks, Can of Nothing," I said to myself, and inserted "KorgRecordScratch.wav" into the FailedMinigame node.
"I won't let your efforts go to waste. I'll write for more games, I promise."

Ryukishi's magnum opus, it's hard not to truly call it one of his absolute greatest things he's made for the when they cry series and his whole career.

A saddening tale of a girl who tried her best to fight fate in the only way she could. It subverts so many ideas, handles mental health in such a realistic way and an emotional rollercoaster which leaves right up to that heartfelt climax.

I've reread the junkyard scene as many times as I can count and not once I have I finished that scene not an emotional break.

I'm still glad I got to experience this last year and my reread at this moment is only making me appreciate and understand what ryukishi was trying to tell.

Birth and death 😭

You suck at parking should be about the most throwaway game ever. A simple, decent little driving indie challenge that you can crank out in a weekend and forget about. Kinda fun but dime a dozen and like a poor man's trackmania more than anything. Nothing offensive, nothing terrible, but also not particularly worth your time either. Y'know, very middle of the road indie game stuff.

And boy do the devs not recognise that. Of all fucking things, YSAP's devs thought it justified the greediest monetisation system they could possibly achieve. The game is $20, which is probably on the high end in the first place for whats on offer here, but wait! There's a $10 battlepass. Which in itself is pretty hilarious, who the fuck is going to play the game for long enough and care about the multiplayer enough - wait what do you mean there's also a paid item store.

Yes, this wet fart of a title that would be a free flash game 15 years ago copies the monetisation model of Call of Duty Warzone. It is an utterly baffling display of greed. And this game is self-published, there's no Activision blizzard to blame, and it's already on gamepass, so the devs already have a giant cheque from microsoft in the post. Utterly pathetic.