Hey, It's EV!?

did you know video games are good? did you know indie games are cool?

I took the chance to drop by the Digital Games Expo event at Akihabara UDX today, with the primary goal of obtaining a Hokkaido 4500km guidebook and playing the Heart of Crown Online demo for a free coaster, but with a secondary goal of just Seeing Cool Stuff and oh boyyyyyyy video games

Digital Games Expo is really a place to recharge your creative batteries because you get to see so many different passions and inspirations. The hall (totaling I'd estimate 100 circles or so) is roughly grouped by genre, and you can feel the history as you go - the side-scrollers with Megaman-style boss selects, the shmup area where people haul in CRTs in and make Famicom-style cartridges, the music games with arcane controllers with arduino sticking out, they're all here.

you can feel the sort of games that the developers loved, that they want to build more of, that they used as grounds for synthesis to build something their own they could plant anime girls into. and yet you can see things you've never seen before

(a bunch of games after the cut)

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Rhythm of Deck Builder caught me off guard, dance mat sticking out from a table. it's a stylish and innovative deckbuilding RPG, set to a tune, where in lieu of a hand, your cards are dealt out onto a grid, and you have four beats to move your character on the grid (one step at a time) and activate the cards of your choice.

it's an interesting way to frame thinking fast, and the analysis only gets trickier once cards with passive effects for NOT collecting them get added to the mix. mechanically, I feel the game needs some adjustment, but the style and concept is really impressive.

Egg War Puzzle is a classic 1v1 puzzle game going into early access this month, with all the polish and flash you'd expect of a frantic character-based puzzler.

like many games of its era (not to claim I am its biggest veteran), it feels both familiar and unique, with the player positioning falling 2x2 squares to match 3 tiles in any direction - and it seems that gravity exists but tiles can match in midair? multi-tier character skills and color-based attack/defense schemes look to add more dimension to the action as well. I'm always here for the puzzlers

Gosick Rogue - I gotta stand up for the deckbuilders out there. I am voted most likely to accidentally make a deckbuilder in 2024. Gosick Rogue is a fairly work-in-progress-feeling effort by a small dev, but still manages to introduce a playstyle that, while maybe not yet balanced nor in-depth, feels unique among the genre.

while drawing heavily from the traditional Slay the Spire combat framing, Gosick gives you a fixed-size, 10-card deck which you draw in the same order every time (starting with 3 cards and using/drawing 1 a turn). this got my head racing with the focus not just on how to arrange my cards to form an effective combo, but even calculating, from the start of combat - did I have enough power to win at all? (timing out an enemy after 10 cards counts as neither a win nor loss)

Heart of Crown Online is the 3D reimagining of the digital port of the famed (among people who know me) deckbuilding board game (i.e. Dominion-like). this series and its Etrian Odyssey art are dear to my heart, having worked on an unofficial translation over a decade ago, and I'm always a fan of its fast-paced and aggressive deckbuilding action (where Dominion is a "build the perfect engine" game to me, Heart of Crown is a "build an engine that gets it done" game. Also anime girls are there).

the original digital port actually also has online play as well as a bunch of unlockable short story scenarios which are very cute, and I highly recommend it. this 3D (with Live2D planned, apparently?) version is still shaping up, but I look forward to seeing how it turns out! they had a challenge to see if you could win within 18 turns for a chance at winning a deckbox - to which I barely managed to defeat the ferocious CPU as Raolily's right arm. as it turns out, the challenge is "name your favorite princess, then draw a random card, and if you pick her (1 in 6), you win the deckbox". my favorite princess is of course the bespectacled Bergamot, but I ended up drawing, ironically, the Raolily card.

I didn't get a chance to play nature prhysm but it caught my eye as a music game with a custom three-layer controller and a weather themed UI (featuring a fake clock in the top-left that goes from 0:00 to 24:00 as the song progresses, background animations, and a difficulty rating themed as "chance of rain").

prhysm's gimmick is that it layers multiple colors into its 4-falling-lane traditional UI, with the controller consisting of 3 rows of 4 red, green, and blue keys that all combine, taiko-style, into the same lanes. but that's not all! you can also mix colors (following light color mixing rules) for some chords that are truly mindbending. what I'm saying is that you're never too into music games to not be amazed by seeing someone tear up a song far beyond your comprehension.

I'd also like to segue to Kokoro Clover Season1 by means of "games that show a clock in the top-left", but this time because Kokoro Clover is an action/adventure game framed around giving you that feeling of a Sunday morning magical girl anime, complete with OP, ED, transformations, fancy shiny toys, and according to the Steam page, "the time in the upper left corner can be changed to 8:00 or 9:00! Relive that feeling of watching anime in the mornings!". That's the good stuff.

shikakukes was a double surprise for me, as it was my first time seeing a Playdate game at an event, as well as my first time seeing and using a Playdate ever! it's a very polished and quite fitting game for the platform - a homage to the 1989 puzzler Quarth, where you can either build up or destroy floating blocks in order to arrange them into rectangular shapes (which erases them).

it features pretty much everything you (I) would want - intuitive and reactive gameplay, varying forms of play that adjust how you approach a multifaceted action-puzzle, and a variety of outfits for a cute mascot. oh, and the Playdate crank lets you scroll the field up AND down (replenishing or consuming your limited energy, another smart constraint).

I had long assumed myself Not A Playdate Person; most of this is hipsterness repelling hipsterness like a magnet formed out of something internalized long ago, but another part is the fact that while I like throwback stuff (and aspire to make a low-poly 3D game sometime), I've never considered myself much of a Hardware Purchaser (note: I have purchased a Beatmania KOC, a PS3, and a Vita this year). I guess I'd say I like oldish things but I'm not as enamored with intentional friction involved in enjoying them (whether in terms of physical hardware or old-style game design).

but also I have told multiple people "I played a Playdate today and didn't think I'd be into it but it's actually really really cute" and 100% of them have told me "you are the exact person who would want a Playdate" so uh sound off in the comments I guess. the biggest reason I wouldn't at this point is that I'm actually very bad at developing with hardware constraints

anyway I have a comical amount of flyers and photos of games that I saw but didn't have a chance to get hands-on time with just yet, that I'm excited to research and like. wow. there are so many cool games. so many developers out there of all skill levels. I love having really polished devs to look up to, as well as more amateur devs to remind you that you can just make stuff.

it owns to make stuff! go make a deckbuilder themed around the idol character cd for your mobage rpg that features half of your crackship that only like four people have drawn art of ever. actually i am probably going to spin the deckbuilder of that sentence off into another thing and find another genre for that game. it was a funny idea but i have Plans