I'm back in my own house again and back to work during the day. I've been spending a lot of free time on my own development projects, and shockingly other media like "books" or "non-sport moving images." Still a lot of games though. A lot of habitual Bombe and MC Eternal of course.
I'm still moving forward in In Stars and Time on most days. Generally an hour or so at a time. The plot continues to move forward in a gripping way, and makes the timeloop aspect quite interesting. The part of the game I'm at has some quests that require quite a substantial commitment to complete before looping back, but I've found them to be rewarding after the fact, so it's not a complaint. I do have a minor complaint that the mysteries revealed by the timeloop tend to be very Deus-Ex Machina'ish and impossible to discover 'organically'. But the game is still a strong recommendation.
I started playing Kingsvein the latest game from the developer of Horizon's Gate. It has tactics'ish RPG gameplay similar to Horizon's Gate, but with a more traditional storyline rather than a giant open world. I'm enjoying it a lot so far and plan to keep playing it, though I said the same about Horizon's Gate and soon lost the thread on that. My biggest complaint with Kingsvein is that there are a huge variety of classes and skills you can use to build you character. But the unlock tree always starts with the same two classes and requires you to 'throw away' a lot of progress to access the more interesting builds.
Tonight I started playing Shipwrecked 64 a faux-retro platformer that is also supposedly haunted or something like that. The premise is compelling, but the game annoyed me immediately by having no way to invert the y-axis on the controls (Incidentally, it's now quite easy to fix this in a lot of games with Steam's controller config tool.) But even beyond this the controls are terrible, somehow the dialog control is the worst of all. Dialog slowly appears on the screen and then must be skipped manually, but skipping the dialog also cuts it off before all the words appear. I didn't get far enough to engage with the meaningful layers of the game, but I don't know if I will at this point. Also no "64" game would have this much FMV
Annoyed at the previous game, I also started Corn Kids 64. It's a much better rendition of a late 90s 3D platformer from the creator of Lyle in Cube Sector (At the time of writing the 60th best game of all time. ). It allows you to invert the y-axis, which is a good start, but you can't invert it without also inverting the x-axis, so Steam's help is required again. I've had a lot of fun running around the first area. Though the controls have all the same problems with cameras and imprecision that the actual games of the time had, and seems to think this is a good thing for some reason. I think I will power through this one though.
I also played a bunch of old DOS games from my childhood to remind myself of them. None of them are worth mentioning though.
One exception though, is that I actually played NIOSA (which I have mentioned before after discovering it from an excellent Timberwolf Video). The game is a silly joke where you play as a visitor to NIOSA, a street festival in San Antonio, and try various foods, or get drunk, or lose your wallet. The gameplay is sort of a hybrid between Sierra AGI adventure games and weirdly specific job simulation games. There's very little depth to the game, but there is surprising amount of stuff in the game, and a lot of mechanical complexity to what is there (You start the game with $25. But you need tickets to buy food. You buy tickets with money. But you'll need to keep some money to pay fines for pissing yourself or buy bandages when a mariachi band tramples you.) It feels a bit like walking around in the world of Leisure Larry 1 without the main narrative, but with the bad jokes. I'm not sure which game's casual racism has aged more poorly though.
JANUARY GAME OF THE MONTH
Swollen to Bursting Until I am Disappearing on Purpose
It's really good. Equal parts compelling, mysterious and unsettling. I don't think any game I've played this year has stuck in my brain so effectively.
All Games Played
- MC Eternal: Good
- Bombe: GREAT (Notable)
- In Stars and Time: GREAT (Notable)
- Kingsvein: Great
- Shipwrecked 64: Disappointing
- Corn Kidz 64: Good
- NIOSA: OK