#would love to play some big open world rpg or whatever. but not for $90

[thehardkandy]

i want a new game to play sooooo bad but i am sooooo picky it is making it impossible

[catatonicengineers]

A Defense of Cait Sith

Plushie Princess Saga:

A Hundred Ways to Put the WRO Back Together

A Hundred Ways to Wreck Shinra HQ

Reeve’s Adventures in Babysitting and World Saving:

And Take a Stand at Shinra

While There’s Still Time

On Plushies and Oppenheimer:

A Defense of Cait Sith

~

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer

I was eight-years-old when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, exactly one year after its release. Like many 90’s gamers, FFVII was a turning point into the world of RPG’s from which I’ve yet to recover. Kids today will never understand the coming of age that occurred somewhere between Yoshi’s Island and grappling with the ethos of Avalanche blowing Sector 1’s reactor sky high. It’s no surprise that my 3rdgrade brain found an essence of familiarity to cling to amid the existential dread and ecoterrorism that was the greatest game ever made.

Cait Sith was the cute, cuddly party member that validated my love of cats and ignited my adoration for moogles. I would relentlessly make room for him in my party, despite his terrible combat stats, and hurl endless Phoenix Downs every time he fell.

He was quirky, he fought with a megaphone, his limit breaks were oddly sparse compared to the rest of the cast, and his home base of Gold Saucer looked like a unicorn threw up all over a casino. What’s not to love?

According to recent Reddit threads, Youtube comments, and rage bloggers, apparently a lot.

The advent of the long awaited FFVII remake rightfully caused a massive revival of the excitement first felt by long time fans of the franchise. The release date has been confirmed for March 3, 2020 – two days before my 30thbirthday. Not gonna lie; feels like the universe aligned to bless the official passing of my youth with this nostalgia bomb.

It’s with this love of all things FFVII in mind that I’d like to formally pose a defense of the game’s most hated character.

Cait Sith/Reeve, this one’s for you.

The Laughter

We first meet the lively, dancing robo-moogle and cat combo in Gold Saucer and we’re not quite sure if this strange entity should count as one party member or two. Either way, he joins your crew as the quintessential comic relief with nary a backstory in sight. That’s right; you are now the proud owner of Cait Sith. A “fortune teller” by trade, Cait Sith’s motivations remain as murky as your party’s future.

At first glance, it’s easy to pass Cait Sith off as a filler character, the cute one added for giggles. The one the writers never bothered to flesh out because, let’s face it, that moogle is mostly fluff anyway. The “most useless character” title isn’t entirely unjustified.

If this was where Cait Sith’s story ended.

I still remember the day my older brother announced that he’d read ahead in the player’s guide (this used to be a thing, kids) and discovered Cait Sith was a Shinra spy. I’m pretty sure I went through all the stages of grief before settling on denial and assuming he was playing a joke on me. Surely, my favorite slot machine loving companion couldn’t be a traitor.

Enter Reeve Tuesti, the man behind the moogle. He’s the head of Urban Development at Shinra Electric Power Company. He wears a signature blue suit to work everyday. He hates board meetings. He’s not fond of his coworkers. Like Tifa, he’s an introvert. And he’s the guy who engineered the Mako reactors.

If Hojo is Dr. Frankenstein, Reeve is Oppenheimer. The tragedy of the monsters we create is always greater when it’s a monster we loved. Where the other Shinra execs are motivated by greed, power, and a desire to play God, Reeve is the only Shinra higher up we encounter with genuine empathy and a sense of advocacy for the people. It’s easy to assume that Mako reactors would improve lives, but as Marlene so eloquently asks, “isn’t that because we were taking away from the planet’s life?”

When faced with the guilt of a design gone horribly wrong, those in authority have two choices; own the guilt or double down. And Reeve doubles down.

I’ve never been a fan of the way modern RPG’s have everything clearly spelled out and spoon fed to the gamer. The reason we don’t need further backstory for Reeve is because his character arc is already apparent if we do a bit of digging. I was surprised to learn that the common conjecture behind the exact mechanics of Cait Sith involved him being a remote controlled, autonomous but non-sentient robot. Given that assumption, it’s fair to say that Cait Sith is a worthless character who lacks emotion or consequence.

One opinion I’ve seen trending is why not simply make Reeve join the party, sans the giant stuffed animal? After all, we’d get to see how he grapples with his role in Shinra and eventual betrayal of Avalanche.

Two words; cognitive dissonance. You have to question what kind of 35-year-old executive creates a plushie cat proxy to begin with. See I’ve never thought of Reeve and Cait Sith as separate. The gritty psychological mechanics that are Reeve have always been there, plush or human. Reeve has developed an alter that’s effectively a form of escape. The assertion that Cait Sith lacks consequence isn’t false – a robot carries out its duty, incapable of harboring guilt, blame, or moral repercussion. That’s a pretty darn good way to remain detached enough to stab your party members in the back!

Cait Sith is also an outlet for everything Reeve’s repressed executive life lacks. As Cait Sith, he’s silly and carefree, though not completely unfamiliar. Glimpses of Cait Sith’s witty quips are echoed in Reeve’s mock nicknames for his colleagues – “Kyahaha” and “Gyahaha” respectively. When life is tough to take, we laugh so we don’t scream.

Plus, the idea of Reeve controlling Cait Sith in real time, much like an MMORPG avatar, is just plain hilarious. I’ve always imagined him as the kind of guy who rolls up to his 9-5 office job, pops open a spreadsheet to look busy, and boots up Cait Sith in the other tab. He’s the OG Aggretsuko, the guy making Jim Halpert faces at the camera every Shinra board meeting.

And I get you, Reeve. Really, I do.

The Tears

Cait Sith’s sacrifice was a cop out for killing off a real character. Why didn’t Reeve just die instead of the plushie?

First of all, how dare you.

Second, not all deaths need be literal.

A pervading theme throughout FFVII is the concept of identity. Are we born into an existence we have no control over or can we choose who we are day by day? It’s easy to want to be someone else, the First Class Soldier who sweeps in, keeps his promise, and saves the girl. Our reality is often less of a fairy tale and riddled with our own failures.

By the time the party reaches The Temple of the Ancients, the line where Cait Sith ends and Reeve begins is blurring. Reeve speaks more often as “himself” through the plushie and the nuances in their speech and mannerism are blending. It’s no accident that this shift happens as Reeve becomes more at ease around Avalanche, ultimately switching sides.

I’ve heard a lot of criticism on the seeming lack of motivation to Reeve’s redemption. If we examine the cognitive dissonance theory that governs his character, the switch is far less sudden.

Cait Sith’s death is necessitated by Reeve’s accountability. The innocent plushie alter isn’t working anymore. It’s not enough to keep him from recognizing the horrors he’s been complicit to. Sacrificing this part of himself is the ultimate acknowledgment of culpability. It’s arguably a more important death than if Reeve actually martyred himself. Like Cloud, he no longer needs to be “someone else” and has started down the path of doing what only he, and not Cait Sith, can; stopping Shinra.

There will be more wonderful, fluffy moogle-cat plushies, but the need to disassociate completely is gone. He’ll confront whatever comes without a crutch – or in this case a teddy bear. Reeve reminisces that the original doll was “special” and we end with Cait Sith reminding him(self) not to forget this.

The Silence

In 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer was denied all security clearance and effectively blacklisted by the McCarthy administration for his strong opposition to nuclear warfare.

Sometimes we find ourselves in a place we never hoped or expected to be in, surrounded by people we despise, and convinced the world is going straight to heck. We can either get out of dodge or stay.

If Reeve had indeed sacrificed himself rather than Cait Sith, this would simply have been yet another escape. He stays. He works. He gets Marlene and Elmyra out of Midgar. He spies on Shinra. He finally tells Gyahaha to stick it. He goes on to head the WRO and never stops advocating for the people.

Reeve’s not a fighter. He can barely get by with a handgun in Dirge of Cerberus and Cait Sith’s megaphone is no Masamune. Despite this, he takes a big risk by being the only insider on the team. We’re pretty sure Shinra doesn’t share Reeve’s opposition to capital punishment either.

Maybe this is why I’ve always loved Cait Sith/Reeve. I’m intrigued to see if Square Enix will add any further insight into our favorite plush moogle-cat-spy, but if they don’t, that’s alright too. Cait Sith is still a pretty solid character. After my brother spoiled one of the game’s major plot twists for me, I ended up reading the player’s guide for myself. And he was right. But he was also wrong. I recall marching proudly into the living room to declare that while yes, Cait Sith was a traitor, he was also a hero.

So fight your fight. Fail and fall. Hurl some Phoenix Downs and get right back up again.

[secretgamergirl]

Abuse I’ve just had to sit with forever

Right now I can’t look anywhere without seeing people speaking up about abusive monsters in various positions of power and it’s really triggering a lot of PTSD for me about all the times I’ve been in positions like that where nobody has ever listened or tried to help so... I’m just going to rattle off all the ones that come to my head, anonymously, and I don’t know, if anyone who knows me wants to ask me about any of these and/or try to really do something to help, maybe come talk to me about it through whatever private channel we talk in sometimes.

Family stuff. There’s a lot, and there’s no real way to talk about any of it anonymously because I mean being members of my family it’s already narrowed down way too much.

Someone once put me in the temporary care of a woman who savagely beat me because her own children were making too much noise when they should have been asleep. Bad enough that when I went back to school I was almost ripped out of my home by child protective services on the assumption that’s where it happened. Oh and she also force-fed me rotten food with maggots in it. I ended up pretty sick as a result, lost a whole lot of weight, and ended up with a serious eating disorder that’s plagued me since. I did eventually get out of there but I don’t know that I’ve ever really conveyed the full extend of it.

One of that woman’s children had some sort of torture kink, very nearly killed me, did put me in the hospital from injuries, and might have raped me. Hard to say because I was like... 7? Hard to translate those memories now that I have the context and vocabulary. I tried to explain that to anyone who’d listen at the time but, again, I didn’t have the vocabulary and I don’t think it came across that like... ropes and tools were involved, not just fists. Never got into that with therapists, because the first one I had really loved playing gatekeeper with trans stuff and liked the “maybe you just think you’re a girl because of abuse as a child” line of thinking too much already. I think I heard he eventually landed in prison though, so that’s something?

The first job I ever had. Games website. I was too young to be working but nobody ever thought to ask about it, and my family needed the extra income to avoid homelessness besides. The owner of the site... was really into open sexual roleplay in workplace text chats. I was so young and weirdly sheltered that I didn’t even process that that was even a thing, and 90% of it went straight over my head, plus I was in a weird state at the time with the whole trans thing where oh yeah, if anyone’s doing any roleplaying stuff on the internet, I’ll be in the character of me-but-a-girl but everything is pretend here right? So... there was a whole lot of mounting and thrusting being described and it took a few years to sink in that that was not in fact about him pretending to be a knight with me as a horse or something. And there was also a lot of... failing to pay me for years of backbreaking work, outright stealing from me, and I mean, I was up until like 4 AM every night working while still in high school. So, yeah. that was a lot. Never told anybody about any of this. So far as I know he still runs the site and nobody’s ever confronted him about anything.

Used to try to play various RPGs with some people in this extra niche-y game space. Sort of the first place I was ever read as a woman without offering anyone “corrections.” And... there was just this one guy who whenever he was GMing had some weird creative excuse for my character (usually the only woman in the party) to... be raped and/or impregnated just all of the sudden and totally out of left field. Which everyone was OK with somehow. And when he wasn’t GMing he was all over my character of course. Never really spoke up to anyone. I just left one day.

Ended up... in the inner circle of someone very famous. Mostly famous for being a victim of abuse. Which is why I ignored... every single red flag there is that someone is an abusive person and taking advantage of everyone around them. They controlled every aspect of my life for years. Had me do a whole lot of work for them, place myself in real physical and psychological danger, regularly. Directly asked me to severe ties with most people in my life. Install kill-switch sortware on my laptop for their piece of mind that none of our conversations would ever be seen by anyone, while also making me talk only in privately managed chat services where they logged everything and my screen wiped at regular intervals, and insisting I use an untraceable alias in it. All of this I was constantly assured was for my own safety as much as theirs, somehow, and that I was their most valued friend who they would keep safe, start paying a huge salary to soon, as well as help secure me a safe place to live and get properly started on medical transition stuff that I was unable to do in the increasingly unsafe place I was living at the time. I could keep going with this, but again, I don’t want anyone playing guessing games. Eventually, as serial abusers do, this person got sick of me, cast me out, and said presumably unspeakable things about me to everyone in that social circle, because everyone quite promptly cut all ties to me without a word. I once mentioned some small fraction of this publicly in defense of... multiple people attempting suicide as a result of this person’s abuse, and it was made very, very clear to me that this is not someone I will ever be able to safely speak about in public.

Another person who is very famous, with ties to abuse prevention stuff, added me to a blacklist to kill my career prospects and then kinda put a hit out on me on a neo-nazi website, but I’ve written about that incident. Nothing happened as a result of speaking out aside from the violence I was already being subjected to ramping up and more people cutting ties with me. Oh and those who didn’t are still quite friendly with her.

Several women with ties to... dangerous people randomly got it into their heads several years ago that I posed some sort of threat to someone I am told they “feel very protective towards” and... unleashed a hell on me unlike anything I have ever seen. I have spent the past 6 years now dealing with death threats from far right terrorist organizations who in some cases have very sizeable body counts, and those groups don’t scare me anywhere near as much as these people. Anyone else I have seen them paint a target on completely withdrew from the internet their careers and any sort of public life to try and stay off their radar. I have had multiple people privately confide in me that they had been threatened never to speak to me again before proceeding to make good on that. I have individually thrown myself at the mercy of every single one of them, explained that I have absolutely no ill will towards any of them, and had never even heard of this person they’re “protecting” before they started coming after me. Nothing has worked. They’ve never stopped. I’m legitimately afraid someone connected to them is going to murder me some day, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve confided in all of maybe 3 people about this. One might be dead, one is a total hermit, the third briefly tried supporting me, received threats, and promptly retracted everything, replacing it with a fire and brimstone speech about how I am an evil monster who tricked them. I have regular nightmares about this, and collapse into a shivering heap just seeing any of their names mentioned.

I... spent a good deal of time in social contact with a person I have been told I need to be friends with to advance in a career I would like to pursue. While doing so, he sabotaged a project that was fairly important to me, and I saw some him mistreat someone else in ways I find quite disturbing, but that’s her story to tell and not mine. I don’t feel comfortable around him, and have no real choice but to give up on those dreams. Haven’t really discussed this anywhere. The sort of work I can get would definitely vanish completely if I did.

The sort of work I can get also involves working for a variety of companies with people very high up the ranks who have seriously harmed a number of people I consider to be very good friends, in ways that in some cases include sexual abuse, and I... really would prefer not to ever work for anyone employing such people now that I am aware of this.

Yet another famous person, but one who I feel perfectly comfortable naming, Graham Linehan, used to follow me on social media with a level of enthusiasm that could arguably be better referred to as stalking. Then later he joined some extremist anti-trans hate group and rose to the top pretty quickly. And some years after that, it finally sank in that worshiping a trans woman while also leading a group of people bent on killing us all, so he has been very loudly and very publicly rambling about his hatred for me specifically. I don’t really have to speak up about this one because he’s doing plenty of that on his end, but I do have to note that while this famous person terrorizing me hasn’t really earned me any sort of public defense or sympathy, it has encouraged a whole lot of people to invent an alternate timeline of events where I am directly responsible for him being a bigot, leading to me getting dangerous threats from both horrible bigots and people who claim to hate horrible bigots but have suspiciously poor aim.

Hey speaking of celebrities, one of the stars of Firefly used to regularly send me photos of violently distended testicles. One of the stars of Star Trek once posted something encouraging millions of social media followers to attack me and left it up for a weekend. One of the producers of World of WarCraft once threatened to sue me for libel and went on a big PR tour about it, speaking on podcasts and such, and so many fascists pretending to be journalists have dumped so much crap on me...

And not to long ago in something of a wacky mixup, someone ELSE rather famous, who does diversity consulting no less, confused me for someone else and cut loose with a horrific bit of hate and gossip and throwing me under the bus, and misgendering me, saying random harassers baselessly calling me a pedophile were probably onto something. Privately told a handful of people about that, because I thought she was a friend and that was so heartbreaking, but anyone I told is just pretending not to have seen it.

Someone was once offering me help because I was in a dangerous situation, financially. I explained that things had been extra hard since coming out as trans. Suddenly he goes from helpful and concerned to just... violent. Screaming a me, openly trying to chase me out of the space we were both in. I reported this to the proper people. They tried talking, he left. The whole community mourned the loss and wondered who could have driven him off. Still doesn’t feel like a safe place for me.

I don’t really know why I’m bothering with all of this. Nobody is actually going to help. I’d say nobody is actually going to read this, but I’m sure plenty of people who hate me will to see if I’m talking about them and use it as justification to make things worse. Plus some people I’m not talking about I’m sure. I get plenty of that all the time.

Nothing ever helps and you can’t ever win. If you try to keep the abusers appeased by not outing them, the abuse never stops. If you try to speak up, their fans and friends treat it like declarations of war and pile on. If you just try to be there for other people when they’re being abused, you get singled out as a “troublemaker” and added to hit lists and black lists and... nothing works.

I don’t want a lot out of life. I want to know I have enough food, and have a place to live where I’m not at risk of dying from either temperature extreme, a bathroom, enough room for my book shelves, a bed, a couch, a dinner table, and a yoga mat. Maybe a space where my cats can run around a little enclosed semi-outdoor area for the fresh air and sun. I want to be able to deal with my medical problems. I want to see and talk to friends sometimes. If I’m really greedy, I’d like to have all that for a particular friend too who I’m constantly worrying about dying of poverty. And I’d like to be able to work on games. Maybe play them sometimes. Maybe watch things.

And that’s the really messed up part. Because abusive people and people supporting the structures of abuse always say they just want to focus on getting work done, or having fun, and it’s a lie. What’s most important for them is perpetuating abuse. They could just stop, or get rid of the people doing it, and the rest of us could live our lives and everything would be fine. But no instead we have to drop everything and make sure no woman anywhere feels safe enough to even breath.

[bloody-fists-beating-hearts]

It’s a Fallout76/Bethesda rant

Bethesda just released Fallout 1st, a horseshit pay-to-win subscription system for their absolute cum-bubble of a game, and while it’s getting the flack it deserves there are people already putting on their kneepads so they can gobble down Todd Howards entire turgid cock, and as someone who likes rpg’s way too much this irked me, so have a massive and barely coherent rant i took off the discord because why not.

I want to start off with this:  Every good thing about current fallout comes from the fanbase. The stories people tell, the headcanons, the fanfics, the art, everything fans do for it is made with more love, and more thought, than anything Bethesda’s writing and games design team has done in the last 10 years

Now first of all, I haven’t bought or played 76. People are gonna stop me right there and go ”well you haven’t bought it how would you know its bad!!” yeah, I’ve never eaten dog shit either but I can pretty well guess that I ain’t gonna fucking like it.

I knew the second he said "there are no npcs" with actual enthusiasm that this game was gonna be shit. And if you give me 2 seconds to gloat, I never bought the game and I knew this was gonna happen and I was RIGHT so suck my fat hairy nuts all those fanboys who pre-order things mindlessly just because there's a brand name attached to it. If there is anything you take from this its DO NOT PREORDER. BRAND LOYALTY IS FOR BOOMERS AND BOOTLICKERS. FOR FUCKS SAKE BE SMART WITH YOUR MONEY.

Games like this are fucking 80-90 dollars or more in Australia so I actually have to think about whether this momentary distraction is worth almost an entire days paycheck, and I’m still looking for employment which means I actually haven’t bought shit in a while (side note, anyone wants to commission me for 10 dollars I’ll draw damn near anything. God I need to make rent)

Every executive at Bethesda seems to be playing catch-up to EA's monetisation scheme. Beth has abandoned their model of single-player rpg's in favour of a "games as a service" model. Fallout 76 seems to me like its a weird experiment for just how far they can stretch this and still make money. It actually makes me wonder if they are 

 a) just completely unaware of fanbase response [no idea HOW]

b) are running into financial problems and are doing this out of desperation

 c) todd howard is still mad that obsidian made a better fallout than he ever could and he's doing this out of spite 

  Games as a whole has become much like the movie industry where publishers will throw big buckets of cash around to development teams, and those teams have CEO's and higher ups that throw lavish meet n greets and have nice fancy suits and cars and then treat their development teams like shit, overworking them to the point of exhaustion, because the product has to be on time for release dates that are scheduled to be the most profitable (christmas is a notable one). 

And those products are consistently bland, shitty, shallow experiences. Narrative cum-dumpsters that are purposefully made to toe the line as safely as possible, to be open to as wide as an audience as possible so they can make the most money, and Bethesda is a huge offender. Skyrim was fun, sure, but it was watered down to fuck, it had shitty dialogue, it had bland one-note characters, it had a simplified skill system. It was impossible to lose. Seriously, try and fail a fucking quest in skyrim, other than one or two, it's a hand-holder of an rpg, but it has a huge community of fans that put in monumental effort, for free, because they like the Elder Scrolls, and they like the world bethesda made. 

  Then Bethesda goes "hey, that watered down thing we made got huge! lets release it about 12 more fucking times, with some of the SAME bugs, with the SAME content, with the SAME limitations and Yes, we absolutely expect you to pay for it, again. Then they release the remastered edition which, to their credit, is free to anyone who already bought the legendary edition (on PC), and does actually have updated 64bit capability and some graphical enhancements (that aren't anywhere near what some goober in his basement cooked up in his spare time, but whatever). Then, seeing that Skyrim was so popular, with kids especially, and made money, they turn their sights to fallout 4, a game that was so anticipated that someone made a fake countdown and caused a small meltdown on tumblr/social media when it was revealed to be fake (i was part of that fiasco, i remember the hype, i was there goddamnit)

So Fallout, a franchise that literally has its theme as its FUCKING TAGLINE, an ADULT game that is equal parts crude, gory and humorous. A game that satirises the cold war era of american my-country-tis-of-thee blind loyalty and openly mocks the way war was idealised, and shows that not even the literal end of the world could either stop humanity's lust for blood or its desire for conquest. Games that showed you the growth of the world - from shady sands to the NCR, from the vault dweller to arroyo, shit actually happened in the games, the world didn't just stop turning when the bombs dropped. A game where you you become a porn star for fucks sake, and it's funny. 

So Bethesda sees that, makes something like it (fallout 3) which is good, but a little rough around the edges when you look at it too hard. But the way they suck you into the vault, the way they build a relationship with your dad and your way of life is immersive as fuck, so when you leave the place you actually feel like you're leaving something important, not just finishing the tutorial

then they outsource a Fallout game to obsidian, because hey, we saved your franchise by buying it off you, but if you can make an entire game in one year and get a metacritic score of 85 we'll even throw in a bonus. And fuck me sideways and in the ear, if the obsidian devs didn't work themselves harder than a 4-armed hooker. And they made a game that on release was a clusterfuck of bugs, because they were given an unrealistic time limit and missed the metacritic score by ONE POINT so bethesda goes "nhey heh sucks to suck" and fucks them off the franchise forever. EXCEPT (and I admit I'm biased here) the game is good. The game is actually really good when you remove those bugs, and people start forming attachments to it, and mentioning how bad fallout 3's writing is by extension. 

  So Todd and Co. in his infinite wisdom, decide that the only thing a fallout rpg needs is 50s aesthetic and fuck all else, and he releases a game so watered down it can't even be called an rpg. And its not. There are no skills. There are barely any dialogue checks. Instead of dialogue, Nate/Nora is a flat, samrish individual that is either "yes sir right away sir may i have another", "yes but i'm gonna make an unfunny quip about it" "this option pretends to say no but its gonna give you the quest marker anyway". 

The game drops any pretence of difficulty by giving you a deathclaw, a minigun and some power armour in the first 10 minutes, allowing you to effectively reach late-game power levels with some minor scavenging for ammo or cores. Then the game ropes you into some inter-faction war that realistically you wouldn't give a shit about, because some spud in a cowboy hat fucking deputizes you into a military general because you shot like 4 raiders from a rooftop (with a minigun. in power armour. making you nigh-invulnerable to bullets). You're sad about your son about 3 times the whole game and then you're on your merry way to mowing down humans left right and center without a care in the world. God fallout 4's writing is so stupid it gives me an aneurysm.

 Remember the part about resources wars and america only having the veneer of a strong country while riots, inflation, and resource shortages tore it apart from within? Bethesda doesn't, have an eerily stepford pastel coloured glimpse at a world that was totally fine, nothing wrong here, shame it got nuked oh well moving on

Your spouse? yeah you love them, they're said 2 whole sentences to you then they died, be sad because you totally loved them and it is totally sad that they are dead. Your weird play-dough son shaun, you love him so much, you even tickled him on the chin once, okay he's gone off you go to chase him - woah now, don't chase him too hard we have all these side quests for you to do! What would be the narrative reasoning for a supposedly distraught parent to fuck around boston instead of finding their goddamn child? fuck knows! just go pick up some goddamn wood and get to base building sonny-jim! 

Companions? yeah, they're fun, we gave them a romance questline and it's thus: if you pick enough locks and pass a minor charisma check maccready will be ready and willing to tell you about his sick child, and then he'll ride you like a stallion. Talk to him like, 4 times, and he will be your bosom buddy for life in about 3-5 days if you just pick locks like a fucking madman, because character growth is hard and counting beans is easy.

 Also your son is a part of the faction we were talking about! something about synths, remember that one questline from rivet city that barely anyone actually remembers and was an interesting time waster at best? Well get ready to do that same quest but about! 15! more! times! because we could not think of anything else to write about synthetically produced humans that assume peoples identities other than having them as a hamfisted metaphor for slavery. Why do they take over people's identies? Well because the institute needs them to aasdkfjdh kshshshsh t9oe of course. 

Speaking of hamfisted metaphors, here's the underground railroad, named after the underground railroad that actually mattered, except this time its the same thing but synths. They are so top secret that the only way to find them is to follow the only bright red line in a street that is exclusively green-brown otherwise, and then enter their super secret password, which is "password"

They are then, like every other faction, absolutely willing to trust you, at face value, no questions asked, because have to actually do something or require a skill check might make this hard for people under the age of 12 to play. Then you go do whatever fuckin shit you do, I stopped playing at this point, and then you find out your son is actually 60, you guys have a tearful, 10 sentence reunion, then he diesthe whole reason you were out here in the first place dies, and you react appropriately, which is to say you say his name really sadly, and then go back to mowing down raiders with reckless abandon

And then 76 gets released, bethesda drops all pretense of fallout still being an rpg. You want a story? Fuck you, pay up. Its retro future and thats all that makes falloutSatirizing war mongering? You can nuke things in this game and its totally fine, its actually the goal, because fallout has nukes in it right? Pay us 10 dollars and you get army olive drab spraypaint because hurrgh war is fun and great, wasnt that the tagline from the first game?The more i rant the more angry i am because people put their heart and soul into writing this. The lore and dialogue is actual work that someone researched and loved and felt proud of and now  it's becoming a hilariously meta parody of itself. 

Honestly FUCK bethesda and and fuck todd howard for his pisspoor cash grab. Not even worth calling it a video game anymore

[twiststreet]

I'm curious: a bit ago you referred to Disco Elysium as being a "Child-of-Kentucky-Route-Zero game." I think I get what you mean, but could you elaborate on that a bit?

Well, Kentucky Route Zero kind of looms large in my head, for a lot of reasons (moreso than something like Gone Home which may have been equally influential but which I just didn’t really like much):

1) It was an adventure game that really abandoned the puzzles. I’m not gamer enough to tell you the historical antecedents for that-- I was aware of things like Gravity Bone or Jason Rohrer’s Passage before it, the Stanley Parable, that game where you’re an old person walking around a cemetary, etc.  I had been kind of lay-person aware of indie games (but not like Japanese games like you sometimes post where it’s ... a kid having magical summer or whatever, Boku no Natsuyasumi).  But it was the first one in that sort of graphical adventure space that really clicked in my head, where a lot of ideas I think finally came together and got amplified or put together into a bigger whole, a bigger story that those ideas felt organic to...

Unlike puzzle-era graphical adventures, KR0 was just really confident about the story it’s telling being enough.  It gives you a level of control but it doesn’t come to a dead halt if you don’t know what to do with that control.  It’s sort just happy to let you walk around in its narrative space, but it’s not trying to “create the Holodeck.”  Even if you didn’t read about the behind-the-scenes, you can tell the creators are more interested in theater than in simulation, which I think the older generation of game designers were more into-- there’s a classic designer who talks about his dream game being one where you perfectly simulate a single neighborhood corner, whereas I don’t see that as being a goal for the current generation the same way.  (Though I thought of that designer a lot too playing Elysium because so much is set in a small place of people colliding with one another, but in a more D&D way...).  

Disco Elysium skews back the other way more in a way-- I think the creators talk about it having more of a classic D&D influence in terms of player choice. But they’re emphasizing choice instead of puzzles, which I think is different.  There’s ways of failing but you’re not going to just come to a complete halt the same way with Elysium, I don’t think.  It’s going to tell a story to you rather ... kneel at some altar of “gameplay” that doesn’t really make a ton of sense.  Because those puzzle games have their time and place, but I don’t think they were even as fun to play as KR0 has been, even when your character’s like... slow and limping... KR0 just sort of gets that the game tools are there to create an emotion in the player rather than to be some “challenge” to be surmounted or conflict defeated. 

But yeah: how much interactivity is “enough”?  Like, KR0 I think asks that questions in a more interesting way than other people did.  

2)  But yeah, KR0′s de-emphasis of the player-- it really from the get-go was unapologetic about de-centering the player.  Who you even play as changes moment to moment sometimes (which is kind of a move I’m always into, e.g. MGS-2), but also on a more molecular level... You’re not there to “save Kentucky.”  You have a minimal mission in the game, making some deliveries, but it’s hardly a mission game.  That world exists before you, and the stories that have happened there have already happened, and you’re just sort of there to explore that narrative and react to it, rather than try to control it.

Which I think is just healthier in ways, too-- would a game environment that deemphasized “heroic fantasy” ideas would produce the same kind of “They targeted gamers... gamers!” mania? There’s a pretty great game designer (I’ve read all this stuff in the last few years-- it’s horrible) Chris Avellone, who did a lot of Fallout New Vegas and stuff, who talks about how with people playing traditional role-playing games, they don’t care about their decisions unless those decisions are couched in “How will this effect your character” and “will it make your character more powerful?”  (I forget his exact phrasing so I might be mis-remembering).  Whereas KR0′s powered just by empathy and curiosity and metaphor.  

(New Vegas is an interesting comparison point as Elysium where New Vegas has the same “trying to be D&D quality” of emphasizing choice but the combat is more traditional games and... while the very best parts of New Vegas, which is to say the casino for foodies, resemble Elysium, it’s mostly... It defines the role-playing completely differently.  KR0, there’s this variety of choices that are about deciding things that may not matter but that you want to decide, maybe deciding who people are and how they feel and who they were, rather than just what they do.  And I get the feeling that’s a big part of paper-pen role playing, whereas New Vegas and those games try to create a “blank slate” which you can then define by your actions and see that as being the appeal of RPG’s, the ... character definition through action functions.  Elysium, it’s about really deeply exploring this single character and deciding who you want your character to be, down to deciding whether they think of themselves as being a HoboCop or a superstar cop...)

(I don’t know-- I’m rambling and within parentheses at that, but I think the difference in those approaches can be understated... I think that’s 90% of the ballgame, but it’s like... You know, it’s hard to talk about without getting into “power fantasies” and heroic fiction and the sometimes-troubling relationship between those, which KR0 really completely eschews...)(Though again, see Metal Gear Solid 2, for the alternate move which is just ... taunting and belittling the player for wanting a power fantasy, which I kind of admire more but...)(I’m really loving Death Stranding so far, but I think that sort of willingness to be just openly hostile to his audience is a huge part of what I admire with Kojima-- he made an open world game where you *fall over a lot*).

3) Plus, and I don’t know how much this is just me overstating it, but:  KR0 has that thing comics people used to talk about, to no effect, of being a “container” for other art. (In comics, they just meant they wanted pie charts about how Cyclops is into cuckoldry...?  But perhaps predictably).   My memories of games back then aren’t reliable but... It has art direction.  It has visual storytelling.  It approaches the 2d plane of the viewing screen as a proscenium so then you have those moments of that coming apart in the first game and I found that pretty thrilling.  I just don’t remember the level of that being as high before KR0-- certainly the abandonment of AAA photorealistic values in the indie space was inevitable, but it doesn’t just do, you know, that cute ultraflat “lowpoly” stuff-- it has a look to it.  Style!  Like, Elysium gets compared to Planescape Torment a lot, which I never played, but Elysium just looks really gorgeous by comparison... Just designed.  

But it’s to a thematic effect that I think the games after it have really adopted of ... contemplating people within an environment, and that relationship.  Games are really amazing at creating environments to explore-- it’s like the easiest thing to do in a game engine-- you can download Unity and in about 5 minutes create a whole little world to walk around in with mountains and trees and clouds and everything.  (Doing anything else is a little tricky, it turns out but).  Kr0 kind of shifted the focus onto the environment more and thinking about how that environment was shaped by and in turn shapes the people within it.  

This invariably turns out to be a “political” consideration, so KR0 and Elysium and Night in the Woods all have a certain amount of political content.  (I think KR0 most successfully because I don’t think any game after it has their sense of the poetic, but.  Or KR0′s not interested in explicit political messaging so much as ... the humanity of the situation, but).  And I think that’s really cool, personally, as it opens up a space to think about what games are for... that I don’t think was a part of the conversation otherwise.  

I mean, by comparison, the New Vegas folks when they were promoting their new thing Outer Worlds (which I’m going to play!  I like those guys!)... they’re out there talking about how their game is “political” but not “politically charged.”  What the hell does that even mean?  Whereas Night in the Woods, say, I mean that one’s to the left of me.  Night in the Woods is pretty much a game about how cats should join a union... I don’t want cats unionize!  Imagine the amount of yarn the NLRB will have to buy...  (This is where I think Oxenfree falls down where... Oxenfree had a lot of KR0′s surface qualities, but didn’t really get at anything more, I don’t know, “thematically mult-valent” or whatever, I don’t think... Oxenfree was more a surface experience for me...)

I don’t know.  There’s probably more to talk about.  (Other people are bigger fans of those side-games than I am-- I appreciate those but haven’t delved as deep into those as other folks).  Or there are things KR0′s doing that I don’t think the games after it have caught up with yet-- KR0 has a meta level to it, where it’s in conversation with adventure game history, in ways I might not fully appreciate, and if that’s true of Elysium, say, I don’t see that. For me, I think another thing about all those games though is they have a sense of the tragic, but then don’t wallow in that space.  KR0 has some sad shit going on it, ruined lives, broken places, but I think if the only way KR0 was influential was just the Junebug scene, and her song in it, it’d still be the game of the decade, you know?   Elysium and Night in the Woods both have that same mentality of ... It’s not about the misery, it’s how people find meaning past that point.  Which isn’t to say there’s not a quality sometimes to contemplating the misery and really acknowledging the terror and anxiety of that. I think you can do interesting work that isn’t “hopeful”, if that’s not your honest orientation. But what I think is interesting is how KR0 and its progeny carve out this space for sadness and anxiety and a feeling of the spookiness of a post-collapse space that isn’t just a “horror” game, that isn’t just jump-scares or whatever (though I remember getting pretty anxious playing some KR0 bits, even knowing it’s not a horror game, e.g. that contract scene)... I think that’s really interesting, that it’s not as easily categorized as that... 

Sorry to ramble.

[fire-emblem-drabbles]

“Match Up” Commission

As usual, my match ups aren’t open, this is a commission!

This is again for @petalpetal, but this isn’t really a traditional match up; this time around, she gave me a list of characters she wanted to be paired me, and from there I just do what I always do! 

Sorry these two took me so long;;; I’ll try and get to the other 5 done soon as well!

Can I have a matchup please I’m 24 and  panromantic asexual (is not turned off by sex). I’m an art history major who is aspiring to work at a museum one day. I mainly want to be a research assistant when it comes to working at the museum because I love to do research about things.  I love to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, make art, watch bing watch sitcoms, and play video games mainly rpgs or adventures anything with a story line basically.   I’m interested Comedy, supernatural, and audiodramas. Also I really love retro anime and manga from like the 60s-90s and basically if something is weird, tacky or creepy most likely I will love it.    I have severe anxiety and depression and in order to cope with that I tend to act childish and goofy because I love to make people laugh and acting that way makes me happy. I also struggle with ADHD. mainly the ADD side of it the only time i get really hyper is when I’m extremely excited about something. I’m not really one to hold grudges or stay mad at people for long. I am also not a very social person, large crowds make me nervous. Well social in the sense I like going to big outings. When I’m around people I’m comfortable with I’m extremely outgoing. In other words I prefer to hang out with a small group of friends then go to a big party.  while I am shy by default I can be social and friendly when needed to be. biggest example of this is how I am at work when I’m working the front counter of the fast food place I work at. Then I will put on my customer service persona and be friendly and helpful to everyone.  Overall I try to be a cute friendly lovable girl who has an open view of the world and sees the beauty of everything.  and I just want to share all of my passions with the rest of the world.

Ryoma: What first drew Ryoma in to you was your passion; for the things that interest you, the people you love, and so much more. Just one look at you, and he knew he had to know more about you. It was a pleasant surprise to him that you shared some of his interests. He may not look it, but he really is interested in art, especially those that come from other cultures, so your knowledge on art history will surely keep the two of you talking for hours! He’s also very eager to learn about other things that interest you-- admittedly, he doesn’t understand your like of creepy and horror things (he’s not scared, but doesn’t understand the appeal; still, he’s very supportive), but finds he really likes anime and podcasts!

While Ryoma can’t empathize with your depression or anxiety, he's actually used to helping people with such since (he is an older brother, after all-- Takumi and Sakura needed his comfort more than once!) His advice is also well past his years and is very helpful when dealing with them. Also, he’s the best at comforting people; his voice goes all soft, he envelopes you in his arms and reminds you everything will be okay. If at that moment, or ever,  you don’t want to be touched, he gets that too-- just know, whatever you need, he’s willing and able to give it to you! As for you ADHD, he doesn’t mind either way and in fact, finds it endearing; seeing the genuine joy and excitement in your eyes as you talk about the things you love makes him so happy. 

He also understands how you feel about people; while he is used to dealing with crowds, he much prefers one on one company. When the day has worn him down, and he feels he can hardly keep his eyes open, all it takes is a smile and a laugh from you to give him a little more energy. In the end, he adores you because of how charming you are, from the passion you show in your interests and to those you care for!

Oboro: Oboro is very interested in what you have to say about art and art history. She’s always sure to pay close attention, not only because you look adorable when you get that look in your eyes but because your talk of ancient arts and cultures always inspires her work! More often than not, the two of you will be working together, you on your art, and her with her clothing, with a podcast or some of your favorite animes in the background. It’s quiet, with not many words said between the two of you, but its time she wouldn’t trade for the world.

Oboro understands your struggle with mental illness; she struggles with PTSD herself. For her, coping is diving into her work, whether it be making clothing or cleaning. Your childish and goofy side helps remind her to take a step back and relax though; there are other ways to distract yourself than working to death after all, and Oboro needs to be reminded of that! But on the other side, she’s good at keeping you focused when you get distracted as well! Her work ethic is like no other, so the two of you really balance one another out in that she can keep you on task, and you can help remind her to take breaks sometimes!

Oboro also understands how you feel about crowds. She’s won’t be shy or nervous but so many people make her feel uncomfortable. Like you, she prefers to outgoing with the people she cares about! She also understands having to pretend to be nice; it’s something she has to do since she represents Takumi but if not for that, a lot of people would be getting her dark look... Overall, I think the two of you would work very well together! You would have endless things to talk about and share but the two of you are different enough to also keep things exciting and new!

[codylabs]

Chapter 3: Hunt the Huntress

“So Ford was right!” Mabel exclaimed. “There ARE more out there!”

“It’s better than that!” Dipper added. “If this really is robotic life, life doesn’t work alone! That means there’s a whole ECOSYSTEM out there! A robot ecosystem somewhere out in the forest! Just waiting to be found!”

Wendy was strangely silent. “Hmm.” She said.

They found their bikes outside the manor, and began to mount up.

“That means Juan has a mom and dad to go home to!” Mabel said, stepping on the first pedal. “I’m so happy for him! But I need to get all my cuddling done now before you guys find them!”

“Cudling. Right. Sure.” Dipper said. “Okay! Wendy. Where did you find this thing? Let’s head back to that area of the forest, and have a look around! See if we can’t find some other signals or footprints to track…”

“Wait!” Mabels said. “They don’t have footprints! They have tank tracks on their feet! So it’ll be tracking track tracks!”

“Ha ha! Track track track…” Dipper laughed. “Right?”

“Yeah.” Wendy mumbled, her voice still quiet. “Let’s do that.”

“HOLD UP THERE, FELLERS!” McGucket’s voice interrupted them. “I think I may have somethin’ fer ya ta use!”

“’Sup?” Dipper asked.

“Eh, just these contraptions here.” McGucket pulled a half dozen cup-sized devices out of his pocket. “I hootinannied up a couple radio transmitters to give out the same signal that your robit does. So you can use ‘em for bait, decoys… I ain’t rightly sure how ya plan ta go about this, but if you ever wanna use ‘em, just flip that there switch.”

“Hey, thanks!” Dipper took two, and Wendy took the rest.

“Yeah, awesome!” Mabel said.

“No problemo!” McGucket did a happy little jig, turned back toward the manor, and waved goodbye.

“That’s so great!” Mabel said. “You’re so totally prepared for this now!”

“Wait, aren’t you coming?” Dipper asked.

“No, I’ve got to introduce Juan to Candy, Grenda, and Waddles! They’ll adore him! Could I have the other pair of gloves?”

“Uh…” Dipper handed them to her. “Sure. Just… Um… Just keep an eye out, all right? We don’t know if Juan’s family is gonna come back for it, and they could be… Dangerous…”

“Okay.” Mabel said. “I’ll stay in the shack then, and invite everyone over! Ford has ray guns. He won’t let people near.”

“Hmm.” Wendy mumbled. “Yeah. You go do that.”

“Hey.” Dipper noticed his friend’s grim expression. “What’s bugging you?”

“Here, take the box, Mabel.” Wendy said. “Run on ahead. I think my bike has a flat tire; we’ll catch up.”

“All right!” Mabel rode off merrily with Juan in her bike’s basket. The little creature chirped happily in the breeze. (Aunt Mabel definitely was its favorite.)

Dipper turned back to Wendy, and her bike with perfectly fine tires. “Hey.” He said. “What’s wrong?”

She sighed, and thought for a moment. “Have you ever played ‘Space Androidoid 2?’” She asked.

“Space androidoid?” He frowned at the change in subject, and worked his memory. “Wasn’t that a game franchise back in the 90’s or whatever?”

“Yeah. Soos plays it. Have you played it?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She said. “So… In this game, you play a bounty hunter. The android, yeah? This bounty hunter was sent to this dangerous planet, the homeworld of this super dangerous alien creature. Right? These creatures are nearly extinct, but the last of the species are on this planet. They may be dangerous, but there’s not many of them left, right?”

“Right.”

“In the game, your job is to kill them. You have to kill them. Every last one of them. Because the risk they pose is too great. If they fell into the wrong hands, if they spread across the universe, if they grew larger… The risk is too great. People could die. So… They need to die. Every last one of them.”

“You’re saying…?” Dipper glanced over his shoulder, to make sure Mabel hadn’t doubled around and snuck back near, as she was prone to do. “You’re saying… We should kill these things? Exterminate them?”

“I’m telling you that it might be the best option. Depending on what we find in the forest today, we might need to. I’m preparing you for that.”

“That’s… Wendy, that’s wrong. We can’t just… Exterminate an entire species. Just because they’re different than us, or just because they scare us. It’s irresponsible. It’s ruining the environment. It’s destroying something priceless and irreplaceable…”

“Heck YES it’s destroying something priceless and irreplaceable. Heck YES it’s ugly, and there would probably be a better solution if we were richer, wiser, or more powerful. But at the end of the day, that may be the only solution we have. And they aren’t just different, they’re dangerous.” Wendy showed him her bandage. “Juan is a juvenile the size of a kitten, and he almost cut my finger in half. Could have done worse is he was on full charge, or if he were actual trying. This took him about half a second. Now ask yourself, how big do these things get? The size of a person? The size of a cow? The size of a car? A bulldozer? A house?”

“We have literally no idea…”

“Imagine the worst-case scenario, dude.” Wendy said. “The very worst. Imagine if they were really big, like tank-sized, and found out they could leave the forest. Imagine if they found out that the wide world is filled with metal: cars and buildings and those guardrails on the roadside and telephone wires… In civilization, they would have all the metal they could eat, and no natural predators. They could cut a car in half and eat it. With the people still inside. They could chop bridges up and let them crumble. When the military comes to evac the town in their helicopters, they could jump out and chop up the choppers. With the people still inside. When they roll down the roads to the big city, they could eat away at the foundations of the big skyscrapers like beavers, and let them fall. With the people still inside. The government might have to nuke the city. WITH THE PEOPLE STILL INSIDE. Are they bulletproof? We don’t know. Can they shrug off an RPG? We don’t know. Are they invulnerable to nuclear fallout? We don’t know. Can they swim? We don’t know. How fast do they eat, grow, and reproduce? We. Don’t. Know.”

“Wendy… You’re being paranoid.”

“So? Our paranoia is what keeps us alive. And keeps others alive. People of our ‘profession’ can’t afford ANYTHING less.”

Dipper considered this long and hard. “But… We don’t even know that they’re that bad at all… What if they don’t get much bigger than a dog? What if they could be easily domesticated, or trained not to eat stuff we like? What if it could actually all turn out to be just like Mabel sees it: happy and adorable...”

Wendy threw her arms in the air. “Yeah!” She said. “That would be great! That would be the most awesome thing in the world! My brothers would totally LOVE a robot dog! Mabel would too! But… But remember the last adventure we had together? YOU were the one who taught me a real meaty lesson that day: life isn’t Mabel Land. If we think it is, if we pretend it is, if we forget our troubles and focus on being positive, then that’s not real. If we do that, people die. I’m not saying we need to kill the cat-rat-bots, dude. Heck, everything we’ve been saying here has been straight-up speculation. We don’t know a thing about these creatures. But if they are hostile, if they’re highly dangerous, we need to be prepared to do anything. Murder an entire race. Do a cover-up. Burn a forest down; I don’t know. And in the end, hardest of all, we’ll need to explain it all to Mabel.”

Dipper felt a terrible and ungainly weight on his shoulders; a looming dread. And he knew that Wendy was right. If these things were hungry and mean, if peace was not an option, she was right. It really could be us-or-them. He finally answered. “I’m glad you sent Mabel off before describing this.”

Wendy beamed, and stuck up her thumb. “Yeah! No problem, dude. I got yer back.”

Dipper nodded. “I guess you’re right though… I guess you’re right.”

“These are the tough calls, Dipper.” Wendy swung her bike around to the direction of the road, and began pedaling. “Depending on what we find out there, sooner or later… These are the tough calls we’ll have to make.”

A half hour later, Dipper and Wendy left their bikes at the end of a logging road, and started into the trees.

Two hours after that, the found themselves deep in the forest, in the cool and quiet stillness beneath the massive trees. Somewhere far away and high up, a lonely woodpecker drilled into a trunk, and its tapping echoed hauntingly through the forest, the only living sound. Wendy folded up her map and slipped it back into her pack. “This is it.” She said. “This is the place.”

The bear trap lay in the same place she’d found it, the branch she’d used to pry it open still wedged between its jaws. And the rusty metal of the trap itself was scarred and cracked in places where Juan had grinded on it, in his futile efforts to escape.

“Okay.” Dipper nodded, and pulled out the radio tracker. “Let’s see if I can find a signal of some kind…” The devices speaker warbled with unclear static, spun lazily around a few times, and finally pointed back the way they’d come. “No good.” He said. “It’s still just picking up Juan. I wonder… If it DOES have a mother of some type that’s supposed to home in on its signal, I wonder where it is now? It’s been 3 days…”

“Maybe its mother abandoned him.” Wendy suggested. “Maybe it was here, and since it didn’t have hands, it saw that it couldn’t free him from the bear trap without destroying him. So it just left him. Started ignoring his signal.”

“That would make sense…” Dipper nodded. “But what do we do now?”

Wendy looked around, and then pointed to the next ridge. “Well. Maybe if we head up there and hit one of McGucket’s transmitters, she’ll see the source has moved, and understand he got free. Worth a try, right?”

Dipper nodded, pulling out a decoy. “Good idea. And while we’re walking, keep a look out for… You know… Like, anything.”

“Oh, I have been.” Wendy assured him. “Way ahead of you. Way ahead.”

“Seen anything?”

“Nope.”

“Well.”

The ridge turned out to be a little taller than it looked from a distance. And a little steeper. They were on their hands and knees now, half walking, half pulling themselves past the rocks and roots. Though the sun remained obscured behind the trees, Dipper soon found himself sweaty and weary. Sports. He growled to himself. Why have I never done sports? Maybe a little football, or… Track, or… Wrestling or something, would have given me some better cardio. Should have known this was waiting for me. Man. Now I’m like a second-class-adventurer. He looked up at Wendy’s backside, progressing further and further ahead of him. She’s the athletic one. The dangerous one. And I’m the smart one. Right? I always was the smart one. But now she’s in on everything I was. And she’s been at it all year. She probably knows more than I do. She’s probably more curious, more clever, and smarter than I am. The journals are gone, and she has her diary… What do I bring to the table now? When Wendy got more than 20 feet further up than him, she seemed to notice his exhaustion, and stopped to let him catch up.

“You need a minute?” She asked when he passed her.

He thought about this briefly, but his sense of manly honor allowed only one answer to pass his lips. “Nah.” He said. “I’m good… We’ve gotta be halfway, right?”

“Uh…” She gazed down the slope. “Yeah.” She said. “A third at least. But it’s best not to think about it like that. Think of something else.”

They climbed on in silence, as Dipper tried to think of something else to think about. He settled on Gideon Gleeful for no real reason, and spent the rest of the climb nursing silent grudges and wondering how that kid had turned out.

“Hey, we’re basically to the top!” Wendy finally announced.

Dipper was right behind her. He breathed deeply, rubbed his sore arms, and leaned against a tree.

“Ugh.” He said. “This hill looked way shorter from the bottom.”

“Yeah.” Wendy nodded, leaning against a different tree. “Yeah. So. We’re up here now. The radio signal can probably reach the whole valley… How we gonna do about this?”

“Okay…” Dipper said, looking around. “Let’s put the decoy up in a tree or something, so it gets even better range.”

“I have a better idea. Since the idea is for it to think the decoy is its baby, why would we put it up a tree? How would its baby got all the way up a tree? I think we should put ourselves up in a tree instead. So we can see it coming and stay out of danger.”

“Alrighty.” Dipper said. “This is going here then.” He dropped the decoy on the ground.

“Nope.” Wendy reached into her backpack and removed a large net. “It’s going on top of this. Did your dad ever teach you how to rig up a trap like this?”

“No.”

“Oh. Well here, I’ll show you.”

Twenty minutes later, the decoy was transmitting, the trap was set, and the two teens were thirty feet above it, trying to find some way to get comfortable up among the sharp and pokey branches. Wasn’t long before Dipper got sort of bored. “So.” Wendy broke the silence. Apparently, she was just as bored as him. “How about that Pacifica brat? Mabel said she asked you on a date or something?”

“OH OH UH… Yeah.” Dipper looked up at her branch, and scratched the back of his head nervously. “Yeah. Yesterday. She… Well, she’s actually changed. A little. I think. She’s not a brat very much I guess… I mean… She’s not super mean, really, and… And she can actually be a hero when she needs to. Anyway, I said yes, and… I guess it’ll kind of be my first date.”

“Oh yeah? That’s cool. Where you guys going?”

“I guess we’re going to the… Uh… I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s like a seafood place. Mabel says she went there with Gideon once. And she says the food is really fresh. But she said the word ‘fresh’ all slow and menacing, so I’m not sure what she actually meant.”

“Huh. Sounds awesome.” Wendy nodded.

“Yeah.”

“Y’know, I’ve never really had seafood.” Wendy said.

“Me neither.” Dipper shrugged. “But it sounds like it could be pretty fun. Pacifica said the Caviar is really good.”

Wendy seemed to consider this for a moment. “The Caviar.”

“Yeah.”

“…You poor jerk. You don’t even know what Caviar is, do you?”

“No.” He admitted.

“Me neither.” She shrugged. “Probably some kind of enchiladas.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“What are you gonna wear?”

“I don’t know. Something, uh… Some fancy color. Like black pants, and, uh… A black shirt… That… Goes over top of a white shirt or something. Like whatever Bipper wore. Mabel said that he looked pretty nice.”

“Yeah, he was pretty dapper.”

“Yeah. Can’t be too hard. I’ll figure something out.”

“When is this date?”

“Thursday.”

“You should probably figure that out sooner rather than later. Correct me if I’m wrong, but right now your entire wardrobe consists of socks, underwear, brown shorts, red t-shirts, and that vest.”

“Well, no… I… I… They’re all different…”

He felt his gaze on her, looked up, and met her eye. She frowned very slightly. “Which means.” She reasoned. “That every day I’ve ever seen you… You’ve been wearing the exact same shirt and pants. The. Exact. Same.”

“UH…” He struggled to weasel his way out of this. Had he really? He thought he’d just been procrastinating washing his clothes. Sure, some mornings he just picked up his shirt and pants where he’d tossed them the previous night, but had he REALLY done that EVERY morning? Was he seriously that bad? “Uh…” He repeated.

“I knew it.” She snapped her fingers and leaned back against the tree trunk. “It’s true. You never change your clothes. That means I win the bet. Ford has to pay up.”

“UH…” He struggled. “How about you, then? Your shirt and pants have stayed the same color since as long as I can remember…”

“Woah, dude, chill. This is my lucky jacket. And I do have other things besides grey jeans.”

“Like what?”

“Like… I have some red pants… And a dress. And my dad gave me a kilt at some point.”

“Red pants. Red.”

“Yeah.”

“And a dress.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a kilt.”

“My dad has… Eccentricities.”

“Have you ever worn any of those items?”

“Umm… Well… No.”

Dipper smiled with smug satisfaction. She’d fallen right into her own trap. “You know what they say…” He chided, as he leaned back and inspected his fingernails. “Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw dirty laundry.”

“Oh yeah, Mr. Kitten-Sneeze?” She retorted, sitting forward. “Well people who live in wooden houses shouldn’t roast.”

“Yeah?” He retorted. “Well people who live in ice houses shouldn’t blow steam.”

“Yeah? People in paper houses shouldn’t choose scissors.”

“Yeah? People in gallium houses should stay chill.”

“Yeah? People in spiky houses shouldn’t trip and fall on their face.”

“Yeah? People in straw houses shouldn’t lose needles.”

“Yeah? People in bubble houses shouldn’t even walk.”

“Yeah? People in golden houses shouldn’t… Uh… Okay, I got nothing.”

Their intellectual debate was suddenly interrupted by a noise from below. Their eyes swiveled downward, and stared at their new visitor. They both grinned, half in satisfaction, half in horror.

The parent had returned.

It was the perfect image of Juan, but scaled up to roughly the size of a lion. Its legs were longer and leaner, its back was wider and flatter, its treads were wider and more rugged, and its head was the size of a wheelbarrow. For a machine of its size, it moved surprisingly quiet. Almost silent, but for the occasional snapping twig beneath its treads.

Unlike its child, which had been shelled in silvery, bright plating, the parent appeared as a matte grey/brown, with a oil-like bluish sheen. Almost so dark that it blended in with the forest floor.

If these robots were, as they suspected, part of some unknown larger ecosystem, what role would these cat-like units play in that system? Dipper began to strongly suspect that Juan, and his parent here, must be the predators. Their eyes were in front, they moved silently and directly, and they had a large system of hooks in their mouth, as if for spearing and grappling. They were looking at a robot designed for hunting, killing, and eating other robots.

So rad.

Wendy took out her phone and began taking a video. Dipper took out disposable camera and began snapping pictures. The lion-bot seemed oblivious to them as it moved through the trees. Its dark red eyes swiveled back and forth across the ground, searching carefully for its target.

“Man.” Wendy whispered under his breath. “Soos is gonna flip when he sees this.”

“Soos and I are pterodactyl bros.” Dipper mentioned off-hand. “I wish he didn’t have to stay back at the Shack. He’d love this thing.”

“What’s pterodactyl bros?” Wendy asked. “And doesn’t that have a ‘P’?”

“It’s like blood brothers, but totally dinosaur-centric in every way. And the ‘P’ is silent.”

“Makes enough sense…”

The antennae mane of the lion-bot extended up and outward now, fanning out like a radar dish. It turned its head side to side, scanning. Then the antennae retracted, and it turned around to look directly at McGucket’s decoy.

“This guy is too big to trap in the net…” Dipper groaned.

“Yeah…” Wendy ran her fingers through her hair. “She’s gonna set off the trap anyway, but then just escape, and then… Then what do we do? How are we gonna find her again? How are we gonna track her back to where she’s from??”

Dipper racked his brain. Finally something occurred to him. “Wendy! Give me the magnet gun!”

As she handed it down, he pulled out his swiss-army knife. He unscrewed the side of the gun, reached into its mechanisms, and removed one of its neodymium magnetic armatures.

“What’s that?” Wendy asked.

“This.” Dipper answered. “Is a rare-earth magnet. One of the strongest on Earth. You got some tape?”

“No.”

“DANG IT… Uh… I’ll just use my sock.”

He took off his right shoe and sock, squeezed the magnet into the sock, then squeezed another one of McGucket’s decoys in on top of it. Then he tied the mouth of the sock closed, and was left with a finished product.

“Ah.” Wendy nodded. “I get it.”

Dipper smiled as he put his shoe back on. “Poor man’s GPS tracker.” He said proudly. Then he turned it on, and held the package out at arm’s length over the net. “Now come on, girl. Just a little closer…”

The lion-bot wandered over toward the decoy at the bottom of the tree, and began to circle around it curiously. Its antennae extended again, as if to make sure that this was, indeed, the source of the signal. When it decided it was, it angrily stepped on the decoy, destroying it instantly. The robot began to look around and turn in a circle. And at a single moment, it was directly beneath them.

Dipper dropped the package.

It fell silently and unceremoniously straight down for 30 feet, and finally connected with the lion-bot directly in the small of its back. With a loud ‘CLUNK’ it stuck and attached, and the magnet kept it secure.

“YES!” Dipper cried.

“DUDE!” Wendy congratulated him.

The robot seemed to panic at the impact, and stumbled around just enough to set off the trap.

The net jerked up around its front left leg, and tangled in place. The robot thrashed for a minute, backing away. Then it noticed the rope holding the net in place. Its head opened up and its mouth extended.

Dipper and Wendy stopped smiling, for the hooks in its mouth were the size of steak knives. As for the saws, they were easily as big around as dinner plates, and there were about 5 of them.

The lion-bot clipped the net with the saw, and it fell away. The robot stepped free. Then, forgetting both the net and the tracker on its back, it turned its eerie red gaze up toward Dipper and Wendy.

“Welp.” Wendy said. “It occurs to me that it can chop down trees.”

“You know what?” Dipper said. “Today was fun.”

The robot retracted its saws, and swatted at the trunk of their tree with one paw. The tree shook heavily, and Dipper grabbed a nearby branch to steady his balance.

“Plan.” Wendy said.

The robot turned the top of its head forward, and rammed the tree with the entire weight of its body. The tree shook so violently that Dipper had to grab the branch to keep from falling off, and it almost didn’t work.

“Plan.” Wendy repeated.

“What do we have?” Dipper asked. “Do we have, like, weapons?”

“Between the two of us.” Wendy recited. “We have two axes, three knives, four decoys, two walkie-talkies and a magnet gun that’s missing an armature.”

“Actually.” Dipper pulled another magnet gun out of his backpack. “I brought one too. You just had yours handy… Uh… Take mine.”

“I was gonna say…”

The tree shook again as the robot spun its saws up to speed and began to cut away at the base of the trunk. It was cutting FAST.

“PLAN.” Wendy repeated once more.

“Okay…” Dipper racked his brain, and finally got an idea. When it came, he began speaking fast. “…Okay, Check this thing out. It’s got no ears, and no nose. Just its eyes, and those antennae. So I’m guessing it usually tracks prey by sight and electromagnetic junk. Us meatbags got none of that junk, so if we’re out of sight, then it’s lost us.”

“Climb down the tree then.” Wendy said. “Climb down to just out of reach. When the tree topples, we hit the ground running, and get hidden as fast as possible.”

“Yeah.” Dipper began his descent. It was counterintuitive, climbing down TOWARD the hostile thing. But he understood the sense in it. The higher up they were, the faster they would hit the ground.

“Worse comes to worse.” Wendy added. “This gun’s ‘pulse’ setting fried my old phone from 20 paces. It could be deadly to this girl.”

“Yeah.” Dipper nodded, while silently praying that they wouldn’t have to kill it. It was just looking for its child. It had been deceived, and ensnared, and taunted from above. Now it was just as angry as anyone would be. It didn’t deserve to die.

Wendy seemed to read his thoughts. “I don’t want to do it either, man. Which is why I haven’t done it yet. But it’s just an animal. Like we talked about; us or them! Now get ready!”

The pile of sawdust beneath the lion-bot’s apparatus was growing, and the tree was swaying more and more. Now there was a cracking noise, and the tree was going down.

“JUMP!” Wendy called, and they did.

Dipper heard the tree crash to a stop behind him, and he hit the ground running, aiming for the nearest, thickest tree. He ducked down behind it, and took a deep breath. These trees were very old, very thick, and large. Room enough for a teenage boy to hide behind most any of them. A few seconds later, Dipper hazarded a look back at the scene of the fallen tree.

The robot turned in a circle about thirty feet away, looking for a sign of them. It had its antennae out, so Dipper supposed his guess must have been correct: it used electrical signals to find its prey, and they had stumped it, just by virtue of being human.

Wendy was nowhere to be seen. Good.

In a moment when the robot was turned away, Dipper sprinted off toward a different, further tree. So it continued. Eventually he was able to put some distance between himself and it, and could just barely pick out its movement through the trees.

It moved around, this way and that. Sometimes nearer, sometimes further. As if it believed they were still near, and didn’t understand where they could have gone.

At long last, it turned, retracted its saws, and retreated down the far side of the ridge. It moved down the embankment with agility and speed, almost identical to that of a real lion.

When all had been silent for 5 minutes, Dipper again decided to breathe easy, and stepped out from behind the tree.

He met back up with Wendy near where they had split.

“Good plan.” She told him. “I noticed the no-ears-no-nose thing, but I guess I never put it together that it actually COULDN’T hear or smell.”

“Yeah, thanks!” He ran his fingers aggressively through his hair, just to dispel the pent-up adrenaline. “WOW, that was intense!”

“Yeah dude! Totally crazy. Did you get pictures of it?”

“Heck yeah, but not after the action started. Did you get footage?”

“I dropped my phone somewhere… Ah ha! Here it is! And the camera is still running! That means it got all of it!”

“AWESOME!”

Dipper pulled out the radio tracker, and tuned it back to Juan’s frequency.

The needle pointed decisively down the ridge, in the direction that the mother had disappeared. “Hey, I’m tracking her!” Dipper said. “The magnet kept the decoy still attached to her!”

“Dude!” Wendy said. “That means mission success! Woot woot!”

“Mission epic success!”

“Dude!” She said again. “We survived a robot lion attack today! Gimme some!” She held up her hand.

Dipper high-fived her. “Yeah!”

“That’s going on my resume!” She added.

Dipper smiled, quite unsure how to take that, but mainly just alarmed and amused that something like THAT would go on a resume. “Uh…” He frowned, and laughed uncertainly. “Seriously? Could I see this resume at some point?”

“Uh… Sure. I guess. I’m still working on it though, so spelling and whatever isn’t… Swanky.”

“I could check over that if you want.”

“That’d be nice.”

Dipper realized he had more important business at the moment, while they were still up on this ridge with this great view. He pulled out a map, a marker, a compass, and the radio tracker, and laid them out on the forest floor. And he began to record the lion-bot’s progress.

He sat there, writing down numbers and angles from the tracker’s needle, for about 5 minutes. At the end, he drew out the results on the map. Based on all this, the robot seemed to be heading in a generally south direction, away from town, away from the valley. Over toward a small cluster of hills in the far distance.

After this, he folded the map back up, put the tools away, and hefted his backpack.

“Okay.” He announced.

“Okay.” Wendy nodded.

Dipper pointed toward the cluster of hills. “There’s our new target.”

“Hmm.” Wendy squinted up at the sun. “Might want to hold till tomorrow. If we turn back now, it’ll be almost dusk by the time we make it back to the shack. And I still have to bike home from there.”

“Okay.” Dipper nodded. “Man. Yeah. We’ll call it a day then. I’m pretty whooped anyway.”

“Me too. I think a branch caught me as I jumped off the tree. Gonna have a nasty bruise in the morning.”

“Ah. And I… Well. Now I don’t have my sock. I’ll probably have a blister or something by the time we make it back.”

“Awwwww, poow baby…”

They turned away from the view and their new target, and started back down the slope toward town.

After a few minutes of climbing, Dipper spoke up. “What you making a resume for?” He asked. “You looking for work? Or… Like, where you hoping to work?”

“Uh… Oh… You know…” She shrugged. “Work. I don’t exactly have a job yet this Summer. I worked weekends over the school year for a fast-food place, but… I don’t know. Now they don’t need me full-time. I want something a little better for the Summer, right? But I don’t really… Know what to do. I think a resume might open up some… Stuff. Right?”

“Yeah, but what job were you hoping for?” He clarified. “Like if you wanted to give a rocking resume to one person, who would it be?”

“Uh…” She turned her attention back to the hike for a moment, and descended the slope by a few tricky steps. “I’ve been thinking, and I think maybe it would be nice to be a cop. What do you think?”

“A cop??” Dipper blinked, a question suddenly burning in his mind. “Have, uh… You HAVE met the cops around here…”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, I’m sure you would fit right in.” Dipper grinned sarcastically.

“But that’s just it, isn’t it?” She asked. “These idiots, these BUFFOONS, need all the help they can get. Maybe if they let me… Shuffle paperwork. Or be secretary. Or ride along on patrols, I could actually help them be a little better at their job. Then people would actually be SAFE… Instead of… You know… Now people have to put caps back on the fire hydrants the cops turn into sprinklers, and everybody has to worry about not being zapped for mentioning our mutual friend…”

“So… You take the fall. You have to work with... Those guys. And you have to do a job with tons of boring paperwork… And you work extra hard to pick up the slack… All just to make people safer.”

“It’s not a great plan.” Wendy mumbled. “And… It probably doesn’t have much of a future. And I’d probably hate it, and I don’t really want to do it, but… If I could get that job, it might… Be best? I don’t know.”

“Wendy.” Dipper said. “I’m not positive, but I think that makes you a hero.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Uh. Yeah… Yeah. I know.”

[exclusiverenew265]

Star Wars Games For Mac

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Aspyr has been known for decades for its Apple ports of video games. But the Austin, Texas-based company has expanded it repertoire and today it is launching a classic Star Wars game for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga. Originally developed by TT Games Developed for Mac by Robosoft Technologies Published for Mac by Feral Interactive Limited Released on Mac in November 2010 Gameplay hints and walkthrough links Stuck? Maybe our gameplay hints will help you out of a tricky situation. Star Wars the Old Republic for mac is the same game that is supported for the PC, but is now compatible with Mac OS systems. The Old Republic was developed by Bioware in 2008 as a new generation MMORPG. Their have been millions of players registered since the dawn of the beginning of Swtor. ECOOPRO Gaming Headset for PS4 Xbox One PC, Stereo Gaming Headphones with Noise Cancelling Mic, Bass Surround, LED Light & Soft Memory Earmuffs for PC Mac Nintendo Switch (Camouflage) 3.8 out of 5 stars 478. Jun 30, 2019  The 100 Best Mac Games today Mac Gamer HQ picks its favorite Mac games from all genres, including worthy free alternatives. Star Wars: KOTOR 2: Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2. Knights of the Old Republic games are some of the most famous RPGs of all time. KOTOR 2 is very similar to the original KOTOR. There’s definitely a.

5) Click ‘Search’ in the top left corner and type in Star Wars™ Galaxy of Heroes 6) Click on Star Wars™ Galaxy of Heroes in the Google Play Store 7) Click Install 8) Open Star Wars.

Elizabeth Howard, vice president of publishing at Aspyr, said in an interview with GamesBeat that this kind of title — the $10 version of Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast ��� is more representative of the kind of game that the company is publishing these days.

Aspyr is taking advantage of the fact that there are more game stores available for a wider variety of content than ever before. And there are more intellectual property owners that want to see their content move to the new platforms where the gamers are active. The basic model for Aspyr is to license games and then act as both publisher and developer for the new content.

I talked with Howard about the company’s aspirations and the outlook for both independent game publishers and developers in the current gaming landscape.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Above: Elizabeth Howard, vice president of publishing at Aspyr

GamesBeat: You have some Switch titles coming from the Jedi series?

Elizabeth Howard: Yeah. We have both Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy coming to Switch and PlayStation 4. Outcast is dropping later this month, and Academy comes out in the early part of next year, with a further investment in Academy as far as the multiplayer experience. We’re really pumped about bringing that to console players.

GamesBeat: How did you get that? Have you done any Star Wars titles before, or is this the first time?

Howard: Our relationship with LucasArts specifically goes back almost 20 years. We did the Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy titles for the Mac when they first released. My tenure at Aspyr goes back to doing them the first time. Our core business model is licensing games and then doing the development and publishing. We get the source code and do the engineering and take it to market.

That’s been a valuable asset, that we have this amazing library of content that we can reflect back on now. Almost a generation of gamers have grown up without a lot of these things we were able to touch the first time. We have access to this stuff now to bring to new audiences on new platforms.

It’s not our first time with Lucas, but I’m trying to reflect on whether this is our first time with Lucas as part of Disney. We did Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on iOS back in 2013. That came about as Lucas was being acquired by Disney, which was super exciting. It was quite the nailbiter. But we still managed to do it.

GamesBeat: How long ago now did you branch out from the Mac to other platforms?

Howard: This is our second version of that, I would say. We did multiplatform publishing in the early 2000s. We brought a couple of titles — back in the day we did Guitar Hero for PC, actually, and Tony Hawk. We did a few DS titles. We were the publisher of a game called Stubbs the Zombie on Xbox and PC.

With the rest of the economy, things got rough in about 2008 and 2009. We were still in the world of physical goods and limited distribution back then. It was a much more expensive game to play for a bootstrapped private company in Austin, Texas. We refocused on Mac and started exploiting our catalog digitally. That was the next growth phase for us.

Then, in about 2013, it was a matter of, how do we start stretching our capabilities in new ways? From both an engineering and a publishing perspective. We did titles like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and a game that I loved back in the old days that we brought back called Fahrenheit. We did those for iOS. More recently we developed Civilization VI on Switch. We also, in the last couple years, have beefed up our publishing capabilities as the multiplatform partner for a number of independent titles, including Layers of Fear and Observer.

We’re seeing the culmination of the last five years of work, extending our development and publishing capabilities to allow us to do much bigger projects. The recent announcements are the first step in a much bigger direction for what you’ll see from us in the future.

Above: Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast debuts on September 24 for the Switch and PS4.

GamesBeat: How do you find those teams that can do this work? Is that part of your task, to find developers to remake some of these games on new platforms?

Howard: We’re in a pretty significant growth mode here. We’re at about 90 employees, and we have a significant engineering department. We’re now growing our art, design, UI/UX, and other creative and engineering departments in order to expand our internal capabilities. Then we work with a handful of trusted external developers as well.

But to answer your question, yes, our relationship with Disney in this particular case is, we are the publisher. We have an agreement where we’re figuring out the development and go to market process for these titles.

GamesBeat: You do a lot of this work in house, then? The porting work.

Howard: Right.

GamesBeat: In this case is it almost more like building it from the ground up, or does it still feel more like porting?

Howard: I feel like “porting” overly simplifies the work that goes into it. In the days we were doing Mac titles, that’s a more clear port, because it’s more A to B, PC to Mac. The work now to support the specific UI required for console, and then digging in on the additional features we might be able to bring to a particular experience — with the Switch titles we support rumble. With PS4 we support trophies. We’re doing whatever we can within the licensing limitations to improve the experience for that particular customer.

We brought Civilization VI to a number of other platforms. We brought it to iOS, including iPhone and iPad, and we also did Linux. We were the developer for Switch. That’s taking a keyboard and mouse experience and making it work really well on a touch platform, and then stretching that even further to hybridized touch and controller. We call it a sort of reimagining.

GamesBeat: Are there some rising platforms, from your point of view, and some that may be waning or going away?

Howard: From our perspective, broadly the future is multiplatform. Mac was once our bread and butter as a company, but I don’t imagine that being — I think last year was the first year that other platform revenues exceeded our Mac revenues. It seems like the Apple ecosystem is moving more in the direction of mobile, and we’re doubling down on the triple-A experience, which is more traditionally PC and console.

I am really excited to see the enthusiasm around Switch. I’ll be really curious to see how the market receives this. Certainly the announcement went well. It seems like there’s a bunch of consumer interest. But we’ll see how that shows up in purchasing. That will be fun to find out.

Above: The Aspyr team

GamesBeat: Is Switch a very crowded store, or does it still feel less so than some other storefronts out there?

Howard: The Switch store is less so than others. Certainly Steam has an immense catalog that can make it more challenging to battle your way through the content cloud. That being said, I also don’t know that the Switch digital store is quite as optimized as some of the more established platforms. We’ve always invested in bringing these big brands and triple-A experiences over. We’re able to benefit from the established market interest. For a short time, we’ll have one of the only Star Wars games on the Switch. That’s probably not a bad marketing strategy.

For things like Steam, platforms that are more competitive, we’re looking at unique ways to approach that market. We have an upcoming title that we’ll be announcing soon where we’re looking at a new way to approach monetization that will help with discoverability, as well as exciting customers as far as a new way to allow them to play games without having to pay for them up front, but without quite going down the road of free-to-play.

GamesBeat: What are you doing as far as original titles? Do you have titles coming through a different kind of process that are going to make it to the market soon?

Howard: I’d say right now our big focus, and where we see our growth and opportunity — I always like to talk about the unfair advantage. We’ve spent more than 20 years being triple-A brand and game stewards. Our future is, how do we make that even bigger and better? Growth for us is really around stewarding these beloved games and beloved gameplay. That’s where our strength is. We’re building a team that’s capable of doing that in even bigger ways. Instead of just a re-release, maybe a reimagining, a remake, a bigger undertaking with bigger brands.

Right now our focus is not on original, internal IP. We’ll continue to work with external developers as their publishing partner, taking games to market. But we’re really focused on our growth around these big brands.

GamesBeat: What sort of publishers are direct competitors for you?

Howard: It’s interesting, because we always have this debate. We’re a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Team17 have their own IP that they publish in addition to working as a publishing and development partner. The differentiator for us is we’re clearly focused for the most part, again, on triple-A. Even in the Mac days, we were still the Civ people and the Call of Duty people and the Borderlands people.

I think there’s still a market opportunity for licensed IP. There was a day, call it more than a decade ago, where there was a ton of licensed IP, and frankly not well-executed. Everybody was throwing a game to market in association with a movie launch. But if you look at the success of something like Spider-Man recently, when you’re able to connect brands with players in a polished way, it still works. Those kinds of games might be where we exercise more creativity.

GamesBeat: Do you have any interest in raising money? If there’s a growth plan a year from now or a couple of years from now, what do you expect to be like?

Howard: It’s a good question. Right now we’re not in the process of preparing for something like that. We’ve been a bootstrapped company since our inception. So far it hasn’t been a limiting factor. We think the kind of content we’re working on is valuable to strategic partners in the market right now, so potentially that means finding ways to continue to grow and fund games of significance without having to go that route. I might be coming back to you in a year with a totally different story, but right now we’re focused on this, and that sounds like a ton of work and effort. We don’t think we’re there yet.

Above: Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast for the Switch and PS4.

GamesBeat: It seems like there’s a lot of opportunity in the middle space of the industry. Not among the giant companies, but the companies that can really benefit from things like cross-play. That’s going to be more and more doable across a bunch of the platforms, the ability to take a hit game out into a wider market more easily. That seems to be a trend that helps companies that are in this middle space, which in the past seemed like they were under a lot of pressure.

Howard: I certainly feel like there’s an air of growth and opportunity in games. It’s obviously driven by the revenue growth we’ve seen over the last few years. That was my takeaway from going to GamesBeat and watching all those panelists, just the size of the impact. Gaming is growing globally in terms of humans playing games, and that leads to more opportunity.

To your point, crossplay is an awesome feature. What are opportunities for us to — I think our big differentiator is trying to find the best way to as much value as we can for the player with the games we touch, be it a remake or a reimagining or an indie publishing opportunity. Maybe spending a bit more time and energy on those kinds of features to really delight customers. There’s a lot of opportunity for all of us, and for Aspyr specifically as a 20-year veteran of shepherding big brands to new markets.

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Rating:Category:Perspective:Year released:Author:LucasArtsPublisher:LucasArtsEngine:Jedi

[www].se [ftp].se [mirror].us DarkForces1.2.sit_.bin (31.04 MB) For System 7.0 - 7.6 - Mac OS 9

[www].se [ftp].se [mirror].us darkforces.toast_.sit (105.51 MB) For System 7.0 - 7.6 - Mac OS 9

[www].se [ftp].se [mirror].us DF_Gold_Package.sit (1.21 MB) For System 7.0 - 7.6 - Mac OS 9

[www].se [ftp].se [mirror].us DF_user_missions.sit (14.62 MB) For System 7.0 - 7.6 - Mac OS 9

[www].se [ftp].se [mirror].us DarkForcesManualPC.pdf

Star Wars Games For Mac

Star Wars: Dark Forces is a 1995 first person shooter from LucasArts. It's a great game - similar to Marathon and the like.

Dark Forces puts you in the boots of mercenary for hire, Kyle Katarn. Initially charged with retrieving the Death Star plans from an Imperial base and delivering them to Princess Leia, Kyle subsequently is hired by the Rebel Alliance to seek out and destroy a new threat - an army of super, mechanized stormtroopers: the dark troopers. Dark Forces lets you explore numerous Star Wars worlds with total freedom, all while blasting an onslaught of enemies and achieving mission objectives.

Excerpt: — Macintosh Multimedia & Product Registry Volume 9, No.4 - 1996

3rd DL: — DF Gold, a suite of editing tools for the Macintosh version of Dark Forces. With thanks to compyislife for adding it to the archives. 4th DL: Is a collection of 60+ user made missions for Dark Forces + an instruction on how to convert PC missions to the Macintosh.

Compatibility

Star Wars Games For Mac Os X

Architecture: 68k PPC

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Minimum Requirements: 68040 8 MB RAM 5 MB Hard Drive Space Mac OS 7.1

* Works under Mac OS 9.2.2

[daleisgreat]

35 Years of NES - Flashback Special!

It took me 12 minutes to set up this shot of what encapsulates my NES fandom! Please sit down and listen for awhile as I recount my life and times as a NES kid! This October in a couple months will mark the 35th anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in North America so that means it is time for another flashback special where I recount my personal history with the NES. This is the 11th platform that has gotten the flashback special treatment from me in the little over a year I have been doing them and if you want to get caught up with the rest make sure to check out the links at the bottom of this entry! Furthermore, if you are looking for a more traditional anniversary piece chronologically highlighting the history of the system and its top games I have you covered there too. At the bottom of this article I have embedded old podcasts of mine I recently uploaded to YouTube from my personal archives where we highlight the system as a whole on its 25th anniversary ten years ago. I additionally have podcasts from my history of RPG and comic book videogame series highlighting the NES entries from those genres that are all featured at the bottom of this article to keep that NES anniversary train rolling for the rest of the year! Being Introduced to the Power

I will never forget the first impression the NES made on me because it was the first time I ever witnessed and played a videogame! It was the Christmas shopping season of 1988 and I just got home from Kindergarten class to see my older sister playing some electronic contraption that was absolutely foreign to me. My eyes soon gazed upon the TV where a crudely pixelated man in red overalls was running and jumping across the screen to the catchiest of background music jingles that will always stick with me. She soon enough passed along the NES’s vintage rectangular controller to me and within minutes I was hooked as I sunk my teeth into my first videogame, Super Mario Bros.. Our family got the ‘Power Set’ which had the 3-in-1 cart featuring Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt/World Class Track Meet along with the Power Pad and Zapper accessories. I was too little to figure out how to operate the Power Pad at the time and rarely played World Class Track Meet, but the family did get a decent amount of playtime in Duck Hunt and groveled over how we could never shoot that damn dog! We always kept coming back to Super Mario Bros though. I had no idea what I was doing as a five-year-old at that time, but I knew I had to give it my all to get Mario to jump to the top (and over???) of the flagpole at the end of most levels. Eventually I stumbled my way accidentally jumping into hidden blocks that contained SECRETS like extra lives, bonus coin blocks and vines that lead to bonus coin rooms and warp zones! Much like today how I have to explore every nook and cranny in the latest open world sandbox game, Super Mario Bros. planted the seeds for that gaming mindset in me to jump around and explore everything to find whatever secrets Nintendo had in store for good ‘ol Mario.

The minus world was the ultimate secret in videogames for so many years that it was the #1 secret of the top 100 secrets in the 100th issue of Nintendo Power. It took me about a couple years of trying over and over and taking advantage of all the warp zones and extra live secrets I could, but the original Super Mario Bros. was the first game I ever finished. When I thought I discovered all the secrets in the original Super Mario Bros. a friend or cousin would power it on and showed me all new secrets and tips that blew me away. First it was getting to time a jump just right on a koopa troopa coming down the block stairs so Mario would repeatedly jump on them to get near-infinite lives. Then they showed me the hidden warp zones….and then there was the day after much repeated attempts that my cousin showed me the much talked about ‘minus world’ in the game that perplexed me so much that I lambasted him with questions about said level’s eye-opening odd level design. ‘Why did the level never end? Why is this magical force sucking Mario through the bricks, cousin….IS MARIO A GHOST!?!?’ That tripped me out as a Kindergartner, but not as much as the most sinister-looking baddie in the game, the dastardly Hammer Bros!!!! No I am not talking about the adorably-huggable hammer bros. from Super Mario Bros. 3, I am talking about the spiky-squiggly-shaped monsters that chucked super-sharp-metal-thingies at Mario!!! The original Hammer Bros. petrified five-year-old Dale!!! Just see for yourself below…

Encountering the Hammer Bros. for the first time in a night level only amplified the terror they unleashed! I was terrified of them, but what was especially terrifying was how Nintendo gave them a paint of cuteness by their look in Super Mario Bros. 3 as you can see above on their right. You can almost look walk right up and give them a hug! Bring back the sinister OG hammer bro Nintendo! As much as I loved the original Super Mario Bros., I never got to put a lot of playtime into its sequels. I think they were always rented out at the local video store. I do recall watching my cousin finishing Super Mario Bros. 2 and watching in awe the quality of the ending ‘dream’ cinematic that stirs controversies to this day! I never played much original NES Super Mario Bros. 3 either until I got Super Mario All-Stars where I later played a ton of both of those games, but that is a story for another day. The Joy of Renting and Garage Sale-ing

Speaking of renting though, it was how I played almost all my NES games for the first couple years our family had the NES. I was too young to realize games could be purchased at the store and thought games could only be rented at the video store….at least that is what I think my mom caused me to believe anyways. Looking back I loved those early NES years perusing the local video store and only going by misleading box art on what to rent. There are four specific renting memories stood out from those years around the end of the 1980s. One is playing a ton of the first CastleVania and being perplexed at why the heart pickups did not restore health, second is perishing repeatedly in the original Mega Man right from the start which got me to swore off the franchise for a few decades (more on that later). Another time I freaked out at the video store receiving my copy of Tengen’s RBI Baseball and discovering how their black cartridges differed than the standard NES gray carts, but only to have the video clerk assure me they would work on the NES. Finally, my favorite rental memory was getting gleeful goosebumps as a result of the mesmerizing beats of what is my single favorite NES theme, yes I am talking about the ‘Moon Theme’ of Duck Tales. A theme so powerful it still gives me the shivers to this day.

Behold the single best NES stage music of all time!! Now listen to it for ten hours straight!!!! I mentioned in previous flashback specials how I grew up with divorced parents. I would visit my dad on the weekends and he would usually be a system a generation behind because he was big on garage sales and people were getting rid of their old systems typically when the next system was hitting. So when the NES was the primary system, I would play Atari 2600 at my dad’s on the weekends. Around the time SNES launched in 1991 was when my dad finally got a NES, and he would have another regular NES game or two every several weeks he found at another garage sale. I recall the first four games he got with his NES: Days of Thunder, Gauntlet II, Ikari Warriors and 10-Yard Fight!

My dad bought whatever he thought was a deal at the time of those garage sales, and the quality of games he brought back varied greatly. His garage sale bargain was how I first played classic hits like the original Legend of Zelda and Maniac Mansion. I was seriously into both of those games even though I struggled to make progress in Zelda because all I had was the packed in map to guide me in the pre-Internet and strategy guide days. I made my own dungeon maps in Zelda, and loved trying to figure out the way to get past its increasingly trickier dungeons and puzzles, but eventually got stuck after the third dungeon and could not deduce the pattern in its version of the ‘Lost Woods’ for the life of me. Maniac Mansion was the first adventure game I was exposed to and was instantly hooked, even with the clunky and censored NES port I was resilient in attempting to figure my way around the lighthearted obstacles of the mansion and trying to hide from its alien residents. Reflecting back on my fandom for Maniac Mansion, it got me confident that if I was aware of the PC gaming scene of the late 80s/early 90s instead of the NES scene that I would see myself being head over heels for the countless adventure games from Sierra and Lucas Arts at the time. There were other times however my dad would come back from a garage sale with not-so-desirable titles like XEXYX, Dash Galaxy and Rocket Ranger, but sometimes his picks were a surprise. I somehow got locked into the addictive nature of the stock market game of Wall Street Kid and played far more of that than I had any right to. My dad eventually got the four player adaptor for the NES and the family tried to do the unthinkable one day and dedicate an afternoon to finishing Gauntlet II. We loved that game, but never had time to finish it in a session because the levels just kept never ending and we presumed it had to end by level 100. So one of my favorite NES memories is when the family gathered determined to finish level 100…which we did, but our bravery was for naught when we were all stunned to see that was not the end of the game. I believe we got to around level 130-ish before we eventually threw up our arms and powered off the NES. How the hell were we suppose to know back then that the levels procedurally generated!?!

Gauntlet II and Ikari Warriors were two of the four games that came with the NES my dad purchased at a garage sale and thus we invested countless hours in both, yet both titles we failed at finishing! My dad, brother and I played far too much Ikari Warriors together. I know it is a sloppily designed game with a lot of glitches and other hiccups, but the setting and atmosphere of Ikari Warriors rode the coattails of the infectious Rambo-hype of the 80s. Ikari Warriors on the NES felt like more of a faithful videogame adaptation of that film than the actual Rambo NES games itself. Ikari Warriors was the next best thing by chucking grenades and wreaking havoc with a tank, especially with a second player in co-op! That game burned through lives to the point of where I expected there to be a cheat code to get more lives because it would hang at the game over screen for a good 10 seconds so eventually I mashed buttons until I memorized that ‘A,B,B,A’ unlocked three more lives! I was super proud of being able to figure out a cheat code on my own! The levels in Ikari Warriors went on forever though, and regardless of having near-infinite lives with that code, we would eventually get bored and/or confused at that awkward fourth stage with the bizarre piping the warriors would get hung up on. Over the years the odd gameplay quirks of Ikari Warriors I look back at fondly I came to discover that everyone else detested as one of the worst NES titles, which I feel is a bit much. If my words cannot do it justice, then James Rolfe captured the highs and lows of Ikari Warriors perfectly in an episode of Angry Videogame Nerd I highly recommend giving a watch by clicking or pressing here. Playing with a Different Sort of Power

Over the years I came to find out that the mega popular Nintendo Power magazine was the go-to source for NES fandom of that era. I am an outlier in this case as I was not aware of the magazine until well into the 16-bit era. I chalk this up to never buying games brand new at the time where most new games on Nintendo platforms came bundled with Nintendo Power subscription inserts which I did not become keen to until getting new GameBoy games in 1993. So where was I to get all my latest NES coverage in the late 80s and early 90s before the Internet and then completely oblivious to the videogame magazine market? Through super cheesy, early 90s videogame-themed TV shows! There was not an official Nintendo Power show, but there was an awesome game show on weekday mornings for a couple years in the early 90s called Video Power that showcased kids playing the latest NES games in various challenges. Nickelodeon had a videogame TV show too, which was another game show called Nick Arcade. They had kids answering trivia and competing in various arcade game and virtual reality-esque challenges. The magazine GamePro also endorsed a TV show at the time and it featured more traditional game coverage and I recall it having an over-the-top host showcasing the latest secrets and tips. If you are not familiar with these shows, they are fun to look back on as they capture the goofy ‘extreme kids’ nature that dominated the early 90s. James Rolfe once again does a nice breakdown video of Nick Arcade and Video Power I will embed below or you can click or press here to check it out. These three shows and the latest gossip with classmates and friends were the only ways I got my news about the latest NES games back then.

Nick Arcade and Video Power are dissected in the above video and those TV game shows were how I was initially glued into the latest NES games as a kid. NES ‘Rights of Passage’ For those that grew up with the NES, I bet you have a good idea where this is going. Anyone that owned the traditional rectangular NES with the flip cover of doom will know that model of the NES was notorious for only powering up games about half the time. Recess-rumors lead us all to believe that blowing into the cartridges made them work better, and while it usually did I still remember my dad buying cleaning kits at the store and insisting using it to clean the games instead of blowing into them…but I like many other NES-kids were super impatient and instead went with the blowing/jiggling the NES-cartridge ever so gently into place….and sometimes wiggling the cartridge up and down several times before firmly locking the cartridge into place and powering on the system. That was the way I convinced myself to get NES games to power on their first try with a 60% success rate! For younger readers here who are doubting me, I am not kidding. This was a thing….seriously! Click or press here for proof where the GameSpot crew of 2005 detail their near identical NES-troubleshooting demonstrations in their excellent video on the NES!

As the header above alludes to, that was one of several ‘rights of passage’ for all NES-kids of the era. The so-bad-its good animated show, Captain N the Game Master likely was part of your Saturday morning cartoon lineup (yes, I have the DVD set, be on the lookout for a review…eventually). Another one was ‘NES-thumb.’ I love Nintendo’s directional-pad, but on the NES longer play sessions with button-mashy-prone games would result in it leaving a scouring imprint on the thumb for hours! I feel safe to say a majority of NES-kids encountered an awful LJN-published game based off one of their personal favorite licensed properties of the 80s. For me it was the atrocious X-Men title, its agonizingly bad Back to the Future game and most of their WWF games. As much as I loved the Ikari Warriors code described above, the most popular code spread across several NES games was the ‘Konami’ code. Ask any then game player 35+ and they likely would be able to subconsciously spout it off to you instantaneously! John Cena turned the code into his best t-shirt design! Calling Nintendo’s long distance-fee heavy hotline for the latest tips from Nintendo’s endorsed gameplay counselors was another thing that got kids to surprise their parents with $100+ phone bills. The last big hurrah for NES-kids was going to see The Wizard at the end of 1989 to see a few precious minutes of Super Mario Bros. 3 gameplay a couple months before its release! I could go on about The Wizard forever, but that was why I covered it here on my blog last week instead so if you want to know all about the Nintendo adver-film, then click or press here for my entry on it! 8-Bit Sports Fun for Everyone! Talking to other core gamers and listening to many gaming podcasts over the years one irk-ing trend is of most ardent game players shaming sports game fans. I understand why the main EA Sports and 2K Sports games are sim-focused experiences that are not for everyone, but they continue to sell well and have their dedicated fanbase. Back in the 8-bit and most of the 16-bit generation, sports games were simpler pick-up-and-play affairs that worked for almost anyone, especially on the NES with its simpler graphics and only having two primary action buttons. The first sports game I got into on NES was Double Dribble which blew me away with its ‘cinematic’ dunks. Nintendo’s Ice Hockey was a huge favorite of mine and it featured fast, scoring heavy action, and had fights, overtime and shootouts all crammed into a NES cartridge. I thought it was the best hockey game on the NES, and then I discovered the more brutal and up close fights in Konami’s Blades of Steel! There were a deluge of baseball games on the NES and the two I got into the most were the original RBI Baseball and BaseWars. RBI Baseball had the illusion of realistic baseball, but simple enough for anyone to grasp. It had a twee-art style, happy-go-lucky background music to nod along with and was one of the first baseball games to feature real MLB players. BaseWars frigging ruled! Futuristic teams of robots duked it out on the diamond and would engage in battles when attempting a tag out!

For pigskin NES classics, the first one I got into was 10-Yard Fight! It had rather….particular…controls for a launch-era NES football game, but I eventually adapted to it. I know now that Tecmo Bowl and especially its sequel, Tecmo Super Bowl were the cream of the crop of NES football games, but I never got a chance to play them until many years after the fact (and I was still blown away by my friend’s first play he picked against me which was scrambling to the back of his endzone and unleashing a 100-yard touchdown pass!). My own personal top pick is NES Play Action Football, a gridiron game that will forever have a place in my heart! I have everlasting memories of my dad teaming up with me to take on the computer. The passing controls in this game are garbage so we only did running plays, but the players ran absurdly slow…and that was even when factoring in there was a turbo speed button! My dad and I however learned to own that ridiculous control scheme! I would hand off the ball to him and then I would take control of the linemen and block defenders for him as he ever-so-gradually-inched-his-way-across-the-field. I am not embellishing by saying it took a good two whole minutes to traverse about 80 yards. It was completely asinine, but I felt a huge sense of accomplishment with every first down and touchdown my dad and I accomplished with our teamwork! That covers the four major American sports, but there was also a lot of representation from the ESPN Ocho tier of sports games. I loved me some Super Dodge Ball and loved going through its world cup mode. Its adorable oversized character graphics carried over into Nintendo’s soccer game, Nintendo World Cup. Nintendo also delivered two excellent golf titles on the system with the self-titled Golf during the black box launch era of the NES, and a more fleshed out version of that game with a career mode and three courses in NES Open Tournament Golf. Konami’s pair of International Track & Field titles were excellent arcade conversions. Finally, I would be remiss if I was not to give Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out a little love here. I ate up the puzzle pattern boxing gameplay with its distinctive roster of foes for the affable Little Mac. I wish I was not awful at it as I could only get to Bald Bull before my inferior skills met their match.

I invested countless hours into marginally satisfactory NES wrestling games. The cream of the crud pictured above is Wrestlemania Challenge and Tecmo World Wrestling. The wrestling nut in me begrudgingly admits there is not a five star grappler on the NES. All the WWF games range from middling to atrocious. WWF Wrestlemania Challenge I would say was marginally solid because it had functinal enough gameplay, a decent roster with wrestlers not seen in many other games at that time like Rick Rude & Andre the Giant, featured finishing moves and best of all one of the few wrestling games that played AWESOME chiptune renditions of the wrestler's theme music throughout gameplay! Avoid Tag Team Wrestling and M.U.S.C.L.E. at all costs, both of those abysmal wrestling games make all the LJN WWF games seem competently made. Pro Wrestling is good for a launch era game, but it is very limiting all things considered. I had a lot of fun with WCW Wrestling back then, but its unique controls have not aged well. I would have to give Tecmo World Wrestling the nod as my favorite NES wrasslin’ game because of solid controls, Tecmo’s trademark cinematics and its goofy announcer providing nonstop text play-by-play on the bottom of the screen that constantly had my attention.

Some of my favorite driving NES games seen above are Micro Machines on the left and Super Off Road on the right. A Micro Machines game with the same style of core racing mechanics has appeared in almost every console generation since! Super Off Road is probably my favorite four player NES game. Driving and motorsports were another favorite of mine, and the NES was loaded with them! My two favorites were Super Off-Road and Super Sprint. The former because it was a pretty faithful conversion of the arcade game and had four player support my family and friends clocked many hours with. Super Sprint had a similar overhead view of the whole track, but felt like it had more realistic handling, yet still contained many increasingly tough obstacles to overcome. In a strange twist, I later found a couple years ago the developers of Super Off-Road made a F1 style of that game that is also four player compatible in Indy Heat, but it also features pit stops where you can ram over the pit crew! Excitebike was an early childhood rental favorite as I loved going over the ramps and wiping out and randomly assembling a mish-mash of parts of a course in the track editor. I was bummed the NES never got the excellent OutRun from the arcades so I had to suffice with Square’s take on the checkpoint-based driving game, Rad Racer and its sequel a couple years later which were almost, but not quite on par with Sega’s flagship arcade driving game. RC Pro-AM and Micro Machines I am a huge fan of both racing games that feature an overhead camera that locks on and follows the car from a birds-eye view unlike the average behind the car camera perspectives that dominated that era. Collecting for the NES As the 1990s wore on a local video store selling its excess stock and a local game store called Tiger Play were my go to spots for a few years for used videogames. I will never forget lucking into a $2 copy of Tengen’s Tetris at the video store. Eventually eBay opened the floodgates to track down a lot of the NES games I rambled on about above. A regional annual retro game convention, The Midwest Gaming Classic, I attended several times over the past 15 years also attributed to many of my NES games. One year I was ecstatic to get a fan translation of the original Mother game that Nintendo would later officially release on the WiiU as Earthbound Beginnings. I was also ecstatic to get a fan mod updated rosters version of Tecmo Super Bowl. I eventually got a NES-clone system towards the end of 2000s that handled NES games exponentially better than the original Nintendo system and also allowed the ability to play Japanese Famicom games. At MGC I would buy one or two random cheap Famicom games a year to make use of the Famicom slot. I only wound up with several Famicom games, with highlights being Baseball, Tetris and Mighty Final Fight.

The last trip I made out to MGC in 2018 I went in with the goal to finish off my Power Pad game collection and hunt down the last three Power Pad compatible games I did not own to officially have all eight or nine Power Pad games. After perusing the many vendors there I was able to track down the much treasured copies of Athletic World, Eggsplode/Street Cop and Dance Aerobics down, along with a bonus homebrew NES cornhole/bag toss game, Tailgate Party, that also took advantage of the Power Pad. A couple years ago YouTube creator, Pat Contri released his exhaustive Ultimate Nintendo Guide to the NES Library coffee table book/tome that reviewed every single NES game. I read it over the course of a year via a few pages a night before bed. It naturally turned me onto several games I either long forgotten about or completely went over my head and I wound up tracking them down online. That book got me wound up on a NES four player game kick and I have about a dozen four player NES games right now. One night a couple years ago I did a four player NES party night and managed to have a fair amount of fun with some friends going at it in Super Off-Road, Gauntlet II and Super Jeopardy. Right now my preferred way to play NES cartridges is via the Retron 5 system. I know that clone system is a little polarizing because of its emulation software it uses, but I love its performance at playing NES games and other cartridge based systems on my HDTV without the fuzzy graphics and lag that happens when plugging in old composite/RCA cables that came with the NES. I also love that it allows save states and the equivalent of Game Genie cheat codes. A couple years ago I finally got around to playing through SNK’s action-RPG, Crystalis and I would be lying if I said I did not take advantage of save states and a couple of the cheats. Official Nintendo NES Preservation Nintendo has been doing their part, for better and worse, at keeping the NES catalog alive digitally going back to the launch of the Wii in 2006. I picked up several NES games digitally for the Wii at $5 apiece for the Wii’s Virtual Console. I did the exact same thing a few years later for the WiiU and 3DS. The Virtual Console was a handy feature I took advantage of somewhat, but I think it far benefitted younger gamers who were being introduced to those classics for the first time. Nintendo spawned the mini-console craze a few years ago with them debuting the NES Classic, which packed 30 first and third party NES games into a pint sized version of a plug-and-play NES. It featured a solid lineup of games across all genres and was a great bargain considering strong library of games. The emulation quality was leagues better compared to the Virtual Console and the NES Classic feature better implementation of save states and now the ability to rewind gameplay. I brought the NES Classic over to family gatherings and it was a hit all night long.

The NES Classic and NES Channel on the Switch are my two top legitimate recommended ways to digitally dive into the NES library! The best part about the NES Classic was how easy it was to mod and upload your own games to. I know the various RetroPi’s and Mister devices have been capable of this for awhile, but there is something special about the NES Classic’s interface that makes it the preferred way for me to re-experience these NES gems. For a little last minute prep for this article, I loaded up Nintendo’s latest way to experience NES games via the NES Channel on the Switch. Right now it has a little over 50 unique NES (and a small selection of Famicom) games available to play in North America. I dabbled with a few different game for a little over an hour, and finished off my session by playing through the first several stages of Super Mario Bros. again. Nintendo once again stepped up their emulation efforts here by having even better functioning save states and rewind features and now the ability to do online two player. I got my nephew to play with me online and it worked surprisingly well…..other than my fifth grade nephew initially being a little crabby at the graphics being ‘old’ at least. I do not hear many people touting this feature that much and I think it is awesome that Nintendo made this back catalog online and all things considered is part of a great value for $25 a year for Nintendo’s online Switch service.

If those two options do not interest you than there are a ton of other NES games that got re-released as part of collections on many systems over the years. On the current gen alone I would recommend the first Mega Man Legacy Collection that collects the first eight Mega Man games, of which the first six are the NES games. That was how I first experienced Mega Man 2 after the aforementioned boycotting of the brand. Yes, it was after decades of reading testimonials on how Mega Man 2 is one of the all-time greats for the NES I finally played it off that collection a few years ago and loved it. It also allows save states thank goodness, or else I would never be able to conquer that final gauntlet leading up to Dr. Wily! Other recommended collections would include the digital collections Konami released last year rounding up the early entries of the CastleVania and Contra games, both of which have all their NES installments. I highly suggest getting Capcom’s Disney Afternoon Collection that has six of the best licensed NES platformers such as both Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers games. SNK released an excellent 40th anniversary collection last year too which includes several of their NES games including my beloved Ikari Warriors and its two lesser sequels. The Double Dragon and Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle gathers the Double Dragon trilogy, and a ton of Technos favorites like River City Ransom, Super Dodge Ball and nearly a dozen others that until now were exclusive in Japan. For younger readers not familiar with the NES library, these are all recommended ways to legit first experience a healthy chunk of some of the best games of the NES library! The Power Lives On…. I cannot believe it has already been nearly 35 years since the NES first launched in North America. Since it is the system of my childhood, I will always be super nostalgic about it. The NES introduced me to the world of videogames and I have been hooked ever since. My favorite game for it would have to be the original Super Mario Bros., with podium finishes going to The Legend of Zelda and yes, the dastardly Ikari Warriors. Whenever I go into a retro game shop or convention I almost instinctively find myself glomming towards the NES section in hopes of finding some long neglected title to have in my collection even though I constantly remind myself I have every game I want for it. Many thanks for making it through this beast of a read and indulging my lifetime of NES memories and I hope I have either introduced you to some new NES factoids and games here or at least had a fun trip down memory lane with me. If you want to indulge me in more NES retrospectives, but in audio form this time, I have embedded a few podcasts I recently un-vaulted from my archives below.

Here is the all-encompassing retrospective I did on the NES for its 25th anniversary 10 years ago.

And here is where we do a deep dive on all the comic book videogames on the NES.

To wrap it up, here is podcast deep dive on all the RPG games on the NES.

My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

You have not lived the late 80s/early 90s NES fervor without watching a whole episode of Video Power. I present this episode above for your consumption!

Wait a Second, Did I Forget Some Games? Bonus Overtime!!!! I know, I know…I have rambled on forever so that is why I officially concluded this flashback just above. However, if you are somehow, someway still scrolling down and find yourself here I have a few more NES favorites and memories I would love to share so they do not remain on the cutting room floor. First off, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trilogy on the NES I have to get some reflections on! That first game….what a mess of a platformer it turned out to be. I did love its theme music though! TMNT fever was ubiquitous during the NES generation and I was an ardent fan of the shelled heroes like almost all kids my age so I forced myself to put way too much time into it than I should have. Several years ago I revisited it and finally finished it, well after the help of Game Genie cheat codes that is. Even with the cheats that swimming level remains a tumultuous effort to persevere through.

TMNT II: The Arcade Game is exponentially better and is a pretty decent port of the first arcade game. While the graphics are dialed back significantly to run on the NES, that did not stop my friend Matt and I revisiting and romping through this and its sequel several times over the years. TMNT III: The Manhatten Project is a NES exclusive, and featured the same arcade brawling engine as its predecessor, but this one has colorful beach levels with foot soldiers that toss sand at the turtles!! Yes, I have played the NES version of TMNT Tournament Figheters and I will give props to Konami for mustering everything they could out of the NES graphically by late 1993 and making it the only proper 2D fighter on the NES, but it simply does not measure up to its vastly superior SNES counterpart. There are some first party Nintendo games I held off from touching on in the main feature because I have had only minimal experience with them. It is totally on me! There was one more renting memory I refrained from above, and that is dealing with Metroid. Bottom line, it spooked me too much around age six or seven to progress far into it and I remember being irate at going back a screen to see enemies I eliminated moments earlier had respawned again. I need to correct this and revisit it someday. Kirby’s Adventure I briefly played on the NES Classic to briefly try it out before moving on to different games and I never got around getting back to it. That is another NES regret I must rectify as I have played through and enjoyed past Kirby games before! Nintendo’s official licensed version of Tetris is a good playing and looking version of the classic puzzler, but it lacked one key thing the Tengen version had and that is multiplayer! My dad and I played a ton of competitive and co-op multiplayer of Tengen’s Tetris. The Tengen version also had the more Russian-flavored art style that made the visuals pop more. The co-op mode was surprisingly addictive teaming up with my dad to clear a wider, single drop box. I was surprised no other Tetris revisited this idea until it was announced days ago for the upcoming deluxe version of Tetris Effect on Xbox Series X.

Nintendo's Tetris is on the left, Tengen's Tetris is on the right. I love the unique aesthetics and music in both of them, but Tengen's version had an excellent 2-player VS. and co-op modes that made it highly sought after, especially after Nintendo got it banned from stores! The only traditional RPG I put a lot of time into on the NES was the first Dragon Warrior. I rented it, and borrowed it another time from a friend later on and enjoyed the early parts of the game before I ventured out under-leveled and was too young to grasp the concept of grinding to level up in order to properly square off against the tougher foes. I eventually got much farther into it when it was re-released on GameBoy Color. Wait a second, does Zelda II: The Adventure of Link count as an RPG? I have heard for years people argue whether the Zelda series is considered a true RPG and I have always been on the side of classifying them in the action-adventure genre, but Zelda II is incredibly different from all other entries in the series and has leveling up and experience points involved so I would make an exception that Zelda II be considered an RPG. Unfortunately, it was another one that was too brutal for me in my childhood and I never got that far in it. I want to finally wrap this beast up by applauding the preservation market for unearthing several prototypes and lost games that were finished, but never released. Some of the more famous examples of this are Capcom’s California Raisins, a NES version of SimCity and last year the UWC Wrestling title that was canned at the final minute before resurfacing with noticeable roster and gameplay changes as WCW Wrestling. I also want to commend the smaller publisher and indie game scene for finding the resources to release new games on actual physical NES cartridges. They may be unlicensed, but it nevertheless puts a smile on my face to see new NES games being released today! Okay, with that I am finished for real this time! Many thanks again for spending an afternoon powering through this!

You heard my favorite NES background music earlier with the Duck Tales' 'Moon Theme.' Now behold the worst NES music...no 1942 does not qualify. I am talking about this grinding, ear screeching exuse for music that is the general background stage music for Back to the Future. You are Still Here!? Even after all these videos and links and over 6000 words of my babbling of NES nostalgia? I guess then I have one more story to share since you made it this far. This one is not a moment I am proud of. Sometimes being a NES kid brings out a…..darkness among rival NES kids. I was spending an afternoon at a cousins playing NES games all day. The same one who showed me the Super Mario Bros. 2 ending. The same one who we decided to put on hockey gloves to mimic the fights in Blades of Steel, though thinking back in hindsight I think we got our mimicking of the hockey fight in reverse and we should have had gloves off.

My cousing introduced me to some of my favorite NES sports games like Double Dribble and Blades of Steel. And as you are about to see, it brought out the worst in us! Anyways, this day he was showing me Double Dribble and we played it all afternoon. It impressed the hell out of me by having the national anthem opening and its cinematic dunks! Towards the end of the day we were playing other games when my mom arrived to pick me up. As I was getting ready to leave and my cousin was distracted playing a different game my NES-darkness overtook me and I thought I could ‘borrow’ my cousin’s copy of Double Dribble without asking him. I think I slid another game in Double Dribble’s place where it was on the carpet and I was super slick by flipping it upside down so he would not see the label. Yeah, I only made it out about halfway to my mom’s car outside when he came barreling out and we play-wrestled on the ground for a brief moment until I forked over that copy of Double Dribble. I must have been around eight or nine at the time and one dumb kid to try and pull that off……I should have went for his copy of Super Mario Bros. 2 instead! I am kidding of course, kids do not be like dumb NES-kid Dale and mess with your friend’s games! Extremely not cool, hugging out with a heartfelt apology, now that is cool, no wait, it is emphatically…..Totally Rad!

[demshootangames-blog]

A review of sorts mainly for people who already played it, because fuck trying to explain this game to people who have not played it (don’t play it).

Has there ever been a game more painfully average than Dead Rising 4? Though honestly, its juuust a tad below average. It is a weird case of changing the formula partially in the right places, but keeping the old things that should have changed with the new changes. Running around in a zombie filled town has never been so “ok”. The familiar Frank West who is nothing like Frank West from the original is on the case once again. Taking pictures and solving “cases” in a zombie filled town where everything is wacky and kuhrayyyzeee! Solving a conspiracy and running into crazy people all over the place. Only its just...very mildly crazy. I’m honestly not that bothered that Frank West is so different. He does spout out some really fucking awful jokes here and there that made me cringe, but he is well voice acted and manages to be mildly...averagely entertaining here and there. The same can be said about the entire game. Its just so goddamn average. The weapons feel very boring for the most part, experimentation with combinations is just not rewarding. 90% of the time when you find a schematic to create some crazy weapon, you can find the two things you need to make it with in the same room as the schematic itself. Things are always so conveniently placed that you never need to really look around. Why even have crafting when everything you need is always right there? You NEVER need to be using a normal melee weapon, you never need to resort to using a hammer or a coat hanger to defend yourself from evil zombie dudes. The game has some good changes here and there I feel. The outfit system is alright, the timer has been removed so you can do things at your pace, kind of. I’ll get to that. And visually the game looks alright aside from the zombie corpse physics being really shitty and short lived. Not all the changes were really thought through too well. The removal of the timer for example now means that you could explore to your hearts content, but there is nothing really there aside from some crappy collectibles that nobody gives a single hoot about. It is kind of fun to mess about in the stores in the mall and honestly the mall is the only fun place in that game, but aside from finding few of those now completely optional bosses, there isn’t anything worthwhile. The bosses or maniacs, whatever, are often centered around some theme like a crazy pirate man or a murderous santa. Sounds like fun on paper, but they are half assed and die really easily. The combat system gives no room to create any fun boss fights so why even bother with them if you are going to turn them into optional things? The whole “open world” thing is fucked up too because there is no free roam. You have missions or “cases” that start automatically and they always seem to have a sense of urgency to them, yet the game expects you to just...not give a shit and go out to do shit on your own. But I cant! If the game is trying to tell me to hurry the fuck up because of story reasons, but at the same time its telling me to go explore some random place, I get stressed out. Like what do you ACTUALLY want me to do? Ffffffudge! It’s like a movie that is directed by two directors and both of them want a different feel for the same act. It just doesn’t work. The movement in that game is also pretty clunky and often very frustrating. I wish the game felt more smooth and you had more freedom of movement. Everything feels awkward when it really should be more smooth. The skill/upgrade system is redundant and only serves to piss you off when you level up every 2 seconds and get a huge notification about it on the screen that blocks your view. The game should have been faster and smoother, there were reasons why the older ones were clunky and awkward. There is no reason for it to be the case in the fourth game! And please, for the love of god. To any aspiring game devs out there, do not put perks or skills that do shit like “your critical chance is slightly increased!” or “damage of this thing is slightly increased!” in your games unless its a very in depth RPG or something. If you are going to have a skill system where you unlock things with progression, make every single decision a big deal, a big game changer. Do NOT bother with useless, redundant little “upgrades” and do not put basic skills that the player should have from the get go behind a level requirement. It prevents the player from just enjoying the game and starts a rush for certain skills. The “I’ll just get these 4 skills and THEN I’ll start to enjoy the game!”. Don’t fucking do that. Ghost Recon Wildlands did that shit with its weapons and weapon upgrades. Why does the super sikret special forces team need to find basic weapon attachments like sights and foregrips? Hello? Since they clearly can bring their own gear, you’d think they would bring something that’s not shit with them. But now I’m getting sidetracked. I’ll get to that game eventually, trust me. And boy do I have a lot to say about that one. Anywhoo, Dead Rising 4 is “ok” and in some ways I prefer few of the changes, because I fucking HATE timers in games, but dead rising 4 is almost begging for a timer. Because it tells you to hurry the fuck up all the time. I know they added a timed mode after the fact as paid DLC but why would I pay for that shit? Especially when its made as an after thought. No thanks. It’s pretty clear that dead rising 4 was just a “test”. They tested things out, tried what they could get away with and what would or would not work. Mainly because the game feels so hollow. There was no love or passion poured into Dead Rising 4. It’s like a crazy science experiment and you can bet your ass that by the time they released Dead Rising 4 which was quite some time ago, they were already well into the development of DR5. I’m calling it now. You can quote me on this once it is eventually revealed. If I’m wrong then just forget I ever said anything, pls. It sure is a bizarrely mediocre game that can be entertaining here and there. 4/10 worth getting for under 15 euros but the fun won’t last longer than a few days, the frustration however will last a lifetime.

[barbosaasouza]

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch)

In the land of Operencia, you get to enjoy some fresh air out of doors and hanging out with some friends (enjoy it where you can these days). On the down side, there is a cursed castle which needs to be explored. Oh, and don’t forget the dragon.

If you are not familiar with any of the other platform releases of Operencia, this is a straight-up turn-based RPG; you even get to do some actual (well, in-game actual) dungeon crawling.

As with a lot of the games for the Switch, this looks better and is easier to play on your TV than in the Switch’s handheld mode. Indeed, the game looks very good with interesting scenery, detailed dungeons, and lots of lovely monsters. The art ranges from novel forest scenes to dungeons with water on the ceiling, and the water effects are well done. Even the torches include details like embers floating away and the heat shimmer in the air above them.

Getting started is a bit odd; when you first launch the game you will play through a prologue before you get to the start with your real avatar. It was a bit disorienting to play for a few minutes with one set of characters only to have to start over with a new character, but if you know it’s coming (and now you do) it’s just a warm up for the main event.

Operencia has a fairly standard back story; you are the intrepid young nobody who received a vision in a dream. Now you are following your dream into a great adventure. Along the way, you meet some interesting characters and make alliances to battle monsters and defeat the big bad guy at the end of it all. While this path is fairly well worn and the dialogue is fairly predictable, the game does a good job of engaging the player so getting there is worth the time spent playing.

Once you are engaged in the story proper, the game does a decent job of introducing new elements and combat difficulty in a gradual way so you can get used to playing without dying frequently. The first “level” is the cursed castle where you get to battle some skeletons (very important at PN, those sword wielding skeletons), frog-man creatures, and the obligatory boss at the end. There are also some puzzles to solve along the way—which combination of levers do you need to pull to open the door sort of thing. The puzzles may not always be real brain teasers, but it does involve a little more than “kill everything that moves” gameplay.

By the way, when you do kill monsters, there will be loot to pick up. The game is not very good at explaining how to equip and use items you pick up, but it is not too hard to figure out. If you press the up arrow button on the left JoyCon, you get the character menu. From here, you can assign new ability and skill points, equip weapons and armor, and so on.

One thing the game does explain well enough is how range works in combat. There are three distances of which you need to be aware: close (melee range), middle range, and distant range. The further away an enemy is, the less effective your melee weapon will be. Inversely, the more distant the enemy, the better your range weapon will work for you. As always with magic attacks, spells don’t care about range.

Don’t forget—if you have someone in your party with magic ability, keep a heal spell handy (also known as herbalism). Feel free to use it in the middle of a combat session. No, really—use whatever skills your characters have as soon as you perceive a need. You have herbalism/heal, attack spells, special attacks, etc. Use them quickly and let them recharge during combat.

By the way, there is one combat skill which looks mostly useless but can be very handy, and it is called Taunt. This skill can be used (by you and by your enemies) to force a character to attack only the one who used the Taunt skill. If a skeleton uses Taunt then you can only attack that skeleton. This effectively protects the others until you kill the taunter, or the taunt wears off. On your side, you can use this to protect the weaker members of your party and let the tank take the hits.

As noted earlier, the storyline is what may be called “an oldie but a goodie” but after decades of dungeon crawler RPGs, it is getting difficult to come up with anything truly unique. In this regard, I don’t hold anything against the game.

Where the game could be better is the dialogue and voice acting area. The dialogue is a bit too predictable and the voice work is blasé; not horrible, just a little flat. Character interaction with the environment is also a bit less than stellar. While the world looks great, there are very limited elements with which the player can interact. If you scroll your targeting dot over something you can pick up the object acquires a luminous outline. This isn’t tragic, but with many games like this, you can investigate or smash or use almost everything in sight.

This does bring up one gripe. In the first level, you can see weapons racks in some of the rooms in the castle. They look like perfectly serviceable weapons, but you can’t use them. I personally think it would be better to show broken weapons on the floor or to just not show them at all, but that’s just me.

Moving around in the game is based on squares. While you can use the right JoyCon to look around in all directions, including up and down, walking happens with the left JoyCon. You can only walk in one of the four cardinal directions, no cutting diagonally across a room. To help with the square approach, you can use the left and right buttons to turn 90 degrees at a time. For a game which put so much into the visuals, this seems to be an odd limitation; however, once you get used to it the motion mechanics are not too bad.

Even with some oddities and limitations, Operencia is a fun game. It isn’t a fast reaction, finger twitching adrenaline fest, but it does engage and hold the player’s interest with good graphics, nice audio, moderately interesting characters, and a story with a few hooks and twists.

The post Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[barbosaasouza]

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch)

In the land of Operencia, you get to enjoy some fresh air out of doors and hanging out with some friends (enjoy it where you can these days). On the down side, there is a cursed castle which needs to be explored. Oh, and don’t forget the dragon.

If you are not familiar with any of the other platform releases of Operencia, this is a straight-up turn-based RPG; you even get to do some actual (well, in-game actual) dungeon crawling.

As with a lot of the games for the Switch, this looks better and is easier to play on your TV than in the Switch’s handheld mode. Indeed, the game looks very good with interesting scenery, detailed dungeons, and lots of lovely monsters. The art ranges from novel forest scenes to dungeons with water on the ceiling, and the water effects are well done. Even the torches include details like embers floating away and the heat shimmer in the air above them.

Getting started is a bit odd; when you first launch the game you will play through a prologue before you get to the start with your real avatar. It was a bit disorienting to play for a few minutes with one set of characters only to have to start over with a new character, but if you know it’s coming (and now you do) it’s just a warm up for the main event.

Operencia has a fairly standard back story; you are the intrepid young nobody who received a vision in a dream. Now you are following your dream into a great adventure. Along the way, you meet some interesting characters and make alliances to battle monsters and defeat the big bad guy at the end of it all. While this path is fairly well worn and the dialogue is fairly predictable, the game does a good job of engaging the player so getting there is worth the time spent playing.

Once you are engaged in the story proper, the game does a decent job of introducing new elements and combat difficulty in a gradual way so you can get used to playing without dying frequently. The first “level” is the cursed castle where you get to battle some skeletons (very important at PN, those sword wielding skeletons), frog-man creatures, and the obligatory boss at the end. There are also some puzzles to solve along the way—which combination of levers do you need to pull to open the door sort of thing. The puzzles may not always be real brain teasers, but it does involve a little more than “kill everything that moves” gameplay.

By the way, when you do kill monsters, there will be loot to pick up. The game is not very good at explaining how to equip and use items you pick up, but it is not too hard to figure out. If you press the up arrow button on the left JoyCon, you get the character menu. From here, you can assign new ability and skill points, equip weapons and armor, and so on.

One thing the game does explain well enough is how range works in combat. There are three distances of which you need to be aware: close (melee range), middle range, and distant range. The further away an enemy is, the less effective your melee weapon will be. Inversely, the more distant the enemy, the better your range weapon will work for you. As always with magic attacks, spells don’t care about range.

Don’t forget—if you have someone in your party with magic ability, keep a heal spell handy (also known as herbalism). Feel free to use it in the middle of a combat session. No, really—use whatever skills your characters have as soon as you perceive a need. You have herbalism/heal, attack spells, special attacks, etc. Use them quickly and let them recharge during combat.

By the way, there is one combat skill which looks mostly useless but can be very handy, and it is called Taunt. This skill can be used (by you and by your enemies) to force a character to attack only the one who used the Taunt skill. If a skeleton uses Taunt then you can only attack that skeleton. This effectively protects the others until you kill the taunter, or the taunt wears off. On your side, you can use this to protect the weaker members of your party and let the tank take the hits.

As noted earlier, the storyline is what may be called “an oldie but a goodie” but after decades of dungeon crawler RPGs, it is getting difficult to come up with anything truly unique. In this regard, I don’t hold anything against the game.

Where the game could be better is the dialogue and voice acting area. The dialogue is a bit too predictable and the voice work is blasé; not horrible, just a little flat. Character interaction with the environment is also a bit less than stellar. While the world looks great, there are very limited elements with which the player can interact. If you scroll your targeting dot over something you can pick up the object acquires a luminous outline. This isn’t tragic, but with many games like this, you can investigate or smash or use almost everything in sight.

This does bring up one gripe. In the first level, you can see weapons racks in some of the rooms in the castle. They look like perfectly serviceable weapons, but you can’t use them. I personally think it would be better to show broken weapons on the floor or to just not show them at all, but that’s just me.

Moving around in the game is based on squares. While you can use the right JoyCon to look around in all directions, including up and down, walking happens with the left JoyCon. You can only walk in one of the four cardinal directions, no cutting diagonally across a room. To help with the square approach, you can use the left and right buttons to turn 90 degrees at a time. For a game which put so much into the visuals, this seems to be an odd limitation; however, once you get used to it the motion mechanics are not too bad.

Even with some oddities and limitations, Operencia is a fun game. It isn’t a fast reaction, finger twitching adrenaline fest, but it does engage and hold the player’s interest with good graphics, nice audio, moderately interesting characters, and a story with a few hooks and twists.

The post Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[barbosaasouza]

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch)

In the land of Operencia, you get to enjoy some fresh air out of doors and hanging out with some friends (enjoy it where you can these days). On the down side, there is a cursed castle which needs to be explored. Oh, and don’t forget the dragon.

If you are not familiar with any of the other platform releases of Operencia, this is a straight-up turn-based RPG; you even get to do some actual (well, in-game actual) dungeon crawling.

As with a lot of the games for the Switch, this looks better and is easier to play on your TV than in the Switch’s handheld mode. Indeed, the game looks very good with interesting scenery, detailed dungeons, and lots of lovely monsters. The art ranges from novel forest scenes to dungeons with water on the ceiling, and the water effects are well done. Even the torches include details like embers floating away and the heat shimmer in the air above them.

Getting started is a bit odd; when you first launch the game you will play through a prologue before you get to the start with your real avatar. It was a bit disorienting to play for a few minutes with one set of characters only to have to start over with a new character, but if you know it’s coming (and now you do) it’s just a warm up for the main event.

Operencia has a fairly standard back story; you are the intrepid young nobody who received a vision in a dream. Now you are following your dream into a great adventure. Along the way, you meet some interesting characters and make alliances to battle monsters and defeat the big bad guy at the end of it all. While this path is fairly well worn and the dialogue is fairly predictable, the game does a good job of engaging the player so getting there is worth the time spent playing.

Once you are engaged in the story proper, the game does a decent job of introducing new elements and combat difficulty in a gradual way so you can get used to playing without dying frequently. The first “level” is the cursed castle where you get to battle some skeletons (very important at PN, those sword wielding skeletons), frog-man creatures, and the obligatory boss at the end. There are also some puzzles to solve along the way—which combination of levers do you need to pull to open the door sort of thing. The puzzles may not always be real brain teasers, but it does involve a little more than “kill everything that moves” gameplay.

By the way, when you do kill monsters, there will be loot to pick up. The game is not very good at explaining how to equip and use items you pick up, but it is not too hard to figure out. If you press the up arrow button on the left JoyCon, you get the character menu. From here, you can assign new ability and skill points, equip weapons and armor, and so on.

One thing the game does explain well enough is how range works in combat. There are three distances of which you need to be aware: close (melee range), middle range, and distant range. The further away an enemy is, the less effective your melee weapon will be. Inversely, the more distant the enemy, the better your range weapon will work for you. As always with magic attacks, spells don’t care about range.

Don’t forget—if you have someone in your party with magic ability, keep a heal spell handy (also known as herbalism). Feel free to use it in the middle of a combat session. No, really—use whatever skills your characters have as soon as you perceive a need. You have herbalism/heal, attack spells, special attacks, etc. Use them quickly and let them recharge during combat.

By the way, there is one combat skill which looks mostly useless but can be very handy, and it is called Taunt. This skill can be used (by you and by your enemies) to force a character to attack only the one who used the Taunt skill. If a skeleton uses Taunt then you can only attack that skeleton. This effectively protects the others until you kill the taunter, or the taunt wears off. On your side, you can use this to protect the weaker members of your party and let the tank take the hits.

As noted earlier, the storyline is what may be called “an oldie but a goodie” but after decades of dungeon crawler RPGs, it is getting difficult to come up with anything truly unique. In this regard, I don’t hold anything against the game.

Where the game could be better is the dialogue and voice acting area. The dialogue is a bit too predictable and the voice work is blasé; not horrible, just a little flat. Character interaction with the environment is also a bit less than stellar. While the world looks great, there are very limited elements with which the player can interact. If you scroll your targeting dot over something you can pick up the object acquires a luminous outline. This isn’t tragic, but with many games like this, you can investigate or smash or use almost everything in sight.

This does bring up one gripe. In the first level, you can see weapons racks in some of the rooms in the castle. They look like perfectly serviceable weapons, but you can’t use them. I personally think it would be better to show broken weapons on the floor or to just not show them at all, but that’s just me.

Moving around in the game is based on squares. While you can use the right JoyCon to look around in all directions, including up and down, walking happens with the left JoyCon. You can only walk in one of the four cardinal directions, no cutting diagonally across a room. To help with the square approach, you can use the left and right buttons to turn 90 degrees at a time. For a game which put so much into the visuals, this seems to be an odd limitation; however, once you get used to it the motion mechanics are not too bad.

Even with some oddities and limitations, Operencia is a fun game. It isn’t a fast reaction, finger twitching adrenaline fest, but it does engage and hold the player’s interest with good graphics, nice audio, moderately interesting characters, and a story with a few hooks and twists.

The post Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[barbosaasouza]

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch)

In the land of Operencia, you get to enjoy some fresh air out of doors and hanging out with some friends (enjoy it where you can these days). On the down side, there is a cursed castle which needs to be explored. Oh, and don’t forget the dragon.

If you are not familiar with any of the other platform releases of Operencia, this is a straight-up turn-based RPG; you even get to do some actual (well, in-game actual) dungeon crawling.

As with a lot of the games for the Switch, this looks better and is easier to play on your TV than in the Switch’s handheld mode. Indeed, the game looks very good with interesting scenery, detailed dungeons, and lots of lovely monsters. The art ranges from novel forest scenes to dungeons with water on the ceiling, and the water effects are well done. Even the torches include details like embers floating away and the heat shimmer in the air above them.

Getting started is a bit odd; when you first launch the game you will play through a prologue before you get to the start with your real avatar. It was a bit disorienting to play for a few minutes with one set of characters only to have to start over with a new character, but if you know it’s coming (and now you do) it’s just a warm up for the main event.

Operencia has a fairly standard back story; you are the intrepid young nobody who received a vision in a dream. Now you are following your dream into a great adventure. Along the way, you meet some interesting characters and make alliances to battle monsters and defeat the big bad guy at the end of it all. While this path is fairly well worn and the dialogue is fairly predictable, the game does a good job of engaging the player so getting there is worth the time spent playing.

Once you are engaged in the story proper, the game does a decent job of introducing new elements and combat difficulty in a gradual way so you can get used to playing without dying frequently. The first “level” is the cursed castle where you get to battle some skeletons (very important at PN, those sword wielding skeletons), frog-man creatures, and the obligatory boss at the end. There are also some puzzles to solve along the way—which combination of levers do you need to pull to open the door sort of thing. The puzzles may not always be real brain teasers, but it does involve a little more than “kill everything that moves” gameplay.

By the way, when you do kill monsters, there will be loot to pick up. The game is not very good at explaining how to equip and use items you pick up, but it is not too hard to figure out. If you press the up arrow button on the left JoyCon, you get the character menu. From here, you can assign new ability and skill points, equip weapons and armor, and so on.

One thing the game does explain well enough is how range works in combat. There are three distances of which you need to be aware: close (melee range), middle range, and distant range. The further away an enemy is, the less effective your melee weapon will be. Inversely, the more distant the enemy, the better your range weapon will work for you. As always with magic attacks, spells don’t care about range.

Don’t forget—if you have someone in your party with magic ability, keep a heal spell handy (also known as herbalism). Feel free to use it in the middle of a combat session. No, really—use whatever skills your characters have as soon as you perceive a need. You have herbalism/heal, attack spells, special attacks, etc. Use them quickly and let them recharge during combat.

By the way, there is one combat skill which looks mostly useless but can be very handy, and it is called Taunt. This skill can be used (by you and by your enemies) to force a character to attack only the one who used the Taunt skill. If a skeleton uses Taunt then you can only attack that skeleton. This effectively protects the others until you kill the taunter, or the taunt wears off. On your side, you can use this to protect the weaker members of your party and let the tank take the hits.

As noted earlier, the storyline is what may be called “an oldie but a goodie” but after decades of dungeon crawler RPGs, it is getting difficult to come up with anything truly unique. In this regard, I don’t hold anything against the game.

Where the game could be better is the dialogue and voice acting area. The dialogue is a bit too predictable and the voice work is blasé; not horrible, just a little flat. Character interaction with the environment is also a bit less than stellar. While the world looks great, there are very limited elements with which the player can interact. If you scroll your targeting dot over something you can pick up the object acquires a luminous outline. This isn’t tragic, but with many games like this, you can investigate or smash or use almost everything in sight.

This does bring up one gripe. In the first level, you can see weapons racks in some of the rooms in the castle. They look like perfectly serviceable weapons, but you can’t use them. I personally think it would be better to show broken weapons on the floor or to just not show them at all, but that’s just me.

Moving around in the game is based on squares. While you can use the right JoyCon to look around in all directions, including up and down, walking happens with the left JoyCon. You can only walk in one of the four cardinal directions, no cutting diagonally across a room. To help with the square approach, you can use the left and right buttons to turn 90 degrees at a time. For a game which put so much into the visuals, this seems to be an odd limitation; however, once you get used to it the motion mechanics are not too bad.

Even with some oddities and limitations, Operencia is a fun game. It isn’t a fast reaction, finger twitching adrenaline fest, but it does engage and hold the player’s interest with good graphics, nice audio, moderately interesting characters, and a story with a few hooks and twists.

The post Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[barbosaasouza]

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch)

In the land of Operencia, you get to enjoy some fresh air out of doors and hanging out with some friends (enjoy it where you can these days). On the down side, there is a cursed castle which needs to be explored. Oh, and don’t forget the dragon.

If you are not familiar with any of the other platform releases of Operencia, this is a straight-up turn-based RPG; you even get to do some actual (well, in-game actual) dungeon crawling.

As with a lot of the games for the Switch, this looks better and is easier to play on your TV than in the Switch’s handheld mode. Indeed, the game looks very good with interesting scenery, detailed dungeons, and lots of lovely monsters. The art ranges from novel forest scenes to dungeons with water on the ceiling, and the water effects are well done. Even the torches include details like embers floating away and the heat shimmer in the air above them.

Getting started is a bit odd; when you first launch the game you will play through a prologue before you get to the start with your real avatar. It was a bit disorienting to play for a few minutes with one set of characters only to have to start over with a new character, but if you know it’s coming (and now you do) it’s just a warm up for the main event.

Operencia has a fairly standard back story; you are the intrepid young nobody who received a vision in a dream. Now you are following your dream into a great adventure. Along the way, you meet some interesting characters and make alliances to battle monsters and defeat the big bad guy at the end of it all. While this path is fairly well worn and the dialogue is fairly predictable, the game does a good job of engaging the player so getting there is worth the time spent playing.

Once you are engaged in the story proper, the game does a decent job of introducing new elements and combat difficulty in a gradual way so you can get used to playing without dying frequently. The first “level” is the cursed castle where you get to battle some skeletons (very important at PN, those sword wielding skeletons), frog-man creatures, and the obligatory boss at the end. There are also some puzzles to solve along the way—which combination of levers do you need to pull to open the door sort of thing. The puzzles may not always be real brain teasers, but it does involve a little more than “kill everything that moves” gameplay.

By the way, when you do kill monsters, there will be loot to pick up. The game is not very good at explaining how to equip and use items you pick up, but it is not too hard to figure out. If you press the up arrow button on the left JoyCon, you get the character menu. From here, you can assign new ability and skill points, equip weapons and armor, and so on.

One thing the game does explain well enough is how range works in combat. There are three distances of which you need to be aware: close (melee range), middle range, and distant range. The further away an enemy is, the less effective your melee weapon will be. Inversely, the more distant the enemy, the better your range weapon will work for you. As always with magic attacks, spells don’t care about range.

Don’t forget—if you have someone in your party with magic ability, keep a heal spell handy (also known as herbalism). Feel free to use it in the middle of a combat session. No, really—use whatever skills your characters have as soon as you perceive a need. You have herbalism/heal, attack spells, special attacks, etc. Use them quickly and let them recharge during combat.

By the way, there is one combat skill which looks mostly useless but can be very handy, and it is called Taunt. This skill can be used (by you and by your enemies) to force a character to attack only the one who used the Taunt skill. If a skeleton uses Taunt then you can only attack that skeleton. This effectively protects the others until you kill the taunter, or the taunt wears off. On your side, you can use this to protect the weaker members of your party and let the tank take the hits.

As noted earlier, the storyline is what may be called “an oldie but a goodie” but after decades of dungeon crawler RPGs, it is getting difficult to come up with anything truly unique. In this regard, I don’t hold anything against the game.

Where the game could be better is the dialogue and voice acting area. The dialogue is a bit too predictable and the voice work is blasé; not horrible, just a little flat. Character interaction with the environment is also a bit less than stellar. While the world looks great, there are very limited elements with which the player can interact. If you scroll your targeting dot over something you can pick up the object acquires a luminous outline. This isn’t tragic, but with many games like this, you can investigate or smash or use almost everything in sight.

This does bring up one gripe. In the first level, you can see weapons racks in some of the rooms in the castle. They look like perfectly serviceable weapons, but you can’t use them. I personally think it would be better to show broken weapons on the floor or to just not show them at all, but that’s just me.

Moving around in the game is based on squares. While you can use the right JoyCon to look around in all directions, including up and down, walking happens with the left JoyCon. You can only walk in one of the four cardinal directions, no cutting diagonally across a room. To help with the square approach, you can use the left and right buttons to turn 90 degrees at a time. For a game which put so much into the visuals, this seems to be an odd limitation; however, once you get used to it the motion mechanics are not too bad.

Even with some oddities and limitations, Operencia is a fun game. It isn’t a fast reaction, finger twitching adrenaline fest, but it does engage and hold the player’s interest with good graphics, nice audio, moderately interesting characters, and a story with a few hooks and twists.

The post Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

[barbosaasouza]

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch)

In the land of Operencia, you get to enjoy some fresh air out of doors and hanging out with some friends (enjoy it where you can these days). On the down side, there is a cursed castle which needs to be explored. Oh, and don’t forget the dragon.

If you are not familiar with any of the other platform releases of Operencia, this is a straight-up turn-based RPG; you even get to do some actual (well, in-game actual) dungeon crawling.

As with a lot of the games for the Switch, this looks better and is easier to play on your TV than in the Switch’s handheld mode. Indeed, the game looks very good with interesting scenery, detailed dungeons, and lots of lovely monsters. The art ranges from novel forest scenes to dungeons with water on the ceiling, and the water effects are well done. Even the torches include details like embers floating away and the heat shimmer in the air above them.

Getting started is a bit odd; when you first launch the game you will play through a prologue before you get to the start with your real avatar. It was a bit disorienting to play for a few minutes with one set of characters only to have to start over with a new character, but if you know it’s coming (and now you do) it’s just a warm up for the main event.

Operencia has a fairly standard back story; you are the intrepid young nobody who received a vision in a dream. Now you are following your dream into a great adventure. Along the way, you meet some interesting characters and make alliances to battle monsters and defeat the big bad guy at the end of it all. While this path is fairly well worn and the dialogue is fairly predictable, the game does a good job of engaging the player so getting there is worth the time spent playing.

Once you are engaged in the story proper, the game does a decent job of introducing new elements and combat difficulty in a gradual way so you can get used to playing without dying frequently. The first “level” is the cursed castle where you get to battle some skeletons (very important at PN, those sword wielding skeletons), frog-man creatures, and the obligatory boss at the end. There are also some puzzles to solve along the way—which combination of levers do you need to pull to open the door sort of thing. The puzzles may not always be real brain teasers, but it does involve a little more than “kill everything that moves” gameplay.

By the way, when you do kill monsters, there will be loot to pick up. The game is not very good at explaining how to equip and use items you pick up, but it is not too hard to figure out. If you press the up arrow button on the left JoyCon, you get the character menu. From here, you can assign new ability and skill points, equip weapons and armor, and so on.

One thing the game does explain well enough is how range works in combat. There are three distances of which you need to be aware: close (melee range), middle range, and distant range. The further away an enemy is, the less effective your melee weapon will be. Inversely, the more distant the enemy, the better your range weapon will work for you. As always with magic attacks, spells don’t care about range.

Don’t forget—if you have someone in your party with magic ability, keep a heal spell handy (also known as herbalism). Feel free to use it in the middle of a combat session. No, really—use whatever skills your characters have as soon as you perceive a need. You have herbalism/heal, attack spells, special attacks, etc. Use them quickly and let them recharge during combat.

By the way, there is one combat skill which looks mostly useless but can be very handy, and it is called Taunt. This skill can be used (by you and by your enemies) to force a character to attack only the one who used the Taunt skill. If a skeleton uses Taunt then you can only attack that skeleton. This effectively protects the others until you kill the taunter, or the taunt wears off. On your side, you can use this to protect the weaker members of your party and let the tank take the hits.

As noted earlier, the storyline is what may be called “an oldie but a goodie” but after decades of dungeon crawler RPGs, it is getting difficult to come up with anything truly unique. In this regard, I don’t hold anything against the game.

Where the game could be better is the dialogue and voice acting area. The dialogue is a bit too predictable and the voice work is blasé; not horrible, just a little flat. Character interaction with the environment is also a bit less than stellar. While the world looks great, there are very limited elements with which the player can interact. If you scroll your targeting dot over something you can pick up the object acquires a luminous outline. This isn’t tragic, but with many games like this, you can investigate or smash or use almost everything in sight.

This does bring up one gripe. In the first level, you can see weapons racks in some of the rooms in the castle. They look like perfectly serviceable weapons, but you can’t use them. I personally think it would be better to show broken weapons on the floor or to just not show them at all, but that’s just me.

Moving around in the game is based on squares. While you can use the right JoyCon to look around in all directions, including up and down, walking happens with the left JoyCon. You can only walk in one of the four cardinal directions, no cutting diagonally across a room. To help with the square approach, you can use the left and right buttons to turn 90 degrees at a time. For a game which put so much into the visuals, this seems to be an odd limitation; however, once you get used to it the motion mechanics are not too bad.

Even with some oddities and limitations, Operencia is a fun game. It isn’t a fast reaction, finger twitching adrenaline fest, but it does engage and hold the player’s interest with good graphics, nice audio, moderately interesting characters, and a story with a few hooks and twists.

The post Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) appeared first on Pure Nintendo.

Review: Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Nintendo Switch) published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/