positive wildlife conservation themes and pretty wholesome.

the gameplay isn't anything too insane. most of it is just taking pictures and pressing A until you've interacted with everything in a given area, but it's clearly created for a younger audience and so i don't think its fair for me to say "wow gameplay chugs" or anything like that. definitely the best part is trying to get all of the animals scanned on your phone, as you can listen to the sounds they make in the wildlife guide and then recognize that sound in game to figure out where they are if you can't easily see them.

unfortunately, i feel like so many birds look like each other (lmao) and that's kinda just a fault of reality, i guess, but when they're flying in the air and such it's very difficult to actually tell what a bird is unless you're pointing the camera at it. as such, a large portion of this game is spent looking at birds with your camera that you already have logged, which ends up feeling a little silly. totally could be a me problem though for sure. also, the wildlife guide is disappointingly bare. it has all of the creatures, what they look like, their scientific name, and their sound, but that's it. there's no fun fact or diet or wingspan or anything listed about the creatures, and that ends up making them feel more like checks on a checklist as opposed to creatures that you should strive to conserve, which i feel reduces the effect of this game overall.

there is a website called Ecologi that supports reforestation, and the creators of Alba, Ustwo Games, commits one tree to that mission for every game downloaded or sold. as of my time of writing, they're currently in place 5th on the leaderboard for businesses with just over 1 million trees funded, which i think is pretty neat. to conclude: Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a cute and simple game without much mechanical depth, but one for a good cause. i think it's pretty easy to get behind, and definitely deserves to exist.

Arthur and the Invisibles is a game based off a movie of the same name about a 10 year old boy and his romantic endeavors with a 1,080 year old, made by a man who dated and married a 15 year old when he was 38. I don’t actually want to talk about either of those things though, thankfully. I want to talk about possibly one of the most feverish things I’ve ever randomly happened upon in my entire life.

There is a movie called “Arthur, malédiction”, which is a horror movie about a boy who loved Arthur and the Invisibles so much that he wanted to be a minimoy when he grew up. When he turns 18 him and his friends, for his birthday, go and visit the abandoned house where the movie was shot originally. Of course the horror of an 18 year old who’s entire bedroom was decorated with Arthur and the Invisibles memorabilia wasn’t actually enough, they had to at least try to make it scary, and nothing is scarier than french people in a foggy forest. I’m going to spoil this whole movie because you really don’t care. If you somehow do, I’m really sorry to hear that. First tragedy of this movie, their cooler with enough food for maybe 12 hours that they were going to be living off of for a week gets raided, oh no. They send one person back 800 meters to the car to go and get more food. He gets punched in the face in the woods, what could have happened? We cut back half way through the movie to see that his arms are stuck hugging a tree and the rest of his body has been consumed by the tree? Okay. Onto the next part, one of their friends from earlier in the movie from one scene is seen hanging upside down from a tree by 2 of the group, they untie the rope to slowly lower him to the ground, but it was trapped and there was a bear trap by the rope! He gets caught in the bear trap, let’s go of the rope and the tied up guy falls and breaks his neck and dies. The 2 people that tried to help him down go wait in the car to get help, but they don’t have the keys! The rest of the group tells them if there’s danger, honk the horn 5 times. They honk the horn 5 times, they hear him honk the horn, and then go “uhh let’s go the other direction actually”. They both die. Next, a girl, who is allergic to bees, locks herself in a garage with a big bee hive in it, gets stung by all the bees and dies. Probably the scariest part of all, a mysterious hooded man cuts out the rope of a swing one of the girls was sitting on, causing her to fall through the floor of the porch 50 meters underground into a secret underground sacrificial chamber. They end up getting her back but never explain what that was about. And then finally the remaining members of the group are all kidnapped by a very racist indigenous african tribe? In France? The movie ends with the entire tribe being gunned down by a very stereotypical racist white hick with a shotgun. Fun!

Now you might wonder why I just talked about the parts where they all died and not about its relation to Arthur, and that’s because it doesn’t have one. The conceit is that this group of people discovered the house and got cursed by it and went crazy so they started doing racially stereotyped tribal rituals where they sacrifice people to the minimoys I guess? It’s implied that the minimoys are actually real in this setting but who fucking cares. We can now officially set the count for “how many pieces of Arthur and the invisibles media are racist or pedophilic” back to 0. I kinda hoped this would be more self aware being made by a different person but this guy must be the only living breathing Arthur and the invisibles fan left, a real, walking fossil. Oh yea, the game. It’s bad?

The Ant Bully for Game Boy Advance is yet another average licensed game based on the movie of the same name.

The game is reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda in that it's a top down game, has combat and puzzles, though the progression is fairly linear. One neat addition is radar, that can show items, NPCs, enemies and the objective marker. You can also view a map from the main menu to see the whole overworld, and the objectives list. There's not much exploration until you actually beat the game, where you can try and find all 100 fire crystals for completion and to unlock extras, like sound and music players. The combat is pretty stale though, when you use a spear, you always stand still, which kinda makes the upgrades for it (adding more attack swings) pointless because you usually knock the enemies back, you can't move and attack at the same time which limits combat potential, not to mention that the combat itself is fairly basic, there's little variety. There are a couple extra weapons you gain through the progression, a crossbow, which can be used to fight enemies from a distance, though it's not super strong and really only required for bosses, and bombs that are more useful for puzzles and one boss. The puzzles are also not very difficult, usually revolving around using telepathy and other ants to do certain commands, like carry a leaf as a platform you can walk on, push heavy objects together or make them stand on a mushroom switch, etc.. It sounds like a cool idea, but the ants are only limited to puzzle elements, they can't aid in combat, pikmin style, in fact they're all cowards. There's also a lot of slow block pushing and pulling, that's fun. There are three boss battles, and they're actually pretty challenging, and kinda fun, though the last boss isn't much of a boss, and more of an autoscroller where you avoid hazards, and it drags on for a bit. Still, the two bosses that are actually bosses use different tactics and patterns and are pretty good to fight. The game offers fairly generous checkpoints, usually after some major puzzles and right at the boss battle, though I didn't die very often, most of my deaths are from bosses. There are also turret sections, and they're... alright. You just shoot enemies or break a barrier and move one. There are stationary ones and ones on caterpillar that act as autoscrollers. One issue is that these can become fairly repetitive. At least the music's good.

Speaking of music, let's talk about graphics and music. The graphics look pretty decent. The menus and cutscenes are styliazed as prehistoric paintings, though the ending uses shots from the movie, which are meh. The envoirements look good and characters look alright. The soundtrack is pretty good, leave it to Shin'en once again to create great sounding music for the ol' GBA.

Overall, The Ant Bully is a perfectly adequate game that has some neat ideas, not a bad game but not quite special.