#oh yeah!! the style of the pixel art is based off of this pixel art piece of their ocs by boun!

[stormystarlight]

Have you ever wanted to draw something but you fought due to your skill level at the time you decide not to do it

OH yeah ABSOLUTELY. all the time. my wips folder is full of stuff like this!! let me dust off some old examples

here's a sketch i did for a rain world piece that i was initially feeling pretty good about!! i wanted to experiment with more scenic pixel art, but i guess i didn't know where to start or how to approach it and ended up feeling really roadblocked really early on.

i blocked in some basic colors and did a little detailing on pebbles, but i was just struggling too hard with learning the tools and techniques i needed to pull off what i was envisioning that i got frustrated and stopped. I never picked this one up again, but I have made some other, better pixel art since :] i think the reason the one i linked worked out better is because i was trying to learn fewer things at a time while working on it. that one was a mostly 2-dimensional scene and was more heavily based on a reference, so i didn't have to think as hard about those things. this one was not only a new-ish medium to me, but also had some more challenging perspective and was less reference-heavy. if that makes sense?

more rain world! this was one of my earlier attempts at mimicking the cutscene art style. i got so frustrated with my inability to make the colors & shading look right that it went right into wip jail never to be seen again.

but then i scaled my ambitions back from Immediately Making A Polished Piece to just doing a quick study, and that helped immensely. original on the left, my study on the right. working on this was still difficult, cause i was learning something new, but since it was much simpler it was a much more manageable task. i could take more time to get it right without feeling like i was going nowhere

i never did finish that first one, but i did make some other finished pieces in that style that i think are pretty bangin if i do say so myself. one such example above

here's a video wip (whoa)! god it's really rushed & was never meant to see the light of day in this state so please don't look too hard at it. but this one i got frustrated with mostly because i wasn't feeling good about my ability to draw the cast of characters. so into the pits it went. i don't really have any interest in finishing it anymore since my ideas for the rest of it were speculative and, y'know, the rest of the show has since been released lol.

anyway, to close off my response. the first two are more or less success stories? despite the fact i never finished the original pieces i abandoned. because i wanted to talk about what's worked for me to alleviate this feeling—which is: scale back, try something less ambitious first, work your way up to the big project you're struggling with. but i also have dozens of other examples i could put in here of things that didn't work out at all and went nowhere. like, that just is how it is sometimes. i feel you 🤝 i think most if not all artists (of any medium) go through this haha

[eziojensenthe3rd]

Midnight Gaming: 🙀 Cat Prime

So last night I played Metroid Prime Remastered, checked socials later to find.... Cat confirmed for Monster Hunter Wilds.

Cat

Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat Cat

Where was I? Ok yeah, Metroid Prime.

So Metroid Prime is pretty much my first Metroid game that I've played and to completion. A fine game for the Gamecube, it and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes were for me a big introduction to that style of game, often reffered to as Metroidvania. Perhaps that was why I choose to play this last night after covering castlevania the night before.

Now, while the games are highly praised now with the prime trilogy serving as an example of a trilogy done right, that'll soon change with a 4th entry coming soon turning it in a quadrilogy. Then again maybe it'll be a second trilogy like the star wars sequel trilogy.... oh I dun jinxed it didnt I?

Thing is, while the games are great now, y'all recall how people felt when it was coming to release? It was a pretty chill reception towards the news that this new metroid game would be departing from the classic formula and be a first person game. See, after super metroid, people were waiting for a new metroid game on the N64, hoping to see Samus jump into the 3d space. Nintendo however wasnt sure how to best do a metroid game in 3d so the N64 was skipped for the metroid series, smash bros being the only case of seeing Samus on the system. So when people hear that a Metroid game is coming soon to Gamecube, there was some hype over the announcement, people were excited but when the news about it being 1st person was out, some folks had a change of tone.

There was quite a bit of groaning over this change, people felt that this new direction wouldnt work for the series and that this new Metroid Prime would bomb hard. And then the game launched amd everyone agreed it kicked ass. I bring this up because this isnt something new, people are still doing this thing of writing something off and saying its bad before its even out. Its pretty common to see in the comments of trailers and previews of folks just dunking on what was shown, decrying it as garbage or bad before the feature is released to the public.

People have dunked on Deadlock based on unfinished assests that were leaked. People have dunked on GTA VI back when the only thing shown at the time were test footage leaked from hackers. People were already writing off the Silent Hill 2 remake by bloober team because of Konami's track record and Bloobers awful storytelling but are quick to change their minds with the recent gameplay trailer and news that a lot of the original devs are on board to handle the story aspects and are expanding on certain things they themselves wanted to expand on.

It's just, is it not common sense to atleast wait until something is fully released before critiquing it? Maybe dont judge a meal on raw ingredients alone? Because when its not dunking on something for being another rouglelike, another pixel art game, another hero shooter or another soulslike, its stupid shit like "dei"...

Maybe Cynicism has grown to become everyones goto mood these days. Why bother with getting excited for something when it'll likely bomb. If you adopt a negative attitude, then worst case you'll feel justified for writing it off and if its good, then you get to be pleasantly surprised. Its win-win right? Except, when you assume the worst about anything, about everyone, you end up going down a very nihilistic rabbit hole where you dont feel hopeful about anything out of a belief that it'll only let you down.

Cynicism may feel like a safe bet but it should never be a replacement for optimism.

Where was I? Right, Prime. So Metroid Prime has a remastered version which is honestly just damn fine. The original game had some wonderful enviroments to explore with some fantastic visuals that made the gamecube just shine compared to its... more successful... contemporaries. So booting up the remaster and finding the visuals look even better here, damn, kudos to the devs who handled the remaster, this is just impressive.

Storywise the game does seem a bit sparse in that department, at least in my opinion. You go to the frigate, find out ridley is alive again and chase him to tallon iv and.... bum around ruins I guess. I mean there is the impact crater and the goal of getting the artifacts to open the way to the source of the phazon but... what was samus's main goal throughout the game? Was it to find Ridley and put him down, again. It seems like you mostly forget about him until the Phendrana Drifts cutscene where he flys over and at his boss battle. To be fair I havent really took a deep dive into the lore in game so my memory might be hazy.

One thing I can definatly recall from the original and in this remaster is a lot of points where you're are required to backtrack to a lot of areas to get essential items. You beat the major boss at Chozo Ruins, you move on from there throught Magmoor and Phendrana and then you're required to go back and deal with ghosts to get the ice beam, and you'll have to come back again once you get the X-ray visor so you can deal with them back at the ruins boss room. I can maybe recall a lot reviews crticising this about the game but maybe this is just a moot point since it gives you an opportunity to grab any missle expansions and energy tanks that you werent able to get before.

Something new with the remaster is a selection of controls, allowing the classic controls from the original release, motions controls similar to the wii port, a hybrid set of both controller and motions and finally a twin stick layout thats based on more convential controls. I mainly just stuck with classic since its what im used too but also because its what the original game was designed around.

One feature that this game started is the scan visor which your feelings on it will depend on whether you're doing a 100% or a casual run. On a casual run the scan visor is useful for learning about enemy weaknesses and learning about the emviroments, gathering bits of chozo and pirate lore to learn about the world you're exploring. On a 100% though, it can be a bit of chore to scan anything that counts towards your percentage, power ups, enemies, bosses and any lore you come across. You're gonna need to whip that scan visor out frequently at times just to make sure you don't miss anything.

You know what, as good looking as this remaster is, I wonder why they did this and not just port Metroid Prime Trilogy, the collection of games bundled for wii? They even brought it over to the Wii U's Virtual Console. Why not port that instead of this remaster? And are they planning to remaster Echoes and Corruption later? I'm not entirely sure but in the end, one thing is certain...

They didnt include any of the unlocks from GC Prime... no NES Metroid.... not even the fusion suit.... lame.... still nice tho..

Thank you all for reading this, feel free to leave game suggestions and feedback. Anons are currently on.

[ame-in-the-rain]

when you’re just a music teacher but the kid who you’re the guardian of just gets possessed by goop

(reblogs are greatly appreciated!)

[ectonurites]

a very very genuine question: so its bad to repost art but no one says anything when people repost things from the source material/creator's sketches.....why?like sure everyone who likes it may recognize the style but there are plenty of fan artists i recognize immediately, new or old art, with or without. to me it just feels the same, like either dont repost art or people should be able to repost stuff, i dont see how they can work at the same time. and this isnt me saying people should be allowed to repost and all that bc i do understand the theory of why reposting hurts artists, just that the logic doesnt seem to fit once it extends to famous artists/creators. just bc its official and easily recognizable makes it okay? how does that work? again, there are plenty of fanartists who are easily recognizable and lose no money when people repost their work (bc they posted it for free) and from my own observation, it seems it just, somehow, makes them want to do art less (from what i have read from artists themselves). why do we not consider that when it comes to official creators? wouldnt they also feasibly be less motivated seeing their hard work plastered across the internet for free when thats the sole way they make their income? and its not a system where its solely sticking it to the man bc it hurts the artists income, as well. but if it makes them happy to see people enjoying and sharing their work with others, drawing interest, why isnt it the same with fan artists? people often repost art, not out of malice or intent to claim credit, but bc they enjoy it + want to share it, esp on social media where sharing isnt a feature (instagram, for example) again im not trying to justify reposting, just confused about the contradiction

First of all instagram does have a form of sharing posts- stories. Which yes they are temporary by default, but you can use the highlight feature to collect your favorite things you’ve shared from people right there on your own profile AND it links back to the original post and can permanently be on your profile as long as you keep it there. You can even label them and everything! But then moving on to answering more of your actual questions

To start: this is a very complicated thing. And I feel everyone trying to answer it might have slightly varied opinions. 

I personally see a pretty clear distinction between ‘Officially published/released’ works (like comic book [as like you’ve probably seen I frequently post comic panels] or other materials that may have been released in creator guides, official video game art, promotional art for things, etc etc) as opposed to like, personal work and fanart. Because with official works:

There’s usually a source to buy it and you should if you’re referencing it a ton (while I don’t own every comic I’ve ever read I do have a lot and if I did read something first through illegal means [because some comics are just straight up hard to find due to age/being out of print] and enjoyed it I try to seek out a physical copy after if possible)

There is a level of far wider recognition (I know you personally might find fanartists’ styles recognizable but like, things that are in mainstream media.. have just such a higher profile. it’s not really comparable) 

If you’re not supporting the official release you’re harming the big company that published it far more than the individual artist (like, the individual artist probably also wouldn’t appreciate it, because it can effect them for sure as well, but they’re not gonna be taking the brunt of the damage unless it was entirely self-published work, which I’d definitely categorize differently from what I’m mainly talking about here.)  

Often fanartists/professional artists who aren’t that well known, in addition to wanting to just create work for the sake of it, also want to build their own platform, to have an audience that they interact with. Or like, if they’re offering commissions, a bigger platform puts you in a position where people will actually see the art and want to commission you. When you say reposts of smaller artists’ fanart doesn’t ‘loose them money’ because they didn’t charge to post it, you’re missing the fact that it makes them loose out on proper linked-back-to-them exposure. Especially like, when a repost account on insta or something says ‘ah yes credit to [username] on tumblr’ the vast majority of people who see it aren’t going to then open up a whole different website and look for the artist. Some people might! but if there’s anything i’ve learned from working professionally in arts marketing it’s that people want things that are convenient and directly in front of them. Someone who wants to see more works because they liked one is significantly more likely to click on the username of someone who posted it rather than opening up a browser or a different app and searching a separate name put in the caption. 

Then honestly, I do feel weird about reposts of professional artists’ more personal works unless the artist has stated they’re fine with people reposting with credit. It should be about the comfort level of the artist. I think a lot of professional artists who aren’t in a position where they’re as worried about building a platform, because they already have one and might have professional connections/opportunities already lined up, might not really care about reposts especially on a website they don’t use. (Like tumblr. I’m coming at this mostly from a comics artist perspective here, but most professional artists I see are waaaay more active on twitter and instagram than tumblr) If it’s a website they don’t use, it’s not taking away from the platform they had been building there for themselves. And also, some artists really just don’t give a shit, which is their choice they can make with their work! But that’s not a universal thing. One artist being fine with their personal art being reposted =/= all artists being fine with it. 

In my own experience as a fanartist, when I see my art reposted without credit, especially when it’s art I’ve also already posted on the same platform... it’s definitely disheartening. Even worse is when the repost gets even more attention than my original post. (something that has happened to me multiple times!) Like, it can get so upsetting!  Because it lets me know that someone else was using my art to build their platform and I got exactly zero benefit out of it. Then when it’s reposted with credit it’s a little less annoying, but I still don’t... get much out of it. Especially if it’s an instagram repost and they credit my tumblr not my account on there, since insta captions don’t actually do links unless it’s to other insta accounts. Also with insta for example, I have a 'business’ account set up so I can look at and track popularity of my posts and see how they’re doing as something to keep in mind when considering posting times, etc etc. When other people repost my art there I have no control over it. That sucks a lot! Also, when I quite literally ask people not to repost my art (it is IN! MY! DESCRIPTION!) and they still do, it’s just straight up disrespectful. I asked for a boundary to be respected with my work and people have just completely ignored it. That doesn’t feel good at all.

But, conversely, I’m gonna talk about my more professional irl work for a sec. I’m a graphic designer, so I do things like posters, logos, etc, When I design a poster for a client that is meant to be advertising something, even if it’s got my own original illustration or something as part of it, I know my name isn’t necessarily going to be attached to it the same way as it is with my personal work. I get a credit line somewhere, but that’s in a fine print probably not even on the poster itself at all, but that’s like, part of what I signed up for. I already get paid separately, I am giving permission for my work to be out of my own hands in that way. Professional work for a client is often setup in some way similar to this. I don’t get mad when I walk down the street and see a poster I made up somewhere without it directly ‘linking’/referencing back to me (aside from maybe my signature if it had an illustration), in fact I go ‘OMG ITS THERE ugh wait i see one pixel is off oh noooooo” and then move on with my day. It’s just an entirely different situation because that kind of work has a different arrangement from the start, where you know it’s going to be put in a different type of circulation.

So yeah, my word isn’t god here, but I definitely see official releases as having a different set of permissions based on the fact that they are published in an entirely different situation. And I think reposts of personal art aren’t cool if the artist isn’t okay with them, no matter how big a platform they have. Other people probably approach this with a slightly different perspective, but that’s mine!

[nomoneytoplay]

No More Heroes

Bought for: $17.99

Played on: Switch

(Original) Release date: December 6, 2007

Developers: Grasshopper Manufacture, feelplus, GRASSHOPPER MANUFACTURE INC.

Publisher: Amazon Luna, Marvelous, Windows, Xseed Games

Game Type: Action-adventure, Hack and Slash.

Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Amazon Luna, PS3, Wii, Switch

ESRB Rating: M for Mature - Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language. 

Pros & Cons

Amazingly bizarre comic book style graphics.

Funny mature humor. 

Many references from popular Japanese anime. 

A small sandbox map filled with side missions, upgrade locations and a clothing store to customize your main character. You can also find shirts inside dumpsters, so I guess that makes the main character a dumpster diver...ISN’T THAT GREAT? 

Every location on the map and button command is highlighted by Pixel art.

The game is centered on boss battles, all the boss arenas have a theme for example baseball, school and military. Also each boss have a different fighting style that makes them standout. 

While the game is a hack and slash game, there are grappling moves that are based on Mexican Lucha Libre. They can be performed as a finishing move to small enemies and give you an advantage against main bosses.

THE BEST SAVE POINT IN GAMING, GO TO THE BATHROOM AND TAKE A DUMP.

It’s a hack and slash game, so expect repetitive gameplay.

While the smaller enemies might have different weapons and looks, you will feel like you have already fought this character. 

Graphics seem to lag a bit.

Non playable characters and some areas in the map tend to disappear. 

Special powers are amazing, but the game will sometimes award them when there’s no one to use it against. 

Search for seven (not dragon) balls to unlock abilities. Good abilities? yes. A hassle? Definitely!  

The music in this game is great. However “Heavenly Star” by Genki Rockets is not in the port...is not the same without that song!

Licensed to YouTube by Avex Inc. (on behalf of avex trax); CMRRA, LatinAutorPerf, BMI - Broadcast Music Inc., NexTone Inc. (Publishing), LatinAutor - UMPG, UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, LatinAutor - SonyATV, UMPG Publishing, Sony ATV Publishing, SOLAR Music Rights Management, and 6 Music Rights Societies

My Experience:

I am a fan of all things bizarre, what got me interested in No More Heroes is the style of graphics and story. So of course I wanted to try this game and it is a great Wii game if you ever had the chance to play it. If not, look no further because it is on Switch and PC! I will not be comparing the Wii and Switch versions, but I will be telling you what to expect. 

When your main character is a loser, trust me the game will remind you, you are in for a treat to play as a fun anti-hero. Meet Travis Touchdown an otaku who, get this, has no money! Yeah go figure….is the ideal person for No Money To Play. He is a member of this organization of assassins looking to become number one among the ranks, earn some money….and get laid. 

What? That’s the premise, I don’t make this stuff up.

The story will follow the ranking systems, which will work as chapters, so you will know just how close you are to completing the game. But the source of income for Travis won’t stop there, you see in order to move up to the next fight. You will have to earn money, some of the entry fee might not be completely covered by the last fight you did. But not to worry, you can do small part time jobs like mowing grass, picking up trash, cleaning graffiti art and picking up scorpions. You can also go to the organization's office and ask for side contracts of people who need to be killed off.  

So a lot of your time will be spent getting money and using that money to buy upgrades to your beam sword, (oh yeah Travis main weapon is beam sword forgot to mention) go to the gym to train and purchase new outfits. So you will be doing some of these side activities a lot, in order to proceed. At some point it gets tiring but at least the game makes up for it with good story progression. 

No More Heroes is a game you really should not avoid playing, it is funny, fun and different. For a hack and slash game with a retro/modern look is a must play. Just remember you will be earning and spending your way to become the number one assassin...and possibly get laid. 

A score of 85 out 100 pennies

[ducktastic]

2020 Gameological Awards

Over on the Gameological Discord, we have an annual tradition of writing up our games of the year not as a ranked list but rather as answers to a series of prompts. Here are my personal choices for the year that was 2020.

Favorite Game of the Year

I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into Paradise Killer. I knew that I liked the vaporwave resort aesthetic from the game’s trailer and figured I was in for a Danganronpa-style murder mystery visual novel with an open-ended murder mystery at its core. Those assumptions were… half-right? The game definitely plays out like the exploration bits of Danganronpa set on the island from Myst but with far simpler puzzles. What I didn’t expect was to fall so deeply in love with the environment—its nooks and crannies, its millennia of lore, its brutalist overlap of idol worship, consumerism, and mass slaughter. It makes sense that the world of Paradise Killer is its strongest feature, since the cast of NPCs don’t really move around, leaving you alone with the world for the overwhelming majority of your experience as you bounce back and forth between digging around for clues and interrogating potential witnesses. And despite what the promo materials indicated, there IS a definitive solution to the crimes you’re brought in to investigate, the game just lets you make judgment based on whatever evidence you have at the time you’re ready to call it a day, so if you’re missing crucial evidence you might just make a compelling enough case for the wrong person and condemn them to eternal nonexistence. Am I happy with the truth at the end of the day? No, and neither is anybody else I’ve spoken to who completed the game, but we all were also completely enthralled the entire time and our dissatisfaction has less to do with the game and more to do with the ugly reality of humanity. I’ve always been of the mindset that “spoilers” are absolute garbage and that a story should be just as good whether you know the twist or not and any story that relies on surprising the audience with an unexpected reveal is not actually that good a story, but Paradise Killer is a game about piecing together your own version of events so I feel that it’s vital to the gameplay experience that people go in knowing as little as possible and gush all about it afterwards. Just trust me, if the game looks even remotely intriguing to you, go for it. I’ve had just as much fun talking about the game after I finished it with friends just getting started as I did actually solving its mysteries myself.

Best Single Player Game

I honestly missed out on the buzz for In Other Waters at launch, so I’m happy I had friends online talking it up as Black Friday sales were coming along. The minimal aesthetic of his underwater exploration game allows the focus to shift more naturally to the game’s stellar writing as a lone scientist goes off in search of her mentor and the secrets they were hiding on an alien world. It only took a few hours for me to become completely absorbed in this narrative and keep pushing forward into increasingly dangerous waters. In Other Waters might just be the best sci-fi story I experienced all year and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys sci-fi novels, regardless of their experience with video games.

Best Multiplayer Game

Look, we all know this year sucked. 2020 will absolutely be chronicled in history books as a fascinating and deeply depressing time in modern history where we all stayed inside by ourselves and missed our friends and family. It was lonely and it was bleak. Which is why it made my heart glow so much more warmly every time I got a letter from an honest-to-goodness real-life friend in Animal Crossing New Horizons. Knowing that they were playing the same game I was and hearing about their experiences and sending each other wacky hats or furniture, it lightened the days and made us feel that little bit more connected. Sure, when the game first launched we would actually take the time to visit one another’s islands, hang out, chat in real-time, and exchange gifts, but we all eventually got busy with Zoom calls, sourdough starters, and watching Birds of Prey twenty-two times. Still, sending letters was enough. It was and still is a touching little way to show that we’re here for one another, if not at the exact same time.

Favorite Ongoing Game

Zach Gage is one of my favorite game designers right now, and when I heard he was releasing a game called Good Sudoku I was sold sight unseen. The game as released was… fine. It’s sudoku and it’s pleasant, but it was also buggy and overheated my phone in a way I hadn’t seen since Ridiculous Fishing (also by Zach Gage) seven years ago. Thankfully, the most glaring bugs have been fixed and I can now enjoy popping in every day for some quick logic puzzle goodness. Daily ranked leaderboards keep me coming back again and again, the steady ramp of difficulty in the arcade and eternal modes means I can always chase the next dopamine rush of solving increasingly complex puzzles. It’s not a traditional “ongoing” game the way, say, Fortnite and Destiny are, but I’m happy to come back every day for sudoku goodness.

Didn't Click For Me

With Fortnite progressively losing me over the course of 2020, finalizing with my wholesale “never again” stance after Epic boss Tim Sweeney compared Fortnite demanding more money from Apple to the American Civil Rights movement (no, absolutely not), I dipped my toe into a number of new “battle pass”-style online arena types of games, and while Genshin Impact eventually got its hooks into me, Spellbreak absolutely did not. With graphics straight out of The Dragon Prince and the promise of a wide variety of magic combat skills to make your character your own, the game seemed awfully tempting, but my first few experiences were aimless and joyless, with no moment of clarity to make me understand why I should keep coming back. Maybe they’ll finesse the game some more in 2021, or a bunch of my friends will get hooked and lure me back, but for now I am a-okay deleting this waste of space on my Switch and PC.

"Oh Yeah, I Did Play That Didn't I?"

I remember being really excited for Murder By Numbers. Ace Attorney-style crime scene investigation visual novel with Picross puzzles for the evidence, art by the creators of Hatoful Boyfriend, and music by the composer of Ace Attorney itself?! Sounds like a dream come true. But the pixel-hunt nature of the crime scene investigations was more frustrating than fun, the picross puzzles were not particularly great, and the game came out literally a week before the entire world went into lockdown which makes it feel more like seven years ago than just earlier this year. I remember being marginally charmed by the game once it was in my hands, but as soon as my mind shifted to long-term self care, Murder By Numbers went from hot topic to cold case.

Most Unexpected Joy

I was looking forward to Fuser all year. As a dyed-in-the-wool DropMix stan, the prospect of a spiritual sequel to DropMix on all major digital platforms without any of the analogue components was tremendously exciting, and I knew I’d have a lot of fun making mixes by myself and posting them online for the world to hear. What I didn’t expect, however, was the online co-op mode to be such a blast! Up to four players take turns making 32 bars of mashups, starting with whatever the player before handed them and adding their own fingerprints on top. It sounds like it should just be a mess of cacophony, but every session I’ve played so far has been just the best dance party I’ve had all year, and everyone not currently in control of the decks (including an audience of spectators) can make special requests for what the DJ should spin and tap along with the beat to great super-sized emoji to show how much they’re enjoying the mix. Literally the only times my Apple Watch has ever warned me of my heightened heart rate have been the times I was positively bouncing in place rocking out to co-op freestyle play in Fuser.

Best Music

Only one video game this year had tunes that were so bumpable they were upgraded to my general “2020 jams” playlist alongside Jeff Rosenstock, Run the Jewels, and Phoebe Bridgers, and that game was Paradise Killer. 70% lo-fi chill beats to study/interrogate demons to, 20% gothic atmospheric bangers, 10% high-energy pop jazz, this soundtrack was just an absolute joy to swim around in both in and out of gameplay.

Favorite Game Encounter

It’s wild that in a landscape where games let me live out my wildest fantasies, the single moment that lit me up in a way that stood out to me more than any other was serving Neil the right drink in Coffee Talk. Over the course of the game, you serve a variety of hot drinks to humans, werewolves, vampires, orcs, and more, all while chatting with your customers and learning more about their lives and relationships. The most mysterious customer, though, is an alien life form who adopts the name Neil. They do not know what they want to drink and claim it doesn’t make a difference because they cannot taste it. Everybody else wants *something*. Neil is just ordering for the sake of fitting in and exploring the Earth experience. It’s only in the second playthrough that attentive baristas will figure out what to serve Neil, unlocking the “true” ending in the process. Seeing the typically stoic Neil actually emote when they tasted their special order drink? What an absolute treat that was.

Best Free DLC of the Year

It’s still only a couple of days old at the time I’m writing this, but Marvel’s Avengers just added Kate Bishop, aka Hawkeye, and THANK GOODNESS. Almost every character in the game at launch just smashed the endless waves of robot baddies with their fists and that looks exhausting and uncomfortable. Hawkeye (the game calls her Kate Bishop, but come on, she’s been Hawkeye in the comics for over 14 years, let’s show her some respect) uses A SWORD. FINALLY! Aside from that, I’m just having a blast shooting arrows all over the place. She and Ms Marvel are the most likable characters in the game so far, so I hope they keep adding more of the Young Avengers and Champions to the game, and if the recently announced slate of Marvel movies and tv shows are any indication (with America Chavez, Cassie Lang, and Riri Williams all coming soon to the MCU), that seems to be what Marvel is pushing for across all media

Most Accessible Game

Nintendo is, first and foremost, a toy company. They got their start in toys and cards long before video games was a thing, and they still do more tests to ensure their video game hardware is childproof than anybody else in the industry (remember how they made Switch cartridges “taste bad” so kids wouldn’t eat them?). This year, Nintendo got to rekindle some of their throwback, simplistic, toys-and-cards energy with Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics, a Switch collection of timeless family-friendly games like Chess, Mancala, and Backgammon, along with “toy” versions of sports like baseball, boxing, and tennis for a virtual parlor room of pleasant time-wasters. The games were all presented with charming li’l explainers from anthropomorphic board game figurines, and the ability to play quick sessions of Spider Solitaire on the touch screen while I binged The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix made Clubhouse Games one of my most-played titles of the year. Plus, local play during socially-distant friend hangs was an excellent way to make us feel like we were much closer than we were physically allowed to be as friends knocked each other’s block off in the “toy boxing” version of Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

"Waiting for Game-dot"

I get that everyone loves Disco Elysium. I saw it on everyone’s year-end lists last year. I finally bought it with an Epic Games Store coupon this year. This year was a long enough slog of depressing post-apocalyptic drudgery, I didn’t want to explore a whole nother one in my leisure time. I’ll get to it… someday.

Game That Made Me Think

Holovista was an iPhone game I played over the course of two or three days based on the recommendation of some trusted colleagues on Twitter and oh my goodness was I glad that I played it. What starts as a chill vaporwave photography game steadily progresses into an exploration of psychological trauma, relationships with friends and family, and the baggage we carry with us from our pasts. In this exceptionally hard year, I badly needed this story about spending time alone with your personal demons and finding your way back to the people who love and support you. Just like with Journey and Gone Home, I walked away from Holovista feeling a rekindled appreciation for the people in my life.

[betweengenesisfrogs]

Homestuck is My Favorite Sprite Comic

Yes, you read that right.

Homestuck is my favorite sprite comic.

Those of you who remember the earlier days of the internet are probably looking at this post in disbelief right about now. Others of you might be scratching your heads, not knowing what I’m talking about.

But here’s my pitch: Homestuck is the culmination of an entire genre of internet art, and the tools that make it so powerful are the very tools that made that genre once so reviled.

Homestuck is the greatest and most successful sprite comic of all time.

And honestly, I’ve wanted to talk about that for ages, so let’s do it.

WHAT SPRITE COMICS WERE

Many of my readers are probably too young to remember the era of sprite comics. So: what were sprite comics?

Sprite comics were a genre of webcomics made entirely by taking pixel art from video games – especially character art, called “sprites,” but also backgrounds and other images—and placing them into panels to tell a story. They were near-ubiquitous on the internet in the early 2000s, emerging right as webcomics in general were seeking to establish themselves as an art form.

They were not, shall we say, known for their quality. The low bar to access meant that art skill was not an obstacle to starting one. The folks behind the huge swell of them tended to be young people, kids and early teenagers recreating the plots of their favorite video games with new OCs—not the most advanced writers or artists. They were the early 2000s’ quintessential example of ephemeral, childish art. Unfortunately, they look even worse today—blown-up pixels don’t hold up well when displayed on higher-resolution monitors.

Today, they’re mostly forgotten, remembered only as a weird, strange moment in the youth of the internet. Someone who evoked them today, such as a blogger who compared them to one of the most successful webcomics of all time, would be inviting good-natured teasing at the very least.

It would be unfair to dismiss them entirely, though. In this low-stakes environment, comics where the author could bring more skill—engaging writing, legitimately funny jokes, or especially, a real ability to work with pixel art—really stood out. (Unsurprisingly, these authors tended to skew a bit older.)

The obvious one to mention is Bob and George. Bob and George wasn’t the first sprite comic, but it was the most influential. Conceived initially as Mega Man-themed filler for a hand-drawn comic about superheroes, it quickly became a merging of the two concepts, with the original characters made into Mega Man-style sprites, full of running gags, humorous retellings of the Mega Man games, elaborate storylines about time travel, and robots eating ice cream. It was generally agreed, even among sprite comic haters, that Bob and George was a pretty good comic. Worth mentioning also are 8-Bit Theater, which turned the plot of the first Final Fantasy into a spectacular and hilarious farce, and of course Kid Radd, my second favorite sprite comic. (More on that later.)

But even if you weren’t looking for greatness—there was something just damn fun about them. The passion of sprite comic authors was clear, even if their ideas didn’t always cohere. To this day, I think the sprite comic scene has the same appeal pulp art does—it’s crude and rough, full of garbage to sift through, but every so often, something deeply sincere and bizarre shines through, and the culture of its authors is a fascinating object of study in itself.

Okay, full disclosure: I was one of the people who made a sprite comic. I’ve written about my experiences with that in more depth elsewhere, but yeah, I was on the inside of this scene, rather than a disinterested observer, and from the inside, maybe it’s a lot easier to see the appeal.

Still, let me make this claim: even with all their flaws, sprite comics were doing some incredibly interesting things, and Homestuck is heir to their legacy.

TAKE ME DOWN TO RECOLOR CITY

One of the problems people always had with sprite comics was the sprites themselves. They’re the most repetitive thing in the world. You just keep copying and pasting the same images over and over again, maybe with a few tweaks. That’s not really being an artist, is it? It’s so lazy. Re-drawing things from different angles keeps things dynamic, develops your skill, and makes your work better in general. Right?

I’m mostly in agreement. Certainly I think it’s fair to rag on the Control-Alt-Delete guy, along with other early bad webcomics, for copy-pasting their characters while dropping in new expressions and mass-producing tepid strips. And to be fair, digging through bad sprite comics often felt like an exercise in seeing the same slightly-edited recolors of Mega Man characters over and over again. You got really tired of that same body with its blobby feet and hands.

(It should be noted, though, that there were folks in the sprite comic scene who could pixel art the quills off a porcupine. I salute you, brave pixel art masters of 2006. I hope you all got into your chosen art school.)

All this said, I think the repetitive and simplistic nature of sprite comics was often their biggest strength.

THE POWER OF ABSTRACTION

In his classic work Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud makes an observation about cartooning that has stayed with me to this day.

McCloud notes that simple, abstract drawings, like faces that are only few lines and dots on a page, resonate with us more strongly than more detailed drawings. This is because our minds fill in what’s missing on the page. We ascribe human depth to simple gestures and expressions based on our own emotions and experiences – and this makes us feel closer to these characters as readers. Secretly, simple cartoons can be one of the most powerful forms of storytelling. If you want your readers to fall in love with your characters, draw them simply, and let them fill them in.

Video game sprites work very well in this regard. They have that same simplicity that cartoons do. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a huge part of the success of SNES-era RPGs was simple, almost childlike character sprites drawing people in. I think sprites did the same for sprite comics.

Here’s the weird thing: Bob and George worked. Despite four different characters being variations on the same friggin’ Mega Man sprite in different colors, they immediately began to seem like different people with distinct personalities. For me, George’s befuddled, helpless dismay immediately comes to mind whenever I picture his face, while with Mega Man himself it’s usually a wide-eyed, childlike glee. I would never confuse them. This, despite the fact that the only actual difference between their faces is that George is blonde. It’s pretty clear what happened. The personalities the author established for them through dialogue and storytelling shone through, and my brain did the rest.

Sprites, in short, were a canvas upon which the mind could project any story the author wanted to tell. Even the most minute differences in pixel art came to stand, in the best sprite comics, for wide divergences in personality and ideals, once the reader spent enough time with them to adapt to their style of representation.

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Character designs that focus on variations on a theme, with subtle differences that nonetheless render them instantly recognizable?

Oh, right.

Look at what greets us on the very first page of Homestuck. An absurdly simple cartoon boy, abstracted to a ridiculous degree—he doesn’t even have arms!—followed a whole bunch of characters that follow suit. Though many other representations of the characters emerge, these little figures never quite go away, do they? Why is that?

Simple: they’re very easy to manipulate. They’re modular—you can give John arms or not, depending on whether it’s useful. You can put him in a whole variety of poses and save them to a template. You can change out his facial expressions with copy and paste. You can give him a new haircut and call him Jake. It’s all very quick and easy.

Sprite comics proliferated because they were very easy to mass-produce. Andrew Hussie’s original conception of Homestuck was very similar: something he could put out very quickly and easily, where even the most elaborate ideas could rely on existing assets to be sped smoothly along. We all know the result: an incredible production machine, churning out unfathomable amounts of content from 2009-2012. I’d say it was a good call.

But it goes way deeper than that. The modular nature of sprites always suggested a kind of modularity to the sprite comic premise. George and Mega Man were different people, true, but also two variations on a theme. Was there something underlying them that they had in common? Perhaps their similarity says something like: We exist in a world which has a certain set of rules? One of my favorite conceits from Bob and George was that when characters visited the past, they were represented by NES-era Mega Man sprites, while in the present, they were SNES sprites, and in the future, the author used elaborate splicing to render them as 32-bit Mega Man 8 sprites or similar.

Suppose there was a skilled cartoonist thinking about his next big project, who wanted to tell a story centered around this kind of modularity, a narrative that was built out of iterative, swappable pieces by its very design. He might very well create a sprite comic named Homestuck.

Homestuck is a story about a game that creates a hyperflexible mythology for its players, where the villains, challenges, and setting change depending upon what players bring to the experience, yet which all share underlying goals and assumptions. What more perfect opportunity to create a modular story as well? Different groups of kids and trolls have motifs that get swapped around to produce new characters, whether that’s through ectobiology, the Scratch, or the eerie parallels between the kids and trolls’ sessions. And yet each character can be analyzed as an individual.

This is an incredible way to build a huge emotional investment from your readers. Not only does this kind of characterization invite analysis, the abstractions draw readers in to generate their own headcanons and interpretations. A deep commitment to pluralism is at the heart of Hussie’s character design. Then, too, it encourages readers to build their own new designs from these models. Kidswaps, bloodswaps, fantrolls—these have long been the heart of Homestuck’s fandom. And what are bloodswaps if not sprite recolors for a new generation? With the added bonus that now a change in color carries narrative weight, evoking new moods and identities for these characters in ways that early sprite comics could only dream of.

In Hussie’s hands, even the dreaded copy-and-paste takes on heroic depth of meaning. Even when Hussie moves away from sprites to his own loose art style, he continues to remix what we’ve previously see. Indeed, Hussie talks about how he would go out of his way to edit his own art into new images even when it would take more time than drawing something new. Why? Because he wanted to evoke that very feeling of having seen this before—the visual callback to go along with the many conceptual and verbal callbacks that echo throughout Homestuck. This is at the heart of what Doc Scratch (speaking for Hussie) called “circumstantial simultaneity:” we are invited to compare two moments or two characters, to see what they have in common, or how they contrast. Everything in Paradox Space is deeply linked with everything else. And Hussie establishes this in our minds using nothing less than the tool sprite comics were so deeply reviled for: the “lazy” repetition of an image.

(It’s fitting that some of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous images in Homestuck—dream bubble scenery and the like—are the result of Hussie taking things he’s made before and combining them into fantastic dreamscapes.)

But it all started with the hyperflexible, adaptable character images Hussie created at the very beginning of Homestuck.

And if you need more proof that Homestuck is a sprite comic, I think we need look no further than what Hussie, and the rest of the Homestuck community call these images.

We call them sprites.

THE FIRST GENRE-BENDERS

Was Andrew Hussie influenced by sprite comics in the development of Homestuck? It’s hard to say, but as a webcomic artist in the first decade of the 2000s, he was surely aware of them. It’s likely that he quickly realized that his quick, adaptable images served the same purposes as a sprite in a video game or a sprite comic, and chose to call them that.

One purpose I haven’t mentioned up until now: sprites lend themselves very well to animations. In fact, in their original context of video games, that’s exactly what they’re for: frames of art that can be used to show a character running, jumping, posing, moving across a screen. It’s not surprising, then, that sprite comic makers quickly saw the utility in that.

Homestuck was, in fact, not the first webcomic to make Flash animations part of its story. There were experiments with various gifs and such in other comics, but I think sprite comics were among the most successful at becoming the multi-media creations that would come to be known as hypercomics..

Take a look at this animation from Bob and George. It represents a climactic final confrontation against a long-standing villain, using special effects to make everything dramatic, but ultimately, like many a Homestuck animation, leads to kind of a pyscheout. The drama and the humor of the moment are clear, though. This relies in large part on the music—which is taken directly from the game Chrono Trigger. This makes total sense. Interestingly, it also contains voice acting, which is something Homestuck never tried—probably because it would run contrary to its ideals of pluralism. What I find fascinating is that in sprite comics, animations like these served a very similar purpose to Homestuck’s big flashes: elevating a big moment into something larger-than-life. Another good example is this sequence from Crash and Bass. Seriously, it seems like every sprite comic maker wanted to try their hand at Flash animation.

(By the way, it’s a lot harder than it looks!! I envy Hussie his vectorized sprites. Pixel art is a PAIN to work with in the already buggy program that is Flash.)

The result: because of the sprites themselves, sprite comics were among the first works to play around with the border between comics and other media in the way that would come to be thought of as quintessentially Homestuck.

What it also meant was that another genre emerged in parallel with sprite comics: the sprite animation. Frequently these would retell the story of a particular game, offer a spectacular animated battle sequence, parody the source material, or all three. Great examples include this animation for Mega Man Zero, and this frankly preposterous crossover battle sequence. Chris Niosi’s TOME also found its earliest roots as an animation series of this kind. You also found plenty of sprite-based flash games, in which players could manipulate game characters in a way that was totally outside the context of the original works.

The website the vast majority of these games and animations were hosted on?

Newgrounds, best known to Homestuck fans as the website Hussie crashed in 2011 while trying to upload Cascade.

What’s less talked about is that Hussie was friends, or at least on conversational terms with, the owner of the site, hence the idea to host his huge animation there in the first place, and other flashes, like the first Alterniabound, were initially hosted there as well.

It’s hard to believe that Hussie wasn’t at least a little familiar with the Newgrounds scene. I suspect that he largely conceived of Homestuck as part of the world of “Flash animation—” which in 2009 meant the wide variety of things that were hosted on Newgrounds, including sprite animations.

The freedom and fluidity sprite comics had to change into games and animations and back into comics again was one of their most fascinating traits. Homestuck’s commitment to media-bending needs, at this point, no introduction. But what’s less known is that sprite comics were exploring that territory first—that Homestuck, in short, is the kind of thing they wanted to grow up to be.

PUT ME IN THE GAME

I would be a fool not to mention another big thing Homestuck and sprite comics have in common: a character who is literally the author in cartoon form, running around doing goofy things and messing with the story. This was an incredibly common cliché in sprite comics, no doubt because of Bob and George, who did it early on and never looked back. You might have noticed that the animation I linked above concerns a showdown between Bob and George’s author, David Anez—depicted, delightfully, as another Mega Man recolor—and a mysterious alternate author named Helmut—who is like Mega Man plus Sepiroth I think? It’s all very strange. I could ramble for hours about the relationship between Hussie and the alt-author villains of Homestuck and what it all means, but I’m not sure I can nail anything down with certainty for these two. Maybe Bob and George was never quite that metaphysical.

But yes, bringing the author into the story in some form was already a cliché by the time Homestuck started up. Indeed, I think that’s why Hussie’s character refers to it as “a bad idea” to break the fourth wall—he’s recognizing that people will have seen this before, and are already tired of this sort of shit. And then he goes and does it anyway and makes it somehow brilliant, because he’s Andrew Hussie.

Homestuck breathes life into the cliché by taking it in a metaphysical/metafictional direction. I don’t think that was really the motivation for most sprite comic authors, though. Let’s see if we can dig a little deeper.

I think the cliché kept happening because sprite comic authors were writing about a subject that very closely concerned themselves: video games. I’m only kind of joking. The thing about video games is that even though they’re made for everyone, playing through one yourself feels like an intensely personal experience. You develop an emotional relationship to a world, to its characters, that feels distinctly your own. Now, suddenly, thanks to the magic of sprites, you have an opportunity to tell stories about that world for others to read. Of course you’re going to want to put yourself in the story in some form.

When it wasn’t author characters in sprite comics, it was OCs. You know Dr. Wily? Well here’s my own original villain, Dr. Vindictus. You know Mega Man? Here’s my new character, Super Cool Man. He hangs out with Mega Man and they beat the bad guys together. Stuff like that. Most sprite comics retold the story of a game, or multiple games in a big crossover format, with original elements added in. There was quite a lot of “Link and Sonic and Mega Man are all friends with my OC and they hang out at his house.”

What’s interesting, though, is that because these sprite comics were very aware that they were about video games, this was where they sometimes got very meta. It started with humorous observation—hey, isn’t it funny that Link goes around breaking into people’s houses and smashing their pots? But sometimes, it grew into more serious commentary. Is Mega Man trapped in a never-ending cycle, doomed to fight the same fight against the same mad scientist until the end of time? Is it worth it, being a video game hero?

Enter Homestuck. What I’ve been dancing around this whole time is:

Homestuck is a sprite comic…because Homestuck is a video game.

Or more specifically, Homestuck’s a comic about a video game called SBURB, where the lines between the game and the comic about the game blur as characters wrestle with the narratives around them, both those encoded into the game and those encoded into our expectations.

Homestuck presents the fantasy of many a sprite comic maker: I get to go on heroic quests, I get to change the world and become a god. I get to be part of the video game. And then it asks the same question certain sprite comics were beginning to ask:

Is it worth it, to be that hero?

I want to tell you about my second favorite sprite comic, a comic called Kid Radd.

Kid Radd distinguished itself from other sprite comics of the time by being a completely original production. Its sprites looked like they could be from a variety of NES and SNES-era video games, but they were all done from scratch, and the games they purported to represent were all fictional. Kid Radd used animations with original music, and sometimes interactive, clickable games, to tell its story. It also used all sorts of neat programming tricks to make it load faster on the internet of the early 2000s, which was great—unfortunately, these same techniques made it break as web technology evolved, something Homestuck fans in 2019 can definitely relate to. The good news is, fans have maintained a dedicated and reformatted archive where the comics can still be seen and downloaded.

Kid Radd’s premise is that video game characters themselves are conscious and alive—more specifically, their sprites. Sprites developed consciousness as human beings projected personality and identity onto them, remaining aware of their status as video game constructs while also seeking to be something more. The story follows the titular Kid Radd, at first in the context of his own game, commenting on the choices the player controlling him. He must endure every death, every strange decision along the way to save his girlfriend Sheena. Then the story expands into a larger context as Radd, Sheena, and many other video game characters are released onto the internet as data. They try to find their own identities and build a society for themselves, but struggle with the tendency toward violence that games have programmed into them. The story culminates in an honestly moving moment where Radd confronts the all-powerful creators of their reality—human beings.

It’s a very good comic.

The first sprite comic authors wanted to fuse real life with video games. Later sprite comic authors decided to ask: what would that really mean? Would it be painful? Would you suffer? Would you find a way to make your life meaningful all the same? Despite the limitations of sprite comics, these ideas had incredible potential, and in works like Kid Radd, they flourished.

Homestuck is heir to that legacy.

It takes the questions Kid Radd was asking, and asks them in new ways. It tries to understand, on an even deeper level, how the rules of video games shape our own minds and give us ways to understand ourselves.

At its heart, Homestuck is a sprite comic, and it might just be the greatest of them all.

EPILOGUE

I’ve seen a lot of good discussion recently on how Homestuck preserves a certain era of the internet like a time capsule: its culture, its technology, its assumptions, its memes.

I think sprite comics, too, are part of the culture that created Homestuck. Do I think Hussie spent the early 2000s recoloring Mega Man sprites? No, probably not. But what I do know is that sprite comics were part of his world. The first webcomic cartoonists came of age alongside an odd companion, the weird, overly sincere, dorky little sibling that was sprite comics. Like them or hate them, you couldn’t escape them. They were there.

And maybe a certain cartoonist saw a kind of potential in them, in the same way he summoned Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff from the depths of bad gamer culture.

Or maybe he just knew, as some sprite comic authors did, that the time was right for their kind of story.

On a personal level—Homestuck came along right when I needed it.

Around 2009, the bubble that was sprite comics finally burst. People were getting tired of them, or growing out of them, and blown-up sprites no longer looked so good on modern monitors.

I was more than a little heartbroken. I’d enjoyed Bob and George, read my fill of Mega Man generica, and fallen utterly in love with Kid Radd. I’d been working on my own sprite comic for a long time out of a sense that there was huge potential in them that we were only scratching the surface of. I’d dreamed of maybe someday doing something as amazing as the best of them did. But I was watching that world disappear. I had to admit to myself that my work wasn’t going to continue to find an audience. That I could live with. But it was painful to think that the potential I sensed, the feats of storytelling I wanted to see in the world, would never be realized.

And then, in the fall of 2010, a friend linked me to a comic that broke all the rules, that mixed animation, games, music, images and chatlogs. A comic that crafted its own sprites, just as Kid Radd did, and remixed its images into an ever-expanding web of associations and meanings. A comic that took on the idea of living inside a video game with relish and turned it into a gorgeous meditation on escaping the ideas and systems that control us.

That this comic would exist, let alone that it would succeed. That it would become one of the most popular creations of all time, that it would surpass other webcomics and break out into anime conventions and the real world, that it would become such a cultural juggernaut, to the point where it’s impossible to imagine an internet without Homestuck—

I can’t even put into words how happy that makes me. It’s the reason I’m still writing essays about Homestuck nearly eight years after I found it.

And it’s why Homestuck will always be my favorite sprite comic.

-Ari

[Notes: The image of the kids came from the ever-useful MSPA Wiki—please support and aid in their efforts to provide a good source of info about Homestuck! They need more support these days than ever.

For more on Homestuck’s place as a continuation of the zeitgeist of early 2000s experimental webcomics, this article by Sam Keeper at Storming the Ivory Tower is excellent and insightful.

Thanks for reading, y’all.]

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #432

Top Ten Games to Remaster

As we continue June’s videogame-themed series of Tops Ten – during what would normally have been E3, but is still something of a prolonged Videogame Announcement Season – I turn my attention once again to great games past. This has been exacerbated by the release of Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a hi-def spit-and-polish re-do of two of the greatest PC games of the nineties. I have very fond teenage memories of both C&C and its pseudo-sequel, but Red Alert in particular strikes an important chord as one of “the” games that deepened and broadened by love of gaming as an art form. In the way that really only happens when you’re a kid, I absorbed Red Alert, not just completing the campaign and playing hours and hours of skirmish, but also talking about it extensively with friends, designing my own levels, and even going so far as to modify the source files to create my own super-units (nuclear tanks ahoy!). As such, it utterly delights me to declare that C&C Remastered is a phenomenal undertaking, the graphics painstakingly remade to fit modern displays, the interface masterfully tweaked to appease modern sensibilities. But at the same time it offers so many pleasing, knowing, considerate hat-tips to fans, such as a re-imagining of the classic DOS installation prompts. All in all, it’s a must-buy, bringing a 25-year-old series of games more-or-less bang up to date and preserving their legacy for a new generation.

Anyway, all this got me thinking of other classic games, and how it’s so difficult to play them nowadays. Maybe they’re mired in rights issues. Maybe it’s a technological minefield to get them to run on modern systems. Maybe elements of modern gaming – be it graphics or design – have simply passed them by, making them a far more difficult and frustrating experience than they would have seemed Back in the Day. Whatever the reason, these are games that – like classic films from the 40s and 50s – should be celebrated and enjoyed by the young’uns, not left to gather digital dust on forgotten floppies the world over.

So, with no further ado, here are ten games that I would love to see given a bit of digital TLC, renewed and revigorated for the ultra-wide monitors and liquid-cooled systems of tomorrow. In most cases these are just one game that I’d like to see spruced up and re-released, but there are a few “collections” here too, whether it’s a C&C-style pairing of a great double act, or a  celebration of a series, a la Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

Oh, and I’m on about remasters here: not a full-on remake or reboot. Stuff like Perfect Dark on the Xbox 360, not Doom 2016. Old games made good on modern hardware, not a reimagining of the property.

Regardless: have at it, games industry.

Lemmings (1991) and Lemmings 2: The Tribes (1993): I definitely think they should be a double-pack, because whilst the first is a well-regarded classic, the second refines the formula, makes it more user-friendly, offers skirmish-style training modes, and amps up the comedy. But they’re both ancient by now, and despite mobile do-overs in recent years, the originals are very difficult to play. Upping the resolution whilst still keeping the character of the scantily-pixelated sprites would be difficult, but it’d be worth it to once again sample one of the gods of gaming.

Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993): other LucasArts classic adventures have had a spruce – most notably the first two seminal Monkey Island games – but it’d be good to see this cult comedy classic come back to life. I don’t know if the backgrounds ever existed in higher resolution, but I’d love to see the sprites re-drawn to more closely resemble a cartoon version of Steve Purcell’s artwork.

The Jedi Knight Series (1995-2003): I’m bundling all four Jedi Knight games in together – that’s the original Dark Forces, plus Jedi Knight, Jedi Outcast, and Jedi Academy – but let’s be honest, it’s the first two we’re really after. DF gave us a compelling mission-based “Doom Clone” (back when Doom was a genre), and one which would be amazing to see tarted up to 4K with texture filtering a-go-go; but it was its 1997 sequel, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, that struck serious beskar. Huge, expansive levels, in “true 3D” (as we used to call it), full-motion video cutscenes, finally getting a lightsaber and Force powers, but most of all the Light/Dark Side dynamic offering (very basic) morality and a branching storyline. Again, giving it a glossy hi-def sheen would do wonders to preserve the legacy of one of the greatest Star Wars games of all time.

The Quake Collection (1996-2005): really it should be called The Quake Qollection, no? Encompassing all four mainline Quakes. Although, again, let’s be honest: there’s something deeply iconic about the first three, so no one would complain if we just forgot about part 4, yeah? Anyway: Quake was a stunner, a gorgeous 3D technical juggernaut, offering sumptuous lighting effects and gorgeous architecture. Part II came a year later and offered us coloured lighting and a coherent sci-fi story, whereas Quake III Arena in 1999 gave us a sublimely crafted multiplayer shooter and a character that was an eyeball doing a handstand. Despite being graphical powerhouses in their day, getting them to run can be a drag, so it’d be lovely to see them dragged into the 21st Century, especially if they could offer us ray-tracing on next-gen consoles, a la Quake II RTX.

Tomb Raider (1996): we’ve seen the series rebooted in (generally) excellent fashion, but at the same time it feels it lost a little of the majesty, mythos, and merriment of OG Lara. One of the first truly successful 3D games, it was like nothing before it. A subtle update to increase its resolution, filter the rough edges, maybe offer the option to move beyond the rigid grid-based movement structure, and possibly up the poly count so blocky Lara more closely resembles her rendered box-art cousin, would be terrific. Imagine the dinosaur in 4K…!

Descent (1994): one of those games that’s slipped from public consciousness, this was a full-3D shooter a couple of years before Quake shambled onto our screens. Piloting a craft in zero gravity, it offered full freedom of movement as well as a tense shooter dynamic coupled with some mild, X-Wing-style space sim elements. It was funky, fast, gorgeous, and messed with your head. I’d love a remake that kept the levels as-is, simplified the often-complex controls for modern sensibilities, and just in general made it look prettier. I worry that a contemporary “re-imagining” might lose too many of its crazy rough edges, though.

Syndicate (1993): there have been a number of efforts to re-do Syndicate over the years, but apart from its excellent sequel Syndicate Wars in 1996, none have matched the dark joys of the original. rather than try to go all modern and 3D, I’d rather see the artwork redone, redrawn at a higher resolution, perhaps offering subtle 3D touches such as dynamic light, shadow, and ray-tracing. The fiddlier aspects (getting into cars?!) could be tidied up, but the look and feel should remain the same. I honestly think this could be a big deal.

Total Annihilation (1997): if C&C can get remastered, why not the game that was arguably the first real challenger to its sci-fi RTS dominance? TA had 3D graphics, a new and refined model of base construction, and tactical touches such as line-of-sight and elevated terrain. But the comparatively low resolution of late-nineties machines meant that the robotic units could often appear slightly indistinct, turning into a grey melange; boosting the res and the poly count would do wonders, but – like C&C – the gameplay itself should be kept as authentic as possible.

Warcraft I & II (1994-95): I know, I know; they just did a remaster of Warcraft III that wasn’t well received and got everybody’s backs up. But I barely played Warcraft III (I barely played Warcraft I for that matter). Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was the fantasy yin to C&C’s sci-fi yang, and it was great; clear, bright, fast, fun. The cartoony graphics were gorgeous and the units had bags of character (reinforced by the humorous soundbites when you kept clicking on them). I’d want to see the sprites re-drawn in hi-res, with the units given some gorgeous new animations to match their character. Other than that? Keep it broadly the same. It worked 25 years ago, it’ll work now.

Fantasy World Dizzy (1989): I nearly didn’t have a game this old on the list. For one thing, I thought pre-16-bit games would require far more retooling for modern audiences, becoming essentially the sort of reboot I said I wanted to avoid; I can’t imagine a new Skool Daze being too similar to its original. Also which Dizzy do you choose? The one I played the most was probably Spellbound (1991). But I think Fantasy World may be the most iconic. Its Amiga port was almost a remaster anyway, giving it gorgeous colour graphics. A modern version would up the resolution with all-new art assets, obviously, and perhaps could offer a more user-friendly jumping dynamic (and maybe – maybe – I’ll allow scrolling). This could be a lovely way to re-introduce audiences to the character of Dizzy, who should really be held up more as a British gaming mascot, without having to go all-in on a brand new title. Egg-cellent (sorry).

So there we are. There are a couple missing here, obviously; Simon the Sorcerer was nearly there until I realised they did do a gentle remaster in 2018. The Settlers would have made the list, except they are remaking that, although in my opinion it looks like a full-on reboot rather than the upgraded version of the original that I crave. Fade to Black just dropped off the bottom on the grounds that I barely played it in its original form, but a third-person 3D Flashback is still on my Most Wanted list (Flashback itself, sadly, has already had a disappointing remake). And the best Star Wars game of all time, Knights of the Old Republic, I decided not to include as – again – I think we’re going to see that reimagined and folded into the new official Disney canon in some form. Maybe that should preclude me imagining the original game in 4K with updated character models, dynamic shadows, and ray-tracing, but – hey – that’s just me. At least that is one game that I’ll still be able to play fairly easily on an Xbox Series X, even without whistles and bells. Here’s to dead old games!

[satoshi-mochida]

Kingdoms of the Dump is a SNES-style RPG with platforming elements and turn-based combat developed by the New Jersey-based Roach Games. It is currently in production for PC and Mac, but a console release is also possible if the game’s upcoming Kickstarter campaign succeeds.

Here is an overview of the game, via its official website:

■ Welcome to the Lands of Fill

Join the trashcan knight, Dustin Binsley, as he fights his way through the Five and Half Kingdoms of the Dump. Rescue the trashpicked King, defeat the totally disgusting Toxic Grimelin Army and prevent the Lands of Fill from an all-out war!

Accompanied by your best friend Ratavia, embark on a perilous quest from the Trashmounds of Garbagia to the Faucet Falls of Detergeos. Brave dank, dangerous dungeons, face-off against fearsome, filthy foes, and build a party tough enough to tackle the toxic threat!

What You Need to Know

Created for both PC and Mac. Possible console release if funded!

Toggle between FIVE playable characters and use their unique abilities to navigate dungeons, solve puzzles, and take down enemies.

We focus on engaging exploration by letting you run and jump all over the maps to find secrets and trashy treasures!

Explore unique environments and various oddball locations detailed with rich snes-styled pixel art.

Turn-based combat that takes the best from classic RPGs while adding a few new elements, such as tactical character placement and timed hits.

On Screen Enemy encounters, NO RANDOM BATTLES!!!

■ Characters

Dustin Binsley

Class: Garbage Knight (In-Training)

Weapon: His scrappy old sword, “Can-Opener”

Skill: Scrapbinding

Hometown: Tin Alley

Dustin is a young cannister from Tin Alley, who was recently granted with the honor as serving as the King’s personal squire at the 115th Annual KingsCon. However, Dustin stayed up all night drinking curdled milk and overslept the feast. And oh yeah, the King got kidnapped. So now it’s up to Dustin to take on a dangerous mission, where he must prove to everyone-and himself- that he is truly worthy of the title of Garbage Knight.

Ratavia

Class: Rogue

Weapon: Daggers

Skill: Way of the Street

Hometown: Ratlanta

Dustin’s best friend and older-sister figure. She moved to Tin Alley after leaving her home kingdom of Mammalon a few years ago. She wanted to live a simple life in a quiet place… too bad keeping Dustin out of trouble is a full time job.

Walker Jacket

Class: Gunman / Librarian

Weapon: His trusty revolver, “Bookshot”

Skill: Trickshots

Hometown: Needlepoint

A member of the Order of Book’s End and probably the most feared librarian in all of the Lands of Fill. He spent years chasing down overdue books and lost library cards but now must lend his service to a greater cause…

Cerulean

Class: Laundromancer

Weapon: Bubble Wind

Skill: Laundromancy

Hometown: Laundry Forest

This young laundromancer was often known as “shy” “quiet” and “nothing special.” That all changed on his Print-Day, when he received the sacred Star Pattern, not seen for over a century. With his sudden rise to notoriety he found himself ostracized by his fellow Wizards of the Wash. They were probably just jealous. Now he spends most of his time in seclusion working on his bubble arts.

Musk

Class: Stink-Bug

Weapon: Stinklances

Skill: Fumeshaping

Hometown: ???

Little is known about Musk. He has been working for the crime lord Big Daddy Longlegs for the last ten years, but before that no one has been able to find any trace of him. As greedy as he is grumpy, Musk isn’t all bad as he pretends to be. He possesses an exotic skill known as Fumeshaping, where he can memorize the scents of his enemies and create a stink cloud around himself in their image.

Lute

Class: Bard / Student

Weapon: None

Skill: Arguably none

Hometown: Tabletop

Lute is the disowned son of House Stringmire. He didn’t show much promise in his music studies and and often skipped his lessons to go read instead. He became an embarrassment to his family of accomplished musical instruments, and was sent off to join the Book Keeper’s Order and has become the understudy of Walker Jacket.

Watch a trailer below. View the screenshots above in higher resolution at the gallery.

[dramarising-replacement]

Personally I don’t get the hate over the pixel traces of the FR art? I mean if they’re saying “oh it’s my art” then yeah that’s bad, but

I would pay FR dollars to have someone pixel-ify the site’s art. Like I’d pay to have someone redo my dragons in the same pose in digital watercolor, or something. It’s basically just redoing/tracing the site art in a different style, there’s skill and a good way to make money in that.

If they’re claiming it’s their own it’s bad.

If they own a shop saying “I’ll pixel-ify your FR dragons based off site art!” or something similar it’s absolutely fine.

(This is coming from someone with a custom pixel shop, in case anyone wants credibility? unique pixels are hard, but tracing something in pixels is quite difficult too.

[tomatofox-week]

The "Royal" Wedding

Here’s my first one shot for the first day of the tomatofox week.

They’re also avaiable under:

https://mollymolata.deviantart.com/art/Prompt-1-for-the-TomatoFox-Week-Day-1-702168734

https://www.wattpad.com/464241835-tomatofox-week-one-shot-collections-the-royal

http://archiveofourown.org/works/11969100/chapters/27067989

Enjoy it my dear Tomatokits :D

Pair: EvillustratorxVolpina

In the underground station stood a few people waiting for the metro. A metro had arrived and as a few people wanted to enter, the door opened and a strong wind blew the people away from there.

“Back off!” Shouted Stormy Weather leaving the wagon along with a few other akumatized citizens.

“Simon Says, can you get Evillustrator some more help?” Asked Lady Wifi. “They’re a bit late”

“Alright” Responded Simon Says and took his cards out, then threw it at some passengers of the metro.

“Simon Says help Evillustrator preparing everything for today’s occasion” Demanded Simon Says and they got hypnotized and ran out of the metro accompanied by the pink suited guy.

“I’ll be going to Volpina now” Said Lady Wifi pushing out of her phone a forwards sign. “I’ll see you later”

At the cathedral a few male akumatized villains were working in front at the park of the cathedral for the buffet. Kung Food was currently cooking a special soup in a big pot, while gingerbreadman and mama bear were putting on a big table various desserts and pastries for the guests.

Prince Eco and the Magician of Misfortune were cleaning the road together at the Pont au Double. Rogercop and Dark Cupid had closed the bridge due the occasion, then observed Santa Claws arriving with his reindeer and a few passengers.

“Name?” Asked Dark Cupid.

“Santa Claws” Responded the akumatized Claus.

“And the passengers?” Asked the cupid.

“Stoneheart, Horrificator, Bomb Mime and Mime” Responded Santa Claws while the red and black akuma villain checked the list on his hands.

“Get in” Told Dark Cupid stepping aside so, that the sled could enter into the road of the cathedral.

At the side of the cathedral Evillustrator had drawn in front of him a mirror, then drew a kippah to replace his current beret.

“Why are you replacing your old beret?” Asked Hawk Moth as he showed coming from the cathedral’s door.

“I’m Jewish” Responded Evillustrator. “I told you that once”

“Right you did” Replied Hawk Moth. “And by the way, don’t forget to wear your bow tie” Said Hawk Moth taking out of his pants’ pockets and stick it in front of his red colored collar.

“That’s an akuma” Said Evillustrator looking at the bow tie, which looked like a akuma.

“It’s based on a akuma” Corrected Hawk Moth.

“Thanks sir” Said the Evillustrator then the Bubbler passed by the two, stopping in front of Hawk Moth.

“Hey dudes, have you seen Guitar Villain and Xustin Ylvis?” Asked Bubbler, then suddenly someone screamed very loud, causing all to look around.

“Who was that?” Asked Bubbler, then a black panther passed by the three men.

“My animalistic instinct told me it was Volpina” Said the panther. “Nothing to worry”

“Yeah my father-in-law is right” Said Bubbler. “I’ll be asking Mr Pigeon” Said Bubbler leaving the guys back. The Evillustrator looked up at Hawk Moth and pushed on the bow tie, showing it to him.

“Do I look good with it?” Asked the red head, receiving a nod from the tall boss.

“Eeep!” Shouted Lila looking herself in the mirror.

“I know it’s weird to only wear a veil, but it’s better, than wearing the dress over your suit” Said Reflekta looking into the mirror too.

“Yeah you kind of looked a bit fat in the dress” Said Vanisher, making Volpina open her mouth to release her fox scream again, but her mouth was closed by Princess Fragrance’s hands.

“Shush” Told Princess Fragrance leaning her face on Volpina’s. “Imagine how Evillustrator will react at seeing how pretty my favorite vixen girl is” Told the Princess, making Volpina blush.

“Right, he must be getting into the church in a while” Said Volpina, while Miss Fortune tried to cut a hole for Volpina’s long ears with a scissor.

Near midday every akumatized villain sat inside the church and at the outside was Copycat guarding the entrance along with Quin Kong. Antibug showed up wanting to walk into the cathedral, but Copycat stopped her.

“Where do you think, you’re going?” Asked Copycat.

“To the wedding, where else?” Responded Antibug rudely.

“I’m afraid it’s not possible” Replied Copycat. “You’re on the not wanted list” Said Copycat looking at the list, which only said Antibug’s name and Assi Heartless.

“What?!?” Shouted Antibug shocked. Behind her came the mime driving an invisible vehicle, while far behind him sat Volpina with Princess Fragrance and Reflekta.

In the inside the Evillustrator looked at the entrance waiting for his fiancé to enter into the cathedral.

“Can’t wait for her” Said Evillustrator, then Guitar Villain started to play the wedding hymn on his guitar and Volpina entered accompanied by the Mime and her two best friend through the corridor.

The Evillustrator blushed at seeing his akuma fiancé coming along the corridor with the others.

“He looks so adorable with that bow tie” Volpina thought smiling, then arrived at the altar standing in front of the Evillustrator.

“My lady?” Asked the Evillustrator showing her his hand, which she gladly took. Both turned around to the priest, which was Hawk Moth to start the ceremony.

“We have gathered here all together to celebrate the royal marriage of my oldest, adoptive son with his fellow partner, which I’m proud to call her my daughter in law…”

“Yay this is my last ship to get married” Said the Shipper crossing the names Evillustrator and Volpina out of her list and she only had Hawk Moth with Le Paon as last on the paper.

“Guess I owe you something” Replied Betman taking a few cash bills out of his pocket. Pharao sat next to Betman and looked to the side, where Timebreaker sat.

“Sis, what time is it?” Asked Pharao, then observed his sister checking the time on her antique clock.

“12:04” Responded Timebreaker.

“Oh it’s time for me and Darkblade to exchange the turns” Said Pharao standing up and walking up at the door.

At the altar Volpina and the Evillustrator were holding hands, while glaring into each other’s eyes.

“Volpina, do you take Evillustrator from this day as your love wedded husband. To love him, protect him, fight side to side with him, until forever comes?”

“Yes I do” Responded Volpina smiling.

“Evillustrator, do you take Volpina to be you love wedded wife. To love and protect her, fight side at side with her, draw yourself together a future, until the eternity?”

“Yes I do” Replied Evillustrator glaring into Volpina’s forest green eyes with his ice blue.

“I ask now Schmid to give them the alliances” Said Hawk Moth and a Grey skinned guy with a green overall walked up at the two villains, then took from a large red box a type of bracelet and gave one to Volpina and the other one for Evillustrator.

“I promise to you Evillustrator to protect you, fight for you, to shower you up with love, until the end of our time” Said Lila placing the bracelet on Evillustrator’s, which clinched itself on his arm.

“By the way, it really is for the eternity” Informed Hawk Moth and both nodded.

“I promise to you Volpina to be a great husband, which protects you, fights for you and does his best to make and keep you happy. I…I promise you, that my love for you lasts forever” Said Evillustrator placing the bracelet on Volpina’s arm, which also got clipped on the vixen’s arm.

“With those steps done, I declare you to fox and artist….man and wife…you know, what I mean” Said Hawk Moth, then the Evillustator drew on his tablet a wine glass on the ground and stamped on it.

“Mazel Tov” Shouted a few akumatized villains, then the Evillustrator looked at Volpina, which jumped at him kissing him, wildly.

All applauded at the engaged couple and the girls at the front were in love with the ceremony.

“Aww” Said Reflekta.

“Aww” Replied Princess Fragrance.

“Graghrgragghgra” Mumbled Horrificator glaring up at the altar.

“Now it’s time to attack the buffet!” Told Hawk Moth and all ran out accompanied by the couple and the boss of the akumas.

“Hey, hey you two stop there!” Demanded Lady Wifi throwing from her phone a stop sign at them, making them stop in the air.

“I love your powers” Said Chat Blanc walking up to the Evillustrator.

“Hey can I do this?” Asked Chat taking the Evillustrator’s hand to put one of the fingers inside the purple nose.

“Hehe” Chuckled Chat Blanc and suddenly the pause sign disappeared and the Evillustrator hit Chat Blanc in his face with the other hand.

“You’re welcome” Said the Evillustrator.

“Worth it….” Groaned Chat Blanc lying on the ground.

At the outside everyone was at the buffet eating the aperitifs of the wedding.

“I love those Chinese snacks” Said Replay. “I think I’m going to eat another one” Said the guy pressing his watch to reverse back to get his dumpling back, so that he could eat it again.

“Sir, you got enough here on the buffet” Said the butler, which was masked like a penguin.

“No it’s fine Nootler” Said Replay and behind him passed the Pixelator seeing at the big choice on the table and stopped in front of a tower with shrimps and a sauce inside the bowls of it.

“Mmh” Replied Pixelator and pressed the button on his blue glasses to scan the tower, which then disappeared into his device. He giggled and made his way to the next table, then behind him showed up Style Queen to look surprised, that the shrimps were gone.

“What?!?”

Near a light Grey wedding cake stood Volpina with her husband, Hawk Moth and Le Paon.

“Cheers!” Wished Hawk Moth hitting the champagne glass of the on the other three’s glasses.

“Has anyone tried the tiramisu?” Asked the Evillustrator. “They’re real good” Said the groom, then received Volpina’s arm between his and he leaned his head on hers, making her smile.

“Congratulations Volpina and Evillustrator!” Shouted Princess Fragrance holding her perfume gun towards them.

“No!” Shouted both and the princess took it back giggling.

“Just kidding” Said the princess and gave both a hug.

“Congratulations to the newly wed couple!” Shouted a green female akuma with a pink turban covered with plastic flowers. “Woohoo!” Said the female throwing petals at the couple.

“Thank you” Said the Evillustrator while he and his wife were been showered by the pink petals.

Miss Fortune showed up looking around calling for somebody.

“Chat Rouge! Chat Rouge!”

“He’s playing with Reflekta!” Shouted Princess Fragrance.

“What are they playing?” Asked Miss Fortune, then they heard a sort of taser from the near and three Reflekta copies passed by running.

“Daddy!” Shouted one of the Reflekta copies. Miss Fortune rolled her eyes and walked behind the kids.

“Chat Rouge get back to mama” Demanded Miss Fortune.

“Are you two seeing forward to have….you know…a successor?” Asked Hawk Moth playing with the champagne in his glass.

“I really loved to” Said Volpina caressing the Evillustrator’s cheeks, making him blush. “What do you think?”

“If I ever find a zipper on myself, that would be great” Replied the Evillustrator and Volpina raised an eye brow then looked at his back.

“Hawk Moth” Asked Volpina. “Why doesn’t he have a zipper?”

“Well uh….I kind of forgot to add them” Responded Hawk Moth.

“You also don’t have one” Said the Evillustrator looking at Volpina’s back.

“What?” Replied Volpina shocked. “How are we ever going to reproduce?”

“How am I going to pee?” Asked the Evillustrator looking at Hawk Moth.

“Well…I need to think about doing this on you two” Told Hawk Moth.

“And don’t forget the others” Mentioned Paon and Hawk Moth nodded.

“And mines you can do right now!” Growled Volpina and Evillustrator had took his tablet to draw something on it, which appeared behind Volpina’s back.

“What was that?” Asked Volpina passing her hand on the back finding a zipper line on there.

“Does it open?” Asked the Evillustrator, while Volpina tried to pull it up and down. “Great” Replied the red head after seeing the result, then drew one in front of his body. “Perfect”

“You choose the perfect place for it” Volpina said with a flirty look at the purple skinned akuma.

“It’s also easier for me to take it off then”

“Or for me” Said the vixen akuma placing her fingers on the tip of the zipper, making Evillustrator blush.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to try one tiramisu” Said Paon walking off.

“I’m going to check out for the croissant” Said Hawk Moth leaving the couple alone, when Volpina started to embrace him hardly close to her, making him do a dreamy face.

[gamerkats]

KAts Meow Awards: Steam Games

Hey Kitties,

It’s time for the newest Gamer KAts’: KAts Meow Awards. Category: Steam Games

For those of you who don’t know, Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/) is an amazing place to find and play Indie Games (and big-name games too). Unlike games in a store, on Steam, you’ll see reviews and ratings and all kinds of things to help you decide on what’s worth your hard-earned money. Designers can connect directly to gamers and find out bugs, make fixes, take feedback, and grow their fan bases, elevating this age of gaming to a whole new level of incredible.

This time, we decided to pick our top 5 Steam games + an honorable mention we think are just the KAts’ meow. ❤⃛ヾ(๑❛ ▿ ◠๑ )

Our first up is our Honorable Mention: Night in the Woods by Infinite Fall.

Anthropomorphic cats, need we say more?....cause we will. While it didn’t make our top 5 list, this thought-provoking gem is too good not to be shared. It is a 2D side scroller with adorable art and a charming atmosphere. But, don't let its cute demeanor fool you, this game deals with some in-depth topics, existential terror, burdens of life and so on. Some heavy shit, man… Night in the Woods focuses on a slow dialogue based game that deals with the small town residents of Possum Springs. All in all, the well-written story, entrancing music, and delightful art is what puts Night in the Woods on our radar and in our wishlists to one day play.

Coming in at #5 VVVVVV by Terry Cavanagh

Get your time machines charged up, because we’re about to go back to the days of 8-bit heaven! VVVVVV (a title which makes you wonder if their keyboard is broken) pulls out all the nostalgic pixel art stops. Ever wondered what manipulating gravity would be like in the retro game world? Well, VVVVVV did and delivered adorable 8-bit tunes and charming throwback art. Fair warning, though, the gameplay may be difficult for the casual gamer and takes some getting used to. The main story is about a captain who, while sailing their spaceship through the verse, encountered some sort of strange phenomena. Flashing screens later (oh, seizure warning for that too) you are separated from your crew in some sort of strange dimension that lets you alter gravity to move through obstacles. Just watch the trailer and see why it made our list as a respectable #5.

Next up, coming in at #4: The Forest by Endnight Games Ltd

This is like, the ultimate build-it-yourself horror survival game. It’s as if Sims Castaway and Silent Hill had a baby, and that baby was so freaky it was thrown off a cliff Sparta style where it landed on the back of a Great Eagle from Middle Earth who then dropped it on an island to live out its days. Yeah…it’s like that. You play a survivor of a plane crash on an island full of mutated cannibals – as if being a plane survivor on an island wasn’t hard enough. Mostly only coming out at night, these mutated naked human cannibals hunt you, so it’s up to you to build shelters and traps to survive…oh yeah, there’s also that need to hunt yourself so you can eat, and survive the elements that just adds to the ‘Hurray for surviving the crash’ thing. The visual aspects of the game are absolutely gorgeous, and the mechanics are incredible. But don’t take our word for it…check out the trailer above we provided to be wowed for yourselves.

Following that horrific gem, is our #3 choice: Don't Starve by Klei Entertainment

This is an adorable stylistic survival game. At first glance, it resembles our #4 choice, The Forest. You interact with your environment and attempt to survive creatures at night. However, there is soooo much more to it than that. Different characters, special powers, multiple interesting monsters with their own powers and quirks – the list goes on and on. The art alone is worth the game, with its quirky comic feel. It’s like playing inside of a pop-up book with 2D designs mixed in an open 3D world. Even the music is cleverly done as a use of voice for the otherwise silent characters. The only detractor…death is permanent in this game; meaning once you die you are dead. Boo. (｡•́︿•̀｡)

Coming in at #2 we bring you, Feel the Snow by Owlet 

A winter wonderland of cuteness and death!! This little world built around snow-people gives a nostalgic feeling back to Minecraft days. The music is perfect for a snowy mystery, and the art is just plain adorbs. Your main task is to build safety and security in order to protect yourself from the oncoming threat that looms at night. How you interact with the world is up to you: do you investigate the mystery of the missing townspeople, or do you wander about searching for resources to procure your own safety? Sounds a little played out, doesn’t it? Well, what about this…it is multiplayer!! WOO! o(≧∇≦o) Bet you weren’t expecting that twist. FINALLY, one of the games we want to play and we can play together building houses, craft things and fight. Those snow people are as good as saved!

And finally! Taking the #1 spot and the KAts Meow Award of bragging rights for awesomeness: Hello Neighbor by Dynamic Pixels

This is like the game version of the movie Disturbia, except you’re not under house arrest with a broken leg, you’re just a nosey neighbor. And with good reason too, because your mustached neighbor across the way is totes hiding something sinister and it’s your job to find out what. A different kind of survival game as you are tasked with sneaking around, running and hiding as a means of staying alive. Although this may sound easy, and very reminiscent of the horror game Amnesia, the complex and evolving AI sets this game apart into a stellar heart pounding, brain challenging, adrenaline pumping thrill ride of a survival mystery. It looks phenomenal and is #1 on our wishlist of must-plays. Thank-you Dynamic Pixels for making such an amazing game!

Well, this concludes our top 5! Here’s hoping that this inspired a few of you to check out these games. Once we get a chance to buy and try, we’ll certainly post a follow-up and tell you if our wishes match up with reality. If any of you have played these, please tell us what you think!! We’d love to know. Thanks for reading today! Stay safe, and as always STAY AWESOME!!  (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

[stirlingstitch]

Blackwork Embroidery Pt 1 (Shading)

Cross-posted from my blog.

This is NOT going to be an introduction to or guide on how to do blackwork or any other type of hand embroidery, those are very easy to find online if you’re inspired and interested, but I enjoy talking about my favourite craft a lot and people seem to indulge me in this.

I took up cross stitching in 2010, and then in 2013 I tried out some blackwork because I’d seen some and it looked really fun. I’ve never looked back. I find blackwork much more enjoyable and fulfilling than cross stitch! It takes much longer to create the design, but usually it’s faster to stitch and the end result is just so lovely and unique. Most people can cross stitch a Pokemon sprite, but how many design and stitch a blackwork version of it? Like, three?

This is one of the first full blackwork pieces I did. It was more impressive than the cross stitch I’d been doing but I was still finding my style and knowledge. I had much to improve upon!

One of the interesting things is that there are many more ways to show different shades in blackwork than in cross stitch. In cross stitch, if you had five different shades of blue then you would either use five different shades of blue thread, or fewer threads and blending them. But here are some shading methods available in blackwork:

1. Five different colours. One pattern. One thread thickness. 2. One colour. Five different pattern stages. One thread thickness. 3. One colour. One pattern. Five different thread thicknesses (achieved either by using thread of differing thicknesses and/or using multiple strands of thread). 4. Five different colours. One pattern. One thread thickness. Colour change over a wider space than in 1 to make for a more gradual gradient. (This same more gradual effect can be accomplished with pattern or thread thickness.) 5. Three different colours. One pattern. Three different thread thicknesses. (Dark/thick, medium/thick, medium/medium, medium/skinny, light/skinny.) 6. Three different colours. One pattern. One thread thickness. Each section uses two strands of thread, with two sections blending different shades (dark/dark, dark/medium, medium/medium, medium/light, light/light). 7. One colour. Five different patterns. One thread thickness. 

Of course, these can be combined for even more variety. In my dragonite piece (close-up below) I’ve used two thread thicknesses (one strand and two strands) and then for the lightest shade instead of going to three strands I’ve used a lighter orange thread.

I love this kind of variety, I can use different shading methods in different works depending on how many coloured threads I want to use or what aesthetic I’m going for. If I want to be minimalist I can use just one colour thread per colour group and shade by altering the number of thread strands per shade, using multiple threads of differing thicknesses, adding and removing elements from the base pattern, or using different patterns. If I want fewer patterns in the work, I can add colour shade or work with thread thickness.

And then there’s which patterns for each colour/shade/section to think about! I’ve found hundreds by looking online, modified some, and created my own. A thousand people could each design a blackwork piece based off of the same outline and they’d all be different. There aren’t any rules for which patterns you should use (even less if you’re not doing blackwork on a reversible item like a sleeve or bookmark), but there is an artistry to it. There are patterns which resemble feathers, flowers, natural textures, man-made items, and they can be used appropriately, such as a feather-like pattern on a bird. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to! You can place patterns which are similar in shapes or density next to each other to create gentle changes across the work or match ones with greater differences for contrast.

I’ve found that one of the most important decisions for me to make first is what style I’m going for. I’ll show this with my Sapphire and Ruby piece:

Left. I didn’t think about how many threads I wanted to use or what style I was aiming for, so I assumed a different colour thread for each shade of blue and red. Here I picked three different patterns for Sapphire I liked individually which were thematically cohesive with strong diamond shapes. (I’d also started on Ruby, but for ease of comparison here I’m not showing those patterns.)

Middle. I decided I wanted to use only one colour thread and only one thread thickness, so I paintbucket’d all the colours in my Photoshop file to one shade of blue. What did read well with different shades of blue is now a mess since the individual patterns are very similar in density, diamonds and diagonals. I now have to start all over again.

Right. Every pattern has been switched out here! This was a bit sad but I had liked the original three, but I liked the idea of flat colour work more. Sapphire’s hair, the lightest blue, has the least dense pattern; her dress, the darkest blue, has the most dense pattern; her skin and front of dress is in-between. Since the bulk of the dress has a lot of vertical and horizontal lines, I needed diagonals here to make the front of the dress read against the rest, but I needed diagonals that wouldn’t merge into the hair’s diagonals.

In the finished piece, you can see I’ve followed the same guidelines for Ruby, mixing densities and primary shapes/lines to keep each of Ruby’s shades distinct, but also distinct from Sapphire’s. There are fewer overt diamonds than in the original draft, but I managed to include a similar fence pattern on Sapphire and use shapes suggestive of diamonds or meaningful in other ways.

(based off of this original pixel art )

Working on that piece was made much easier by everything I’d learned on my Ninetales pattern. Which was a whole lot! I spent many weekends working on its design; below are nine of the attempts I made (there were many others) while I was struggling to understand the basics of what I was attempting. Compare the contrast between individual tails in the first row to those in the last row. (Yeah, I even changed sprite to see if that would help since the tails are thicker, but I was able to return to the earlier sprite with the pose I preferred.) I also initially started with a different idea about cloth and thread colour, and the unsightly gaps in the third on the top row are an attempt to shade via using different stages which I quickly abandoned.

This is a much more exaggerated example of the stages I went through (as you can see from the design WIPs I had more variety than just diamonds in my initial patterns) but it’s illustrative.

Left. Because of my workflow and how my individual fill patterns are organised, when I work on a draft it’ll look like this, keeping each individual pattern’s colour. This used to make things easier when originally picking patterns! (I’ve since changed my workflow a bit and this is less important now.) Here I was inspired by some more blackwork designs similar to this and decided that instead of simply having all of Ninetales be one basic pattern, each tail and body segment could be its own pattern. Each individual pattern has diamonds in it, some with additional squares or octagons, most are heavy on diagonals.

Middle. Oh wait Ninetales is all one colour let’s check how that looks – ohhh. oh. oh no. Visually it’s a mess: there’s very little variation in density, the diamonds on the lower body and first tail run into each other, the diagonals lead to too much sameness.

Right. Two things have happened here. The first is the density has been varied dramatically, and second is that the pattern shapes and lines have been varied. The upper body touches the most sections so it’s best to start with that, here I’ve made it the densest pattern and also the one with the most simple diamond so it’s nearly all diagonals. Each section has a different density and primary shape than the ones next to it. The mane shares a diagonal emphasis with the upper body but the density is so different changing from diamonds to wide and tall Vs that it still reads well.

Here’s the finished piece! It was readable without adding the yellow shading but I thought it looked better with the yellows. On this sprite there’s less room to establish patterns on the tails since they’re thinner, but I don’t have to worry about keeping the definition on the head. The mane, upper body and lower body share primary shapes, octagons separated by squares, and I’ve kept the upper and lower body quite similar but the difference between additional squares vs additional diagonals differentiates them, and the mane has subtractions to the base pattern as well as addition to make it less dense. The skinniest tail closest to the body only read well when it was a very dense pattern, and the third tail is quite skinny between the mane and fourth tail so it needed to be dense as well, which obviously means the second and fourth need to be less dense and also balance diagonals against horizontal/vertical lines, and so on from there until the last tail contrasts with the lower body.

Next time in pt 2: probably more shading.

[rpgmgames]

January's Featured Game: Wishbone

DEVELOPER(S): Skitty, Kwillow, Ellie, Natasha ENGINE: RPGMaker VX Ace   GENRE: Western, Drama, Farming Simulation WARNINGS:  N/A SUMMARY: Wishbone is a character drama-slash-farming sim game that takes place in a wild west-inspired setting. The player takes the role of a farmer, fresh off the wagon in a new town and tasked with building a successful ranch. Wishbone might seem sleepy and mundane at first, but there’s trouble brewing on the horizon: a fierce, prolonged standoff between the lawmen and the outlaws that will decide the fate of the town itself.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself!  *Skitty: Hello! I'm Skitty, a scruffy weirdo whose hobbies include drawing, programming, and cooking. I also happen to be the coder, project manager, and one of the main artists. In 2014, I released my first game, Theo's Big Adventure, but actually haven't really been involved in the community... I'm a bit of a hermit.

*Katie: Hi! I’m Wishbone’s portrait artist, and I also do some other less easily categorizable stuff, like writing, spriting, concept work and research! This is the first game I’ve ever been a part of the team on, if you don’t count an unfinished choose-your-own-adventure game I made in Flash when I was 13.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Skitty: It's kind of a funny story. Several years ago, I used to be part of the Fallout: New Vegas roleplay community on tumblr. Just for fun, a few of my friends and I came up with an alternate universe where instead of living in the post-apocalyptic desert, all the characters lived in the wild west instead. We ended up having a lot of fun with the idea! My friend, Ellie (who is also working on this project as a writer), suggested the idea of an Animal Crossing-esque game based on that setting... and I, having coding knowledge and having made a game before, volunteered to make it. The struggle between the four central characters remains the same as the initial concept, but the project and the people of the town have evolved a lot since then.

How long have you been working on your project? *Skitty: I started it around April 2015, so it's a few months short of two years old. Progress has been slow because I'm also juggling a job and other obligations, but even during busy times, I typically manage to work on Wishbone every week. Every couple weeks, new features get done and updates are posted to the dev blog.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Skitty: The three biggest ones are Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and Red Dead Redemption. From Animal Crossing, we have have befriending townspeople and decorating your house. From Harvest Moon, we have the farming mechanics and romance. From Red Dead Redemption, we have hunting, foraging, and outlaw bounties. And I suppose Fallout: New Vegas deserves a shoutout for kicking the whole project off, albeit indirectly.

*Katie: I’ve liked Wild West settings for a while, but this project has made me go big on trying to absorb as much information from both the actual time period and from media as I can. Lately I’ve been trying to cram as many old Westerns into my eyeballs as I can so I get a good picture of the (romanticized) aesthetic and shorthands that have been used for this genre in the past.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them?   *Skitty: Honestly, we’ve been fighting against RPG Maker’s limitations since the beginning, since the game we’re making is quite unlike a top-down RPG.

I would say that the biggest difficulty so far has been the patch of code that manages animals aging, getting sick, eating, giving birth, etc when the day rolls over. Originally, each animal event had an autorun page that would process that information when the player entered the barn map, but that would get very messy if the player didn’t enter that map all day. It got even messier if the player sent the animals in the barn out to pasture! To solve this, I first had to learn the order in which autorun events are evaluated (tip: it’s determined by the event ID number!). But that wasn’t enough… as more features were implemented, it became obvious that that approach just didn’t work. There were too many conflicts, and every time I’d fix something, I’d have to go through 20+ animal events, each with 40 pages, and change something over, and over and over… it was incredibly inefficient, typo-prone, and hard on the wrist.

Eventually, I got sick of it and recoded the whole animal system to use “generic” Common Events for interaction (basically I copy the animal’s specific stat variables to “generic�� variables used by the function, then call it), with the aging/giving birth/eating/etc handled by a single event that was called once when the player slept. In hindsight, it seems so obvious… but my previous project didn’t use Common Events at all, so the first year of Wishbone’s development was largely dedicated to learning how to use them effectively.

*Katie: My biggest obstacle has been myself. I’m both a procrastinator and a perfectionist, which is just a horrible combo for ever getting anything done. Thankfully Skitty keeps me as on task as she can, but I still get mired in fixing-loops, and you would not believe the amount of times I’ve sent her revised images just because I moved a nostril two pixels to the left because it had been bothering me so badly.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Skitty: It actually hasn’t changed a whole lot. In the beginning, we had this core concept, basically just Animal Crossing plus Harvest Moon. But even back then we knew we wanted a big plot and minigames and sidequests and stuff… it was just a matter of figuring out if those were feasible to program.

I’d say it actually has more features now than it did in the original concept, too. I think in the beginning we had maybe five minigames, now it’s more like 8-10ish (depending on what you consider a minigame).

*Katie: It’s far larger than we had intended, that’s for sure! The art style has also shifted quite a bit, from the switch to wholly original graphics from borrowed sprites to subtle alterations in the sprite and portrait style. I think the biggest, most significant change, aside from making all-new sprites, is the inclusion of the sky in most of the game’s maps.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? *Skitty: It’s pretty much the same as it always was–me as the programmer/project manager/spriter, Katie as the portrait artist and other spriter, Ellie, Dax, Jester, and Reuben as character/plot contributors. Oh! I guess the big difference now is that we are in the process of hiring a composer?

What was the best part of developing the game? *Skitty: Seeing it all come together into something finished and cool. Sometimes I like to just lovingly look at the maps and videos and such I’m proudest of and think “wow, I did that! And it turned out almost exactly how I’d imagined!”

*Katie: Agreed! The little bits and pieces don’t seem like much, but when they’re part of a whole it’s like they’re completely transformed. I’m also happy to be working in a group - it makes me so proud to be part of this effort!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Skitty: Man, I’d definitely be craftier about how I handled the code for the animals. I didn’t know a lot about scripting at first, MONTHS worth of headache could have been avoided if I’d known how to use script calls.

*Katie: I don’t want to say ‘I wish I could change everything!’ because that’s not true, but it’s hard to keep myself from feeling I can always improve the parts I’ve contributed to the game. I’m doing a lot of learning on the job, and when I look back on things I’ve done before - even just a couple of portraits or sprites ago - it feels like I need to do everything over and make it better!

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore game's universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Skitty: We definitely have plans to use the characters again, but when they’re revisited, it’s going to be in different contexts. You won’t see the desert of Wishbone again, but the characters will absolutely be popping up in future projects.

*Katie: Yeah, these characters are sort of like… actors, in a way. Type-cast actors. We like to put them in different scenarios and see how they adapt.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Skitty: Gosh, it would be amazing if people liked the game enough to call themselves a fan! I’m definitely looking forward to people’s reactions to discovering plot twists and easter eggs and such. I hope people like the characters, too.

*Katie: Having something like this done would feel amazing. I’ve never been part of something this big before, and it’s a lot to be proud of. After that - if even a handful of people like the game, I’d be elated!

Is there something you're afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game?  *Skitty: I hope there aren’t too many bugs in it when I release it! I mean, I’m testing it as I go, but it’s a really big and complex game… there are going to be things I don’t catch. I’d be really disappointed if I released it with a glitch that broke people’s save files.

Also, I really do hope people actually like the characters… I’d be sad if they didn’t.

*Katie: I hope the art does justice to the game… I’d hate for it to be distracting or off, it’s something I worry about frequently. And boy I hope the story and characters come off okay!

Question from last month's featured dev: What's the biggest turn off you can get on an RPG maker game? *Skitty: Hmm… honestly, using the default sprites tends to be a pretty big turnoff. As an artist, it is very important to me that the game have an “aesthetic”, a sense of atmosphere, that the characters feel like individuals… that’s what really catches my eye and makes me want to learn more. I know not everybody is an artist, but like, a simple 8-bit sort of style, or even a “shitpunk” style like Space Funeral is more eye-catching than the default tiles.

Also, I find games made with the default tiles tend to be very easy to get lost in due to the generic nature of said tiles… if you gotta use those, at least make sure your maps are tightly-built and easy to navigate. I’ve played several RPG Maker games where the player spent a lot of time in huge, empty green fields with little or no landmarks. Add some stuff to make the area memorable… players will thank you for it!

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Skitty: Try to set realistic goals for your first (or second, or third…) project. It’s so tempting to want to tell your magnum opus immediately, but that’s usually a recipe for ending up frustrated, disappointed, and quitting. My first project, Theo’s Big Adventure, was fairly short, used mostly ripped sprites from Mother 3 and ripped music from other video games, and still took a year and three months to complete.

Also, try to make working on your project a habit. I find that the hardest part is often just getting started… but once I get in the zone, I can work for hours. Set goals for yourself (whether it’s as big as “I’ll finish Chapter 5 by April” or as small as “I’m going to work on my project for at least 30 minutes today”) and reward yourself if you complete them. If you don’t complete them, don’t beat yourself up… just set the goal again (adjusting it to be more reasonable if needed) and give it another shot.

Oh, and one more thing… it’s alright for something to not be perfect. One of the biggest killers of a long-term project (aside from overambition and having it not be a habit) is perfectionism. Don’t get caught up in the cycle of continually revamping the same pieces over and over again–just let it be imperfect and move on. Nobody’s first project is perfect, but future-you needs the experience and confidence you’ll gain from finishing it to pull off the project of your dreams in a few years.

*Katie: All of the above, but from someone who’s less disciplined, to people who perhaps have similar issues: get somebody who’ll keep your nose to the grindstone and get you working and finishing things when all you want to do is either chase butterflies or toggle an eyeball back and forth to make it “perfect”. You would not believe how much it helps.

We mods would like to thank Skitty and Katie for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved! 

Remember to check out Wishbone if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum 

[sven-kroosl]

My Top 10 Games of 2016

Man I'm glad 2016 is over but the games were good...

Some years play rough and 2016 was one of those years and I am very happy for it to be over. On the other hand in terms of video games, and only video games, this was a really great year. From a really solid resurgence in the quality of triple A shooters, to the Juggernaut that was Overwatch, and some really solid indie releases, there were actually too many good games for one person to play. Also there was a massive update to DotA 2 this year which is always welcome. So here we go, my top ten games of 2016.

 Honorable Mention - The Final Station

 Of all the games I played this year I had the most intense reaction to The Final Station. Upon completion of this game I set aside my controller, turned off my monitor, not the PC, just the monitor, then I went for a walk around the block. I was moved to this act not by any great aspect of the game’s production or by some jaw dropping set piece but instead by the oppressive weight and bleakness of The Final Station’s world. A dangerous world where even the simplest task can expose you to being torn apart by brutal attackers. A world where infrastructure is crumbling and the people normally trusted with protecting everyone have secretly betrayed the trust of the people. After the way 2016 played out, the bleak outlook of The Final Station resonates even more.

 10 - Pokemon Go

 I am not a Pokemon fan. I fully recognize the good and great qualities of the Pokemon universe, but the games and cartoons have just never done much for me. The runaway success of Pokemon Go demanded that I give the game a shot despite my usual lack of enthusiasm. What I found was a really solid AR experience filled with tons of excuses to get me up and about in the real world and a great new icebreaker to start conversations with people I would otherwise have nothing in common. Oh yeah, and some weak ass Pokemon.

 9 - Reigns

 Reigns is a truly fantastically simple game. Of the two mobile games on this list Reigns is the one that fit into my life the best. In that way Reigns was the anti Pokemon Go; Pokemon Go was the mobile game that changed my routine and Reigns was the game that fit into my routine. When you’re waiting in line for the movies or whatever you can’t go running after that stupid Zapdos. But you know what you can do? You can live the lives of half a dozen Medieval Kings, you can meet the devil in the form of you dog, you can fight skeletons in a dungeon, and even more cool stuff. Also it’s a mobile game that you just pay for up front and it never bothers you for money again, which is always nice.  

 8 - Darkest Dungeon

 Fun fact: for most of my 2015 Extra Life Marathon I was having internet service issues and about the only game I could reliably stream was the early access version of Darkest Dungeon, so I have more than a little experience with the game. The way that every part of The Darkest Dungeon works together to to create a gothic horror landscape is just fantastic. The way the cartoony artstyle contrasts with the animation and sound design is just dissonant enough to be unsettling. The way that the psychological maladies effect the gameplay and can just straight up end a dungeon run or in some cases even end a game is a risky gamble that really adds a sense of tension that works incredibly well with the tone of the game. Ultimately Darkest Dungeon is a really great, creepy, game. Be ready to grind a bit though because you'll definately need to.

 7 - The Banner Saga 2

 In a year when the second entry in the XCOM franchise was a disappointment there was a shining star in the turn based strategy genre and that star was The Banner Saga 2. Where XCOM 2 made the mistake of assuming players had maintained their skills from the first game The Banner Saga 2 eased players back into the combat system with a few easier battles before dialing up the difficulty. It also doesn’t hurt the game that it has some of the best hand drawn style art and animation of any game ever. Bottom line: The banner Saga was the best turn based strategy game released this year and I really like that type of game.

 6 - Overwatch

 I really enjoyed my time with Overwatch this year. Zarya is top tier A-plus defensive tank, and is also just the best. The way that Blizzard has built not just a great multiplayer game but also the UI framework around that game which celebrates every player’s contribution is a great accomplishment. I think that the characters in Overwatch are all really fun as is the game itself. It’s just a shame that there’s really no good single player experience in the game and that the story exists entirely outside the game, and that the community for that game is becoming toxic in spite of some masterful design efforts to combat that. Also shameful is Blizzard's decision to add the worst free to play practice, blind loot boxes with repeats, to a full price retail game. Overwatch is a really great game that is slowly getting worse over time and that’s kind of sad.

 5 - Dark Souls 3

 Dark Souls 3 is my first Souls game so I was unprepared for the absolute savagery with which this game assails players, even in the tutorial. Once I played for a while, though, patterns began to reveal themselves and a game that seemed ferocious at first became simply challenging but fair. The appeal of Souls  games was lost on me for a long time. I couldn’t understand why people were so excited to play blatantly unfair games. Now that I’ve played one I understand that these games aren’t really unfair or even onerously difficult. Souls games simply operate at a different tempo from other games and learning that tempo is the really difficult part of mastering them.

 4 - Stellaris

 Just. One. More. Turn.

Getting you to say that after 8 hours is  the ultimate goal of all games like Stellaris.  What Stellaris offers you that others like it don’t is freedom. Freedom to design your own civ, freedom to find your own way to win the game, freedom to be weird. Games like Stellaris, most notably the Civ series, tend to force players into a few basic strategies. Sure you can try a pacifist playthrough in a Civ game but good luck actually winning or even surviving very long that way. Stellaris has a way of making all playstyles viable by making them all just flawed enough that really drew me in to an extent greater than any other game I played this year. That said I tend to be fairly biased in favor of this type of game in general so it’s not a huge surprise that it affected me this way.

 3 - Doom

 Doom is a game about momentum which is important because that is the way it is different from practically every other game this year. The new hotness in games lately has been agility; letting players flit about the environment hither and thither. Doom ignores this trend, almost with disdain, forcing players to keep their feet mostly planted on the ground but letting them move at unheard of, in recent years, speed across it. What this means is that Doom isn’t a game about not getting blasted so much as it is a game about blasting things. The whole point of the game is to treat enemy encounters the way the Kool-Aid Man treats walls. This isn’t just a return to form to the series because this year’s DOOM added a new piece to the old formula; storytelling. In DOOMs of yore story was an afterthought for the most part. This DOOM, though, actually has a story with a plot and everything and actually interesting supporting cast members. This game even managed to give the “Doom guy” a little bit of a personality and for that alone it will go down as maybe one of the best shooter campaigns ever. In a year where the most popular game is often about five opposing team members finding ways to keep you from killing the sixth Doom is a breath of fresh air, letting you really cut loose against a horde of angry demons released by the worst kind of short sighted corporate greed.

 2 - Hyper Light Drifter

 I’ve said this a lot this year and I’m going to keep on saying it, because apparently it needs to be said. Everyone, play, Hyper Light Drifter. As a medium video games are often criticized, occasionally correctly, for being too over the top. With that being the case Hyper Light Drifter is possibly the exception that proves the rule. Which is to say sublimely simple and quiet but also incredibly fun and engaging. It doesn’t hurt that the game has the what is probably the best pixel art and sprite work in a game since Fez, an amazing synth heavy soundtrack and great sound design overall. The real beautiful aspect of Hyper Light Drifter, though, is the gameplay, specifically the combat. Few things this year have been more satisfying than mastering the combat in Hyper Light Drifter. The combat is just different enough from other similar games to be challenging while being familiar enough to not be off putting. But more than anything about the game it is the quiet  tone of Hyper Light Drifter that impressed me. So what are you waiting for. Go play this game!

 1 - Titanfall 2

 Titanfall 2 is a truly magnificent accomplishment in game design and execution. Every bit of the game is impeccably well done, it looks and sounds amazing, plays like a dream and most importantly is a joy to play. While a lot of games have the kinds of traversal mechanics that Titanfall 2 has, nothing feels like Titanfall 2.  That is what makes this the best game of the year, the way it feels. More than any other aspect of the medium, feel is what defines and differentiates games. In a year where great games were built to make you want to gamble on a loot box or increase accuracy of your favorite GPS app, the relative purity of Titanfall 2 makes it stand out. Instead of trapping players in a restrictive character class Titanfall 2 lets people customize almost every aspect of their multiplayer loadout. The game is even more distinctive on account of its campaign, remember those, which is a masterclass in how to pace mechanics. Titanfall 2 is constantly introducing and discarding new, interesting gameplay mechanics and consequently never gets dull or repetitive. When the mechanical brilliance of the campaign is put together with Titanfall 2’s solid “A boy and his robot” story and one of the year’s standout new characters, BT 7274, and you get, arguably, the best campaign of the year.

As parts of video game industry more and more often leave out parts of their games so they can sell them to us later or add sleazy free to play hooks to games they also expect us to pay for up front, it becomes important to celebrate games for simply being complete experiences on release. Unlike some games on this list Titanfall 2 is at that and more, the best game of the year.  

[guidetoenjoy-blog]

The 35 best indie games on PC and consoles

New Post has been published on https://entertainmentguideto.com/awesome/the-35-best-indie-games-on-pc-and-consoles/

The 35 best indie games on PC and consoles

Update: Added the open-world survival indie RPG Outward

Although the best PC games with money to splash are quickly evolving, so are the best indie games you might not have heard of.

One of the best things about our best indie games list is that most of these more obliterate titles, unlike AAA game publishers, don’t try to manipulate you out of every penny any chance they can get. Free from corporate influence and constant badgering for your fund, the best indie games represent the pure artistic vision of the developers- especially if you have one of the best gaming PCs.

However, merely because the best indie games don’t make a lot of money, doesn’t mean they can’t keep up with the latest AAA reaches in scope and ambition. In fact, the opposite is true: the best indie games can easily rival or even exceed mainstream games in both quality and scope- becoming artistic masterpieces in the process. And, they don’t have to rely on tired tropes just to sell millions of copies, like their AAA counterparts.

This is all exciting stuff, and if you want to dive into the best indie games, you’re in luck. We’ve put together a list all the best indie games on the PC market today. We’ve included both in vogue indies like Return of the Obra Dinn and Outward, alongside classic titles like Braid and Dwarf Fortress. And, don’t worry, we’re going to keep such lists updated with all the latest and greatest indie makes.

If you’re looking for the next great indie title, keep reading.

Linux, Windows or Mac – which one is best for you? Watch our guide video below :P TAGEND

Bill Thomas, Joe Osborne, Kane Fulton and Gabe Carey have also contributed to this article

Yeah, it’s not out yet, with Double Fine promising it’ll be out’ soonish’. Still, Ooblets is staying on our radar. Ooblets is being developed by first-time studio Glumberland, and is backed by Double Fine. The game is described as some kind of combo between Pokemon, Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, which has certainly captured our attention- and it should probably capture yours, too. The game blends an art style curiously reminiscent of post-apocalyptic sensation, Adventure Time, with gameplay that revolves around gathering animals called ooblets in the town of, uh, Oob.

In the game, you’ll be able to train and battle your ooblets against other ooblet trainers. At the same time, you’ll have to balance your ooblet training with the real-world responsibilities of being a farmer. That’s right, drawing influence from the likes of Stardew Valley, you can cultivate produce and decorate your house with various trimmings as well. You’ll also be able to join an Ooblet Club comprised of friends( NPCs) you’ll gratify along the way.

If you don’t know what to do in Ooblets, simply walk around and discover new shops and builds that suit your interest. Better yet, you can open up your own shop and sell make that you’ve grown on the farm as well as items that you’ve scavenged throughout the world. Otherwise, you can feed the leftover harvests to your ooblets to watch them level up and learn new techniques to be used in the turn-based, RPG-style battles.

Expected:’ Soonish’

Jonathan Blow& apos; s brainchild first appears to be a simple pastiche of Super Mario Bros, with a middle-aged curmudgeon replacing the titular plumber but still seeking to rescue a princess.

The longer you spend in the game, however, the more that’s revealed to you, progressing from a series of time-bending puzzles to quiet reflective texts- which doesn’t stop it from being the smartest puzzle game since SpaceChem. Blow himself has subtly hinted that the ultimate narrative may revolve around the atomic bomb.

First released as PC freeware by Japanese decorator Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya back in 2004 after five years of 100% solo developing, Cave Story predates the recent indie renaissance by a few years. Because of when and how it was first released, it& apos; s often omitted in indie gaming discussions.

However, this classic more than deserves to be on every best-of list for its caring homage to the classic action platforming games of the Super Nintendo era , not to mention its unbelievable music and breathlessly vibrant world. Oh, and don& apos; t forget the hugely intuitive controls, gobs of secrets and weapons that are simply too fun to use. If you& apos; ve yet to enjoy this one, you need to set it on your backlog already.

From family-owned and operated Studio MDHR, Cuphead has connected with millions of people around the world, many of whom commonly wouldn’t touch a run-and-gun platformer with a ten-foot pole.

Although its gameplay was inspired by classic games such as Mega Man and Contra, most gamers would likely compare it to a Fleischer Studios cartoon like Betty Boop. Because Cuphead employs a hand-drawn art style likened to a 1930 s animation, it’s been universally praised for its gorgeous visuals.

Cuphead is more than just its stunning visuals, however. It’s a series of 19 challenging and engaging boss, with platforming bits interspersed between them. It already attained our list of the best indie games, but Studio MDHR has announced that the Cuphead: the Delicious Last Course DLC, slated for 2019, with a new isle to explore, new boss to conquer and, most importantly, a new character to master.

Many AAA games serve as escapist power fantasies, where the player is ultimately able to dominate the game’s cosmo- right until video games aims. But, many indie games are the exact opposite- like the IGF award winner and suffering simulator Cart Life.

Papers Please is similar to Cart Life in that it& apos; s also an IGF winner with elements of misery about it. Merely, it& apos; s better – it’s a smart, weird sim about the compromised life of a border guard living under a totalitarian regime. It& apos; s ugly and desperate, but also innovative, uproariously funny and terribly smart.

Among the hardcore gamers we know, Spelunky is the go-to drug. Even today, several years after its release, some of them still play it every day, despite having completed it many times over. That& apos; s because Spelunky, an ostensibly rogue-like platformer with a definite objective, is tough, differed and highly randomized.

It also has more dark secrets than a presidential candidate, meaning there are a boatload of ways to finish it, and its daily challenges are a sure-fire way to public humiliation.

Does humor belong in video games? Well, according to the Stanley Parable, that’s a resounding’ yes ‘. This game is hilarious without being dumbed down. Players follow( or don’t) a very British narrator who alterations the world around you, based on your choices.

No choice is penalized, and every playthrough will be fresh with new humor and weird goings-on. Being trapped in the closet in The Stanley Parable is more moving and funny than the majority of members of other indie games.

If you missed out on this ironic gem back when it first launched, you’ll be happy to know that the developer announced the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe edition for 2019, with fresh content, more endings and a console release. This Ultra Deluxe edition actually sounds pretty tempting, even for us- and we played it a whole lot when it first came out.

Farther reading: Retro-me-do! Digitiser’s Mr Biffo on his top PC games of all time

It took more than nine years to build, but Owlboy is definitely worth the wait. Originally designed for PCs and released in late 2016, this clever indie game masterpiece is now available to experience on Mac and Linux as well- and there’s even a Nintendo Switch version! Owlboy centres around a race of owl-human hybrid characters called, and aptly so, Owls. Of them, you control Otis, an Owl who is censured by his mentor for his inept flying skills.

The story finds Otis’ village destroyed by pirates who clearly have is consistent with the Owls. As a result, Otis has to work with an assortment of villagers in-game to take out foes. Of course, when boss combats develop, you’ll need to manage friends accordingly, as each character comes with their own situate of unique skill sets to use in conjunction with one another. If you’ve ever played and enjoyed a Kid Icarus game, this is one for the books. Otherwise, play it anyway.

Similar to The Stanley Parable, Gone Home falls into the unofficially labeled’ walk-to simulator’ genre. Where it diverts from the clever and philosophical Stanley Parable, however, is its focus on life’s difficult realities, as opposed to light humor.

After arriving at your childhood home following an overseas visit, you play as 21 -year-old Kaitlin Greenbriar who is greeted by an empty home. While gameplay is essentially limited to scavenging through notes to find out where your family is, the gripping narrative is exceedingly emotional and obligating, as long as you keep an open intellect. After all this time, Gone Home stands out as one of the best indie games out there.

Only SpaceChem has mixed learning with amusement as successfully as The Kerbal Space Program. The game is simple – design and build a spacecraft to take the cutesy Kerbals to the Mun and beyond.

Yet its focused use of real physic means that you& apos; ll find yourself following NASA as you’re building multi-stage rockets and space station as well as exploring the Kerbal& apos; s strange world on EVAs, before bringing your discoveries back for research on the Kerbal planet – that& apos; s if you can get off the ground at all. It& apos; s a huge, complex, challenging and fun game, that manages to be super smart without being preachy.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is the exact opposite of something like Kerbal Space Program – it’s an action roguelike par excellence. You play as a young son attempting to kill his damned siblings, mom and possibly the Devil, using only your tears, which he shoots from his eyes, naturally. This indie games is matched only by the equally visceral Nuclear Throne.

With dozens of bizarre items to collect, endless procedurally-generated levels, and tons of secrets, the Binding of Isaac is a very dark take on the exploratory model established by Spelunky.

Don’t let the pixel art graphics put you off- Undertale isn’t a game that would have fit on the Super Nintendo. That’s because, in Undertale, the decisions you attain have a huge impact on how the game objective and, more importantly, how it continues in New Game Plus.

While playing Undertale, you’ll come to realize just how much freedom the game gives you. Despite its highly inspired , not to mention intense, boss matches, you’ll be able to make it through the entire nine or so hours of Undertale as a total pacifist. Plus, when you go through the game a second time, you’ll bear the weight of the consequences from your previous operate. What’s even better is , now Undertale is out on the Nintendo Switch, so you can take this masterpiece of game design wherever you go.

From developer Playdead, Inside is comparable to its predecessor, Limbo, in some ways, merely with an added layer of depth that inspires constant wonder. This is mostly a result of the unspoken narrative, which revolves around yet another nameless boy. In Inside, however, the boy in the story is running away from a group of men who- if you fail to stay out of their sights- will try to mercilessly kill you.

Though it isn& apos; t quite clear why the boy is running from these men or why you should even care since you don& apos; t know who he is, so Inside will leave you begging for answers. The bleak, lifeless defining of Inside is more than worth the price of admission. Its minimalist art style alone is avant-garde enough to feel right at home in a museum. Factor in the fact that this game that& apos; s both fun to play and dripping with curiosity, and Inside is one of the best indie games fund can buy.

Developed single-handedly by Eric Barone, Stardew Valley is undoubtedly a technical feat for that little fact alone. If you’ve ever played a Harvest Moon game, you’re already very well known the premise of Stardew Valley – you may merely not know it yet. Stardew Valley is an addictive farming simulator, which assures you interact with townees to the point where you can literally marry them.

Stardew Valley isn’t just farming, though – it’s a whole bunch of interesting thing at the same time. You can go fishing, you can cook, you can craft stuff. You can even run explore procedurally-generated caves to mine for items and even fight slime-monster-things. However, you should keep in mind that your health and energy are finite, so you& apos; ll want to keep your character rested and fed to avoid suffering from exhaustion. Pass out and you’ll lose a considerable amount of money and items you’ve worked hard to attain. Stardew Valley will have you playing for hours on end, for better or worse.( Definitely better .)

From Canadian game developer Alec Holowka, inventor of the award-winning Aquaria( also featured on this list ), and independent artist/ animator Scott Benson, Night in the Woods is an unconventional side-scrolling adventure game centering around a 20 -year-old protagonist named Mae who drops out of college to move back in with her parents.

Featuring a tale largely based around dialog choices and mini games that set a spin on mundane tasks, like carry boxes up the stairs and eating perogies, Night in the Timbers is a timeless coming-of-age tale. Not only will you experience middle class America through the eyes of a personified cat, but virtually every interaction in-game will have you laughing aloud. And now that it’s available on the Nintendo Switch, you’ll be able to take it wherever you go.

If you’re a fan of the recent wave of games inspired by Dark Souls, you’ll perfectly love Hollow Knight. You take control of the Hollow Knight, and result them through the deceptively adorable scenery to take on boss and other difficult challenges. Much like Dark Souls, it’s not immediately clear what you’re actually supposed to be doing as the narrative is intentionally obtuse.

The Dark Souls inspirations don’t end there, however. It also embraces Dark Souls’s’ tough but fair’ philosophy, where the game is only as hard as you make it – you can overcome anything as long as you have patience and learn from your blunders. Hollow Knight takes these lessons from Dark Souls and injects them into a MetroidVania, with all the side-scrolling and upgrades you could possibly want. You can even play it on the Nintendo Switch now.

If you’re looking for a game that’s as unforgiving as it is fun, seem no further than Dead Cells. It takes gameplay inspiration from so many places- from roguelikes to MetroidVania. There’s even a clue of Dark Souls in there, to create a unique action game that will test your restrictions.

Each time you play this game, it will be different. And, while you’ll lose some progress each time you die- and you’ll die a lot- the game will become more and more rewarding as the complex and fluid combat becomes second nature. In the final release of video games, you get access to over 90 weapons, skills and abilities that’ll let you tailor your gameplay however you want.

Whatever you do, don’t get discouraged when you fail. Get up and try again, and Dead Cells will merely reward you in the end, which is why it has our vote for one of the best indie games in 2019.

Introversions was one of the earliest& apos; indie& apos; companies, releasing games like Uplink, Defcon and Darwinia whilst Vlambeer was still in short pants. After years of struggling, they& apos; ve eventually hit a huge success with Prison Architect, a game where you construct, faculty, attire and manage a maximum security prison, of all places.

With smart captives who are willing to do anything to escape, you& apos; ll struggle to keep them all inside – or keep them from rioting – and turn a profit. It& apos; s eminently playable, even more so in the near future as Paradox has acquired it and plans to make it available on all platforms.

These days, it’s hard to find an RPG that will really push you to your restrictions. Outward, with its focus on survival and tough combat, is one of these RPGs. There isn’t much in the way of narrative, but you’re placed in the middle of the world of Aurai, where you’ll have to struggle to survive. You’re not a hero, however, just the everyman trying to survive in a harsh world.

In many styles, Outward is like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. There’s a heavy emphasis on exploration, but you aren’t dedicated quest arrows or any kind of waypoint. You have to rely on your own ability to use a map, along with any directions that are given to you by quest NPCs. If you’re looking for a challenging RPG, this might be one of the best indie games for you.

Dwarf Fortress is its own genre, its own industry. This is a game that, before you& apos; ve even set foot in it, has to generate the entire geography, myth and history of its massive world. Then it tracks every single one of the dwarfs you& apos; re managing down to the hairs on their legs, and the particular horrible elephant murder that they’ve witnessed and are now carving on an ornamental chair.

Your undertaking is to keep the dwarves alive as they carve out their subterranean kingdom – given that insanity, monsters and starvation beset them at every stage, that& apos; s not easy. And dwarves, always, always mine too deep.

Run. Jump. Die. Repeat. That’s essentially the gameplay loop of Super Meat Boy, a fiendishly addictive 2D platformer that’s also bloody hard, with an emphasis on bloody. Gallons of blood is spilled as the game’s eponymous meaty hero leaps over deadly fells, spinning finds and strolling chainsaws in a bid to rescue his girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from the evil Dr Foetus. Obviously.

Boasting solid controls, lots of humor and vibrant graphics, Super Meat Boy leapt onto the PS4, Vita, and Nintendo Switch in style.

It might not be Playdead’s most recent game, but Limbo is timeless. Even five years after its release, the game’s haunting storyline still affects us. You play the Boy, a child with glowing eyes who is cast into Limbo to find his sister. Making your style through a bleak and dangerous world full of hostile silhouettes, giant spiders and deadly gravitational fields, you’ll need to think quickly and perfectly day your motions if you’re going to survive.

Limbo is much more than a simple platformer: it& apos; s an experience, and one that will have you pondering the very essence of life by the time you finish. Deep, profound and absorbing, it& apos; s one indie game everybody should take time out to play.

If you& apos; re yearn for a retro-inspired multiplayer archery combat game( aren& apos; t we all ?), TowerFall: Ascension is the pick of the plenty. Fast, frenetic and teeth-gnashingly hard in hardcore mode, the game& apos; s mechanics are simple: fire arrows at your foes or jump on their heads to stay alive until the round ends.

Arrows that don& apos; t hit are embedded in walls, making for tense scenarios when you have to traverse the map while dodging foes to retrieve them. As such, practicing until you achieve Robin Hood-esque levels of accuracy is recommended. Ascension is best experienced with friends in local multiplayer mode, which remembers Super Smash Bros& apos; most manic moments.

It’s not often that a platformer manages to balance challenging and engaging gameplay with an emotional and thought-provoking narrative, but Celeste pulls it off. From the developers of Towerfall, Celeste follows the story of Madeline, a young girl who decides to face her mental health issues by climbing to the top of the mysterious Celeste Mountain. In doing so, she learns more not only about the mountain, but about herself as well throughout the process.

An inevitable classic, Celeste integrates the obvious jumping, air-dash and climbing controls into a brutal series of platforming challenges in upwards of 700 unique screens. And, if that’s too easy, you’ll unlock B-side chapters along the way, designed for only the bravest of hardcore players. Better yet, you don’t have to worry about waiting an eternity between each respawn. Instead, Celeste brings you back from the tomb in an instant, a welcome deviation from the typically extensive loading screens.

Have you ever wanted to land on an foreigner planet, and build a factory? We admit that it’s an odd premise, but we promise that it works in Satisfactory. You’ll land on one of three planets of varying difficulty, where you’ll be tasked with building and automating a factory to exploit the world around you.

The premise audios bland, but being able to explore these beautiful worlds in first person, while scavenging materials and fighting off hostile wildlife builds it all that more exciting. Plus, is there something better than sitting back and admiring something you worked hard on?

Satisfactory is in early access right now, and exclusive to the Epic Games Store, but if you can get past all that, you’re sure to get hours of wholesome simulation out of it.

After the fury success that was the original Nidhogg, it’s a shame to see the superior sequel get thrown under the bus. Nevertheless, in spite of its controversial art style, Nidhogg 2 packs a refined, stunning appear that the first version, a cult-classic, couldn’t even think to compete with.

In still frames, we can see how this could get misconstrued, but fortunately, it’s the fun and addictive local multiplayer gameplay that makes Nidhogg, well, Nidhogg. And it’s all there in Nidhogg 2. Additionally, every time you respawn, you get one of four unique weapons that only bolster the challenge.

Esteemed indie designer Jon Blow& apos; s follow up to Braid may look like an entirely different adventure, being 3D and all. However, the two are more thematically alike than you might think. The Witness, at its core, is another puzzle game that tells an interesting story through said puzzles.

This puzzler takes place in an almost equally impressionist- albeit heavily Myst-inspired- world, but it& apos; s story is far more nuanced and mysterious than Blow& apos; s previous. At almost every corner of this island that you& apos; ve simply woken up on( or beneath ), there is a clue as to how you got onto this island and why you& apos; re here.

Don’t get us incorrect, we liked Bastion, but we won’t deny that Transistor was SuperGiant Games’ best work to date. Much of that has to do with the blending of action-based and turn-based RPG parts contained within its cyberpunk futurescape. Likewise, in classic SuperGiant fashion, those mechanics are complemented with a stunning art style and a music rating so unforgettable it’ll induce you want to buy the soundtrack.

Leaving key gameplay beats up to the player, the narrative isn’t so variable. Transistor’s main character, Red, is a renowned singer in the city of Cloudbank. However, she’s been attacked by a group of vicious robots who call themselves the Process, operated by another group called the Camerata. In her journey, she detects the Transistor, a mysterious sword with the voice of a man. Soon enough, she’ll learn more about him and how he will shake up her world.

It’s weird to think that Oxenfree came out before the first season of Stranger Things, and yet, the two coincidentally have a lot in common. The 80 s-inspired heavy synth music composed by scntfc, for one, accentuates some genuinely gripping sci-fi horror focusing around – you guessed it- groupings of teens stuck on an island.

The story involves a handful of uniquely written characters, namely the main character Alex, along with her stoner friend Ren, her newfound stepbrother Jonas, her dead brother Michael’s ex-girlfriend Clarissa and her best friend Nona( who Ren happens to be in love with ).

The plot is explained through branching speech dialogues, similar to Life is Strange or modern-day Telltale games, and it features five different endings depending on your choices.

Exploring a surreal wilderness seems like quite the trend these days in gaming, and developer Campo Santo& apos; s debut only serves to keep it going strong. Set in the wilderness of 1989 Wyoming, you& apos; re playing Henry, a fire lookout that& apos; s all alone in the woods after exploring something strange in the distance.

That is, save for your partner on the other line of a walkie-talkie: Delilah. She& apos; s your only phase of contact as you explore the wilderness. Will you make it back alive? Will the decisions you stimulate help or harm the relationship with your only lifeline to the outside world, your boss? Don& apos; t worry about those questions just yet- admire those forestscapes first!

Rust is one of the more successful indie titles of recent times. By the end of 2015, it had sold more than 3 million transcripts, which isn& apos; t too shabby considering it wasn’t even finished — the game has been on Steam& apos; s Early Access scheme since launching in December 2013.

It seems people can& apos; t get enough of the Day Z-inspired survival sim. It ensure you use your wits and bearings to survive its harsh open world, starting off with nothing but a boulder. After assembling resources needed to build a house and weapons to fend off attackers( other online players, in other words ), Rust gradually becomes more intense as you defend your growing base — or attempt to breach others& apos ;.

Fans of the original Overcooked will not be disappointed by its second installment in the chaotic couch co-op series from British indie game developer Team1 7.

This time around, your undertaking is to defeat the& apos; Un-Bread& apos;( zombie baked goods) that have taken over the Onion Kingdom, by battling through brand new recipes including sushi, pizza and burgers in increasingly chaotic kitchens with up to three other people.

To add to the frantic fun, you must battle obstacles including random flames, collapsing floors and interfering passers by, all while get your orders out to the pass in time.

Things get complicated incredibly quickly, and relationships, friendships and family bonds will be tested as you work together to complete your recipes on time, inducing it a fun and challenging sofa co-op game that will construct you truly understand the meaning of “too many cooks spoil the broth.”

The natural progression of survival games, SCUM takes what predecessors like Rust and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds both succeeded at and iterate in impressive ways. And, while it’s still in early access, it offers a unique twist- combining the frenetic gameplay of battle royale games with the slow, thoughtful gameplay of a survival sim.

SCUM, unlike other similar games, is extremely heavy on the simulation side of things, however. You shouldn’t expect to run in firearms blazing, as you’re going to get tired promptly( just as you would if you tried running outside in person with a ton of stuff in your knapsack ). But, if heavy statistic systems is something your into, there’s a lot to love here. It’s like spreadsheets with a physic engine.

Just don’t go in expecting a polished experience , not for now. However, developer Croteam promises to add more features over hour, and as they’re backed by Devolver, you can trust that video games is going to shape up into something great.

Every so often, there’s a game that perfectly mixes and balances aesthetic, gameplay and narrative- where everything feels like it only, well, fits. The best indie games always excel at this, and Return of the Obra Dinn is proof. A mystery taking place on a derelict ship, you’re tasked with figuring out how the crew of this lost ship died, disappeared or worse.

The entire game has this old-school visual styling that, combined with the simple controls and gameplay technique make it keep feeling a nostalgic sort of adventure. Right from the sets menu, you’ll get to choose what kind of monitor you’d like to emulate- we picked an old school Macintosh option- that should give you an idea of the type of retro revivalism on offer here.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a game that will require critical thinking, exploration and a ton of reading. If that all sounds appealing to you, and you’re all good with retro aesthetics, you will love this game. In fact, it’s one of the best indie games in a season marked with AAA decadence.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve probably spent hundreds of hours playing Roller Coaster Tycoon during your childhood. And, while there have been plenty of amusement park simulators over the last few years, they’ve never quite hit that place.

Until now.

Parkitect is the closest we’ve ever gotten to those early aughts park simulators, and we’re absolutely in love. From the cartoonish art style to the realistic simulation and Steam Workshop integration, Parkitect is one of the best indie games 2019 has to offer.

For years, thatgamecompany has been behind some of the best indie games on the market, merely most of them had been exclusive to PlayStation. One such game was Flower. Serving as a kind of a precursor to the beloved Journey, Flower puts you in command of a bloom petal, surfing through the wind.

You’ll activate different colours of flower beds to affect the environment, which will also get you different colored petals, until you have an entire trail of colour surfing high winds. It’s an incredibly relaxing and artful experience, and it might just be hiding a message about the industrial world we all find ourselves living in. Trust us, give it a shot as it’s one of the best- not to mention, most legendary- indie games ever.

Read more: techradar.com