veebs-hates-video-games

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Games. I played some more.

God Eater Resurrection: Thank you Valve for finally fixing the bug that made it completely unplayable for me when the people who made it couldn't be bothered. Now I was able to properly not enjoy playing it. The controls feel pretty awkward to me, and I suppose I could remap them, but it didn't seem worth the effort when the combat felt super mushy anyway and not satisfying to me. It doesn't help that nearly every female character design is extremely questionable. I do appreciate that unlike so many more recent games it runs happily at a locked 60 fps and native screen resolution with no upscaling or post-processing smearing the image into goo and destroying the image quality. I miss that. At least now I can spare myself trying any of the others since I know they're not my thing.

Roguebook: It's been like six days since I spent over two hours playing it, and I can barely remember anything. It really didn't make a whole lot of an impression on me. I remember it seeming...fine? I didn't anti-enjoy it or anything, but I also wasn't enjoying it enough after a couple runs to keep playing. I can appreciate what they're going for, and I did like how my deck filled out over time and some of the interactions between things, but I think I saw enough of it for me.

Mosaic of the Pharaohs: Basically Proverbs again (it's the same guy) except this time Egyptology-themed. I was a little worried it might be weird about stuff in the way a lot of Egyptology stuff can be, but it feels like it at least tries to avoid the worst of that. And otherwise it's just more mosaic puzzles, generally on the easier side (when it's already a relatively easy type of puzzle to begin with). It's pretty ok and got me through some podcasts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[veebs-hates-video-games]

More stuff I've played recently, or at least finished/given up on recently:

Shadowhand Solitaire: I appreciated what they were going for with the original version of Shadowhand, trying to make a different kind of card game from what they usual do, but I wasn't into it enough to finish it. I tried this and got further, but ultimately I didn't finish it. Technically it's my fault for playing on hard mode, but I don't remember that being such a problem in the original Regency Solitaire years ago. Here though it's just completely unbearably unfair once you get to like chapter 20. If you get anything other than an excellent deal you're pretty much screwed and have to give up and try again, which is extra annoying because you have to do that for eight hands in a row because you have to basically perfectly clear all of them to meet the chapter requirements. The card layouts seem deliberately designed to give you severe bottlenecks that can completely screw you over if RNG isn't in your favor. It's probably fine on normal, but don't play it on hard unless you hate yourself and want to waste tons of time hoping for the game to finally give you the occasional winnable hand. The much shorter review of it I sent to friends was just a picture of my Steam Deck in the trash, if that tells you anything about how I felt about it by the time I gave up.

Strange Jigsaws: More ambitious than Fleb's previous stuff like 20 Small Mazes, and most of the time some very clever and fun puzzles. There's only so much I can really say about it though without spoiling things. There's a pretty solid amount of variety in puzzle mechanics and gimmicks for something entirely themed around jigsaws. There were a few I had to really stop and think about for a bit to figure out what they were getting at, but only one that I thought was actually bad. It annoyed me enough that it put me in a bit of a bad mood afterward, but the ending of the game was good enough to nearly make up for it. There have also already been some small patches to tweak a few puzzle presentations and clarify stuff that people were getting confused by though, so by the time anyone might see this it might already be fine. But anyway overall it's pretty fun.

Hazelnut Hex: I'm kind of surprised this is as cheap as it is and as unknown as it apparently is. It's extremely forgiving for a bullet hell game, like if you just want to finish the game it lets you use as many continues as you want, but actually being good at it and getting most of the achievements and an actually good score would take some skill. All aspects of the presentation are pretty great. The art style and color palette are very fun, there's plenty of good animation, and the music is catchy too. And for the handful of levels it has it manages to fit in a ton of enemy variety too. Definitely one of my favorite shmups I've played in a while.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Here's a couple more impulsive pickups because they looked silly, and I appreciate it when people are silly or get weird with things:

boyfriend or cake??: I was a little worried early on that it was going to get bad weird instead of fun weird, but it ended up being both more fun and more interesting than I thought it would and went in a direction I wasn't expecting.

The Count of Monte Clicker: I never would've guessed someone would retell The Count of Monte Cristo as an incremental game and actually make it work, but here we are. Well, not the whole book, but a decent chunk of it. It's Alexandre Dumas the same way Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is Jane Austen, like it contains enough of the original story and characters to be immediately recognizable, but it also has enough silliness on top of that to be its own thing. I had a little bit of a rough start because of a couple display issues at the low Steam Deck resolution and non-16:9 aspect ratio, but once that got sorted out it has a fun retelling of the story, decent gameplay variety, and ok progression. The pixel art and style of music used also do a good job setting the tone as something a bit different from the original book too.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ah heck, I forgot about a couple things I played and didn't say anything about them for a while, and now I have to do it when they aren't fresh in my memory. Again.

Guild of Dungeoneering: I do genuinely like a bunch of stuff about it, like the sketches-on-paper aesthetic and the silly songs, and when a run is going well it's pretty fun to play. I just felt like there were too many situations where I ended up with zero good choices available and I got screwed over by RNG rather than mistakes on my part, and after it happened one too many times I quit playing before finishing the rest of it. It just felt like either RNG was in my favor on a run and I was completely unstoppable or it was not in my favor and it was completely unwinnable no matter what I did, and I'm not a huge fan of that type of balance (or lack thereof). Also it just feels bad to lose a character that's built up a couple permanent bonuses as rewards for successful runs to getting RNG screwed and having to start over with a new one without any of those bonuses. If it's clearly my fault for doing something stupid that's one thing, but yeah.

Piczle Lines DX+α: If you're looking for another Piczle Cross Adventure, this is not it. It has some of the elements of that later game, but they hadn't quite nailed down what made it work yet. The presentation isn't quite as good, and it doesn't have anywhere near the level of QoL features either. Aside from that, I just don't like this type of puzzle as much. I don't find it particularly challenging, just tedious, especially incredibly tedious on the 128x128 puzzles, which are a crime and should never have been included in my opinion. Also it has some wonkiness with the UI and controls, especially with a controller. The music is relentlessly catchy though, even the original "bad" music you have to manually switch to.

Blood Lily Loop: I literally only clicked on it because it had "lily" in the name, and I wanted to see if it was that kind of lily or not, and then bought it for the heck of it when it said "friendship" in the description because I am incapable of not buying random stuff for a dollar or two that looks even remotely interesting. And it was actually pretty entertaining? Not amazing or anything, but the characters are enjoyable enough, and the story is self-aware enough that it manages to be silly in a fun way and avoid some of the typical problems things like time loops can fall into by getting out of its own way and not dragging things out. I might check out some of the others since little bite-sized stuff like this is good when I'm getting burned out on longer things or my brain just doesn't want to stick with any one thing for very long.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

It's that time again where I play more demos. I guess.

Maze Mice: It's fine, I guess? Combining Pac-Man, Snake, and Vampire Survivors is a unique and interesting idea, but it's just not terribly interesting past a single run. Sure more stuff unlocks, but so what? As long as you're even vaguely smart about your movement it seems pretty trivial to survive until the kill screen, so the different unlockable weapons and passives mostly just change the colors of what happens on screen and how much you can mess up and still win. There's nothing really wrong with it beyond that, but it feels like they had one really good idea to build a game around and then forgot to build a game around it.

Ok I lied, it's that time again where I only play one of the demos I downloaded, and then I get sidetracked by other stuff for an entire week and don't touch any of the others. Maybe some other time.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I should really listen to past me and have more sense than this, but with the opportunity to play the Switch 2 version of Tears of the Kingdom I spent another ten hours on it. The short version is that that's ten hours of my life I could've put to better use doing literally almost anything else.

It does look a lot nicer and feel better to play running at a higher resolution and framerate, but that doesn't really address any of the stuff that made me give up on it the first time around. I still like it more than Breath of the Wild (which I can only think of one thing I like more about: infinite bombs), but that's a pretty low bar to clear for me.

I still think the control layout is kind of baffling (the inability to remap the buttons doesn't help things), and the menus are a disaster (both the full screen ones and the little popups for switching weapons etc.), but the main thing that stood out to me this time while already knowing what I was getting myself into is that it just doesn't respect me or my time at all.

Two things in particular come to mind, mostly because they annoyed me enough to complain about them on Discord. One was a side quest that involved schlepping an orb across the desert, which is annoying enough itself, but when I was nearly all the way there I got one shot by a generic store brand lizalfos from off screen because Nintendo hates me personally. The good news was that my most recent autosave was 90% of the way there. The bad news was that The Orb is not included in your save file, so I had to go back and start over anyway because Nintendo hates me personally.

And then my reward for all that was a tiny bit of vaguely interesting lore, 300 rupees (which, despite being possibly the largest amount I'd ever gotten from anything all at once, is enough to afford 1/4 of a single item of clothing in a shop), and a few gems. Oh, and half a dozen melons. Considering it took like an hour to do the entire side quest if you include all the previous stages of it, that's super underwhelming.

And then I finally got around to doing the autobuild quest like 50 hours into the game, even though you're apparently supposed to get it right after you start playing. I'd already picked up the quest, but that was like two years ago when I was originally playing the game, so I had zero idea where the statue it was telling me about was anymore. The good news is that there's a quest marker, which I figured would point me in the right direction. The bad news is that of course it doesn't because Nintendo hates me personally. It takes you to the quest giver, who continues to not tell you where the quest actually starts from, and this is of course after I wasted like 15-20 minutes trying to reach the quest marker in the depths because that's where the quest takes place, only to realize that for some reason the quest marker shows up on all three map layers despite only being relevant on one of them, because Nintendo hates me personally.

Ok fine, I eventually figure out where I'm going and start following the statues that point to the next one in line. Not terribly interesting, but it's a classic thing games have had you do for decades, so fine, I guess. Zelda itself has been doing that since the early 90s. The problem is that the older equivalents usually took place on a single screen, or at least within a small area, while there's like 20 of these stupid statues and not much else interesting along the way, so it takes several times longer. When I turned the quest in and was informed there's another series of statues I can follow to get to something else, my reaction was that I'd rather never play video games again than do that.

It really feels like a game that has 100 hours of stuff to do in it but that's been stretched out to 700 hours by mildly inconveniencing the player at every possible opportunity. And I'd have a lot more patience for it if the peaks were like 9/10 enjoyment for me, but at best it never gets above maybe 7/10, and most of it's below that for me.

It's a shame, because it's full of lots of great ideas and interesting mechanics, and it improves on most of the stuff that bugged me about BotW, but there's still so much unnecessary mild but persistent irritation that I'm never going to finish the game even though I made it through three of the four main regional dungeons.

It doesn't do any one thing well enough to get me to put up with the rest of it, just a lot of stuff that's fine, I guess. The characters are fine (I even kind of like some of them, but there's just not enough going on there usually), the story is fine (please just put whoever did the story in Age of Calamity in charge of the mainline games, because that's the best Zelda storytelling has ever been), the puzzles are fine (I don't feel particularly clever for solving most of them like in pre-BotW games because it feels like you can just use the same handful of tricks over and over or just bypass them entirely, which is also a problem in BotW and Echoes of Wisdom), and the gameplay is...well, I personally don't think it's fine, but that didn't stop me from overall enjoying other stuff like The Witcher 3 where I didn't like the gameplay much either.

In conclusion, if I ever threaten to buy or play another Zelda game from BotW onward (that isn't a spinoff or in the distant future after they've totally reinvented the series again), someone just hit me with a brick. It's for my own good, and everyone else will be spared me complaining about it too.

Still looking forward to Age of Imprisonment though, if they handle that anywhere near as well as they did AoC.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Oops, I started accumulating more of a list of things I played and then forgot to post them while getting distracted by other things I haven't finished/given up on yet, so I'd better do something about that now. At least this time they're all generally pretty alright.

Magic Archery: Technically it's an incremental/clicker/idle game, but it's only like an hour long so there's not much time to spare for sitting around waiting for things to happen. Once it gets going it just kinda goes. Pretty satisfying progression and some silly upgrades, and the aesthetic is good too.

Tower Wizard: Made by the same person as the previous one, but this one is much more Gnorp-like. There's a lot more Stuff in it than Magic Archery, but also there's more waiting. It's right on the line between having enough stuff to do often enough to not get bored sitting around and having long enough gaps that it makes sense to go do something else for a while, which is an awkward place to be. Still pretty good though, even if the interactions between abilities are less interesting than its main inspiration, (the) Gnorp Apologue, and you can much more easily just get all of them and not worry about it.

A Building Full of Cats 2: Unsurprisingly it's a lot like the other Full of Cats games, just more so. I think I didn't quite get into this one as much as most of the others, but not really because anything's wrong with it. Actually I'd say stuff like the music has only been getting better over time, and there were fewer things I had to give up and use the search button for than in some of the older ones. Definitely curious how their metroidvania will turn out next year, since they've been gradually inching toward including more gameplay elements than just hidden object stuff.

optimal conditions for a sacrifice: I think I mostly liked this one, even if I'm undecided what it was trying to say. It feels like the author created it for someone else who isn't me, or maybe even just for themself, and I happened to be there to see it too. It was interesting enough to spend the half hour on it it asked of me though. I dig the art, and the music sounds like it could be from an old Squaresoft game from the 90s, especially the main menu theme that could be right out of one of the Mana games.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

More stuff I've been playing lately, with mixed results:

Against the Storm: It seems fine, probably? But maybe not for me. I get what it's going for and probably at some point could've gotten more into it. Part of it is definitely that it would benefit a lot from a bigger screen and a mouse and keyboard. It's technically playable on a handheld, but that's clearly not what was originally intended for it. Also 720p makes it a lot harder to get a feel for what's going on or discover mechanics/UI elements the tutorial doesn't tell you about directly because so many things are so tiny.

Hidden Capybaras with Orange: Unsurprisingly it's nearly identical to Hidden Capybaras with Orange in the Whimsical Library, minus the Whimsical Library of course. I still like some of what they did with it, but the novelty is beginning to wear off a little already.

Jane Austen's 8-bit Adventure: People really are out there making NES games in 2025. Like very literally, it's an NES ROM designed to run on an actual NES. And it feels very much like an old school NES game, for better and worse. It looks and sounds exactly like something that could've come out in the 80s, and the controls feel like it too. The biggest difference is just that it doesn't have a limited number of lives and force you to start the entire game over if you die. I was enjoying it for a bit, but I didn't finish it because I eventually got tired of falling in bottomless pits and having to start the level I was on over. I did enough of that on the actual NES for one lifetime. I swear I had one more thing to say about it, but my brain decided to spontaneously start playing the Cave Story title screen music on a loop instead for some reason.

Click and Conquer: I downloaded the demo on a whim, played through it, bought the game, and then finished that too, all in one sitting. There's nothing revolutionary about it or anything, but it does what it sets out to in a satisfying enough way. It could've dragged things out a lot longer, but it has a good sense of when the player is likely to have had enough of whatever the most recent elements are and accelerates the progression to move on to the next thing. And while it's not super deep, I was not expecting the last level or ending to actually have something to say or any kind of message (which is reflected in the skill tree looping around on itself and literally being a cycle of violence). That was kinda neat.

DEEEER Simulator: I think this might be one of the best things I've played this year in terms of succeeding at being what it's trying to be. Plenty of other things I've played have been more ambitious or had higher highs or bigger payoffs, but this one managed to do exactly what it set out to do and then get out of its own way and be done with itself before screwing too much up in the process like it easily could've if they'd tried to stretch it out to more than a couple hours. It's entirely built around absurdity and lightly poking fun at other stuff and deliberate jankiness, but it works because it fits so much stuff into such a small amount of time, and anything that doesn't quite work right moves on to something else even sillier very quickly. I do think I would've liked it less if I'd watched the trailers first though, which I think maybe give away too much.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Demos? Demos.

Rift of the NecroDancer: On one hand it's nice to have something that's vaguely in the same vein as old Harmonix games like Frequency/Amplitude, although I did have to change the controls to match up with I used to use for those before it felt at all normal to play. On the other hand even just the tutorial introduces like 4000 concepts at once, which is way too many. If I stuck with it for a bit I could get used to it and recognize all the different things by sight after a while, but I don't wanna, so I'm not gonna. This can go next to Crypt of the NecroDancer/Cadence of Hyrule as rhythm games that are like 80% designed for me personally and 20% designed to make me not want to play them at all, but I'm glad other people seem to like them. Oh but also it probably has the best latency calibration I've ever seen, so that's good too.

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom: I definitely like the idea of it, but I'm not really feeling it while playing it. I don't really think there's anything wrong with it, I just don't like it. The controls feel pretty tight, and it's generally pretty clear what's going on and what does what in the environment, but I don't think I enjoy navigating a 3D platformer in a car. Not super into any of the dialogue/story either, what little there is. Like I see "Alien Mosk" and "Tosla" and it's like 😐

[veebs-hates-video-games]

So I just played both Eiyuden Chronicle games, and one of them is one of my favorite things I've played this year while the other is one of the biggest disappointments. One of them I happily 100%ed, and the other I force quit in the middle of a boss fight so I could uninstall it.

The short version is that Rising is great, and Hundred Heroes was an enormous letdown after just having finished that.

Rising is nowhere near the most ambitious thing I've played this year, and it doesn't have anywhere near the highest highs, but it's one of the ones that most successfully executed on what it set out to be, at least if you're willing to engage with it on its own terms without expecting it to be something else.

It's not a sprawling RPG, and it doesn't have a super deep and involved story or tons of character development. What it does have is good vibes, a ton of charm, and a very likable bunch of characters and world. It looks great, the music is super catchy, and while it's not perfect it at least feels reasonably polished. On the combat side of things the link combos feel satisfyingly crunchy, and then you go back to the cozy town building side of things and constantly have new interactions with a fun cast of weirdos and their daily lives.

It made me pretty excited to see what Hundred Heroes did with the setting and what happened to the handful of characters that reappear in it. Turns out the answer seems to be they made a worse game that looks and feels much more dated.

My very first impression was wow this looks so much worse than the other game did. I know they were trying to capture the look and feel of stuff like the older Suikoden games, but it's just kinda meh looking compared to Rising, which also has 3D environments and 2D characters, or something like Star Ocean 2R, which I played last year and looks amazing.

And then my next impressions were that I didn't like any of the characters as much as the ones in Rising, at least not initially, and that the voice acting was very "fine I guess" but not adding a ton for me. I think the only time in the few hours I played where the characters really worked for me was when Nowa and Seign were alone, and that might be it.

And then the combat and menus...exist. I kept feeling like it would be nice if there were a bit more information available in some places or if it could be bothered to explain the details of some things a bit better (which maybe it does later, but it sure doesn't early on), and like it would be nice if there were a reason to do anything other than auto-battle for anything other than boss fights.

What finally killed it for me was a couple things. The camera is pretty awful in some places, with it fixed and not letting you control it but also moving around and changing angles suddenly on its own, which was starting to give me a headache just walking around town even though I normally have zero issues with motion sickness. And then to throw the first boss fight with Mellore at me after giving me a headache and making me suffer through a 50/50 chance of every turn being completely wasted or not, combined with laggy menus and overly long animations wasting even more time...well, that's where I force quit the game so I could uninstall it.

I really did want to like Hundred Heroes, and there were glimpses of something I might like in there, but it did too many things that annoyed me too often, and I have better things to do with my time like play other games I don't like.

Rising is still great though, if you're into that sort of thing. The town theme has lived in my brain looping as background music for the past couple days.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I played a decent amount of Soulstone Survivors last year, and I mostly had pretty nice things to say about it. Then this week when it finally hit 1.0 I went back to check out all the other stuff that had been added since then.

I have opinions.

They aren't so good anymore.

I do still like plenty of things about it. It has a lot more interactions between different skills and effects than most similar games do, which can be fun for a while to figure out. The art and music and overall presentation is generally quite good. There's good consistent progression constantly unlocking new stuff to try out. For the most part I had a pretty good time until somewhere in the midgame.

Unfortunately it got increasingly less fun and interesting from then on.

You know all those different skill and status effect interactions? They don't change how the game actually plays at all once you know how to combine them, and every run with every character built around every weapon or type of damage feels identical except for some of them being bad and taking forever to kill stuff.

All the fun visual effects they made for the dozens of different skills? I hope you don't like actually being able to see any of it, because at some point the game becomes unplayable without turning the opacity of it down well below 50%, or in some cases all the way to 0%.

The progression and unlocks? Eventually those get pretty pointless and tedious too. There's basically zero creativity in the achievements or the unlock conditions for new stuff, and they just become grinding after a while. Not as bad as Nordic Ashes, but when Halls of Torment exists I expect at least a little better at this point.

In the end, over the course of a year it went from one of my favorite games in the genre to just kind of disappointing. Part of that is because I've played games since then that handled a lot of those things better (particularly Halls of Torment), and part of it is some fundamental design decisions they made that pushed the game in this direction as they tried to keep scaling stuff up.

I don't think it's bad or anything. The first half is still pretty good. It just falls apart for me after that, and there are other games that have avoided making those same mistakes.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Ok, what about going back to games I did actually play after all that stuff about ones I haven't yet?

Saints Row 2: Ironically the Windows version runs better on Linux these days than it ever did on Windows (without any tweaking or mods, at least). It's still pretty janky compared to 3 and 4 though, so I didn't stick with it too long. I'm amazed how many modern games this many years later still don't have some of the seemingly obvious character customization options Saints Row had as far back as at least 2 and 3 a decade and a half ago, which were super flexible in terms of body types and mixing and matching gender stuff.

KUUKIYOMI 3: Consider It More and More!! - Father to Son: It's still fun and silly in the same "WarioWare but make it about being either considerate of others or an over the top jerk in various social situations" way, but something about it didn't quite do it for me as much as the first two. I don't know if it was the choice of situations for the minigames or I was just in a different mood when I played the others before. I'll still probably get the fourth one if it's on sale cheap enough some day though.

Hidden Capybaras with Orange in the Whimsical Library: I continue to be unable to resist things with silly names or premises when they're super cheap. As they say, I'd buy that for a dollar. Assuming "they" are in the 1980s. And part of the cast of RoboCop. Anyway, it's hidden object in the style of the Full of Cats series, which works for me. Less stuff to do than one of those, but it's also cheaper, and the artwork and way they hide some of the stuff is fun. The night versions of the levels are definitely the star of the show.

OPUS: The Day We Found Earth and OPUS: Rocket of Whispers: Just gonna combine these two since they're related and took me basically a single sitting each (not counting brief hummus breaks). The short version is that neither one is anywhere near on the same level of OPUS: Echo of Starsong, which was genuinely pretty great, but they're still interesting, and you can see the progression in their approach to making games and telling stories. They've generally kept the strongest parts, like the way they focus on characters and emotions, or the sci-fi-adjacent settings but leaning away from grounding the world and story in science and more toward humanity and spirituality/mysticism, while trying different increasingly ambitious things with the gameplay (which is always the weakest part of their games but still generally fine). I would strongly recommend Echo of Starsong over either of these, but for anyone who's already played that and wants to check out Sigono's previous work I thought these were both interesting enough to have been worth it, and neither one is very much of a commitment unless you want to 100% them.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

different person roaming the drawn to life tag here, because the autism hit about it recently and won't let me go! if you're looking for an uncensored copy of dtl:tnc, my understanding is that you'll want to avoid the compilation cartridges, and look for copies of the standalone game whose serial number on the back of the cart has a sequence of BDREN0J## - The N0 should typically indicate that it's the original, unedited version of the game, whereas N1 would indicate a "patched" version with the censored ending. I will note the dtl wiki suggests that on PAL carts N0 releases can sometimes have the censored version regardless, and doesn't even make note of my particular serial number (BDREN0J22), but assuming they're accurate about the PAL carts being less consistent, NTSC copies are probably a safer bet :p

I was actually literally just looking at that page to see what the deal was. Luckily it took all of like five minutes to find a copy with the same product code as yours in good condition and super cheap. It's anyone's guess when I'll actually get around to it, but at least the hard part is out of the way already.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

The Drawn to Life games have surprisingly good stories, which is why I feel like having an uncensored copy of The Next Chapter is so important

Noted 📝

[veebs-hates-video-games]

To elaborate on the favorite game series thing, idk how easy it'd be to find them (especially an uncensored cartridge of the second game, which is a very important distinction to me) but I absolutely love the old Nintendo DS games "Drawn to Life" and "Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter"!

The art is amazing, the sprites are cute, and the music is just something else. There are a couple (three) songs in the soundtracks with lyrics and two of them have actually made me cry.

They released in September of 2007 and October of 2009 respectively. The best (and most unique imo) part of the games is that, as the name implies, you draw a lot. You draw your player character, your weapons, platforms, modes of transport, and forms you can take (in one of them). (Note: if you aren't much of an artist, but you still want it to look decent, both games have templates for a majority of the drawn stuff that you can use instead!)

There was also a third game in December of 2020 on the Nintendo Switch, but nobody likes it. It's genuinely awful gameplay wise compared to the previous ones and is full of glitches apparently. Not enough pros to outweigh the huge glaring cons of the game.

Sorry about the rambling lol

Oh I totally remember those. I never got a chance to play them because I didn't have my own DS until I got a 3DS as a gift way more recently at the end of its life, but they looked interesting.

I did like the other series 5th Cell is better known for though: Scribblenauts. I kinda felt like I'd seen enough of it after just one of them (Unlimited, I think?), but it's neat that it worked as well as it did and recognized and responded to so much stuff.

These days the kinds of games they made would just be AI slop instead of having so much stuff the devs had to think to include themselves, which is kinda sad to think about. The whole thing that made them interesting in the first place was that you could draw/write whatever you wanted into them, and an actual person had anticipated what you might want to do and figured out how to make it work ahead of time, and then they built an entire actual game on top of that and made everything else about it good too.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I wonder if you'd hate my favorite game series from my childhood

I mean, I hate my own favorite game series from my childhood, so it's entirely possible.

Or more specifically I think the newest games in it are some of the most impressive things I've ever seen on a technical level and have a lot of great artwork and clever mechanics, but I actively dislike playing them and didn't get much enjoyment out of trying (if you guessed that's the Zelda games from BotW onward you win).

But you never know. I also sometimes have a great time with stuff that's deeply flawed, because people are just weird like that.

And if it's something I've never played I usually like trying stuff out anyway just to see what its deal is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[veebs-hates-video-games]

Still working my way through a few more demos:

Absolum: I really wanted to like this one more than I do. The presentation is great, and the world and initial story hook are immediately compelling. I just don't usually click with most 2.5D brawlers like this and haven't since the NES. I keep trying anyway because occasionally I do really like them, but this probably won't be one of them for me. I do like the fairly generous parry window when you dodge directly toward an attack though, which feels a lot better to me than the really oldschool games like this that don't have anything like that.

Consume Me: This one has been on my wishlist since as soon as it was wishlistable, and from the demo it seems just as good as what all the awards it's won have been saying about it. It perfectly captures the awkwardness and stress of being a teenager while still managing to abstract it enough to turn it into actual fun gameplay. They aren't kidding about the content warnings about disordered eating though. It was pretty uncomfortable. I'd like to play the full thing when it comes out in a few months, but we'll see if I'm doing any better at the time.

Whimsical Heroes: Kind of like a slightly streamlined/simplified King's Bounty/HoMM-type SRPG but with a cuter art style and composed entirely of talking vegetables and animals. Hard to say yet whether the full game will have enough substance, but it at least has potential. It does live up to the whimsical name. The battle music also stood out as particularly good for setting the tone and making things more exciting. The scene transitions could be sped up 3x and might still be too slow though, so hopefully that gets changed for the full release.