Wil

I've not been keeping up partially because of writer's block and partially because I've been dealing with waves of illness whenever I haven't been doing stream things, sometimes that's more visible than usual in my streams but well, I try my best to prep folks for that.

Oh god what did I play, do I even remember?

• INFERNAX: Felt pretty indebted to Monster World as much as it did Simon's Quest. Enjoyable but I still need to get the other endings though.
• PURGATORY DUNGEONEER: Excellent work from Damien Crawford, who's impressed me before with faer's previous dungeon crawler experiments, and this one borrows from those as well. I had fun taking care of old adventurers going through things and wanna spend more time with this off and on casually.
• PRODEUS: Probably the most I've ever had a retro-style FPS get its' hooks in me, and with good reason as it came from Raven Software vets. I do have some misgivings about the difficulty scaling not exactly paying variety dividends. Enemy spawn count and placement is the same regardless of difficulty, with more hits required to take down single targets - personally I'd rather have a higher/rearranged mob setting for difficulty instead. I really like the way some of the late game weapons feel though.
• ZOZ: Continued (and later finished!) @wil's excellent ZZT card battler RPG, really satisfied by both the good and the interesting endings as well.
• KEVIN COSTNER'S WATERWORLD: A meme game that goes deeper than you could ever expect, and even if it was punishing at points, I'm still wanting to see what Macaw45 does next in game development - whether it's inspired by EVIL GATE or Hardline.
• ELSEWHERE IN THE NIGHT: Totally messed up and mindbending point and click adventure, wish it had a more satisfying conclusion
• DEATH STRANDING RL: An interesting 7DRL take on a game I really connected with at first sight, this version didn't quite grab me the same way but it was neat to see somebody try this.
• POWER SLAVES: Extremely tiny metroidvania, has some ideas that could probably be refined but some of the ending paths could be given a bit more leniency.
• BOWLING CROSS: FINAL FRAME: This is one I need to play more of sooner or later, real cool sports action RPG that feels like a lost Game Boy Color gem. Getting the ball finesse down is gonna take some practice though.
• THE FORGOTTEN CRAWLER: A short experimental dungeon crawler with a solemn theme of an online game world getting erased in real time, as somebody that saw a few MMOs collapse in on themselves this one resonated pretty hard.
• SNORB'S DUNGEON CRAWL: Maybe not as ambitious as ZOZ, but not a bad bit of ZZT, even if it's largely a shitpost game with very inside references that go a little over my head at times.
• LIRAEL'S LIBRARY: Extremely unique non-combat survival roguelike, something I feel compelled to get better at someday.
• THE FABLED SUN: Kind of a Cave Story/Legacy of the Wizard-inspired metroidvania with big areas and bigger challenges. Could use an in-game map though, but still one of my top three of my night of first time itch.io games.
• BANE OF ORKS: Real cool text RPG that feels inspired by SSI classics, rougelikes, and (even if the dev may or may not want to admit it) the first wave of JRPGs. Out of all the Completely New To Me games this month, it's the one I wanna come back to the most.
• CRYSTAL PROJECT: For all the Final Fantasy and metroidvania notes brought up elsewhere, there were big pieces of this that felt like slipping into an extremely cozy Nihon Falcom classic. There's so much in this that I just click with, whether it's the incredibly deep exploration, the platforming (which honestly gets easier as the game went on), the tactics of job balances in combat, the mystery of the world, and the fact that after 70 hours I could play it another 70 hours and not get tired of it. Just behind the perfect narrative trio of 2022 in Citizen Sleeper, Pentiment and Norco on my GOTY list, in spite of having a story that's barely carried by words, but by everything you do and find instead. I've got more time to put into it, with post-game and extra side content and New Game+ and the Randomizer and whatever else Andrew Willman does for this game.
• CHAINED ECHOES: Chained Echoes is a very good western JRPG. Like Crystal Project there's lots to do and see. But Chained Echoes gets in it's own way a lot, especially in terms of the story. There's a lot of inconsistency of character in the first half, there's entirely way too much oversharing of personal detail, and there's a bit of overreliance on plot twist tropes that refuse to let up until nearly the final act. However, the game seems to pull itself together, just barely, for a really excellent conclusion and (like most of the game) pulls deep cut references from cult RPG classics in the process. And yeah, the battle system is extremely fun, in some says even more than Crystal Project's is. I've still got unfinished business with this one as well, and hopefully I get to revisit it (and New Game+ when it happens) down the line.

So yeah, 2022 is full of games I want to play more of and play again, but there's just one problem with that. I have a HORRIFYING backlog. And this month I get to visit 3 RPGs in new ways, experience some side games that I never had the chance to play in youth, and finally experience the one big game in the series that got away from me. I'm playing through the classic side of the PHANTASY STAR series - with the first two chapters being visited in their SEGA AGES Playstation 2 remakes for the first time by me (I've played the originals multiple times and I played through the SMS Power retranslation of Phantasy Star 1 when it came out), Phantasy Star 3 with the General Improvement and Fast Walking hacks (I love the story beats and the worldbuilding of Generations of Doom but I'm totally pragmatic about the vanilla game being a tough watch), and my first times experiencing Phantasy Star Adventure, the Phantasy Star II Text Adventures, Phantasy Star Gaiden, and Phantasy Star IV. I've been wanting to visit the Algol saga in full for a while and the passing of Rieko Kodama made it a priority after the obligations of DOSember and my January schedule. The final Thursday will be either a short Phantasy Star IV stream or a short game, depending on the situation, as a means to join in on the viewer side of Save and Raid: Wastelands, also being organized by friends that put together DOSember.

Also I've got preliminary plans for March falling into place - I'm starting a new process of working through a long game on my Tuesday stream, and I have a few in mind for Tuesdays to come - namely Cross Code, TROUBLE SHOOTER: Abandoned Children, and The Lost Child - but my first few months will be occupied by one of my favorite Diablo clones, TITAN QUEST. I'm also weighing options on scheduling a new game, leaning heavily towards WO LONG: FALLEN DYNASTY but if LIKE A DRAGON: ISHIN! is readily available with my resources I'd like to do that soon as well. Again, everything past this month is extremely preliminary, even if my imagined next year in calendar templates say otherwise.

It was a real treat to see how it all shook out! Thanks again for going on the ZOZ journey with me!