Another week closer to the end of this hellish year, and it’s actually been a pretty interesting one. I’m not really sure where to start with this quick recap, but I suppose Cyberpunk, being one of the biggest releases of the year, is a good enough place.
So yeah, Cyberpunk is finally out, and apparently it’s pretty shit. The two or three people I know who have been playing it have called it “Fine,” which isn’t really what you want to be hearing. Playstation has just straight up pulled it from sale, which is a bit of a “Holy fucking shit” moment, but given that I’ve heard the framerate described as “Less than cinematic,” makes sense. Oh, and in the time I started writing this, Microsoft has now expanded their refund policy for the game. And Best Buy is just letting you return opened copies.
Just in case CD Projekt Red didn’t have enough bad publicity, a re-release of Devotion was going to open on GOG, only for them to bend over backwards to big daddy Xi Jinping. I really love how other articles are calling the game “Controversial” when the only controversy is making a joke about him looking like Winnie the Pooh.
Also in the incredible fight against dangerous things like thought, Twitch has banned the words simp, virgin, and incel. Incredible. It reminds me of when we won WW2 by banning the term Nazi from being printed in newspapers, and saved the free world. I think they’d be better off banning some of the shitfuckers on their site who constantly flout their policies, but whatever.
So what did I do aside from work?
I played a decent amount of Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, and I was planning to do a writeup on that, but it looks like another level might come out next week on the 22nd, so I’m gonna hold off for a bit. Late night existential stream of that is here.
I’ve been too worn out to play more Amazing Cultivation Simulator, but I’m planning to stream some more. Last weekend’s stream of that is here. And I tried Sea of Thieves, but after playing an hour, it really looks like you need multiple people to really play it, so I’m holding out for some more folks to get it.
Just go play Super Mario Bros or Super Mario Maker instead.
If you already own a Switch, and already paid for Nintendo Online, you can download Super Mario 35 and play it. Maybe you’ll like it. Personally, I’m not impressed. If you don’t already have both of those things, it isn’t worth getting them for.
When I first set out to write this article, the opening to it was “Super Mario 35 is Fun,” but I’m no longer sure that’s true. What’s true is that Super Mario Bros is fun, and it turns out that if you modify it, it still remains fun.
But this is like putting truck nuts on a Tesla. For some people knowing that they have a pair of balls on their car gives them the strength to forge onward. I’m not sure why? And for some us, it’s like… Sure. Okay. But I’m not convinced I need those there. Or really want them. I don’t need a pair of rubbery dangly nuts.
Super Mario 35 is a weird thing to review for many reasons, one of which is that the game is only going be around for another 3 months or so. You also can’t actually buy it, you can only get it if you have Nintendo’s online membership service. The best thing I can say about Switch Online is that I like being able to visit other peoples’ Animal Crossing islands and outside of that, it’s just about worthless.
So yeah. It’s a time-limited title that you get for “Free” if you spend $20 to subscribe to an online service that makes dial-up look like Google Fiber, and it’s actually mostly just a Battle Royale strapped to a 35 year old game.
Ed Note: I just realized that this is why it’s called Super Mario 35. That might actually be the cleverest thing about this game.
There really isn’t much else to say about the game honestly. It might be worth downloading if you already bought a Nintendo Online switch membership, but like… Super Mario Bros is 35 years old. It’s older than I am. It’s older than most of my friends. In that time, Nintendo made a bunch more Mario games. They’re still making them. Play those instead. Download a ROMhack, or even just get Super Mario Maker 2.
I can usually find something redeeming in pretty much any game I play, but anything redeeming or interesting about Super Mario 35 exists because of Super Mario Bros, not because of this weird… experiment. It’s “Ice Ice Baby“, something built on top of something else that was really good, but every time I hear it, I’d rather be listening to “Under Pressure“.
While looking for gold, I found silver. Better than finding lead, worse than finding gold.
Editor’s Note: this article was mostly written during the week of the 2020 elections. Then it wasn’t posted. Whoops.
Writing about games this week felt a bit like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, so instead of any big full reviews, I have bunch of thoughts on some things I’ve been playing, even if none of them really stuck with me.
Just think of this article as the digital equivalent of a list of abandoned animals looking for a loving home. Except in this case, I’m the one who abandoned them.
Okay, that fell apart pretty fast, but the core takeaway is just because I don’t like a game doesn’t mean you won’t. If you like the look of a game, clicking the name will bring you to the itch.io page.
Of the games on this list, I think I liked Airships the most. Like the name suggests, it’s a game about building 2D airships and commanding them around.
Much like with other vehicle construction games I’ve played though, after a bit, I kinda just got bored/stuck. There are a bunch of single player missions and an auto-generated campaign with customizable difficulty to play through, but they didn’t grab me. I suspect a large part of the loop of construction games like this is either making small improvements and testing upgraded ships, or trying to build ships and ideas around a gimmick or trick.
If Airships was the game I liked the most, Midboss was the one I wanted to like the most. The pitch is simple: an isometric, turn-based roguelike where you can process the bodies of enemies you kill, learning and absorbing their skills. It just never really grabbed me, though, and after maybe 7-10 runs, I put it down and picked up something else. The body snatch mechanic is cool, but often runs turned into more tedious chains of trying to build myself back up after losing a valuable body, and being kicked out.
From what I played of WitchWay, it’s a puzzle platformer. You are a witch. You have a magic wand, and you can use it move blocks. Blocks have their own rules and twists on how they can be moved. And then I stopped playing. There wasn’t really a special reason for it or anything, I was just… done.
It’s a roguelike, in the classic sense. In both classic senses. Like, in the sense that the entire UI looks like it’s projected onto a CRTV, and also in that it’s a fairly standard procedurally generated dungeon crawler. Unlike everything else on this list, which I would say is the game equivalent of “Just Not For Me Thanks,” Haque’s graphics actively made playing the game harder for me (although they are incredibly on theme). There are sliders to turn off various effects and such, but even with those, reading and understanding the UI annoyed me too much.
IN CONCLUSION
I’d say they’re worth checking out if they sound like your cup of tea. I wanna stress that none of these were bad, so much as they never grabbed me. They’re good, well made games, just not for me.
It’s 2D Fortnite for Furries. If you like any of the words in that sentence, you should probably try it, since it’s free.
Sometimes when I write “reviews” for this blog, I feel obligated to play a given amount of a game, or reach a certain threshold before I give my verdict. Then games come along that remind me that I write these articles because it’s fun, and also because when I’m asked “What do you do for fun?” “I write a blog,” is a more adult answer than ,”I think about Pokemon cards.”
The astute reader may note that for a Gametrodon review, it’s taking me a long time give my thoughts on the game, the mechanics, or if I even like it, but surprise! The actual summary was in the excerpt all along.
Super Animal Royale is 2D Fortnite for Furries. It’s free, you can download it here, it’s on Steam, and it’s generally pretty fun. There’s no pay to win bullshit or gacha, though there are a bunch of cosmetic microtransactions.
Is this enough? Can I now go back to wishing that Champion’s Path boosters were less expensive, and wondering why Shiny Charizard V is $400 dollars?
No? I should talk more about the game? Fine.
Part of the reason I don’t have too much to say on the game is that with a few exceptions, there’s nothing here I haven’t seen before. That shouldn’t take away from the game’s quality and polish, but all in all, you have a tiered weapon rarity system, a battle royale where you drop from a giant flying vehicle, a few different game modes, and a battlepass/exp challenge system that might have been copied straight from Fortnite.
Okay, so outside of all of this, the game does one VERY interesting thing that I haven’t actually seen before, and actually makes me think that more games should steal this system: the way it handles healing/health power ups.
In Super Animal Royale, you have a great big health jug. Instead of having bandages or potions, any health juice you pick up just goes into the jug. When you want to heal, you drink from the jug.
And that’s it! No more having to carry around 100 potions. No more having to figure out if you should carry 5 bandages or one Med kit, because the Medkit heals more, but can only be used once, and the bandages can be used on smaller wounds, but are much slower.
Instead, whenever you run over juice, it gets picked up, and added to your health jug.
I think more games should do this. Screw fiddly potion management. Just let me stuff all the healing items I pick up into my great big heal box, and whenever I need healing, I just take a big sip. It’s like Jungle Juice but for liquid bandaids.
Look, I don’t have too much else to say on the game. It’s free. It’s more or less Fortnite. If the screens looked interesting, or if the game looked fun, just go download it and play it.
PS: We streamed the game a bit. And by we, I mean me and another friend who I work on random projects with. You can watch it here if you want to know more about what the game plays like.
PPS: Oh, and the game has bots, which is something everyone who makes battle royales at this point should just do. Keeps the matchmaking time down, and means that even suckers like myself can get kills.
Good polish, neat mechanics, and some flaws that make it quite frustrating at times.
Ed Note: The game looks way better these screenshots might imply. Everything has a very nice vector art feel, a feeling that was absolutely destroyed by my image compression. Whoops.
I think you should play Loot Rascals. Generally, I’d say I like the game.
Has the lede been unburied? Am I now free to waddle forward and backward between comparisons to other games and ramble about dissonance? I am? Fantastic. Let’s roll.
First, a bit of context, and some info on Loot Rascals: it’s another game I grabbed from the itch.io Racial Justice Bundle. It’s a roguelike, but as far as I can tell, without any between run progression systems. A run consists of five or so levels (I’ve only ever gotten up to 3 before, so there might be more), consisting of randomly generated maps on a hex grid. You control a spacelady or spaceman that you choose at the start (same stats, different sprites), to get through these levels by fighting monsters. You have three stats, Attack, Defense, and HP, and monsters have one stat, Attack/HP.
I know what you’re thinking. No, it’s not a typo.
When you and an enemy occupy the same square you fight, with the time of day determining who gets to hit first. There’s a day/night system and manipulating this system and trying to land the first hit is a big part of the game. The math for combat works something like this:
If the player is attacking, they deal damage to the monster equal to the player’s attack. Player attacks deal damage equal to the player’s attack stat. Monster attacks deal damage to the player equal to the Monsters attack/HP stat divided by the players defense. If the result is less than 1, that value is the chance for the attack to still go through and hit. If an attack hits, it deals 1 damage.
The big takeaway I want you to make is the following: Any attack that hits has a CHANCE to inflict damage, even if the chance is very low. This is going to be important in a bit.
Okay, so we’ve talked about stats. We’ve talked about how they work. But how do you get them?
The answer, of course, is cards. Or card blocks. Your inventory looks like this.
Yes, I know, the Boot Helmet and the Orbital Bowls should be switched, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.
Cards in the main section give you stats. Cards in your stockpile on the right do not. There are a few other different types of cards, like the Chronoflange one, that don’t give any stats, but change rules about how the game works, and also elemental cards, that give access to special abilities, like setting things on fire, teleporting, or creating decoys.
So with all of this said, I have two big problems with Loot Rascals, and they have to do with randomness and telegraphing. Lets talk about the randomness first.
A lot of roguelike games use procedurally generated or random-esqe levels in order to increase replayability. Spelunky, Slay the Spire, and Binding of Issac are a few that come to mind. However, none of these are really random. Instead, they tend to follow certain patterns or rules regarding how they function, and those rules can be learned and exploited. Spelunky will always have a dog in the level. Each floor of Binding of Issac will always have a treasure room to find. Each floor of Slay the Spire ends in a boss fight. The levels for Loot Rascals though, appear to be almost entirely random, and occasionally this means you end up in starting locations that are simply bad, forcing you to take early hits and lose health just to access the rest of the map.
In addition, since card drops are almost completely random (certain enemies will always drop certain elemental cards, but I haven’t found anything of the sort for normal stat cards), you can spend a lot of time trying to farm card drops and get nothing, or you can get one or two good drops early, and use them to clean up an entire level. It’s frustrating, because it just ends up feeling like straight luck.
This feeling of randomness is also present in the damage calculation. Because of the way hit chances work, if you end up in a fight, and the enemy gets to attack you, there is ALWAYS a chance that they deal damage. It’s frustrating, because parts of the game can end up feeling very “Push your luck” as opposed to tactical decision making.
The second big gripe I have is with how the actions that enemies will take are telegraphed, and I’ll just be referring to as telegraphing from now on. Every enemy in the game has some form of movement pattern. The Ratmen will run away, Ogre will move every other turn, the half-horse/half-seahorse Horse Bro will flip combat sides… and I can’t think of any more to list, because I haven’t been able to actually figure out how they work. I have no idea how Bola aliens work, just that they go in circles. The game doesn’t give you any information about where Bounty Hunters will aim their next shot, or how a Webbers’ webbing actually works.
The thing is, because of the situations the game puts you into, it often feels like you’re supposed to have this information, and then make the best choice based on the information.
A few other minor quibbles: you can’t save in the middle of game. There are a bunch of disconnected social components that just don’t seem to work. I wish it didn’t feel like there was an optimal build for any given situation. It would also be cool if you had some ability to choose cards for your build.
Outside of all this gameplay stuff, the art is really solid, if a bit cute, and the voice acting was enjoyable enough for me to mostly not skip it. I liked Loot Rascals enough for it to get it’s own whole little writeup, and like I said at the top, I think it’s worth playing. But there were also quite a few mechanics that mostly just frustrated me.
