[April Fools 2023]

”I’m in love. I’m floating, I’m happy… Ahh, the world is so beautiful.”
-
On the surface, you may be inclined to write off 2005’s masterpiece Marry Me, Misato! as nothing but a cute love story, strewn with the longing desires of a boy way out of his league on his journey to marry Misato. This read is certainly the easy one, but it's understandable that the reader may come to a conclusion such as that. The deliberately faceless protagonist makes it a natural instinct for the reader to slip into their shoes, and their journey is a selfless one. He yearns not to satisfy his own desires through matrimony, but to fulfill the needs of his one true love. However, this read would be missing the trees for the forest, as I believe something far more poignant lies within the text.

At the heart of Marry Me, Misato! lies a greek tragedy for the ages. The tale of a love that can never be. A tale of a boy throwing everything away in pursuit of a mistress who remains ambivalent toward his existence right up to the very end. And perhaps most tragic of all, a tale that rings far too close to our mortal realm to be fairly maligned as anything resembling “fiction”.

Whether we admit it or not, far too many of us have found ourselves longing for love from beyond a computer screen that we should not, nay, CANNOT pursue. Whether that be someone from within our realm who we wish to lay, or a fictional character that exists only within the confines of hand-drawn animated cells, flashing 24 times before our eyes with every passing second of our attention. We know deep down this lust is sinful, yet we pursue regardless. This is not an emotion that has gone unnoticed by the author, as illustrated towards the end of the adventure wherein the protagonist has a rare moment of lucidity: “I thought I was happy, but I am devastated. All my plans to marry Misato were in vain.” There’s a clear understanding of the psychological impact this type of longing can do to a person - should they push themselves to such extremes anyway - yet in a moment framed initially as newfound positive twist of fate, the boy shifts course for one final time and devises a new plan to get just what he desires. What may be seen as a moment of grand victory after a minor trip on the curb can only be described with context as tragic. Despite the courteous feather capping off the adventure in the tasteful arial-fonted “THE END” blazen on screen after our hero's revelation, this this just as shallow as the blank screen that lay beyond the text. This is not a resolution, it’s simply the first loop of a newfound never-ending story, and one with no true conclusion for this boy if his final statement is anything to go by.

As stated previously, it's easy to slip into a trance with Marry Me, Misato! and the narrative it lays out (Who DOESN’T want to marry Misato, after all) but admitting to such hypnosis simply proves its thesis to be correct. There is no clear end in sight for such an adventure: all that lies beyond is a desert of blistering pain and betrayal from the one you think you hold closest to your heart. It may seem fruitful now to chase that woman in red with the soft blue hair dancing in the starlight-draped park, but calling it a wasteful venture would be generous. There’s more beyond the curved pixels on your screen resembling a woman, and unless you pull that plug, you’ll never face that grim reflection on the other side. There’s plenty of things to love in this world, plenty of fish in the sea, but none of them are Misato. None of them can be Misato.
-
“I love you, Misato!”

Hi-Fi Rush is absolutely fucking wild. I can’t believe how high this game shot up for me from the word go all the way through till the end. Legit seeing the trailer it looked like a fun time but I wasn’t sure if I would adore it or not like a lot of people were but I’m totally all the fuck on board with every single thing this game is going for on every single solitary level that it possibly could be operating at. This was tailor made for me in ways I seriously wasn’t even expecting.

I’m a firm believer in the connection between rhythm games and action games and how in sync they really are. Action games like Devil May Cry and Sekiro have a kind of natural rhythm to how they work and generally operate. More than just pattern recognition it’s about the rhythm of enemies, their patterns, learning their moves, learning timing and opportunities for attack with them. It’s a kind of flow that when you really get into something you may or may not even fully think about as it's happening. I remember playing DMC3 years and years ago at this point and even though I was struggling, I still was managing every now and again to get into a flow state in some encounters. I was getting openings right and maneuvering where needed, I was switching up what I needed to and trying a bunch of weapons and ideas in combat, it was hitting just right, I was feeling the games beat.

Hi-Fi Rush brings this idea completely to the forefront of its gameplay and helps you better visualize it. EVERYTHING is on beat, EVERYTHING is set to that rhythm and EVERYTHING around you is there to help you better visualize and understand the timings you are trying to get down. Enemies attack on the beat of the very excellent music that’s always bumping along, you get movement boosts and damage boosts if you hit to the rhythm, things around you groove and gyrate to the beat as the songs blast away. There’s just constantly so much energy going on. What they manage to do with sound and syncing it up with the animations is genuinely impressive ass shit to me and they find really fun and creative ways to keep using it and manages to keep surprising you as the game goes well along its merry rebellious journey. Like I totally get why people are more directly comparing this to rhythm games but honestly I feel like action games inherently have this kinda stuff within them! This one just makes it more obvious in a way that’s both fun and honestly fairly easy to understand!

I absolutely adore dynamic music systems in games but especially within action games like DMC5 and its vocals coming out the higher your style rankings go up and things like that. Or the way Metal Gear Rising’s vocals come in and out depending on how a fight is going or depending on what is happening within that fight. I eat that shit up and this game is a bit like that but all the time everywhere with everything and I just think that kicks major fucking ass.

Combat feels so fucking great too! While I do wish there was weapon variety it more than makes up for it with good enemy variety, assists, chips, special moves and just the range of attacks and ways you can really fuck a robot up. Hitting enemies on beat and dodging within the right timings feels so fucking good too. It encourages you to time everything to the best of your abilities along the beat but it’s not forced if you’re struggling with it at all! It feels very forgiving in that regard which I found to be really nice even if I felt like I breezed through it a bit cause of that. But honestly I could totally see this being an action game that helps get someone into action games because of that ease of understanding and forgiveness! I think it could definitely help someone understand that natural rhythm and flow of action games and their general designs if they may be struggling with the concepts or mechanical ideas of them.

Everything surrounding that wonderful mechanical package is also just as wonderfully put together and considered. The story is like a lost 2005 Cartoon Network show that never hit the air until Tango Gameworks, those brave heroes, leaked it online for all of us to see. Except you have to buy it, or pay for game pass, whatever the point is, it's a fun time. It’s got goofy doofy ass vibes, Chai is a loveable dumbass wannabe rockstar who basically had me cackling almost anytime he opened his mouth, the rest of the gang perfectly plays off of his shenanigans and helps seriously elevate some goofy ass bits. They’re not the deepest characters but like who fucking cares they’re fun and they all fit the vibe and tone of the kind of story and vibe that this is. The villains are much the same, goofy ass jokes and all, who absolutely wanna fuck shit up and the way most of the licensed music is saved for fighting against a good chunk of them is absolutely perfecto. When Nine Inch Nails, The Prodigy and fuckin The Joy Formidable started playing I lost it. This game’s OST is sick as fuck. The original tracks made for the game also rock absolute shit. The art direction is absolutely gorgeous and pops so perfectly, the fun transitions to the 2D animated cutscenes and back again is masterful, the little notes you end up finding everywhere make me laugh my ass off pretty much every time.

This is a game with so much personality, so much pure soul within every fiber of its being. Everything about this game radiates love and genuine joy, I basically couldn’t stop smiling while playing it. Every time I would leave for work I’d wanna come back and play more Hi-Fi Rush, every new level I would try my best to get the base metronome/beat down, I wanted to learn more about this game and delve deeper into its vibes, mechanics and fun ass characters. It’s just so fucking excellently done. Tango Gameworks have absofuckinglutely outdone themselves with this one like holy shit. This is at bare minimum going into my top 10 action games of all time most likely. I fucking a d o r e this shit what a banger. Absolutely going to try to play this again in between something to try to get the combat down even better and better as time goes on. What a wonderful fuckin surprise.

I’m also just incredibly biased towards it because anything that uses music like this and dedicates itself this hard to its concept straight up will win my heart pretty much forever.

I wouldn't describe myself as an Elder Scrolls fan. Most of my experience with the series has been with Skrimm, which I've tried to complete a few times but always seem to lose interest in, typically resulting in me installing a bunch of mods to keep things interesting, installing too much freak shit, then panicking and deleting the game in fear of someone discovering and exposing my sinful nature. Beyond that, my familiarity with the broader Elder Scrolls series has mostly been limited to retrospectives on YouTube channels like LGR, and a roommate I had in college who bogarted my Xbox 360 to play Morrowind and he did this CONSTANTLY when all I wanted to do was play The Orange Box it's MY XBOX, man, just let me play my games!!!

whoa, what just happened

While buying up 360 games to fill out my collection, it felt almost obligatory to pick up Oblivion, which I've been told is a favorite among fans of the series and arguably The Best One. I snagged a copy of the GOTY edition for ten bucks on Ebay and it was promptly delivered to someone else's mailbox. I live among dishonest people and so it was never returned to me, which meant I had to spend another ten dollars to get another copy, and by this point I had Oblivion on the brain, so I decided to make it the first game I played out of my 360 backlog.

Oblivion may be a dated game in a lot of ways, but I also found it compelling enough that I was able to see the whole thing through, which I honestly was not expecting to be the case. The world of Oblivion feels so alive that I often meandered around watching people go about their daily routines. Yeah ok, sometimes I did that because it was fun to watch those routines break in really stupid ways, but I still had fun with it, and it's rare for open world games to suck me in so much that I deviate from the main quest to just, like, exist in those worlds. I was also impressed by how varied main and side quests are. When I think of these types of games, I think of a million worthless icons dotting a map. Countless points of "interest" marking side content that is copy and pasted over and over and over again, utterly pointless and not worth my time. Oblivion, however, manages to pack so much personality into each quest that l actually feel like a genuine participant in people's problems, even if the solution to that problem is to dive into a dungeon composed of the same pre-fab parts I've already seen dozens of times.

That said, I did find myself hitting the Skrimm-point a few times during my playthrough, and this usually set in whenever I was going through a stretch of the game that was combat heavy. Battles take place in first person, all swinging your sword around and casting magic, but that's just facade, the lens through which you view combat. In reality, fights essentially play out through a series of dice rolls. It's your character sheet smacking against another, which results in a bit of a disassociation between what is actually happening and what you're witnessing on screen. It's... not great. The difficulty balancing also feels off right out of the gate. Bonking basic goblins in the head with a sword 18 times before they keel over is really tedious, and when I looked up to see what I was doing wrong, all the advice I was able to find told me to turn the difficulty down a few notches. While this helped a lot, Oblivion's enemies scale with you, which means those basic goblins became about as much trouble as fully armored warriors from beyond the boundaries of space and time, and that results in this feeling of stagnation, like you're never really getting stronger, which in turn exacerbates the disconnected feeling I had with combat.

I'm thankful that I persevered, however, because the pendulum always swung back in Oblivion's favor. Soaking in the world, speaking to the people that inhabit it, learning about their histories, following them home, robbing them, murdering them, getting caught and freaking out and murdering their immediate family to leave no witnesses... That is Oblivion's true strength, and it's what I had the most fun doing. Thankfully there's enough of that I never teetered over the edge and quit. I wanted to make sure I saw as much of the game as I reasonably could, so I committed to doing a few of the longer quest lines. Unfortunately, I didn't finish all of them, but here's my thoughts on a few:

The Dark Brotherhood - I knew I had to complete this quest since it's pretty much the thing people talk about when they talk about Oblivion. I'm happy to say it lived up to my expectations. All the cloak and daggers bullshit at the heart of the Brotherhood initially seems sinister and almost cultish, but that veneer quickly melts away, exposing the Brotherhood as a bureaucracy which is as easily manipulated as it is inept. You eventually ascend to the highest position within the Brotherhood, bestowed the title of Listener after climbing over countless corpses, but what does that even earn you? You're no longer an assassin, you're no malevolent leader of this dark order, you're just a middle-man. A gofer picking up kill orders for a bit of coin. It's perfect.

Theives Guild - Tried to take the initiation test, which involved stealing a sword from someone's home before your competitors do. Unfortunately, someone else got there first, then blinked out of existence, preventing me from stealing it back from them. I reattempted the initiation test and passed it the second time, but disliked the fencing requirements to progress through the guild's main story missions. I got far enough that one of my points of contact was wrongly arrested, which I found out about hours later after returning from killing Mankar Camoran in his pocket dimension. Stuck in the air, mid-animation, basked in the red glow of arcane magic, a member of the thieves' guild ran up to let me know Armand had been detained. Uh, that's cool lady, kinda dealing with some shit at the moment, though! Never came back to it.

Knights of the Nine - Bad quest. Opens with a long, tedious pilgrimage to pray at a bunch of shrines before you can take on the Nine's request to recover their ancient armor. One piece of armor can only be attained by walking over a chasm using boots you pick up earlier in the quest, only you can't wear those boots if you have any points in infamy, of which I had two. How do you get rid of infamy? You go on a pilgrimage to all the shrines. Again. I attempted to do this and almost immediately got stuck in a rock outside one of the shrines (it happens.) Gave up.

The Shivering Isles - I'm the Duke of Dementia, A-Number-One. This expansion gives you a new island to explore with it's own questline that rivals Oblivion's in size and scope. You have to help the Mad God, Sheogorath, prevent the culling of his kingdom by the god of Order. Everyone in the Shivering Isles is broken, driven to insanity for Sheogorath's amusement. The atmosphere is eerie, yet darkly playful, and some of the quest givers you encounter are my favorite in the entire game. In particular, I really like Kithlan. Sure he thinks I'm a shitty escort and uh, he might have died in the last dungeon - I'm not really sure, I never saw him again - but he's a great guy, he thinks it's AWESOME that I'm out here torturing people for information, he knows and respects that get shit done. Anyway, the last "boss fight" in the Shivering Isles is unfortunately underwhelming, so it does kind of fall apart right near the end, but if you get the GOTY edition of the game, then this is definitely the piece of DLC you should check out.

I feel like I have finally developed an appreciation for what people like about The Elder Scrolls thanks to Oblivion. It's not perfect, of course. It's pretty buggy and its combat is atrocious, and I generally think it's not a good sign that people tell you to turn the difficulty down as soon as you start the game... But I am genuinely impressed by how much content and variety there is here. Oblivion feels richer in character and life than modern day open world games, and I think it's given me more motivation to go back to Skrimm and see how it compares. Plus, I heard they made some new... they made some new mods that make the girls prettier... yeeeeah.... these mods are just for daddy.............

It really is Sekiro to Nioh's Dark Souls, but Sekiro is more careful about what it cuts and keeps from its sibling series.

One of the things that keeps Nioh playable despite all its cluttered menus and Diablo-like loot drops is the ability to press a single button that will explain almost anything on your screen. It's not perfect - Nioh's got a lot going on - but it will at least help you understand the value in keeping equipment with bonuses to "Tenacity" and "Low Attack Break". Wo Long doesn't even bother with actual explanations for game mechanics, resulting in a situation where you can read multiple paragraphs about the real life philosophy behind the Five Phases but the actual effects of morale, a central concept in the game, are never explained beyond "it increases your combat power". This lax approach to game clarity carries over into that Help feature too, with most explanations offering up "Health Recovery improves Health Recovery" or similarly enlightening statements.

Combat has been pared down a bit, with the complete removal of weapon-specific skill trees, stamina, and stances. Instead of stamina and limited charges for magic spells, your Spirit bar serves as as a combined mana pool and posture meter, depleting as you do bad things or special moves (dodging, taking damage, using magic) and replenishing by doing good things (successfully landing hits, deflecting attacks). It's a fine system, one that's more intuitive than it sounds because you're likely already avoiding damage and landing hits of your own. Spells, on the other hand, require such a large investment in their stat and the spirit costs are so punitive that hybrid builds are nonexistent for large chunks of the game. What this amounts to for most players is a game in which you have very little incentive to do anything other than light attack or deflect. The window in which you can deflect an attack is much larger than you'd expect - think of a Dark Souls roll that regenerates stamina when you successfully dodge an attack. When deflecting is so easy and actively benefits you, it's easy to forget that blocking is even possible.

And companions? Complaining about NPC companions is as old as NPC companions are, so we'll keep it short. The game is visually busy already, and the companions are as visually noisy as they are incompetent in battle. What's worse, the companions have collision - I was knocked off ledges multiple times while platforming due to my companion landing on my head. I also frequently found that if (and that's a BIG "if") my companions were able to survive more than one or two attacks from a boss, the boss frequently gets stuck in a loop of big, AOE, zoning attacks that make it harder to hit. It's hard to appreciate that you're fighting alongside Liu Bei or Cao Cao when they're getting one-shot by a horse demon within ten seconds of the fight starting.

It's a shame, then, that it feels great! Your character moves like they're in a musou game. Deflecting attacks is hands-down the most satisfying thing in this game despite its ease, emitting a ka-SHING with an impact that has more in common with a lightning strike than two swords meeting. The game feels so good that you can play for a long while on that alone, riding the high of scoring a fatal blow on the boss right when you were most desperate for it. That you can spend the entire game coasting on light attacks and deflects doesn't matter when you're still enjoying the novelty of trying out each weapon's Martial Arts.

Kotaku's Levi Winslow repeatedly called it an "accessible" Souls-like in their review of the game, and I think I would agree with that assessment if we're speaking strictly about the combat. The main issue is that at some point you're going to have to interact with those menus and the loot and the Five Phases system as it interacts with leveling and magic and resistances and it's going to be a LOT to throw at someone who can't touch on reference points from Dark Souls, Nioh, and Diablo. Hell, the PC version displays Playstation button prompts when I'm using an Xbox controller, so something as simple as "the ability to match what's on the screen to my controller" is out the window too. I wouldn't go so far as to call this game "safe," but it's squarely in Team Ninja's comfort zone, and they've done very little to make this game stand out as its own IP and very little to offer an olive branch to new players, even those coming from Nioh. It's a fine time (especially early on!), but there are so many frustrations for a game that lacks a distinct personality.

EDIT: It's been pointed out that you can manually switch the button prompts from Playstation to Xbox in the settings - thank you to HazeRedux for the correction!

Casually browsing away at a furious pace.
Along comes a bird with a most curious request!

"A game I have I do!
Take it from my beak!
Believe in my words for they are true!
Trust in me, for it is peak!"

You take the game and give it a play!

Why, this game reeks!
Although it is a tad unique!
Unfortunate that it is weak!

You return to find the bird was not of his word!

They make way in such a sneak.
For you now look like a geek!
My! What a terrible game of the week!

Clickity click!

You make your way to this very page you do!
Fancy meetin' you here gamer, they got you too?

STOP PLAYING DUAL STRIKE

-WAR CRIMINALS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE GIVEN 'POWER OF FRIENDSHIP'
-YEARS OF DAY-TO-DAY PERKS yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for 10% PLAINS BONUS
-"Yes please give blackhole TWO turns if i play too good" Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

"Hello I would like to control xx−−√=x+x−−√ CO's please" They Have Played Us For Absolute Fools

Impressive how easily you can jump from AC3 to this; Taken together they really do feel like two sides of the same game, especially given the way you can import your old AC from the previous title. Weird to say, but I was thrilled that I still had to do all the same resource management I praised last time, and made all the better now it’s bolstered by some great mission design as well.

I know I’ve complained about the way missions can blur together in some of my other write-ups on the series, but there’s a noticeable uptick in the amount of variety to lend the action some more definition. Something like a stealth sequence sounds like it should be incompatible with the bulky glory of Armored Core, but it works- one of many moments in the game that keep the pace up and makes the prospect of a new batch of contracts all the more exciting. Even the late-game crawls through factories and secret installations are made distinct through radio chatter and unique objectives, racing against the clock or working in tandem as pilots slowly become more frantic over the course of the mission.

If AC3 was a little sterile, then this a game with a lot of heat, a lot of drama- it’s become clearer to me as I’ve gotten my thoughts down what I like and don’t in games, that I’ve realized I'm drawn to a strange balance of arcade immediacy and narrative context, and Silent Line excels in that regard.

A couple of stray thoughts, more on what I’ve played in the series in general so far:

- Normally the volume of items and gear would be poison for me, but I think the series handles equipment really well. Tons of tradeoffs for devoting yourself to one strategy or the other, and even builds that feel like they should be objectively superior to everything else can still have good reasons for being traded out. Tried so many different loadouts on the last level, but the winning build came down to dual-wielding one of the starter machine guns, which I was able to get more value out of than high-tech laser rifles and the heaviest parts I could piece together. I guess the distinction is that the gear doesn’t feel like an attempt to manipulate players into staying on longer, but a broadening of the possibility space- there’s always a chance even the most mundane part has a place to shine later on.

- The short mission design has also grown on me quite a bit as well, letting you speedrun past easy missions and then get straight into the action on whatever’s giving you trouble. The cycle of dying, changing your kit, and making another attempt is really tight, and makes taking wild swings with experimental builds much more inviting.

And despite all this- starting from the beginning and trying to work my way to The Last Raven in the appropriate order to make sure my AC had the right specs, I still died in two seconds on the first mission.

The captivation of the early Steam indie landscape can never be understated. Before the arrival of Steam Greenlight, the walled garden meant a very select few titles graced the storefront now resplendent with asset flips and low-grade eroge. Renowned games like Project Zomboid didn’t even appear on the store at that time — it and other indie darlings relied on Google Checkout and Desura for distribution. So limited was the indie space on Steam that days, weeks could go by without a new title. In looking for what underground, offbeat goodness was permitted, users invariably came across AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, the first title alphabetically on the store. In Dejobaan Games founder Ichiro Lambe’s words:

“A name should be interesting, memorable, and descriptive — a game about jumping off of a perfectly good building in a flimsy wingsuit should be exciting. We had plenty of other ideas. The working title was Low Altitude, and we considered a bunch of others:
Screaming and Falling
AaaAaaAaa!
Deploy Parachute for Hot Chicks
Jumping to Earth From Tall Buildings
Bridge. Antenna. Span. Earth.
Falling Toward Earth
Your Personal Crater
Free Fall
Don't Forget Your Parachute
Remember Your Parachute
Spicy Mountain Lion
Freedom, Free-Fall, Freedom
I Fell From a Building
A few of those were obviously thrown in as jokes. "Deploy Parachute for Hot Chicks" was a dig at the industry's obsession with boobs. Spicy Mountain Lion was my personal favorite non sequitur. But when our PR/Marketing dude, Leo saw the list, he poked his finger at "AaaAaaAaa!," and refused to let me adjourn the meeting until I agreed to go with that.”

Though also available from Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Impulse, and WildTangent, the one-two punch of Steam's self-imposed exclusivity coupled with an ostentatious title made AaaAaaAaa! an enticing proposition for a couple years. Its inclusion in The Potato Sack on April 1, 2011 made it (relatively) explode in notoriety over a year after its initial launch. A crucial part of the associated Portal 2 ARG, many players, myself included, snatched up the game at its steep -75% discount and got to work inflating the player count, seeking clues, and nabbing potatoes for the ultimate goal of releasing Portal 2 early. Ten days after The Potato Sack launched, player numbers remained as high as 4,253, a number which would never be even approached again. By June 27, 2011, concurrent players topped out at 624. A year later, only 13. Since mid-2014, AaaAaaAaa! has failed to reach double digits. It has become a footnote of a footnote, a stepping-stone towards the contemporary AA indie zeitgeist of Game Pass and publishers and safety.

AaaAaaAaa! is reckless, an emblem of a sliver of a fraction of time wherein indies were starting to get the recognition they deserved. The polish of contemporary indies is absurd, their development cycles arduous, their teams an enormity, publishing rights are snatched in an instant. [Finji co-owner Rebekah Saltsman in 2021 stated “Five years ago, I’m like, ‘Oh, I can make a game for a million dollars.’ And that was crazy then. And [now] I’m like, ‘I can’t make this for under four [million].”](https://www.inverse.com/input/gaming/tunic-publisher-says-indie-game-production-is-absurdly-expensive) By contrast, Dejobaan’s marketing budget for AaaAaaAaa! was $0. With assets that seemingly fell out of a wallet containing lint and a single fly, AaaAaaAaa! and its ilk prided themselves not on their graphical fidelity or scale, but singular ideas explored maximally within small packages. AaaAaaAaa! isn’t bursting at the seams with content, but it didn’t need to. Like Zineth or Voxeltron or Darwinia, the aim was to present something new that hadn’t been explored within the games space as a sort of proof of concept, an offer of what games can accomplish.

As an in-effect sacrificial lamb then, AaaAaaAaa! is easy to dismiss as unimportant, as belonging to its position as a footnote’s footnote, but in revisiting it (having realised the kids of today know nothing of this time beyond its winners, its Super Meat Boy and Minecraft and Limbo) I was surprised at how enjoyable it remains. The gameplay is little more than falling while grazing obstacles and responding to simple button prompts. It isn’t good to look at. Yet it kicks ass in all the right ways. This first-person adaptation of BASE jumping evokes concepts of bullet hell with its tight navigation of enclosed spaces, of racing games in its sheer velocity, of arcade high-score chasing as you go for one more kiss, one more score plate. It oozes with risk’s rewards. It is drenched in text as an accessory, taking its overlong title and applying it to every facet of the UI and gameplay experience. It contains small nothingburgers of video chaos as if it is some valid reward in its own right. Image macros bespeckle gray slabs of polygonery. It is balloonshop’s Oreo, sounding not even half good but it is good, really Most importantly, it doesn’t wear out its welcome in the slightest, being just long enough to explore itself fully without the pressures of content bloat on the player. It would be reiterated upon with its semi-sequel AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome semi-reconstructed with its long abandoned half brother 1... 2... 3... KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby), mobilised with AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration) and is apparently being revitalised with the upcoming AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (if it ever releases).

It would be irresponsible to act like Superflight, Steep, Rush, and even Just Cause 3 haven’t trounced AaaAaaAaa! in nearly every regard with their years of hindsight to work off of, their immeasurable polish, and astounding budgets, but AaaAaaAaa! did it without a shred of shame, staying true to Dejobaan’s obtuse philosophies of making games that raise an eyebrow for their names, premises, and gameplay. It doesn’t blow my gourd, but it doesn’t need to. It’s fun, and it sits at the top of my Steam library for eternity. Jumping off of it into thousands of other games as I scroll and scroll seems fitting, somehow. It’s like Dejobaan knew they would be pioneers on an ever-growing mountain that forever shifts its form. It is a stratum fondly remembered.

When I was a wee Vee, my favorite color was purple. These days I grew into a pink boy, but I think I have an idea for why it was originally my favorite. Back in Kindergarten we had our own folders that sat at our tables, we would open them to find little laminated pieces of paper in them with colors pertaining to what activities we would be doing for the day. Purple was the one I always hoped for, because it meant I would be computer labbing for about half an hour.

As you would imagine, Number Munchers was among the games I would play on my class's shitty Apple IIs. You're probably thinking, "wow what tomb did you recently crawl out of? You old Vee!!!! GO BACK TO YOUR SHUFFLE BOARD YA OLD LADY!!! State of your American education system using 20 year old PCs!!!" It's probably true we used Apple IIs due to low budget, but honestly Apple IIs survived for a while and I wanna say the ones we used were kinda nice looking, granted it's been too damn long for me to even recall the last time I actually ate breakfast, and please don't call me old, I am a healthy 21 year old thank you very much.

For the younger folk at large who make up 98% of this website, this is basically an arcade game akin to Pac-Man combined with the goal of educating the ins and outs of numbers such as multiples, equations, and prime numbers. This is handy for me, because newsflash! I'm not a very smart person, at least in the numbers sense. Wandering a 5x6 square grid you take your adorable green lad around the board munching the correct answers to what the game asks of you. An incorrect munch means a bad tummy ache and losing a life. In the meantime, these demented scary assholes named "Troggles" have their presence announced by the left side of the screen before wandering onto the board. You start with only one of these bozos pestering you, but eventually up to three start showing up. Careful around these guys, because they'll chomp and munch you real good....along with any other Troggle they happened to move into the same space with! Freaked the shit outta me seeing them cannibalize each other like that. These guys mean business. There's only one Muncher to eat and they know that! Munch or be Munched, that is the way.

Troggle Roll Call!

I never really liked the names for these guys, and honestly back then I doubt we would call them by their official titles. For now, starting from Reggie going clockwise towards the middle, I christen them...Norm Macdonald, Bert the Bashful, Scary Gary, Curious George, and finally Sneed the Shitheaded Nob. My favorite is Scary Gary, because he always gave me chills as he walked onto the screen and proceeded to eat Norm or Bert with his spooky teeth and unthinking stare. The Troggles are but a race of spherical Wile E. Coyotes, constantly out to eat the Muncher and utilizing ACME brand cartoon nonsense to trap the Muncher, complete with their traps backfiring on them during this game's cutscenes in-between sets of stages.

Apologies for boring y'all to death with the long-winded nostalgia review, but it surprised me how I enjoyed coming back to it despite the 20 years of additional knowledge I have attained since last I played, thinking I would treat this as trivial. I thought I was The Countess of Counting, but it seems I am in fact the Dairy Queen. Thank you Mr. Muncher for giving me that vibe check that I in fact suck eggs at multiplication tables.

You can play this super easily in-browser, so go and give it a try and either say "thank you Mr. Vee for the cute game" or "thanks for goddamn nothin'!!!! spits tongue out at you".

:P