NickShutter
71 Reviews liked by NickShutter
Calico
2020
Calico... is it good? I have no idea. A wonkily strung together island of twee interactions and cute quests where everything feels barely functional, but in a charmingly naff way. Like walking up a hill might make you flail every direction, but in exchange you can rotate any animal you hold and wiggle them about. The bakinng might seem like pure chaos, but when you're shrunk down tiny and forced to play pool to make a tart maybe that's okay?
And it just ends. It just ends. There's still quests to do, people to meet and animals to rotate, but the credit roll just pops up when I least expected it.
I dunno. Not a clue. I think I like Calico. But it's not a good game. Just a cute one.
And it just ends. It just ends. There's still quests to do, people to meet and animals to rotate, but the credit roll just pops up when I least expected it.
I dunno. Not a clue. I think I like Calico. But it's not a good game. Just a cute one.
The Half-Life 2 Beta is one of the most interesting things to come out of a development cycle in this industry, shedding a lot of light on how much stuff can change especially for a game that was known to be as troubled as HL2 before it released. The thing with learning about the Beta is that it's far more interesting to read about it and ponder what could have been rather than actually seeing it made into a final product, as both the leaks as well as a lot of fan-made mods over the years have continued to show. There's a reason why the final product we got for Half-Life 2 was the way it was, and it wasn't out of Valve trying to make a "lesser product;" as interesting as many of those ideas and concepts were, in practice a lot of them were very much cut for a reason.
Real quick on gameplay, it's Half-Life 2. I've never cared for the modding community's obsession with hyper-active smooth weapon animations and reloads because Gordon shouldn't be this gung-ho professional hitman with knowledge on every weapon he picks up, and I still don't care for its representation here even if every gun is modeled quite nicely. Combine soldiers still hitscan just as much as ever if not maybe more because of the seemingly faster firerate on the MP7, but the level design is usually very generous about health items. Level design becomes more cluttered and messy however, with issues leading the player in the right direction, something a Half-Life game absolutely needs to nail and something that leads to my bigger issues in general with the mod.
Raising the Bar: Redux has great art direction and a keen eye for visual detail within the limits of the Source engine, but it just lacks this flow to it that any Half-Life game really needs to have. Getting lost in where the hell Gordon is even supposed to be at any given point is extremely common, and while Half-Life games have always toed a line on believable locations with the ways you navigate through them if you think about them for more than a minute, Raising the Bar: Redux's version of City 17 is just a cluttered mess with weird back alleys and buildings that don't make sense in how they're interconnected. Progression through the environment feels jumbled and messy, stakes raising and lowering seemingly at random and far too suddenly, and RtB:R also has trouble with trying to fill in the blanks and making changes to the unfinished beta storyline. Some of the most interesting parts of the beta storyline such as the dangerous polluted air are mysteriously absent, and while there's attempts here and there of trying to create an oppressive atmosphere, it never quite coalesces into bringing it to a reality here. Some of my favorite pieces of concept art like the mysterious vortigaunt energy tank, this far more deeply menacing dark tram area with the Citadel highlighted within fog in the distance, the deep blue smoky views of City 17 itself, or even this more radioactive toxic take on the canals for the airboat chapter; they're gorgeous pieces of art that also help to really create this image of what makes the HL2 Beta so interesting and I just don't think Raising the Bar: Redux really captures that. The efforts made by this small team are impressive on a technical level and I'm still interested enough to see where they take the mod in the future with wherever their own version of the story goes, but there's too much of this that feels raw and missing that spice that would make this something truly great, at the end of the day just being merely fine.
Real quick on gameplay, it's Half-Life 2. I've never cared for the modding community's obsession with hyper-active smooth weapon animations and reloads because Gordon shouldn't be this gung-ho professional hitman with knowledge on every weapon he picks up, and I still don't care for its representation here even if every gun is modeled quite nicely. Combine soldiers still hitscan just as much as ever if not maybe more because of the seemingly faster firerate on the MP7, but the level design is usually very generous about health items. Level design becomes more cluttered and messy however, with issues leading the player in the right direction, something a Half-Life game absolutely needs to nail and something that leads to my bigger issues in general with the mod.
Raising the Bar: Redux has great art direction and a keen eye for visual detail within the limits of the Source engine, but it just lacks this flow to it that any Half-Life game really needs to have. Getting lost in where the hell Gordon is even supposed to be at any given point is extremely common, and while Half-Life games have always toed a line on believable locations with the ways you navigate through them if you think about them for more than a minute, Raising the Bar: Redux's version of City 17 is just a cluttered mess with weird back alleys and buildings that don't make sense in how they're interconnected. Progression through the environment feels jumbled and messy, stakes raising and lowering seemingly at random and far too suddenly, and RtB:R also has trouble with trying to fill in the blanks and making changes to the unfinished beta storyline. Some of the most interesting parts of the beta storyline such as the dangerous polluted air are mysteriously absent, and while there's attempts here and there of trying to create an oppressive atmosphere, it never quite coalesces into bringing it to a reality here. Some of my favorite pieces of concept art like the mysterious vortigaunt energy tank, this far more deeply menacing dark tram area with the Citadel highlighted within fog in the distance, the deep blue smoky views of City 17 itself, or even this more radioactive toxic take on the canals for the airboat chapter; they're gorgeous pieces of art that also help to really create this image of what makes the HL2 Beta so interesting and I just don't think Raising the Bar: Redux really captures that. The efforts made by this small team are impressive on a technical level and I'm still interested enough to see where they take the mod in the future with wherever their own version of the story goes, but there's too much of this that feels raw and missing that spice that would make this something truly great, at the end of the day just being merely fine.
Amorous
2018
this game is horrible and i only had fun playing it with my cousins where we read the main character's lines with an obama impression
Digimon World 4
2005
if anyone says they have fully beaten this game please give me your address so i can find you and hunt you down for lying
Firstly I'm openly reflecting upon this game so that people know that if you care about LGBT aubiographical trauma games (ie. No One Can Ever Know, Madotsuki's Closet, etc.) this is a very significant one to get to. My guess is that if you follow LGBT people, including me, youre going to see this on a lot of 'end of year' lists.
Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.
Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:
Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)
And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"
One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.
Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.
Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.
The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.
Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.
I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:
I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.
On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.
Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.
Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..
Now one thing I want to point out that is interesting is that due to how emotionally affecting this is, most people have gone on to speak about how it made them cry or reflect their own experiences. Even from people on here actually known for usually writing more erudite reflections. This speak to the power of its performance, but I'll be the one to highlight how.
Once you run the game on browser it blows up to fill your whole browser windows as large as possible, regals you the controls and then allows you to walk. Then, once you move to the edge of the screen 2 things happen:
Would you like to see trigger warnings? (Yes, No)
And then the first line of self narration from Ann: "The problem with talking about this is: I don't know how people will react"
One of the narrative vulnerabilities that segments this from other games of this type is that it will absolutely ask you as a player to think about your intentions in play. Pretty immediately, Ann covers both the fact that sex-work is often lionized and that this is fine by trans people as a narrative of independency. And also that, not simply just the 'text' but the main autobiographical narrator does NOT want this game to be used as a weapon to scold sex workers. What makes this great is that she effectively pulls this off without resorting to second person phrasing saying 'you might think' etc.
Ann is deeply unjudgemental in a general sense but also correctly figures out through her own internalizations that she doesn't really know yet who is reading that, that who could be anybody.
Ann as a character is very timid, flat, and introspective allowing for her lines to travel to the player directly and without flourish. Lines flow out of Ann completely naturalistically like "I couldn't really hear anything" rather than trying to describe it in some detail or another. This enhances the fact that its utilizing the smaller text box design of game boy games. Comprehension and clarity never become an issue during play.
The story is about how Sugaring made Ann less connected to her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman, which may explain why her avatar is a ghost rather than any attempt at depicting herself as a trans woman who just came out recently. It works as another fracture to remind the player that this is just a representation of the events reinterpreted by an older developer who views it as trauma.
Even outside of that the visual design and compositions are absolutely masterful. For example you end up seeing her crush sally from every angle in 2D space during close up scenes, when you move from walking to full on portraits. All of them are gorgeous but here's 2 examples from early on. Even for people who may not personally get much from the story itself, the mastery of the art design is to die for, especially if you're a fan of Game Boy Color games.
I'll join everyone else quickly on the more personal reflection here I admit this part is a bit TMI so skip it if you don't care:
I have always personally had a unstable relationship with the prospect of sex work, due to my own economic conditions and general dysphoria I haven't even felt close enough to the state I want to be in in order to really consider it. Hell the best camera I have for online sex work is a web camera that had its hinge broken off because a friend smacked a fly. So I have actually engaged in and desired the idea of sex work as somewhat of a liberatory function, mostly for online because I always saw irl stuff as both much more seedy and much more anxiety inducing. The matter of fact is I'm a bit of an agoraphobe in general because I can't control how im seen, not just a fear of transphobia but a functionally Weirder fear that I might be only beautiful from a specific angle and the fact I dont have a camera that shows people that angle makes me miserable. As such I tend to also imbue sex work with this mystic sensibility that anybody doing that probably feels visually just perfect, a 2nd order jealousy and dysphoria justified. To a large degree I think this is probably just my own brainrot due to dysphoria, but the reason I'm giving so much depth on this set of cognitive interactions and desires is that while Ann is not critical against embellishing sex work outright, she does show that its not all fun and games for Sally and that Sally feels sort of like she needs to put up a 'sociopathic' identity in order to detach. Even if you are stunning and beautiful, and even if you can utilize it to get independence through others. The fact of the matter is a large part of the game is about being desired yet trying not to let yourself 'know' the other person too much.
On a larger point this is not the only occupational ability given this degree of fixation as a liberation tool in Transfemme spaces. The Blackpaper by Nyx Land is a now slightly dated manifesto that makes a dramatic argument that Transwomen and coding are intertwined, using a quite conspiratorial logic via connecting the word UNIX to biblical references. Seeing this as a 'high IQ' form of liberation, a lot of trans women also imbue coding with this sort of liberatory function, and I feel I should stress that it's actually mostly harmless. While the Blackpaper is weird it imbues a lot of transwomen with a faith and narrative to move on. The reality is just that just as Ann shows an inability to endure to the standards of her field the other reality is that even though its a coping mechanism, we shouldn't actually expect queer people to individually 'be' good at something. For one, it takes a lot of time to get to where you want to be anyway, being a good coder or a good sex worker is not that much different a skill than, say, being good at makeup. In the same way its not ok to push transwomen to be better at makeup or tell them they haven't tried hard enough so to does it reflect here. On top of that for non-transfemme people the sentiments we are good at Hoi4, Fighting Games, Coding, Game Development, are all culturally accurate on a large level but still stereotypes. I'm not good at any of this stuff and a result can mean that people often ignore what I am good at or want to be good at. There are a lot of people out there that fail to meet any of these abilities and are seen as unexceptional, the irony is that Ann or more to the fact the author, Taylor, is 'good at Game Design' (or maybe more art design) but that's not core to the narrative at all. She just wants to exist and this happened a decade ago. So when trans people (of any gender) tell you they just want to exist in peace this is more what we mean! We shouldn't have to find a skill that makes us separated from transphobia, wherein the leisure time to improve in these lionized skills is usually dramatically truncated in comparison to a cis person anyway. The desire to 'overcome' is inherent in anybody looking to escape the chains of capitalist exploitation but we are creatures first, not workers. And as such the narrative of overcoming implies by its own design that others didn't overcome, and until we listen to what they are saying and help them, things aren't going to get better.
Anyway, I straight up don't trust anybody who gave this a 1 out of 10, and I'm summarily blocking all those fuckers in advance. A natural memoir about transphobia and trauma and you give it a 1? Get the fuck out of here with that. A 3-5/10 I can understand, but a 1 is just showing transphobic ass in a way that's 'subtle' enough not to get reported. If you're reading this and you did that, fuck you, I don't want anything to do with you. Scumfuck bastard.
Edit: Franz mentioned to me that these people have a history of doing this. I knew I was onto something. Keep an eye out on these dudes..
Pokémon Sleep
2023
game SUCKS i go to BED
In typical Game Freak fashion, this is technology from a decade ago being paraded around like it's cool when it's Pokemon. Accelerometers tracking your movement in the night certainly works as a means of tracking sleep, but integration with wrist trackers, smartwatches, and smart rings (and AI beds? Whatever that even means?) have allowed a greater degree of fidelity for users. Sleep as Android has been doing a damn good job of telling me I have horrible sleep hygiene for a decade, only improving with time. It has recommended ways of improving my sleep, alarms that go off only when I'm in a light sleep cycle so I'm less groggy, 'captchas' were I can only turn off my increasingly loud alarm with math, or tapping an NFC point, or shaking my phone like it owes me money. Not only am I firmly entrenched in my current sleep tracker, it has always been frictionless. I tap a widget, I put my phone beside me, I sleep.
Pokemon Sleep shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why sleep trackers are used, how they are presently used, where the market lies, and how the gamification of life actually works. This isn't Habitica or Fabulous trying to improve your life through things you don't already do. I have no choice in whether or not I sleep. The appeal of a sleep tracker is that it is set and forget, a companion for something I have to and will do anyways, so it better not be an annoying partner. If Pokemon Sleep wants the user to be concerned about the quality of their sleep, shouldn't it be able to sync up with existing hardware that can supplement its readings? If sleep is meant to be restorative, why is that rejuvenation immediately undone by tutorialisation and currencies and systems and a goddamn battle pass when I wake up? Why am I chastised when I wake that I only got 54/100 sleep points because I woke in the night and can only get 5-6 hours of sleep a night if I'm lucky? Why is the assumption that 8.5 hours of sleep is a perfect ideal for everyone to aim for? Why is there no accommodation for the peculiarities of the human sleep experience, for the insomniac, the narcoleptic, the medicated? The very least it could do is offer a sleep quiz, or a calibration period. The very least it could do is not inundate me with things I have to learn and keep in mind. The very least it could do is not make my phone radiate enough heat that my wrist tracker thinks something is wrong. The very least it could do is not eat 80%(!!!) of my battery at night so I panic when I wake up. And for the chronically eepy like me, the bare minimum amount of effort could be put towards not having a minutes-long load-screen before I can track my sleep. Last night I passed out waiting for it to complete. Y'know what it took for my wrist tracker to document my sleep last night? Nothing.
In typical Game Freak fashion, this is technology from a decade ago being paraded around like it's cool when it's Pokemon. Accelerometers tracking your movement in the night certainly works as a means of tracking sleep, but integration with wrist trackers, smartwatches, and smart rings (and AI beds? Whatever that even means?) have allowed a greater degree of fidelity for users. Sleep as Android has been doing a damn good job of telling me I have horrible sleep hygiene for a decade, only improving with time. It has recommended ways of improving my sleep, alarms that go off only when I'm in a light sleep cycle so I'm less groggy, 'captchas' were I can only turn off my increasingly loud alarm with math, or tapping an NFC point, or shaking my phone like it owes me money. Not only am I firmly entrenched in my current sleep tracker, it has always been frictionless. I tap a widget, I put my phone beside me, I sleep.
Pokemon Sleep shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why sleep trackers are used, how they are presently used, where the market lies, and how the gamification of life actually works. This isn't Habitica or Fabulous trying to improve your life through things you don't already do. I have no choice in whether or not I sleep. The appeal of a sleep tracker is that it is set and forget, a companion for something I have to and will do anyways, so it better not be an annoying partner. If Pokemon Sleep wants the user to be concerned about the quality of their sleep, shouldn't it be able to sync up with existing hardware that can supplement its readings? If sleep is meant to be restorative, why is that rejuvenation immediately undone by tutorialisation and currencies and systems and a goddamn battle pass when I wake up? Why am I chastised when I wake that I only got 54/100 sleep points because I woke in the night and can only get 5-6 hours of sleep a night if I'm lucky? Why is the assumption that 8.5 hours of sleep is a perfect ideal for everyone to aim for? Why is there no accommodation for the peculiarities of the human sleep experience, for the insomniac, the narcoleptic, the medicated? The very least it could do is offer a sleep quiz, or a calibration period. The very least it could do is not inundate me with things I have to learn and keep in mind. The very least it could do is not make my phone radiate enough heat that my wrist tracker thinks something is wrong. The very least it could do is not eat 80%(!!!) of my battery at night so I panic when I wake up. And for the chronically eepy like me, the bare minimum amount of effort could be put towards not having a minutes-long load-screen before I can track my sleep. Last night I passed out waiting for it to complete. Y'know what it took for my wrist tracker to document my sleep last night? Nothing.
Chocobo GP
2022
Now that people are celebrating a re-release without microtransactions:
I'm going to specifically say that my review and low score is not about the microtransactions I didn't care that they were there because the game is just bad. Full stop.
The item system is cool and a nice evolution on Diddy Kong racing's However because of all of the item boxes being entirely random there is no strategy to it whatsoever.
The track designs are so short and wide that Even if you take the tightest racing lines you would can still get passed by somebody who has better item generation.
On top of that it has a two-lap structure making it an extremely quick game to play through, However because of the aforementioned item system and the aforementioned short tracks there is no skill involved whatsoever.
Your best strategy in order to win the race is to hang back get good items and then immediately use them so that you just go through the laps as quick as possible without doing anything.
I was excited for this game on release but it is terrible on top of that It seems to be designed for mobile platforms aiming towards the Mario kart tour audience.
Which is something I detest because that's not a game you play at all.
Chocobo GP is a disappointment, a miserable game, and everything wrong about cart racers, with or without microtransactions.
I'm going to specifically say that my review and low score is not about the microtransactions I didn't care that they were there because the game is just bad. Full stop.
The item system is cool and a nice evolution on Diddy Kong racing's However because of all of the item boxes being entirely random there is no strategy to it whatsoever.
The track designs are so short and wide that Even if you take the tightest racing lines you would can still get passed by somebody who has better item generation.
On top of that it has a two-lap structure making it an extremely quick game to play through, However because of the aforementioned item system and the aforementioned short tracks there is no skill involved whatsoever.
Your best strategy in order to win the race is to hang back get good items and then immediately use them so that you just go through the laps as quick as possible without doing anything.
I was excited for this game on release but it is terrible on top of that It seems to be designed for mobile platforms aiming towards the Mario kart tour audience.
Which is something I detest because that's not a game you play at all.
Chocobo GP is a disappointment, a miserable game, and everything wrong about cart racers, with or without microtransactions.
Clubhouse Games is kind of a mixed bag, especially when you've got other versions of Uno and Ludo, but there should be enough casual games to wheel this out every other session with your friends. I call it shelved at the moment, because I won't start playing the Mahjong type games and have played my share of most the interesting ones. If it's back in the cartridge slot, it will probably stay a while again.
This compilation worked like trying some games in the beginning and stick with the most fun. We actually like Darts more than Bowling, but prefer to pick Pool most of the time, as it's not having the physical requirements. Motion control worked better for Bowling on Wii, in my opinion, but I could figure out throwing 180's in darts swiftly. That sadly made it less a challenge and I wasn't hooked for that reason, too. Pool is stripped to the essentials like most games on here, but it works well enough to entertain some chatty rounds. I did not miss much, except it's not the real table.
We quite often played Ludo online, it's great for being just the game without any glitter and the virtual dice make it go much faster than the physical board game.
We also had a phase playing Othello which I learned to like from the Game Boy game back in the day. Checkers works, but was too simple. I couldn't find one amongst my friends to play chess with and it's too complicated from my wife's view, so based on my old Battle Chess skills from until around 1990, the computer was too hard as an opponent to start again. However, whilst the AI in Othello is challenging, I could manage to beat it and after some training the wife could also beat me once or twice, so she keeps going.
We also like to throw in a few rounds of Air Hockey, Connect Four, Mini Curling or Golf every once in a while, all fun little games to waste your time on for a few minutes more. It really adds up all together and soon two hours have passed. I guess that's somehow the concept of this compilation.
I don't like Blackjack and I spent years playing Hold em on Pokerstars, multiple tables at a time actually, so there's another section I didn't touch yet.
There's some games I didn't play as much as I thought. The falling object puzzle is ok, but it's made for just the few minutes. I've been playing Mastermind for ages back in the day and had a board game revival with my brother a few years back, before I downloaded an app version on my mobile more recently. But the game is there and it's a good chance I'll stick to it later.
That's how much the Clubhouse Games compilation has to offer. Like, I really never played much Solitaire, but one day I clicked on Klondike Solitaire and kept returning almost any day for a month straight. Sometimes 15 minutes at once, sometimes hours while listening Mostrich Mixtapes on Spotify. And that's already a lot more than I played all the backlogged sale items and freebies I never touched, just for one of the included 51 games!
That's the deal here, you get 51 games, most of them on their own maybe worth a buck or two on the eShop. Some of them you'll like, some of them you don't. But in this bundle, at least if you got it for a good price, you'll probably save money on the ones you like in that calculation and get all the other games on top. And if the Ubisoft servers crash too bad again, you also have a backup to play Uno with your friends. So what's to argue about?
This is not a system seller, but it's one of the casual must haves for any Switch collection. Despite you only need one cartridge to connect with your friends locally, who only need the demo, sales might have profited from Covid, as playing online, that requires the full version on all ends, is a most welcome option these days, when developers like the ones from Boomerang Fu sadly still miss out.
One thing I miss here is a good Pinball machine, one thing I still need for my Switch. And just like Clubhouse Games introduced me to Klondike Solitaire, it also raised the question if there's more Golf or Pool games to check out. Seems like it wasn't just plenty wasted hours, but as stripped the games might appear, actually fun and more to come with this compilation and maybe other games I wouldn't have looked for.
Clubhouse Games that way isn't that one AAA blockbuster ruling your life for a couple of days or weeks, but it's a compilation of some little fun games and some the pristine epitome of play, that will probably end up being booted every once in a while as long as I will have my Switch.
This compilation worked like trying some games in the beginning and stick with the most fun. We actually like Darts more than Bowling, but prefer to pick Pool most of the time, as it's not having the physical requirements. Motion control worked better for Bowling on Wii, in my opinion, but I could figure out throwing 180's in darts swiftly. That sadly made it less a challenge and I wasn't hooked for that reason, too. Pool is stripped to the essentials like most games on here, but it works well enough to entertain some chatty rounds. I did not miss much, except it's not the real table.
We quite often played Ludo online, it's great for being just the game without any glitter and the virtual dice make it go much faster than the physical board game.
We also had a phase playing Othello which I learned to like from the Game Boy game back in the day. Checkers works, but was too simple. I couldn't find one amongst my friends to play chess with and it's too complicated from my wife's view, so based on my old Battle Chess skills from until around 1990, the computer was too hard as an opponent to start again. However, whilst the AI in Othello is challenging, I could manage to beat it and after some training the wife could also beat me once or twice, so she keeps going.
We also like to throw in a few rounds of Air Hockey, Connect Four, Mini Curling or Golf every once in a while, all fun little games to waste your time on for a few minutes more. It really adds up all together and soon two hours have passed. I guess that's somehow the concept of this compilation.
I don't like Blackjack and I spent years playing Hold em on Pokerstars, multiple tables at a time actually, so there's another section I didn't touch yet.
There's some games I didn't play as much as I thought. The falling object puzzle is ok, but it's made for just the few minutes. I've been playing Mastermind for ages back in the day and had a board game revival with my brother a few years back, before I downloaded an app version on my mobile more recently. But the game is there and it's a good chance I'll stick to it later.
That's how much the Clubhouse Games compilation has to offer. Like, I really never played much Solitaire, but one day I clicked on Klondike Solitaire and kept returning almost any day for a month straight. Sometimes 15 minutes at once, sometimes hours while listening Mostrich Mixtapes on Spotify. And that's already a lot more than I played all the backlogged sale items and freebies I never touched, just for one of the included 51 games!
That's the deal here, you get 51 games, most of them on their own maybe worth a buck or two on the eShop. Some of them you'll like, some of them you don't. But in this bundle, at least if you got it for a good price, you'll probably save money on the ones you like in that calculation and get all the other games on top. And if the Ubisoft servers crash too bad again, you also have a backup to play Uno with your friends. So what's to argue about?
This is not a system seller, but it's one of the casual must haves for any Switch collection. Despite you only need one cartridge to connect with your friends locally, who only need the demo, sales might have profited from Covid, as playing online, that requires the full version on all ends, is a most welcome option these days, when developers like the ones from Boomerang Fu sadly still miss out.
One thing I miss here is a good Pinball machine, one thing I still need for my Switch. And just like Clubhouse Games introduced me to Klondike Solitaire, it also raised the question if there's more Golf or Pool games to check out. Seems like it wasn't just plenty wasted hours, but as stripped the games might appear, actually fun and more to come with this compilation and maybe other games I wouldn't have looked for.
Clubhouse Games that way isn't that one AAA blockbuster ruling your life for a couple of days or weeks, but it's a compilation of some little fun games and some the pristine epitome of play, that will probably end up being booted every once in a while as long as I will have my Switch.
Psycho Pinball
1994
Being a mechanical sensation, Pinball machines had to compete with video games at the arcades and though developers tried to implement new functions maybe exactly the increasing cost for more complicated maintenance led to the cease of existence. There must have been a general interest in the gameplay otherwise as there constantly was software for home consoles and computers, trying to emulate the fun to be had with Pinball cabinets.
It's possible more recent computers are capable of an almost perfect recapture, but there's a reason even today enthusiasts are restoring Pinball cabinets and some of them are making them accessible through clubs and museums to work their charme as an attraction. In fact, just a few hours ago, in preparation of my next big arcade trip in May, I stumbled over the featurette for a new Pulp Fiction machine and looking at the details made me realize the fascination for physically moving parts again.
Creating a Pinball video game can't provide that amongst all the realism, but the further you go back in time, the bigger had been the problems to depict a realistic table at all. Pinball Dreams for the Amiga might have been state of the art during the era for instance, but how much reason is there to revisit this game today? I might simultaneously have been playing Revenge of the Gator on my Gameboy back in the day, because it was my option for a Pinball video game on the then recent mobile device and we could take from this that these games rather function as a status quo.
Some of you might already remember I was rarely playing Mega Drive games in the nineties, because most of us had taken the Amiga to SNES route, so you might anticipate with the question why on earth would I enjoy a game like Codemasters' Psycho Pinball that much in retrospect then?
The answer in short is: Because they've gotten something right.
I was just recently playing the Pokemon Pinball games and that Disney's The Little Mermaid II: Pinball Frenzy to reassure me enough in saying a good Pinball video game was created under the awareness it is not a real table. So what does that mean?
Well, I found Psycho Pinball, when I was looking for alternatives to Sonic Spinball, that had disappointed me with its gameplay/physics, even though I liked the idea. I could later find out that an almost similar concept with better execution would convince me in the form of Yoku's Island Express. But a couple of years ago, I was specifically researching hidden gems I might have missed due to my ignorance of Sega during the console war, when there also had been monetary reasons to focus on one platform only.
It seems Codemasters' Psycho Pinball had been a UK or European exclusive anyway, so a huge part of you readers might possibly have missed it too, back then. Codemasters had been known for their Dizzy games and Micro Machines already. They would then later move on to create the TOCA and Colin McRae Rally games, some of my absolute favorite racers on the Sony Playstation. They had actually published Advanced Pinball Simulator in 1988, so maybe another Pinball wasn't exotic in their roster, but let me assure you it's no comparison at all.
Knowing Pinball Dreams the selection of four tables in Psycho Pinball isn't much of a surprise. There's a horror, a western and an underwater theme, all three well thought through tables fun to play on their own, but mostly as training for the fourth, Psycho, that is a complete table, but will have portals to the other ones. Until now, I've probably played hundreds of hours on Psycho, quite a lot at first, but I wheel this game out every other month for years now.
Psycho Pinball for me has just the right amount of craziness on a more or less traditional Pinball layout, because it doesn't try to add too much, like for instance the aforementioned Pokemon Pinball, that's rather limited on the Pinball, so it tries to keep you occupied on the catching and developing of Pokemon, which is a nice touch, but something I'd rather pick up a Pokemon game for and not a Pinball game.
On the contrary, Psycho Pinball has got enough Pinball mechanics to explore the triggering of events on each table. And it totally has the physics for that, which is essential. As a Pinball wizard, you neither need a perfect body nor a perfect soul, but if one thing, you wanna have control. Tilting is a helpful option, but it even feels right to save the ball with the outermost tip of your flipper.
Whilst the scrolling is quite a decent emulation of your view following the ball, there sure is a learning curve from chaotic attempts of keeping the ball in play to increasing highscore chances intentionally. Complemented by minigames on the old school screen or inserts of simple platformer mazes there's enough variability to make the hunt for a score of at least 100000000 most enjoyable.
Psycho Pinball is also fast enough, which is a huge problem with a lot of Pinball video games in general. Often enough the scrolling, if there even is some, isn't smooth enough and the ball just doesn't behave right. In Psycho Pinball even launching the ball feels like you're actually pulling back a spring mechanism and every curve or bounce feels like it should be that way.
I'm avoiding the word authentic, because within the limitations of a Mega Drive Psycho Pinball does a great job at creating an illusion, but there's at least the cost of graphical brilliance. The squeaky score is something not everybody can handle, but I actually think it's quite appropriate thinking of it as an overdriven speaker at a noisy arcade. The graphics appear rather pragmatic, probably aware that too many fancy details would rather slow down the processor, but it is actually the speed and dedication to playability that makes you forget about that swiftly.
In fact, the clear design adds to the orientation during fast bounces and aiming for the Jackpot, emphasized by increased tension of the soundtrack when you've completed the letters for "Psycho", probably works best the way it is. Psycho Pinball even today is addictive and just playing it again, I didn't even realize an hour had passed instantly.
Aiming for the preset highscores is doable by the way, but will need some warming up, because Psycho Pinball doesn't throw points at you for nothing. I remember having played once on an ancient Pinball cabinet my then girlfriend's father owned and on that you hardly scored more than a few thousand.
With more complicated targets an upscaling in numbers makes sense, but scoring almost 3 billion for instance on my first play of the mentioned Little Mermaid Pinball for Gameboy Color was just as ridiculous as that one time I left credits in the Star Trek TNG cabinet, because I didn't manage to lose within the twenty or so minutes we waited for our takeaway food. Just like the person who had left some balls for me to pick up on. They probably didn't make much money with the cabinet at that diner.
That's just one of the many things Psycho Pinball does right, I guess. Scoring the first ten million as a beginner seems like a hard task, but the more you learn the mechanics, the better you get at combining events, increasing your bonus and scoring at mini games. It's sheer pleasurable excitement realizing to be in the zone to beat the next highscore and if there's one thing missing, it's a battery in the cartridge to actually save your success.
But that's not a very bitter pill to swallow in trade for the awesome game Psycho Pinball is. I can understand if you're not much into this kind of gaming or you're more after the state of the art simulation, that this isn't the game for you. But if you're interested in good Pinball games check it out. Especially for the Mega Drive, and I've been playing pretty much any Pinball there is for the console, it is as good as it gets.
It's possible more recent computers are capable of an almost perfect recapture, but there's a reason even today enthusiasts are restoring Pinball cabinets and some of them are making them accessible through clubs and museums to work their charme as an attraction. In fact, just a few hours ago, in preparation of my next big arcade trip in May, I stumbled over the featurette for a new Pulp Fiction machine and looking at the details made me realize the fascination for physically moving parts again.
Creating a Pinball video game can't provide that amongst all the realism, but the further you go back in time, the bigger had been the problems to depict a realistic table at all. Pinball Dreams for the Amiga might have been state of the art during the era for instance, but how much reason is there to revisit this game today? I might simultaneously have been playing Revenge of the Gator on my Gameboy back in the day, because it was my option for a Pinball video game on the then recent mobile device and we could take from this that these games rather function as a status quo.
Some of you might already remember I was rarely playing Mega Drive games in the nineties, because most of us had taken the Amiga to SNES route, so you might anticipate with the question why on earth would I enjoy a game like Codemasters' Psycho Pinball that much in retrospect then?
The answer in short is: Because they've gotten something right.
I was just recently playing the Pokemon Pinball games and that Disney's The Little Mermaid II: Pinball Frenzy to reassure me enough in saying a good Pinball video game was created under the awareness it is not a real table. So what does that mean?
Well, I found Psycho Pinball, when I was looking for alternatives to Sonic Spinball, that had disappointed me with its gameplay/physics, even though I liked the idea. I could later find out that an almost similar concept with better execution would convince me in the form of Yoku's Island Express. But a couple of years ago, I was specifically researching hidden gems I might have missed due to my ignorance of Sega during the console war, when there also had been monetary reasons to focus on one platform only.
It seems Codemasters' Psycho Pinball had been a UK or European exclusive anyway, so a huge part of you readers might possibly have missed it too, back then. Codemasters had been known for their Dizzy games and Micro Machines already. They would then later move on to create the TOCA and Colin McRae Rally games, some of my absolute favorite racers on the Sony Playstation. They had actually published Advanced Pinball Simulator in 1988, so maybe another Pinball wasn't exotic in their roster, but let me assure you it's no comparison at all.
Knowing Pinball Dreams the selection of four tables in Psycho Pinball isn't much of a surprise. There's a horror, a western and an underwater theme, all three well thought through tables fun to play on their own, but mostly as training for the fourth, Psycho, that is a complete table, but will have portals to the other ones. Until now, I've probably played hundreds of hours on Psycho, quite a lot at first, but I wheel this game out every other month for years now.
Psycho Pinball for me has just the right amount of craziness on a more or less traditional Pinball layout, because it doesn't try to add too much, like for instance the aforementioned Pokemon Pinball, that's rather limited on the Pinball, so it tries to keep you occupied on the catching and developing of Pokemon, which is a nice touch, but something I'd rather pick up a Pokemon game for and not a Pinball game.
On the contrary, Psycho Pinball has got enough Pinball mechanics to explore the triggering of events on each table. And it totally has the physics for that, which is essential. As a Pinball wizard, you neither need a perfect body nor a perfect soul, but if one thing, you wanna have control. Tilting is a helpful option, but it even feels right to save the ball with the outermost tip of your flipper.
Whilst the scrolling is quite a decent emulation of your view following the ball, there sure is a learning curve from chaotic attempts of keeping the ball in play to increasing highscore chances intentionally. Complemented by minigames on the old school screen or inserts of simple platformer mazes there's enough variability to make the hunt for a score of at least 100000000 most enjoyable.
Psycho Pinball is also fast enough, which is a huge problem with a lot of Pinball video games in general. Often enough the scrolling, if there even is some, isn't smooth enough and the ball just doesn't behave right. In Psycho Pinball even launching the ball feels like you're actually pulling back a spring mechanism and every curve or bounce feels like it should be that way.
I'm avoiding the word authentic, because within the limitations of a Mega Drive Psycho Pinball does a great job at creating an illusion, but there's at least the cost of graphical brilliance. The squeaky score is something not everybody can handle, but I actually think it's quite appropriate thinking of it as an overdriven speaker at a noisy arcade. The graphics appear rather pragmatic, probably aware that too many fancy details would rather slow down the processor, but it is actually the speed and dedication to playability that makes you forget about that swiftly.
In fact, the clear design adds to the orientation during fast bounces and aiming for the Jackpot, emphasized by increased tension of the soundtrack when you've completed the letters for "Psycho", probably works best the way it is. Psycho Pinball even today is addictive and just playing it again, I didn't even realize an hour had passed instantly.
Aiming for the preset highscores is doable by the way, but will need some warming up, because Psycho Pinball doesn't throw points at you for nothing. I remember having played once on an ancient Pinball cabinet my then girlfriend's father owned and on that you hardly scored more than a few thousand.
With more complicated targets an upscaling in numbers makes sense, but scoring almost 3 billion for instance on my first play of the mentioned Little Mermaid Pinball for Gameboy Color was just as ridiculous as that one time I left credits in the Star Trek TNG cabinet, because I didn't manage to lose within the twenty or so minutes we waited for our takeaway food. Just like the person who had left some balls for me to pick up on. They probably didn't make much money with the cabinet at that diner.
That's just one of the many things Psycho Pinball does right, I guess. Scoring the first ten million as a beginner seems like a hard task, but the more you learn the mechanics, the better you get at combining events, increasing your bonus and scoring at mini games. It's sheer pleasurable excitement realizing to be in the zone to beat the next highscore and if there's one thing missing, it's a battery in the cartridge to actually save your success.
But that's not a very bitter pill to swallow in trade for the awesome game Psycho Pinball is. I can understand if you're not much into this kind of gaming or you're more after the state of the art simulation, that this isn't the game for you. But if you're interested in good Pinball games check it out. Especially for the Mega Drive, and I've been playing pretty much any Pinball there is for the console, it is as good as it gets.
Zaccaria Pinball
2013
Why must there always be a tragic hero in the third row? Ok, I know I'm late to this party again, having played my old pinball simulations for ages, totally ignoring what's happening more recently. I also have to admit, that I'm not investing enough into PC hardware to keep track with the state of the art in general and I actually don't have to, because most games I'm interested in are old enough or not very performance hungry. I did know of the Pinball FX family though and have heard of other projects, but Zaccaria Pinball wasn't amongst them.
Could be because it still seems to be early access on Steam, which makes me wonder why I found Zaccaria Pinball on Nintendo Switch recently, but having not seen Pinball FX/FX3 or Pinball Arcade pop up on the e-store as well when I was looking for the genre, I'm wondering about the quality of my searches in general anyway. With any of the three platforms coming with at least one free table I was having a blast nonetheless and having fun with the HD rumble on my pro controller and the OLED screen in vertical, I was also beginning to buy DLCs.
And here's where the tragic journey begins, the reason I'm picking Zaccaria Pinball as my review subject at this very moment, but let's please emphasize first that it's actually me spending dough on a free platform to buy everything extra for. Yeah, that's not me, except for deals on Capcom Arcade Stadium for instance, because I did find some sales for Pinball FX3 and though I don't see me buying individual tables for bloody 15€ to use on the recent Pinball FX, I just had to spend another tenner on the FX3 Williams three-pack containing Attack from Mars, the machine I was doing two hour train rides to play back in the nineties.
Given that favorite pinball tables can be very autobiographical, I actually appreciate at least a split to affordable bundles, but on the other hand I would maybe be interested in more tables, would I have the option for a demo that the Switch versions of both Pinball FX and Pinball Arcade don't offer. It's another huge problem Pinball Arcade lost a part of their licenses, so my only chance to access the AC/DC table for instance was ordering the Stern Pinball Arcade package sold individually. I still hope the code in box version will work when it finally arrives.
However, Zaccaria Pinball did impress me instantly with next to the two free tables every other installment is playable as a demo. They have nothing to hide and that's for a good reason. Zaccaria Pinball is a simulation dream. You've got everything essential from the competitor's systems,but you can go much deeper by setting ambient light or wear on the table next to physics and camera. It can take minutes to study the possibilities before even thinking of playing and the attention to detail is plainly awesome. Having played, you get statistics for each ball's points and the distance they rolled. You immediately recognize Magic Pixel Games love what they're doing.
I'm willing to believe simulations of their signature tables are authentic in design as much as they are in physics, but here starts that issue because of which I'm not dumping all my money into Zaccaria Pinball right now. What they do have is fifties to sixties style retro tables I'm not sure existed. Then you've got the original electromagnetic and solid state Zaccaria tables from the seventies and eighties I can't remember having played, though it's possible long ago at a bar or something. I just don't have a relation to those tables with typical themes from sports to space etc. and as much as I love pragmatic old school designs, none of them catches my attention enough.
Whilst you can set the gap in the middle to a more modern narrow spacing on the old tables, Zaccaria Pinball actually offers remakes of their popular themes not like fantasy tables by Zen, but more like an authentic built as if the company had released them at the beginning of the nineties when their production had ceased. Those tables use elements that could just work as well as a real table and they're really fun to play. Same goes for deluxe versions that are comparable to Pinball FX interpretations of cabinets like Fish Tales, where you have digitally animated figures enhancing the design.
It really seems like they're doing everything right, having something in store for any generation of classic pinball fans and though they might not have the captivating music and knocking on the remakes, they still manage to add more familiar elements without denying typical leveled structures for instance. I appreciate this a lot, but do they want to be a sleeper like that?
Licensing is a very big issue in this segment and on one hand Magic Pixel Games are my heroes for creating their own level of simulation, but on the other it was very brave to enter competition just with one catalog available. I'm sure there are ecstatic fans who are very satisfied, but in this niche of gaming, Zaccaria Pinball occurs to be a whole niche on its own, for that alone I'm willing to spend a few Euros.
They're not even asking too much, I think. The contents of the packs between 5 and 10€ still appear generous, even though single tables can be purchased for between 2 and 3€ each. So what Zaccaria Pinball at least is doing is showing how it's done to the other big players Pinball Arcade (who need to really be revived) and Pinball FX who are going in the wrong direction right now.
But of course right now I want to play tables I've once found in the wild or I'm still looking forward to. It so happens I have a huge history with cabs from the Williams sets on Pinball FX3 and I've just played the Ghostbusters table in the Stern pack a few weeks back at the Dutch Pinball Museum in Rotterdam. I'm still looking for Data East stuff as a simulation, especially the Batman 1989 license that I visited a local ice cream parlor for after school as a kid. But I doubt Zaccaria Pinball will ever go that direction.
So in conclusion this is probably the best game I'm not going to play very soon, which is sad, but Zaccaria Pinball seems like built on a limitation from the start being nothing but an impulse as a great example maybe, but I don't feel the table have enough charisma to carry the game on their own. It's great for fans and except for slight bugs of caught balls on at least one remake, which might actually rather add to realism, it looks finished enough to me to play it. On Switch that is, of course.
I don't know if we can encourage Magic Pixel Games to just use the same engine on a follow up simulator for other licensed tables, but we should at least honor them with a purchase or two. As soon as I'm back on budget I will start buying everything just to enlarge the collection and send my thanks for an operation that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense but that they mastered anyway. It's maybe only adding to the variety of my tables, but when I'll start Zaccaria Pinball, I'll sure enjoy it.
Perhaps you like other of my related backloggd reviews like
Psycho Pinball
Stern Pinball Arcade
Pachinko Challenger
Puzzle Uo Poko
Could be because it still seems to be early access on Steam, which makes me wonder why I found Zaccaria Pinball on Nintendo Switch recently, but having not seen Pinball FX/FX3 or Pinball Arcade pop up on the e-store as well when I was looking for the genre, I'm wondering about the quality of my searches in general anyway. With any of the three platforms coming with at least one free table I was having a blast nonetheless and having fun with the HD rumble on my pro controller and the OLED screen in vertical, I was also beginning to buy DLCs.
And here's where the tragic journey begins, the reason I'm picking Zaccaria Pinball as my review subject at this very moment, but let's please emphasize first that it's actually me spending dough on a free platform to buy everything extra for. Yeah, that's not me, except for deals on Capcom Arcade Stadium for instance, because I did find some sales for Pinball FX3 and though I don't see me buying individual tables for bloody 15€ to use on the recent Pinball FX, I just had to spend another tenner on the FX3 Williams three-pack containing Attack from Mars, the machine I was doing two hour train rides to play back in the nineties.
Given that favorite pinball tables can be very autobiographical, I actually appreciate at least a split to affordable bundles, but on the other hand I would maybe be interested in more tables, would I have the option for a demo that the Switch versions of both Pinball FX and Pinball Arcade don't offer. It's another huge problem Pinball Arcade lost a part of their licenses, so my only chance to access the AC/DC table for instance was ordering the Stern Pinball Arcade package sold individually. I still hope the code in box version will work when it finally arrives.
However, Zaccaria Pinball did impress me instantly with next to the two free tables every other installment is playable as a demo. They have nothing to hide and that's for a good reason. Zaccaria Pinball is a simulation dream. You've got everything essential from the competitor's systems,but you can go much deeper by setting ambient light or wear on the table next to physics and camera. It can take minutes to study the possibilities before even thinking of playing and the attention to detail is plainly awesome. Having played, you get statistics for each ball's points and the distance they rolled. You immediately recognize Magic Pixel Games love what they're doing.
I'm willing to believe simulations of their signature tables are authentic in design as much as they are in physics, but here starts that issue because of which I'm not dumping all my money into Zaccaria Pinball right now. What they do have is fifties to sixties style retro tables I'm not sure existed. Then you've got the original electromagnetic and solid state Zaccaria tables from the seventies and eighties I can't remember having played, though it's possible long ago at a bar or something. I just don't have a relation to those tables with typical themes from sports to space etc. and as much as I love pragmatic old school designs, none of them catches my attention enough.
Whilst you can set the gap in the middle to a more modern narrow spacing on the old tables, Zaccaria Pinball actually offers remakes of their popular themes not like fantasy tables by Zen, but more like an authentic built as if the company had released them at the beginning of the nineties when their production had ceased. Those tables use elements that could just work as well as a real table and they're really fun to play. Same goes for deluxe versions that are comparable to Pinball FX interpretations of cabinets like Fish Tales, where you have digitally animated figures enhancing the design.
It really seems like they're doing everything right, having something in store for any generation of classic pinball fans and though they might not have the captivating music and knocking on the remakes, they still manage to add more familiar elements without denying typical leveled structures for instance. I appreciate this a lot, but do they want to be a sleeper like that?
Licensing is a very big issue in this segment and on one hand Magic Pixel Games are my heroes for creating their own level of simulation, but on the other it was very brave to enter competition just with one catalog available. I'm sure there are ecstatic fans who are very satisfied, but in this niche of gaming, Zaccaria Pinball occurs to be a whole niche on its own, for that alone I'm willing to spend a few Euros.
They're not even asking too much, I think. The contents of the packs between 5 and 10€ still appear generous, even though single tables can be purchased for between 2 and 3€ each. So what Zaccaria Pinball at least is doing is showing how it's done to the other big players Pinball Arcade (who need to really be revived) and Pinball FX who are going in the wrong direction right now.
But of course right now I want to play tables I've once found in the wild or I'm still looking forward to. It so happens I have a huge history with cabs from the Williams sets on Pinball FX3 and I've just played the Ghostbusters table in the Stern pack a few weeks back at the Dutch Pinball Museum in Rotterdam. I'm still looking for Data East stuff as a simulation, especially the Batman 1989 license that I visited a local ice cream parlor for after school as a kid. But I doubt Zaccaria Pinball will ever go that direction.
So in conclusion this is probably the best game I'm not going to play very soon, which is sad, but Zaccaria Pinball seems like built on a limitation from the start being nothing but an impulse as a great example maybe, but I don't feel the table have enough charisma to carry the game on their own. It's great for fans and except for slight bugs of caught balls on at least one remake, which might actually rather add to realism, it looks finished enough to me to play it. On Switch that is, of course.
I don't know if we can encourage Magic Pixel Games to just use the same engine on a follow up simulator for other licensed tables, but we should at least honor them with a purchase or two. As soon as I'm back on budget I will start buying everything just to enlarge the collection and send my thanks for an operation that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense but that they mastered anyway. It's maybe only adding to the variety of my tables, but when I'll start Zaccaria Pinball, I'll sure enjoy it.
Perhaps you like other of my related backloggd reviews like
Psycho Pinball
Stern Pinball Arcade
Pachinko Challenger
Puzzle Uo Poko
Everybody 1-2-Switch
2023
1-2-Switch worked well as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch, demonstrating a lot of the unique ways the console could be played as well as the unique tech in the joy cons (HD rumble and IR sensor). It has obviously sold well enough for Nintendo to experiment with a sequel but another tech demoy experience 7 years into the Switch lifespan just doesn't cut it.
They did a similar thing with Wii Play and Wii Play Motion on Wii but those had the benefit of coming bundled with a controller to sweeten the deal, Everybody 1-2-Switch on the other hand has been chucked out at half the price of a regular Switch game without really offering any incentive to pick it up.
This is another collection of shallow minigames for a multiplayer only experience. The twist here is that by using your phone as a controller you can have up to 100 people playing at a time, which is pretty cool but when the games on offer are as shallow as a dried up puddle, it doesn't really offer much of a reason to gather that many people.
You have stuff like a game where you call an alien by moving in a rhythm, or trying to count to a specific number before flipping a cooking ingredient and these are like, cool, neat, they're functional but calling them fun is a stretch.
The best game on offer here is one where you hide your joy con in a room and the other team can press buttons on their joy con to make the hidden joy con vibrate to help find it. It's ripped straight out of Wii Party sure, but it's a game that is really fun, especially when you have a ton of places to try and hide your joy con.
My biggest issue with the game is it's all wrapped up in that corny over the top patronising American style voice over. You know the one where they really want you to have a good time and you can just imagine them asking you over and over if you're having a good time while telling you the lamest of puns and everyone else is putting on that fake over the top laughter. It's the type of thing I feel like you can only really enjoy when you're in a specific mood with a specific group of people. Heck having a horse mascot called MC Horace perfectly sums up the vibe of the whole thing.
Everybody 1-2-Switch is a functional game that is probably best enjoyed in the right setting with the right group of people and possibly a generous amount of alcohol. Otherwise it's a pretty shallow offering of mostly mundane games that get old pretty fast
They did a similar thing with Wii Play and Wii Play Motion on Wii but those had the benefit of coming bundled with a controller to sweeten the deal, Everybody 1-2-Switch on the other hand has been chucked out at half the price of a regular Switch game without really offering any incentive to pick it up.
This is another collection of shallow minigames for a multiplayer only experience. The twist here is that by using your phone as a controller you can have up to 100 people playing at a time, which is pretty cool but when the games on offer are as shallow as a dried up puddle, it doesn't really offer much of a reason to gather that many people.
You have stuff like a game where you call an alien by moving in a rhythm, or trying to count to a specific number before flipping a cooking ingredient and these are like, cool, neat, they're functional but calling them fun is a stretch.
The best game on offer here is one where you hide your joy con in a room and the other team can press buttons on their joy con to make the hidden joy con vibrate to help find it. It's ripped straight out of Wii Party sure, but it's a game that is really fun, especially when you have a ton of places to try and hide your joy con.
My biggest issue with the game is it's all wrapped up in that corny over the top patronising American style voice over. You know the one where they really want you to have a good time and you can just imagine them asking you over and over if you're having a good time while telling you the lamest of puns and everyone else is putting on that fake over the top laughter. It's the type of thing I feel like you can only really enjoy when you're in a specific mood with a specific group of people. Heck having a horse mascot called MC Horace perfectly sums up the vibe of the whole thing.
Everybody 1-2-Switch is a functional game that is probably best enjoyed in the right setting with the right group of people and possibly a generous amount of alcohol. Otherwise it's a pretty shallow offering of mostly mundane games that get old pretty fast
I actually found out I was bisexual because I read Gay Ace Attorney fan-fiction for a laugh and realized after reading like 10 of them that maybe I wasn't reading it for a laugh anymore.
So you could say these games mean a lot to me.
So you could say these games mean a lot to me.
Snoot Game
2021
Yes, I played the whole thing. All 4 endings. Having played it now, I'm totally unsurprised at the positive reception here (and on the broader internet) due to being written halfway-decently moment to moment, but man, y'all got fuckin psyopped into thinking a game about “fixing" an enby into being your doting submissive wife was good!
Ok, short review out of the way: Snoot Game is a parody/anti-fan-game of Goodbye Volcano High, a game which, as I am writing this review, is still a month or two off from release. GVH looks to be a story-driven graphic adventure game in the same indie niche as games like Night in the Woods and Life is Strange, and despite not being out, has earned quite a lot of ire from places on the net like 4chan. This revulsion is due to the fact... that it's a queer, furry, narrative-heavy game that showed up for a mere 1 minute and 35 seconds in some livestreamed PS5 showcase event. This bitter outrage and derision at something so mundane is nothing out of the ordinary for chanboards, but what followed was, at least in terms of scale.
Enter: Snoot Game. I’m not sure at what point in the development process they decided to focus on the de-transing and courting of Fang over making a “based” version of GVH, but in terms of playtime, this switch seems to happen somewhere about an hour or two into the game. This first section is pretty obviously terrible in a multitude of ways that’re impossible to ignore: the first line of text is a January 6th joke, which is followed up within a minute by the MC (named “Anon”) attempting to troll on a chanboard on his phone, there’s a teacher who speaks with a “comically” over the top Japanese accent (not pictured: the protagonist being like “huh? I can’t understand a single word this guy is saying…”). There is also a lot of blatant trans and enby-phobia on display in this section, from the protagonist accusing Fang of identifying as NB for attention to the constant mental misgendering of Fang with she/her pronouns (a trend which carries across pretty much the entire game, except for a short stint in one of the bad endings). Fang is shown as being short-tempered, rebellious, and is part of a band that sucks at playing music. Their bandmates and Fang’s only other friends at the school are a fentanyl addict, and a manipulative (rolls eyes) SJW Feminazi girl who goes around beating people up to let off her anger. This section also contains probably the single best “gotcha” moment against the writers of this game that I have ever seen within the span of only two textboxes, in the form of the MC complaining about the grammar of using singular “they” while also making two grammatical errors themselves within a single sentence.
But this section is just the opener and is, for the most part, the most spectacularly (read: obviously) bad Snoot Game gets. I think a lot of the people who shit on this game played or saw someone play this section, threw up their hands, and moved on. But not me! However, contrary to popular opinion that the rest of this game is “actually surprisingly heartwarming”, It’s also really bad, but in a much subtler and more insidious way.
There are lots of little things in which the game attempts to force you to accept its worldview to function. I already mentioned the internal monologue only referring to Fang with she/her, but as the story progresses, basically everyone in the game except the most "harmful influences" (Fang's 2 friends I mentioned earlier) switches to using she/her with no fanfare, including Fang's own brother. By the time you meet Fang’s parents everyone’s already switched to it, but they throw in the caveat of deadnaming Fang as well and reiterating that Fang is “just going through a phase” (something that the game later just tells you outright is true).
The sole SJW character from earlier, Trish, is probably the most blatantly propaganda-ish—she is also the only black-coded character, you know, just by happenstance (also Anon says she texts in “ebonics” in ending 1? which just doesn’t make any sense under the worldbuilding here, where species is just a substitute for race mostly? Very odd to fuck up your worldbuilding just to have your MC call something “ebonics”). In a particularly telling sequence of events, she pulls off a heist to embarrass Anon in front of everyone at school for the sole purpose of outcasting him from the band’s friend group, a tactic which succeeds at embarrassing Anon but fails at cleanly removing him from the friend group, as he takes Fang with him, something that Trish is shown at multiple points to be extremely angry about. This cements her (again, probably the only vaguely actively queer-positive main character left in the story at this point) as the “villain”, or at least, the single worst influence on Fang as a person.
There are 4 endings in Snoot Game (Spoilers from here on out! If you care about that, which you shouldn’t.), and only 2 in which Fang remains nonbinary. Of these endings, there is one where Fang shoots up the school, and the other leaves Fang (presumably) depressed, “looking like a junkie”, and with (gasp) tattoos, black lipstick, and a shaved head. During this second ending, which takes place 4 or 5 years after the events of most of the game, Anon thinks to himself that “I couldn’t save her (sic). Why would I save her? In her infinite talent can’t she see she’s a dump?”. Aside from the fact that all of Anon’s conclusions in ending 2 about Fang’s mental state are assumed to be true despite him having only seen them in passing at a restaurant (maybe Fang was just having a bad day or something, you never know), the only 2 endings which allow Fang to be nonbinary are also shown to be the “worst”. Take note of this!
In the other 2 endings, Fang switches back to using their old name (again, this is 4chan-written, so despite everyone else having birthnames like “Naser” and “Trish”, Fang’s birth name is “Lucy”. Real creative.) In these endings, Fang tells you something between that they were pretending to be nonbinary for attention, or that Trish drove them into it. (sidenote: Anon is able to switch almost instantly to calling Fang “Lucy” in both of these endings, despite only ever having known them as Fang. And yet switching names is simultaneously shown as something too confusing and hard for Fang’s parents to do. Interesting.) These are also the “best” endings. In one, Anon reunites with Fang years later and they have settled into a “motherly but still available” role helping out kids at the local church, so basically, the tradwife ending. And in the other one, and also the “best” ending in the game, Anon and Fang date for the rest of the year, break things off temporarily when Anon attends college, reunite after a time-skip and get married. Also, Fang is a schoolteacher in this one, which further reinforces the idea that for Fang to be happy, they need to not only detransition, but they need to take up the “traditionally female” role of being a caretaker. (Also, in one of the endings, you get the context that before Fang “started this whole non-binary deal” they were happier then too, so there’s another data point to correlate, I guess.)
Look—there’s nothing inherently wrong about writing a wish fulfillment romance story about a dominant and self-confident white guy finding his submissive caretaker white wife and living happily ever after. You do you bro. But there is something pretty fucky about presenting a traditional lifestyle as the ONLY path to happiness. And there’s something Extremely fucky about doing this by taking a queer character from someone else’s story, making your story about how de-transing them is the only way they can achieve happiness, and then releasing your story early in the hopes that your fanon interpretation supersedes whatever actually happens in the original source material.
But probably the most fucky is that a lot of this is subtextual and clearly is easily ignored by most, which allows its ideas to spread. Do not take me lightly by my saying that Snoot Game is propaganda, because it is. By word count, most of this game is just standard faire SoL wish fulfillment fantasy. Anon goes stargazing with Fang in one route, he goes to an aquarium with them in another. Normal shit. It’s just coupled with the added caveat of, you know, the whole arc of the game being dependent on the presumption of many of its characters that Fang’s trans-ness is just a phase, and that this presumption is ultimately proven correct. The shot is, (really, any number of bigotries, but most predominantly) transphobia and NB erasure, with SoL romance as a chaser. Again, really insidious shit.
This is why I feel uncomfortable giving this anything more than a 1/10. Snoot Game is generally paced well, has a lot of surprisingly decent music, and a lot of very well-done illustrations, but in service of what? Of fulfilling a delusional fantasy of “solving” someone’s trans-ness? Of spreading the idea that “if I just get them to fall in love with me, I can save them from their wicked ways (being queer)!” And of also spreading the idea that queer people are mentally ill and doomed to loneliness, lest they renounce their ways? Fuck riiiight off.
Ok, short review out of the way: Snoot Game is a parody/anti-fan-game of Goodbye Volcano High, a game which, as I am writing this review, is still a month or two off from release. GVH looks to be a story-driven graphic adventure game in the same indie niche as games like Night in the Woods and Life is Strange, and despite not being out, has earned quite a lot of ire from places on the net like 4chan. This revulsion is due to the fact... that it's a queer, furry, narrative-heavy game that showed up for a mere 1 minute and 35 seconds in some livestreamed PS5 showcase event. This bitter outrage and derision at something so mundane is nothing out of the ordinary for chanboards, but what followed was, at least in terms of scale.
Enter: Snoot Game. I’m not sure at what point in the development process they decided to focus on the de-transing and courting of Fang over making a “based” version of GVH, but in terms of playtime, this switch seems to happen somewhere about an hour or two into the game. This first section is pretty obviously terrible in a multitude of ways that’re impossible to ignore: the first line of text is a January 6th joke, which is followed up within a minute by the MC (named “Anon”) attempting to troll on a chanboard on his phone, there’s a teacher who speaks with a “comically” over the top Japanese accent (not pictured: the protagonist being like “huh? I can’t understand a single word this guy is saying…”). There is also a lot of blatant trans and enby-phobia on display in this section, from the protagonist accusing Fang of identifying as NB for attention to the constant mental misgendering of Fang with she/her pronouns (a trend which carries across pretty much the entire game, except for a short stint in one of the bad endings). Fang is shown as being short-tempered, rebellious, and is part of a band that sucks at playing music. Their bandmates and Fang’s only other friends at the school are a fentanyl addict, and a manipulative (rolls eyes) SJW Feminazi girl who goes around beating people up to let off her anger. This section also contains probably the single best “gotcha” moment against the writers of this game that I have ever seen within the span of only two textboxes, in the form of the MC complaining about the grammar of using singular “they” while also making two grammatical errors themselves within a single sentence.
But this section is just the opener and is, for the most part, the most spectacularly (read: obviously) bad Snoot Game gets. I think a lot of the people who shit on this game played or saw someone play this section, threw up their hands, and moved on. But not me! However, contrary to popular opinion that the rest of this game is “actually surprisingly heartwarming”, It’s also really bad, but in a much subtler and more insidious way.
There are lots of little things in which the game attempts to force you to accept its worldview to function. I already mentioned the internal monologue only referring to Fang with she/her, but as the story progresses, basically everyone in the game except the most "harmful influences" (Fang's 2 friends I mentioned earlier) switches to using she/her with no fanfare, including Fang's own brother. By the time you meet Fang’s parents everyone’s already switched to it, but they throw in the caveat of deadnaming Fang as well and reiterating that Fang is “just going through a phase” (something that the game later just tells you outright is true).
The sole SJW character from earlier, Trish, is probably the most blatantly propaganda-ish—she is also the only black-coded character, you know, just by happenstance (also Anon says she texts in “ebonics” in ending 1? which just doesn’t make any sense under the worldbuilding here, where species is just a substitute for race mostly? Very odd to fuck up your worldbuilding just to have your MC call something “ebonics”). In a particularly telling sequence of events, she pulls off a heist to embarrass Anon in front of everyone at school for the sole purpose of outcasting him from the band’s friend group, a tactic which succeeds at embarrassing Anon but fails at cleanly removing him from the friend group, as he takes Fang with him, something that Trish is shown at multiple points to be extremely angry about. This cements her (again, probably the only vaguely actively queer-positive main character left in the story at this point) as the “villain”, or at least, the single worst influence on Fang as a person.
There are 4 endings in Snoot Game (Spoilers from here on out! If you care about that, which you shouldn’t.), and only 2 in which Fang remains nonbinary. Of these endings, there is one where Fang shoots up the school, and the other leaves Fang (presumably) depressed, “looking like a junkie”, and with (gasp) tattoos, black lipstick, and a shaved head. During this second ending, which takes place 4 or 5 years after the events of most of the game, Anon thinks to himself that “I couldn’t save her (sic). Why would I save her? In her infinite talent can’t she see she’s a dump?”. Aside from the fact that all of Anon’s conclusions in ending 2 about Fang’s mental state are assumed to be true despite him having only seen them in passing at a restaurant (maybe Fang was just having a bad day or something, you never know), the only 2 endings which allow Fang to be nonbinary are also shown to be the “worst”. Take note of this!
In the other 2 endings, Fang switches back to using their old name (again, this is 4chan-written, so despite everyone else having birthnames like “Naser” and “Trish”, Fang’s birth name is “Lucy”. Real creative.) In these endings, Fang tells you something between that they were pretending to be nonbinary for attention, or that Trish drove them into it. (sidenote: Anon is able to switch almost instantly to calling Fang “Lucy” in both of these endings, despite only ever having known them as Fang. And yet switching names is simultaneously shown as something too confusing and hard for Fang’s parents to do. Interesting.) These are also the “best” endings. In one, Anon reunites with Fang years later and they have settled into a “motherly but still available” role helping out kids at the local church, so basically, the tradwife ending. And in the other one, and also the “best” ending in the game, Anon and Fang date for the rest of the year, break things off temporarily when Anon attends college, reunite after a time-skip and get married. Also, Fang is a schoolteacher in this one, which further reinforces the idea that for Fang to be happy, they need to not only detransition, but they need to take up the “traditionally female” role of being a caretaker. (Also, in one of the endings, you get the context that before Fang “started this whole non-binary deal” they were happier then too, so there’s another data point to correlate, I guess.)
Look—there’s nothing inherently wrong about writing a wish fulfillment romance story about a dominant and self-confident white guy finding his submissive caretaker white wife and living happily ever after. You do you bro. But there is something pretty fucky about presenting a traditional lifestyle as the ONLY path to happiness. And there’s something Extremely fucky about doing this by taking a queer character from someone else’s story, making your story about how de-transing them is the only way they can achieve happiness, and then releasing your story early in the hopes that your fanon interpretation supersedes whatever actually happens in the original source material.
But probably the most fucky is that a lot of this is subtextual and clearly is easily ignored by most, which allows its ideas to spread. Do not take me lightly by my saying that Snoot Game is propaganda, because it is. By word count, most of this game is just standard faire SoL wish fulfillment fantasy. Anon goes stargazing with Fang in one route, he goes to an aquarium with them in another. Normal shit. It’s just coupled with the added caveat of, you know, the whole arc of the game being dependent on the presumption of many of its characters that Fang’s trans-ness is just a phase, and that this presumption is ultimately proven correct. The shot is, (really, any number of bigotries, but most predominantly) transphobia and NB erasure, with SoL romance as a chaser. Again, really insidious shit.
This is why I feel uncomfortable giving this anything more than a 1/10. Snoot Game is generally paced well, has a lot of surprisingly decent music, and a lot of very well-done illustrations, but in service of what? Of fulfilling a delusional fantasy of “solving” someone’s trans-ness? Of spreading the idea that “if I just get them to fall in love with me, I can save them from their wicked ways (being queer)!” And of also spreading the idea that queer people are mentally ill and doomed to loneliness, lest they renounce their ways? Fuck riiiight off.
Walkabout Mini Golf
2020
What an incredible minigolf game at a fundamental level. The physics in this put the other 2 big minigolf games on Steam to shame, all the while being in VR. The courses are naturally more tame than the batshit something like Golf With Your Friends leans into, yet these levels all feel like a lot more thought went into them.
Queuing up with friends is also incredibly easy, the host (or any player) just needs to set the room password for a private match, the same field being used to join said lobby. If someone crashes they can rejoin where they left off, score intact (happened twice so far); at worst they may replay the hole they crashed on but with no penalty.
The scoring system is more reasonable, instead of penalizing you for stroking out you simply just, stroke out and move on. Why in the world GWYF makes stroking out an 18 total thing (also 2m time limit) is beyond me.
My only complaint is that to adjust settings such as whether or not you want smooth walking or turning, putter power etc., you need to actually enter a game to do so; you cannot adjust them from the main menu lobby.
I'll be coming back to this to 100% it (under par all courses, find all the hidden balls and get the golf clubs).
Queuing up with friends is also incredibly easy, the host (or any player) just needs to set the room password for a private match, the same field being used to join said lobby. If someone crashes they can rejoin where they left off, score intact (happened twice so far); at worst they may replay the hole they crashed on but with no penalty.
The scoring system is more reasonable, instead of penalizing you for stroking out you simply just, stroke out and move on. Why in the world GWYF makes stroking out an 18 total thing (also 2m time limit) is beyond me.
My only complaint is that to adjust settings such as whether or not you want smooth walking or turning, putter power etc., you need to actually enter a game to do so; you cannot adjust them from the main menu lobby.
I'll be coming back to this to 100% it (under par all courses, find all the hidden balls and get the golf clubs).
Subnautica
2014
The survival parts (thirst/hunger) feel a bit tacked on. Pretty quickly that entire system transforms into occasionally hoarding a few resources and cooking now and then, and health/oxygen already felt like they were doing enough for the survival aspect.
Exploration is fun - but scavenging for materials quickly grows tedious. The scavenging is fine when entering a new biome, but on the 3rd or 4th trip to go find Silver to craft some thing or another it's not that interesting. I like the idea of base building, but when I know it's predicated by walking around the ocean floor for an hour picking up scrap metal, it's hard to want to engage with.
The game is kind of relaxing otherwise. I think when you strip away all the excess you have a creative take on the metroidvania, dividing up an open sea into biomes feels really organic and neat. The dangerous sea animals worked well for a more tense atmosphere.
Overall it feels kind of bloated. Which maybe makes sense if it's been having updates for almost 10 years..? I know Early Access is a great marketing move, but I can't help but feel like when you let players design games you end up with bloated experiences (as the game starts to become a container for multiple peoples' desires rather than just a few designers).
Exploration is fun - but scavenging for materials quickly grows tedious. The scavenging is fine when entering a new biome, but on the 3rd or 4th trip to go find Silver to craft some thing or another it's not that interesting. I like the idea of base building, but when I know it's predicated by walking around the ocean floor for an hour picking up scrap metal, it's hard to want to engage with.
The game is kind of relaxing otherwise. I think when you strip away all the excess you have a creative take on the metroidvania, dividing up an open sea into biomes feels really organic and neat. The dangerous sea animals worked well for a more tense atmosphere.
Overall it feels kind of bloated. Which maybe makes sense if it's been having updates for almost 10 years..? I know Early Access is a great marketing move, but I can't help but feel like when you let players design games you end up with bloated experiences (as the game starts to become a container for multiple peoples' desires rather than just a few designers).