Year: 2022

Switch Mario Party Games Compared by a Dad Who Would Rather Play Something Else

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Currently playing: King's Bounty (Genesis)

I’ve played Mario Party games off and on in the past. Sometimes I even enjoyed them. When you’re with a group of friends or family, and the down-time between turns and minigames doesn’t matter as much, they’re a great background game.

As a parent to a child who loves playing them, I have officially played enough Mario Party. The good news, for you, is that I have played enough Mario Party on the Switch to go in-depth on which one you should play, when you would really rather be playing anything else.

Super Mario Party

Although it’s a few years old now, there are several points in Super Mario Party’s favor. It has a large variety of gameplay modes – including 2v2 and 4-player co-operative modes, in case your gameplay companion is really insistent about winning. All of the board game modes are slightly more strategic – though obviously nowhere near Civilization VI – thanks to the differentiation of characters by their custom dice blocks. →  Post of Tsushima

Out Run, I Mean Outrun Culture

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A few months ago I found myself buying (and playing) the Sega Ages version of Out Run on Switch. It’s a great port with some interesting new features, and it made me appreciate the game all over again. Eventually I found myself doing some historical research on the game to learn more about its development and legacy.

Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. My search results were dominated not by Out Run, but by …. Outrun.

As far as I can tell, “Outrun” is the name of both a subgenre of synth music, and a surrounding subculture. According to the Outrun subreddit’s description, Outrun is:

Dedicated to the synthwave music scene, a revisionist 80s music style of synthesizers and pulsing beats, and the retrofuturist 80s aesthetic of fast cars, neon lights and chrome.

And the wikipedia entry says:

Synthwave (also called outrun, retrowave, or futuresynth) is an electronic music microgenre that is based predominantly on the music associated with action, science-fiction, and horror film soundtracks of the 1980s.

 →  I am become game, destroyer of words.

Top 5 Most Likely Video Games of All Time

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After the recent scandal wherein President Carter revealed that the classic WonderSwan game Knuckle Justice: Fist of Freedom, Face on Fire (KJFoFFoF) was not an actual video game but rather an elaborate ruse perpetrated by stock insiders to bolster their Bandai holdings, the game industry has been looking inward and has not liked what it has found. With a key pillar supporting the entire enterprise of gaming now left crumbling into the ocean of deception below, it is unclear even to game historians if any actual video games have ever been produced or developed. It is against this tumultuous backdrop that we present you with our intensive research on the Top 5 Most Likely Video Games of All Time.

5. Rival Turf

With its overt graphics and controller support it is hard to deny this is a game. Experts are still studying the specific signals of the alleged controller outputs because it has been suggested by skeptics the movement of what is undeniably graphics on screen is actually following a semi-random program routine. →  Michigan: Article from Hell

Review – Ys IX: Monstrum Nox

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So I just beat Ys IX. It was… better than I was expecting, but not as good as it could be. It takes nearly every feature and system from Ys VIII – features and systems, mind you, that were new and specifically built to work in that game’s very particular setting – and brings them whole hog into this new game, with a very different setting. Suffice to say that it doesn’t really work.

For example, in Ys VIII it made sense to earn rewards for mapping out the island, since it was literally uncharted. But it seems insane to be rewarded for mapping out a centuries old city (under the guise of “finding the places that tourists would be most interested in”).

Similarly, it made sense to have a crafting system on an island with no shops, and a bartering system that allows you to refine low grade crafting materials by essentially trading for them. But Ys IX has so many different shops – with so much good gear – that forging your own weapons usually isn’t worth it (meanwhile, you refine items by interacting with a magic lantern. →  Readalations: Persona

Affordable GOG Game Recommendations Part 2

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Currently playing: Don't Starve Together

More GOG recommendations, continued from Part 1 here.

More Strategy games

Knights & Merchants: The Peasants’ Rebellion – If you’re into sims, this sure is a sim. When I had the time to play the original release (which had no fast-forward) I reviewed it. I find myself mostly agreeing with my earlier self; it’s an interesting game if you’re into the idea of building a supply chain from scratch, sort of like a peaceful, less dangerous cousin of Dwarf Fortress. I’d probably recommend the more recent Banished over this one, if only for the clunky combat K&M requires you to engage in – but if you want to build a medieval ant farm and then leverage it to crush your enemies, this might be your game.

Seven Kingdoms 2 – This is a deep, relatively slow-paced RTS that was largely ignored at release. I’ve never actually met another real-life person that played this, so if you claim to have played it I will assume that you are a robot but have good taste in games so you’re cool. →  You had me at read more.

Affordable GOG Game Recommendations Part 1

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Since videolamer has begun the process of following in Buzzfeed’s esteemed footsteps, it’s only natural that we reach for the low-hanging fruit of picking out games we played and telling you to play them. GOG (www.gog.com), briefly branded as Good Old Games, is stacked with tons of games created by incredibly talented developers years ago, most of whom will never see any of the money you spend because the rights have been sold and resold dozens of times over. But at least if you spend money on these 20-year-old games, it will assuage the slight twinge of guilt you might have felt if you pirated them.

Many of these games are more than 20 years old. Some run in DOS/DOSBox, but many have fan patches available. Check the corresponding GOG forum first – there is typically a stickied topic for mods/patches. All of these games are $9.99 or under on GOG, and many go on sale frequently.

Role-playing games

Dark Sun: Shattered Lands – I personally have been meaning to get back to this game for years, having not played it for at least 15. →  Readalations: Persona

Last Minute Nintendo 3DS and Wii U Virtual Console Game Recommendations

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With eShop purchasing for the Wii U and 3DS set to end next year, and the majority of releases for the Wii U coming out in the 2012-2016 timeframe, it seems appropriate to bring up the immense loss of availability that we’ll see once the eShop is closed.

Digital-only releases are already only available to those brave few that bought a Wii U. There are fewer systems and games available on the Wii U VC than the original Wii VC (RIP), so even what is still available until next year is a stripped-down version of what once was. But many of the games available on Wii U VC are still unavailable to owners of the Switch via the Switch Online apps – so once the shop closes for new purchases, the selection will be further stripped down. Given the licensing and coordination required for many of the games on Wii U VC, many are unlikely to surface on the Switch’s various retro portals.

Consider the SNES alone – secondary sales for titles such as the original Harvest Moon fetch hundreds of dollars for just a cart, and the original’s minimalist style and quick gameplay are still a metric by which the modern sequels are judged. Mega →  All your posts are belong to us.

Deep Thoughts on the Hotline Miami Series

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I played both Hotline Miami games sometime within the last year and a half (my memory’s a bit fuzzy on the specific date, and honestly, it doesn’t matter).

Before I begin, I want to make one thing clear. These games are even more violent and depraved than I ever imagined, even after reading lots of reviews and seeing lots of screenshots. Much like with the show Squid Game, there’s a general sense among Extremely Online People that you simply must partake in these experiences that go out of their way to traumatize their audience.

I think that’s a load of crap. If you look at a game like this and think “that’s not for me,” I think it is absolutely valid, understandable, acceptable, and in no way worthy of judgment. Indeed, I wouldn’t be mad if you, dear reader, feel that reading this post isn’t your cup of tea.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about Hotline Miami.

As tends to happen more often than not, my take here is basically the opposite of the general consensus (I swear this isn’t intentional). →  And so it games…

Some Favorite, Disappointing, and Interesting Games from 2017-2021 Part 3

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Jay

Night in the Woods: This is part of a trilogy (in my mind only) of left-wing games that also includes Disco Elysium and Kentucky Route Zero (Cart Life and some others would also qualify). It may be a little twee at times but the darker themes give it an actual edge that separates it from normal precious, hipster writing. Writer Scott Benson has criticized other games for using political stuff as background scenery for games without actually saying anything meaningful in the specifics of the game. On the other side of that coin, how many times have EA or Ubisoft developers created something that is plainly political in some way and then in interviews explicitly stated the opposite? Even the Fallout creators took this publisher approved position while doing the PR rounds for Outer Worlds.

Night in the Woods is a good companion to Disco Elysium. They have a lot of political overlap but present themselves very differently (tonally different, both include lots of people/animals standing around speaking). →  Sid Meier’s Alpha Centarticle

Top 10 Trends I Ignored – An Old Man is Prideful of His Ignorance

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In the dozen years since I used this site as a platform for bad jokes, Wii apologia, and po-faced discussion on design, many gaming trends have come, and in some cases, gone. Having ignored most of these shifts in the industry, I will now document these trends and explain why I am better than each of them.

  1. MMOs

These already existed when this site launched in 200…something. As I am competing with my dead grandfather at having the fewest friends, I worried social gaming would lead to comradery and therefore defeat. This fear was unfounded, however, as years on gaming forums have led me to accumulate exactly zero new acquaintances. “Who is that condescending guy who only posts single sentences that are obviously sarcastic?” is what I assumed people would say. Warnings from moderators and replies from people who thought I was serious are instead all I got. Many true artists are not understood until their work is reanalyzed and contextualized, often years or decades after their deaths. →  For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a gamer against their game.