I bought Dissembler for Tom and he loved it, and so did I. It’s a tile-flipping color-matching game, which normally I get bored with, but this one hooked me and I raced through the whole thing in record time. The learning curve was perfect. I almost never keep sound on during games, and I turned the music off here, too, but left the very satisfying flipping sound effect on. If you’re looking for a storyless puzzle game with a simple mechanism and a lovely look, I recommend this.
Also just played Fire Maple’s new p&c game Crookhaven. I like these games because they have huge maps, good graphics, and the puzzles aren’t really hard, so when I’m not feeling at peak mental performance, these games are perfect distractions. They’re about as close as you can get in a purely graphical video game (with some text story) to being IF, IMO.
Finished playing through Halo: Reach today. It’s been one of my favorites in the series for a while but I won’t lie, I think it’s just my favorite now (with Halo 2 close behind), at least in terms of the campaign. The story, the characters, the atmosphere… Just great. It’s just a well-done tragedy, and I’m a big fan of it.
Been really into StarCraft: Brood War lately. My brain tries to blue-screen when I play it, but I can analyze and understand why stuff works and why other stuff doesn’t when watching replays from other players.
I just pre-ordered the new Glitch Games game, Recursion, which will release on March 11. I am counting down the minutes, because I love Glitch so so much-- one of my top 10 developers. The games are all P & C puzzle/adventure games, can be quite difficult, and give you a lot of bang for your buck. If you haven’t played any, I recommend starting with the Forever Lost trilogy.
My sisters are making me play Warframe with them. It’s very hard for me. I don’t understand games where I have to move fast and kill things, especially in multi-player. I am old.
The last time I played a multiplayer shooter was Bungie’s Marathon with networked Macintosh computers.
Soon after that, I started yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
Bungie was the best game developer on Mac and was single-handedly keeping gaming alive on that platform for many years in the 90s. Mac users were feverishly waiting for Halo, knowing that the second coming was inevitable… then Microsoft bought them and released Halo as an XBox exclusive. Fuckers.
I play through the Midnight Scenes, a series of short, point-and-click adventures with pixel art graphics. The entire series is done in style of The Twilight Zone, with strange and creepy stories. Games are created by Octavi Navarro, Spanish pixel artist and game developer.
I should have been working on my Spring Thing entry this weekend, but instead I blinked and ended up 25 hours through FF7: Rebirth.
I thought Remake was just okay, but Rebirth essentially made every single thing I didn’t like about it better. Hell of a game. Hope we get Queen’s Blood in some standalone form.
I play through the Midnight Scenes, a series of short, point-and-click adventures with pixel art graphics. The entire series is done in style of The Twilight Zone, with strange and creepy stories. Games are created by Octavi Navarro, Spanish pixel artist and game developer.
I got those as part of the Ukraine bundle and enjoyed them. It’s kind of funny that monochrome games are so rare…this is certainly a justified use for it.
I started playing Firewatch, which I knew of as a first-person walking simulator, so I was surprised to find it had a whole prologue section that is essentially choice-based IF. Looking into it, I see some of the devs got their start as writers for The Walking Dead, so maybe that’s where the influence comes from, but honestly the interaction style felt less like that and more like a Twine game to me.
Another thing I was surprised to learn is that after that point, 90% of the gameplay is just orienteering, which I was always terrible at in Girl Scouts and am not much better at digitally, even with a map that shows your current location. Oops. The narrative is interesting, though, so I will soldier on even as I repeatedly get lost in the underbrush.
One is the little-known Pokemon Reloaded, which uses real-time arena battles instead of turn-based battles. In other words, it’s an action RPG.
I played an earlier version about five years ago, which was already very complete. After years of development it’s finally finished. It’s in Spanish but there’s an English option in the menu.
It’s quite different from most kart racers … it seems to have a bit of Sonic Riders in it, with a trick system and ring-management based boosting (similar to air management, if you’ve played Sonic Riders).
Some of the course design is a bit unforgiving but I’m enjoying it so far.
Back in February, I spent a couple days implementing a computer version of one of my favorite solitaire games: Penguin by David Parlett. It’s a variant on Eight Off or Baker’s Game, one of those perfect-information games where you lay out the whole deck face-up.
But most of that family of games are either boringly easy or they’re rarely winnable. This one comes out at least three quarters of the time, but it requires quite a bit of thinking and planning before you start moving. Certainly not everyone’s cup of tea but I like it.
It has been two and a half months and it’s amazing how much more I play this game when I don’t have to shuffle and lay out a full deck of cards by hand. I love being able to just sit down and code stuff like this.
