Z-A

I removed the paywall for my little horror game about a dishwasher that causes psychic damage. I wanted to make a statement with its original price being the minimum wage for tipped workers in the U.S., but I don't think that was very effective and it doesn't make much sense to keep it behind a paywall at this point.

I used to engage in a habit of re-writing Magic the Gathering stories, the ones they would put out on the mothership as short web fiction, as what I called "goblinizations," the notion being to make them more honest by making them more ridiculous. It has been long enough since the last time I read them that I was able to laugh at my own jokes. I decided to put some of them here, with annotations explaining what must be to non-Magic people what must make me sound like a maniac. Well, more of a maniac, anyway. I thought about making them into footnotes but settled on hover text because that is the way I would want to read it.

I finished Sea of Stars recently, and its a game that's been tumbling around in my head for months at this point. I'm a huge fan of it, and really enjoyed my time with it, but it's not without its flaws. Quick Summary: It's a beautiful game, great music, strong gameplay, and some really uneven character/scenario writing.

First with the strengths, the game is extremely fun to play. Part of that is obviously the combat, which has a lot of different moving parts that all sync up to give you a lot of options. (Even if Turn Delaying is just the best thing to be doing at any time) Timed Hits, Combo Points, Boosts, Lock Breaking, and balancing small MP pools give you a good puzzle and options in a fight. However, the other gameplay strength I enjoyed was Dungeon Design. Hobbling and clamoring over ledges, adjusting puzzles and levers, dodging enemies for first strikes, or just finding hidden treasure, the world traversal felt fun, a far cry from something like a Bravely Default dungeon layout.

One of my biggest grips with this game, the character/scenario writing. Specifically here, the opening of the game is the biggest hurdle. The first 6-8 hours gives us so little to latch onto, our main pair have the most paper thin of characters and the quest we're on is extremely ill-defined, basically being "get a boat to get to where the game starts in earnest." This stumbling out of the gate takes some time to correct, and while we do finally get an understanding of what any of the Solstice Warriors Duties are and we do come to have a driving plot we can follow, in other ways (Valere and Zale as characters) it never really corrects. Thank goodness for Garl.

A lot of what I want to touch on involves plot details, so Full Spoilers below the cut here.

There was a night where between the mental taxation and the wine I couldn't remember the word "vault" and so said in a meeting that I had done the task of the "cage for goods." That phrase has attained legendary status in our little lobby, and is an easy way to take me down a peg whenever I'm up to my usual tricks. Best of all, I was impostor that round and the fake humility from my error allowed me to escape suspicion.

I wish I could play more often, hence the recruitment effort.

We're all very happy here, playing Among Us.