shipped the first 10-minute gameplay beta of a solitaire game I'm working on, and by shipped I mean "posted on cohost asking you, the reader, to give it a shot and provide feedback on the gameplay feel
working on that was most of the day, and by that I mean 5 hours, scored to Hommarju's new SDVX track MURASAME (a nice little 140bpm bop). time does the opposite of flying when you're working hard, and it flies whenever you're doing something else, like watching SummoningSalt's History of Lego Star Wars World Records while playing Mario's PAD.
(as always, SSalt's speedrun videos are great, and I would like to give a shoutout to the Lego Star Wars speedrun community for allowing two-player input in single-person speedruns, resulting in the most wild hand pretzeling imaginable)
on the topic of Puzzles & Marios, I decided to drop it, and in the most mobage / numbers-go-up way, I did it immediately after the end of a long grind session on it. the game throws a pretty wicked difficulty spike at you at the end of World 3 (bad enough that it is a universal experience by people online), but doesn't give you an interesting ladder to get around the grind wall, as your party at that point consists of something like Goomba, Koopa, Koopa, Toad, Goomba, Hammer Bro, Koopa, Goomba, Paragoomba (evolved using all the resources you earned naturally up to that point), Small Mario, and Big Mario, all of which are more-or-less palette swaps of each other with glacially slow levelling and stat growth curves.
given that the grind curve and stat growth is not appreciably better than what I imagine the equivalent F2P game to be circa 2015, the game suffers, ironically, from being a paid retail title, because it doesn't give you any of the interesting / expedited ways to get around early difficulty spikes:
- gacha so that you can get a diverse pool of comically powercreeped units
- for that matter, having a diverse pool of comically powercreeped units and beginner help (such as mission-style handouts)
- limited-time events to earn efficient leveling resources or to mix up the flavor in your mouth
- a stamina system so that you are forced to take a break from the endless grind for upgrade mats
so you're just stuck there, grinding an early level, for a chance of a chance of dropping the EXP Food monster (F2P game DNA lives strong here), which, frustratingly, is called "Coin Coffer" (note that coins are a currency in this game that I currently have 800 of and literally no use for as of World 3), and you're like, okay, now PAD's gameplay style, where if you build a few small chains, you do no damage, and if the RNG drops a bunch of chains from the sky on you, you can kill god, feels bad
and so next up I get to try Dragon Quest VIII or something for all I know
I also did a lot of cleaning today, since I plugged in the humidifier for the first time this winter and immediately was assaulted with Humidifier Has Been In The Closet For Months stink. a trip to MUJI, some citric acid, and a 90 yen brush later, I got it smelling nice again, along with cleaning out the grime basically everywhere in the bathroom and all the sinks in the house. that brush is gonna get its 90 yen worth