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!

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A deeply mid experience. The drilling is fun for a level or two but it becomes very clear that this core mechanic does not have the mechanical depth needed to even carry it through its 4 worlds and sub 2 hour run time. It's pretty satisfying to go into the dirt and pop out once or twice but the areas you can dig really hinder the level design. They are essentially just linear lines. You go in one end of dirt and navigate your way to the other end. This then gets combined with a grapple hook that feels truly awful to use and the cannons from Donkey Kong Country. These cannons felt like archaic game design in the 90s and here they are now in the year of our Lord 2024. I mean I love stickerbrush symphony as much as the next guy but the cannons in this game don't even require you to aim or time your shot like 90% of the time.

Then whatever momentum you can muster is stunted by the constant stop and start of looking for these dumb collectibles which I would love to ignore but they literally lock levels behind collecting them. So many of them are hidden behind walls or off screen that it forces you to crawl through levels scanning every wall for subtle cracks. Their inclusion is in complete opposition to the core appeal of the game.

Idk, the girl looks cute and I assume the fine folks worked hard on the game, but this game was just so frustrating to play. I feel a lot of love put into it but not a lot of thought.