Author: MrBlueSky

Chico’s Rebound
I’m just kinda sitting here, staring at my screen and trying to figure out how to introduce Chico’s Rebound. Given that sentence, you can probably tell that it’s not going great, and that I’ve been forced into some sort of meta-narration, because otherwise I am going to sit here until the flesh rots off my bones and the sun burns out.

Chico’s Rebound is a sort of follow up to Chico and the Magic Orchards, a game I wrote about a few years ago. It’s also not really a follow up, because while the characters are the same, the core gameplay really isn’t. Magic Orchards was a sort of light puzzle game with some exploration elements.

Rebound instead takes it’s inspiration from that clasic iPod¹ game breakout. If you’ve played Breakout, you know the basic deal. If you haven’t… well. It’s pretty simple. You have a ball, and at the bottom of the screen, you have a paddle of some sort. You bounce the ball off the paddle, and when it hits bricks, they disapears. Get rid of all the bricks to clear the level. Pretty much just PvE pong.

I really hope we all know what Pong is?

Anyway, that’s what Chico is cribbing off of, a souped up version of Breakout with more mechanics. It also has some other mechanics, including overworld exploration, and some puzzles, but the less said about these, the better. They’re not particularly fun, and I found myself struggling a fair bit with them when it felt like I shouldn’t be².

Instead, the main thing here is the variants of Pong. There are a lot of fun ideas here. One world has fire and water powerups that interact with growing and burning down plants. Another ghost themed level lets the ball swap between corporeal and phantom states, ignoring platforms in the other modes. Another world has a set of mushrooms that swap colors when hit, and can only be destroyed by hitting a matching colored switch.

These are good, and pretty fun. Unfortunately, this is where most of my praise ends, because Chico’s Rebound is doing some really weird stuff with how it controls, and to explain why, we need to talk a bit more about Breakout and how progression in Chico’s Rebound works.

Most of the time in Breakout, any connection of the paddle to the ball launches the ball back up, with the ball reseting only if it’s dropped and goes off the screen. In Chico’s Rebound however, you can regrab the ball by just touching it. Instead, if you want to keep the ball bouncing, it’s necessary to do an input to have Chico do a tailspin. If you fail to do that input, Chico just grabs the ball, and then you can relaunch it.

This would trivialize the game, making it very easy to just clear all the blocks with no risk, except Chico’s Rebound has a scoring system, and to cut to the chase: unlocking more levels ultimately requires beating previous levels at certain score thresholds. Getting higher scores requires high combos, and losing the ball offscreen OR catching the ball both drop the combo.

The end result is that you need to be doing this tailspin input constantly, and if you mess up at all, even if you were in the right part of the screen…. you probably have to restart that specific level.

It doesn’t help that this generally felt a bit inconsistent at times, and I found myself dropping hits I’d thought I’d done an input for, and I found this frustration with the controls overwhelming most of the enjoyment I got out of the games unique level mechanics.

The game also has bosses. I generally liked them, but some almost require you to patiently regrab the ball and wait. Those are a bit less enjoyable.

Chico’s Rebound was $8 and 4 hours long. I don’t really regret it, but I wish I could recommend it more strongly.
1. Apparently iPods are retro now. If this makes you feel old, you are welcome to join me in this shallow grave I will be digging for myself shortly. ↩︎
2. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Chico’s Rebound’s overworld, but it’s so disconnected from the games main mechanics. Imagine each time you wanted to play a level of Mario, you had to solve a crossword first. That’s the energy here. ↩︎
April 21, 2026
Welcome to the slightly newer and mildly improved version of Gametrodon.

Hello there.

You might be looking at the website today, and wondering if my WordPress installation has finally been compromised by Russian bots.

Have no fear. This is still the same old Gametrodon you politely tolerate and read occasionally. For better or for worse, I’m not planning to change anything about how I run this blog. Well, mostly nothing.

Gametrodon has been an interesting project, probably approaching 5 years in length, and like any project, that means its been around for some ups and downs in my life, and I’ve updated it with remarkable stability all things considered.

That said, there’s a ridiculous amount of cleanup that could be done on the site. There are close to 430 posts, and more then 800 images. Most of the posts are lacking in metadata and featured images, and virtually none of the images have alt-text for folks who are visually impaired.

This layout adjustment is mostly so that I can start doing some more changeups, as I’m aware not everyone wants to hear me talk about events every two weeks, and would rather read my thoughts on games, even if they do sound like they’ve come out of the mouth of a slightly concussed sloth.

The end goal is turn Gametrodon into something a bit more user friendly with a modern theme (I will figure out how to add search bar to mobile) and let folks see all my recent posts, while ignoring stuff they might not be interested in.

It’s been a weird 5 years. Here’s to another, better, 5.

April 21, 2026
Single Player Magic The Gathering
Recently I promised a friend that I would make them a single player Magic: The Gathering experience. This is funny for a lot of reasons. Mostly that the person in question is a game designer who loves single player games, and I’m a game player who hates them. But a promise is a promise, and so I spent a lot of time playing single player magic.

And I have some thoughts.

I’m going to detail those thoughts, various game modes, and my experiences with them. I’m pulling them from this list on Board Game Geek.

Also, in case anyone who made any of these ends up reading this: please keep in mind, I’m a hater. I already don’t like single player board games. I’m doing this mostly for research on my end. Don’t make changes to your mods to try to please me of all people.

The Wrath of Zorr

The first one in the list, Wrath of Zorr, is possibly the least interesting to me, both from a play and design standpoint. It’s a standard game of Magic where you roll against a series of tables, resolving effects and creating tokens for the AI opponent.

Notably, it appears to be from 2013. The problem with this is that creature power has been substantially pushed up since then. I was able to grab one of my commander precons, shuffle in the commander, and beat it to death with ease.

Zorr’s turn 3 best outcome is arguably to get a 1/1 flier and kill spell, or a 1/1 flier and a 2/2 bear, whereas a 3/3 for 3 is practically the floor for creatures in the precon I was using.

Wrath of Zorr also requires the player to make a lot of decisions about what to kill, when to attack or block, and redefines existing magic terms, notably completely changing what “Exile” means in context.

I suspect that 15 years ago with creature power level much lower, this could have been a more interesting experience. As it was, I found it dull and clunky.

Aaron’s Solitaire – Moonfrog Edition

Aaron’s Solitaire is another single player variant that uses a single deck between the human and AI player. The player plays a normal game of Magic, and the AI plays cards off the top of the deck for free.

Aaron’s Solitaire suffers a bit from the same problem, despite coming out in 2019: creatures are too strong when they aren’t controlled by mana costs. This time though, it happens in a slightly different direction, because it allows cards like this to pop out on turn 1.

Do you know what happens when this occurs? You lose.

Same for this guy.

Again, I didn’t find this mode to feel very much like playing Magic, and I didn’t exactly have a great time.

Horde Mode + Garruk the Slayer

Horde Mode was the first one of these I’ve played that offered something that felt a bit closer to standard Magic experience. While the player plays a standard game of Magic, the opponent plays with an 80 card deck, and that deck also functions as their life. On each of their turns, the AI player resolves up to the top 3 cards of their deck (Stopping early for mythics/rares/uncommons) and then swings in with everything.

I’ll give Horde Mode some credit here. It was more fun than the other modes. But it was still not very fun, because I found it to mostly be a deckbuilding puzzle rather than a gameplay puzzle¹, and the deck I built was this abomination.

Still, the deck as life was cool! I liked that.

Takeaways

Based on playing these, I came up with a few specific design goals for my single player variant.
1. The game should play like Magic (no custom cards, no redefining keywords, all rules work normally), but it shouldn’t feel like a standard game of Magic.
2. The player should have to make some interesting decisions about how to “play” the game. Meaning you shouldn’t be able to win with just deckbuilding. (Also, boardwipes and control lists should be at least somewhat pressured.)
3. The AI’s actions should not be super random, and if anything, should be telegraphed to player within reason.
4. The AI and player should be on roughly even power curves. The AI should be limited by mana costs to some extent.
Anyway, I made a prototype of it. The result was something I’m calling Spiderman Vs The Portal Master. It was well received, and probably violates a lot of copyrights. Given how well it went over, I’ll probably go back to it at some point and make a version I can release for folks to play if I find the energy.
1. And despite what some people think, I do think Magic is a game about piloting decisions, and not just deckbuilding. ↩︎
April 16, 2026
Spring Cleaning Write-up

It’s been a little bit hasn’t it? In the interest of cleaning out my backlog of unfinished work and making it so that I don’t have to look at 18 drafts every time I log into this website, here’s a bunch of stuff I played enough to have opinions on, start write-ups, and then just never finish them.

Order is going to be how good the games are, because one of is these is simply one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, some are the greatest games I played last year, and some were only marginally better than taking the money I spent on them and setting it on fire.

Without any adieu or whatever, let’s begin.

Blue Prince – The greatest puzzle game of the last 10 years.

I started a Blue Prince write-up after “beating” the game, then went back and played another 50 hours, and I have still not beaten the game.

Blue Prince is one of the greatest games in the last 10 years. It is easily the greatest puzzle game I have ever played. If you have not played it, and you like puzzle games at all, go play this. I took notes playing this game, and even with the screenshots, my Blue Prince google doc is 170 pages long. And yet the game never felt overwhelming, or extensively frustrating¹.

Blue Prince is a masterpiece. It is brilliant, and you should play it. The rabbit hole goes as deep as you want it to.

UFO 50 – 50 incredible games from Derek Yu and other collaborators for a video game console that never existed.

You know what was great last year? UFO 50. I played a bunch of UFO 50, I was going to try to review it, then it turned out that was going to be too hard, so I was going to review a single game from UFO 50. That was Avianos, a dinosaur themed 4x game with action selection mechanics, and I couldn’t even get that done. So yeah. UFO 50. It’s incredible. You will find something you love in it, and that’s ignoring all the other secrets and collectibles, and a billion other things I never even touched.

High Tide – Abstract tile movement game by Marceline Leiman

I don’t know how to write a good review of an abstract ocean themed game about hexagon movement, but I’m not a full time game reviewer. Dan Thurot is, so I’m just going to link to his review, and hopefully that makes up for stealing the images from it.

One thing I do want to quickly note is that it now has a commercial release, instead of having to make some sort of eldritch deal to get one of the very limited night market copies!

Hytale – Minecraft, but not finished, but also designed by people to whom “quality of life” is not just 13 random letters in a row.

What if Minecraft was designed by someone who cared about player experience on all levels of the game, instead of keep in a perpetual state of stasis by suits at Microsoft who are so scared of ever making any adjustments to their 2 billion purchase that Roblox already ate their lunch? You’d probably get Hytale, and if the game goes and manages to actually ship all of its content instead going back to development hell, it is going to be the best one of these crafting games.

It’s a big IF though. Like a HUGE fuckin’ if.

Gundam Card Game – I keep thinking it’s spelled Gundum, but I guess that’s wrong?

It’s fine. Resource structure similar to One Piece, mostly entertaining to play, and nobody’s scalping it quite as hard as some of these other games, so that’s cool.

Donkey Kong Bananza – I keep spelling “Bonanza” correctly, which is wrong.

I was going to put Donkey Kong Bananza here, but then I realized I’d mostly already finished this writeup? And never posted it? I think because I got laid off almost immediately after getting it to 80% complete. Anyway, you can read that write up here.

Highguard – Lessons should be learned here, but they won’t be.

It lived, it died, we hardly cried. The most notable thing about Highguard to me is that it’s not the very bottom of this list, but you can’t even play it if you want to, so who cares?

Age of Darkness: Final Stand – The worst RTS I have ever played.

It is rare that I play a game that fails on every conceivable level, while still somehow making it to release. Age of Darkness is that game. It is so shockingly bad that even just thinking about it again, more then a YEAR after I last played it brings to mind a list of problems burned into my brain. Here it is!

The game’s networking is awful and it disconnects in multiplayer constantly. The game is micro intensive while requiring equally expansive macro. The units are both hard to control and incredibly dull, with no single character matching the personality of zergling, space marine, or zealot. There are no alternate build paths, the campaign difficulty is a brick wall, the game just looks bad, and as a result of all of these it just isn’t fun to play.

There is nothing redeeming, and nothing it does better than its ancestors or contemporaries. It’s not even bad in an interesting way, it’s just awful and I want my $28 back.

I’m not even going to link to it. They don’t deserve it.

April 14, 2026
Donkey Kong Bananza
Writer’s Note: I got laid off about a week after writing the majority of this article, forgot about it, and came back to it in mid April after getting a new job. So if this write up feels a bit temporally disconnected, that’s why. I also don’t feel like changing it at all, because even 4 months later from my initial write-up, my Switch 2 has been at best a Pokopia machine. I feel mildly ripped off by getting a Switch 2.

One of my Christmas presents (from myself, to me) was a Switch 2. I’ve been cautiously looking at the Switch 2 for a while. I was going to write “the last few years” there, but apparently this thing came out in June? Like, last year June?

2025 was a very long year.

Anyway. Switch 2. I was gonna ride it out for the long haul and pick one up second hand or something, or wait a few years, but then the invisible hand of the free market decided to divert the entirety of the world’s rare minerals into the Plagiarism Machine we’re pretending is artificially intelligent. RAM has quadrupled in price, other computer parts are looking to do the same, and dear reader, being the savvy fellow I am, I realized the game consoles are also made of computer parts!

Anyway, I now have a Switch 2. It was $450, came with Mario Kart World, and I also grabbed Donkey Kong Bananza, Pokemon Legends Z-A, and Kirby Air Riders¹. Oh, and Pokopia. Each of these was $70. $730 for 5 video games. So when you think about it, about $165 per game.

Donkey Kong Bananza is not a $146 game. It is maybe a $65 game, and that is STILL less than I actually paid for it.

I should probably talk about gameplay, but I’m not really going to.

Nintendo doesn’t launch consoles without a some sort of flagship game, and for the Switch 2, that was Bananza. Instead of a Mario platformer, though, this time we got a Donkey Kong one.

Bananza is a 3d platformer and its primary gimmick is terrain deformation. A fair portion of most levels can be destroyed, or picked up and thrown around. I’ll be honest, it’s kind of hard to describe in words, so I’m just gonna link Dunkey’s video. It’s a bit of a cop out, but I’m not sure that you’ll benefit much from me describing traversal mechanics for 4-5 paragraphs. If the game had just come out, I might do that, but it’s been six months. Instead, I want to talk about how the game made me feel, cause it’s a bit of a weird one.

When I think back on Bananza, I don’t really remember all that much. The game itself is like a sort of weird fugue state. There were no moments where I found myself particularly excited, or came up with something I thought was a particularly clever solution.

Instead, the game was more like 16 hours of primal id. Early on, you get access to a set of special transformations, and because of how charging up to use these transformations works, it’s possible to just chain them together one after another. Turn into a giant monkey, shred everything, get enough gold to refill the charge, repeat. This wasn’t all of Bananza, but it was a lot of it.

On the flip side, I find myself very impressed with Bananza as a game, from a design and technical standpoint. I found myself constantly wondering how the terrain deformation actually worked, or trying to figure out how you’d design a level to generally keep the player going where you want when they can just grab a section of the floor and use it as a surfboard, or blow up half the level looking for collectibles. How do you make it so that they can’t actually block their own progress, or get REALLY lost?

And yet, despite how impressive it is, I don’t really find myself enthused by it. So maybe that’s worth talking about for a bit?

A Great Craftsman with Poor Tools, and Vice Versa

Something I often hear repeated about Super Mario 64 is how invigorating it was at the time. The idea of 3d graphics, the squishy Mario face on the start screen with real time 3D deformation. I don’t know if this is true. I wasn’t really around for that. But my understanding is that this was indicative of an exciting new future, where games had much more power and space to work with.

In a similar sense, it might seem tempting to look at Bananza and envision an equally exciting future for the Switch 2, but I have my doubts. For starters, we already know that the Switch 2 is under powered compared to other consoles. Looking at Bananza’s terrain deformation and gameplay and being enthralled by potential is like being excited by the balls a contact juggler uses.

The “magic” isn’t in the balls after all. It’s in the developers, level designers, and programmers at Nintendo, not in the Switch 2. My personal computer is far more powerful than any of the consoles, and none of the games that have caught my attention over the last few years have really used that power for meaningful game mechanics. Instead, it gets used for higher and higher fidelity graphics most of the time.

And as an audience, we’ve seen what the next generation Pokemon game looks like! It looks depressingly like the last generation Pokemon game. So I don’t have a huge amount of hope that the elegance in design and mechanics is going to translate to games that non-Nintendo developers make for this thing!

A bit more about price for a moment

The price of games generally doesn’t bother me. I say generally, because games are my primary hobby, and I don’t mind spending money on my hobby. Mostly. The PC I’m writing this on was around $4000 all things considered, and I’ve gotten thousands of hours of use out of it.

That said, I feel like I got a pretty bad deal with the Nintendo Switch 2. I’ve spent $800 on this thing for 5 video games. Two of those games I found to be weirdly mid (Mario Kart World, Bananza), two I haven’t cared enough to actually play (Air Riders, Pokemon), and 1 has been pretty good (Pokopia). I’ve spent $730 bucks on a single “pretty good” experience so far.

It does not feel worth it.
1. I haven’t even opened my copy of Pokemon or Air Riders, and the 2 hours of Mario Kart World I played did not sell me on it whatsoever. ↩︎
April 12, 2026