this sort of game (and online horror in general) is extremely hit or miss to me, leaning toward miss most of the time. i am happy to say, however, that this was basically all hit. everything it has to show you is extremely effective at building an uncomfortable atmosphere and it is very, very freaky sometimes! it only has one moment that i think is really lame and typical of a modern horror game and you are unlikely to see it.

to me, this is a great utilization of the strong liminal/anomaly concept that so many writers and devs lean on to make lazy and uninspired art.

I think Sion should have never been reworked. Imagine all these shonen protatgonists running around getting one-shot by a guy who looks like Klungo from Banjo Tooie. It would have been the funniest shit in the world.

I am going to confess something that will forever change our relationship: I love League of Losers. I started playing in 2013 and it was the most exciting multiplayer game I had ever played. I played a shit ton of games as Shen and Skarner and with friends it was electric. Eventually I went to college and, living in the corn fields of Iowa, the internet conmection on these Iowa campuses was so rotten that playing League online was simply not a possibility.

So, I spent a few years Not playing League, working full-time jobs that meant that after a brutal 9 hour shift I was NOT even interested in getting screamed at by a 16 year old Udyr in my chat. I briefly tried going back to the game in 2021, but this was the time Akshan was released and I found his kit despicable. Which is nothing new: every new champion is released hideously broken and able to solo games because that is how you sell them. But that overloaded kit? Give me a break.

But, you know what, you can't stop me from playing Renekton, so I have been playing it the last month and I have a couple thoughts about the game that made me reflect on it. My first thing is: How do new people get into League? It seems impossible. If you show even the slightest competency in a win you will instantly get paired against Team Smurf who will make you go 0/15/4 as fucking Kennen or something. If I was brand new and I saw Yasuo owning my team while my team unearthed ancient slurs to tell me to kms, I would say, "Ah, this game is for fucking morons." The fact Riot is so incapable or disinterested in figuring out the smurf problem or actually banning people who abuse chat is insane. It has been a problem since the day I joined the game and has not even moved an inch.

Riot's general ineptitude is it's own essay entirely. They are a poorly run Boys Club that fails at even the simplest of tasks when it comes to operating one of the largest games of all time, and half their financial model has to be based around smurfs buying Yasuo skins on new accounts because it seems impossible to me that new people successfully are retained. It's like the Burger King that is ALWAYS hiring because the pay is shit and customers are fucking morons.

The amount of rage in this game is kind of astonishing. For the record, I think shit talking opponents is fine. They are your enemy! Shit talking teammates is insane to me. No one's play has ever improved because they got told to hang themself in the most grammatically alien way every written. I had someone rage at me in ARAM once! The fucking casual mode! What is wrong with this playerbase?

So, my recommendation for any new player is: mute EVERYONE. Do not assume that something someone types in chat will be worthwhile. It won't be. Pings can do enough. Watch good players online play, and they will regularly communicate their thought process during objectives and team fights, and a lot of those thought processes can be applied to your own game. Do NOT pay for a fucking course for the love of fucking God. The game is about map awareness it is not rocket science save your money. You should also avoid bot lane, as bot lane in this game is the most useless role I have ever seen in a Moba.

Historically, the ADC was great at pushing lanes and snagging kills, but now EVERY champion is hyper lethal and mobile, so the fucking Ezreal dinking around bot lane is just a relic of the past. He will never help nor hinder your game; he is just a sitting duck fr. Your Zed or Lee Sin or K'sante are the ones who will carry you to the finish line due to their ability to explode enemies and not die doing it. Supports are also the whiniest, most pendatic fucking crybabies in the history of gaming. If you, as a level 1 Vayne, don't engage in the most brainded fight in history, they WILL rage and probably AFK. Botlane needs a severe rework because it is such a useless and not fun lane.

So, after ALL this crying, how can I possibly like League? The thing is that sometimes it all works. Sometimes it comes together and you get the kind of excitement and thrilling plays that define great multiplayer games. Sometimes you'll lane against bloated characters like Yasuo and Yone as Renekton and just blow them the fuck up with your empowered W. 200 years of game design vs. a Pissed Off Crocodile. I wish there more beast characters being made, as every new champion is designed to appeal to Main Character Syndrome in ways we haven't yet seen. So just shutting those Main Characters down with really simple characters like Ren and Garen? M'wah, perfecto.

Other complaints: Voice actors are terrible anime dub actors. Mute them instantly. Nasus and Renekton sound awesome though. Unmute them. Whoever designed Akshan should be sent to a prison camp, and I'm not just saying that because my Akshan mid the other day AFKd after dying once since it prevented him from being the Main Character. Riot is so bad at making a game that they are still making it 10 years later.

Play it if you dare.

L2AGO #15

More or less the spiritual successor to Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge, Zapper: One Wicked Cricket has you playing as this leapy electric cricket hopping through various ecosystems and environments to get his other buggy friend back so he can watch TV after his friend was kidnapped by a vulture or something... I think there's a plot to this whole game. Anyways, my friend Silverhand's more or less covered the main flaws so I won't go into too much detail regarding that; my favorite parts would have to be the simple yet satisfying laser puzzle solving in one of the end game levels (in general, adding the wrinkle of an electric attack to break down obstacles was a nice touch) as well as the entire purpose of the right joystick serving as a twirly antenna controller, reminiscent of the quack button in Duck Game. Speaking of which, I appreciate that there's this layer of satire that's taken farther than Frogger 2 through dumb enemies (the "ghost" enemies with a sheet and two cut-out eyeholes + red sneakers got me good) and exaggerated deaths; Zapper gets fucked up like Crash Bandicoot when he meets his demise, and it's all in great fun. There's also a late game level that's very similar to those 3D tunnel snowboarding minigames from the Sonic franchise, which was a nice diversion though I do wonder why there's only one of those levels, and plopped at the end to boot. I think the only other complaint I'd have to add onto is that you will need to be using the antenna detector a fair bit to make sure you're not missing the often hidden eggs, otherwise backtracking to previous sections when you often can't scroll the camera to see what's behind you is pretty obnoxious; this also applies to needing to backtrack after getting charges from collecting fireflies to open up blue boxes, though fortunately you don't need to care too much about that unless you want to unlock special cheats. Overall, I enjoyed my sparse time with Zapper as a pretty organic follow-up to Swampy's Revenge and would love to see more of these goofy kinds of sweet & short action adventure traversal games with light puzzle elements.

An unofficial sequel to Frogger 2 by the devs of that game, Zapper is a fun and short... platformer? Frogger-like? Something along those lines. Some creative level themes, pretty tight controls (not exactly helped by playing on a gamecube controller), and some good music that you can jam out to with the dedicated antennae movement thumbstick (which serves no gameplay purpose, it's sick). My main complaint is with eggs, the main collectible, sometimes being hidden inside crates or other breakable objects, causing you to have to sometimes backtrack through a level to get them unless you're very meticulous with the locate button. There were also a few times where more natural looking platforming areas that don't adhere to the grid made it confusing where you're supposed to go or if you could make a jump. Also while the music is good most of the time, there are a handful of levels where it's replaced by barely noticeable ambient music. It feels like they ran out of budget for that partway through or something, which would fit with the game overall as it's very short. Still a fun time overall though, an easy recommendation to fans of Frogger 2, and if you haven't played that game you should go check it out as well.

JESUS SAVES.

Sometimes a work comes along that feels like it was made for you. I’d like someone to break into the dev's office to confirm whether or not they’ve got satellite images of my house. I’m not certain what I was prepared for, going into this — all I really had to go off of was the ridiculously good box art — but the initial point-and-click exploration blobber gameplay hooked me. It’s a unique method of exploring this castle; most point-and-click games would take you directly to the next screen, while a game that gave you direct movement controls would be even more granular. This is more in the vein of something like Shin Megami Tensei, and it’s a really neat way to handle walking through these dark corridors. While this isn’t an especially frightening title, this is still a good method for building some tension while you explore.

Of course, this only lasts for about as long as it takes you to enter your first combat encounter. You meet a goddess who gives you a rosary to protect yourself, and you’re immediately pitted again a demon with the sole instruction to click the bead color that matches its eyes. A cross engraved with JESUS SAVES slams into its face, the demon’s head cracks open with a little hand-drawn animation, and you get a triumphant jingle on the following results screen which gives you an exorcism ranking. It’s a dramatic tonal shift, and it fucking rules. It marked the exact moment that I knew I was going to fall in love with this game.

I’m a sucker for the mixed-media approach that’s already here — a lot of the enemies look like drawings clipped out of demonology books, contrasting the overworld sprites and the dithered castle graphics — and the back-and-forth swinging between goofy minigames and tense exploration works in a way that seldom does anywhere else. There’s even a massive genre shift near the halfway point, where the game turns into a top-down RPG Maker game where you walk around solving puzzles and exploring dream-like areas beyond the castle walls. There’s so much going on here, and it would be so easy for all of this to feel sloppy and unfocused, and it doesn’t. I don’t know how Odencat and Fuming managed.

I’m just stunned at how perfectly this aligns with my tastes. It desperately needs to be experienced, because discussion without that baseline of having played it is near-meaningless. This is a dense work with a lot of little branches, and there’s going to be a lot that I missed on my playthrough that someone else picked up on right away. I'm surprised at how little I'm managing to come up with. Normally I'm incapable of shutting the fuck up. I've obviously written enough that I can't claim to have been left speechless, but there are only so many ways that I can say "I love everything here". This is my hole. It was made for me.

Oh, the power of friendship saves the day? Splendid.

EDIT May 17th, 2024: This is for the original itch.io release of the game back in January. I've yet to play the full release, and my work week just started. Give me a week or two and I'll update this accordingly.

A super simple concept supported by great aesthetic direction, and gameplay full of depth. It carries the same energy as the many experimental titles you'd see on PS1 and PS2. The dystopian backdrop, accented by its quirky script, had me completely engrossed. The grimy art direction, which manages to feel like a less restrained MGS1, complement this nicely. I also have to mention the soundtrack, mostly relaxing, and a nice compliment to the challenge of completing a meal.

Though despite the challenge, there is something mesmerizing about the gameplay loop. Mastering the flip is difficult, but when you get to the point where you're flawlessly juggling food on a stuffed pan, it is extremely satisfying. There's a method to the madness. Initial food placement is vital to finishing a dish. Also, the sensitivity adjustment, with the scroll wheel, is a great QOL addition (though to be honest, I ramp it up all the way). Food also doesn't cook when your pan isn't moving, which is super helpful when positioning for a flip.

Arctic Eggs is something special. After completing a couple of requests, I was compelled to see this one to the end. I clocked out at about an hour, and I was totally satisfied giving it my time of day. Not too short, but not too long, and I feel like it wraps itself up nicely. There is a more expanded version on its way; maybe hold off for that one, but this is definitely a game worth experiencing.

In an interview with IGN in 2020 Senior Producer Fleur Marty commented about Gotham Knights, Warner Brother's newest Batman game that it's, and I quote:

"is very much not designed as a game-as-service."

Now I don't blame him for this comment, it's part of his job when doing PR rounds to help sell the product. I can only imagine with the negative outlook the title was receiving that the Eye of Sauron at Warner Brothers was watching intently. The thing is the reason I don't believe him is to give credit to the talented people that work on WB Montreal as I refuse to believe they would design such an awful system if it wasn't a live service game initially that was repurposed. Now I like the premise of it, playing as the sidekick's when Batman is gone and the launch trailer is superb at really emphasizing that feeling. I like the idea of having the game co-op and having upgradeable RPG mechanics but the way it's implemented is just dreadful.

So it's an open world game similar to it's predecessors where Gotham City is the playground. When you are let loose to explore there are basic repetitive crimes on the map where you can scan to find them then interrogate criminals to find pre meditated crimes and it's utterly pointless. Simply finding them organically exploring would have been better and more interesting. When stopping crimes sometimes there are chests that have resources in them or blueprints for new gear you can make. The resources are just various shades of colours with huge numbers that are never explained. Playing with a friend to tell them I'd found "some green" which I already had 100,000 of just means nothing and is extremely unexciting. I had random unexplained resources coming out of my ears, blueprints for weapons and armour I'd never use equally spilling out of my bat belt pouch. To compound matters further creating one of these items you can do on the fly but you can't equip it until you return to the Belfry which the game makes you do constantly. It just seems to want to break it's own flow all the time with these "not designed as live service" mechanics.

The game generally is a bit of a rough state in various areas. The movement around the city will have you feel constantly stuck on objects like perches and lampposts that Batgirl seems to glue to with the worlds strongest adhesive like she'd made a lifelong commitment she refuses to break. Bless her. Additionally there are constant little things like the lack of a proper jump being only contextual leaving questions if it will actually work, running into other players or walls kills all momentum and you freeze for no reason, a choppy frame rate and playing online co-op auto stops my headset working in private chat forcing me to mute and unmute again in mid conversation for just no reason. All small things, nothing stopping the game being unplayable but they can get frustrating over time.

The thing is if you strip those mechanics out and look past the niggling technical issues there is actually the foundation of a good game here. When playing specific story missions and it's focused on the plot and unique locations it's really good. I like the characters and narrative, there are some touching scenes and funny moments. There is the framework of a great game here just held back by an obviously difficult development and initial design pivot regardless of what Fleur Marty may have been stating on his PR rounds. My friend and I did have fun playing it regardless and certainly don't regret it. Riding through Gotham on a bat-cycle launching into the air to land on an unsuspecting criminal and doing a finisher with a brutal kick to the jaw is really satisfying. I also loved playing as Batgirl and wanted more of that ever since the Arkham Knight - A Matter of Family DLC. Whilst it just doesn't reach that level of quality it was still fun, just extremely flawed.

Worth a try if you're curious as it's constantly on sale, hard one to recommend but it's not as bad as some people make out I feel.

+ Story premise is really good.
+ I like the characters and story beats.
+ I like the presentation though it's not as dense and gothic as it's predecessors.

- Upgrade and open world systems are just awful, clearly was designed as a live service game that pivoted in development but the damage is there.
- Combat and movement isn't smooth enough.
- Some minor bugs and frame rate issues.