Gametrodon

Author: MrBlueSky

  • Level 99 – A Quick Review

    This has been more of a travel and event review blog as of late, hasn’t it? I’ve went to Winter Weirdness, played some One Piece TCG, won some Magic. In between all of that, I’ve been doing a lot of work on Card City Critters, designing and drawing a whole bunch more cards!

    Even with all of that done, Granite Game Summit is just about 2 weeks out, and PAX East is just a bit after that.

    Oh, and yesterday, I went down to Natick to try out Level 99 for a friend’s birthday.

    Level 99 is a giant collection of real world physical puzzles and minigames located in the Natick Mall.

    One minigame required running through a line of swinging axes like a real life version of Sens Fortress, while another involved sliding pucks up a giant pinball board to score points. Some are more physical, like a giant set of monkey bars that you have to climb across while tapping buttons on a wall. One was a collection of riddles where you have to match names to photos.

    There’s also subset of head to head duel games. If you’ve ever seen one of those videos of people playing augmented reality pong on a rock wall, it might have been from Level 99. Most of the duels are a little less sophisticated, but there was a weird sort of a quidditch/dodgeball thing that I thought was quite clever.

    There’s also a sort of art/scavenger hunt thing, but I didn’t find this bit super compelling. Fortunately, like most things at Level 99, you don’t have to spend time on things you don’t really want to do. Almost all the challenges are 2-5 minutes long, and if you come out of something disliking it, you can just move onto the next one.

    In order to really explain what I appreciated about Level 99, I’m gonna have to be a bit of pessimist for a moment. Sorry.

    Most branded arcades I’ve been to as an adult are actually not super fun. Funspot is an underwhelming tourist trap of often broken pinball tables. Most machines in a Dave and Busters are pretty much just slot machines for children.

    Outside of things like lightguns and driving rigs, I’ve yet to encounter anything in these arcades that actually take advantage of their unique size and space to deliver something special in the gameplay department. And even said lightgun games are often underwhelming, mostly just reskinned rail shooters.

    To avoid painting with a super wide brush, there are a lot of places I’ve gone to that I’ve enjoyed, like the Barcade in New York, or Capital Pinball. But these are often the exceptions—carefully cultivated little spaces—as opposed to the norm.

    If you scale things up from your standard plug-and-play style machines, you end up with theme parks, which I different but honestly equally negative feelings about. I went to Universal Studios Florida a few years back, and while I remember being impressed by the production value, I felt like I was nickle and dimed from every angle, while also being asked to wait in long lines for 5 minutes of fun.

    Level 99 was $60 per person for the whole day.

    Nobody charged me to use a locker to store my bag and sweatshirt. Across the 7 hours I stayed, I saw maybe three games that were out of order. I saw two of the three fixed within an hour, one fixed with about 2 minutes of me mentioning to an employee that it wasn’t working. The longest I ever waited in line for anything was maybe 7 minutes, if even that.

    I am just so used to these sorts of spaces being designed and priced by someone who traded in their soul for an MBA. By the sort of person who uses the word “value extraction” completely unironically.

    It was just such a breath of fresh air to have a weird clever little gaming space that seemed to want you to show up, have a good time, and actually want to come back. Did they sell me a 12 ounce can of beer for 8 dollars? Yes, but that’s a small sacrifice to make for a space where all the games actually work, where all the lines are reasonable, and that costs me less than Battlefield 6.

    Overall, it’s fantastic, and I would love to go again as soon as every part of my body stops aching.

    A few final quick caveats or notes for anyone I might inspire to go to Level 99:

    • Wear comfy shoes and pants! You are going to be moving around a lot.
    • Level 99 isn’t really designed as a “kids first” space. A lot of these puzzles require people to be either fairly dexterous, or at given level of strength. A 6 or 7 year old would have a better time a normal playground built for their size.
    • Likewise, I wouldn’t go alone. Most of these puzzles are team based, and require AT LEAST 2 people to work. Also it’s much more fun to duel your buddies.
    • If you’re going on a busy day, you probably want to pre-register/order tickets in advance.
    • If you can avoid it, don’t go on a busy day. Go in the middle of a Thursday with no holiday/vacation/etc. The crowds never got bad, but they did get loud.

  • LinkedIn is Terrible for Communication

    Since getting laid off, I’ve had the experience of spending more time than I normally would (any) looking at LinkedIn. It has been an interesting experience, because I exist in the middle of two separate bubbles in that space: information technology and business process management on one side, and game development on the other.

    In the IT/BPM space, all public statements are universally enthusiastic about AI. On the flip side, the gaming space consists of folks like Chet Faliszek looking to start fistfights with every single person who declares that AI is the future and now.

    I won’t lie, this second bit brings me great joy. Currently, my BlueSky feed consists of almost entirely of people looking to feed Ryan Dancey’s career into a wood chipper after he suggested you could just replace game designers with LLMs.

    Again, great joy.

    Still, the thing I want to talk about is the first group. The BPM/IT space, and the various posts about how “the future is now, and it is AI.”

    Now, while I’ve said that everyone is posting that AI is the future, you might notice that I never said that everyone is saying or everyone believes that AI is the future. That’s because they don’t. I know at least a fair number of the folks posting about the joys of AI on LinkedIn either don’t care, think it’s bad, or actively loathe it, but because of current market conditions and messaging, they feel they have no choice.

    The problem is that LinkedIn is almost entirely a platform for social signaling, not for actual communication. There are exceptions to this, like Chet. If you have adequate social or monetary capital, you actually can treat it like you would the YouTube comment section, or alternately, post your real opinions.

    But I didn’t write any of Portal, so if I go onto the L’OREAL page, and say that their partnership with NVIDIA for some AI powered makeup is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen, I’ll never get a callback.

    The incentives aren’t to have open or interesting discussions about business, challenges, or exciting new developments. The incentives are to go along with whatever everyone in upper management currently believes. Even when doing otherwise might be better for everyone.

    Anyway, it’s kind of unfortunate that LinkedIn requires all of us to engage in a large scale version of the emperor’s new clothes.

  • Quick Lorwyn Draft Review

    Last night I got a chance to draft some Lorwyn! I’ve been curious about how this format would play in draft ever since the pre-release. My local game store, the Fourth Place did an event, so I figured I’d take the opportunity and head over. (Side note: If you’re ever in the area, you should stop by. It’s a great store.)

    I would like to say that since the pre-release, I’d practiced and learned the set. This would unfortunately be a lie, because outside of a few drafts on arena, I have done zero prep. I hadn’t even bothered to look at a pick list.

    Instead, I had a simple plan: ignore what everyone else was doing, and force Blue/White Merfolk.

    This was it. The extent of what I’d learned from my digital drafts was that Tributary Vaulter and Shore Lurker could take people to pieces, and that Gravelgill Scoundrel made it possible to push through clogged boards.

    So yeah, that’s what I did. Spoiler alert: I won the pod.

    It is a deeply uninspired list, but still managed to be solid. Perhaps the only notable thing about it is the lack of rares, with Deepway Navigator being the only one. It runs 24 non-lands, and has 2 cards with mana value above 4. It also runs zero one drops. Pure and simple, it’s very much a “just find a way past them” style list.

    The games were a pretty swift set of matchups, going 2-1, 2-0, and 1-1-1, followed a Bo1 playoff I won.

    I don’t know that there’s anything I can even learn from this. While there were some close games, and I did take a few losses, it was almost always dependent on my opponent getting out something like Virulent Emissary or Scarblade Scout to have a bit more extra life, and slow down my early turns. The moral of the story seems to be that “fliers are good” and I kinda already knew that.

    Overall, I have mixed feelings about Lorwyn as a sealed and limited set. Ignoring aesthetics and theming, the mechanics have never really clicked for me. While I was initially worried about the lack of removal during the sealed pre-release, draft has made it pretty clear that there actually is plenty of removal. At the same time, the very low number of counterspells remain a bit weird.

    In the one to two dozen games I’ve played of draft Lorwyn Eclipsed, it has never really felt super fun or exciting. They’ve been tense! It’s felt good when I’ve won, or pulled out of sticky situations, but I’ve never had any huge moments of dropping a bomb, or feeling like I’ve figured out something incredible, or spotted clever synergies.

    Some of it may just be the colors I’ve drafted. Merfolk arguably have the least interesting play pattern—mostly just tapping creatures through card effects. But there are only 8 convoke cards under rare, and only two are instant speed.

    I like winning in Lorwyn. I just wish I liked playing a bit more.

    As a final note, I’ve seen some complaints/comments online that the set really pigeonholes you into your archetype, with very little space to branch out. I don’t think I’ve drafted enough of the set to make the same statement confidently, but it does seem accurate to the experience that I’ve had so far.

    Also, I promise I’ll go back to writing about games instead of just things I’m doing shortly, but despite losing my job, it’s been a weirdly busy last few weeks.

  • Green Mountain Gamers – Winter Weirdness 2026

    I got back late last night from another Winter Weirdness, one of the events hosted by Green Mountain Gamers, which organizes tabletop game days in the Vermont/New Hampshire area. I quite like these events.

    They’re very lightly structured events. Folks bring their personal games to the event to lend to other people for the event, and then just spread out to play.

    As always, I’ll be talking about what I played, what I liked, and anything else about the event that strikes my fancy.

    The games I brought

    I brought a smattering of stuff, including Mottainai, Combo, Trio, Pride of Ninja, Brightcast, Blaseball Wild Cards, and the first LoTR trick taking game. These were all small, and I was able to to stuff them into a bag. I’ve linked the ones I’ve done reviews for, but I enjoy all of these, and someday I really need to give Trio its own write-up.

    Image of 7 board games, LoTR trick taker, Combo, Trio, Brightcast, Mottanai, Pride of Ninja, and Blazball
    The 7 games I brought
    Game time

    First thing I did once I got there was crack open my copy of Pride of Ninja, and recruit a few people to play with me. I’ve been interested in Pride of Ninja ever since I first saw it two years ago at PAX Unplugged, and having actually managed to buy a copy this year, I finally got a chance to sit down and try a full game.

    I really like it! It’s a pick and pass drafting game with two small twists: first, after everyone takes a card, players either reveal that card, and place it in a front row slot, or keep it hidden and place it into a backrow slot. This means that as the draft goes on, you get some information about what your opponents are doing, but it’s still possible to hide key pieces.

    Second, many of the cards work in such a way that you actually need to care about what your opponents are doing, and a few cards can be effective tools for either punishing your opponents, or drafting off their success. What I really liked about these cards, though, was that it never really felt particularly painful to be on the receiving end of these plays.

    Pride of Ninja is great.

    Next up was Moon Colony Bloodbath. This was a weird one.

    Moon Colony Bloodbath is a tableau builder where you build up, and then lose your tableau. Well, you do if you’re me. If you’re winning, less of said tableau ends up blown away by accidents, infighting, and malfunctioning robots. The player power graph goes up, and then it goes way, way down.

    My feeling on Moon Colony Bloodbath is a decided sense of “Hmm.” I don’t know if I disliked playing it because it’s a bit undercooked, or because I just lost every game horribly. During the back half of the game, once my starting supply of colonists had been whittled to nothing, and I was forced to liquidate buildings, there was a sort of dull sense of a boredom instead of a comedy of overconfident self-destruction.

    Moments before everything is liquidated and destroyed.

    It felt like the final turns of a game of Terraforming Mars, where instead of doing anything interesting, you just min-max for victory points, as there isn’t enough time for any grand scheme to actually come to completion.

    I also have a really weird complaint about the game’s art and theming. The game feels like it wants to be doing a sort of 1950’s-60’s pop-sci/science fiction style. I think this is a really good theme, and standing alone the art is fine if not great. But in conjunction with the rest of the game’s mechanics, it feels like the artist was never in on the joke. Every location is played fairly straight, and every robot just looks like a generic robot. It feels like no one told Franz Vohwinkel that each of these colonists was going to meet a horribly grisly death.

    Anyway, with those two finished, I switched over to a few quicker games. This included a few rounds of Tiger and Dragon, a quick playthrough of the first level of the Lord of the Rings Trick Taking Game, and a short game of Combo. No notes here except maybe a reminder to myself that I should actually do a writeup on Combo one of these days.

    After all of that, I played Panda Royale. I don’t like Panda Royale. This might be a bad game. It’s got an aggravating draft order system, dull dice types, pointless and tedious arithmetic, and the theme has absolutely zero connection to the mechanics of this sloggy roll and write.

    This was followed up by doing a 4 person draft of Edge of Eternities to round out the day. Unlike the other several times I’ve drafted this set, I actually did quite well this time, and manged to win almost all of the games I played.

    And then it was time to leave.

    Oh…

    The Barre Social Club

    This event was held in Barre Social Club, and I just want to note that it might be the single most beautiful space I’ve ever been in.

    There’s all this great old furniture, and the walls are covered in old maps, magazines, playbills, and other fun bits of old paperwork.

    Like, just look at it.

    Oh, and this bookcase?

    It’s a secret door!

    Okay, not that secret, it leads to a kitchen space, but like… still! Isn’t that cool?

    It’s a coworking space, so if you’re in Barre, it’s worth checking out. Anyway, that’s all for me right now. I’m gonna see if I can write something to put up for today about a specific game. Talk more later.

  • Holo vs Robo – a Plants Vs Zombies inspired Hololive Fan Game

    I tried to cook bacon this morning after removing 2-3 feet of snow from around my car. As a result, I type this in an apartment filled with a grey haze—like a small cloud of carcinogenic fog has decided to take a nap—sprawling from the kitchen toward the living room.

    None of this has anything to do with Holo vs Robo, but if at any point my thoughts wander a little too far, it’s probably from the smoke inhalation.

    Anyway. Holo vs Robo. It’s a Hololive themed Plants Vs Zombies clone. It’s a perfectly okay game, if (currently) a bit underwhelming in some areas. If you like Hololive, and never played Plants Vs Zombies, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t know what Hololive is, it’s a Japanese VTuber company. And if you don’t what VTubers are, you can either watch this video, or live in blissful ignorance.

    On the other hand, apparently Plants Vs Zombies came out 16 years ago: back when I still had hope for the future, and joy in my heart. And given that it’s been turned from a lovely polished single game, to a franchise that included a class-based shooter (that I actually really liked) and a billion terrible mobile games, I figure it’s probably worth discussing the mechanics at least a little bit.

    Gameplay

    Overall, this is a tower defense game. If you’re not familiar with the genre, it goes something like this: waves of enemies spawn in, and you need to build structures to attack and stop them from reaching your base. When I call Holo vs Robo a Plants Vs Zombies clone, it’s not because the two are both tower defense games; it’s because HvR pretty much lifts all of its mechanics wholesale from PvZ.

    This includes things like the pre-battle screen. Here, you’ll select the up to 8 units you’ll be able to use in the next battle, while on the right side of the screen you’ll get a preview of the enemy types you’re going to face. Enemies start out as fairly simple robots, and evolve into fancier versions as the game goes on, most of which are some sort of Hololive callback or in-joke.

    Once you’re in a level, you’ll spend Cheer (sun/money) to place down towers. Towers have a variety of properties, best demonstrated by going over the ones I have in the above image.

    Furthest on the left, we have Ollie, the red-haired one. Ollie doesn’t attack, but does generate additional Cheer to buy more towers. In the second column from the left, we have Gura (White Hair/Blue Shirt) and Aqua (Pink Hair). Gura shoots bullets that travel down her lane, and the lane above and below her, while Aqua shoots fast weak attacks down the lane she’s placed in. The green one is Fauna, who heals towers in front of her, and the brown haired one is Nodoka, who acts as a wall.

    So there’s your general list of tower behaviors: generate resources, attack, heal, or defend.

    You might notice that there’s no enemies actually visible on the screen, because this configuration of towers is killing them as fast as they can spawn. Aside from some special robots and a few specific level, this is not a very hard game. In my case, I found everything but the bonus content and sliding panel levels to be pretty easy, taking about 11 hours total to do 90% of the game’s content.

    Complaints and Praise

    I don’t think Holo vs Robo is a bad game, but that’s mostly because Plants Vs Zombies wasn’t a bad game. There are some things I am more tolerant of, and some which I am less tolerant of. There’re also a few choices I quite like.

    As a small gripe, the menu options is a bit shit. Following a grand tradition of a certain types of games, I had to launch the game with custom Unity flags to make it run on my ultrawide, something I’ve found myself doing a lot more than I’d like to as of late.

    As a larger thing, the game doesn’t really do as much to solve the fundamental problem of tower defense games: once you find a setup that works, you tend to just run that setup until it stops working. This was also a problem that Plants Vs Zombies had, but again: that game came out 16 years ago. While a few levels spice things up, there are still really limited options for Cheer generation, and many of the “good” units… just stay good throughout the entire game. As a result, I don’t really remember what I did during the last 10 levels prior to the finale.

    I did really enjoy a lot of the bonus content. There’s some fun goofy mini-games in addition to the story mode. The art for the little chibi Hololive members is pretty great.

    Overall, I don’t really recommend Holo Vs Robo to non-Hololive fans at the moment. It’s a perfectly fine game, but so much of the humor and enjoyment here is based on knowing Hololive in-jokes that I have to imagine it’ll feel like a bit of a non sequitur for anyone else.

    For Hololive fans, if you’ve never played the original Plants Vs Zombies, this might not be a bad place to try it out. It’s $7.00 on Steam.

    Side Note: As a Hololive fan, I was a bit bummed to discover that the Hololive member I follow (and who‘s on my computer case), Mori Calliope, wasn’t available as a tower, but instead as one of the single use powerups—and IMO, the worst one in the game. It’s a not tragedy or anything, but I can imagine folks who discover their favorite member either isn’t available (or just kinda sucks) being a little disappointed like I was. I wish the game did offer more ways to use each tower type. It’s a small thing, but something I did find myself thinking about.