Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 3

Yew kin dew eet!

Hey there, reader. It’s been a while since we just stopped to chat a bit about you. By the way, you’re looking great. Is that a new hairstyle? It’s nice. I’d offer you a cookie, but this web site is a strict no cookie zone. And before I get into talking about you, can I just point out that there are no auto-play videos trying to distract you with ads? There’s no flashing banners or attempts to monetize you, my dearest, most favoritest (totally a real word, shut up spell-check) person in the whole world. You come here to read me, and because of that, all of this lack of exploitation is because I respect you. No, it’s because I love you. Because you are special.

So, I want to talk to you about A.I. and you. By now, other artists have told you our side of things. Corporations are stealing their work and feeding it into machines to “train them.” You also have to have seen by now that what gets cranked out is pure shit. But the same corporations keep insisting that with enough time, all that crap will somehow become quality.

Set that aside.

Environmentalists have no doubt told you that the energy needs of these technologies is a climate disaster, and that they are sucking power from the grid so hard that brownouts and blackouts are going to become more and more common. Corporations don’t even have a pithy comeback for that. They just don’t care.

But set that aside, too.

The message sent to you, reader, is that these genius billionaires are just “leveling the playing field.” It sounds so cool, right? But that’s framing, and what these assholes are doing is belittling you. “Leveling the playing field” translates from marketing into rich asshole as “You don’t have the talent to make art. Let us steal talent from artists and give it to you, loser.”

NO. Reader, that is simply not true. You want to write a book? You can do it. I should know, I’ve written a fair number of them, and then sold hundreds of them all by myself. I spend a good portion of my time playing video games, reading comics and books, and I’ve written so many books despite my lazy slacking ways. You can too. All you have to do is sit down and put one word on a page, and you have taken the first step to being a writer.

You want to make a web-comic? Go look at the first weekly installments of most web-comics, and what do you see? Simplistic poses. Minimal backgrounds. Basic facial expressions. Fast forward to the present installments, and they all look way better. These days, getting your first web-comic out there gives you better than average odds of getting it turned into a cartoon or live action series. Companies are looking for your art to inspire them. You can do it. You can make that comic you’ve had brewing inside of you since middle school.

You want to make a video game? Reader, there are great games made by just one person all the time, with credits screens that read like a cartoon joke:

A game by Dave
Art by Dave
Music by Dave
Programming by Dave
Catering by Dave’s wife

You can make a game like them, or make one with a few of your friends. You don’t need A.I. You don’t even need money. Get a 3D program like Blender for free, look up free tutorials on YouTube, and get in there. There are all kinds of game engines that let you make a game for free, and others who only ask for a cut once you’re selling games. If it hits well on one platform, you can port it to others and keep on making new version of the same game, so then you can fund the next game with your profits.

You. Can. Do. It.

Really, that’s most evil part of this A.I. scam. Yes, it is evil that rich people want to steal from artists, who are frequently struggling financially because other corporations take huge cuts to distribute their work while paying the people who make the art as little as possible. But that’s why I’ve always been indie. The store gets their commission, and I get what I earn, fair and square.

But today, this isn’t about me. It’s about you, and how these evil lying sacks of shit are trying to kill your dreams and tell you that you can’t do anything without their scam products. Reader, don’t you believe a word of “leveling the playing field.” If you want to be creative, you can. You don’t need an A.I. product to give you a prompt or a whole story, or badly drawn artwork, or some shitty chiptune that would make a first year musician cringe. You can do whatever you want without those assholes. All you have to do is believe in yourself, sit down, and get to it.

I believe in you, and I’ve seen thousands of people just like you rise up on their talents and their efforts alone. I know you can do it, too. Now get out there and stick it to the man by making liars out of them every single day.

You got this, reader. Or, should I say, artist?

Game review: Islets for EGS

Metroidvanias are a hard sell for me, existing well outside of my preferred styles of game. The problem is mine, as I have little patience for hitting a literal wall and having to backtrack to find the new tool I need to make progress. Once I do have the needed upgrade, I struggle to remember where I was supposed to backtrack in order to use it.

Islets won me over with its whimsical animation style and combination of side scrolling platforming mixed with bullet hell aerial boss battles. But what kept me playing until the credits was its willingness to cater to my needs at every step of the journey. For instance, when I got lost, I could go to an NPC and pay a small fee to have my current goal marked on the map. Be it a new upgrade, a boss, or whatever I was struggling to find, having a little question mark on the map made it possible to avoid getting lost. There were other accessibility features, and I’ll cover those later.

Let’s get into the story first, which is about a floating island made up of several smaller islets that drifted together and created a perfect biome. A group of industrious critters decided to keep them held together with huge electromagnets, as the combined island was perfect for promoting biodiversity. Some unsavory varmints conspired to shut down the magnets, and the islets drifted apart, making each biome more barren and hostile as a result.

Now many years later, creatures from the surface world have all taken to airships to unite the islets once again, and the main character Iko is a new arrival who is just learning how to become a warrior. His ship is mocked by another fighter, Snoot, and then is torn apart by the jet stream behind Snoot’s ship. Crashing on the first Islet, Iko must find a way to survive and get another ship.

Right away, I noticed paths I couldn’t reach, but I also saw what I would need to make progress. I’d say, “Okay, I should come back after I get my double jump,” which ended up being the first acquired ability. After I got it, I bumped into another obstacle and said, “That will be after getting wall jumps, I guess.” Which is to say, I’ve played enough games like this to grasp what I need even if I don’t yet know when or where I’ll unlock those new abilities.

Shortly after beating the first boss, the double jump and a new ship (and friend) guide Iko to a sky camp offering a place to upgrade damage on his sword and bow or add a hit point to his health bar, a clinic to heal up at, a shipyard to upgrade his airship, a postbox to receive letters from friends and rivals, the aforementioned map marking service, and an open space to chat with other NPCs found throughout the story.

From this base, Iko can fly to the other Islets, and each of them guarded by flying bosses. The first aerial fight is harder than the others because Iko’s ship doesn’t have any weapons. It’s all about dodging until the boss throws a boomerang attack that damages themself. (Iko’s ship has a helpfully small hit circle, but the boss is a true bullet hell bastard, so I ended up winning with a microscopic amount of health left over.) Later fights allow for payback with a cannon that fires faster when closer to the boss, and later with a teleportation ability that allows for dodging ringed energy attacks that would otherwise be unavoidable.

For fans of the genre, all this sign-posting and helping hands might ruin the experience, but I would point out that folks who want it harder can turn up the difficulty and just ignore the map marker NPC. I mean, the game will still direct players where to go, kinda like how running the wrong way in Dark Souls educates newbies that they’re better off going the other way until they get stronger. (Or smarter. Hello, master key!)

It is a very linear game with a well-defined path, but I don’t consider that a bad thing. I do wonder just how much leeway I might have in sequence breaking the islets, since in a lot of places, progress would be impossible without having the right abilities. I’m sure speed runners would find a way to do it, but to me, it seems quite difficult.

Beyond double jumping, Iko will unlock the ability to swing his sword down while jumping for a plunge attack, climb walls and wall jump, fire arrows that teleport him a short distance between gaps, fire another arrow that makes a cloud-like platform to run on or block traps with, and a charged beam attack to break metal boxes blocking off areas of unexplored territory.

Along with these abilities are new gimmicks in the environment, all of which are unique to the biome they’re in. For instance, there are gravestones that give Iko a higher jump one time, but the charge has to be held until the right moment, making the rest of the gaps and traps before the jump a set of mini-puzzles. What makes these nice is that nothing is overused. Each one is a fun idea that changes the way I look at a level, giving me a way around Iko’s limitations until he picks up a new ability that negates the need to rely on the gimmicks.

As I got to the latter half of the game, though, I really started to struggle with all the traps leading up to the bosses. I might run from a shrine or teleport doorway, having my health whittled down until I died, sometimes without knowing the next save point was just one screen away. (Tip: do invest the funds to add icon markers to the map. Oh, and use the zoom on the map. I frequently got lost before realizing the zoomed map could show me where I was getting turned around.)

The problem, at least for me, was the way upgrades are doled out randomly. It’s possible to not see any health upgrades for several levels, and the potion to increase health only give one point despite being quite pricey. Even on the Easy difficulty setting, Iko ends up being quite fragile by the mid-game.

But…it is also possible to turn on invincibility, which I ended up doing several times after struggling to complete sections full of traps. I also quite gratefully took advantage of the offer for unlimited arrows rather than waiting to regenerate them with melee attacks.

This might horrify purists, but what I noticed after having the invincibility feature on for a while is that it gave me more confidence in dealing with the environment, but it also helped me to learn how to move with the same confidence of a better gamer. I started taking less and less damage, moved through traps at a breezy pace, and spotted patterns at a glance rather than hanging back at the opening of each screen, too worried about my limited health to take a leap of faith.

It’s also interesting because I find that I wanted to play again on a higher setting with the training wheels pulled off. I wanted to see if having some idea of where the goals are, I can find them without talking to the map marker, and if I can get there without relying on assistance. Those accessibility features gave me the confidence and the desire to try.

I have to mention this other detail about myself: I’m getting older, and I don’t have the hand coordination that I used to. My writing process used to be typing hour-long flurries up to sixty words a minute with few typos. Now I struggle to hit the keys I’m aiming for, and I spend a lot of time rewriting what I wrote because almost every other word has wrong letters. Similarly, I struggle to get precise inputs on a controller. Using this game as an example, instead of turning to attack an enemy behind my character, I frequently ended up doing a plunging attack, or swinging the sword up over my character.

These kinds of age-imposed handicaps only get worse with time, and yeah, it cuts me out of a lot of tightly controlled platforming games that I might otherwise want to play. For instance, even with all the assistance options turned on, I can’t play Celeste. Forget the bonus strawberries or B-side tapes, I can’t even play the regular levels with a video guide showing me exactly what to do. Yes, I know I need to wall jump over the saw and then double jump to land on a moving platform. But thirty minutes later, I’m still no closer to landing on it, and I’m just ready to cry and call it a day.

I can’t play Super Meat Boy, or The End is Nigh, or I Want to Be the Boshy. I like watching other people play them, but I’m forever locked out of that area of the gamer clubhouse. So imagine how it feels when a game comes along that recognizes me and says, “Is this part too hard on you? Relax, there’s a setting to help you make it.” It’s such a wonderful feeling, being catered to instead of being punished for not being young and fast and accurate anymore.

Those training wheels aiding parts of my first run got me thinking, “Okay, I can do this for real.” So once I finished the game, I started a new file on Normal difficulty and set out to see how far I could get. Which it turned out was the mid-game. All the bosses have added phases after getting down to half health, but those were mostly manageable. Around the mid-game, it feels like the bosses also start moving faster, so the small window for doing damage shrinks even further. I went from eking out wins with a little health left over to getting pancaked before the bosses even got to their second phase. I might try again later, but for now, it’s just too hard to get on in normal mode. But there’s still the chance of trying again in easy mode with the accessibility stuff turned off.

Regardless of difficulty setting, there is one reason I will never get full completion on the game: star rooms. Certain screens have a set of stars linked by a line, and touching the first sets off a timer to hit every star in seconds. I think I managed to solve two, I’m still too far from the last star on most of them when the timer goes off. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but it got to the point in the latter half of the game when I would enter a room and see those stars and loudly declare, “Nope, fuck it.”

I do have one other gripe about collecting the tokens for upgrades: it needed the ability to reroll options. Frequently I’d get three cards, two for a faster fire rate on arrows, and a third for more currency. What I wanted was more arrows and more health. It’s up to RNGesus how Iko progresses through upgrades, and it frequently felt like he’d forsaken me.

Even with these minor complaints, I really enjoyed Islets, and as I said, I’m ready to go back into it sometime soon. It’s a lovely game with great graphics, fantastic music, a cute story, and a satisfying conclusion. Plus, it’s one of the few Metroidvanias that I actually want to play again, which is a huge accomplishment.

I give Islets 4 stars and recommend it to fans of the genre as well as folks curious to try it, but reluctant to get locked out of the finale. This is a game that wants you to see the ending, and it’s willing to help you get there. So if the other games in the genre felt too difficult, maybe try this one out and then see if you are willing to try the others once you have more confidence.

Hey look, Fallout 4 got “upgraded!”

I had another review planned for this week, a positive one at that. But then I remembered that after the launch of the highly enjoyable Fallout on Amazon Prime, Bethesda promised an update to Fallout 4 with the bait, quote, “bug fixes.” That update arrived, and like a noob, I downloaded it hoping for the best.

Some of you might be new to my blog and don’t know that I don’t care much for Bethesda, but I also rather liked Fallout 4 because it was the most stable of the 3D Fallout games. (Okay, also because I like the music. I’ve actually played sometimes just to listen to Diamond City Radio a few hours before erasing my save file.) Granted, it always has been buggier than an ant farm, but it rarely crashed on my PS4 (RIP) or on my PC with the settings all locked to Medium.

So “bug fixes” called me back because I wondered, could I finally recruit Tina DeLuca to join me at Sanctuary Hills? Would I finally get Sanctuary to 100 percent happiness even if I recruited The Concord Five? Could I convince Marcy and Jun to work for more than one day on farming instead of watching them pound a hammer on a rusted metal wall?

But of course, nothing got fixed, and Bethesda went and Bethesda’d so hard that no one besides Mr. Matty is happy.

Before I get to my own gripes, let me mention a couple of spectacular fuck-ups. First, this anniversary update was meant to include Steam Deck compatibility. Welp, that didn’t work out because the Steam Deck version does away with the popup that lets players decide on their graphics settings. Bethesda came up with a default graphics setting that crashes most Steam Decks frequently. (Sarcastic Gasp!)

And for those of you debunking every Bethesda complaint with “Duh, there’s a mod for that,” Bethesda broke a lot of mods with this update, just like they did with the introduction of Creation Club in Fallout 4, and with the Special Edition and Anniversary Edition of Skyrim. There are guides on Steam on how to roll back the game and turn off auto-updates just to get back to playing your saved modded games. Yes, eventually you can mod to fix anything in the new version, but you can also count on Bethesda to routinely drop by and break your game with another update. And, you’re welcome.

But let’s set that aside. I last played Fallout 4 four months ago because Steam had a sale on all the DLCs, which meant I could finally get them all and try out the unofficial patch and add a few minor mods and graphical improvements. But even going to the barest minimum of mods, they broke the game so hard I frequently ended up with the ground and buildings all in black with a sky all in white. So I got rid of the mods and played the whole game vanilla with my standard settings. It was mostly a good time, with the usual assortment of bugs.

I deleted the game, and then deleted the folder to get rid of old save files, and I moved on. Cue this announcement that a new update will offer bug fixes, and my dumb ass ignored the maxim “Fool me one shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.” No, all I cared about was fixing specific bugs. But since it promised graphical enhancements, I also downloaded it to see if it could get the kind of glow up that Skyrim had moving from the launch game to the Anniversary Edition.

Let’s set aside the fact that not one bug I hoped got fixed was addressed. Let’s just take that as a given. With a fresh install and nothing modded, my game crashed five times just trying to get to the vault. Worse, despite the character creator looking great, every single model looked atrocious. I went back to the settings and returned to my standard settings, the ones I’ve been using since buying the game on Steam ages ago. I crashed every twenty to thirty minutes. The only way to avoid that nonsense was to downgrade my setting to the lowest possible values for every setting: lowered resolution, lower draw distances, lower debris, no decals, no reflections, no nothing special. Folks, even then I could expect a crash every hour or so. They took the one Fallout game I praised for its stability and made it crash as frequently as Fallout: New Vegas.

What. The. Fuck.

I don’t even know why I’m surprised anymore. But I just figured, with two mediocre releases in recent memory, Bethesda might take this opportunity to bring fans back on board with the last game to come out that sucked less than their usual efforts.

Even before I went to post this, Bethesda has announced another update that’s meant to both fix the graphics problems they created, but also to add in “bug fixes.” Because we know how much they’ve historically worked to polish all their games, right?

That’s really what boggles my mind. This is a company that has consistently released updates that further break their already broken games. They promise to fix their stuff, and six months later, they issue a patch that breaks even more stuff. But somehow, they’re still in business.

It’s like if I set up a lemonade stand, but I just peed in the cups. Then some people up the street grabbed the cups and diluted the pee with sugar, lemon, and a lot of water. So then I saw the success of my lemonade stand, and so I shit in all the cups. That’s Bethesda, all day and every day.

The Big Con for EGS

Looking at the video trailer for The Big Con, I didn’t really feel like it would be a game for me. But then I read a longer description and decided to give a shot. The story goes that Ali is a small town girl living in a looonely wooorld. She took the midnight…whoops, wrong notes.

Right, Ali is a small town girl working with her single mother in a video store. She learns that the store is going to be taken over by loan sharks, and that her mother owes ninety-seven thousand dollars. So Ali hooks up with a complete stranger to try and gather enough money through pick-pocketing, shoplifting and fencing garbage in pawn shops. So, a high fantasy setting.

Before I get to the gameplay itself, I should mention that Ali has a hallucinatory friend named Rad Ghost, the kind of mascot D.A.R.E. would think up who frequently says stuff like “Thank you for not doing drugs!” Despite the hallucinations and questionable setup, I felt for Ali. As a teen I spent a lot of time hanging out in video stores and at the dollar theater, so like her, I’m something of a film nerd. Add in her desire to get out of her small town and do ANYTHING combined with her crush on a friend, and she really hit all my feels in the best way to make her an endearing protagonist.

Shortly after learning about the video store’s impending doom, Ali meets Ted, (no last name, but she’s okay with that because, hey, it’s the 90s) who proposes that if she can pickpocket enough people to buy him a bus ticket, they can leave town together and hustle up the money Ali needs to save her mom’s store. She goes along with it because how else is she going to get that kind of money?

The pickpocket mini-game is pretty easy, but let’s say you aren’t gifted with coordination or thumbs. There are accessibility setting that get rid of the mini-game and just let you press a button to do the thing. It’s a game that wants to tell you a story, and if you want the easy version, these folks will deliver exactly what you need.

Moving on to a shopping mall for the next target, Ali gets the chance to make money from fencing toys, collecting items for a shady pawn broker, making change with vendors, or trying to beat an arcade gamer’s best score in a Rad Ghost game. (Which offers another accessibility feature. Is the game too hard for you? Make Rad Ghost invincible. I didn’t use it because the game isn’t that hard, but it is nice to see for folks who want it.)

From there, Ali gets on a train (midnight? No mid-afternoon) to Las Vegeena. Okay, I’m misspelling it intentionally, but it’s another town with similar goals that just add more dollars needed to level up and move on.

During most of the game, I kept looking at what Ali was doing and thought, None of this qualifies as The Big Con. I was right, and there’s a twist that has Ali scrabbling to get back the money she stole fair and square before time runs out. In between all of this are side missions, a little unrequited love, Furbies, and a lot of “it’s the 90s” jokes.

Which is to say, I ended up liking The Big Con quite a lot. It’s not a great game, but it is a good time that introduces enough new ideas in each level to keep the whole story feeling fresh. It made the NPC side stories interesting enough that I went out of my way to talk to everyone, and it’s not often that I do that even for games I love.

The version I played was the Grift of the Year edition, which does bring one minor lament from me. It’s in the voice acting, or rather the style of it. While the text on screen is telling the full story, the voice actors are speaking one or two random words that having nothing to do with their actual dialog. I kind of wished that if the first version had been so successful, they would have pulled in the main cast for a proper reading of the script. It’s a big ask, and a minor gripe, but a few pivotal moments of the game were stripped of their urgency by having voice actors hum or whine a one word comment like “Anyway.”

In the end, I’ll give The Big Con 4 stars. It’s a nice narrative adventure that that doesn’t overstay its welcome and delivers a satisfactory ending without going overboard into a sugar-coated finale. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants a light-hearted comedy as a palette cleanser between grim-dark apocalyptic ARPGs.

Pretty sure no bards created Tamriel

After having an abysmal time playing Diablo, I spent a while playing Skyrim through several “speed runs,” or the closest someone of my mediocre skill level will reach. I started with a sword and shield run to see how soon I could join the Dark Brotherhood and assassinate the emperor of Tamriel. (Level 15, pretty easy, actually.) Next, I did a two-handed hammer run to see how fast I could help the Stormcloaks end the civil war. (Level 17, a bit trickier because I needed a few more levels in heavy armor and alchemy to see me through to the end.) I then did a mage run to do the civil war from the empire’s side. (Level 19, as mages require a lot of skills that other classes can skip just to stay alive.) And then, finally, I just played through the main game, with detours to join the thieves’ guild, the bards’ college, the Dark Brotherhood, defeat an ancient god, and then help the Stormcloaks get rid of the empire. (Because if it’s good enough for Hammerfell, it’s good enough for the Nords!)

Before I get to the ranty griping, let me answer the question, “Zoe, why do you still play Skyrim if you were never a fan?” The answer is, I’m a fan of the mechanics. It’s like with Borderlands 2. I don’t like the story, but I love the looting, the shooting, and the creative paths of designing new builds for each character class.

The added twist with Skyrim is, if you want to get good at a skill, you need to keep doing that skill. You want to get better at picking locks? Buy some lockpicks and find some locks. Even better is that unlike Bethesda’s Fallout games, you can pick a lock with a high skill level requirement even if you’re an idiot. You found a master lock? Well with enough picks and patience, you can pick that lock, and you will get several levels for putting in the effort. You even gain experience by breaking picks. You can cheese lock pick leveling by buying up a bunch of picks and intentionally breaking them in a master lock.

And yeah, skill leveling doesn’t always make sense. Like, if you want to level up in heavy or light armor, you do so by getting your ass kicked. But in most cases, it’s a great system. Swing a sword to level up one or two-handed weapon skills. Shoot a bow to level up archery. Use a shield to raise blocking. Smith stuff to level up smithing. Cast spells to level up in magic. It’s a fantastic, brilliant idea, and I love it.

BUT.

I am not a fan of the writing of Skyrim, because it’s just so Bethesda. I want someone in the company to explain why the technical side of their games get so much love, but the actual stories meant to immerse you in their worlds are so painfully bad.

Some of you may say, “Oh, it’s not so bad, is it?” Well let me show you.

Skyrim, Main Plot
You are a prisoner who manages a miraculous escape, only to uncover your role as “the chosen one,” who will help save all of Tamriel from a Very Bad Boss. Wow, that’s so cool. And it’s not like any other Elder Scroll games ever started with the prisoner just falling into The Plot.

Oh, wait, that’s all of them.

But anyway, we run with this premise and take on a test to prove we’re the real chosen one, leading to a meeting with the Blades, a faction formerly dedicated to the chosen one, who have recently fallen on hard times. But thanks to the chosen one, they can return to their former glory, and maybe even stop the end of the world. (Pay attention, this comes up later.)

Then, at the end of the game, the leader of the Blades proves that once again, Bethesda does not understand how a chain of command works, and the only way to remind this chick that you are her boss is with a mod.

The biggest problem with the main story is, it wants so hard to send you all over the place to look at the other stories, like it’s eager to show you how much work went into this Very Big Game. But that’s a mistake because it instead demonstrates how little work the writers did.

The Civil War
From the opening of the game, the player is told about a civil war going on between the empire and the Stormcloaks. But until the player goes to either capital to sign up, neither side is actually doing any fighting. Skyrim occasionally pays lip service to the war by having Imperials or Thalmor escorting a prisoner along the roads, but beyond that, the war can’t begin until you are ready to join in and become Captain Awesomesauce.

Once you do pick a side, go into it knowing that the missions are nearly identical, and even the dialog is word for word the same for both factions. Even worse, both sides hint that once the other side is defeated, the Thalmor will swoop in to capture a weakened county. Yeah, that never happens. They could have made a DLC to do that, but instead, Bethesda released a lackluster home builder DLC, a vampire hunting campaign that can break the game by killing story essential characters, and a nonsense side quest to slay a revived first Dragonborn, because of course he’s Eeeeeeeevil.

But the “real” war that was supposed to come for the winner of the civil war? Nope, to do that, you gotta get a mod, because Bethesda couldn’t be bothered.

The Dark Brotherhood
This side plot is thrust on players by guards telling them to go to speak to a boy who wants to kill an old lady. Should you go along with it, the Dark Brotherhood will kidnap your character and force them to kill one of three people. It doesn’t even matter which one. Do that and you’re in the club…er, guild. Upon joining the assassins’ guild, the player is told that these guys were once feared all across the land, but have recently fallen on hard times. But now that the player is with them, perhaps they can return to their former glory.

Then suddenly there’s a crisis in leadership. But if you can resolve it, the remaining members of the guild decide that you should be the leader. Then they do nothing and put you back to work. You get no cut from other assassin contracts, the quality of the contracts after the main story doesn’t reflect the supposed heightened status after pulling off a series of daring assassinations. Nothing changes once the story is over. And get used to that, because…

The Thieves’ Guild
While trying to find a member of the Blades for the main quest, the game tries quite forcibly to get you to join the Thieves’ Guild in Riften. You can actually ignore this and finish the game, something I’ve done from my first playthrough. But I figured that for the sake of being thorough, this time around I would join up.

Right from the start, the thieves are actually more like spies and saboteurs. The first few missions involve working for a client to find out who is trying to cut off her business relations. While the player can take on jobs of actual thievery, those are boring fetch quests that all yield a piddling 250 gold. I can make better money just crafting potions.

The player finds out that, surprise, the Thieves’ Guild was once feared by all, but have recently fallen on hard times. But, now that the player has joined them, bla bla bla, yakkity shmackity. But wait, there’s a crisis in leadership, you say? I wonder who’s going to become the leader, and then get back to work because Bethesda doesn’t understand how a chain of command works.

Winterhold College
As a mage build, this is an obvious first stop, but it’s also brought up by the main story, and several vendors and NPCs can suggest going there for various reasons. Getting in is easy, as the testing mage who asks to see you cast a random spell will sell it to the player for a steep discount.

Once inside, that’s when the stupid begins. The aspiring mage is told to attend a class, where bumbling dumbass Tolfdir starts a lecture talking about how magic is dangerous, and caution must be taught and observed. He says he will teach all students a basic ward, then only teaches it to the player and says, “Welp, that’s all for lesson one! Now let’s go diving into an ancient ruin that’s very dangerous and poke magic objects with a stick to see what we can learn. Hope nothing bad happens.”

Shock of shocks, something bad happens, and it’s only further reinforced that the guy who urged caution around magic can’t practice what he preaches. Stick around a bit longer, and it’s revealed that Winterhold College once held an esteemed rank amongst the Nords, but have recently fallen on hard times. Sigh.

But at least here, there are lots of clues why the college is looked down on. All kinds of side quests are about mages doing evil experiments, and you can’t swing a dead skeever without it getting resurrected by bands of roving necromancers. Whole camps of mages are ready to kill anyone on sight if they approach their camps. So yeah, I can see why folks in Skyrim might dislike mages. That’s because most mages in Skyrim are either idiots or dickheads, and sometimes they’re both.

Suddenly, there’s a crisis in leadership, but once the player saves the day, the remaining teachers decide that even though they all coveted the position for themselves, the player’s character is fully qualified to become the Arch-Mage. Even if they can’t cast anything higher than novice spells. Y’all, I love being a mage, but this college is almost the worst school I’ve ever attended in a game. Almost, because…

The Bards’ College
The final insult to the idea of higher education lies in Solitude, where the player can ask to join the Bards’ College and will instantly be sent to a dungeon to look for a book. Upon returning the book, a single creative editing session leads to instant success, and the dean makes the player an official bard. That’s it. No need for music lessons, poetry reading, nothing. They couldn’t even pay lip service to the bard class. You can own a lute, drum or flute, but they don’t do anything. Honestly, most of the bards in Skyrim’s taverns go the extra mile to prove what a shitty college they graduated from. But hey, at least they don’t elect you the leader just for being literate. So I guess that’s progress of a sort.

These examples are why, as we sit in utter silence from Bethesda, waiting for something on Elder Scrolls VI, I don’t feel anything at all. In the time since Skyrim was first released, and then rereleased, (and re-rereleased) we’ve seen Fallout 76, a game so poorly written that Bethesda had to introduce new chapters just to make it even remotely worth playing. Then we got Starfield, the first IP from the company in ages, and the actual story is pointless because they wanted players to get to the ending and then loop around to the start to become Starborn. Get it? It’s Dragonborn, but in space.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure when Elder Scrolls VI comes out, it will have some tweaked mechanics to make it interesting to play. But I’m not so stoked to become another prisoner chosen to take on a god or saving a continent as foretold in the prophesy. I just want to be a wandering alchemist or armor smith who occasionally spelunks in caves to look for adventure and crafting materials. Because that what’s kept me involved in Skyrim. It’s the mechanics, and not the writing.

On the day that Bethesda releases one of these franchise games with actual good writing, I think my head may explode trying to fathom how that happened. Until that fateful day, I’ll be here, playing, reviewing, and writing, and I’ll be happy to have y’all along for the ride.

Why Diablo sucked

Not long ago, I watched a speedrun of Diablo on the YouTube archives of Awesome Games Done quick, and as the runner got into the lowest floors, I suddenly realized that I had never finished the game with any character. I saw it was only ten euros on Battle.Net, so I figured I would fire it back up to sort out why I stopped playing.

I could nitpick on all the game’s flaws. No, check that. I will do that anyway, but the sum of all its flaws can be condensed down to one damning statement: accounting isn’t fun.

Spending ten minutes in every session trying to sort out whether to call a financial loss on a run by casting a portal or lose twenty minutes walking back to town is not fun. Being financially penalized for wanting to hold onto items is not fun. Even when the game is almost starting to feel fun, here’s a room filled with thirty enemies who will deplete my carefully budgeted supply of potions while dropping no gold or items to sell back in town, and I’m right back to having no fun.

I’m on the eleventh floor with the warrior, who I’m sure was Blizzard’s intended way to play because he seems blessed to have more gear and gold drop, and because he can tank up with heavy armor and a shield that will block a lot of hits. The sorcerer and rogue both have to played far more cautiously, with constant awareness of where doors are to run back and create choke points. Because the moment they are surrounded, I might as well hit Load Game to try again. But even once I got them deeper into the dungeons, loot and gold don’t drop nearly as frequently for them.

In town, every single citizen has their hand out, waiting for payment. Deckard Cain wants one hundred gold to identify magic items, and easily half the time, those items are trolls, like a bow that removes ten vitality and ten dexterity. So it’s only worth one gold, meaning I lost 99 gold just to have Cain tell me, “Ooh, tough break! Better luck next time, sucker.”

With both the sorcerer and rogue, I found spells that might help them deal with the swarming horde problem, but neither yet had the magic points to read the books. So they had to take up space in my inventory, making every run even less profitable. All the developers had to do was add a freaking travel trunk back in town so I could hold onto a few items. But no, that level of convenience would compromise their “vision.”

With the rogue, I had to use a bow that cuts off ten vitality because Griswold the town blacksmith has only one magic bow for sale, and he wants seventeen thousand gold for it. I’m on floor six and have thirteen thousand. But all it takes is one wrong decision to cost me another thousand gold, and then I’ll be back on a low incentive grind for the one weapon that might make all this feel less painful.

Meanwhile, Griswold is offering the warrior five different bows, all of which would aid the rogue, and all at far more reasonable prices.

Then there’s the sorcerer, who at the end of every run must walk first to Pepin the healer to buy full health potions, and then walk all the way to the other side of town to buy full mana potions and scrolls of town portal, and then walk all the way back to the latest shortcut entrance or to their portal. There is a spell to cast town portal, but as mana doesn’t regenerate, any cast of that will require drinking a full mana potion just to get back in fighting shape.

Ah, and don’t forget to recharge his staves, which will be one half of the upkeep charges if I was forced to also use it as a melee weapon. Then I have to walk into town to have Griswold repair it. Since it’s a magic item, that’ll cost extra. Then I can go to Adria the witch and get it recharged. Another seven to eight hundred gold lost, so that whole run was a financial loss. Gee, what fun.

Adding to this frustration, I ended up deleting and restarting three different sorcerer runs because I’d each time reached a point where I couldn’t press on with no mana and damn near broken equipment, but I also couldn’t afford to restock and repair. It didn’t occur to the developers to respawn enemies, giving players a chance to recover funds on less difficult enemies before pressing deeper into more difficult biomes.

Even with the warrior, the intended way to play, shit can get ugly fast. On floor ten, I ran into a mob that swarmed him, and between their melee attacks and the flood of arrows raining in from six different directions, the warrior got stun-locked and couldn’t do anything but die. I struggled with this for a half an hour before finding the one pixel I was allowed to use as a choke point. When it was all over, I realized that the incoming damage had destroyed my shield. So I took a portal back to town, only to discover Griswold, the fucking weapon blacksmith, didn’t feel like stocking shields, mundane or magical, ever again. I had to tank two floors of mobs just to wait for a shield to drop.

And I repeat, what fun.

So, here’s the thing: I set that grind aside, and I played a few newer fantasy games, and they all seemed to have learned their lessons about fun in games. They all have more storage space, both on my character and with some kind of trunk or closet back at my camp to store the stuff I can’t use yet. The prices of their economies are such that near the middle of the games, I will have the funds to buy one or two premium items and still afford health potions, new spells and what not. And all of them balance their enemy placements so that the players will always feel challenged without feeling overwhelmed. On and those enemies drop loot far more frequently, so returning to town means that even if some of the loot is crap, at least I turn a profit and it wasn’t a total crap run.

Hell, Sierra even put out an expansion for Diablo, Hellfire, against Blizzard’s wishes, and it set out to fix some of Diablo’s worst traits. It included the ability to jog, more frequent and more varied loots drops, and a room to transfer loot from one character who doesn’t need it to another that does. Blizzard didn’t want any of that. They got mad at Sierra for fixing their shitty game.

And now I’ll close out by talking about Diablo IV, which I still haven’t finished because it’s an always online game, and I frequently log in to discover I can’t have a stable connection. Graphically, it’s a gorgeous game, and the few times I’ve got to fight the biggest, nastiest demons in the game, man, that is some great stuff.

But a lot of the game is fighting the same six dungeon bosses in different palette swaps, most of  whom combine massive health bars, spamming the screen with area attacks, and spawning unlimited minions to distract me from the fact that they’re really kind of pathetic. I do that repeatedly in the name of collecting meager ability boosts that I have to grind legendary loot to break down and make the materials to pay for upgrades through a different flavor of accounting. If I want “guaranteed” legendary gear, I have to grind World Events to collect Obols, a separate currency meant expressly for gambling on loot boxes, and those World Events mean fighting the same copy-pasted mobs with different palette swaps instead of just fighting Lilith and the Lesser Lords of Hell. You know, the actual fun part of the game.

It just feels like Blizzard never learned anything about what made Diablo II great, or what made Diablo suck.

In fact, looking at how they’ve handled so many of their games, with all due respect to the fans who embraced them and found their own joy in a game’s grinding loops, I don’t feel like Blizzard deserves half the reverence they cultivated through Diablo II, WoW, and Starcraft. They’re just another big publisher looking at ways to exploit their player base and their own staff, all in the name of squeezing out another profitable quarter.

So it’s no surprise that the people at the top think Accounting Simulator: Tristram Edition is fun as a game. But they never really seem to ask what would be fun for us, the people buying their games.

Game review: Cult of the Lamb for Steam

Way back in 2021, I did a review for the mobile version of My Friend Pedro and said that Devolver Digital games never fully clicked for me. I still hold that same opinion, but I keep giving their games a chance because as a publisher, they seem to be the most earnest and ethical folks in the gaming industry, and because they are willing to publish weird, original games instead of chasing the latest bestsellers.

Take Cult of the Lamb as a prime example, where the main character is an actual lamb being led to the slaughter to prevent a prophesied return of an evil god. One minute into the game that lamb is killed, only to be resurrected by the aforementioned god. He commands them to kill his enemies, build a cult, and free him from his eternal prison. It’s one part The Binding of Isaac mixed with Cult Simulator. On paper, that sounds fantastic.

In practice, the wonderful dungeon crawling bits are dragged down by the cult maintenance, and a large part of managing the cult being a drag falls on the industry-wide decision to have ridiculously accelerated day/night cycles. I hated that “feature” in Skyrim and Fallout. I hated it in GTA V. And in Cult of the Lamb, they decided to make an even faster clock speed while chopping the night into a ridiculously short quarter wedge of the in-game clock.

This isn’t helped by the fact that cult members age and die in days. So every attempt to build a cult big enough to open later dungeons is hampered by the need to constantly recruit younger cultists to replace the folks who are keeling over on a daily basis.

On the dungeon crawling side, you first start with only one area, Darkwood, open to explore. You go in to kill some of the old god’s people, gather resources, and face a mid-boss fight that unlocks one section of a four-section lock on the real boss’ door. Then defeating them makes the monsters tougher (which makes zero sense, but just run with it) and adds a new boss at the end called a Witness who is supposedly stronger than the god who formerly ran the place. (Ditto on the not making sense and running with it.)

Before I go any further, I need to emphasize that I stuck with the game to its first available ending because the dungeon grinding parts of the game are superb. I wasn’t fond of the hammer and axe, as they were both very slow to swing and left my little lamb open to sucker punches by faster attacking enemies. But I still stuck with them because there’s typically one or two rooms in each run to swap out starting weapons for something different.

As more dungeons are unlocked, new weapon types get added, going all the way up to a blunderbuss. In other words, a magical shotgun. You can guess which was my favorite. But I also liked using the swords, daggers, and clawed hands weapons. All of these can have magic abilities, like poisoning enemies, stealing health, spawning a homing ghost that chases down enemies, or just guaranteeing a higher chance of critical damage. All of these options plus a huge assortment of ranged curses make every run a delightful kind of slot machine where I almost always feel like I won a fantastic prize.

During each run, there are chances to find new cultists, either by freeing them before they can be sacrificed, or by defeating them and converting them to your cult. Every cultist can have up to three attributes, usually negative, but sometimes you get lucky and find someone who shits literal gold or who can level up their faith faster.

Back at the base, you then set up a shrine to collect their faith, and build a church to collect a separate spiritual currency. With the shrine, leveling up unlocks new facilities to build in your base. Meanwhile, leveling up with sermons in the church will unlock new combat abilities. (Including new weapon variants and new spells, most of which make further dungeon runs even better.)

Additionally, inside the church, completed quests can give out three pieces of a stone tablet, and with a full tablet, the eponymous lamb can declare new doctrines. These determine what the cult believes, and the choices are either be evil, or be good. Some are more practical, like choosing if you can feed your folks grass without penalty, or if they can eat each other without penalty. (Okay, writing it out like that, I realize that is still Good versus Evil.)

Within the church are also options to change the lamb’s “fleece,” or the cape that they wear. These are unlocked by taking side quests from NPCs. One wants you to fish for special seafood like squid, lobster, and crab. Another wants you to collect mushroom to unlock a psychedelic brainwashing ceremony. Each completed quest will reward you one piece of a four-part badge, and when you get all four, you can unlock a new cloak. I liked the version that added more damage with every enemy I hit. (Which resets to zero when the lamb gets hit. I frequently got that damage counter up to around 200 percent, and going into a boss fight, those kinds of numbers are real useful.)

But there’s also another fleece that draws four tarot cards at the start of a dungeon. Tarot cards add boosts to the lamb, like adding poison damage to attacks, adding some kind of damage to dodge rolls, granting extra life points, or just boosting weapon damage or attack speed. The only catch to the cloak is, after drawing those four cards, no more can be taken during a run. But given that most dungeons only let me draw three cards, getting all four at the start was pretty useful.

Finally, killing one of the old gods and taking their heart to the church unlocks extra powers for the lamb. There’s only four to choose from, so eventually you unlock them all. The most useful at the start is being able to “focus” and teleport back to the base instead of completing a dungeon run. That’s because you might need to come back to complete a quest for one of your cultists, or because you were just doing a resource gathering run to complete a new facility. There are other reasons too, but I’ll cover them in a bit.

The last facet of the dungeon runs are relics. These activate a special power that has to be recharged by killing enemies, so I tended to save it up until reaching the boss. Some are quite powerful and can take off half the boss’ health. Others might only do a little damage, but they can recharge quicker, so it’s safe to use them more often. But there are also fragile relics, meaning they can only be used once before breaking. A good example of this is a fragile relic that makes the lamb smaller for the duration of the run. The hitbox on their weapon is still pretty close to the same, but the lamb’s hitbox is much smaller, so it’s a lot easier to avoid taking damage. (Which was how I beat three of the four bosses without taking a single hit. Yes, I’m a fan of that relic.)

So, this is most of the gameplay loop covered. Go to the dungeon to grind for loot and cultists. Return to base to indoctrinate the cultists and set them to some kind of task. Maybe they will worship at the shrine all day to generate more energy, or work at a lumber mill or mine to generate base resources, or work the forge to make refined materials. In these kinds of jobs, they will work most of the day, only taking a few breaks.

BUT, there’s a whole other side of managing these guys, and all of it is a pain. Cultists need to eat, and to do that requires making a garden and mixing ingredients from that with meats collected in the dungeons. On my first run, I took the option to feed them grass without penalties because it was the most common resource. But even then, I frequently had a nearly starving flock because of that fast day/night cycle. I could never focus on or enjoy either the land management or dungeon running aspects because of that dreadful hunger meter.

It doesn’t help that most meals have penalties, and the few that don’t are so resource intense that they require many days of gardening and hunting to get the ingredients together. This is fine when you’re on the first and second dungeons and only need to maintain a few cultists. But after hitting the fifteen member mark, feeding them anything that isn’t a basic recipe is its own special level of hell.

Then there’s faith, which is just fucking annoying. I might be in the act of setting up a new shelter for my followers when someone will walk up and start shouting “HIYO!” while waving to get my attention. If I dare to ignore them and they walk off mad, the faith of the whole cult plummets because I don’t want to do mundane tasks for these ingrates. As for the actual quests? Here’s a short list of options I got in my first run:

Make that other cultist eat shit, because I think that would be funny

I want to eat a bowl of shit

Go pick flowers in a dungeon for me so I can decide not to give them to another cultist

Go get me some mushrooms from that dungeon so I can look at them

I don’t like that guy, so go put him in prison

I’m paraphrasing, but these are the kinds of pointless quests that I was being asked to do. The one about a cultist asking to eat shit is even more dumb because all cultists get deeply unsettled at the sight of a their own feces, and might even vomit if they see several piles in the same area, The guy who asks to eat a bowl of shit won’t look at the raw ingredient without a panic attack, but if I cook it on the griddle, suddenly it’s a tasty treat? Oh, and despite cooking it, that idiot is still going to contract a disease, forcing me to send him to his shelter or a healing bay so he won’t die. Either way, he’s not getting any work done, making the quest a punishment for accepting it.

But refusing to do any cult quests results in an even larger drop in the whole cult’s faith than just ignoring quest givers. I mean seriously, everyone is so upset that I told shit eater no? I got to the point of unlocking the third dungeon when I decided to start a new run. The first time, I really tried to make all my doctrine choices toward helping my flock become good. But the second run, I decided, and I quote, “Fuck no! Fuck these fucking fuckers!” I then named my second cult KillUall.

First, I unlocked murder as an option, and then instead of eating grass, I chose to unlock a faith boost for cannibalism combined with a faith boost for elderly cultists being killed before dropping dead of natural causes. Each time I murdered a cultist, I harvested their flesh to feed the others.

Expanding on my evil reign, I would refuse any quest that I thought was pointless, then wander over to the shrine to bless enough cultists to balance out the lost faith. There’s supposedly a loss of faith for murdering a follower in broad daylight, but I just murdered old folks and blessed the rest of the flock to recover their lost faith. I started calling this, “Bless you, for I have sinned.”

Lest I forget, on the gardening side of things, it is possible to set up buildings so that cultists can plants seeds, water plants, add fertilizer, and do most of the tasks of gardening on their own. IN THEORY. In practice, anyone you set up for the job will do one or two tasks and then call it a day. So the whole plot of land set aside for gardening may need to be watered, but that lazy bastard will water three plants and then wander off to chat with a friend. You can’t feed fifteen cultists off of that kind of work ethic. So while I tried to get them to work in the first run, in the second, I just did the gardening myself.

All of this leads to my final choice of the game. After defeating the four bosses, “One Who Waits Below” said I had to come to his prison to give back his crown and die for realsies. But to do that, I needed twenty followers, and I only had fifteen. I ran through two dungeons to get more, and three died back at the base from old age, leading to a crisis in faith. Even in a totally evil cult, I was penalized by my special snowflakes having to look at a dead body longer than ten seconds. That is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. Ten seconds looking at a corpse and their faith is shaken. What. The. Fuck.

Each time I got partway into a dungeon to grab new followers, I got message pop-ups that someone had reached old age or died. This went on for the better part of an hour, making me progressively more angry. So, I finally got twenty followers, ran to the prison’s shrine, and walked up to my god. He then teleported all of my followers into cages, implying that he’d be killing them along with my lamb. I looked at the helpless people crying for me to help them, and I said “Been a real pain knowing you fuckers, now fuck the fuck off.”

I’ll tell you something else: I actually saved the game right before entering that portal because I figured I might do the other ending, just to see what the last boss fight was like. But then I got to that anticlimactic ten second ending, and I decided to just YouTube the fight. Not even the promise of a three boss fight with a two-phase final boss could convince me to play it any more.

The scoring is easy this time around. I’m giving Cult of the Lamb 3 stars because it easily earns 4 based on the variety found in the dungeon crawling. I even liked the fishing mini-game, and I usually find those to be rather tedious. But every time I started to have fun, my flock reminded me how lazy, petty, and useless they were, serving only as a busted keyring to help me open the doors of the higher-level dungeons.

This is another Devolver Digital title that wasn’t for me, but I can confidently say that I’ll continue to pick up titles from them. There are at least two coming this year that I want to try, and another that got pushed back to 2025. They may not completely work for me, but their offerings are still way more original then companies who would rather chase trends than have faith in their developers to try new ideas.

Cult of the Lamb tried some new things, and while one half of the game was a swing and a miss for me, the other half was a good time that I really enjoyed. So maybe you’ll try it and find you like both halves. Either way, Devolver Digital games are priced far more reasonably than AAA publishers, so there’s no harm in trying it out. Oh, and they have a free demo, so you can dip your toe in the blood before jumping in to swim.

That’s it for me, y’all. Happy Easter, and I’ll see you next time for more reveiwy goodness.

What I’m watching: Anime

Right, I’m doing this list because despite playing two games, reading two books, and one manga, I still am nowhere close to having a review ready. It’s not a case of not putting in the effort either. I just have a lot on my plate. For instance, this last week, we got invited to go to a local theater to watch a production of The importance of Being Earnest. I’m not a huge fan of Oscar Wilde, but I haven’t been to a theater production since grade school, and I figured, wouldn’t it be nice to do something different for the weekend?

I looked around and realized I didn’t have any theater appropriate clothing. So each day after lunch, I went shopping. The first day looking for shoes was a bust, but each day after, I got a dress shirt and sweater, new pants, and new shoes. The shoes in particular required a bike ride of twenty kilometers, because everyone local caps shoes sizes for ladies at 39, and I’m a 42. (Douglas Addams would say my feet are the answer to everything.) Then of course, there was going to see the play, and by Sunday I didn’t feel like doing anything besides watching cartoons after all that bike riding.

And so here we are, one week blown, and I’m still no closer to a review. But, when I got up this morning, I thought, Hey, why not use my procrastination to my advantage for once? Granted, these aren’t reviews because I’ve not seen a full season of most of them yet. (And the ones I have seen, you probably already know, or will know if you want to see them based on a blurb.) But hey, maybe you’ll see something you like and hop in with me.

And so here we…no, wait, I said that already. Right, on with the anime I’ve been watching!

Delicious In Dungeon
This is one of hubby’s shows, and at first, I didn’t care much for the premise or the characters. It’s definitely a hard sell to new viewers as it falls into the dreaded “but it gets good after X episodes” category. The premise is that a dungeon raiding party gets mauled by a dragon because they were too hungry to fight properly. Their healer, a close friend to the group’s mage and sister to the paladin, sacrifices herself so the others can escape.

Out of funds and most equipment, the remaining party members go back to the dungeon to find the dragon, kill it, and recover parts of the healer to perform a resurrection spell before the dragon can fully digest her. They meet a dwarf who is an expert in cooking dungeon monsters and form a plan to reach the dragon without supplies by eating everything they kill. “Hilarity” ensues.

For me the first episodes are pretty weak, desperately trying to wring out comedy from the repeated gag of “Ick! We’re not eating THAT!” This is followed immediately by “Wait, this is tasty!” But once they get past that and start working on real character development, the story does get good. It just takes a while to get there, so it’s not exactly on my recommended list.

Classroom of the Elite
Alright, this is a harem anime, with all the tired tropes that entails. Random guy has large breasted high school students swarming him like ants on a dropped candy bar. Two whole episodes are dedicated to cheesecake, one at a pool where some camera shots are literally just boobs with the heads cropped off, and the other on a cruise ship. These episodes are actually played back to back. (Or maybe boob to boob would be more fitting, but I digress.)

But…as with the previous entry, if you can set that aside, the premise is interesting. Students are attending a private school that promises placement in any corporation the students want. The first catch is, they have to live on campus with no contact outside, not even with their parents.  Catch two is, every class is graded not only on lesson scores, but also by the behavior of all students in the class. It’s either pass together, or fail together.

The show focuses on the D class, the lowest ranking students with the most defects, and thus the highest chance to fail. At the back of the class is Kiyotaka Ayanokōji, a guy who plays at being a slacker, but who is constantly bailing out his classmates using secretive plots. His “wingman” is Suzune Horikita, who claims she doesn’t care about anyone else passing, but still goes along with Kiyotaka’s plans. She also doesn’t object each time he gives her credit for the class’ victories, making the rest of the students think she really cares about them. (Also, maybe she’s coming around and starting to care…but only a little.)

Beyond that, the various ways that literal class warfare plays out among the A, B, and C ranks makes for a fascinating story, with plots twists coming in every episode. But I only recommend this if you don’t mind obvious fan service, or you can do what I did and fast forward through those parts until it gets back to the actual plot.

DD Fist of the North Star
This one is a doozy. The apocalypse never came, so Kenshiro, Raoh, and Toki must try to find work. At a convenience store called Ryuryuken, the owner (Ryuken) makes the three brothers compete to determine who will get a part time job. So they’re working for him full time, for the right to work for him part time. It’s so stupid it arrives back out on the other side to become brilliant.

The three brothers are all complete idiots with short attention spans, so a lot of the comedy is played off of how stupid they can get with each premise. Also there is a narrator, and he is serving fresh hot piss-takes every ten seconds. Jagi is rarely mentioned, or even remembered. Bat is playing Captain Obvious, a pointless task because no one is listening to him. Rin seems like she’s always there with a book of matches after the brothers have spilled enough gas to have a proper dumpster fire.

It’s all very much a slapstick sketch show, so if you like your humor more high brow, this isn’t for you. But for me, every episode has had me cackling loudly between groans of dismay at some of the worst pun, ever.

Solo Leveling
This one started off looking like a horror anime, and then swerved to another genre at the end of the second episode. Based on a Korean web-comic titled Only I Level Up, the story follows Sung Jinwoo, a hunter who is tasked with entering dimensional rifts to fight monsters. If the monsters are not defeated, the portals break open, allowing the monsters to invade our world.

Hunters are ranked by letters, starting in video game style with S and moving to A, B, C,D, and E, and Jinwoo is an E rank hunter who barely qualifies even at that level.

In the first episode Jinwoo and a squadron of hunters enter a dungeon that is supposedly ranked D, but the group encounters a “double dungeon,” with the second half being populated by giants of insane power levels. Several hunters die, and Jinwoo sacrifices himself to save the remaining hunters.

With just seconds of his life remaining, a screen pops up asking him if he wants to become “a player.” He accepts the proposition, and recovers in a hospital with all his limbs somehow reattached. (Seriously that second episode was hellishly gory.) Jinwoo soon discovers what no one else knows, that the portals are actually part of a game. How? Hell if I know, but so far the story has been pretty interesting, and the animation style is very dynamic and detailed. I figure they’ll eventually get around to explaining what’s really going on, but for now, I’m happy to go along for the ride. Plus, being a gamer, I’m perfectly fine with any show framed around my favorite hobby.

Knights of Sidonia
This one gets a bit harder to sum up without spoilers, but I’ll do my best. Sidonia is a space ship carrying what may possibly the last humans in the galaxy after an alien race destroys Earth. In order to survive, the scientists aboard Sidonia genetically altered the surviving people so their offspring could photosynthesize, thus requiring far less food and water than normal humans. Then they made reproduction into a cloning process, so a lot of the population are just newer iterations of the same specimens.

A thousand years have passed, and the humans are still being hunted by the gauna, who are shapeshifters capable of rapid regeneration, making them extremely hard to kill. To defend themselves, the humans develop giant robots (because of course they do) armed with spears tipped with the one thing that can truly kill the gauna.

Into this scenario arrives Nagate Tanikaze, who was somehow born a normal human, raised away from the other humans, and raised to be a pilot using an older model of a training simulator. When his grandfather dies, Nagate is forced to join the rest of the crew, quickly becoming one of their most proficient pilots.

This is a pretty densely plotted show, but with only two seasons available, it doesn’t really answer all the questions I have about Nagate, the ship, the council making all the decisions for the last humans, or the gauna’s true intentions, nor does it reach any sort of resolution. Even so, I liked it enough that I’m watching it again.

Robotech
This one is a rewatch based on nostalgia, being the first anime I saw as a kid, long before even knowing what anime was. Pitched as a giant robot soap opera, it is in fact three different cartoons stitched together and rescripted by Harmony Gold. (Who have frustratingly made it impossible to get the original anime and their sequels exported to the US for decades.) Beginning on Earth with a crashed spaceship, the show follows three generations of soldiers, each of them dealing with a different alien invasion.

With the first arc, it’s the Zentraudi, a genetically mutated race of soldier slaves who can be micronized to human size and grown to be fifty foot tall monsters. With the second arc, the Robotech Masters try to reclaim their technology with an army of clones. Then in the third arc, a single soldier returns from a failed deep space expedition to find the earth has been ravaged by the Invid, and must assemble a small group of freedom fighters.

What worked for me back then still works now, and that’s consequences. Unlike GI Joe, Transformers, or Gobots, people die in this show. Even characters who seem like they have guaranteed plot armor get pasted with the kind of unflinching realism that other violent cartoons aren’t willing to approach. It’s that realism, even in a show about giant transforming robots and space invaders, that keeps pulling me back in for another viewing.

There you have it, my current anime list. This was fun to write, mainly trying to cover the larger plot points without spoiling anything. Because really, half the fun of anime is not knowing what will happen next. So I might come back around on this next seasons to recap the new shows I’m seeing once I finish these.

See you next week, hopefully with a proper review.

Book review: The Crow Trap by Ann Cleeves

I’ve been a big fan of the TV series Vera since it first started airing in Italy, but lately our TV reception has put new seasons in a permanent stasis. We’ve had the technicians out three times in three years, and each time they assure us the signal will be better, and maybe a few days pass before we lose the signal again.

So I decided to buy the first book to see how different it is compared to the show, and it’s a pretty big difference. Part of that has to do with the book being a traditional mystery, inviting the reader to pick up the clues and solve the crime themselves. But even beyond that, the TV show swapped the order of the books and created entire new characters and plot lines.

The Crow Trap, the first book of the series, is actually the third episode of the show. (Book three is episode one, and confusingly, episode two is book two.) The first victim of the book isn’t revealed until thirty percent into the story, and the main character doesn’t come in for the investigation until close to the middle of the book. Even then, the story’s perspective is told from two civilians’ perspectives until seventy percent of the book is done. Only then does Vera take over as the protagonist and give readers insight into her thoughts.

In The Crow Trap, ornithologist Rachel Lambert begins an environmental study in the cottage of her friend Bella Furness, only to discover that Bella has hung herself. The study goes on, being part of an impact report that could influence the choice to open a quarry on the land. Rachel works with a botanist, Anne Preece, and a mammal expert, Grace Fullwell. The study seems to be proceeding without issue when Grace is found far from her scheduled route, strangled to death.

Once DCI Vera Stanhope is introduced properly in the middle of the book, it becomes clear that she had a cameo during Bella’s funeral, being briefly noted by both Rachel and Anne. Vera details how she knew Bella’s mother-in-law Constance Baikie as a child, and then later explains how she knew Bella. Both help to highlight Vera’s connection not just to the characters, but to the land itself.

Even after she enters the mystery, instead of relying on her team of inspectors, Vera recruits Anne, Rachel, and Rachel’s mother Edie to snoop around and dig up clues through gossip. She has her own ideas about the murder, and despite entrusting the woman with her investigation she is unwilling to support their speculation of possible connections between Bella and Grace. It’s only after the second victim is revealed that Vera is forced to recognize the flaws in her theory.

By this point, the book is eighty percent done, and all the clues have been presented to the reader. It’s then that the writer subtly asks, “Are you ready to solve this?” I was, and when the big reveal came, I was right. However, I did not catch the motive, and the real reason for the deaths left me stunned in the best possible way.

I give The Crow Trap 5 stars, and I appreciate that it was less of a police procedural and more of a traditional mystery. That said, I hope the next book in the series does more to explore Vera’s squad, because aside from occasionally tossing Joe Ashworth in a scene as a background character, everyone else is treated as a nameless audience member to Vera’s speculative performances. A big part of my love of the show is her interaction with her team, like Kenny, Holly, and pathologist Dr. Cartwright.

Both versions have their strengths and weaknesses and different doesn’t necessarily mean bad. I’d recommend both the show and this book. Just, go into them knowing they are navigating the investigation from vastly different motivations. One wants to make you the detective, and the other wants to show you the process Vera goes through to solve the mystery.

Game review: Grow Home for Steam

Fair warning that there will be higher than average swearing in this week’s review. That’s because I didn’t play Grow Home so much as I endured as much of it as I could stand before throwing my aching hands up and declaring “fuck this.”  Part of this physical agony could be blamed on my first controller choice, which has triggers with a higher amount of tension than the standard PC gamepad. It’s great for shooters, helping me avoid accidental misfired shots. But here, the constant back and forth of “left shoulder, right shoulder” left me ending sessions with massive hand cramps.

But even setting that aside, this is the kind of half baked formula that could be good with more effort, and instead it got released as good enough in a damn near broken state. It fails to explain some of its most important mechanics, botches control schemes for both gamepad and mouse and keyboard gamers, and adds a list of busy work to drag out what is already a tiring slog.

I got to the point of the game where I had grown the central plant up to the little robot’s (BUD) mothership. (MOM) I collected a star seed and delivered it where I was instructed. Credits rolled, and the game was done, yes? FUCK NO. The game said, “Go fetch eight more seeds for us. Do you want to?” I selected NO, and the game went, “Thank you for your opinion. Now go get them seeds, biyatch.”

It was then that I said, “No. And not just no, but fuck no, and Grow Fuck yourself.”

So, where to begin? With the first run that ended in miserable failure because the tutorial said “Press X to grow the plant shoot,” And not “Oh, and use the left stick to steer where the shoot grows.” So I got to the second level and looked around to discover I had no shoots left to grow. I only learned I could steer because I went to YouTube to see where I’d gone wrong, resulting in me shouting “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!”

Then there’s run two, where with aching hands, I was left literally screaming because no amount of dead zone alteration could stop the shoots from veering wildly off course. I started a run with mouse and keyboard, foolishly thinking that the act of aiming shoots would be with the mouse, but I underestimated how sadistic the people making this game are. Of course the act of aiming would be on the less accurate option.

In run four, I swapped my controller for one with less tension in the triggers and better dead zones on the sticks, and I got to the end credits. Or rather, the first set of credits, I guess. Did that make the game better, or fun? NOPE. This is because even then, I was constantly wrestling with the game’s so-called physics. Any particular climb could end with my little robot’s hands both clipping inside a surface, resulting in the game deciding that it wasn’t clinging to anything and cue another panicked plunge. Multiple shoots decided to ignore my inputs and just do loop-the-loops and barrel rolls, and several decided it would be “funny” to stop growing a meter short of their intended destination, forcing me to stumble back down the vine in search of another shoot. (Which would almost always veer off target to once again stoke my screams of frustration.)

The game also asked me to stick every stupid fucking thing into the fast travel points to scan them, and again, the game won’t let me keep hold of most of the samples. I’d find a plant, confirm that I hadn’t scanned it yet, and as soon as I got it loose from the ground to drag it back to a Tele-Router, the robot’s grip would fail and said object would drop down into the pool of water at the very bottom of the “planet.” (A term so loosely used that Pluto would like a word.)

And because the most fun in modern games is more checklists, I was also tasked with collecting crystals that give out minor upgrades to the robot’s mobility. Oh, now my rocket pack will putter out in three seconds instead of two? Well, that’s still fucking useless.

I’d also like to briefly lament the robot’s drunken walk animation. He’s slow to start, finally gets up to speed, and then stumbles into a somersault whenever his momentum is arrested. The number of times I walked down a vine to jump on a leaf, only to have that little bastard roll off the side and erase all my upward progress…I reiterate, I did not play this. I endured it. For you.

Before I get to the final score, I want to mention that I got Grow Home and the sequel Grow Up as a bundle for four euros. I thought I might review them together, or maybe do a Versus series entry, but I got into the new game to discover that in addition to the controls being changed and the robot’s ability to grab surfaces being even worse, the sadistic developers added a new sidekick named POD who felt the need to talk every ten seconds, like, “Hey, BUD, scan that plant!”

“Hey BUD! Scan that plant!”

“Hey BUD! Scan that plant!”

“Hey BUD! Scan that plant!”

“Hey BUD! Scan that plant!”

Somewhere out there is an asshole who’s proud of themselves for this mess. And somewhere out there is a masochistic gamer insisting that this is actually fun, and I just didn’t give it a fair chance. I’d like to imagine that masochist lives in Stockholm.

Grow Home can have 1 star, the score I reserve for broken unplayable shit because despite clearing that low bar, it left me with hand cramps, burning hate, and the strong desire to Jay and Silent Bob the entire team responsible for this mess and its even more broken sequel. I recommend it to no one. May BUD, MOM, and POD rot in hell with the Atari version of ET.