25 hours of flashing lights and dropped frames. Nothing better than entering a randomly generated room with 5 enemies already locked and loaded with one hit death lasers and you cast one of your five full screen wiping super spells. Then the screen explodes in a rainbow confetti of items, gold, and experience.

It's all the fun of the original Astlibra but with 80% less story and 80% more jank. There is NOTHING to compare to Astlibra Revision. It is transcendent game design.

Ufouria 2 is a genre of game that needs its own name. It's a real hollow nothing bullshit kind of game and I don't mean that derogatorily. The game has such a wonderful cast of characters and a beautifully simple aesthetic and all I want is to have a good time with that core appeal. It's what drew me into playing it in the first place. While mechanically the game is shallow, it is very modern philosophically. The different zones are randomly generated on entry which makes them fresh on revisits, which as a metroidvania, happens frequently. Upgrades are dished out at well calculated intervals. It makes me FEEL like I'm progressing. I don't need to master mechanical complexity in every game I play. Sometimes I just want to enjoy an aesthetic, exist in a world, play a role. But doubly, I dont want to be bored by the game. So while these tricks with the progression and level design may seem cheap (and they admittedly are) they serve the ultimate appeal of the game, which is it's charming aesthetic, and they provide the exact amount of satisfaction and engagement (for my monkey brain at least) necessary to make the short run time fulfilling from beginning to end. The newer Yoshi games could learn a lot from this game.

This game has the perfect name. Very Rhythm and very Doctor.

With the Rhythm it's nice that it keeps throwing gimmicks at you instead of raising the difficulty on the individual gimmicks too high. When the gimmicks get overlapped it can be hit or miss but it's mostly hits. Playing a level well is satisfying and it doesn't require too much to get past a level which is good because...

The little narratives explored in the Doctor side of this game are all so charming. All the stories feel so small but also cover such grand emotions under the surface. Things like love, and anxiety, and regret. The songs bring out these big explosions internally but externally the narratives are so insignificant. There is also a lot of melancholy here that you could only get in a hospital setting.

The game also has a lot of grand boss fights which is fun for a rhythm game. They bring out all the tricks and gimmicks for those and they are pretty delightful to experience.

Just a solid little guy. The Baseball guys plotline, in particular, got me so emotional for how ridiculously cornballs it was.

After becoming an F1 fan I took my friends karting to some local warehouse and we had a real hoot. Zooming around on these little guys rubbin and racing. I've had the hunger for speed and drifting in me ever since and today I decided to graduate from Mario Kart baby boy to big man Ridge Racer guy.

This game is cool. It's got cool in its DNA. The menus are awesome and there's these little storylines with all the teams and the music is BUMPIN.

I played on the Pacman team and spent the first three races figuring out the drifting. Once I got the hang of it and finished off that campaign I went straight to playing on team DIG and slowly crawled my way to the end. You can pick up and master this game in very short order which is nice. Little compact experiences like this are nice. I wanted to drift and this game let me drift. Nice.

The way this game has enemies that are just non-antagonistic is wild. And the way it messes with perspective having big enemies in the background and small enemies in the foreground and rewarding shooting things far away is such an inverse on the rail shooter mentality of things being far away being harder to hit and not a threat.

That and just the mere act of interpreting the shapes as antagonistic is flexing a brain muscle nothing else in the entire world has ever done.

I also played this high, the way God intended, so I don't even know what I'm talking about right now.

I figured I'd better mark this date (11/28/2023). I maxed my silly little account. Got the big 2277. All it took was being unemployed for 2 months but I did the dang thing and no one can take that away from me. Unless they hack my account and take it away from me.

So there's a really REALLY good like 3+ hour video that explains why OSRS kicks so much ass. Definitely go watch that.

All I can say is that I spent very long, very intimate hours with every skill in this game and even the ones I thought I'd hate I eventually grew to love. There is a constant forward progress in OSRS. Every thing you do is always a step forward towards your goal. It's like doing the dishes or shoveling the driveway. Each action gets you closer to the finish line, there aren't really any step backwards to a number going up. As someone who does not like to waste his time I got a lot of quiet, peaceful, zen-like satisfaction from my 3000+ hours of gameplay.

Instagram also informs me that these are all symptoms of autism and as far as I'm concerned a max OSRS account is as good as an official doctor's diagnosis.

NOTES:
I will admit that I may be exaggerating with the "love every skill" thing. Aside from artifact stealing I think thieving sucks eggs. I also think firemaking was saved by the new afk method introduced recently. The only viable way of training it before was wintertodt and wintertodt is like a recruiting ground for bigots. I can only read so many racial slurs before I quit and train something else.

Also I am employed again. So that's cool.

Best part about being the second child in a middle class family in America is capitalism will sometimes just price out your family from engaging in Christianity. Shit is way too time consuming and costly. By the time I was of a memory forming age my parents had long ago given up going to church or really any engagement in religion at all. Pretty sweet!

Not that I don't feel the weird religious guilt that is just kind of engrained into our culture but a lot of the major trauma I think I've expertly avoided.

We Know the Devil captures the subtle and not so subtle baggage of Christianity through some very clever and well written prose. Each of the gals are suffering from similar but distinctly different internal struggles and mental anguish and their interactions by themselves, as a group, and paired off are all subtly different and well explored.

I loved Venus's confused frustration with the rigged system. Neptune's anger at her friends self deprecation. Jupiter's internal disgust with herself. The dialogue can get very intimate for how short the runtime is but it never comes off as corny. The casual bits are fun and the emotional highs really hit. It is such a tight package clocking in at barely 2 hours.

Combine that with a spooky aesthetic, neat art style, some sick tracks, and a fun choice system with multiple endings and this is probably as good as visual novels are gonna get for me.

Driving games at arcades are inherently great and amazing and worth every penny. Feel the wheel, the pedals, and the gearbox at your fingertips (and...toe..tips?) is so recognizable and yet gameified.

Crazy Taxi excels in its framing giving you more of an excuse to freestyle routes and regularly back up and brake hard. In a race you wanna forward and take the optimal line but the raw adrenaline derived from Crazy Taxi when you are approaching your destination and you slam your foot down on the brakes and rotate the wheel to slide into the spot is unmatched and unique to driving specifically an "arcade taxi."

On rainy days in elementary school we would play board games for recess. One of the games was one of those two stick mazes with holes. You'd move the maze around, twist and turn the whole 3D space, and try to navigate the metal ball paste holes and to the finish. It was really fun and a lot of kids would watch and take turns. A real spectator sport.

This game really brought me back there. Played it at a bar for a while with "the boyz" and we were absolutely shrieking with delight advancing very slowly up the board.

Very cool tactile feel. It's definitely skill based and you can feel yourself getting better. The aesthetic with the cabinet art and the beer sliding theme is neat and frames the whole package.

If you see one of these at an arcade or bar definitely feed it a few quarters. It's neato.

Garlic man still got it. He don't miss.

All the mini games were cool and creative and my wife didn't leave me after watching me do the little dance. I had some controller issues near the end but ultimately it was pretty smooth sailing.

This game spooked me supreme like 3 times. So that's pretty good. I was really weak and put all my points into strength which made me really strong, but then later I wasn't very strong but I just kept doing it and eventually I was really strong again.

I'm a pretty simple guy. Just walking through a bunch of spooky scary PS1 mazes really is all I need to have a good time.

4 skelebones out of 5. oooooOOOOoooo boooooooo!

This is more of a short part 2 to my Style Savvy: Styling Star review.

Because while playing Style Savvy in anticipation for Fashion Dreamer. I pretty quickly realized that none of the stuff that made Style Savvy so special was going to be in Fashion Dreamer. At least judging by the trailers, and now after reaching the credits I can confirm it. They got rid of all the narratives and this world of fashion influencers is strange and creepy and soulless. Which just leaves the dressing up, which is...fine. It's not really implemented well and is oddly restrictive between the body types, but I AM a cute girl, and I DO look good. You can go into some pretty good detail with the colors on individual pieces. Ultimately though, the game just has nothing going for it when stacked up against any of the Style Savvy games.

Which I guess they weren't trying to make a Style Savvy game, they were trying to do something different. But maybe they SHOULD have tried to make a modern Nintendo Switch Style Savvy game, it would have been incredible.

If you are interested in this game and haven't played Styling Star or any of the other three Style Savvy games. Go play Styling Star. You've been putting off hacking your 3DS for long enough. The time is now.

EDIT:
This game is driving me mad. I keep flip flopping between 3 and 2 stars.

So on the one hand I feel like I'm underselling the dressing up of this dress up game. Like the dressing up is good. There is a lot of clothes and hair and face and color options. You can really get lost in the min-maxing of very small details of your overall aesthetic and Fashion Dreamer really excels at this. So I think it is good at BEING a dress up game and that should be worthy of 3 stars.

But on the other hand the very act of existing in this world is torture. The stationary NPCs and their maddening voice acted one liners are atrocious. All the Bingo cards and gacha shit are a plague on my experience. Most of the gameplay is liking clothing on a menu. One by one. It feels like a glorified mobile game. When I first saw the Nintendo Direct featuring this game I thought of how interesting the concept of a "dress up game" was. I did a little bit of research and found Style Savvy: Styling Star and after playing it I thought, "wow, this genre has so much to offer." It was just such a beautiful experience from beginning to end. And then this comes out and there is just zero attempt at an emotional connection. Am I asking too much for a bit more pathos out of what is essentially just Farming Simulator: But Clothes This Time? Perhaps I am.

Ultimately though, I'm left feeling a bit confused, a bit frustrated, and that lands me on a 2 star verdict.

After seeing the Fashion Dreamer trailer on that one Nintendo Direct I was pretty intrigued with the concept of the dress up game as a genre. I’m always on the lookout for cool new gameplay loops, the more ridiculous the better. I've got a cousin who I don’t really peg as a gamer and she says she actually plays dress up games on her phone quite a bit. This intrigued me more. A whole new genre I’ve never given a passing thought to and a trusted confidant insuring me that there is fun to be had. How delightful.

So I researched Fashion Dreamer and any research for Fashion Dreamer will inevitably get you here. Style Savvy: Styling Star is essentially made by the same team and has a bit of a cult following. Not in that trendy way that puts Misfits t-shirts in Walmart but in some other, far more menacing way. Just read the comment section for a Fashion Dreamer youtube video. Who are these people? Where did they come from? Their existence alone is proof of one thing. I think I’m gonna have a pretty good time. I put a lot of stock in the invisible passion of anonymous internet faces.

So a little about me. I am but a humble and lowly wife guy. My close friends and I, in a crowd, are pretty basic and standard dudes. We like to party, we like to wrestle, I’ll throw the pig skin around the ol grid iron when the situation permits. Opposed to how I present online, in real life I’m not unmasculine. But there are certain traits of masculinity that I despise for their toxicity (should come up with a phrase for that). For example men aren’t really supposed to be too emotional unless that emotion is anger. I don’t like being angry, but I LOVE crying. I cry at just about everything. Sometimes the boys and I will get together and watch cool scenes from movies and anime on youtube and just try to cry. Have a bit of a cry off. This is not a joke.

So while I am not unmasculine I am also not ununmasculine (should come up with a phrase for that). Online I present very female. I use a women's name, I always play as female characters when I have the option, and dressing up is a huge selling point for me in a game. Men’s aesthetics are alright but Women’s aesthetics are amazing. Not to sound like a FREAK but I love the aesthetic beauty of women. I love their shape, their movement, and their fashion/design. So Style Savvy has a lot to offer me in the roleplaying department. The one thing I know going in is I can be a girl and I can dress up. Everything beyond that is just gravy and boy this shit is smothered in gravy. But before the gravy, does it excel at the core appeal?

Well yeah obviously I gave it 5 stars.

The basic gameplay loop is as follows:
1) you stock your store with clothes
2) people buy clothes from your store
3) you stock your store with more clothes from the profit

As the game progresses you get more and more clothing options and everything you buy for the store you can also dress up your personal character with. When it comes to customizing your personal character just look up and read the little descriptor for the game. “Choose from over 20,000 new and returning fashion items.” This gameplay loop is satisfying and good. There is kind of too much clothes for it not to be. I came up with 30+ little outfits that I have saved in my scrapbook for my character and she looks fabulous. She’s killing it. Beat mug, limp wrists, V.I.P list, wave, wave, blow a kiss, I’m that bitch, sis.

It was great and occupied maybe 5 hours of the initial gameplay. But here’s the thing. This game is not a 5 hour game this game is an 80+ hour game.

So let’s get into the gravy.

The world is wonderful. Once I got through my initial rush of button mashing through dialogue to get more clothes and become the queen of fashion, I started to actually read the dialogue and pay attention to the story and it’s great. All of the characters are very emotive in talking sections and it’s immediately endearing. Every minor customer has their own little narrative going on with a lot of subtle depth to it. You are of course just a humble and lowly queen god of fashion playing only a small role in their lives, selling them a hat or whatever but over time it starts to really illustrate how much of an effect running a fashion store can have on people. One gal came in initially because she had a class reunion coming up and she wanted to spice up her wardrobe before going. Then she comes back and it was a hit so she wants to change her whole style. Then she comes back again and decides that the new style wasn’t really her and she wants to go back to how she used to dress. The minor customers narratives really emphasis the word minor, but they are also very genuine. The sheer quantity of characters and little narratives implies a very large world outside of the store that breathes a lot of life into the game.

There are 3 main gals who become idols that are regular customers and their narratives are the main story of the game. You track their progress, hang out with them, help them and their agency, and listen to their new songs that are fully voiced with lyrics and absolutely shred. The main story is a sweet little ride and encompasses like 50 other side characters that are all very wonderful and charming little balls of optimism and encouragement. When I take a step back and look at the world as a whole I can’t help but realize: Style Savvy: Styling Star has created the ultimate Feminist Utopia. Move over Barbie (2023). All the characters are open about their feelings and pursuing the arts, making music, baking bread, growing flowers. No one's an ass. To me this world is perfect, I want to live in this world and flail my arms around like a freak during dialogue and strike little poses when the clothes fits real good.

I love this world and just existing in it is a real treat but the game goes beyond that. You live in the world but you also radically help shape it and that is where the secret gameplay loop is revealed.

The initial satisfaction of playing the game comes from just dressing your character up. It’s great and fun and there are a lot of options. But after a while it gets a bit boring, there’s too much freedom in it all. I was like a fashion god with no restrictions, everything I did looked good and I had plenty of money to buy whatever I wanted. It was lonely at the top. When it comes to dressing up my character there wasn’t much to it, no real threat of failure.

At this point during my playthrough the customer characters were all starting to make larger requests. At first they just want singular articles of clothing and most of the time I just gave them whatever matched their criteria that I just happened to have in stock. Some of these people left the store looking absolutely tragic. I regularly mocked their request behind the screen. A stripy scarf? Why not get a big red nose as well you fucking clown. Any customer who wanted something from the “April BonBon” brand were laughed out the door (completely satisfied). There was one instance in particular where I gave a women a $400 button up vest. She was wearing a long sleeve hooded sweatshirt, ripped jeans, and a $400 button up vest over it all. She left the store with the widest smile and I could of cried. From that point forward I vowed: Never again.

So the customers are coming in with bigger budgets and larger request, whole outfits sometimes. And this is where I discovered the real core gameplay loop. My hate for certain brands, my past mistakes in customer fashion, my god like status. It was all intentional. They kept coming back because they trusted me as a beacon of fashion, and they were right. The women with the vest returned and I gave her a leather jacket and it completely evolved her. All the other pieces of her aesthetic and wardrobe clicked into place. She actually looked good. A customer would ask for an “April BonBon” outfit and I'd run to the outlets scouring their stocks to create an outfit that not just satisfied them but satisfied me. They presented me with filth and I made them beautiful. THIS IS EXPRESSION BABY.

It’s one thing to have the infinite possibilities of your created character. I made my perfect women with the exact haircut I wanted and the exact brands and clothes and colors and designs. But when all these customers with their bizarre lives and terrible tastes would come in and I sold them an outfit that looked good DESPITE the aspects of them I didn’t perfectly design in a lab that’s when I started having the BIG FUN. The expression of helping others express themselves is beautifully represented in this game. Then you take another step back and realize just how much you helped build this feminist utopia, at least aesthetically, and how much of a difference you can make just by running a little clothes store.

Then I unlocked the hair boutique and gave everyone pixie cuts and I will admit, things got kind of weird after that.

Really interesting and cool story, but holy moly I can only run through so many forests fighting the same old dudes for so long. I'm very excited for the sequel. I trust Remedy to expand on the good and fix the bad from a gameplay and environment perspective.

I specifically hope the manuscript pages make a return, though I'm not sure how it will work narratively. It's definitely the highlight of the game for me. A diegetic way of learning more about side characters, what's happening "off-camera", and even what will happen later through a prose presentation was a super unique and well executed little slice of the gameplay pie. More of that please. Fatten me up Alan, I'll be your little piggy.

I loved the rap songs. Every time one of those played it really boosted the atmosphere. Voice acting and story were also pretty cool. The rest of the game was just alright. It's repetitive but the gameplay is satisfying and fun but definitely not fun enough to justify the repetitiveness. End of the day I had a good time with it but didn't leave too much of an impression. Wish I had more to say :( the game oozes cool but there is something lifeless in the core gameplay. The main dude IS cool but he doesn't make ME feel cool playing as him.