Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both US citizens, were murdered by Trump/Miller/Noem/Bovino's Gestapo. The Trump Administration immediately went into "they were domestic terrorists" mode, even as multiple videos were being released refuting all of their statements to the nth degree. Trump's Gestapo then used five-year-old Liam Ramos as bait to have his mother open the door to her house so that they could "legally" enter and arrest her and her other child, all the while claiming that the father, Adrián Alexander Conejo Arias, had fled the car when approached by ICE to leave Liam in the car by himself. We've known for a while that ICE/DHS will lie to save face, but to this extent has been something else.
It is incredibly fucked up how our neighbors have been forced to make daily patrols of the blocks surrounding the nearby elementary school out of fear that SUVs full of uneducated, out-of-shape high school peaking law enforcement dropouts will snatch up a parent as they're dropping their kid off at school. On a beautiful January day when it's 55 degrees, the sun is out, neighbors from all over are playing at the nearby park, and there we are scanning for SUVs driving in groups. Not that we have to worry about The Squire being taken, but our community and school have plenty of people who don't look anything like a current ICE employee, and we look out for our neighbors and fuck all if you support any of this; and by "this" I mean the whole of the Trump administration. Your views aren't needed here. Are your groceries cheap enough now? Fucking hell.
And I played some video games last month, too.
And after some corticosteroid injections in December to combat carpal tunnel symptoms, I feel like I'm just below my peak at bouldering from just before the pandemic.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for The Shaved Ice Shop through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
The Shaved Ice Shop is a strange little game from indie developer Holitass. It's part cafe sim (because the shop sells coffee, milkshakes, and shaved ice), part life sim (because you buy groceries and walk from the cafe up flights of stairs into your apartment), part thriller, and part retro atmospheric-horror (because of the aspect ratio and film grain). The majority of the game, however, is spent in the cafe fixing drinks for customers before heading home for the night, and it was only during the second-to-last chapter that I realized that the game takes place at a night cafe, not that time is incredibly wonky.
Before we get into the actual game, I need to preface a few things. First, of the six times I played this game, I became nauseous 75% of the time and was thankful that each chapter only lasted about 18 minutes. I have some theories as to why this happened with this game, but nothing conclusive, so keep that in mind while I speculate. First, I couldn't invert the y-axis, but I've played non-action games with a non-inverted y-axis before, so I don't think that that alone would cause my nausea. Second, the formatted screen ratio could have had something to do with it. The screen ratio itself didn't bother me as it added to the aesthetic, coupled with the graininess of the "film," which helped to contribute to a sense of unease. Lastly, there was no reticle of any kind. I remember Jenna Stoeber (when she still worked at Polygon before they were bought out by Valnet and fired 25+ of their existing staff) did a video highlighting the effect that having a reticle in video games (not just first-person games, you plebian pus rats) and how it can help reduce motion sickness (aka simulation sickness).
The gameplay is primarily centered around taking three to four orders to complete a shift, which seems rather odd for an entire night shift, but, going back to the motion/simulation sickness, this ended up being the perfect amount of time I could spend playing before I would have needed to quit altogether. Also, not being able to invert the y-axis played a bit with navigating behind the counter. Not having a reticle, apart from the above paragraph, played havoc with being able to pick up packs of ice for various drinks, and clicking on which particular kind of syrup you want to add. I found being able to click on the small target to open the gate in the back of the shop somewhat annoying. All of that aside, once you finish the first day, which is the last day in the timeline, I felt more comfortable operating the machines and how the game wanted me to make drinks, except that on the second day (being five days before the first day; trust me, it makes sense), I got confused and had to look up the steps to take to make a flavored milkshake. I also greatly appreciated that I never felt that I was going to lose the game or customers if I took too long to make a drink, and that there was only ever one customer at a time, probably due to in-game limitations, but it was still nice.
If you want an accurate cafe/shaved ice shop simulator, though, you should look somewhere else, at least because of the three/four customer shifts. Recipes are not real-world accurate. You don't have to account for the amount of liquid in a cup if you're going to be adding additional liquid. When drinks pour out of the blender into cups, the hole is at the upper portion of the lid, which wouldn't make sense from a physics standpoint. And as we're in the blender, there is no cleaning of the equipment between drinks. There's one blender for making blended coffee drinks and ice cream. Later in the game, your character makes instant ramen a la Cup O' Noodles by placing an unopened container in a microwave without opening the lid to add water, and the animation of you drinking straight from the cup keeps the lid closed; also, without boiling the inside of your mouth with scalding hot sodium-rich deliciousness.
I lastly wanted to touch on the story, which will probably be the briefest section, as I want to avoid spoilers. Since the bulk of the game is preparing drinks for customers, the story that happens in the background happens when you're off shift and heading home to your apartment in an alley behind the shaved ice shop. The events are not overly complicated, but still land with an "oh damn," but not in a way that's surprising. I'm not at all disappointed that I saw the story unfolding the way it did by the end of the third episode (Four Days Before). If you watch the final episode (One Day Before), I decided to choose the response I did because I felt that the character would still be in shock and likely have experienced forms of relationship abuse from the same source for a while now, and standing up to their abuser wouldn't've been a choice that they could make on their own without a significant suppport network. I did try to get an alternate ending, but something wasn't happening in the game the way I thought it should (is this too vague?), and I gave up after four attempts.
The Shaved Ice Shop, despite all of the inaccuracies in the actual running of a night cafe, and the frequent simulation sickness, and the missing reticle (see paragraphs two and three), was a nice and short comfy thriller. If you like your comfy couch stories to include abusive relationships, murder, and suicide. Actually, now that I write that out, it doesn't sound like a cozy game. . . It was a nice game, though, once I was able to stomach the nausea.
I've never played any of the Adventure Island games, probably because six-to-twelve-year-old me didn't want to play a middle-aged man running around a series of islands in a hula skirt; I prefer my nearly naked men to be wielding spears and lances.
Like a lot of ending themes from NES (and some SNES-era) games, the ending theme to Adventure Island 3 is an entirely original theme that wasn't compiled from songs earlier in the game or the series. What I like about this song is how the melody line takes on the galloping role that is typically handled by the bass line. There's another flittering tone there in the middle doing runs of a sort, tucked in between the galloping piano (MIDI piano?) and the wonderful clapping percussion line. "Ending 1" is a pretty short song, looping after only 25 seconds, but for me, it's one of those songs that doesn't let you realize you've been listening to the same melody six times over the last three minutes.
I don't remember where I first heard about or acquired MANDAGON, but it's likely that I saw that the game was free and added it to my Steam account. Then, I promptly forgot it existed until going through my Steam library from the bottom up (when sorted by recently acquired) and didn't recognize anything about this game. The game is described as taking inspiration from Tibetan Mythology, of which I know absolutely nothing about, so I'm not even going to try to make connections between the visuals and gameplay and anything to do with Tibetan culture. There is a thread on the Steam forums that delves into the symbolism that I didn't catch, and I'd recommend reading through it if you want a 100% deeper analysis than what I have here.
MANDAGONis a pretty simplistic platformer. You control a square-shaped bobbing head capable of a massive vertical leap. There are no power-ups, no enemies to fight. There are collectables of sort, in the form of totems scattered around the map that either give hints to the story or nuggets of Tibetan philosophy. There are also six tablets that you have to collect to open the final door at the center of the map. There are elevators you can unlock (although I didn't unlock them all), ladders to climb, water jets that propel you out of the water, and, for lack of a better term, a tethered jetpack to help you reach out-of-reach platforms.
I don't really know what else to say about this game. It was short, just over 31 minutes, and was not at all complicated. When I used the first of six tablets the illumnated the central door, I was afraid that the subsequent tablets were going to be more difficult to obtain, but that wasn't the case at all. The map is helpful in this regard, as knowing where buildings are that you can enter (to find the tablets) and where the tablets are supposed to go is visually obvious; doors are black on buildings, and pedestals for tablets are white buildings.
It was just really nice to sit down and play an entire game in just over 30 minutes. To experience a work of art that integrated symbolism and meaning from a culture that wasn't my own, but that I could still appreciate on several levels. Reading analyses from the Steam thread above offered more of a heartfelt story than I knew existed. Kind of similar to how I interpreted the story in Last Labyrinth, or really a lack of interpretation.
I've had this article on the back burner for a while in the hopes of interviewing Christopher Tyng about this particular composition. I was trying to find out if he had written songs for a Simpsons video game and the songs were plugged in after the fact, or if he had written specific songs for specific locations, knowing ahead of time how they were going to be used.
Because! While I really like this song and find it super catchy, I find it hard to actually place this song within C. Montgomery Burns' massive mansion east of Springfield Gorge, just outside of town. I can't really see either Mr. Burns or Smithers sauntering out to the wrestling ring to this song, or even when Mr. Burns chucks a nuclear bomb into the ring.
The song is high energy, if somewhat subdued during the actual gameplay, and works well with the campiness of the entire game, i.e., Simpsons characters beating the crap out of each other in a very slapstick manner, so I'll give it that. And while having a theme performed on an evil-sounding harpsichord is more appropriate for the characters and setting, it makes for bad video game wrestling music.
Which is probably why I'm not the producer or sound designer picking out music at a video game company.
Well, Nintendo finally released their Year in Review this week, which is the reason why this article was pushed back an additional week, but I'm kind of okay with that. So many companies that collect data on their customers (Steam, Spotify, FitBit, Reddit, etc) and a lot of those, possibly thanks to Spotify, are released around the beginning of December, so it was nice that Nintendo actually waited until the beginning of the new year to post our collective data on the previous year.
That being said, let's start off this year with Steam's RePlay for 2025:
No real surprises here, although I probably would have the first Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster as coming in fourth after Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster; although I'm still a little surprised that I clocked 64.9 hours in FFIIPR; maybe I left the Steam Deck on? But 23.5 hours in Final Fantasy is still very respectable for a 38-year-old video game that I've beaten just over half a dozen times. Resident Evil 6, it turns out, I spent 36 hours on.
The breakdown between Classic Games, Recent Games, and New Games seems pretty accurate as far as play time goes. Although I wonder if Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls Online are considered Classic Games,as they were released 11 and 10 years ago, respectively. Regarding the genres, JPRGs at the top felt pretty accurate, although apart from Resident Evil 6 and some early dabbling in The Walking Dead: The Telltale Definitive Series that I started (and have yet to finish) might've been the only Zombie-related games....oh wait. I did play/The Squire played quite a bit of Plants vs. Zombies, so there's that too. And I guess you could say that there were zombie-adjacent demon-like creatures in HELLBREAK. I don't know, who am I to argue with the data that Steam's collected?
And then there was Nintendo.
Yeah, no surprise there with Super Mario Bros. Wonder taking the top spot. The Squire received that game for Christmas 2024, and we play it at least once a week. Or we did until a couple of weeks ago, and now LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga is on heavy, almost daily rotation. The Squire loves to choose different characters to play as, so be prepared for multi-hundreds of hours going into that game in order to unlock as many of the characters as we can get.
But that's this year, so let's go back to last year.
There were a lot of games I played on both the Switch 1 and the Switch 2, partly to try and beat Triangle Strategy, and while I did make a huge chunk through that game, I do feel that I ended up making so many bad choices that that game felt like a huge tragedy.
Oh, by the way, purchased a Switch 2 last year. I'll preface that I 100% don't regret this decision. The system feels and plays great. I'm still a little annoyed about the whole game card only being playable by one system at a time, even when it's only being used by one account. You know, this whole article. I guess the only other thing is that the only dedicated Switch 2 game I've purchased over the last six months was Mario Kart World, although I did recently purchase Star Wars: Outlaws because it was on sale for only $5 more than the lowest price it's ever been on Steam, and the port does look really good. And lastly, we don't have a camera for the Switch 2 and have never used that dedicated C-Button to chat up our other friend(s) who also have a Switch 2. I think Duke has one.
Okay, we're getting away from our original mission.
I felt pretty good about some of the progress I made through previously purchased games like Car Quest, Lords of Exile, and (partly) happy with 9 Years of Shadow, except I did hit a skill wall about 75% of the way through, so I might need to put that game on perpetual hold.
Jumping down to the genres, I'm guessing Action was from Super Mario Bros. Wonder, Lords of Exile (need to write about that one), 9 Years of Shadow, and I did start Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus back in February, although that didn't go too far for reasons I can't remember. The RPGs I think were from several games I received from Keymailer that didn't quite stick, although I did put a fair amount of time in Collection of SaGa: Final Fantasy Legend to get in the right headspace for Romancing SaGa - Minstrel Song - Remastered International, which again, was another Keymailer game that I thought was going to be better than it was, at least for me.
The last thing I want to talk briefly about is selecting LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga as my favorite game of 2025 (that was released in 2022). I feel like it's just been a really fun game for The Squire to play, and the couch co-op aspect has been a lot of fun too. One thing that I hadn't anticipated was that it's helped develop his navigation of menus, as within a few seconds, I'll see our stud count (in-game currency in LEGO games) drop by roughly 25,000 because The Squire has purchased an in-game rumor on how to unlock any given character he wants to play as. And I really think that playing this game will get him used to playing a game in a 3D space with dual joysticks (one for moving, one for camera; and yes, the y-axis is inverted). So we're teaching skills over here too. So that's good.
Let's finish things here. It's getting late on Thursday night, and I would like a few hours of sleep before waking up at 6:30 AM. So thanks for sticking in there with us through a few thousand words and 10 minutes of non-doom phone on my part (see above videos if you haven't already) set to some groovy tunes. Here's hoping 2026 is a good one.*
"BGM #09" from Gonta no Okiraku Daibouken on the Game Boy Color (2000) Composer: Unknown Album: No Official Release Publisher: Lay-Up Developer: Lay-Up
If I were to tell you that there was a Game Boy Color game that centered around a canine mascot heavily featured in dog food commercials in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you'd likely believe me. So now that you're on board, we're featuring "BGM #09" from Gonta no Okiraku Daibouken (Gonta's Great Adventure). I couldn't find a whole lot about this game or the golden lab Gonta whom the game is based. Apparently, Gonta was a very popular dog on the Japanese TV program Mezamashi TV during the "Kyuo no Wanko" segment that would feature good doggos. This might even be the same "Gonta," but from what I was able to find out, "Gonta" is a modestly popular dog's name in Japan.
As for the music, from what I was able to find out, some of the music in Gonta no Okiraki Daibouken was adapted from the music that was used during the "Kyuo no Wanko" segments, so it's likely that "BGM #09" was pre-existing music written for Mezamashi TV and not specifically for the video game. But as for who the composer was, I wasn't able to find any reliable leads; although there were some AI-generated leads that were all further unverifiable.
So all we're left with is a catchy little chiptune from an obscure Japanese Game Boy Color game about a popular dog featured in a segment about good dogs, and continues to grace the labels of Sunrise brand dog treats.
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