I’ve been gone a while and am incredibly behind in what I’ve been playing. I’ll write up about what I’ve been playing (and beaten!) but this article is going to be a bit more somber.
Let’s rewind back to June of 2015. A company I’d never heard of, Campo Santo, published a reveal trailer for their first game, Firewatch. I was absolutely enthralled with it, I must have watched that trailer a dozen times easily.
This trailer gave me chills.
The art style and voice acting were superb, for the first time in a long while I was excited about a new game. This one absolutely came out of nowhere and I was cautiously optimistic. (Caution: Past here there be spoilers!)
Absolutely stunning visual style. Credit: Campo Santo
Eventually on February 9th 2016 the game launched on Steam and I bought it without question, I was so eager to start it. This time I was going to try out my brand new Steam Controller and play it on my 62in TV. When the game launched it was magic, my whole living room lit up with the beautiful colors. You play as Henry and the opening sequence is quick clips of you loading up a truck with a camping pack interspersed with a story of you meeting a woman, falling in love, and eventually marrying them. Each one of these little clips presents you with decisions to make that seem completely benign, but as the relationship evolves, the questions get a lot more complicated. Eventually your wife, who was an incredibly smart and accomplished academic, starts to deteriorate due to early onset dementia. You start sneaking out at night to drink at the neighborhood bar because taking care of your wife is taking such a toll on you. Eventually taking care of your wife becomes too difficult and she is placed in a home closer to her family. You take that about as well as can be expected, so you decide to run away to Wyoming and take a job as a fire lookout. So with your soul nicely crushed into a fine powder the game actually starts!
Hello darkness my old friend. Credit: Campo Santo
Once you arrive at the national park you are equipped with nothing more than a map and a compass to get to your assigned tower. No fancy GPS or smartphone. This game is the definition of a walking simulator, There’s no combat, just walking and occasionally picking up things, and playing it with a Steam Controller was absolutely sublime. In the beginning of your new job you meet your boss, a fellow lookout named Delilah whom you only communicate with via walkie-talkie. While you are going about your days, talking with Delilah and doing absolutely mundane tasks like pick up garbage and scold drinking teenagers, things start getting weird. The teenagers you scolded earlier disappear, someone breaks into your tower, you find a secret research facility, now you’re involved in some kind of vast conspiracy. Are all these events tied together? Who started the forest fire? Is the Government spying on you? what happened to the teenagers?
This game can generate infinitely enjoyable wallpapers. Credit: Campo Santo
While all this is going on your relationship with Delilah gets more and more intimate, idle flirting during the day, more serious talks at night. You’re both here because you’re hiding from your real lives, and that desire to escape brings you closer together. Campo Santo does a very good job of making you feel like you really are Henry, you decide what he does, how he reacts to events in the game, how he responds to Delilah, does he tell her the truth? Does he lie to her? That’s all up to you. It all feels incredibly real, and I loved it.
Life of a lookout. Credit: Campo Santo
Unfortunately by the end of the game you start to piece the puzzle together and it all kind of falls apart, not in a bad way game wise, but it falls apart for poor Henry. There’s no conspiracy, the secret research station was for tracking wildlife in the park, the teenagers got drunk, ran off, and are completely fine. The ominous specter was an ex lookout named Ned, who always brought his son with him to the job and whose body you find in a cave, having died from a climbing accident. He was interfering with you and Delilah this entire time because he didn’t want anyone to find his sons body and know that his son dying was his fault. He explains this in a cassette you find, you never catch Ned, he’s long gone by the time you listen to it. All of this turned out to be you (Henry) looking for a deeper and more complicated explanation for what was happening because you didn’t want to deal with what was really going on in your life. At this point in the game the forest fire is out of control and you need to evacuate, but at least now you can meet Delilah at the evacuation point and leave together. By now you’ve probably guessed that doesn’t happen either. Delilah is freaked out by what happened with Ned’s kid because she knew he was there but looked the other way, she’s also freaked out about what’s been going on between the two of you. Unbeknownst to you, she took an earlier helicopter out, so you never get to meet her either. One of the last things she says to you is that you need to go back to your real life and go see your wife. It hurts, it really does. You get on the helicopter and the game fades to black and the credits roll.
Spooky tower! Credit: Campo Santo
When the credits rolled I was absolutely awestruck. You’re supposed to win at the end of a game, this isn’t winning, you didn’t save the world, you didn’t get the girl, you accomplished nothing, I was pretty upset. It didn’t help that I was at a low point in my life and felt vulnerable so this game really affected me more than I was expecting.
The game really drove home the fact that even though Henry took this job to avoid what was going on in his real life, it was only temporary and he needed to eventually go home and face his problems. It’s hard not to see the parallel between that and the fact that most people play video games to escape whatever is going on in their current life. The message at the end of the game is very real: you can’t perpetually avoid whatever difficulties are going on in your life, eventually you have to deal with them. I was definitely affected by the end, I really wanted Henry to end up with Delilah but not every story has a happy ending.
Maybe that’s why the game’s conclusion was so polarizing for people. You play a game to escape and having it remind you that this is just a temporary avoidance of your real life is a bit of a downer. It certainly was for me, but I will still remember the game fondly, and still recommend it to people that are looking for a short game with a stunning art style and solid story telling.
A million years ago, if you wanted to play a good racing game you would play Gran Turismo (GT) on the Playstation 1. Then the original X-Box was released and they developed their own simulation racing game called Forza Motorsports. The game was well recieved and off we went! there was finally an alternative to GT on a different system. I missed the first one but I did hop onto the series with Forza 2 and Forza 4. I enjoyed Forza 2 immensely but Forza 4 had the Top Gear Test track, and voice over by Jeremy Clarkson. It was the best feeling taking a car around the Top Gear test track that I’d seen on the TV show a million times. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to driving around that track.
A few months ago I saw that Forza Horizon 3 was finally on sale so I picked it up and for the most part I really enjoy it. Forza Horizon is a lot more arcadey than the regular Motorsport series. It takes place in “Australia” and is completely open world. You drive around between festival locations and engage in races, sprints, photo ops, bucket lists and stunts. It’s got a fairly wide range of racing activities for you to engage in if you feel so inclined. The more races you win, the more fans you get, and the more fans you get the more festival locations you can unlock and upgrade.
Zoom Zoom Baby!
I still get blown away with how beautiful modern console games look, and I’m not doing anything special, I’m playing it on a 6 year old 62in, 1080p plasma TV. the game just looks really good.
I HATE HEIGHTS.
It seems as though Microsoft wanted to get as much random pop culture stuff into the game as possible. I was driving along the beach looking for a marker on the map and at the mouth of a cave I saw a Warthog from the venerable Halo series, and would you know, there was a race with it!
Boy was that squirrely to drive.
Half the fun is trying to take cool photos.
“Hey Grif, Chupathingy! How about that? I like it. Gotta ring to it!”
There is some definitely goofy stuff in it, they thought it was a good idea to include a Reliant Robin in it because………….reasons.
………..But why?
And in their infinite wisdom they decided to let people modify the car, so I put a high revving motorcycle engine in it and got the kind of results you’d expect.
That car is only good for going in a straight line, you can see how dented that car was and that’s just from me attempting to take a slow, wide turn and ending up a tree or in a gully, it was madness. They did include something from Top Gear, there might be more, I’m pretty far into the game and haven’t come across anything else yet. I was looking through the Horizon store at what was available to purchase or get for free and came across this beauty:
“Look at it this way. You will be the first person ever to go to the North Pole, who didn’t want to be there!”
It’s the Hilux from the Top Gear Polar special! The first people (I think) to drive to the North Pole, and one person who didn’t want to go! I upgraded the tires and added a stonking V8 to it and took it off some sand dunes for a good laugh. If you want to really see what madness is like get in a Group B Delta Integrale and go off those dunes at 100+ MPH, it’s a hoot!
Overall I enjoy the game, the environments are varied enough, the race types offer a good variety of difficulties. I only have one real complaint about the game and it’s the music. There are a ton of channels but it feels like they only have 5 or 6 songs and the radio announcer says the same exact thing. If I have to hear the radio lady talk about whoever did the 300 foot skid in front of her booth I will have to just shut off the music entirely and turn on Spotify. It’s so obvious it really takes you out of the game. BUT other than that I really enjoy the game and am surprised at how much time I’ve put into it.
Right now I’m playing Terraria again and am 15 hours into a new character and it’s the farthest I’ve gotten in the game. Good times all around!
It’s been too long, and the excuses would just be excuses. So let’s talk about No Man’s Sky.
So Pretty Credit: ElcaYouTube
No Man’s Sky launched in August of 2016 to…….not so great reviews. It was touted as a super crazy intergalactic game with limitless possibilities to how you can play the game, with an infinite number of randomly generated planets populated with an equally infinite number of animals and plant life that you will be able to explore, with multiplayer, and trading, and space fighting, and base building, and black jack, and hookers (probably).
Yeah! Credit: Tenor
The reality was a lot less cool, there was definitely no hookers OR blackjack to be found anywhere. The planets were very sparse, the wildlife generated were……..unimpressive.
The fever dreams of a meth addict. Credit: nicktweetshere
The company that made the game, Hello Games, could have taken the money and run like most companies have these days. Instead they buckled down and kept releasing content updates to try and catch the game up to what they were promising people.
August 9th was the biggest content update since the games release and it feels like a completely different game. They revamped the planet generation, added actual multiplayer, player model customization, 3rd person view, and a myriad of other changes that have really breathed new life into it.
I picked the game up last year on sale for my PS4, played it for a few hours and moved on. The game was only ok. It wasn’t fantastic but it wasn’t terrible. I loaded it up on my PS4 after the NEXT update went live and I have been dumping hours into it whenever I can. I’ve hopped around from planet to planet, I built my first base (it was a shack, literally a wood shack), I even have a frigate! The story has a lot more meat on it’s bones, and random encounters are pretty great. I was hopping to another planet and as soon as I came out of warp I saw a frigate being attacked by filthy space pirates. I was getting hailed by the ships captain and he was pleading for help. So I engaged the pirates and took them out. The captain radioed me back and thanked me. I could have just gone on my way but I decided to land in the frigate to see what it was like inside. I wandered around and ended up on the bridge and spoke with the captain. He was stressed out from being in command and asked me to take over. Uh, sure? And that’s how I became the captain of a space frigate. That’s the kind of random stuff that makes this game fun. Other times I just turn on some music or a podcast and fly around the planets, collecting resources and trying to build upgrades for my ships, my space suit, or the multitool laser….blaster…..thingy. I even customized my character, now I look like someone who tried out for the Rebel Alliance and didn’t quite make the cut.
Behold! Captain Sassypants.
Unfortunately, for a game that came out two years ago there are still a LOT of problems in the game. I backed out of the menu for the teleporter and soft locked my game, on a PS4, I softlocked a video game. I have never done that in my life and I owned a CD-I. I had to go back to the PS4 dashboard and force close the game. Other than that there have been times where the screen goes black during a warp from one planet to another, sounds like the mining laser not triggering until 1-2 seconds after I’ve fired it, things like that. They’ve added so much to the game but I don’t know how little things like this still aren’t fixed. I can’t be the only one experiencing these glitches.
All in all the game is good, not great, but good. It’s obviously trying to tick all the boxes on the list of features they originally promised. But it feels like a mile wide puddle, tons of possibilities but not a whole lot of depth to the individual parts. I’m under 20 hours into the game so hopefully it gets fleshed out some the more I play. It’s still not perfect and I don’t know if it ever will be. But for now it’s a pretty good game and a nice way to relax in front of the TV or computer for an hour or two.
Ok! It’s been a while, the plan was to post at least once a week but life happens. Luckily this isn’t a job!
I’ve been trying a few different games with varying levels of success, peppered with a lot of frustration with my computer. These are the games I’ve tried playing the past 4-6 weeks have been trying to play:
-Cities: Skylines
-Enter the Gungeon
-Battlefield: Bad Company 2
-Diablo 3: Season 14
Enter the Gungeon is the first roguelike that I’ve really put time into. I managed to put 9 hours into the game and even though I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress I have managed to consistently get to the 2nd boss and once or twice managed to get to the 3rd level.
I have no idea where my character is. I must have just gotten hit and am flashing.
The game is a twin-stick shooter roguelike where you get one life and try to get as far as you can in a dungeon that has every level randomly generated. Once you die the game is over and you have to start again. The only measurable sense of progression in it comes from defeating bosses, wherein you get money that can be spent at the gun store at the beginning of the game. Every item/gun you purchase gets added to the random pool in the gungeon. It’s frustrating but the fact that I’ve put 9 hours into it since I started in earnest is a good sign.
A short respite, once you clear a room you can take a quick brake before going to the next room full of guys that want to practice shooting you.
The characters are very cutesy/cartoony. It’s really funny watching the Bulletkin wobble around while they try to shoot you.
All in all it’s a fun game and very easy to pick up and put down because a typical run (if you’re garbage) is 15-20 minutes.
Next article will be about Cities and my frustration with my own stupidity, it’s great.
I was debating whether or not I should write this because I didn’t want to pile on the wagon of everyone else talking about it, even though no one looks at this website. So whatever!
Last Thursday, the man known as “TotalBiscuit”, or John Peter Bain succumbed to that dragon cancer. I’m not going to pretend that I knew him, because I didn’t. I knew him as much as any other fan did, be it through his YouTube videos, his sports casting, involvement in e-sports, his strong stance on consumer rights, or whatever else I’m missing, the guy was prolific. I wanted to write a short article about how he affected my life and how I approach games.
I can’t remember how long ago I came across him, it feels like he’s just always been there in the background. I want to say he came on my radar around the time I was huge into the Destructoid website and followed Jim Sterling, I somehow came across one of TB’s “WTF is…..” videos, where he goes through the options of the game, and the first half hour to an hour of game play and I really enjoyed it. I’ve followed him since then and enjoyed his content immensely. He was very open and fair about how he reviewed games and what he was looking for. Not everyone liked him, but from what I saw he was at least respected because he was principled and did not allow developers to push him around. I wouldn’t do it justice trying to explain it so I’m just going to link to the wiki that does a good job. Link here: TB’s consumer advocacy .
Here’s TB reviewing a game I love/hate. Space Run!
I enjoyed his “WTF is….” videos, his collaborations with another YouTuber Jesse Cox (especially their Terraria series, you can feel his frustration with Jesse, it’s hilarious), and his Co-Optional podcast. He turned me onto a lot of games and is responsible for a good 25% of my Steam library. His approach to games is something I need to take to heart again because I’ve forgotten it. He liked the games he liked, whether they were huge AAA titles or indie games, if you made a game he enjoyed, even if it was flawed, if he enjoyed it that was good enough for him. In his reviews he wouldn’t mince words, he would tell you what he liked and what he didn’t like and would rate it accordingly. He was arguably to video games what Oprah was to books, if they raved about it people would buy it. Game developers mostly took what he said to heart, the case I’m most familiar with was the game Warframe, he did a “WTF is…” video about it years ago and the developers took his suggestions and implemented what they could into the game. The game is still fairly popular now all these years later and on the day he passed the the community manager and community director shut down their weekly stream and they were visibly upset. Link here: Warframe ends stream early. The day he died and the following few days he popped up in almost every gaming subreddit I’m subscribed to, and practically every gaming news site. It’s hard to deny how much of an impact he had on the community.
He really had a passion for games and I wish I had that. He believed in it so much that he built a career out of it. I used to have it, and I truly hope i can recapture it. I’m making progress but it’s slow.
On friday I downloaded Warframe and gave it a go, I’m probably about 5-6 hours into it and am enjoying it. On top of that I decided to start playing Enter The Gungeon again and am making frustratingly slow progress, but I did make it to the 3rd level. Once I can remember to take screenshots during game play I’ll write up an article about it, it’s fun but holy hard Batman. I’m also going back through his “WTF is…” videos and will be checking what I’ve got in my Steam library vs what he’s reviewed and will give a few of them a chance. I can’t decide what to play for myself so why not let TB decide on a few games for me.
The last thing I’m going to leave is the Twitter post his wife made the day he passed. RIP TB.
In my never ending quest to fill the gaping void in my life by filling it with material things, I have been on the hunt for an original DMG gameboy. I plan on rebuilding it same as I did with my GBA except this would involve a bivert chip, backlight, new shell, buttons, glass screen cover, etc.
I found one for sale on eBay as “no power, for parts” and decided to take a gamble. Looking closely at the photos I saw the battery terminals were corroded and was confidant that was the cause of the no power. I paid $16.49 for it and a few days later the fun began!
She’s a bit rough!
I put batteries in to confirm and it did not turn on at all. Time to do the needful!
I took it completely apart, first items on the list were the battery terminals and boy were they grody.
Holy corrosion Batman.
Those went into a vinegar bath while i took everything else apart to clean with ISO. Next up was the front LCD/controller board.
That speaker is 10 kinds of gross.
That speaker was awful, it took 3 cotton swabs to get all that grossness off, and another swab to clean the board itself. I was disappointed to see the LCD had a pretty deep scratch in it that I hadn’t noticed in the eBay photos. The back wasn’t as bad but the back of the speaker was rusted because of course it was.
This DMG has lived a rough life.
Next up the mainboard!
Not bad!
It wasn’t nearly as bad as the LCD board but I still gave it a quick once over with cotton swabs and ISO as well as scrubbing the power switch with a tooth brush and blasting it with compressed air.
After giving the shell a good scrub a dub dub in the sink with dish soap and a took brush I dried the shell as best I could and blasted all the small crevices with more compressed air. I fished the battery terminals out of the vinegar and was happy to see they had lost almost all the corrosion, so I gave those a quick scrub with the toothbrush and put them back in the shell and put the front board back on to see if I’d fixed the no power issue. I flicked the switch and heard the unmistakable gameboy ding! but no video! I was so close. After doing a little more research online I decided to try squirting ISO into the contrast wheel and going ham on it with a toothbrush. It worked!
It worked! Sort of!
The telltale missing vertical lines, the result of broken contacts in the lcd ribbon. An annoyance but not impossible to fix! most people are able to repair these missing lines by gently rubbing their soldering iron along the lcd ribbon, heating up the metal inside and reconnecting whatever broken connections there were in the ribbon.
Sadly after an hour of touching every square millimeter of that ribbon with my iron I couldn’t fix it. It was pretty late at that point so I figured I’d peel off the protective layer on the front to see if there were any scratches to the actual glass, and that was how I learned the DMG has a polarizer on the back as well as the front. So now that whole thing is completely useless. The LCD is soldered to the front board and no one has been able to come up with a reliable way to replace the LCD. There’s also the fact that no one is reproducing these LCDs.
So for now I’ve wrapped up the DMG until I can find a DMG with a working LCD I can use.
At the suggestion of my brother I looked for a copy of Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 and found a mislabeled copy on eBay for about 12 bucks.
He’s a little beat up but otherwise in ok shape.
The first thing I did was check the board, clean the contacts, then put it into one of my systems to check it and it wouldn’t load! It would just go to a white screen after the Nintendo logo. I was super annoyed because it was advertised as working. I sent a message to the seller letting them know the game wasn’t working and they were nice enough to apologize and issue me a refund and told me not to worry about shipping it back. After stewing about it a little bit I decided to see if I could fix it, it was already broken, what was the worst that would happen, I’d break it more? I took the board out of the cartridge and gave the entire thing a wipe down with 90% ISO and trying it again. No dice! I looked up which components were which on the board and decided to try re-flowing the solder joints on the ROM chip.
You’re up soldering iron!
My goal was to very slowly and gently run the tip of the soldering iron across the contacts for the ROM chip, and that would hopefully heat up the solder enough that it would reconnect all the pins.
The chip highlighted in red stores the ROM of the game.
After a couple passes along each side of the chip i put it back together, put it in my GB Boy Colour and turned it on…..
Huzzah! Success!
It worked! I was shocked! A total shot in the dark and it fixed the game! Now I can do what I assume most people do when they buy used games, check the save files!
What on earth did I stumble onto?
Holy crap the previous owner had 148 hours into this game and had max level monsters.
Ho
Lee
Shit
Well now I feel bad deleting the game.
Now that I’ve got the game working it’s time to clean the cartridge , and it was covered in grime, the back was completely covered in stickers from at least 3 different game stores. It was so bad I had to soak the back in ISO for a couple minutes before I could scrape it all off.
So sticky.
The entire cartridge was scuffed to hell but the back was the worst.
Almost as scuffed up as my car!
I fixed it a few days ago and I’m still blown away that I was able to get it working. Now it’s time to play my first Dragon Warrior game! I’m a few hours into it and I really enjoy it. It’s a gameboy color title and I’d completely forgotten what a GBC game looked like. The team that colorized this game did a fantastic job, it’s incredibly vibrant and looks great!
For the past year or so I’ve been really into reliving the old days of handhelds. It started with buying a reshelled GBA SP, but I longed to get another GBA similar to the one I owned as a teenager. It was the first version of the GBA that was laid out like a Game Gear. The one I had in highschool I’d modified with an afterburner front light with relative success. Unfortunately at some point during the move out of my childhood home and into my dad’s the screen got cracked and I threw it out, oh how I regret that now. During my Reddit browsing I found that people figured out how to modify those AGB’s with the backlit screens from the GBA SP. The best of both worlds! With that information I purchased the required parts and went the extra mile by upgrading the shell, buttons, replaced the plastic LCD cover with a glass one, a voltage regulator to make the LCD as bright as it was in the GBA SP, and an upgraded speaker. I tried installing an amplifier board twice and fried the AGB’s board the first time and the second time it still wasn’t working. Either I’m entirely incompetent (possible), or I somehow fried the amp board (also possible). I decided to cut my losses and just replace the speaker. After literal blood, sweat and tears I ended up with this.
Who’s a handsome GameBoy?
I love the colors and the screen looks incredible. It fits in my hands so well and i don’t get any cramps playing it for more than 15 minutes, it’s lovely. Pairing that with an EZ Flash IV and regular carts makes it a wonderful experience.
Since then I’ve set my eyes on building a customized original DMG, of which was my first ever game system that I received for Christmas as a VERY young child. It had the official GameBoy carrying case, at least 6 games, including the portable battery pack. That I ended up selling to a neighborhood kid for 10$ during a garage sale. OH the regret. My new plan is to buy a rough DMG and do pretty much what I did to the AGB, back light, bivert mod, upgraded speaker, new shell, new buttons and glass. I am still on the hunt, as well as fighting the urge to just put everything on a credit card.
In the meantime I’ve been looking for actual GameBoy cartridges to play on my AGB. I have a friend I talk to about stuff like this. I’ve known him since I was in high school and he’s the one guy that really enjoys the same nerdy hand built stuff that I do. We’ve talked and helped each other with a ton of stuff, mechanical keyboards, working on our cars (he helps me, I’m hopeless and he’s a grease monkey), squeezing every ounce of performance out of our aging PC’s, modifying SNES Classics, and now……custom handhelds.
During our conversations about my hunt for a DMG and what I plan on doing he got sucked in. Eventually I’m going to need to write his wife a letter apologizing for continuously introducing him to hobbies we just keep throwing money into like some bottomless pit. He ended up buying a broken DMG for 20$ and fixing it. He’s going to modify his as well. The whole point of this story is that he doesn’t really have any small retro game retailers around him in Miami that isn’t in some ghetto so this past weekend I made a couple visits to my local game stores to see what GameBoy games they had and boy did we make out.
The 5 on the left are mine, 5 on the right are Gaston’s (no one else buys games like GASTON). I think the prices were fairly reasonable. I even got a discount on everything!
Once I got home I went into autopilot mode of taking the stickers off, cleaning the cartridges
Dirty girl.
and the contacts, checking the internal batteries
Definitely already replaced, it’s adequate.
testing them using my favorite knockoff GameBoy Color.
Chinese knockoffs have their uses.
Tetris!
It was a nice mindless exercise and I ended up with some cleaned and working carts. Time to ship Gaston’s 5 off to Miami!
It’s been almost exactly a year since I’ve posted on this site and that’s all on me. My idea about randomizing games didn’t really really help me because I was still worried if I was wasting time playing whatever game was on the list.
Since then I was given a Minecraft edition Xbox 1 for Christmas so now I’ve got a PS3, PS4, XB1, SNES Classic, 2 Vitas, a 2DS XL, a GBA SP, my custom GBA and my desktop PC. So the choices just keep growing, it’s great lol
My custom GBA has been broken for a couple of months from me screwing up an amp installation but a kind stranger on Reddit sent me a spare GBA he had for free so i was able to transplant it to my shell and get it working again. Since then I’ve actually beat a couple games! I’m very torn on it because as per the rules of rose colored glasses, I remember these games being a lot harder and were unable to beat them when I was younger.
The first game I beat on my GBA since fixing it was a colorized ROM hack of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins.
I managed to beat it fairly “easily”. And by easily I mean I may have used a couple game state saves. It was challenging but I remember it being a lot harder when I was younger.
Last night I decided to try starting Kirby for the Game Boy and……..beat it in an hour. It was a regular game cart so there was no save-state shenanigans.
I think I need to reevaluate how I approach games as far as what I consider a good game. Kirby was fun but when I beat it I was honestly shocked because I’m used to the current fetishised “if the game isn’t punishing you it’s not a good game” a la Darksouls etc. The game does have a NewGame+ option so I think I will give that a go.
Before I start the challenge proper I’ve been slowly getting into my library. I started playing Rust and Planet Base but in this Post I will discuss Rust.
Rust is an online survivial/building game that’s been in Alpha for a long time. The general premise of the game is you spawn naked with a rock and a torch, you need to mine resources and build a base/tools/weapons on a server with other players, most will murder you on sight.
I play on a small community server and overall it’s been a mixed bag between enjoying the game and having to deal with people breaking into my base and stealing my stuff or killing me and stealing my stuff. There’s a lot of killing and stealing, so much.
The crafting system is clever and fairly intuitive, movement is good and the constant updates are keeping the game on an upward trajectory of improvement. The developers push out updates every two weeks and so every other Thursday all the non-modded servers are wiped. I’m still 50/50 on that because on one hand it’s cool because everyone gets to start over every two weeks, but all my progress gets wiped and I have to start from scratch. I’m conflicted.
This is my current base, it’s pretty great.
BEHOLD! PENIS HOUSE!
Shockingly enough I’ve got more than 10 minutes in the game.
The people on the server are nice, the only griefers I seem to run into are outsiders, today was the worst experience by far. Someone wanted a part that I happened to have a spare of. Unfortunately they were located on the exact opposite side of the massive map. It must have taken me 10 minutes to get over there, I had no guarantee that they weren’t going to murder me on site either, I was doing this all in good faith. I finally found the place and gave the part to the guy, he gave me some items in exchange and we went our separate ways. I made it probably 10 feet our of the building and an outsider that had been killing other regulars opened fire and killed us both. I lost all my gear, my rifle, my clothes, everything on my person. I re-spawned back in my base and was super pissed. It’s ok, it will all get wiped and I’ll start over.
I will probably keep playing it because it’s got a nice mix of exploration/building and the people on the server are pretty good fun to talk to.
*I need to figure out my OBS setup so I can start recording but I’m hoping to start this project in earnest in the next week or two. *
