i don't really wanna put a rating on a thing like this, though i kinda wish i could put a <3 on it the way you can with letterboxd. but anyway. this hits very close to home.

i moved back to my original hometown in michigan after living in portland, oregon for about 13 years... at the end of 2019. at the end of a relationship which had lasted for nearly 10 of those years. i stayed with family briefly and then moved into a smallish 1-bedroom apartment that i hate (with my cat, kismet, who i brought home with me because i couldn't stand to leave her (and i wish i could've brought more of my cats with me)).

one big difference (between myself and this game's creator, according to the game itself) is that my mental illness gets in the way of me keeping jobs and i've been unemployed for most of the time since. i'm currently receiving assistance through september, and i need to have some sort of income before then. i also want to move. living alone is killing me.

honestly, i don't even know if i'd still be here without the small irc channel occupied by longtime friends providing me with some sort of anchor. i do wish i could hear people's voices more often, though. one of the things i miss most about living with my ex (and, for a time, a roommate) is that constant source of company. i just need to be near people, even when we're all tending to ourselves, in our own space (within the same space).

my desk is positioned right in front of one of my 2 windows and i have a decent view of trees and sky, but the loneliness is inescapable. i don't live downtown, either, so i rarely feel like going outside unless i have a place to go - otherwise the aimlessness of "going out for a walk" just makes me feel even lonelier.

my cat cries a lot and i think she's lonely and bored. i feel awful about it. i would like to get another cat, but i'm too poor and i pretty much only spend my money, whenever i do have it, on video games and weed. sometimes booze.

writing this isn't actually making me feel any better.

damn it

oof. looks cool as hell, but there's just no sense of depth perception and it's way too easy to get hit by projectiles even when you're sure you should've evaded them thanks to your hitbox being HUGE and animation/trajectory of enemies and said projectiles being very choppy and unpredictable. meanwhile, the animation of the ground beneath you is surprisingly smooth for a famicom game, but uhhh it ain't the floor we're trying to dodge. i'm sure it's a lot more playable with the 3d system visor, which i would assume virtually nobody has.

an alluring little action rpg by all appearances, especially with the msx2 and the mystique it brings to someone who grew up on the nes and had scarcely heard of this japanese computer until much later... new devil golvellius is very fetch quest-driven, much of your adventure involving killing enemies until a hole appears - and then you go into the hole to buy a bible (boosting your health) from a witch. combat feels like flimsy, whack-a-mole busywork and there's a bit too much actual grinding for an action rpg like this. despite the nice presentation, you can do much better for early examples in the genre, e.g. crystalis, zelda 2, faxanadu, or the magic of scheherazade.

first of all, it's a singular memory of a broken dimension, but i don't fuck with igdb anymore and the misnomer is fitting in its own way (please, don't go fix it). i like to keep this at the top of my steam wishlist, where it has sat for years and will persist for as long as this remnant lingers. if you can find the old prototype floating around out there like one of cayce's mysterious and disjointed viral videos in w. gibson's pattern recognition (you totally can, it's not actually hidden or anything), you'll discover a piece of work abandoned (mostly) by its creator out of frustration with the linearity of its form as it took form. it remains a compelling proof of concept nevertheless - an artifact of artefacts struggling to exist within the noise of the digital landscape.

not really my first time playing this, though it might as well be. anyhow, it's a vertically scrolling shooter with a hook: survive each of the 4 heroes' stages, finding their unique spell tokens along the way, and then deploy said spells at a specific moment (you'll have to figure that out) during the final stage, where the heroes form a unit. if you fail to find any one of those spells or allow even a single hero to die - with a single hit - you're hosed. it's a game that demands mastery, and while it may be unlikely that most people today are going to put that kind of energy into a nes game with a dodgy reputation, well... that's fine. it's still a neat little game to pop in for a few minutes and see how you fare. it's pretty fun blasting everything in sight (including the scenery) in search of the power-ups you'll need. a pad with autofire would be highly recommended. don't stress... unless?

for an early game made by rare, this one's extremely forgiving. infinite continues! you pick up right where you died! only your score resets upon death, but like... who cares. it's a bit awkward, with your attack button making kuros just kind of... waggle his sword around? but enemies will take damage from it even just by touching it without your input, and more importantly your damage output will instead quickly fall to the various weapons thou hath discovered - like the throwing dagger that acts like a boomerang. you'll get magic you can cast with the select button, too. and you'll be mashing that attack button almost constantly, with enemies flying at you from offscreen, from every direction... relentlessly. there's a weird, arcade-y slip n slide feel to the platforming and progression with smooth scrolling in four directions, doors leading into caves leading to doors emerging in previously inaccessible places - these levels are big! - and there's just a really fun loosey-goosey feel to the exploration and discovery. no knight has ups like this knight.

yeah, this... is pretty much what i remembered. this game was straight up irresistible bait to a kid browsing rentals in 1991 (at video tyme... before the blockbuster buyout). preceding the era of 'tude and following the most righteous triumph of bill & ted (rather blatantly), totally rad was very attractive.

it's a great-looking and great-sounding nes game, yet its gameplay is... er, marginally rad? it's not exactly bad. its platforming is utterly basic - more like contra than mario, though hardly on contra's level with its shooting. odd quirks like the inability to run up small diagonal ramps or keep your weapon charge while jumping make it more awkward than it should be. the magic system is... well, it's there, but it's very limited in that there are no replenishing drops - you have to manage your mp between checkpoints. you also can't use your heal spell while transformed, so you'll have to go into the pause menu to revert to your human form, and then pause again to heal, and then probably pause again to transform once more. yeah, there are transformations giving you different attacks and abilities - sort of a blend of mega man and super mario bros 3, or something, though not nearly as good as either.

a little bit rad and a little bit gnarly, but most of all it's... well, it's charming and even a bit odd, yet fairly standard, ultimately. worth a shot.

seems like it might be cool with 2 players, so someone can control the bird. without that, your tiny rapier makes combat incredibly tedious, and combat is constant, making this a pretty grueling trial of patience. you're constantly assaulted by virtually unavoidable damage from flying enemies and projectiles, and you'll absolutely die before a level is finished if you aren't dealing with every single enemy by poking and retreating... again... and again... and again. it just feels kinda gross to play.

might like it a bit more if i ever have a chance to play it with someone, though i'd say that's... extremely unlikely. always thought this seemed like one of the interesting nes games i'd missed out on, but no - i would not recommend this one to anyone but serious nes completionists.

i have next to zero interest in survival games. i think outward presents itself well as a sort of action rpg drawing from games like morrowind, breath of the wild, and souls - plus a survival game... though i also think its new trailer with the "nobody owes you a living" line is some eye-rolling capitalist bootstraps garbage.

that being said, outward is a video game. at the start of the game, you're thrust into the aftermath of a shipwreck you've survived, faced with the demands of the asshole capitalist bootstraps tribe of cierzo, your home town. because you were one of the few survivors, and the ship had been carrying goods they'd been expecting (which you'd procured for them), the assholes of this town are frothing with demand of recompense - at your expense. absolute fucking assholes.

thankfully, you aren't stuck there. you have a variety of options, and among those are several paths out of cierzo. you'll even have choices further down the line regarding not only your only fate, but that of cierzo itself. the assholes. fuck them and their blood debt nonsense.

on the other hand, you can choose to do right by cierzo in spite of the mob at your door. you have quite a few choices to make along the way, really, and ultimately this is what makes outward so compelling. exploration, foraging, looting - these are all means of not only your survival, but more importantly of fueling your progress along your chosen way forward. this is how outward manages to surpass what (i assume, frankly) most survival games tend to be - it's also an action/adventure game designed around your ability to choose your path and make your mark on the world, its conflicting factions, etc. turns out, at least in my experience with outward, the cruelty of the game's opening is inspiring in ways more interesting than simply saying: survive. ultimately, it wants you to struggle and thrive.

easily one of the best-looking 8-bit games i've played. its use of color within a limited palette is just stunning, constantly. even the composition of the images, also palette-limited, benefits from the eye of an experienced manga-ka. and the animation! sparse as it is, it really makes this feel like some obscure japanese pc game - not a famicom vn.

the game's story is fairly conventional '80s sci-fi anime mecha fluff punctuated by goofy "flirting" (or just straight perving) and the latter is borderline cringe most of the time (you and your girlfriend seem to be dead-set on brutally negging each other, with your little sister's presence making it weird), but it's all fairly innocent. in the end, we're lucky to have this little gem playable in english, and it makes me wish there was more like it.

some radio banter i heard while playing won me over: "the big ones are the ones that come out of people..."

this is solidly... solid? it has absolutely no charm, unlike the cast of aliens, and that seems to be one of the main things yet eluding video games which worship the space military aesthetic of the movie sequel (whereas alien: isolation did a more or less fine job of reaching for the tone and feel of the original film (with a touch of aliens as well)). it's fun 2 blast da xeno, tho. i enjoyed playing the technician and dropping my sentries. mindless. truthfully, though this may be a bit more graphically detailed it's about as stone cold "OK" as terminator: resistance (which also, like, hardly sucks). might play some more in the future, but at the moment i feel very spoiled for excellent games to play and this one stays on the game pass shelf for now