McDoot
BACKER
2016
Parsnips drool, taters rool.
The best way to play this game is to sleep at 10am and then get mad that no one wants to marry you.
The best way to play this game is to sleep at 10am and then get mad that no one wants to marry you.
2010
This review contains spoilers
Space Funeral depicts a world in which perfection has been spoilt by chaos - with perfection, in this case, being a generic default JRPG skin for RPG Maker 2003.
There is something incredible about the fact that the hand-drawn mspaint sprites actually look better than what the final boss would have you believe is a beautiful un-improvable world. I don't think thecatamites is pulling some double-irony-layered joke here, judging from their itch.io which sports a pasta-glue-collage art style, this is a genuine attempt at synthesising meaningful visuals and honestly I think they might have been a decade too early.
We now live in a post-Cruelty Squad world, where non-conforming designs are seeing a bit of a renaissance in games - after all, challenging aesthetics are a progression of any art medium. The plot presents this as a purposeful uglifying of something pure and it comes across as frustration, whether the anger is coming from a lack of ability (which I somewhat doubt) or resentment that the indie gaming scene at the time was full of clones and generic designs.
This last point becomes harder to internalise 12 years after the release of games like Space Funeral or Barkley: Shut up and Jam Gaiden, which are victims (beneficiaries?) of survivorship bias, their place in the sarcastic RPG maker games hall-of-fame being cemented by a decade of self-aware ironic games that are influenced or are a symptom of those earlier titles.
As a side note, as someone who hasn't played many RPG Maker games, I find it amusing that the JRPG progression can be neatly squeezed into 60 minutes of gameplay.
There is something incredible about the fact that the hand-drawn mspaint sprites actually look better than what the final boss would have you believe is a beautiful un-improvable world. I don't think thecatamites is pulling some double-irony-layered joke here, judging from their itch.io which sports a pasta-glue-collage art style, this is a genuine attempt at synthesising meaningful visuals and honestly I think they might have been a decade too early.
We now live in a post-Cruelty Squad world, where non-conforming designs are seeing a bit of a renaissance in games - after all, challenging aesthetics are a progression of any art medium. The plot presents this as a purposeful uglifying of something pure and it comes across as frustration, whether the anger is coming from a lack of ability (which I somewhat doubt) or resentment that the indie gaming scene at the time was full of clones and generic designs.
This last point becomes harder to internalise 12 years after the release of games like Space Funeral or Barkley: Shut up and Jam Gaiden, which are victims (beneficiaries?) of survivorship bias, their place in the sarcastic RPG maker games hall-of-fame being cemented by a decade of self-aware ironic games that are influenced or are a symptom of those earlier titles.
As a side note, as someone who hasn't played many RPG Maker games, I find it amusing that the JRPG progression can be neatly squeezed into 60 minutes of gameplay.
2019
I'm a huge fan of JRPGS but not a massive fan of Pokemon. D&P and HGSS have a special place in my heart but apart from that I don't really care about the series.
My partner hates JRPGs. On a whim, they decided to play a copy of Sword we had lying around. I have never seen them devour a game like this, playing the required 30 hours to see the credits (and then some more because the game REALLY doesn't end there) across 4 days.
Watching them play this entry has made me appreciate how important Pokemon is for casual RPG players.
Pokemon Sword is the first turn-based game that hasn't made them walk away from boredom. It also had a good balance of stats, moves, systems and gear to evaluate without overwhelming a new player. The graphics are pretty enough and the Pokemon designs are hard to fault, even though we both had to stop our selves from throwing up as the frame rate plummeted after connecting to the internet in a Wild Area. I also think the roster is pretty good despite what others may say, especially with the DLC, providing a tonne of familiar faces that my partner had already seen in promotional art or the Pokemon knowledge that is seemingly airborne to every human on Earth. I enjoyed seeing some of my favourites from previous generations here (Rest in Power Greninja). Contrast this to Generation V where you had to play with these 150 new boring ass Pokemon and you will enjoy it!
I am going to make an assumption based on my own experience of Pokemon. Here we go. Pokemon was never good and playing a new Pokemon game will never give you the same feeling that your first did. I liked Pokemon as a kid and because I enjoyed playing Pokemon Pearl, I played Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker - which is a banger - and lead me to play Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies and started my love for the genre. But the Pokemon games have always been repetitive with boring ass stories that drag on (even the games with good stories such as White have this issue) and copy-pasted design choices. Pokemon always was and always will be 'baby's first JRPG', but I am very appreciative for it introducing me to some of the most important games of my life. And I hope it does the same for my partner.
My partner hates JRPGs. On a whim, they decided to play a copy of Sword we had lying around. I have never seen them devour a game like this, playing the required 30 hours to see the credits (and then some more because the game REALLY doesn't end there) across 4 days.
Watching them play this entry has made me appreciate how important Pokemon is for casual RPG players.
Pokemon Sword is the first turn-based game that hasn't made them walk away from boredom. It also had a good balance of stats, moves, systems and gear to evaluate without overwhelming a new player. The graphics are pretty enough and the Pokemon designs are hard to fault, even though we both had to stop our selves from throwing up as the frame rate plummeted after connecting to the internet in a Wild Area. I also think the roster is pretty good despite what others may say, especially with the DLC, providing a tonne of familiar faces that my partner had already seen in promotional art or the Pokemon knowledge that is seemingly airborne to every human on Earth. I enjoyed seeing some of my favourites from previous generations here (Rest in Power Greninja). Contrast this to Generation V where you had to play with these 150 new boring ass Pokemon and you will enjoy it!
I am going to make an assumption based on my own experience of Pokemon. Here we go. Pokemon was never good and playing a new Pokemon game will never give you the same feeling that your first did. I liked Pokemon as a kid and because I enjoyed playing Pokemon Pearl, I played Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker - which is a banger - and lead me to play Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies and started my love for the genre. But the Pokemon games have always been repetitive with boring ass stories that drag on (even the games with good stories such as White have this issue) and copy-pasted design choices. Pokemon always was and always will be 'baby's first JRPG', but I am very appreciative for it introducing me to some of the most important games of my life. And I hope it does the same for my partner.
2022
Every FPS is a rhythm game if the soundtrack is good enough.
Here is Doom Eternal sans all of its intricacies, weapon wheel and abilities; stripped away in lieu of a metronomic blast-beat to make. sure. you. always. shoot. on. time. The enemies are immune to this however and will attack as they please.
The tracks that serve as the focal point for this glorified (demonified?) desktop visualiser blur into one streak - each iconic (or maybe symbolic) vocal performance flattened by un-inspired instrumentation and musical choices - the final track showcasing this discord the strongest. Serj Tankian is fighting for his life while the band is chugging the same power chords as the last 14 tracks.
Not a single 7/4 time signature or triplet in sight. Truly hellish.
Here is Doom Eternal sans all of its intricacies, weapon wheel and abilities; stripped away in lieu of a metronomic blast-beat to make. sure. you. always. shoot. on. time. The enemies are immune to this however and will attack as they please.
The tracks that serve as the focal point for this glorified (demonified?) desktop visualiser blur into one streak - each iconic (or maybe symbolic) vocal performance flattened by un-inspired instrumentation and musical choices - the final track showcasing this discord the strongest. Serj Tankian is fighting for his life while the band is chugging the same power chords as the last 14 tracks.
Not a single 7/4 time signature or triplet in sight. Truly hellish.
2017
DropMix walked so Fuser could live die horrifically.
Can someone tell me why I owned a Japanese import copy of this game in Europe?
Very cute, very wholesome.
2002
Our sense of space and distance is simply incomplete when we are young. Our relationship to an urban environment is warped by our daily routine - three arcing lines leading from my front door to my school, the shop where I would buy sweets, and my cousin’s house, all held together (meta)physically by concrete buildings and dirt paths. One day, when I was 12, instead of following one of these three paths out of my house, I turned around and crossed a road that went in the opposite direction. I had unlocked an entirely new section of my town that I had never seen before and I could barely keep a hold of where I was, constantly reminding myself, ‘I took a left at the big tree and then crossed the road’ to try and remember my way back. And then suddenly, I find myself somewhere familiar, crossing between two houses that I had walked past on my way to school every morning for the last 900 days without thinking anything about.
When I eventually discovered the joys of google maps and running outside to see if the satellite would see me (despite the fact that there were a different set of cars parked outside of my house), I still didn’t fully understand where I was existing. My house pointed North, so even my pre-existing understanding of my daily arcing paths were longitudinally aligned with what I was being presented on the screen in front me.
The terraced houses in my street each had a garage, not attached to the homes themselves, but were instead nested into the bottom of culd-a-sacs. For as long as I had lived there, footholds had been carved into the brick work. On the flat tar roofs lay discarded glass bottles, sweet wrappers and bored teenagers. A 12 inch gap in 2 roofs perpendicular to each other at one end was enough to make 12 year old me feel like a parkour fiend. 3 years earlier I had made a similar leap between two wooden benches, only a foot and a half from the ground which resulted in me eating shit and snapping my front tooth in half.
When my dad moved out when I was 6 my bedroom in his terraced house consisted of a mattress on the floor and an Xbox on a upside milk crate. This new house faced onto a British A road, with a single tree in our shared backyard, a far cry from the pseudo-urban new town that I had grown up in. But inside the Xbox upstairs was a disk containing Jet Set Radio Future and Sega GT 2002, which came with the console, gifted to me for my 5th birthday. To 5 year old me, the former must have been almost entirely alien to me, the pop art pallete wrapping around a dense and intertwining metropolis, but now 17 years later, I am reminded of those 12 inch jumps I made between garage rooftops and finding my way back home via one familiar footpath.
When I eventually discovered the joys of google maps and running outside to see if the satellite would see me (despite the fact that there were a different set of cars parked outside of my house), I still didn’t fully understand where I was existing. My house pointed North, so even my pre-existing understanding of my daily arcing paths were longitudinally aligned with what I was being presented on the screen in front me.
The terraced houses in my street each had a garage, not attached to the homes themselves, but were instead nested into the bottom of culd-a-sacs. For as long as I had lived there, footholds had been carved into the brick work. On the flat tar roofs lay discarded glass bottles, sweet wrappers and bored teenagers. A 12 inch gap in 2 roofs perpendicular to each other at one end was enough to make 12 year old me feel like a parkour fiend. 3 years earlier I had made a similar leap between two wooden benches, only a foot and a half from the ground which resulted in me eating shit and snapping my front tooth in half.
When my dad moved out when I was 6 my bedroom in his terraced house consisted of a mattress on the floor and an Xbox on a upside milk crate. This new house faced onto a British A road, with a single tree in our shared backyard, a far cry from the pseudo-urban new town that I had grown up in. But inside the Xbox upstairs was a disk containing Jet Set Radio Future and Sega GT 2002, which came with the console, gifted to me for my 5th birthday. To 5 year old me, the former must have been almost entirely alien to me, the pop art pallete wrapping around a dense and intertwining metropolis, but now 17 years later, I am reminded of those 12 inch jumps I made between garage rooftops and finding my way back home via one familiar footpath.
2003
I am horrified to find out that people liked this game more than SH2. The levels are so uninspired with much more tedious combat encounters. I also managed to miss picking up 3 maps in a row, which combined with the repetitive level design made it hell for me to progress.
2020
This took place in my backyard.
I feel bad giving THPS 1-3 middling scores despite the fact that they had me gripped and addicted.
Completing the Pokedex in this one is probably marginally more enjoyable than the other entries.
2001
I'm actually blown away by how much more engaging the puzzles are in this game compared to it's contemporaries.
This review contains spoilers
Obviously the definitive version of the game and I loved the New Content as well as Time Guy, but I am a bit disappointed by the new bucket endings. There is very little in terms of new routes to take to get the new endings.
2021
It was okay - just made me want to go and play Hades some more.
There are only 2 dungeons and the game hints at things that are more impressive than what is actually in the game (a character just disappears and you never to get to date him even though he says he is an axe? that sounds sick what the hell).
The combat and RPG elements are quite simple but inoffensive. The dating sim elements feel quite non-existent (the dating events are nowhere near as good as something like Persona) and everyone is way to eager to get into your hands.
Non-binary representation tho :)
There are only 2 dungeons and the game hints at things that are more impressive than what is actually in the game (a character just disappears and you never to get to date him even though he says he is an axe? that sounds sick what the hell).
The combat and RPG elements are quite simple but inoffensive. The dating sim elements feel quite non-existent (the dating events are nowhere near as good as something like Persona) and everyone is way to eager to get into your hands.
Non-binary representation tho :)