Leon's Microblog – November 2020

Just, don't ask. https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=151391

and I think it reveals what intuitions game designers have about "HP", where it's analogous with raw body mass, characters being bags of flesh that are "emptied" by hits and shots and "filled" by food. HP as this abstraction of "health" clumsily forced back into the concrete.

Based on a couple of developer comments, 'ne 2 is simply a straightforward allegory for outgrowing an evangelical childhood rather than specifically a commentary on the medium (yes, even given the inclusion of "metacoins", collectable coins literally named after Metacritic).

To me, though, it seems obvious 'dyne 2's story isn't addressing those games, or the violence/love dichotomy they deal in (and the earlygame doesn't really cast your actions as being motivated by "love" so much as service, an obligation to a cause).

*gulps down an entire glass of water, then spit-takes with a completely empty mouth* HEY, THIS ACT HAS NO CREDITS?? You finish the end cutscene and it just… goes back to the title?! Did they just… FORGET to put them in? Who the HELL made this game?? Who are they hiding?! Who ar

Me (represented by the eggblob from the puzzle game Petal Crash on the left) every single time I encounter an NPC in Hiveswap Act 2 (represented by the fiendkin from the same puzzle game on the right)

Harvester is a game where Western social undercurrents of violence, cruelty, inequality and hypocrisy are shockingly laid bare by townsfolk representing various facets of society, who slowly indoctrinate the player until they accept that society really desires murder, rewards it.

I'm REALLY glad I watched footage of Harvester (1996 point-and-click) before playing Hiveswap Act 2 (2020 point-and-click) because the final chapter in this basically retroactively turns the entire game into Harvester.

These are all problems that could be solved by writing multiple valid routes through each testimony (instead of just the same structure Phoenix Wright used 19 years ago) or just more solid playtesting. Anyway, I recommend mashing the tiny question-mark hint button liberally here.

Note for the wary: this game has an Ace Attorney minigame in it, and while the character writing in it is surprisingly good, it suffers from the standard Ace Attorney puzzle problems: evidence that can be used too early, testimony with multiple apparent contradictions, the usual.

I'll shout out this song and its remixes. You spend half the Act listening to them, and they nail the sensation of being surrounded by nice commuters who were raised to be utterly deranged, and know it, and are ashamed of it, and are also literal children. https://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/ticket-to-ride-rusty

If you're the sort of person who really, REALLY loves animated fighting game backgrounds while also REALLY never once having played one, let me say that Hiveswap Act 2 has a lot to offer.

I will say, though, that the bog-standard point-and-click narrator is still capable of genre-typical humour, such as this "emergent joke" across both playable characters.

This one, though, has over thirty onscreen characters, and thus the narrator character's sad demise, while still very noticeable and jarring, is nonetheless soon forgotten about.

That being said, though… I actually think this isn't that big of a wound on this game. ACT 1, as you know, had a total of 3 onscreen characters, so the narrator in that one really had to carry the whole game on its shoulders, and the bulk of text was item interactions.

Lategame spoilers: there's a serious horror-themed level, and its tiny plot is exactly the horror taste I love – namely, the antagonist is written in a sympathetic and foolish fashion. Even the first time it kills, it's loosely implied it did so to do the player a favour. Bless

Anodyne 2 has a number of unlockable developer-commentary areas called "Unzones", many of which use the engine's default skybox and shape primitives, and I was REALLY hoping they were going to borrow a joke Oikospiel did, and refer to the totality of Unzones as "an Unity".

At last someone gets me

SAME ENERGY

SAME ENERGY

'dyne 2's protagonist's design (Nova) reminds me a lot of Xexyz's Apollo, another game which blended fantasy and science-fiction into something distinctly its own, and which featured a space-suited silent hero receiving orders from various nebulously-defined authorities.

People have probably concluded that this game is like Glittermitten Grove (for obvious reasons… and actually, that game REALLY would have been improved with an Anodyne 2-style framing story), but I most enjoyed this game when it reminded me of Oikospiel.

I'll say this about the game's shrinking-and-cleaning: I do appreciate that it's not quite legible as Fantastic Voyage-style medicine, it's not quite legible as cyberpunk hacking, and it's not quite legible as Psychonauts-style dream-entering, and is its own indivisible concept.

Which is a shame because there's a lot of seeds and hints of greater depth – there's a subplot involving a school bully seeking redemption that ends up going barely anywhere – and there's a lot of good environment designs (WAY better than Anodyne 1).

Really the most disappointing part of this game is how predictable the plot turned out to be. The characters don't really have arcs, and with the exception of one chapter, the conflict progresses fairly linearly. This really has the plot of a AAA game.

So, like. Random philosophical question here. At what point does an Epic Gamer Reference stop being a reference and start being plagiarism

Lemme tell ya, just when you think you're at the end, it starts tossing dungeons at you like they're about to go rotten. "What? Dialogue? Story? No, you're filling out your skill trees and equips. Here's sackloads of currency, plus sackloads of a new currency I just invented."

Chroma has aged well as an allegory for the Internet circa 2000: excited at new modes of human communication, fearful of existing racial and sexual prejudices being simply reinvented across it, and, most importantly, ending abruptly with its plot unfinished, like a true webcomic.

Bad news: the inter-chapter navigation links inside these files crash the player when activated, so this isn't an ideal preservation of the work. Nevertheless each chapter in and of itself is complete, and remain fully responsive to mouse input.

This game turned out to be much more of a straight dungeon-crawler than what I'd expected, which is a bit *types "unfortunate" and then backspaces all of it* disappointing. Also, the game really loves its own battle system… which is my way of saying "select easy difficulty".

2020-01-01

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Same energy https://twitter.com/goodvideozone/status/827307654024413184

One final note: the game comes with a file listing various "Content Warnings" for the story. I've crossed out all the entries I'm convinced are jokes (or listed insincerely) and added my own (opinionated) remarks about ones which I believe are slightly or strongly misleading.

I got the true ending! I love this crappy game! 7 out of 10!! The magic rating! Also there's like 15 endings and the multiple conditions for the true ending were only outlined in the changelog.txt for some reason!!!

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My current uninformed speculation is that the creator is a well-meaning fellow who would nonetheless take five seconds to recall what the last two letters of LGBT stand for. That said, I have played zero of his other four games, so who knows what I could extrapolate from those.

In the game itself, only a few sore thumbs stick out: the main character at one point describes her sexuality (lesbian) as "being allergic to wieners". Also not a good sign, and one which also produces a few mercifully brief jokes about "hermaphroditic" shapeshifting dragonfolk.

It's been hard for me to squint at what this Saintbomber guy's politics is, since his only social media presence is one Patreon and one abandoned dA from 2012. The game's credits thank 4chan's yuri board (/u/) for playtesting… which I don't consider an especially good sign.

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Importantly, most of the relevant tracks are from the Jazz section rather than just the Cool and RPG-style sections, lending this game less of the usual tiresome JRPG bombast and more of the playful tone befitting this game's polycule of jokers.

You might've noticed by now, but all of the music (minus a few generously donated tracks) is from the MusMus royalty free soundtrack library https://musmus.main.jp/english.html (also known to aficionados as "the REAL default RPG Maker and RenPy music").

After you clear each dungeon, the game's villain adds mandatory encounters to the overworld, explained via this – how would you uncouth Americans put this – "PC98-ass cutscene". Ironically, this is an EXTREMELY good way of reminding you who the otherwise very distant villain is.

Another warning: it's obvious that this is a "got sick of making the game" release rather than a "final" version. Typos are noticeable, a few cutscene splashes use placeholder or sketch art, a few NPCs have "TODO" dialogue, as well as the aforementioned lategame balance issues.

As for the mechanics: the random encounter rate is refreshingly low, and most of the combat is pretty balanced, though in lategame the ability to purchase level-up potions, plus a few overpowered hidden spells, lets you brutally hammer the difficulty curve into a sheet.

Word of warning: this game's plot hinges on a LOT of character family tree references. One should strongly consider making a diagram on paper if you want to understand what they're talking about as the game goes late. It's a goddamn Wizardry dungeon of genealogy here.

The meat of the game is really the interstitial inter-party dialogue. This clip essentially represents what it's like to play it. The dialogue maintains this exact volume, tone, and back-and-forth throughout. The door in this clip isn't even plot-relevant for God's sake.

Additionally, most of the game's monsters and bosses are monster women who are frequently topless, though their designs are not – shall I say – as overtly sexualised as more explicitly pornographic works.

Regarding the game's R-18 content: this RPG stars several mid-20s cis noblewomen with long sexual pasts with each other, and have onscreen sex (with each other) about once every 90 minutes of play time, and spend the rest being handsy and giving each other access to their bodies.

The MTG corp periodically making "new" Lotus cards is hilarious to me because the original, apart from being banned, isn't even fun to play with. It's like if each new Mario Kart added different blue shells to the roster, and proudly advertised each blue shell's new features.

Mother 3 even has a final "Black Lodge" dungeon in the vein of Harvester's, consisting of a seemingly endless gauntlet of dreamlike, thematically dissonant rooms, gradually indoctrinating the protagonists in the belief system of the antagonist, ultimately asking them to love him.

What I find interesting are its similarities with Mother 3… The latter features an encroachment of capitalism (again invoking "idyllic" 50s suburbia), and the corruption of the natural world, culminating in a completely fake metropolis dedicated only to worshipping the Pig King.

This environment forces the protagonist to become increasingly accepting of all of these forms of violence, ramping up to the final scene where he willingly performs a literal, actual Mortal Kombat fatality on a begging woman.

Harvester's main point (often obscured by its misguided marketing) is satirising the "inherent" violence of videogames, by presenting a world set in an "idyllic" pre-videogame era (the 50's) suffused with normalised forms of violence: colonial, military, institutional, sexual.

I remember in the back half of the 00's that Mother 3 was touted as "the closest videogames have come to literature" but this game feels identically aspiring to allegorical literature exactly a decade earlier. (Not to say that it's good. Both games have comparable failings.)

99. "No! You can't stick a fork in me here! I only learned how to cook mac and cheese!" 100. "This battle is being recorded for training purposes. Potty-training, that is! ...Y-you're all babies."

97. "By the Blessed Pollen of the Vast Spring Bloom, HEAL ME YOU TURDS!" 98. "Always bring sharp pencils to a final exam!"

93. "Half the matter in my bodysuit isn't in the Periodic Table yet." 94. "Whatever author is writing my life: stop making the enemy so hot!!" 95. "Armour strong. Helmet strong. Sword strong. Enemy... stronger." 96. "My sectors are corrupted! Email me a patch, quick!"

90. "My connection to Command is dead... so it's time to use the classified mech weapons!" 91. "Human minds are so soft and pliable! It grosses me out!" 92. "No psychic tricks or wizardly conjuring can beat the sheer might of being 6 foot 1."

87. "My ultimate may be ready... but are the lights and the cameras?" 88. "These wings will carry me to the edge of victory! These arms will slowly lift me up to it!" 89. "No prism can refract the colour brown. Mud will always swallow the light!"

84. "Call me any name. But, if you call me late for dinner... I shall be most displeased indeed." 85. "Every crack you carve in my body will be covered by moss by century's end." 86. "Take my phone! My number ends in 58008! I want you to have it!!"

81. "Time for a true show of ventriloquist skill. My dummy... has a DIFFERENT VOICE-ACTOR!" 82. "Spin cycle! Full-strength powder! The stains of my shame will be washed away today!" 83. "While you're healing me, can you fix my makeup? Just kidding... I'm all natural."

77. "The strongest Light comes from searing Flame. You want Her, you get Me too." 78. "BOOM! Two pair! The double katanas of Poker hands." 79. "Vertical paper... Only a coward uses that throw." 80. "My blade was forged in a volcano and cooled in the deepest of peat bogs."

74. "The Earth is dying beneath us! I can barely channel mana for my necromantic spells!" 75. "Your bullets hit only my self-preservation chips!" 76. "I am done weeping. Now to fight with utter calmness and rationality!"

71. "The humble spear: Heavy, long, and slow, like all the coolest swords." 72. "Being psychokinetic, even an arrow can become a deadly weapon in my grasp." 73. "There's no Dewey Decimal Number for an event like this!"

68. "I appreciate the healing, but I expect my personal physician shall scowl at your handiwork." 69. "I'm like a frog. It's impossible to boil me." 70. "Push me over, and I'll use martial arts to switch places so YOU fell over instead."

65. "My inventory is full. I can't take any L's today." 66. "Only a fellow master of the rules of Backgammon can hope to match wits with me." 67. "By Mother Nature's blessing, let me delete the hostile processes from the sector!"

61. "I've been sliced up like ribbons so often, I figured I'd wear 'em!" 62. "Being a robot, I can't feel gratitude for healing me. Go to hell." 63. "Rise, vengeful dead! N-not if you're vengeful at me, though." 64. "The black wind blows... That NEVER happens this time of year."

58. "The animals aren't my servants. They merely owe me a few gambling debts." 59. "My body is an obstacle to my will. Rocket-jumps let me surpass it." 60. "Mr. Bear, the enemy is scary! 'Grr, stop doing ventriloquism in battle! Grr!' Sorry!"

54. "My ultimate was always ready. I see now it is I who was not." 55. "Forget SOS, I need SMS! Save MY Soul, damnit!" 56. "It WAS an honour to serve. Now it's just for survival." 57. "Fight fire! I don't care what with, just fight it!"

50. "Balance the books, balance the soul." 51. "Wish they'd issue us healzookas... Or just invent them." 52. "I'm the spider, you're the fly. Your words bounce off me and stick to you." 53. "Ha! You stabbed into a wound I already just got!"

46. "My ultimate ability is not even CLO- wait nevermind it's here." 47. "I am a scion of the Void, human. Healing me doesn't make us friends." 48. "In close-quarters combat, I offer no quarter." 49. "My only peers are the ones I eat in fruit salad!"

41. "I'm like caltrops. I always land right-side-up." 42. "Don't be scared! Stress ruins the brain's taste!" 43. "Remember, add acid to water... if you're a WIMP!" 44. "I only need one arrow. Let's find out which one." 45. "If I die, I die. If you die... YOOOOOOU die. ;-D"

37. "I'll devour your memories... and have your body for dessert!" 38. "My ultimate ability is not even CLOSE to bein' ready yet!" 39. "There's no wall I can't outsmart, and no pit I can't outmuscle." 40. "WHEW! Another battle successfully just begun."

33. "Thanks for reviving me. I might bleed to death twice today." 34. "Every inch of my beard is a year of arcane study!" 35. "It seems I rocked when I should've scissored." 36. "Blood is just muddy water. Let me return it to the ocean."

29. "Someone check my ultimate's meter! I think I heard it ding!" 30. "Meet my left arm. Only part of me that ain't utterly dominant." 31. "Need a good tailor? I need a good pincushion." 32. "You'd be a perfect test subject. Pity I lost my tenure!"

25. "Cover me! I need to wash off this blood before it dries!" 26. "Health kits to my left! The same health kits are now to my right!" 27. "No! I keep my spare test tubes in that pant leg!" 28. "Thanks for the healing! Now off to undo all your work!"

21. "10 Print Hello World? More like 10 Billion Zillion Print Hello UNIVERSE!!" 22. "As the cosmos moves in a circle, so too do I strafe." 23. "I'm a gamer, so I THINK I know how to kill a grown man, guys." 24. "We need backup! Preferably in front of us!"

17. "A sword is just a tool. A sword plus Extend-O-Arms is one HELLUVA tool." 18. "Hit me, dealer. I've got x-ray vision, so I can see your cards' bones." 19. "The way I see it, all o' THEM defected from MY side." 20. "I've hit homers off pitchers with tighter pants than you."

13. "The only blade worth wielding is the rollerblade!" 14. "Rudimentary physics: Force equals mass TIMES ANGER!" 15. "Behold my huge brain! My huge, soft, jiggly brain!" 16. "Can you keep up with my dance moves? Nevermind – this part's my solo."

8. "Even a mere twig can give a tender foot major ouchie-wouchies." 9. "By my hatbands! What in the Celestial Brim is this?" 10. "We are all so beautiful beneath all this skin and flesh." 11. "Only another cyber-assassin can best me!" 12. "Activating STEAAAAAALTH MOOOOOODE!!"

4. "Actions are pure. Words are deceptive. Especially "masticate"." 5. "Should my sword break, I guess I'll poke around out back for another one." 6. "Stand and fight! Hover and fight is good too." 7. "I'm starting to think them rotters can respawn too."

Good ending! The final chapter's split-party battle is particularly good at always having another plot twist to deploy just before you switch viewpoints, such that you paradoxically always feel like you need to hurry up to get back to the "real story" every time.

This game having the same kind of "dialogue tree song" as in Kentucky Route Zero, complete with voiced lyrics, in the same chapter number (3), is oddly comforting, like I'm seeing a game subgenre be slowly born.

OK, listen. This tweet is important. Remember the guitar minigames from Night In The Woods? Remember the shame and frustration they were designed to callously elicit? What we've got in this game is a loud, screaming parody of that exact experience.

Cinematic parallels

I will say that the new combat sprites being very specifically Lucah-inspired, to the point of commissioning animations from one of Lucah's devs, is a very powerful move for this series.