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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Neon White was my suggestion as well. Ultrakill is fun but is going for a more Devil May Cry style game where score and style matter significantly.

    Neon White i found a little confusing at first until I got the feel of it. Its a movement puzzle game, with some shooting. Precision and repetition are key to learning the levels and beating them quickly, and once you get into its groove, time flies by. For being a time-challenge game, I find it surprisingly relaxing and forgiving.


  • A Call of Duty RTS? Only if they brought back WC3’s Heroes, and maybe gave you a whole Company of them to manage.

    RTS’s need a massive new hit to redefine the genre. The starcraft style is stale and too slow for how most people game today. I’d kind of enjoy seeing people take another shot at where C&C4 and AoE3 were trying to go: something more tactically oriented with a greater emphasis on mobility. I think that era of RTS innovation got completely hamstrung by trying to force every game to not only have multi-player but also to be an esport and also to be a live-service endless money machine.

    You may note that games today are still being ruined by the same forces.



  • It’s so good! The purist expression of factory building: no costs, no distractions, just automation.

    It has a great concept too in the space layer. The game is played initially on a grid like any factory game. But then you can zoom out to a higher layer where you can place chunks to define the build able area and build “space belts” which essentially codifiy the main-bus style of building. (You also get space trains, which are like trains in other games.)

    I “beat” the basic campaign and hopped back over to Satisfactory since 1.0 came out, but I’ll go back to shapez when I finish there. I hope they add more complex and tricky buildings and requirements, the challenge of assembling an efficient build in shapez is just so interesting and fun.




  • B&W was a real fun game, very interesting ideas and it really tried to be different from other games in ways that did and didn’t work.

    We really take control and camera schemes for granted these days, but it took a lot of misses before we landed on the semi-standardized methods we rely on now. B&W portrayed the player as a divine hand, and you had to click and drag to literally “drag” your viewpoint around the map. You could also click on the creature to lock your hand onto it and allow you to gently move the mouse to pet it, or rapid swipe to slap it across the face!

    The creature responded amazingly well too, reacting to many stimuli in the environment, mimicking actions you take, and responding to rewards and punishments. The systems of morphing it’s character model based on how far along the “devil to saint” meter were reused heavily in Fable. MS probably has a patent on the technique, the fuckers.

    Anyway, super exciting to see fans reverse engineering it! I’m a big supporter of remaking classic games as new open source engines. I think projects like Spring (rts) and gzdoom really show how powerful and creatively productive a community that cultivates good, open, tools can be.


  • I’ll controversially say that I really love the Steam controller. Not the steam deck (which is honestly my number 1 if we’re including handhelds) but the original controller intended for use with the steam link device.

    It really just needs a right analog stick and it would be great. The lack of one takes it from 10/10 to like a 7/10. It’s so good otherwise, great weight and size, good design. Sensible layout and the big track pads work really well! It was clearly a prototype for how the Deck layout ended up, though I actually like the controller’s big circular pads more than the decks little square ones.




  • Eh, I might buy it on sale since I already have the other Castlevania collections on Switch. They’re convenient to play and I liked the portable games quite a bit. Ecclesia is probably my favorite in the series!

    But yeah, also, emulating on Steamdeck would probably be better, but more work to set up and hunt down ROMs.

    Speaking of Ecclasia, why did the DS have such great entries in several series? Days of Ruin is also my favorite Advance Wars game, and I feel like both were later games, darker in tone than previous, with actually good use of the touchscreen.



  • The developers of the game Blasphemous (The Game Kitchen) are working on a new game (The Stones of Madness) which is visually inspired by the works of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, commonly called Goya, who did a lot of paintings but is perhaps best known for his unpublished (until after his death) “Black Paintings”, the best known of which was post-humously titled “Saturn Devouring his Son.”

    The game is in the genre of tactical stealth, similar to classics like the Commandos series or the recent Shadow Tactics. In this genre, you control a group of 1 to 5 units each with distinct abilities to overcome obstacles, most commonly enemy guards patrolling for intruders, which all characters can also avoid by using various stealth-game techniques (hiding in shadows/bushes/behind doors, climbing things, knocking guards out and so on).

    The author of the piece feels that the plot and setting are reminiscent of author Umberto Eco’s work, in particular a work called “The Great Escape” which I actually can’t find so maybe it’s called something else in English. His most famous work, In the Name of the Rose, is set in an Italian monastery so maybe the author meant that one, or maybe Eco wrote a lot of abbey-based mysteries? (Eco is also well known around here for the essay Ur-Fascism, which provides the most commonly referenced definition of what fascism is.)

    I think the Goya influence is pretty apparent in Blasphemous as well, but I think the devs are broadly inspired by the art and history of Spain, because they live there.