I only got out two blogs last year it seems, my Sam & Max review and that quite long look at Laser Lords. I'm still pretty happy with those! I've juggled some other blog ideas, but haven't been able to finish any of them, but I should at least take this chance to take a look back at 2018.
Work, work, work, work, work
While I did get my first job in 2017, I only got it at the start of December, so I only really worked at that job for a month in 2017. Not so in 2018, I worked that job all year in 2018! It's certainly been a source of growth, settling into the daily rhythm, learning the ropes and taking on increasingly more responsibility and a wider range of tasks.
I look back at my work experiences in 2018 positively for that reason! I don't really talk much about work outside of work, so if you ever wonder about it then this is your confirmation that things are going well.
Aaaaa, video games!!! Again!!!
Finally, it's time for the stuff that people do actually care about! Video games! People love video games, right? I know I do, and I am a person, so clearly it's only logical to deduce that yes, people do like video games!
Last year I wrote that my income no doubt influenced me playing a variety of games, though looking back at it I don't seem to have played many more games this year, or really spent much on games at all! I should definitely stop being so frugal with this sort of thing, most of the games in this blog are quite cheap and some are even free!
I have been telling myself to get a new PC with a more powerful video card, once I do that there's more types of games I can play since currently I stay away from graphically intensive games because my PC can't really handle them. I've had Rock of Ages 2 for a while now but it quickly became clear that it was way too choppy to really be worth playing on this PC.
Anyway, here follows a list of games I played in 2018 in a rough chronological order!
Night in the Woods
Hey, this game was on last year's list! I started this game in 2017, but finished it in 2018. I went into NITW knowing it was a game that was very explicitly about certain topics and didn't shy away from getting political, but I found that even though I didn't personally relate to much of the game, its themes and messages still strongly resonated with me, the characters and setting really struck with me and were written in a way that felt really natural and engrossing.
I've been meaning to get back to it and do the route I didn't choose on my first playthrough, but I've not really gotten around to it yet. I should, someday!
Sam & Max
This might be familiar, this was the topic of one of my two blogs of 2018! Good first game, better second game, third game that takes one steps forward and two steps backwards.
Princess Remedy
The Princess Remedy series of games are two quick and simple retro twin-stick shooters, I quite enjoyed them! The games have a nice adventurous feel and whimsical, silly dialogue, and the general gameplay which takes place is small battle maps with predetermined sets of enemies strike a good balance of difficulty and fun.
The first game is actually free on Steam, go check it out! The second game is only €4 euros as well, so if you like the first then definitely consider the second, it's basically more of the same with a few more bells and whistel and it continues the charm on the first game.
Squidlit
Here's another whimsical retro game! There's a certain sort of cuteness to games like these! This one has the style and gameplay of a GameBoy platformer, with a limited colour palette and rather simplistic movement and mechanics. It's a fun little way to spend an hour or two and it's definitely the sort of game you can play over every once in a while. If you like Princess Remedy, you'll probably like this too.
Celeste
Celeste is a non-retro 2D platformer that masterfully combines its narrative of facing and coping with one's anxiety with its solid platformer gameplay focused mostly around aeriel navigation using dashing, walljumping and wallclimbing. It also just looks, sounds and feels very nice, I look back on playing it fondly. Even though it has some dark elements, it feels very wholesome overall and I really like the way the game treats its "dark alter ego" character. Definitely recommended if you like 2D platformers!
Duel Links
Oh boy, here's the big one. Duel Links is an online Yu-Gi-Oh! game for mobile and Steam focused around the YGO card game, mostly playing PvP while PvE is mostly just grinding against NPCs or a constantly rotating cycle of events. There's a lot about Duel Links that I like, such as the clean interface, the quick engine and the overall presentation. There's a lot of characters from the anime and they're all voice acted too, so that's fun. The gameplay itself is also quite different from the regular card game since it takes place in a speed duel format with less monster zones, less spell/trap zones and less life points. The card pool is also much more limited and way below the power level of the regular TCG, so it's really its own format with its own intricacies and such.
Sadly, the game's also run by Konami has has a F2P model. The gem income is pretty decent right now, but there's periods where it suddenly dries up and it does feel like at any moment Konami can decide to get stingy or withhold key cards behind paywalls or not introduce cards they should whilst releasing blatantly overpowered modern decks that can wipe out entire fields in one turn. It's kind of messy.
I still enjoy it a lot, but it's a bit of an on/off thing, it really depends on whether the events that week are worth playing or not.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Tag Force 3
What, another YGO game?! Truly 2018 is the year of YGO. Tag Force 3 is a completely PvE-centric experience which bases itself around the actual card game as it was played at the time of its release. Since this was released around the end of the GX era and the start of the 5Ds era, it has all cards that were available up to that time, had that time's banlist and has some game-exclusive cards based on cards used in the anime that weren't printed (yet) at that point.
It is a pretty polished game, every duelist has a 3D model and animations, though the international releases cut out the Japanese voice acting and didn't replace it with anything else, which is a big fat shame. It's still fun to play though, especially when you're just messing around with decks. The big gimmick is that you can choose to either do normal duels or 2v2 tag duels. I mostly stuck to 2v2 tag duels, though you'll probably want to use some sort of cheat to be able to control the AI to limit frustration.
One rather disappointing factor is that while the seven main characters get their own unique story modes for the campaign if you tag with them, and they're mostly pretty well-written and stick close to the anime or provide interesting alternative scenarios or funny deviations from the canon, all the secondary characters get shafted with the same generic story mode that really limits the replayability of the game. Such a shame! I even made a word document where I wrote a few stories of my own.
So yes, I basically wrote self-insert YGO fanfiction.
Into the Breach
Into the Breach is a unique strategy/puzzle game where you control a squad of three giant mechs who have to defend cities from gigantic invading alien space bugs. The core gameplay of the game takes place on 8x8 grid battle maps where the enemies telegraph their attacks in order and you command your mechs to take action to prevent the enemies' attack patterns from damaging the cities. This goes on for several turns until the enemies decide to flee, so survival becomes more important than merely destroying all enemies, oftentimes it'll simply be impossible to defeat every enemy on a map in the number of turns it takes to win the map.
What sets this apart is that once an enemy telegraphs their attack, they are locked into using that attack, so you can mess around with enemy positions to get them to miss their attacks or even attack either other, provided you have the right mechs for the job in the right locations. It's a very strategic game that often borders on being a puzzle to figure out how to most efficiently deal with the enemies every single turn while also positioning your mechs to be able to deal with enemy's attack patterns next turn.
It's a very compelling game, and there's enough variety of mechs and additional equipment to keep the game fresh, I really hope an expansion comes out at some point with new mechs, enemies and mechanics.
Faster than Light
Faster than Light is a real-time spaceship-to-spaceship combat rougelike made by the same developers who made Into the Breach. It was ItB that got me to try out this game for a discount, and it was fairly interesting. The game is very much about keeping your cool and micromanaging the combat, and I really enjoyed those aspects, though I didn't find playing as boarding ships to be interesting, while repelling boarders was always really easy by just releasing the airlocks.
My main gripe with the game is the excessively random and unengaging world map traversal. Traversing the world map is for the most part just complete guesswork and most events are basically just trial and error until you figure out the optimal solutions, the game's not like Renowned Explorers in which nodes are clearly marked for what they contain before entering them and where the options are mostly intuitive and probabilities are shown to the player alongside all parameters that in/decrease the odds, it just doesn't feel like there's much meaningful decision making with regard to which events to visit or what options to select, and the game is also hindered by the final battle feeling really samey across every playthrough since you'll always fight the exact same flagship in the final zone.
I got into the game for a while, but haven't looked back at it since for those reasons.
Space Channel 5 Part 2
Space Channel 5 Part 2 is a zany, bizarre and fun romp of a rhythm game with the best setting of them all: RETRO SPACE. It is set in that wonderful idea of space thought up by people who have no idea what space is, so everyone has incredibly tacky fashion choice and aliens have Teletubbies TV screens instead of faces and it's all played up with incredible ham and cheese. They even got Michael Jackson to appear as SPACE MICHAEL, and it's as great as it sounds. Hee hee!
I am very fond of the game's approach to rhythm, which is about copying your opponent's commands in sync with the music making it a mostly auditory challenge rather than the typical Guitar Hero approach where you have to input commands as they fly across the screen. Never cared for that myself, that seemed way too visual for a rhythm game.
It was fun to play through the game, it's definitely a game you can pick and play for a session since it's pretty short, but it is a finicky port and prone to desynchronizing at times, which is a giant shame since everything else about the game just oozes charisma.
Kaiju Big Battel: Fighto Fantasy
Aaah, I've been meaning to finish my blog about this game!! I probably bit off more than I could chew, so I might just cut it short a bit and write a conclusion to it, it's getting way too long.
Anyway, Kaiju Big Battel is a Final Fantasy inspired game about a colourful cast of superheroic wresting Kaijus exploring across time, space and reality to stop Donald Trump wearing a box over his head from making terrible RPG Maker games and developing real estate on the Moon. It's rather on the easy side for the most part and doesn't have quite the depth of complexity I look for in JRPG combat systems, but makes up for it with a ton of charisma in its premise and presentation! Expect to read more about it in a blog, hopefully!!
DELTA RUNE
Man, Toby Fox really dropped a bombshell on me when he released this demo. I loved UNDERTALE and spoke of it very fondly in a past blog and Delta Rune really brought back that same excitement I felt back then. It's a game that is brimming with charm, tons of little secrets to find and competently realized combat mechanics centered around defending rather than attacking.
As a demo it is a massive success I'd say, it definitely got me pumped for the full game should it ever come out and it really proved to me that Toby Fox didn't just have a fluke with Undertale's quality. Seriously, go check it out, it's free!
Resident Evil
Here's a game I played during my Winter Break! It's the REmaster REmake of the original REsident Evil. The RE in REsident stands for Resident Evil, of course. Specifically, it's the HD remaster of the 2002 remake of the 1996 original. Man, to think how far games have come between 1996 and 2002, it feels like a lot more changed in that timeframe than between 2002 and now!As a remake it sticks very close to the original in most regards, and it gets away with it since the original Resident Evil's game design was far ahead of what it could do with the PS1's limitations and its rather troubled development. The REmake goes and polishes the original game from a diamond in the rough to true gem of a game, never has an RE game so convincingly sold its atmosphere as REmake did with its immaculately designed mansion and the incredible camera angles.
Pokémon Renegade Platinum
Are you familiar with Pokémon? It's an obscure, little-known indie series where you collect monsters and make them battle each other. Renegade Platinum is the latest and last entry in Drayano's series of Pokémon difficulty enhancement/full Pokédex conversion ROMhacks, where he edits the base game to have a tougher difficulty curve, all Pokémon are made available to catch and train and optionally comes with various edits to several Pokémon to give them larger movepools and buffed stats to make more Pokémon viable to use through the whole game and to lower the relative power gap between Pokémon.
I enjoy these ROMhacks far more than the base games! They really push the player to be more mindful during battles and don't throw the same few Pokémon at you constantly during wild encounters and trainer battles. There's even a few new events!
Renegade Platinum isn't my favourite ROMhack, I still think BlazeBlack/VoltWhite and their sequels are the best ones, but it's still a worthwhile experience and Drayano even added a few new events and battles here and there that really add to the game. I just wish there were more double battles!
Return of the Obra Dinn
Okay, so I am kinda cheating here since I played this game very early in 2019, but the game's exceptionally good so I'm going to talk about it anyway! Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery/puzzle game set in the late 19th century aboard a deserted merchant ship. Your task is to deduce the identities and fates of the sixty people who boarded the Obra Dinn using various clues, logic and process of elimination.The way this is done is through a magical pocket watch that lets you hear the final moments of someone's life and then lets you walk through the moment of that individual's death. A lot of clues are hidden in this dialogue and these moments, and it's an absolute joy to piece it all together since the game is constantly mixing up the way it conveys its clues and really challenges the player to have an observant eye and notice small details that can uncover big revelations.
This gameplay is reinforced with an exceptional presentation. The whole game is rendered in a 2-bit style meaning the colour palette is limited to two colours, it's a visually striking look and works up working really well. The audio and voice direction are both top notch and do a good job conveying information clearly, and the music is quite fitting as well.
Conclusion
So yes, that's 2018! More work and games! Last year I said that 2017 was a mess from a global perspective but treated me well, I'd say the same goes for 2018, so hooray for consistency.
I'm hoping I can actually write more blogs in 2019, I suppose if I had one New Year's Resolution it'd be that. I do have a few ideas, after all. There's that Kaiju Big Battel blog, I do want to write a silly blog about Yu-Gi-Oh and maybe I'll write a bit about shows I've been watching too, like that Gumball blog in the past. Maybe I will write about your favourite show and why it is garbage!!
We'll see!
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