gapgames

[gapgames]

An assortment of games that I did not care for

It's hating time, kiddos! I realized that I don't have a whole lot to say about the games I didn't enjoy, so I figured I may as well do them as a lightning round.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate - It's 100% a skill issue. Every time I play I'm basically just flailing around in the air and then I'm out of the tournament in the first round. But I'm also not compelled to develop any Smash skills so here we are. To its credit, it's the only game I know that maxes out the switch controller limit, so it's a top tier party game. C tier for me though.

Animal Crossing New Horizons - it's so cute but also so boring 😭 I'm just too lazy to decorate my island. C tier.

Shadowverse: Champion’s Battle: This game is basically Hearthstone/Pokemon/Magic the Gathering but as an RPG. So you play as some anime kid, and you and your friends like to play a card game called Shadowverse. That’s it. What’s the point of that? I don’t need to play a game through a proxy! And what’s worse is they added an open world! So in between playing games as some anime kid, I have to spend time running around some irrelevant high school and talking to NPCs. Open worlds work great when the world you’re exploring is one you want to be immersed in, but this world is just some generic anime high school so it’s not interesting at all. E tier.

Surviving Mars: It's a Mars colonization city builder. I like city builders, but this was so unsatisfying to play because after you build out your colony, you end up with a sad, ugly colony and not a beautiful city. Maybe domes and red hills will be all the rage in the future, but I'm just old fashioned. C tier.

Ori and the Blind Forest: Sometimes, game developers are so focused on the artistic side of game making that they forget to make the game fun. D tier.

[gapgames]

Gaokao Love 100 Days

A few weeks ago, I played a beautifully imperfect game.

It's a visual novel + time management sim, where you play as a student in China studying for the Gaokao exams while maintaining a relationship with your girlfriend. There are 60+ endings in this game, each with wildly different plotlines.

I played around 10 endings, and here are some that I remember:

- Got dumped for having low grades and then developed a gaming addiction

- Had my parents lose faith in me, leading me to become a NEET

- Ignored my girlfriend and my friends to study, and got into Peking University but lost touch with everyone.

- Worked hard with my girlfriend and moved out of the province with her

- Enrol in a Gaokao boot camp after failing my mock exams, where I lost all sense of joy even after getting good results on the Gaokao.

- Had my relationship discovered by my girlfriend's over controlling parents, leading to her becoming a prisoner in her own home.

- Go crazy and become a studying machine after failing my mock exams. My test scores improved dramatically but eventually it affected my health and I end up hospitalized.

I actually didn't really care for the romance in this game. There are two main heroines, and one of them keeps droning on and on about food and her cats (she talks about cakes for what I swear is 20 min at one point) and the other one has a "holier than thou" attitude while being weirdly obsessed with your character. That said, the main character's mental health struggles felt very real. My in-game parents' behavior was truly infuriating. The rumors about me circling in school after my relationship was discovered made me not want to go to school anymore. Heroine #2 lecturing me about respecting my parents after they screamed at me for something I didn't even do made me not want to talk to her anymore.

I don't know if it's actually a realistic depiction of what taking the Gaokao is like, but it is truly a good "what pressure does to the mind" simulator.

Overall A tier, it brought me back to my childhood, where my parents put immense pressure on me and had crazy high expectations just because my brain developed a little earlier than other kids. All the other kids caught up eventually, and the reality was that I'm not a genius, but my parents clung to that hope until I graduated university and became a mediocre adult.

[gapgames]

Among Us

I hate deception board games.

Unfortunately, I grew up going to math camp, studied physics and now work as a software engineer (yes, I'm a sellout.) For some reason, people who do these things seem to LOVE deception games and LOVE taking them extremely seriously.

I love my friends, but they're super annoying to play board games with AND THEY ALWAYS SUGGEST THEM. They're the type of people who would take an hour to play a single game of coup because they're constantly analyzing and arguing over every single action everyone makes. It's some Death Note bullshit. They'd be like "Gap played the sheep card last turn, but sold milk three turns ago. If she was telling the truth, then it makes no sense because it would be more optimal to use the milk to grow the sheep. So she must be lying. Or maybe she's actually telling the truth and wants us to think she's lying so that we don't sell wool en masse. Either way, she's evil so let's eliminate her" and then they'd be wrong and then they'd genuinely wonder why I did such an illogical move.

When Among Us came out, I was thrilled. It fulfills my friends' need to point fingers, but makes it bearable for my peanut brained self. Time limited rounds! Stuff to do besides letting your eyes glaze over once you're eliminated! It was a godsend in the middle of the pandemic. My friends kept wanting to play resistance online, and I was getting sooooo bored (to be fair, sometimes it was quiplash when they let me pick.) The two months we played among us were glorious.

Overall rating: B tier, it's still a "yell at each other" game.

[gapgames]

Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters

I'm gonna kick this off with the first game I have ever played in my life.

I was in fifth grade and won a PSP in a contest. My strict Asian parents refused to buy me any games for it, but I didn't mind. This was the first gaming console I ever owned, and it came with Size Matters.

That summer, I played the shit out of it. I replayed it several times, and I think I 100%ed it.

That first real gaming experience blew my mind. Until then, my experience with gaming had been Neopets, Newgrounds and occasionally Cooking Mama on my friends' DSs when they would let me play.

I was so impressed that there were several worlds we could explore, a story to follow, mini games, guns and armour to upgrade and Easter eggs! Eventually I got bored of it and left my PSP to collect dust, but that game planted the gamer seed in my soul.

(side note: My parents stuck to their word and never bought me any games. Even after I won a Wii at the same contest the following year. I did play a lot of Wii sports though!)

Since adulthood, I've played many other games. I might be blinded by nostalgia, but it's still my favourite 3D platformer. Maybe it's because I mostly play Nintendo games, but it's rare to see a platformer where you get to play with so many weapon and armour choices. It's nice that the bosses in this game don't require you to use an exact formula (is that just a Mario thing? The boss does 3 attacks, then exposes a weakness?)

Online, people seem to think it was a clunky game, but I don't care. In my heart, it's an S tier game.