tdstr
2019
as a game to dump an hour or two into on gamepass? it's fine.
at it's best it's actually fairly fun, but the framing just doesn't work here, and it ends up burning itself out pretty quick. the roguelike procgen structure combined with the void of visual identity makes achievements feel increasingly meaningless with more runs. there are bike parks that toss the roguelike structure for something more resembling a 3D trials game, but if you want that push and pull of tricks vs. speed (the best thing here), you're not going to get it there. in the roguelike section, on-trail vs. off-trail is a part of that push and pull, with both areas being easier or harder in different circumstances, with a bunch of tradeoffs to boot. but in the bike parks section, the difficulty of the trails is cranked wayyy up with no real punishment for just going around all of the challenges presented to you, which is pretty underwhelming and makes the whole thing feel pointless. it's a shame, because the bike feels pretty fun to control, but i feel like there's a lot of stuff here that coulda been improved if the focuses were in different places. but unfortunately, "pretty good bike game" just doesn't get people (myself included) to download your game out of novelty in the way that something like "mountain biking roguelite" does.
at it's best it's actually fairly fun, but the framing just doesn't work here, and it ends up burning itself out pretty quick. the roguelike procgen structure combined with the void of visual identity makes achievements feel increasingly meaningless with more runs. there are bike parks that toss the roguelike structure for something more resembling a 3D trials game, but if you want that push and pull of tricks vs. speed (the best thing here), you're not going to get it there. in the roguelike section, on-trail vs. off-trail is a part of that push and pull, with both areas being easier or harder in different circumstances, with a bunch of tradeoffs to boot. but in the bike parks section, the difficulty of the trails is cranked wayyy up with no real punishment for just going around all of the challenges presented to you, which is pretty underwhelming and makes the whole thing feel pointless. it's a shame, because the bike feels pretty fun to control, but i feel like there's a lot of stuff here that coulda been improved if the focuses were in different places. but unfortunately, "pretty good bike game" just doesn't get people (myself included) to download your game out of novelty in the way that something like "mountain biking roguelite" does.
2018
had a free week on steam/was free to keep through amazon so i figured i'd play a bit since my friends were on. its, uh, it sure is fallout!
tried to do the main quest and it bugged out at the first real conversation and locked me out of progressing. tried leaving the room and coming back and didn't fix it so whatever. adding npcs to this actually probably made it worse. bethesda cowardly adding them in after people complained feels like a misstep--its pretty much impossible to care about anything narratively going on when it's so blatantly just an excuse for the gameplay.
but what about that gameplay? at the end of the day it plays nearly identical to every other bethesda game released in the past 20 years or so, lol. only took me like an hour to get bored of it, and probably 20 minutes of that was me trying to make david lynch in the character creator.
what new was here though i feel isnt very compatible with the nature of this game, at least as far as the learning curve goes. unless you and all your friends begin at exactly the same time you'll all be at different points and have different levels of understanding of the systems, so if you're late to the party it can feel like you need to rush to understand stuff like how you should optimize picking special cards or in what circumstances you're supposed to base build and how persistence even works on that. these are things that i could easily google but i don't want to do that, i want to play the video game. i think that mightve worked ok in a single player setting, being introduced to them sequentially and having time to digest them. but fo76 just throws you into all these mechanics with no more than a 3-minute-long hallway walk as a leadup. for me that just makes all that stuff seem kind of too annoying to learn to bother with, especially for a game i doubt my friends will be playing a week from now.
also not a fan of the servers being mostly occupied with randoms. this is a general problem I have with mmo adjacent games but there just isn't anything special about the adventure you're on if you're constantly reminded that other people are doing the same shit as you. i think you can set up private servers if you pay up but i'm not doing that lol.
overall, it's doubtless been said before, but it just feels like a worse version of Skyrim Together.
tried to do the main quest and it bugged out at the first real conversation and locked me out of progressing. tried leaving the room and coming back and didn't fix it so whatever. adding npcs to this actually probably made it worse. bethesda cowardly adding them in after people complained feels like a misstep--its pretty much impossible to care about anything narratively going on when it's so blatantly just an excuse for the gameplay.
but what about that gameplay? at the end of the day it plays nearly identical to every other bethesda game released in the past 20 years or so, lol. only took me like an hour to get bored of it, and probably 20 minutes of that was me trying to make david lynch in the character creator.
what new was here though i feel isnt very compatible with the nature of this game, at least as far as the learning curve goes. unless you and all your friends begin at exactly the same time you'll all be at different points and have different levels of understanding of the systems, so if you're late to the party it can feel like you need to rush to understand stuff like how you should optimize picking special cards or in what circumstances you're supposed to base build and how persistence even works on that. these are things that i could easily google but i don't want to do that, i want to play the video game. i think that mightve worked ok in a single player setting, being introduced to them sequentially and having time to digest them. but fo76 just throws you into all these mechanics with no more than a 3-minute-long hallway walk as a leadup. for me that just makes all that stuff seem kind of too annoying to learn to bother with, especially for a game i doubt my friends will be playing a week from now.
also not a fan of the servers being mostly occupied with randoms. this is a general problem I have with mmo adjacent games but there just isn't anything special about the adventure you're on if you're constantly reminded that other people are doing the same shit as you. i think you can set up private servers if you pay up but i'm not doing that lol.
overall, it's doubtless been said before, but it just feels like a worse version of Skyrim Together.
1992
played pretty much just for the novelty factor of it having a YTPMV song as well as some bizarre theming juxtapositions, but WOW this is hard.
admittedly i havent played much othello before this, but I was able to get past the tutorial and world 1 just by intuiting some of the strategies. however once I hit world 2, even 30 minutes of othello strategy videos on youtube couldn't save me lmao.
it's still othello at the end of the day, and I can tell I like the core of it enough to search for another version of it, but it's probably a bad idea to keep trying to learn on this one instead of whatever the othello equivalent of chess.com is lol
admittedly i havent played much othello before this, but I was able to get past the tutorial and world 1 just by intuiting some of the strategies. however once I hit world 2, even 30 minutes of othello strategy videos on youtube couldn't save me lmao.
it's still othello at the end of the day, and I can tell I like the core of it enough to search for another version of it, but it's probably a bad idea to keep trying to learn on this one instead of whatever the othello equivalent of chess.com is lol
2024
neat little destruction game in the vein of stuff like catlateral damage or katamari. short, free, does exactly what it says on the tin. easy recommendation
1992
basically just a SNES port of a goosebumps book.
far too early in VN history to have any sort of QOL features like text speed adjustment or auto-advance, so it's agonizingly sluggish. doesn't seem that bad at first since it's a bit faster than speaking speed, but the dialogue and narration are pretty rambly and repetitive, so the inability to skim hurts it greatly. very shlocky and very slow overall, some good music tracks and manages to do some cool things with mood-setting but it inevitably shoots itself in the foot once it leaves the tension and shows you the thing you're supposed to be scared of and it's like a scooby doo villain.
only really worth a look if you're interested in the history of the VN medium as a whole. in that respect it's neat to see where most of it all stemmed from! but on its own merits its just not very good at what its trying to do lol
far too early in VN history to have any sort of QOL features like text speed adjustment or auto-advance, so it's agonizingly sluggish. doesn't seem that bad at first since it's a bit faster than speaking speed, but the dialogue and narration are pretty rambly and repetitive, so the inability to skim hurts it greatly. very shlocky and very slow overall, some good music tracks and manages to do some cool things with mood-setting but it inevitably shoots itself in the foot once it leaves the tension and shows you the thing you're supposed to be scared of and it's like a scooby doo villain.
only really worth a look if you're interested in the history of the VN medium as a whole. in that respect it's neat to see where most of it all stemmed from! but on its own merits its just not very good at what its trying to do lol
2021
played 20 hours. feels like watching a MrBeast video
2024
what if james ferraro made hardcore techno. its like myhouse or yume nikki but good
1998
having finally gotten around to MGS it's so immediately clear why it's so revered by almost everyone who touches it.
in many aspects it's still groundbreaking even today--the story, presentation, dialogue, voice acting... it's all still beating the fuck out of most "cinematic" games even now, over 25 years later. there's certainly plenty of "snake objectifies women" moments, but they stop appearing not that far in and even manage to get retroactive justification with the further development of Snake as a character, like talk about being on lock. and in 1998! fuckin, like 50% of AAA games still dont get good voice acting and this game had incredible voice acting when that number was looking more like 95%. how the hell...
unfortunately, it really pains me to say that time has not been kind to the gameplay here in the slightest. at its best moments it never gets any better than what you could get out of a Escape The Classroom When The Teacher Isnt Looking flash game--the backtracking isnt really all that bad (except on those god damn stairs), but my biggest gripe is that like 80% of the game is actually played by looking at the tiny map in the top right corner. you got all this screen real estate but it mostly goes to mechanical waste since the actual mechanics of it--the stuff you're actually doing--is communicated with much more clarity and spatial awareness with that tiny minimap. i've never really considered myself much of a stealth fan but even then i've probably been spoiled by modern stealth games, which are much more complicated and can get away with just showing you the world as-is since the interactions and visibilities are assumable with a good degree of confidence. that isn't the case here though, since it's all simple cones of vision that you mostly just have to walk around.
the combat generally kinda sucks too, now this is something im a little more willing to forgive given the themes tackled here and how you're generally supposed to avoid combat anyways, but also, you gotta do those boss fights and most of them are reeeeally bad. pretty much all of them have some stupid gimmick you're supposed to butt your head against until you figure it out, which is a mode of play that's gone from extremely popular to extremely niche in the past few decades. this whole ethos is what defined a lot of old school western adventure games and its probably also why i think most of them suck shit tbh... visual novels win... but that's beside the point, i think no one could have predicted the internet becoming what it has, and making the question of "how to beat sniper wolf mgs1" a simple google search away. which turns that point in the game from an excuse to backtrack and go exploring and extend your playtime with your brand newly purchased video game into what at its worst feels like a guided tour. this is no fault of MGS, its the fault of the world for changing around it...
but all that said, if you can get past the gameplay (its not really that bad its just okay most of the time and bearable with sparing guide use and savestate spam in a few particularly annoying boss fights) there really is a hell of a lot to chew on here. very very excited to dive into the later games within this series as they will probably have better gameplay (i do recall vaguely having fun with MGS5 for a brief while early on in high school before I got stuck on some mission and couldn't progress), as well as kojima's older ADV work like snatcher and policenauts... i've never played a kojima to credits and while i am kind of kicking myself for not doing it earlier, this does feel like probably the best place to finally start on that journey and i'm not sure a less Video Game Experienced version of myself coulda truly appreciated just how groundbreaking this was in context of the time.
in many aspects it's still groundbreaking even today--the story, presentation, dialogue, voice acting... it's all still beating the fuck out of most "cinematic" games even now, over 25 years later. there's certainly plenty of "snake objectifies women" moments, but they stop appearing not that far in and even manage to get retroactive justification with the further development of Snake as a character, like talk about being on lock. and in 1998! fuckin, like 50% of AAA games still dont get good voice acting and this game had incredible voice acting when that number was looking more like 95%. how the hell...
unfortunately, it really pains me to say that time has not been kind to the gameplay here in the slightest. at its best moments it never gets any better than what you could get out of a Escape The Classroom When The Teacher Isnt Looking flash game--the backtracking isnt really all that bad (except on those god damn stairs), but my biggest gripe is that like 80% of the game is actually played by looking at the tiny map in the top right corner. you got all this screen real estate but it mostly goes to mechanical waste since the actual mechanics of it--the stuff you're actually doing--is communicated with much more clarity and spatial awareness with that tiny minimap. i've never really considered myself much of a stealth fan but even then i've probably been spoiled by modern stealth games, which are much more complicated and can get away with just showing you the world as-is since the interactions and visibilities are assumable with a good degree of confidence. that isn't the case here though, since it's all simple cones of vision that you mostly just have to walk around.
the combat generally kinda sucks too, now this is something im a little more willing to forgive given the themes tackled here and how you're generally supposed to avoid combat anyways, but also, you gotta do those boss fights and most of them are reeeeally bad. pretty much all of them have some stupid gimmick you're supposed to butt your head against until you figure it out, which is a mode of play that's gone from extremely popular to extremely niche in the past few decades. this whole ethos is what defined a lot of old school western adventure games and its probably also why i think most of them suck shit tbh... visual novels win... but that's beside the point, i think no one could have predicted the internet becoming what it has, and making the question of "how to beat sniper wolf mgs1" a simple google search away. which turns that point in the game from an excuse to backtrack and go exploring and extend your playtime with your brand newly purchased video game into what at its worst feels like a guided tour. this is no fault of MGS, its the fault of the world for changing around it...
but all that said, if you can get past the gameplay (its not really that bad its just okay most of the time and bearable with sparing guide use and savestate spam in a few particularly annoying boss fights) there really is a hell of a lot to chew on here. very very excited to dive into the later games within this series as they will probably have better gameplay (i do recall vaguely having fun with MGS5 for a brief while early on in high school before I got stuck on some mission and couldn't progress), as well as kojima's older ADV work like snatcher and policenauts... i've never played a kojima to credits and while i am kind of kicking myself for not doing it earlier, this does feel like probably the best place to finally start on that journey and i'm not sure a less Video Game Experienced version of myself coulda truly appreciated just how groundbreaking this was in context of the time.
2022
I have no clue why but I guess you can play a fuckton of shitty mobile games with no ads in your browser now through YouTube??? Maybe these are supposed to have ads, this feels like a game that only exists to serve you ads, but my adblocker seems to have caught them anyways. So brave of Google to step up their game and give you keys jingling in an environment even more interactive than YouTube Shorts.
At level 20 the sky changes from blue to orange, and then at 40 it just alternates back. I locked into this for 30 minutes for a third color, God damn it
At level 20 the sky changes from blue to orange, and then at 40 it just alternates back. I locked into this for 30 minutes for a third color, God damn it
Really solid short queer game hindered by the simple but ever-present issue of the text flying by wayy too fast with no real way to slow it down. Feel like I woulda been able to appreciate it more if I didn't have to skim half of the dialogue to be able to read it in time. Still pretty solid though, although that's admittedly coming from the perspective of a gay man so it may be biased.
Consciously made the effort to only play it once, doesn't feel in the spirit of a "coming out simulator" to be able to do it again.
Consciously made the effort to only play it once, doesn't feel in the spirit of a "coming out simulator" to be able to do it again.
2001
Perfectly competent guideline Tetris game. Although, the "story" mode (the main reason I played this) is a bit of a misnomer--so, you know how Tetris tends to have an endless mode and a marathon mode? Yeah, well, the story mode is just marathon mode. There's a opening cutscene that does some worldbuilding, some blurbs in the info menu, and a short little 3-5 second long animation when starting and ending a game, but that's about it, as far as a proper story goes.
Still, it's guideline Tetris, and guideline Tetris is good. Some of the modes are definitely better than others, Hot-line is interesting since you're incentivized to stack poorly and be good at recovering near the top, Fusion introduces single block pieces that can't be cleared away which makes clearing the board a fun challenge. They're not all hits though, Sticky doesn't ask you to play any differently than in normal Tetris (except you get cascades now), Cascade is fine (but I found chaining cascades much easier in Fusion), and Square isn't great since it fucks with the bag system and asks you to build these really ugly and imposing squares, but at the end of the day you don't have to play all of the modes and you still get Tetris.
Didn't take me very long to mute the announcer though, I never do that in any Tetris game but I can only handle so much sensually whispered "single"s before it gets annoying, which it turns out is only like 30 minutes worth.
Still, it's guideline Tetris, and guideline Tetris is good. Some of the modes are definitely better than others, Hot-line is interesting since you're incentivized to stack poorly and be good at recovering near the top, Fusion introduces single block pieces that can't be cleared away which makes clearing the board a fun challenge. They're not all hits though, Sticky doesn't ask you to play any differently than in normal Tetris (except you get cascades now), Cascade is fine (but I found chaining cascades much easier in Fusion), and Square isn't great since it fucks with the bag system and asks you to build these really ugly and imposing squares, but at the end of the day you don't have to play all of the modes and you still get Tetris.
Didn't take me very long to mute the announcer though, I never do that in any Tetris game but I can only handle so much sensually whispered "single"s before it gets annoying, which it turns out is only like 30 minutes worth.
2024
Extremely fun for maybe an hour or so. What's here dries out pretty quick though, and even by the end of my first play session I could tell the amount of stuff to do was already running pretty thin--giving you a single map, a couple of monsters, and not much else. However, the recording mechanic is engineered to be funny with friends much more than even Lethal Company, to where I think a robust version of this might honestly surpass a robust version of the game it's really clearly riffing from. Given Landfall's history with releasing and promptly abandoning novelty multiplayer games, though, I wouldn't hope for much.
Holds up. Can't imagine playing the remastered version that removes all the copyright infringement though...
1982
App Store revisionism made me think this game was an auto runner for years.
Pitfall is a novelty. Pitfall wasn't always a novelty. Pitfall is probably one of the best games on the 2600, even if that doesn't really mean anything. 3D Tic-Tac-Toe is one of the best games on the 2600 if you can convince a friend to play it with you, if you want a measure of how little it means to be "one of the best games on the 2600." But once upon a time, Pitfall was one of the most sprawling video games ever developed, one you had to spend several weeks slowly, methodically mapping out and then several more improving your executional skill to be able to get even remotely close to beating it.
Nowadays, after running around aimlessly for 10 minutes or so, you can just look up a map of the game. If you then decide to follow along, you'll probably get maybe 70% of the way through before time runs out even with heavy use of emulator rewind. Then you'll probably look up the TAS and see that you've got less than 2 minutes of wiggle room from frame perfection if you want to "beat" Pitfall. I did not beat Pitfall.
Pitfall is a novelty. Pitfall wasn't always a novelty. Pitfall is probably one of the best games on the 2600, even if that doesn't really mean anything. 3D Tic-Tac-Toe is one of the best games on the 2600 if you can convince a friend to play it with you, if you want a measure of how little it means to be "one of the best games on the 2600." But once upon a time, Pitfall was one of the most sprawling video games ever developed, one you had to spend several weeks slowly, methodically mapping out and then several more improving your executional skill to be able to get even remotely close to beating it.
Nowadays, after running around aimlessly for 10 minutes or so, you can just look up a map of the game. If you then decide to follow along, you'll probably get maybe 70% of the way through before time runs out even with heavy use of emulator rewind. Then you'll probably look up the TAS and see that you've got less than 2 minutes of wiggle room from frame perfection if you want to "beat" Pitfall. I did not beat Pitfall.
1989
Very historically important, and very awesome that it existed at all, but still a game a million times more interesting to learn about than to actually play.
The story within and behind the making of this game is pretty dang cool, but it is still an "action-verb" adventure game with a set of not super well chosen verbs (what's the difference between look and investigate? and why even bother having a lockpick if it only works on a single door?), where you'll be trial and erroring a ton and frequently being booted back to the title screen. You can use a guide, but at that point it's short enough that you may as well just watch a YouTube video about the game. Obviously Caper in the Castro is by no means alone in these problems--these were very much hallmarks of the entire adventure game format in the era--but I've always been more of a Myst guy than a Lucasarts guy, is all I'm saying.
Gameplay gripes aside though, it is still extremely cool this was made when it was. A "gay short-form adventure game released for free over the internet" is the sort of thing you'd expect to be released on itch in the past 5 years, not via a BBS in 1989. Even though there's really not much going for it in the gameplay department (you're never going to hear anyone singing praises for the straightwashed version of this, Murder on Mainstreet), you've gotta give it props for being so many years ahead of its time regardless.
The story within and behind the making of this game is pretty dang cool, but it is still an "action-verb" adventure game with a set of not super well chosen verbs (what's the difference between look and investigate? and why even bother having a lockpick if it only works on a single door?), where you'll be trial and erroring a ton and frequently being booted back to the title screen. You can use a guide, but at that point it's short enough that you may as well just watch a YouTube video about the game. Obviously Caper in the Castro is by no means alone in these problems--these were very much hallmarks of the entire adventure game format in the era--but I've always been more of a Myst guy than a Lucasarts guy, is all I'm saying.
Gameplay gripes aside though, it is still extremely cool this was made when it was. A "gay short-form adventure game released for free over the internet" is the sort of thing you'd expect to be released on itch in the past 5 years, not via a BBS in 1989. Even though there's really not much going for it in the gameplay department (you're never going to hear anyone singing praises for the straightwashed version of this, Murder on Mainstreet), you've gotta give it props for being so many years ahead of its time regardless.