yashkonu

[yashkonu]

[yashkonu]

Big Horn

Horn with 5000 HP after a good nap. Can't believe I forgot to post Big Horn!

Check out the [Bluesky] post in case the censors take it down :P

[yashkonu]

a bunch of games i've played recently

it was going to be a more precise 'small games i played in june' because i'm trying to play more small games but life has been complicated so i'm doing this instead. this is as much journaling for me as it is posting for thee so! join me below if you feel like it

BAD END THEATER

a 2021 game by nomnomnami that i feel like i got to too late. i enjoyed it! a satisfying little exercise in choosing your own adventure that feels more mechanical than narrative despite largely being a VN. that said (and i've felt this way about a few other VNs too (don't get me started on slay the princess)) it left me hungry for a little more depth. in the same manner as slay the princess it feels like the necessary sprawling outwards of a story with this much branching leads to none of the branches having much meat on their bones--an interesting premise that can't possibly be explored much because the damage that would do to the scope of a game intended to be 1-2 hours long is cataclysmic. I think I'd have been more unambiguously positive about this one if I'd played it in 2021. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Umineko and the Type-Moon VNs.

CAN ANDROIDS PRAY

a 2019 game by Nat Clayton (who on poking around is primarily a level designer? neat). The itch page describes the game as sitcom-length, which is... possibly true on the shorter length of sitcom runtimes, but I don't think I spent more than 15 minutes with it. Fundamentally the game is one conversation between the pilots of two downed mechs, digging into questions of humanity and faith in the face of a selfhood you can't fully know. I wish were longer, because I really just left hungry for more of what it's doing.

PREY AT THE ALTAR

a 2024 game by mokadevs. Now we're cooking. A lot of my complaints in the other games I've talked about so far are about games maybe not quite doing enough with their scale (which is hard when you're making a short game!), and it's something Prey at the Altar nails. The game is something like a half hour long, and I genuinely felt like it did the most it could with every minute of that time. it paints a picture of a pretty fascinating world, drawing on but not just replicating real-world religious practice. the art is very cute. I really liked this one.

THE SIGNAL FROM TÖLVA

a 2017 game by Big Robot that I somehow only even heard about a month or so ago. No idea how I missed it, honestly, since it's exactly my kind of thing. I guess I was pretty busy that year. This absolutely isn't a small game, and I'm not done with it yet, but I'm far enough in that I want to talk about it a bit. It's something of a cross between a walking sim (a genre I'm not usually hot on, but I like the tendency toward narrative focus (just make a VN if you're not going to actually DO anything with the walking)) and a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. The player character is nominally a hacker, but you never spend any time *as* that hacker--instead, you hijack remote surveyor robots across the surface of a planet called Tölva where you've discovered (and seemingly become singularly focused on) a mysterious signal. Like from the name.

Embodying these surveyor drones is great. They're heavy and have a rhythmic tromping stompy sprint, they jump like they're carrying a backpack full of bricks and often slide erratically when they land. You slowly traverse the planet's surface, collecting resources and scanning objects giving off odd signals as you narrow down your focus to the one signal you're here for. Things get weird in fun ways. I'm something like halfway through and looking forward to the rest.

KOTOR 2

[with the resignation of someone who knows she's a parody of herself] a 2004 game from fuckin Obsidian and part of a franchise I don't like very much. I've been really stressed and played the whole thing in the last five days. I've made a few attempts to play this game before, largely because the people I know who pay attention to star wars have consistently said it's both good in weird and interesting ways and pretty much unique in the star wars canon (or pseudo-canon if you respect disney, which i don't).

Shit I gotta hand it to them they were right about that. They just don't do it like this and it's fascinating. getting it into a state where it's decent to play was a sort of a minigame all its own (bless this mod list from the ongoing A More Civilized Age podcast playthrough of the game for saving me a bunch of legwork) with all the classic fun of .ini editing and locking framerate in my GPU settings.

Even with all of that though, this game does sincerely suck to play. The combat is just not fun and while it's at times gratifying to see a buff completely turn a fight around or an upgrade make a generic item completely busted, it's just an endless slog of clicking the same handful of ability buttons on 2000 enemies. I think a lot about the recent (and ongoing, in some places) wave of games trying sooooooooo so hard to not be games, but there truly was another era where they were being games too much. Obsidian you don't need to put another room full of droids there please I promise. Why was the last map just endless empty rooms full of enemies with like two meaningful encounters.

That said, while playing KOTOR 2 is roughly akin to a 55 hour long game of slow tedious whack-a-mole, the narrative they're putting together is fucking FASCINATING. This will inevitably get spoilery but like these games are old enough to drink. The story spends a lot of time examining morality from angles that it can't mechanically support, often through the lens of a certified Character of All Time, Kreia. Terrific character. On top of some really great voice work by Sara Kestelman (who did a lot of shakespeare, and it shows), she approaches the world of a star wars game from a distinctly un-starwarsy angle. She frankly doesn't really care about good and evil--or more precisely maybe, she doesn't care about them unless they're useful to her.

I've heard that a lot of players don't love her, since in a number of conversations she'll find some way to chide you about your answer to a question or a problem regardless of which answer you pick. Literally, in some cases, you cannot give an answer she approves of. To some people I can see this coming across as hypocritical, but as is often the case with things that look like hypocrisy it's more a case of not understanding her motivations. She doesn't care about the answer you're giving, she cares about getting you to trust and rely on her! She cares about getting you to seek her approval and accept her answers to your questions! It's why almost all of the influence gains you get with her are from answers like 'I will consider what you've said'. That and the whole DEEP SPOILERS thing about you being a living ragged wound in the force itself, the last boss being driven primarily by a hatred for and yet a dependency on the force itself... they truly just do not do stories like this in star wars. It's great.

There are points where it stumbles in this which basically boil down to the systems of the game not really supporting the story they're telling and all of the dark side options having all the subtlety you'd expect from a 2004 star wars game. Real save the orphan/torch the orphanage stuff. Even with restored content mods there are a bunch of places where it's just painfully obvious that how much was left on the cutting room floor with this game, and we must never forgive lucasarts for giving obsidian 14 months from project start to release date to make it. Criminal. I'm never touching the game again.

[yashkonu]

[yashkonu]

electrologist: okay how are you handling the pain? just let me know if you need me to tone it down :) --- [VN PERSON]: If I think it doesn't hurt, then it won't hurt. If I think these aren't my follicles, and that they're just the follicles of some doll, then I won't feel pain, right? [CAREER MASOCHIST]: more pain than this several times over would still be in the realm of 'a good time' >[DESPERATELY TRYING TO BE NORMAL]: haha ok i'll let you know! :)

[yashkonu]

get lost old man i need to go misunderstand qui'lon's mechanics

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i'm just playin games

i know that's plastic loooove

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i get what's being attempted with the much lighter tone! i do! zeta got BLEAK sometimes and ended on a gut punch. this, however, is so not the way to go about making the tone lighter. 200 increasingly hard to swallow reasons why Fa can't accomplish anything and Judau has to come save the day. Every returning character from zeta has forgotten how to do, essentially, everything. no one's guns are working so the violence has to be non-lethal for a while but then all of a sudden it starts being lethal and no one seems to care.

i dunno! i think my problem with this is less the change in tone and more that the change in tone isn't done well.

well so far i think you could replace double zeta entirely with toy commercials set to crazy frog music occasionally interrupted by two minute snippets of gundam (also set to crazy frog music)

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well so far i think you could replace double zeta entirely with toy commercials set to crazy frog music occasionally interrupted by two minute snippets of gundam (also set to crazy frog music)

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estrogen definitely would not have saved kamille but he should have tried it anyway just to play havoc with the ideologies of half of the cast.

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i want to get through double zeta and cca and then im going to take a gundam break to watch something else. this is all part of a personal project of mine to get a bit more familiar with the mecha anime genre space, so it'll probably be escaflowne? gunbuster maybe? im not sure yet.

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ahhhhh it was still good though despite all the "tomino gives you his opinion on The Sexes" moments. the tail end really reminded me why i'm watching all this.

i keep thinking 'surely THIS is as bad as zeta gundam's baffling chauvinist bioessentialism is going to get' and then i'm wrong again

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AGAIN.

i keep thinking 'surely THIS is as bad as zeta gundam's baffling chauvinist bioessentialism is going to get' and then i'm wrong again

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indie fps Project Silverfish by @siristhedragon is slated to enter early access on the 26th. it's stalker with scalies. there's bullet drop and gunfeel. there's quiet exploration that shifts suddenly into tense looting amidst chaotic factional firefights. there's physics shenanigans and prop stacking to get into places you shouldn't. there's an unkillable revolutionary leader named mamma roach and you can give her your guns.

this is all in the free demo! i've been helping to playtest the EA version and it's got even more. it's really good, and it promises to only get better! the demo's also on itch and i believe siris is planning on keeping itch updated to parity with the steam releases, if steam isn't your thing.

check it out! wishlist it if you've been grabbed by any of this!

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I was bored so I put her in the void. Say goodbye to her now.

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PRISON OF HUSKS is a nostalgic soulslike that takes place in an abandoned painted world. Play the demo on Steam now!

[yashkonu]

the other thing about next fest is that you can make shovelware pretty quickly but as any developer will tell you making an actual game that you want to actually be good takes infinite time and isn't actually possible in our universe. so only like one in three next fests are particularly good, and in the intervening two you really have to root around for the gems.