Zoe E. Whitten's Blog

Game review: Word Trails for Netflix

I should probably start this post off with some pleading apology after saying I would do a game review soon and then vanishing for weeks. But what happened was, I started playing older games, and I kept bouncing from one to the next as soon as I finished a run in each. Nothing worth a review, but I had a good time, and it helped me to avoid doom scrolling. I’m calling that a win.

Anywho, when it comes to technology, we live in strange times. My phone, despite being two years old now, has more RAM and storage space than my first PC, as well as more video RAM, better sound quality, and a higher screen resolution. And yet, when it comes to mobile games and apps, we live in a time of virtual garbage.

This is why I initially had hope for subscription models that would make games better by ditching ads, “microtransactions,” (100 dollars for a bag of digital currency is not a micro anything) and loot boxes. But many games on these services are the same mobile shite with the exploitation removed, and that doesn’t change the fact that most simply aren’t fun to play. They still desperately peddle daily login gifts to try and keep people on the treadmill, but when it comes to the actual gameplay between all the lousy menus and worthless presents, there’s not enough incentive to keep going.

Which brings me to Word Trails, courtesy of Netflix’s subscription. It’s pretty much like a lot of other word puzzle games. The top half of the screen is similar to a crossword grid, and the lower half has a circle with letters to link and form words. Any words spelled that aren’t on the grid go into a bonus pot, which eventually fills up to award a pittance amount of gold.

I played a lot of this at the hospital. No, like 1,000 levels worth, and for some reason, I kept playing it when I got back home, so I’m now at level 1,348. For a while, there was a pride issue motivating me, as each level has a little text at the top saying “X% of players have completed this.” Well, I’m now at the point where that number is 0.2% of players, and I can assure you, it’s not that players couldn’t finish a puzzle. It’s just that they gave up playing long before reaching this level of Hell.

What’s so wrong with it? Well for one thing the words used feel like a list generated by AI. Note, I’m not saying I know it is AI slop. I’m saying it feels like AI slop. This is because too many levels use the same words over and over. Someone playing a few minutes at a time with sessions spaced out might not notice at first, but eventually, even they’d have to take note of the number of times the same solutions pop up. But having played for hours at a time because I had nothing else to do besides nap, I started to get annoyed, and then aggravated by the lack of variety.

Which makes it even worse if this isn’t an AI generated list of words, because that means a person made up these puzzles knowing how little variety they had, and instead of just ending the game at a predefined peak, they circled back around for the worst hamster wheel of spelling ever.

This doesn’t even touch on the problem that the dictionary is missing tons of valid words. Each time I’d enter one and be denied, I would immediately go online to check real dictionaries and see that yes, it is a real word, and whoever set up this spelling game is an idiot.

You know the missing word that chafes my intimate bits the worst? App. I’m playing on my phone on an app, and yet the app won’t recognize the word APP? Dafuq?

Lastly, there’s still a currency being offered for solving puzzles, which is used to buy hints, either a random letter added to the grid, or a more expensive option to fill in a specific box. I’m guessing that some people ended up giving up after using all their gold on hints, because the cost of the hints versus the crappy amounts you get for solving puzzles is still part of the old “free to pay” model. You only get a pittance by filling up the bonus words jar or by solving all the levels in a “city,” which is 20 puzzles. Daily logins are equally shitty as rewards go, so anyone wanting a little help would either have to log in daily for a month without playing to recover funds, or they could delete the app and do something more meaningful, like pick scabs, maybe.

I could go on, but let’s just make this one short and sweet. Word Trails is yet another mobile piece of trash that’s just distracting enough to get you through a bank line, without ever crossing over into being fun. I give it 2 stars, and I wish fervently for the rapid economic death of the “free” mobile gaming market.

Game review: Brotato: Abyssal Terrors DLC

Folks, I apologize for all these delays with new updates. I finished playing the Brotato: Abyssal Terrors DLC for this review before I went to the hospital, but I am still on the mend and find myself returning to bed for long naps with just a few chores around the house. Did I need to ride my bike into town for supplies? Well then, it’s time for a two hour nap. Pulled some weeds in the yard? Three hour nap. This isn’t likely to improve soon, but I’ll do my best to get back on track with reviews.

So, before I talk about the Brotato DLC, I should mention that I had little interest in getting it until I noticed that the achievements progress bar in Epic Game Store’s library page wasn’t full even though I’d unlocked everything. This by itself annoys me. I can’t say if it’s a problem with Epic’s platform only, or if it was a choice of the game maker’s and is the same on Steam, but either way, I should not be penalized for not buying the DLC.

Adding into this is the percent of players who completed the achievements, but I’ll get into that later. (And this will be a recurring theme in my next review as well.) But setting that aside, I decided to get the DLC because some of the challenges sounded interesting enough that I wanted to try them.

Oh, and in my original review, I said that the story was the Brotatoes were killing waves of “aliens.” But in adding a new map with the DLC, it became clear that the Bros had invaded another planet, which put a whole other light on the game. The Brotatoes are the invading aliens killing increasingly angrier wave of natives, which seems more reasonable from this adjusted angle. I mean, I’m okay with playing as the asshole in any game. I just kind of assumed we were acting as the lone remaining defender, not the first colonizer. That’s my bad.

The new map is…it’s fine, and it features new enemies native to their surroundings. But honestly, I played it a few times before going back to the original map. Many of the challenges for the DLC were made harder by playing on the new map, and the added enemy variety wasn’t that compelling for me to keep grinding on it.

There is a new mechanic added to the game, Curse, which creates an interesting risk and reward balance. Adding to Curse, either by killing cursed enemies (Highlighted in a purple outline) or by picking up cursed weapons in the shop, increases the health, strength, and speed of cursed enemies, but it also increases the number of materials they will drop. Cursed weapons in the shop are stronger than normal versions, and they may also have added special traits. So aside from the challenge to finish a run with no Curse added, I almost always went in for adding more Cursed equipment to every run.

On that note, finishing a run with no Curse ended up being really damned hard. Any ranged weapon could randomly hit a cursed enemy who was off-screen, and even with melee weapons, I could accidentally hit one who had just popped up next to my Brotato. In the end, I had to select items that severely downgraded my range so that I could only hit enemies directly next to the Bro, and as you can imagine that made just surviving the run EXTREMELY difficult.

Just as with the base game, victory for any challenge boiled down to whether the RNG was willing to give me a workable build. Some runs only took a few attempts, and I won by actually killing the final boss instead of running down the timer and winning simply by not dying.

A lot of the new Bros have fun new abilities that I needed time to sort how best to use, and also what builds would help them arrive to the final wave with plenty of firepower to spare. I actually had more fun with these new characters than I did with the base game, even as I struggled against the RNG to get the right builds.

Having said that, I don’t think the makers understand what percents are. Lots of upgrades say they add five percent to a stat like armor or damage, but it’s not a percent. It’s just five more points added to the current value. That’s not how percentages work.

In a similar vein, the achievements of the DLC say “0.2% of players completed this.” But that’s not really the case. This is taking all players of the game into account, including those who don’t own the DLC. Now keep in mind, Epic gave Brotato away for free. A lot of the base game achievements have very low percentages, but I’m sure that’s because many folks bounced off of the grind or the difficulty without attempting many of the challenges. Even so, the percentage of players beating the challenges in the DLC should be limited to those who bought it, which would create a more accurate percentage.

What I’m getting at is, I’m not that great of a gamer. I’m certainly not in the ranking of best gamers ever. If these numbers were adjusted to account only for players who bought the DLC, I believe they more accurately say something like “40% of players completed this.” Because honestly, while some were hard to finish, they weren’t so difficult that a mediocre gamer like me couldn’t brute force my way to victory.

In the end, I find myself just as conflicted about recommending the DLC as I was about the base game. It doesn’t help that after installing the DLC, the game became a lot more prone to crashes. I would pause it to go outside with the dogs, come back and try to play only to have it crash to the desktop. The current run does continue from the last shop visit, so I never lost that much progress, but a crash is still a crash, right?

Did I enjoy my time with both the DLC and base game? Well, yes, but I was equally vexed by all the runs that ended in dismal failure simply because RNGesus wasn’t feeling generous that day. And by day, I mean certain challenges eluded me for the whole day before I finally lucked into a working build. I’m semi-retired, so I have time to put up with this kind of bullshit. But most folks I know have jobs and families and lives to keep them busy, so I think this kind of game will just annoy them.

Maybe I’m wrong, and some of you are just masochistic enough to grind against this mind boggling mess. If so, for you, I’m saying it’s a 4 star experience. Much like the base game, Brotato: Abyssal Terrors can be a lot of fun when it hits those Goldilocks moments, and for the very patient gamers, there can be quite a few of them. Just go into it knowing that there are often some WIDE gaps between those moments.

So, funny story…

I said there was going to be a review next, and I know you’re asking “Where have you been?” The hospital. I’ve been there for some time now. A while back I got bit. I didn’t see what did it, but I assumed it was one of three types of mosquito in our area. One of them makes a lovely giant red disc when it bites me, and if I scratch it, the disc swells until it’s hard as a stone and turns purple. So when the bite turned red and swelled up my ring finger in a few seconds, I thought, “Mosquito” and applied some cream that’s both antihistamine and antibiotic.

A few hours later, despite not scratching it, the finger was purple, and I had trouble making a fist. The next day, my hand was red and swollen so bad it looked like a Disney character’s mitt. My neighbor applied more ointment and wrapped the finger in gauze, and I tried not to worry too much. But it wasn’t until I was doing work in the office and noticed I couldn’t feel my fingertip that I unwrapped the gauze to find a massive new purple nipple in the middle of my finger. Then the tip split open, and it started oozing a combination of pus and blood. I went to hubby and said, “I’m not an expert by any means, but I think this means I need to go to the emergency room.” He agreed, and away we went.

I was given prescriptions for cortisone and antibiotics and sent home. My hand went back to normal as I finished the antibiotics first, but I still had two days of cortisone left when I noticed a burning pain in my ankles. By the last day of my medicine, that pain had spread to my feet, knees, and hips, so I went back to the emergency room. While I waited in patient intake, the pain spread to my upper body. During the transfer to triage, I dropped to the floor, so luckily that meant I skipped triage and went straight to a room for assessment.

The next day, a doctor arrived from Rheumatology. He said my case was unique, and they wanted to take over my treatment so the students could study me. Folks, I could not be happier to hear that. It meant a nice room with only one neighbor, plus guaranteed exams to find exactly what I had. I didn’t bother mentioning that from the age of nineteen, I’ve had a lot of illnesses, and not once has anyone ever nailed down what’s wrong with me. But I figured, hey, I’ll get a full checkup, so I can at least find out if my internals are still in decent shape.

I’ve gone through x-rays, several blood tests, had a urine sample collected, did sonograms, bone mineral scan, physicals, the works. The internals are fine, and the closest answer we could find is that I had, “a reaction” to being bit. Which is an understatement, to be sure, but it’s more than I expected.

I got home on my birthday, and I’m definitely not going to lament that. I immediately made an aglio, olio, and peperoncino for lunch to make up for all the bland meals, and for dinner, I got a bacon cheeseburger with fries from a nearby restaurant. All in all, a pretty good birthday.

I am still not 100%, and I will need to be on meds for at least a month to treat the pain, inflamed joints, and sensitive skin. (It feels like a sunburn when my legs are touched.) I get tired real easy just from walking a bit, and when I do lay down, I crash hard.

But I’m home, and I’m grateful to the doctors and nurses who got me back on my feet. When I first arrived, a walk across the room seemed impossible. Yesterday, I managed about a half a kilometer walking the department’s hallway back and forth. Yes, I needed a nap right after, but that’s a lot of progress, and I couldn’t have got there without a LOT of help.

Anywho, that’s the report, and barring complications, I promise, the next post will be a review. I’d apologize for the delays, but as you can see, I wasn’t procrastinating this time. No, I was vegetating.

See you next time, folks.

Solitaire doesn’t need mobile mechanics

As I mentioned before, I’ve been sick since just before Christmas. The combination of high humidity and a too cold house has not made recovery easy. So even though I wrote that I would be committing to more time with “butt in chair, and words on screen,” what’s really been more common is ass in bed playing Solitaire on my phone.

The thing is, for years, I’ve been looking for a mobile version without ads. So when I found a version through my Netflix subscription, I downloaded it, and it was mostly fine.

Keep in mind, I’ve been playing Solitaire a long time. I first played with real cards after watching my mom play it. When we got a computer with Windows 3.1, I just moved over to computer versions because then I didn’t have to shuffle and count out the cards. Double bonus. I’ve played every version and variant since then, so it remains my most played game ever, edging out Tetris by close to two decades.

These last two months, I’ve played a LOT of this version from my four blanket-layered bed, and it’s got every mobile mechanic you might expect besides ads. It’s got a profile, a daily challenge, daily goals, a leaderboard, a leveling system, and a series of unlockable animations. And then of course it keeps asking to send notifications of new daily goals and daily challenges.

Now that I’m level 121, and am in the middle of animation pack six, I’ve come to the realization that Solitaire doesn’t need any of this stuff. They don’t exactly ruin the experience, but they don’t add any element of fun, either. Take the animation packs as an example. At no point during my many decades of playing did I say, “Yeah, this is all right, but it would be more fun if the cards turned into dancers and mimicked horrible versions of the Macarena, Raise the Roof, and Do the Lasso.” Just do the card cascade and let’s move on to the next hand.

Similarly, I don’t care that I have unlocked a new title for my profile page. I’m playing Solitaire. I don’t care if I can be called Savvy Cardslinger now. Every few levels, I get a new title, so the profile lights up with a red circle with a little white 1, like I should rush over and change my profile. Nah, screw that. I’m just going to play the next hand. Well, I admit, I did change my profile once when Heart Breaker became an option. But that’s only because it amused me slightly.

The daily goals and daily challenge are equally pointless. I can do most of the goals on the same round if the RNG is right. Back when I was still trying to keep up with those things, challenges were more iffy, like, “win 15 hands,” and I was going, “I wasn’t planning on being on the toilet quite that long, mang.”

The daily challenge is just another shuffle, but assigned to every player. I usually don’t even bother with it because all it does is add a little crown to a calendar. I’m old enough that I don’t need a daily gold star next to my name. That was neat in first grade, but I’m about to turn fifty. What I need now is glowing book reviews and maybe one day a fancy little statue from a reputable writer’s awards ceremony. (Seriously, good reviews are like cocaine, in that the highs they provide are intense, but don’t last long before I’m chasing another hit. But I digress.)

Both the daily challenges and daily goals will regularly ask me if I want to turn on notification to be notified when they refresh, but what’s the point? They refresh at midnight. I don’t need a reminder to play Solitaire. I’m stuck in bed, so I was going to do that anyway.

I don’t even care about the scoring system, or more accurately, I don’t understand it, and I don’t care to look up how it works. As near as I can figure, there’s some kind of bonus added if I play faster. But I’m just playing this because it’s a relaxing way to pass the time that doesn’t stress my body or my brain. I don’t really care if I average three minutes per game. In the morning, that can stretch all the way to four or five because I’ve got a dog or cat asking for cuddles, and I’m not going to tell them, “Not now, buddy, you’re ruining my score!”

About the only part of the score I do like is seeing how many moves I needed to complete each hand, because now I know I average around 120 moves for most rounds. But again, Solitaire isn’t a game of skill. It’s luck of the draw. Yes, I had a hand that I finished with 107 moves in one minute and forty seconds. But that wasn’t because I was so good. It was just a really great shuffle that let me stack up the cards faster than my normal pace.

A couple years ago, a mobile game ad promoted a version of Solitaire that went, “No ads, no gimmicks, just good old Solitaire.” I got that version, and it of course had ads, and gimmicks. (Leaderboards, daily goals, daily challenges, yada yada yada.) But if anyone knows of a version, even a paid version that ditches all of this mobile clutter, will y’all please let me know? It’s a bonus if they toss in Spider, Klondike, Freecell, and Pyramid, but I will honestly pay to get a clean copy of old school Solitaire that doesn’t try to turn it into some kind of online tournament. I don’t care about that, you know? I play Solitaire because I like playing with myself.

Wait, that came out wrong…or did it?

Anywho, see you next week with a real review.

My favorite anime of 2024

I have a few regrets from 2024, mostly game purchases that I couldn’t play because my PC is too old, and also not avoiding the lovely chest cold I got for Christmas. (Still cherishing that, whoever gave it to me. Bless you.) But the one choice I made that still looks good in hindsight was signing up for Crunchyroll.

In my teens, anime came after many years of reading fantasy and sci-fi, both in books and comics, and I was blown away by how writers on the other side of the world took similar ideas and did some magical origami to make a whole new frontier to explore.

Then of course, work and life started biting away at my time. But with Netflix offering a sampling of new anime, I got curious to see what else was available, and I’ve been delighted to discover that yes, new anime is still just as fun now as it was when I was first discovering it.

Here is my list of top anime for the year from Crunchyroll, along with a few honorable mentions from Netflix:

DD Fist of the North Star
Probably the dumbest anime I saw this year, which is what makes it so brilliant. The apocalypse of the old Hokuto no Ken series never came to pass, so Ken and his brothers have to find work. They end up at a convenience store, all of them competing to become a part-time employee under their master. In a wasteland where skills matter more than brains, these guys would be kings. But in a world where brains matter more, they’re almost too stupid to survive. It’s a premise ripe for laughs, and I sometimes had to pause an episode due to aching ribs. Plus, the show is drawn in a super-deformed style that I haven’t seen in a long time, so it’s just slightly tickling my sense of nostalgia as well. It’s good stuff.

Solo Leveling
These days the genre of normal people falling into a video game and discovering their own quirky skill has a lot of competition. What makes this one stand out is how the world is set up. See, it’s the “real world,” and all over the planet, portals are opening into a monstrous dimension. Most people don’t know they’re entering a game world, but after almost dying in a dungeon Sung Jinwoo sees a pop-up window asking him if he wants to continue. This leads him to access the in-game menus that no one else can see, because no one else has been near death in a dungeon. They either survived, or they didn’t.

The other things that made this first season stand out are seeing Sung use grinding mechanics to overcome the dungeon bosses solo, and in how the other “heroes” react to this supposed E-class fighter suddenly taking on tougher dungeons. Season two should be arriving soon, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Mashle
This one should come as no surprise. I loved the manga, and the anime manages to take everything that was good in still form and brings them to explosive, hilarious life. Mash Burndead’s rise through the ranks of a magic school despite lacking any magic powers is the best kind of absurd anime. Many of his classmates view him as vermin to be expelled or even exterminated, only to have him hand their ass to them, AND THEN help them out when they need a friend. So somehow, this adorable meathead manages to unify people who would normally despise each other, and even convince his school that he’s “got the juice.”

(Blame NFL Christmas day commentary for this term entering my vocabulary. Every other play, they’d say, “He’s got the juice,” and I would shout, “He’s got the juice! What kind of juice does he have?” And then I’d name a different juice. Luckily I did not turn it into a drinking game, or I might have died from alcohol poisoning.)

Season two is coming, promising a darker turn against much deadlier opponents, but unlike some series that go on forever, this one could be wrapped up sooner rather than later. Which is great because this is a show that makes a perfect introduction to anime for newcomers. When they finish this, they’ll definitely be ready for more.

The Weakest Tamer Began A Journey To Pick Up Trash
The most wholesome anime of the year starts in a dark place, with a young girl on the run from her village after the village elder puts a bounty on her head for having a zero star skill. Posing as a boy and taking the name Ivy, she goes on adventures with a very rare and very fragile slime. This is a perfect show to introduce kids into anime, but even adult fans can probably find some joy in the journey from a scared fugitive slowly becoming a respected heroine. It’s just a pure joy to watch, and it’s another show that I’m eager to get a second season of.

Dead Dead Demons DeDeDe Destruction
Probably one of the harder anime to recommend, and certainly not as a first entry. It starts with a zero episode set years after the events of the rest of the series, and that’s part of what makes it so bleak. You’re walking into a typical slice of life anime about high school girls living under the shadow of a giant UFO. And yeah, they get up to some cute adventures. But first and foremost, the show has already told you, “This will all go badly soon.”

Alongside that sense of foreboding, there are several factions pushing towards that apocalyptic tipping point seen in the prologue, and some of the things they do are gut wrenching. Worse, almost everyone involved thinks they are the good guys. Like I said, this is hard to watch, and harder to suggest. But it’s powerful and honest in a way that doesn’t seem possible for a sci-fi anime about cutesy girls being cute. So yeah, if you’re ready for a gut check on the same level as Grave of the Fireflies, try this show out.

My Hero Academia
Given my love of super hero comics from Marvel and DC, an anime about an academy for super heroes is an easy sell. I’m now well into season five, and it’s been one hell of a ride so far. There’s a pendulum of sorts swinging through each season. On one end are the “calmer” school activities, which give the characters time to develop relationships with each other. On the other end are the attacks by the villains, which have only become bolder and more intense as the series plays out. War is coming to this world, and it is not going to be pretty when it happens.

But if they had just started the war without giving us time to get to know the characters, the stakes wouldn’t matter. It’s the time invested in building up everyone that has me worried for that coming war, and that’s great writing mixed with amazing animation. So if you love costumed crime fighters, this one is definitely for you.

From Netflix
I debated putting these on my top Netflix list, but I decided they belong here among their peers. Before I dig in, I just want to say how glad I am that Netflix started buying anime shows because it’s got me back into a cherished pastime that I had almost forgot existed.

Rising Impact
Golf anime. It seems so unlikely that this could work, but it does because of Gawain, or as I call him, Golf Goku. Gawain is discovered by a pro golfer in the mountains living with only his grandpa. Just like Goku. She soon learns that he’s very physically powerful and encourages him to take up golf to hone his skills. From there, he joins a special school full of rivals who at first underestimate him, only to be humbled by his strength and focus. Then they become his friends after he whoops them real good. You know, like Goku.

The end of the second season brought a new threat to Merlin’s two golf academies, so I’m definitely looking forward to the continued adventures of “Squishy Joe” and his Z-team of golfers.

Pluto
I sat on watching this for a while. A darker interpretation of Astro Boy, set in a world where a serial killer is hunting both humans and the most sophisticated robots in the world? Sounds too heavy for me. But once I sat down with it, I couldn’t stop watching.

At its core is an investigation that starts with serial killing, but leads to a government group who had been tasked with finding weapons of robotic destruction in the Middle East after accusations by “the United States of Thraxis.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which war they’re drawing inspiration from, but going from there to who is responsible for the murders and why is a grim but fascinating story. As an added bonus, I didn’t guess who the killer was until just before the moment of truth, and as a lover of mysteries who frequently picks up on foreshadowing and clues, I was happy that this left me guessing almost to the end.

Ranma 1/2
So good, I listed it twice this year. We finished the first twelve episode season already, and that is my only complaint about this returning classic. We really should have been treated to a full, proper season. It’s not like the studio has to wait on new issues to come out.

Anywho, rather than remake the anime frame for frame, this new Ranma 1/2 opted to remain more faithful to the manga. What makes the manga so good is that it takes place in a world where literally everything is a martial art. Gymnastic fighting? Yep. Martial arts figure skating? Yup. They haven’t got there yet, but there’s definitely a martial eating contest in the future. It’s just so goofy and perfect, and I need more people to watch it so Netflix doesn’t pull a Netflix and cancel it early.

That’s the anime of 2024 wrapped up, and given production cycles, I expect some of these might just loop over to a list for 2025. I feel like I should thank all these artists and writers, because getting back into anime has also helped to revive my own creative process. A lot of stuff, including the lockdown, had just burned me out, but now I’m back in the zone, remembering the fun of building worlds and filling them with great characters. So thanks, anime people. You’re going to make 2025 much better for me, I just know it.

Now, let’s see what new stuff this year will add to my to-watch list…

My favorite Netflix shows of 2024

For the second year, I’m dropping a list of my favorite shows on Netflix, partly in the hopes of converting some of you into fans, and then maybe Netflix won’t cancel them. But it’s also because lists are good way to remember stuff. In fact, there were a couple shows on this year’s list that I really enjoyed, and then forgot I’d even watched them because my brain is turning kinda goopy these days.

Just like last year, these aren’t all the shows I watched, or a definitive list of stuff I liked. Also, I debated adding in Amazon shows I’m watching, but that was just reruns from my PC because we only got subtitles working on the Fire Stick in December, so hubby couldn’t watch shows with me on the TV. Next year there should be a list for their stuff too, but for now, I’ll leave them off.

Oh, also, I’m keeping my anime picks apart for another list, as most of those shows are watched on Crunchyroll, and I feel like it might be better to promote them separately from Netflix.

On a side note, quite a lot of anime on Netflix has the worst translations I’ve ever seen. A character might say their friend’s name, and it gets twisted into something like “But are you sure this plan can work?” Then other times, someone will use a title like ni-san (brother) or ne-chan (little sister) and the translator goes off the rails like “Mr. Ken Harada of 173-5021 Hakodate, in Hokkaido prefecture.” The few times they get a translation right feels like a genuine miracle.

With my rambles and rants out of the way, let’s get into the list, m’kay?

Lidia Poët season 2
This was on my list last year, but the new episodes take everything great about the series and adds a season-spanning conspiracy to solve, a hot new prosecutor who shares Lidia’s passion for seeking justice, and a new career path for her brother Enrico. The only thing I don’t like about this season is that I’ll have to wait for the next one to arrive. But it has already been greenlit, and I can promise you, it’s very likely to be on the top list for 2025 too.

Jentry Chau VS The Underworld
A teenage girl returns to the hometown she almost burned to the ground with her mystic powers discovers that she’s being hunted by a wicked spirit. She also unwittingly opens a portal into the underworld, forcing her to both find a way to close it and defeat the mogui trying to sacrifice her and steal her powers. With a premise like this, it’s already got my attention, but there’s also a great cast, a superb soundtrack, and more action than you can shake a rain stick at. This is another show I am BEGGING Netflix to keep running with for as many seasons as possible.

A Man on the Inside
Ted Danson plays a retired professor whose daughter challenges him to find something new to get him out of the house, so he gets himself hired to be a spy in a nursing home plagued by a few recent thefts. I loved this show, but somewhere after the third episode, it managed to wring just as many tears out of me as it did laughs. The first episodes are funny because Charles is a terrible spy. But as he comes to learn more about the other residents of the retirement home, his connections to them turn sentimental. It’s that reconnection to other people that drives the story, but also what makes them so sad to watch. Still it’s a great show that can make me laugh and cry, even more so when they can make me do both at the same time. There’s hints of a second season for this show too, but even if it doesn’t work out, I’m glad to have seen this.

Ranma 1/2
Oh, hell yeah! I’ve been trying for ages to get the original Ranma 1/2 DVDs, but every copy I dug up was in bad shape, with most being unwatchable without making me queasy. So here’s a new remake that sticks closer to the manga, meaning that while I know a lot of the characters and jokes, the order they come in is fresh and new. Still, there are scenes that remain faithful to the original, and it’s funny how I can remember every line from these moments right before they’re given, and still laugh as if I’m hearing them for the first time.

This is the first time seeing this with my husband, so just as with our viewing of old Star Trek shows and Batman: The Animated Series, it’s fun to share something I’ve loved deeply since my misspent youth and see how much he loves them, too.

Sweet Home seasons 2 and 3

What I really wanted out of the new seasons of Sweet Home was to see the original group find ways to survive in the apocalyptic, monster-filled hellscape they’d just emerged into after escaping their apartment building. What I got was a much larger cast, all of them crammed into an underground shelter while the dwindling military forces continued to search for supplies outside. Even the first season’s villain and hero monsters are pushed to the side for a great deal of time to build up these new characters, and I admit, I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. But season three put all those concerns to bed, tucked them in gently, and delivered a deeply satisfying good night kiss. If Netflix would have faith to let more shows wander for a season or two like this, I think they’d find more people coming back to check out new stuff instead of just rewatching their favorite old shows.

Fairly Odd Parents: A New Wish
Of course I was on board for a new sequel to one of my favorite Nickelodeon cartoons. I adored Hazel from the first episode, but what I wasn’t expecting was to fall in love with Hazel’s parents, Angela and Marcus. She’s a self-help author, and he’s a professor of para-science studies. This would make them seem distant and detached, far too busy to pay attention to their daughter. Instead, they are constantly joining in on her play times, noticing when things are bothering her, and encouraging her to be her best self possible. It’s just so wholesome and heartwarming.

Then the writers offer a great group of friends and teachers, a strict principal, a rich kid and his Jeff Bezos parody father, a few returning fairies mixed with some new arrivals, and a delicious twist ending that leaves me terrified of another Netflix cancellation. Please, watch this show and help convince them that it’s worth at least a second season to explore the premise laid out in the last minute of the finale. Because damn, I NEED to see that.

A Killer Paradox
A limited series from Korea about a serial killer who can not only sense wicked people, but somehow is gifted in such a way that all evidence linking him to his killing spree just vanishes. You might think this would be incredibly liberating for a guy like Lee Tang, but instead he struggles to process his grief and guilt at the growing number of victims he’s leaving behind, even as his gifted killer instinct drives him to find new targets.

This is a great show with an amazing cast that covers the story both from Lee’s perspective, and also from the detectives who are trying to catch him. Plus it’s got a great ending that I wouldn’t change a single detail of.

The Brothers Sun
Another limited series worth watching for Michelle Yeoh alone, but she’s surrounded by a  huge cast of talented actors, and this is a fantastic premise for an action comedy. Bruce Sun is a college student who is supposed to be studying to become a doctor, but all he wants to do is improv comedy. He thinks his mother is just a homely nobody, but she’s an important figure in the Taiwan Triads. Bruce’s father is shot in Taiwan, leading his brother Charles to come to America to protect both his mother and his brother from assassins. By the way, Charles doesn’t want to be a killer; he just wants to be a pastry chef. Both brothers are hoping to aim lower than their parents would approve of.

Once Bruce gets over his initial shock at discovering his family’s criminal roots, he ends up being dragged into the plotting and scheming, all while trying to push for his dreams of just being a funny guy. By doing so, he makes his mother and brother examine their own dreams and goals, and the whole family veers between heartfelt reconnections, wacky hijinks, and intense fight scenes. It’s absolutely brilliant, and even if this was a limited series, I wouldn’t mind if the writers pitched a sequel.

That’s it for this year, and I’m already looking forward to making a list for 2025. Ooh, dare I hope for The Wandering Earth II? We should also be due for a new Stranger Things season, and there’s a lot of shows I hope will get the chance to expand or wrap up their stories instead of being tossed aside like half-filled tissues.

But it has been a pretty good year, with good games and great shows. Here’s hoping that 2025 will offer more, but if you can’t find any new releases to love, maybe give these a shot, m’kay?

My top games of 2024

Gaming in 2024 became a bit more vexing for me this year. As I’m mentioned several times before, my PS4 died, and my PC is now so old that it can’t keep up with newer games. So stuff like Elden Ring, Enotria, Lies of P, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns all gave me a big nope when I tried booting them up.

Now don’t worry, I’m planning to get a new gaming PC in 2025. Whether I get a PS5 is still up in the air, and depends a lot on me getting some new books out. But that’s a me problem, not a y’all problem.

Despite the hardware setbacks, I was still able to find these gems, which I am quite happy to share with y’all.

Vampire Survivors
I know, you’re thinking “What, again?” But listen, during this year Poncle put out a lot of free updates, and then they delivered two paid DLCs that were both digital love letters to two of my favorite games of all time, Contra and Castlevania. Hell, I still haven’t unlocked everything in Ode to Castlevania, but I have FINALLY found a vampire. You know the one I’m talking about, and if you don’t, it means you still need to play Vampire Survivors. There’s no reason not to. It’s cheap, it’s easy to play, and it will give your beady heart hundreds of hours of boundless joy. Don’t you want to be joyful? Shut up, you do. Now go get that game.

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
I’ve played through the full campaign three times this year, which should already tell you how much I love it. I’m planning a fourth run, and so obviously a major part of its appeal is the multi-class feature, allowing me to create a character using the best traits of two classes, and in trying to find “the perfect build.”

But my love is also for the story telling, which is probably some of the most confident and joyful out of all the Borderlands games. The humor relies a lot less on stereotypes and punching down, something Borderlands and Borderlands 2 can’t claim. It even manages to make Claptrap enjoyable for me, and given how little I like that guy, I’d call that a miraculous accomplishment. Best of all, it’s a one and done affair, with no DLC to buy, no season passes, no loot boxes, or any other AAA bullshit. It’s just a good time that invites you and a few friend to get together for a few days of adventures in the world of Bunkers ‘N Badasses.

Islets
Let me get out the movie announcer voice for a second…ahem. In a world where Richard Scarry is a god, animals from the surface world have taken to airships as adventurers seeking to reunite four floating islands that previously were held together with magnets. This metroidvania wooed me with its cute characters and gameplay, but it really impressed me with its many, many accessibility features. No matter what skill level you are at as a gamer, Islets will tailor itself to your needs, making it a perfect game for beginners. But if you want to go hard core, oh, this game can also accommodate you and whip your ass from one island to the next. If you skipped this because it looked too twee and cutesy, believe me when I say, you need to give it a chance.

Dread Delusion
An RPG set in a futuristic apocalypse and based on PS One style graphics. Everything about this game said, “This is for you, Zoe!” I got to the end, and I was not disappointed. I mean, as an RPG, your choices don’t really change much in the world. But that world has a story to tell, and it is wonderfully weird and very compelling. If you looked at the graphics and said, “Meh, not next-gen,” please drop those pretenses and get in there for the story, and for a world unlike any you’ve ever seen before.

Shakedown Hawaii
An homage to old school GTA games, this is a joyously evil romp around an island trying to own everything. Featuring an older rich guy struggling to save his crumbling evil empire by way of extortion and shady business practices, the core loop of this game is shaking down businesses to force them into accepting protection. But the ways to go about that in each business are different, and there are a ton of side missions to keep the main story from ever feeling dull. It took me a little under 50 hours to see everything Shakedown Hawaii has to offer, but it was enough to convince me to keep it on the hard drive for another romp through its cartoonish world.

Neon Abyss
Sliding onto this list at the literal last minute is a procedurally generated rogue-lite dungeon shooter that does everything right to please me. It’s a twin-stick shooter that involves Greek mythology, a new set of modern titans that calls to mind American Gods, and boasts a whole lot of style in its world design and in its impressive chiptune-techno soundtrack.

Like many rogue-lites, it is possible to find a bad run, but I’ve ended far more runs feeling like a boss because so many of the gun and items can take a humble start and turn it into an epic adventure. Even more incredible? All this fun comes in at less than one gigabyte of files. So do yourself a favor and make a little room for this gem. I’ve got a good feeling you won’t want to erase it to make room for anything else.

With that, the list of top games for 2024 is done. I know it’s a lot more indie titles this year. As for the new year? Well, hopefully it’s something to look forward to. Speaking of stuff to look forward to, I still have to post my top Netflix picks (pix? Nah.) as well as a list of my favorite anime from Crunchyroll and Netflix.

I know this year’s output hasn’t been great, but I have a good feeling about 2025. Well, a good feeling about MY output for 2025. As for the year itself, we’ll just have to play it by ear. I’ll be glad to have y’all along for the ride, too.

So that was 2024

I’ve spent most of the last week doing two things: playing The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth and typing up best of lists for January. Today, the last day of the year, I’m here at my desk, thinking about the year as a whole, and it really wasn’t terrible. Yeah it wasn’t great, or even quite as good as 2023. But maybe that’s the wrong way to examine each exiting year.

Let me go back to the basics to assess the year. Did we have enough to eat? Yes, always. Did our animals ever go hungry, or suffer from a lack of medical care? No. Was I not entertained? Oh, for sure. So what then, caused the feeling that 2024 sucked?

America was a large part of it. More specifically, watching half a year campaigned away, being assured over and over that surely no one would elect that guy again, and always thinking, Yeah, but y’all said that last time, and he got elected in the first place. And then he got elected again.

I’m here in Italy, where our voters decided that an actual fascist was fine. On the local level, my city decided to go strong to the left, which was something of a relief, but that’s one city in a country, you know? It’s a drop in the bucket.

On the global scale, I look around and see voters decide that less service and worse services are fine, so long as the rich don’t have to pay taxes. I wonder how it is that this bold-faced lie is believed so completely despite very recent history proving that so-called conservative rule doesn’t conserve anything aside from off-shore accounts. National budgets rise, deficits explode, civil servants get fucked over by their bosses AND the people they serve. And for what? Because everyone everywhere is convinced that the little guys need to prop up the aristocracy?

That’s the backdrop for my ennui, a handful of billionaires, all racing to become the first trillionaires, and all of their shit pouring metaphorically down into my life to dilute the happiness I have.

We’ve not received a raise to counter the rising food prices and energy bills. Every month there’s some unexpected expense that neatly zeroes out our bank balance, leaving us unable to build any savings. Every last two weeks, there’s the husband asking me again to be careful at the store, because we don’t have much left. It eats away at the joy I’m trying to hold onto, the constant gnawing that at some point, not even being careful will balance out to zero, leaving us with less than zero.

What I’m saying is, it’s fear and anger that have tainted everything good in 2024 to make it seem downright awful. But it wasn’t. Unlike a few prior years, I haven’t had to spend most of my time riding buses and trains to hospitals to visit my husband. He doesn’t have to commute two hours to go to work. He just gets out of bed and walks to the office. I ride my bike almost every day, weather permitting, and when my ankle will allow it, I’ve gone on long walks with my dogs and the cat.

Where I live, on a clear day, I can see a range of mountains stretching from the west all the way to the northeast. Even on a cloudy day, I can find beauty in the fields and crops all around me. I ought to be every bit as inspired as when I first moved to Milan and had a gorgeous view of the Alps right outside my window.

It’s all in the perspective, and I realize now that what tainted 2024 wasn’t really anything awful happening to me or mine. It was proxy threats. It was social dread, the daily anxiety of others that kept me looking away from my own life.

Which is why for 2025, in order to finish at least one new novel and two new short story collections, I will be giving the new year a slogan in Polish:  Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy.

Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Which is terrible, I know, but more than ever, I’ve got to get back to making words I can sell. I can still remember the first years I put out several new books, and the result was, I could buy new furniture, a new TV, new books and games. I could afford to donate to charities and help people out in their times of need. That first flood of sold words got me my side gig editing for a web site and occasionally for their print magazine. I need to get back to that, to cover what we’re losing over time, and to eventually replace the stuff I bought that is now becoming obsolete.

2025 is my race to win, if I stick to my lane and just keep doing what I do. Butt in seat, words on screen. Everything else that might distract from that is only going to hurt me and stop me from writing and selling words. So: Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy.

I think all of us to a certain degree are going to have to embrace this to keep perspective on our own little pools of happiness. I’m not saying we can’t be part of communities and try to find our own people to bond with. That’s important too. But to keep moving ahead, we all need to see what’s in front of us and ask the basic stuff first. Do we have enough to eat? Are the bills paid? Are the animals and/or kids okay?

If all of those are a yes, then what’s really dragging us down isn’t what’s wrong in our homes. It’s the trickle down bullshit of society trying to convince us life is awful and meaningless, and anyway, AI is going to replace us all next week. So fuck it, give in to melancholy and despair. Don’t celebrate your everyday victories. Don’t find joy in your hobbies and pathways of mental escape.

No. Fuck that shit. Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy. Print it on a shirt. Learn to pronounce it right. Teach it to everyone who looks like they’re ready to accept defeat in 2025. Instead of deciding we’ve no fucks left to give, let’s all find the inner strength to push back and take our joy away from the jaws of ennui.

Not my circus, 2025, and not my monkeys.

Game review: Neon Abyss for Steam

I am absolutely delighted to be contrasting this review to my last one for a number of reasons, because in most of the ways River City Girls failed, Neon Abyss manages to make playing it not only tolerable, but enjoyable. Granted, they are not similar games, with one being a fighting game and the other being a side scrolling rogue-lite. But what I mean is that Neon Abyss sets out to build a game that I’d want to keep revisiting over and over, and they passed that test with ease.

Neon Abyss opens with Hades asking the player to defeat the new titans, who have stolen some of Hades’ powers and taken over the human world through corporations. So the player picks a mercenary to enter the titular neon abyss to slog though a set of dungeon and boss fights, leading to a showdown with one of the titans.

Each defeated titan unlocks another target to hunt down, and defeating the regular bosses also unlocks alternate forms of the fight. For example, defeating Tok, the god of social media, unlocks Tik, and beating Sung, the god of Screens grants access to later fights with Sam.

There’s a McTucky boss fight with parody forms of Ronald and the Colonel (and McFamily, adding one for Wendy as well.) There’s a god of pills, a god of guns, a god of idol singers, a god of plushies, and a god of makeup. There’s one for crypto currency, gambling, and yes, even influencers like Pewdie. Which is part of what makes every run feel fresh and interesting. The order of bosses to be found in the early floors of each dungeon are random, but each one and their variants forms are fun to shoot it out with.

Within a few fights, the game turns ridiculously meta by breaking the fourth wall. The game developer comes to Hades to complain about the game needing more features to keep players coming back. Hades complains to his secretary that he’s got a limited budget to do anything with, and each time she suggests a new plan to make the developer’s wishes possible. Then she and Hades hire you, the player, to get out there and earn your keep for their sake. The cheek.

Here is where stuff gets grindy, but if you got on board for the loop through the first three titan fights, the grind won’t be an issue. Each new development requires taking twenty Abyss Gems from the later stage bosses. The earlier fights drop a different currency, Faith Gems, which are used to unlock new rooms and features in the game. So the Abyss Gems are meant to encourage sticking through every run, even if one of them has turned into a slog with a bad build. I can’t say that incentive always works, as I have sometimes bailed on runs. The option to return to the bar is right there in the menu, so if I’m not feeling a run, I’m okay with giving it up. Besides, the next run will probably be better anyway. (Seriously, bad runs are rare, so the RNG here seems to favor fun over fuckery.)

I haven’t gotten around to the controls yet, but before I do, I want to contrast this game with River City Girls. That previous slog-fest gave no option for remapping buttons, but Neon Abyss allows it right from the start. Which is funny because when the tutorial put the most important functions on the triggers, I said, “Oh, no, that’s not how I like it.” I changed everything, only to move to the next screen where the tutorial explained that my character shoots with the right analog stick. Which would make using the face buttons tricky, yes? Yes. So I reset the controls, and aside from tweaking how to jump down between platforms, I found the rest was mostly smooth sailing. My only issue was more with my controller’s loose analog sensors, so sometimes trying to find the right angle to shoot from took a little fiddling and a bit of swearing.

In the same topic of accessibility, there’s an easy mode, and swapping difficulties can be done at the starting menu, or it can be done in the bar between runs. Raising the difficulty makes some obvious changes in enemy health and speed, increasing the size and speed of their projectiles too. Beyond tailoring how hard you want the game, you also get features like aim assist and adding a dotted line indicating the trajectory of grenades. Also, any feature you unlock that isn’t working for you can be turned off while still keeping the features you do like. This is a game that wants you to have a good time, and it’s willing to compromise to meet you in your comfort zone.

Now there are some caveats to all of this, most of  it having to do with the DLC. As far as the base game goes, the only issue to be aware of is that the more runs you make, the harder the game gets, even at the easiest level. This is a gradual creep in power scale, which I think helps ease players into learning to play smarter rather than harder, and this is fine.

The DLC characters and their included boss, Chronos, though…I don’t like him or them. The DLC characters all feel kind of clumsy, and maybe it’s just a quirk of RNG, but it always feels to me like they are given less resources to work with. With the base game characters, I can usually eke out enough coins to buy a new gun in the first shop, or if I like my starting gun, to grab an extra key or grenade. But with the DLC characters, I can get all the way to the third floor of any run and still not have enough to buy a gun, let alone the pricier power-ups that go for around 70 coins.

Then there’s Chronos, with his massive health bar, exponentially larger than any other boss, combined with a veritable visual vomit of attacks. It’s not just that too much is going on to discern attack patterns. This dude is throwing out so much stuff all at once that at first, I didn’t even see the platforms in the background to jump on. But even once I did see them and have some idea of where to jump, the screen was so full of projectiles that it was impossible to dodge anything. Hell, I couldn’t even tell if my own bullets were connecting because there was just too much stuff on screen to sort out what was mine or his. Feh.

I uninstalled the DLC, and I was surprised to learn the combined DLC represents a nerf for the whole game. Some characters like Anna got more severe downgrades, but all the base game characters were suddenly able to find more money, making trips to the first floor shop less…frugal. On a few runs, I was even able to buy the gun from the first shop AND a seventy coin item. With the DLC, that would have been impossible.

I’m conflicted about that, too. I mean, I didn’t exactly struggle to reach the titans at the end of many runs with the DLC installed. But the game turning stingy on a whim? Why? Was it some reaction to Hardcore Gamers saying it was too easy? I don’t know.

It’s a minor lament, given that I was having fun with the game right from the start. It’s just that I’m having even more fun now that I have a bigger budget to buy guns and gadgets. In both cases, I’d give Neon Abyss an enthusiastic 5 stars and recommend it for fans of platforming Mario-like games and twin stick rogue-lites.

Game review: River City Girls for Steam

Time is a funny thing. The way you experience it can feel vastly different depending on whether you are enjoying what you do, or whether you were being tortured. For example, I played just a hair under fifty hours of Shakedown Hawaii and loved almost every minute of it. Then I played twenty-two hours of River City Girls, and it felt like it would never end.

Unlike Shakedown Hawaii, an homage to GTA games, River City Girls is an actual entry in a very long-running franchise, Japan’s Kunio series. The intellectual properties were bought by ARC systems, who then went on to make this and many more games. I can’t talk about the quality of the others, but I can say this was quite a painful experience, both physically and mentally. Beating the game somehow made all of my efforts even worse, like deciding to pick my nose after scratching my sweaty butthole.

Oh, and I need to warn you, there will be massive story spoilers this time, because I cannot explain my pain without exposing that god awful ending. So if you want to avoid spoilers, skip this review, okay?

River City Girls follows Misako and Kyoko, two delinquents who nobody likes. Don’t feel too sorry for them, because by the end of the game, you’ll feel the same way. With few exceptions, they insult everyone all over their town, and they complain about everything. Their adventure begins when Kyoko, who is skipping school to hang out in detention at Misako’s school (remember this point) with Misako, gets a text message that their boyfriends Kunio and Rikki have been kidnapped. (Remember that too.) So they first must bust out of school, with the principal rallying the other students to stop them.

And let me stop there. First, Kyoko isn’t a student at the school. The principal somehow knows she’s with Misako and keeps telling student to “Stop those girls.” This makes zero sense, but it’s just the first of many plot points that are bolted onto a fighting game to keep it moving forward no matter how unlikely any of this is.

Before the game has even moved out of the school, the action is paused every few seconds for pop-up tutorials, and there’s no way to turn that off. Opening the menu gives one pop-up for every screen, and even getting out into town, there’s more pop-ups.

I wish I could say that was the most frustrating part of the experience, but then there’s the controls, which worked better in the old NES days when there was only a D-pad and two buttons. For starters, instead of assigning a dash button to one of the triggers or face buttons, dashing is activated by tapping the analog stick twice in the direction I want to move, but the dash gets shut off if I change directions, and just getting it to work reliably was damn near impossible. Worse, because I’ve developed hand tremors, even the slighted wiggle of my thumb could be interpreted as a dash command. So when I need to walk, I ran past opponents or into attacks face first, and when I needed to run, I literally couldn’t do it to save my life.

None of this is customizable, by the way. When it comes to this or any other accessibility features, you get bubkes. This is coming from ARC, who in Dragonball Fighterz added all kinds of nice touches to make the game welcoming to newbies and pros alike, and to handicapped gamers as well. This serves in stark contrast to River City Girls, where there’s not even a beginner’s mode, just normal and hard.

I should also mention how the attack and interact button are the same, which is all kinds of fun when an enemy drops a weapon. Then my character crouches to pick it up, and the opponent who dropped it springs up off the ground and pummels them. So I get up and try to fight back, only to try to pick the damn weapon up again. I try to walk away from it to make the attack work, and the same opponent does a sliding kick to introduce their foot to my character’s boobs. Later on, the game adds in the ability to pick up opponents and use them as melee weapons, and this has the exact same aggravating chain. Both ideas could have worked if interaction and attacks were separate buttons, but as they are in this game, they just add more friction to a control scheme that didn’t need more “help.”

While I’m going on about things that don’t make sense, there’s zero point to the leveling system. On the character’s menu, numbers go up to seemingly reflect their growing powers, but every single fight takes exactly the same slow number of punches and kicks to end, and the health bar drops with the same consistency when compared to the start of the game. Like, if they wanted to unlock attacks at certain levels, that’s fine. But don’t bolt on a ridiculous rising power level when I can confirm nothing is changing.

Then there’s side quests, because of course there are. The first is getting a cheeseburger for someone neither of the heroines like. Said burger costs twenty-fucking-five dollars, so kiss that first new move from the dojo goodbye. Worse, this fucker just keeps showing up to assign more bullshit:
“Beat up this guy in the men’s room so I can pee.” What?
“Smash the cars of people making us look bad because we’re so poor!” What the fuck?
“Kill these yakuza snitches!” What. The. Actual. Fuck.

The writers were so desperate to find anything for side quests, they assigned the dumbest jobs I’ve ever worked in a game, and I once had to hunt for batarangs and graffiti in Gotham Knights. And I loved Gotham Knights.

Let’s get back to the plot while also covering boss fights. At the end of each section, the girls run into someone bossy, triggering a cut-scene followed by a bunch of dialogue that always goes like this:
“What have you done with our boyfriends?”
“I…who are you, and why are you asking me about this?”
“You kidnapped them, because that guy said so.”
“I don’t know him either. What the fuck are you two bitches on about?”
“Grrr, let’s fight!”

This triggers the boss fight, and every boss has increasingly aggravating powers to drag out their fights. While you’re stuck with mundane melee options, these assholes get magic powers like telekinesis and even flight. There’s one boss, Hibari, who some designer decided wasn’t having a fair fight with her flying and lobbing unblockable magic attacks, so they let her keep summoning two minions to run in from either side of the screen. They also felt that the only way to do damage to her was to precisely time one attack and stand under the boss in a pixel perfect position to make said attack bounce off her force field, back down to the floor, and then back up to her. Then, and only then is the player allowed to make a few attacks, amounting to doing minor scratches to her health bar while she and her friends can decimate my health bar with one hit.

The Hibari fight and every other boss fight highlights the discrepancy between what counts as a hit for me versus what counts for the boss. If a boss’ attack whiffs my character but doesn’t actually connect, well, that’s close enough. Meanwhile, I’ve practically got to be practicing proctology to make sure I can find the boss’ hit box, otherwise it doesn’t count. Oh, and randomly, the bosses can just decide they don’t feel like taking damage or staggering in a combo. Because why not, right?

Upon ending a fight, there’s another dialogue that goes:
“Wow, you girls are tougher than you look.”
“Now tell us where our boyfriends are.”
“I already told you, I don’t know you or them. But if they really were kidnapped, go to the next neighborhood over and look for this guy to beat up. They probably know something,”

At no time do either of these idiots collect proof that the people they’re attacking have any solid information at all. For that matter, they don’t even have any information on who took their boyfriends or why they did it. Aside from a single flashed scene in the opening introduction and the intro song saying the girls need to save their boyfriends, this Rolls Canardly creaks from one boss fight to the next on the strength of one thing: that Misako and Kyoko must find Kunio and Rikki no matter who they have to thrash to do so.

So, ready for the punch-line? Kunio and Rikki were never kidnapped, and what’s more, they aren’t Misako and Kyoko’s boyfriends. Remember that text message that got this whole thing started? It’s never explained who sent it, or why. Setting aside that brain fart from the writers, the end of the game is, “Hahaha, theses chicks aren’t just rude and stupid, they’re also delusional!” Wow, that’s…that probably the shittiest game ending I’ve seen all year, and it somehow manages to make the ending of the NES classic Pro Wrestling, “Congratulations! A Winner is you!” feel more rewarding.

Getting to the end, the game unlocks Kunio and Rikki as playable in a New Game Plus mode. I thought I’d try that to see what it changes, and it doesn’t change anything. The principal is still yelling at student to get “those girls,” the boys have no dialogue of their own, or non-girly items to buy in the shops. But the creamed corn topping this steaming pile of poo is that the fucking tutorial pop-ups come back around. Yes, you just beat the game. You probably know how everything works by now. But you still have to suffer more because, again, why not?

I’m told that River City Girls 2 was all around a better game, but I think it will be a while before I try to play it because of how badly this game soured me on the setting, the characters, and the franchise in general.

For all these reasons, I’m giving River City Girls two stars. It’s been a while, so I want to remind y’all that I only give 1 star to broken, unplayable games. But man, I was so tempted to drop the 1 star bomb on these chicks, and I cannot recommend this to anyone, for any reason.

Feh.