First Impressions: Knock Knock (NS)

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of Knock Knock for the Nintendo Switch from developer Ice Pick Lodge, publisher Sometimes You, and Indie Gamer Chick through her #IndieSelect event late last week.  The game was given without promise or exception of a positive review, only that I talk about the game and share screenshots/video through social media channels.  All of the words contained in this article, unless otherwise noted are my own from my own personal experience playing the game.

Before playing Knock Knock, I was previously familiar with the game, but only in that it was sitting in my Steam wishlist since September 2015.  Cannot say for sure why I never picked up the game amidst the numerous sales that happen each year, but there it forever sat until this morning when I finally removed it.

So from what I have been able to tell, Knock Knock is an interesting game. The core mechanic/genre is that it is a survival horror game where you play a character whom I believe to be some kind of scientist living alone in the woods when events start to happen to/around him.  These events seem to be a combination of dreams and waking world hallucinations.  The house too changes in-between stages, although I do not know if they are procedurally generated or if the layout is the same for each playthrough.  At present, the game seems to be broken up into two sections, and which section being a hallucination seems purposefully ambiguous.  The first stage involves waking up in a bedroom with a lantern where you wander the house for a bit, interact with a clock that looks a lot like the character, then you wander around outside until you find the house again (?), then when you go back to the house, the second stage starts.

In this stage, you wake up in what looks like a laboratory (still in a bed though), but now you have a candle instead of a lantern, and additionally, there is a clock which counts down to dawn.  This second stage, from what I can tell is where the action happens.  Armed with your candle, you walk through the rooms of this house, fixing/turning on lights, climbing stairs/ladders, and avoiding ghostly apparitions that attempt to come in contact with you which sets your clock back quite a bit, forcing you to play longer. 

There are a number of other mechanics, most of which deal with sound design, which Ice Pick Lodge has done a fantastic job with.  The banging sound of doors slamming, the knocking upon the doors, the ambient room sounds, the two voices that talk to you are also appropriately creepy and I sometimes cannot tell if they are trying to help or hinder my progress.

There is also the element of having your character stand still when entering a room and letting their eyes adjust, which will sometimes reveal objects in the room that you can either interact with (hide behind). 

Ultimately, I am not 100% how well I am playing the game.  I know I am progressing because at the end of each stage, a little character avatar moves along, what I presume to be, a map of the game, leading me towards some massive doom.  This kind of bothers me a bit, especially in the first stage part where I end up going outside, as I feel like there is something that I am missing.  Why does my character go outside?  What is the point to this part where you essentially wander a bit inside, then wander outside?  Is any of this actually happening or is it all in the character's mind?  I almost feel, at least right now, that Knock Knock will warrant a second playthrough after reaching the end of the game for the first time.

That is where I am currently at feelings-wise.  I am on the seventh of possibly 13 stages (heh, 13), and if there is a good/bad ending, which would not surprise me at all, I may just have to replay this, which is not a bad thing because so far, I really love what Ice Pick Lodge has done and the Switch port that Sometimes You has published.  Now if I could only figure out the subtleties that I feel like I am missing. . .

Yet to figure out if this is anything besides being pretty creepy when it happens.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
A Deadly Being

Game EXP: Grab the Bottle (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of Grab the Bottle from developer Kamina Dimension and publisher Sometimes You last week through Indie Gamer Chick's #IndieSelect event.  The game was received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and shared via social media channels.  All of the words in this article, unless otherwise noted, were conceived and written by me and are my own thoughts and experiences while playing this game.

As I stared up Grab the Bottle, my expectations for what the game was based on the screenshots I saw on Indie Gamer Chick's Twitter feed were drastically different than what the game turned out to be.  I have not talked about a trace-the-line game Jack Lumber from Owlchemy Labs.  Because the screenshot showed an elongated hand reaching around obstacles grabbing a bottle, I thought that this would be a perfect game for the Switch and that I might finally redeem myself after giving up on Jack Lumber a couple of years back.  So when I was at the menu screen for GtB, I was a little confused as to why there was to touch screen functionality.  So I thought, "Okay, let's see what this game is actually about then.

Instead of tracing a line around objects as I had previously thought, Grab the Bottle is instead a game where a hand reaches out on its own and the player has to turn the hand around objects, often gathering items before finally making their way to the bottle.  There are elements of the Nokia phone game Snake, so your reaching hand cannot cross or touch your already ridiculously long arm.  There are other elements and mechanics that further develop the game beyond my brief description (as you can see below), but that is the basic gist.

As one would expect, the levels become increasingly difficult, adding in more complex obstacles and items (like the pacifier) that require picking up before the bottle can be finally acquired.  And, as the game progresses, so does the age of the player character, the locations also change, as well as the type of bottle being grabbed, from baby bottles, to soda, beer, and others (maybe?  I've only made it to the near end of the teenage soda drinking levels).

And that is where I am at.  Near the end of the soda levels, there is what looks like a magpie (based on the coloring of the bird) that flys off with your bottle.  The subsequent level is a pretty big departure from the previous static levels.  Here, your hand is chasing the bird at high speed, dodging tree branches, other birds, and for whatever reason, balloons.

What makes this stage all the  more difficult, is that if your turns are too wide then the screen passes your hand and you die, starting you back at the beginning.  And unlike previous stages that allow you to hit your hand three times before being pulled back and restarting the level, here a single hit causes you to "die."  There have been a number of posts on Twitter (that I am presently unable to locate) with people having their end screen after they manage to catch the bottle in the above stage showing upwards of 500 deaths/tries.

Now, I can understand and appreciate a jump in difficulty when it comes to boss battles, and this bird chase is essentially that, but this is not so much a jump forward as it is a ballista launch forward.  In past levels I took sometimes die upwards of 20-30 times and here are people needing 500+ tries.  Now, I am in no way saying that a game should be easy enough so that people would be able to beat it (or individual levels), but the problem that I have with this level in particular is how drastically different it is from the rest of the game building up to this point.  Earlier levels focused on being able to plan out your course and you could look at the entire level figuring out what to do before you even extend your hand.  In this level, it is all about dexterity and memorizing what comes at you when.  The comparison I made to Conklederp, is that the earlier levels were like bouldering, being able to plan out your course before you even start.  This bird stage is like parkour when your are moving quickly and have to react fast the environment as it comes at you.

Fly Away Little Bird, Fly Away. . .

I have gone back to the bird level a couple of times since my first exposure to it, but each time I am only able to put in about 10-15 tries before I get too frustrated at my own ineptitude and have to stop.  At that point, for me, the game has become no longer fun, and why am I engaging in something that I do not find fun?  I have a number of games that I do have fun playing and I can honestly say that I have given this one stage enough of my time, sadly to say because I really do love the concept in Grab the Bottle, but I seem to have hit a skill wall that I am unable to find myself able to get over.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental

Game EXP: Diablo III: Eternal Collection (NS)

I was planning on writing a First Impressions article for Diablo III, but then I just kept playing and before I knew it, I had 25-30 hours clocked in and I was in Act IV of the game on my way to facing the lord of Hell.  So now here I am, having beaten the monstrosity of Diablo himself, talking about my experience playing this six year old video game, but only a month old game on the Nintendo Switch.  And despite how much time and the frequency I spent playing, I feel like my ultimate takeaway from Diablo III is that it is kind of a silly game.

Well, before I am eviscerated by hard core gamers who are offended at my declaration and will/may/might accuse me of my n00b-ness, let me break down my street-cred just a bit.  My introduction to the Diablo franchise was sometime in 1996-97 when I watched Dellaños play it on his computer at some low frame rate that allowed his fight with The Butcher to take about 30% longer than it should have and allowed enough time for him to plan out his moves between clicks.  Later when he got the game running faster than 5 fps, he said how much harder the fight was when the game was running at speed.  He later gave me a copy of the game which I played until my computer died and I lost the .iso file.  I also played a fair amount of Diablo II (single player mostly) in the mid-late 2000's, although I never finished because my netbook crapped out after having a pint of stout dumped on the keyboard.  So, I may not be a hardcore Diablo gamer, but I am still fairly familiar with the franchise as a whole.  Just do not ask me all about the lore.

When I booted up Diablo III on the Switch, I decided that I would forgo my usual Frost Mage play style that I fell in love with in Diablo II (and that I later used in Torchlight II) or Fighter that I nearly always use in Diablo (when I can get the game running), and I decided to play as a Monk.  My thought going into the game, was that I my weapon choice was going to be heavily limited to knuckle-style weapons, maybe a kama, staves, or other similar weapons.  Armor too would be limited to light-type such as cloth, hide, and/or leather.  What I was not prepared for was at level 30 having my Monk doning what looked like a mish-mash of medium and heavy armor while wielding a massive glowing two handed sword*.  I also liked the mention that the Monk has some level of healing abilities.

Long gone now are the days of delving into a dungeon or scouring a field killing a handful of enemies with individual clicks of the mouse.  In Diablo III, I now only have to hold down the A button while wave after wave of demons break upon my walled fists of destruction.  There were even times while while fighting in Act IV (having bumped up the difficulty level in the game from Hard to Expert) that I started falling dozing off, but still holding down that A button and apparently randomly pressing one of the other skill buttons, and I was still very much alive after opening my eyes.  Early in Act I, I came to realize that Diablo III seemed to be mainly about fighting as many monsters on screen at a time, and linking together attacks to kill as many demons at a time. thereby increasing your experience modifier.  Sure, I felt that there was some level of exploration involved in the game, and I did my best to reveal as much of the map as possible, but the main reason to do that was to discover more enemies to kill.

You know, let us talk about the difficulty, which I think couples well with my assertion that the game still manages to be a bit silly.  Now, I have only played as the Monk class so all of my views are based on that playthrough experience.  According to Blizzard's online guide, Monks are designed to "emphasize high maneuverability over staying power, darting in and out of melees and avoiding protracted slugfests."  If you were to ask me, I would say that Monks are very well designed to engage in slugfests.  Maybe it was the way I equipped my Monk, but I would try to have at no fewer than three pieces of equipment that had allowed me to gain health either per second, per hit, and/or per kill.  By the end game, I had items that had +5285 health per second, +3550 per hit, +825 per hit, +2750 per kill, along with an armor rating of 1511k.  That's right, 1,511,000 was my armor.  My modified damage was 46.0k, which probably is not too high when compared to other classes that focus on reeeeeaaaalllly high dps.  And I was only at level 62 when I beat the game.  And here is the real shocking bit for people who have played the first two Diablo games but not the third: I used my one health potion (because you only have one that has a recharge timer) maybe fewer than 20 times the entire game.  This is not supposed to come across as horn tooting, but more of a critique about the way the game was constructed.

What Even and Why!?

Speaking of construction, I do not think I fully understood all of the emphasis the developers took to being able to customize your character.  One of the sellers/artificers in the game had the ability to change the appearance and color of your gear.  Don't like the look of your sword, change it to look like that other sword.  Want to wear red armor instead of blue, pay 5,000 gp to do that, but hope that on your next excursion you don't get some legendary loot dropz.  I also did not see the benefit of making every single piece of your characters armor to look like rags.  Is it to give the impression to other players that you are weaker than you really are?  Is there even a PvP area in Diablo III?  And lastly on the cosmetics train are the banner, wings and pets that you can tack onto your character for no other reason than because they are there.  You can even equip your character with Mercy's wings from Overwatch, because to hell with any sense of lore continuity right!?  All of this genuinely felt like it was integrated to make Diablo III more appealing to an MMORPG crowd.  Actually, a lot of what makes Diablo III Diablo III feels like it was to attract the WoW base.  The only real benefit I can see for all of this fanciness is to make your character more visible when you are playing co-op and you both are surrounded by 75+ demons with 35 more coming in from the surrounding areas.

I realize that I have spent the greater part of this article harping on a game that I put in 35+ hours into and that for the most part, had a fun time playing, and there was plenty that was actually very well done in the game, especially for the Switch port.  Everything was very smooth in both docked and handheld mode, and I never noticed any stuttering, even that one time I racked up 100+ kills, although there were a handful of times that sound effects were either cut out entirely or were a second behind whatever action I had just performed.  The voice acting was as good as I was expecting it to be, which has always been of high quality since the first game.

I will most likely talk more about the Diablo III DLC, Reaper of Souls (which came pre-packaged with the Switch port, hence the "Eternal Collection" subtitle) as well now that Season 16 has started, but I wanted to give myself some time away from the Nephalem to play another game I have sitting in my queue.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental


*P.S.

Not very Monk like if you ask me.

MIDI Week Singles: "Crazy Driving" - State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem (NS)

"Crazy Driving" from State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem on the Nintendo Switch (2018)

Composer: Chatsky

Album: State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem OST

Label: Steam

Publisher: Sometimes You

Developer: Lapovich

There are more exciting songs on the State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem OST than "Crazy Driving," and " reminds me of mid 2000's Offspring, but I have noticed that any time after playing and I am walking around the house, I find myself humming (or doot-dooting more likely) this music.  I find it to be just so light, playful, and full of joy that if you take it out of the context of driving over people and shooting at cars and alien ships, then you have fun little song appropriate for Saturday morning cartoons circa 1989.

You could even make the argument that the combination of art style in the game coupled with the music is what makes killing 200+ people in the span of 15 minutes tolerable to the morality of the human psyche.  I am not making that argument, I am just saying that someone out there probably could.  Now that I think about it, the intro to "Crazy Driving" reminds me a lot of Jun Ishikawa's "Gourmet Race" from Kirby Super Star, but that is likely just a coincidence.  There is also a bit of a surf rock feel that may not necessarily feel out of place in a modern remake of California Games.  Maybe?

I wish that I could find more (or anything for that matter) about the composer Chatsky, but for the time being, this wonderful soundtrack will have to be my only avenue; ie, we will probably be featuring more of this music in the future.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I Kill It On The Spot

Game EXP: State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a copy of State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem for the Nintendo Switch from developer Lapovich Games, and publisher Sometimes You through Indie Gamer Chick's #IndieSelect last week.  The game was given with not expectation or promise of a good or positive review, only that the game be talked about and shared through social media channels.  All of the words contained in this article, unless otherwise noted were conceived and written by me and are my on thoughts and experiences while playing this game.

State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem is a top down twin-stick shooter that is similar in mechanics to the first two Grand Theft Auto games, as well as Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the Nintendo DS.  The game is made up of sections where you drive from one end of the city to the other with the sole purpose to rob a bank, although along the way you are welcome to defend yourself as necessary, or just cause general havoc as every single character on screen is trying to kill you, so you just go and try and kill them right back.  The other section is the actual bank robbing process where you run through a singular building killing everyone/thing that comes near you while you try and take out the miniboss located near the middle of the massively large bank building.  Methods of mayhem in the game depend on what stage you are on, as your primary weapon changes with each bank you rob, but you are also armed with a secondary weapon (also gained when you rob banks? I am a horrible person and have forgotten, although I am pretty sure that is how a new weapon is acquired).  What really makes SoA:MoM stand out more so than other games with similar story lines, is that the art here is all done in a child's hand drawn aesthetic.  Colors are purposeful and bold, almost like an MS Paint picture that someone used a bit  of copy/paste elements to create the landscape and world.  Even the sound effects in the game sound like the developers at Lapovich just recorded themselves making car, gun, and dying noises.  If you make the sound "Brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr" with your mouth right now, that is the sound while driving the car in State of Anarchy, and that is pretty great.

One major departure from the semi-GTA formula is that the game is made up of concrete stages, which helps break up the game a bit, in that I am currently on Stage 13 out of 48.  However, some stages are broken up into multiple sections, which I have found to be a little frustrating especially in the alien stages that include the run-and-gun areas followed by an alien boss fight, or the driving after the alien ship followed by another alien fight.  So after I died multiple times against the boss at the end of Stage 13, I turned the game off, thinking that I would be able to pick the game back up at the boss fight, only to find that I had to go through the beginning of Stage 13 all over again.  A little frustrating, except that your skills and abilities still carry over, even when going back and replaying earlier stages.  The gun you have however, is all dependent on the Stage you are playing.  So for instance, the buzz saw gun you use in Stage 9 will not carry over if you then replay Stage 4.  I feel this counteracts the need to grind previous stages for additional skills and abilities, but everyone is forced to use the same equipment for each stage.

Going into SoA:MoM, I was a little bit concerned considering my experience with InkSplosion a few weeks back.  In that game, which was also a twin-stick-shooter, I definitely felt at a disadvantage playing on the Switch, or at least with the Switch's Joy-Cons.  Here, I did not find my hands cramping often, although I would still require re-adjusting my thumb position, especially during the stages that required driving and shooting in order to proceed; this was the only time I did not like the buzzsaw weapon.  The stages too where you went head-to-head against the alien you just shot down, I felt like my skill that I had brought to the previous levels was not enough when I was required to dodge wave after wave of bullets and other projectiles.

And I guess this is kind of where I am at with State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem if you look at the layout of the stages.  There are two earth stages where you drive around then loot a bank.  Then one stage where you drive around attacking a UFO.  Then two more stages where you drive around then loot a bank.  The one stage where you get abducted by aliens and run around on an alien planet followed by an alien boss fight.  Followed by an outer space stage where you fly around then fight an alien ship boss.  Then you crash back to earth and start the process all over again.  Believe it or not, I am kind of hoping that there is a fetch quest or an escort quest somewhere in there just to break up the pattern, but that does not seem to be the case.

Essentially, the point of the game, from where I am currently sitting, is that you kill enemies to earn experience points to learn skills to better kill enemies, and pick up money to buy skills to help you better kill enemies.  In a game that purposefully is light on story, I kind of wish there was a little bit more variety.  Maybe that is a little unfair, requesting so much more from a small development team, but that is just the way I feel, which is one of the main reasons why we are here.

But let us end on an up note!

The music!  The music to this game is something I was not expecting at the quality that is presented.  Chatsky (of whom I can find nothing about) has written music that is oddly suited for this type of game.  The driving around (shooting bad guys, running over bad guys) music is much more upbeat and cheerful than you would expect to find, but taking into account the art style, makes these stages in the game a lot of fun, thanks in part to the music.  And then there is the music that plays when you enter the bank, damn!  I would link to the soundtrack and the composer, but I have not been able to find any additional information about Chatsk, and the only soundtrack I have found has been bundled with the Steam version of the game.  But I am going to leave the music there as there is a 87.47% change that we will be using a song for an upcoming MIDI Week Single.

So that is what I have to say about State of Anarchy: Master of Mayhem.  Similar to Devious Dungeon,  I will continue to play (and post) about the game as the stages layout lends itself for easy pick up and play, but for now the repetition in stages has caused my interest to wane a bit.  But I will be playing the soundtrack (and scouring for more music by Chatsky), which along with the art style and sense of humor, are some of the highlights of this indie title.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
It's No Stranger to You and Me

Hahahahahahahahahahaaaaa!

Year in Review: 2018

In this edition of Year in Review, Dr. Potts and I decided to have a conversation, think podcast in written form.  Here we discussed "stuff" from 2018 varying from our personal lives to actual content that we talk about here on a semi-regular basis.  The article was written over the course of a month and-a-half, kind of as we each found time to add to its length.  We decided to cut it off as the conversation could have gone on for much longer, which would have lead to an unwieldy article for all involved.  So below, you will find Dr. Potts' words preceeded by a "D" and JWfW/JDub/Jaconian's preceded by a "J."   Lastly, I want to apologize for the formatting as apparently switching back and forth between fonts can play merry hob with the spacing apparently.  It is what it is I guess.

D: So many things that happened in 2018 were in my personal life.  Got Engaged. Lost two step moms.  Mom moved back to Sacramento Area. But there were plenty of fun things too.  Books, movies and lots and lots of Magic TG.

J: Yeah, Conklederp and I had our own family tragedies to deal with during the beginning and end of the year.  Coupled with the smokiness that we had up here during the summer kind of put a damper on 2018 being as fun as we were hoping it was going to be.  But hearing about Dr. Potts and Jane's engagement was definitely one of the highlights.  Plus, two (three if you count SimonsMom, as she did play a couple of times with our SoCal group, and Beardsnbourbon getting engaged too) separate groups in our local D&D group got engaged (they were already together before joining our group so I can't claim any matchmaking abilities).  

In the books front, I definitely felt like I've been behind where I would have liked.  So on that note Dr. Potts, what have you been reading?  I've been reading compilations and switching between those (Poe, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Robert E. Howard), which is probably why I'm only finishing one book every couple of months.

D: Ah yes, that's a good reminder:  I did get to play D&D this year for the first time in a long time, with some childhood friends of Jane's and my brother in law m_v_k.  It was great to return to D&D and they were a good group.  

I also read a great deal.  Jane is a super-reader, and it's rubbed off a little bit.  She requests lots of good ones, and has also gotten me into listening to Audiobooks.  Highlights for the year include:  "Eleanor Oliphant is perfectly fine" ; "Borne" ; "Ancillary Justice" and more.  A recent favorite is "All Systems Red."  I wish my library tracked what books I've checked out, as most of the books I read or listened to this year were from the Library, and there are definitely some I'm forgetting.  

J: Ah audio books.  I feel like I have a love/inability with audio books.  I did listen to two earlier this year when our office was significantly less populated, with "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy, "True Grit" by Charles Portis, and I started "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushie, but was unable to finish it when more employees moved into the office.  I also finished E.K. Johnson's "Star Wars: Asohka" from a previous Audible subscription and have a few chapters into "Thrawn" by Timothy Zahn.  For me, it's had to do anything else by pay attention to the story being told, which is kind of hard to do in an office environment.  Also the time commitment can be something awful.  How do you best listen to audio books?  

J: On the video game front, 2018 was definitely dominated by my use of the Nintendo Switch, supplanting my Steam activities.  I think the last Steam game I put 120+ hours into was either Morrowind or Skyrim, and those were in separate years.  This year it was The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Fortnite (for good or ill), and Dark Souls is quickly coming up on that with 52 hours already logged in with my current character. 

D:  Thanks for asking!  I love audiobooks, and I find my best times to listen is whenever I can!  particularly when driving or performing mindless tasks.  Sometimes I will eat my lunch really fast and then spend the rest of the hour just walking around listening to an audiobook.  I seem to be able to listen to the story and have some mild distractions, so that helps me a lot.  Incidentally, I listened to the Timothy Zhan Thrawn trilogy on Audio way back when.  

J: I have the first Thrawn in audio book format, but it's the new Thrawn.  I don't know how to explain it.  It's the one that is now considered canon because it was after the fall of the Extended Universe.  It's the one published in January 2018.  Like, I kind of knew the name of the character Thrawn but nothing about him as he was never mentioned in any of the movies or any of the Star Wars games I played.

D:  The Switch sounds really cool!  I've noticed you've played lots of indies on it as well.  I think I'm waiting for any kind of significant price drop before I pick one up.  It wasn't that long ago I bought my Wii-U.  It was an extremely slow year for me and video games.  I put about 50 hours into Dragon Quest VIII before reaching a fetch quest before the like, third final iteration of the boss.  I was pretty tired of it by then.  I also played lots of Katamari: Damacy earlier in the year, and have had some fun playing 2 player games on my SNES classic.  Overall, Video games have really fallen to the wayside, sadly.  I'm not sure what it is.  

J:  I do love the Switch and has become my platform of choice, usurping the 3DS (partly because it's still not working), but there are frequently Steam-level sales on games and there are a lot of indie titles that are making their way to the platform too.  The last half of the month I ended up getting involved in #IndieXmas2018 which is/was an advertising campaign of sorts run by Twitter user IndieGamerChick in collaboration with a bunch of developers and publishers to get the word out on a lot of indie games.  All of the ones that I played for on the Switch I had never heard of before, and only one out of the seven I thought was kind of meh.  It's definitely re-energized me and playing indies on the Switch.  Sorry, I interrupted you.

D:Jane and I do watch lots of TV and quite a few movies at the theater.  Latest of which was Into the Spiderverse, which was really good!  

J: Spider-Verse was fantastically good wasn't it!?  Again, I'm not as familiar with Spiderman lore as you are and had no idea, although it shouldn't really surprise me, that this concept was already in the comics since 2014.  The art was great, the story was great, the voice acting was great.  My only kind of "eh" was Spider-Ham who only seemed to exist to further showcase the ridiculousness of varying Spiderman universes.  There was a little bit of Loony-Toons action that Spider-Ham enacted during the final fight, but I would have liked to have seen more of him.  And maybe more crowd reaction shots or news footage (Jameson!?) of people catching glimpses of all of the different Spider-people.

D: It would have been great for J. Jonah Jameson to have been in the movie.  But we did get Spiderman in sweatpants, so split the difference.  

I noticed your retweets and references to IndieGamerChick, and have since picked up a few codes from her.  I'm currently playing/tweeting about JonesOnFire, which has been a fun time.  I plan to turn my tweets into an article at some point.  

I really like what IndieGamerChick is doing, and I am feeling a bit energized by it as well.  I don't want to spend the money, but I do think a Switch may be in my future.  I love little indie games, and I'm really glad they're available on the system.  I have been really 'off' of steam since I switched computers and never really got it running on my new system.  And, of course.. there's Magic...

J: Totally agree with the #IndieXmas2018.  It has definitely gotten me more aware of indie developers and publishers that I was previously unaware of.  Like now I know about Ratalaika Games, Sometimes You, All Those Moments, Thinice Games, and I know I'm missing some.  I feel like it has also put me in a different mind set as far as playing games quickly, but still beating them, or at least most of them.  Some of the puzzle games like Twin Robots: Ultimate Edition and TETRA's Escape  I still have to finish, but what I love about those two in particular, is that I feel like I can pick them up to play a couple of levels then put them down when I get too flummoxed.  Then the #DiscoverIndies that Indie Gamer Chick started which is a lot like the #IndieXmas2018 and #IndieSelect, but this time you buy the game.

Anyway, that was how my year ended, posting on Twitter a lot more in the last weeks of December than I felt I had all year.  Plus it gave me a new appreciation for Twitter as a way of sharing information on indie games, which I like.

And for me, I think this is a decent place to call this article to a close, otherwise I feel like we could just end up having a running conversation that would end up never getting published.  So I'm going to say "good bye" for now and I will be back with more indie games as the year goes on, as well a handful of Switch games as the year progresses.

D:  Yes, I'm feeling like this will run on and on.  In general, I still have found it very challenging to sit down and write, edit and complete articles in general.  Even monthly updates, which tend to be pretty easy.  Maybe we can adopt this format as a monthly post, just a conversation that develops over the month.  *and* if we both follow #IndieSelect, that is also a monthly format, so it might slot nicely into the conversation.  Just a thought.

I'm trying to reprioritize to catch up on things I've let fall fallow.  But, as with any year, I don't want to put too much stock in resolutions.  I just want to keep it in mind.   Looking forward to 2019, it should be a very different year.  

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian & Dr. Potts

Instrumental

Game EXP: One Eyed Kutkh (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received One Eyed Kutkh on the Nintendo Switch free of charge from developer Baba Yaga Games and publisher Sometimes You as part of Indie Gamer Chick's #IndieSelect.  The game was received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played, shared, and talked about through social media channels.  All the words and screenshots here unless otherwise noted are my own and were not provided or given by any outside parties.

One Eyed Kutkh is a short point-and-click game in a science fiction setting that is apparently based off of "fairy tales of the Far North."  By short, I mean that the first time I played it, it took me between 45 mintues and one hour to complete, and even then I was not sure that I had actually completed the game and did not run through a very elaborate tutorial.  By the end, I was ready to get to the meat of the game, only to discover that I had in fact played the game in its entirety.

There are a couple of draws to One Eyed Kutkh (OEK here on out because I keep forgetting how to spell "Kutkh"), is the art style.  Colors are vibrant, almost to the point of being childish, but OEK never feels like it is marketed or geared towards a preteen audience.  The other draw is that there is no tutorial or explanation for how to do anything, which admittedly confused me a bit.  When I opened the game, there was a gear icon, which I took to mean settings.  I was then brought to the screen here, and took the symbols to be similar to those found on a PlayStation controller.  It was not until the Kutkh kept glaring at me and its ship crashed that I realized I was not in the settings screen, but actually playing the game.  

That was when I fully realized that OEK does not have any dialogue or text to tell you what to do.  Instead it uses character animation and message bubbles to point/direct the player in the right direction.  Also having a limited move set means there is very little chance in walking past something or missing something hidden on screen.  There were some non-story related objects I found I could interact with, like the tree object surrounding the Kutkh and their spaceship.  But really, OEK operated almost more like an interactive story with point-and-click elements than what you would expect from a game like Thimbleweed Park, or Shadowgate.

I could see some people balking at the $4.99 price tag on the Switch, considering how short the game is, similar to how people reacted to the original price of Gone Home and that you could speed run the game in under a minute if you felt so inclined.  On Steam, the game is only $2.99, so on the Switch you are paying a bit of a premium.  That being said, I cannot honestly say what a "reasonable" price would be since I personally will typically only buy games when they are on sale, but this is a line of thought for its own article.  I have also found there to be no replay-ability when it comes to the story, but I think it might be possible to find more things to either click on or have one of the two playable characters or the other citizens of the world react to.  However, we do reread books even when we know the stories, so there is that too.

What I came away with from One Eyed Kutkh was that I felt good, pure and simple.  It was like I played a game that made me feel warm.  I played a game that did not require dexterous fingers, or parts of my brain that I have reserved for games like Earthworms or the Professor Layton series.  What I played was relaxing game that requires no knowledge in any language, told through actions.  The music too, composed by blinch, was atmospheric, beautiful, and only helped to enhance the artwork and storytelling in the game. 

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Alternate Them on Grace and Favor

MIDI Week Singles: "Above Ground BGM" - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (NES)

"Above Ground BGM" from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1987)

Composer: Akito Nakatsuka

Album: Game Sound Museum ~Famicom Edition~ S-4 Link no Bouken

Developer: Nintendo EAD

Publisher: Nintendo

I thought that with today's release of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link on Nintendo's NES Online gaming platform, that using another song from Akito Nakatsuma would be appropriate seeing as how we haven't featured music from Zelda II for nearly 4.25 years ago.

What I love about Nakatsuka's theme is that it starts out using the introduction and elements from Koji Kondo's theme of the same name, but then it goes off on its own, essentially what Zelda II is trying to do with the fledgling series.  And throughout the first two thirds of the song, there are little snipits of Kondo's original theme before going back into Nakatsuka's original music.  Then things get really amped up at 0:38 when the melody goes on a few runs before repeating back to the beginning.

The interesting thing with this song though, is that it has to be catchy enough to be memorable, but more so because in The Adventure of Link, there are random enemy encounters when you leave the road that break up the music, and then the music goes back to the repeating point (0:06) so it may not be too often that you are able to hear the full 0:48 seconds of the song.

So if you are someone who is going to replay Zelda II: The Adventure of Link  on Nintendo's online service, the NES Classic, or are playing the second game in this defining series for the first time, I hope that you enjoy this possibly overlooked classic of a song.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Take Me Back

Game EXP: 99Vidas - Definitive Edition (NS)

Disclaimer:  I received a free copy of 99Vidas - Definitive Edition for the Nintendo Switch from QUByte Interactive, and  Indie Gamer Chick through her #IndieSelect event.  The game was given with no expectation or promise of a good or positive review, only that the game be talked about and shared via social media channels such as Twitter.  All of the words, thoughts, and experiences written here are my own and have not been influenced or provided by an outside entity or deity.

99Vidas - Definitive Edition is a modern take on the classic arcade style side scrolling beat'em up, a la Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, and The Simpsons.  The game was developed by Brazilian company QUByte Interactive back in 2016, and was later ported to the Switch, Xbox One X, Steam, PlayStation 4, and PS Vita in 2017 & '18.  I received the Switch copy of the game, so everything I have to say about the game relates to that specific port of the game.

Here, the boss got "too big" for the game and would occasionally glitch.

First, off, one of the more amazing and fun aspects of 99Vidas is that starting off, you have access to 16 different screen filters that change the visual look of the game.  When I started my first playthough, I decided I would play with the Vintage TV filter which adds CRT lines, reduced graphic quality, rounded eges of a CRT screen, and a burnt center glare that never goes away.  It was a pretty interesting introduction to a game that is well aware of itself, frequently making 4th wall breaking jokes about fighting games, video games and their mechanics.  On my first runthrough, I was able to beat the first boss, halfway through the second level before realizing that I would need more than the two lives I started Stage 2 with, considering that the difficulty increases as the game progresses (and your skills increase too), and that I had already lost three lives in Stage 1.

So I restarted the game in Story Mode (which carries over any/all character upgrades), this time using the Portable filter, which essentially makes it look like suped up Game Boy game, and still only made it as far as my original run-through.  I made another attempt at beating Stage 2 this time not using any screen filters, thinking that maybe they were too distracting, but in the end, I was still stuck between halfway and 2/3rds of the way through Stage 2.  So I moved the difficulty down from Normal to "Izzy," meaning Easy.  Although Izzy is also the name of one of the other characters and developers.

And while Izzy was easier, it certainly was not easy in the way that Resident Evil 2 is easy on Easy mode.  As witnessed below, even the Stage 2 boss on Izzy was able to (just barely) defeat me:

Currently, I am on the last stage, which even the character seems annoyed by, with having to re-fight all of the end-of-stage bosses all over again, but this time without the ability to stop by a store post fight to buy more lives.  And from what I can tell, there is no other way to earn extra lives in-game aside from buying them with points you earn during the stages.  At this point, I feel like my best/only option, instead of starting Stage 6 with 3 lives, is to restart the game, from the beginning, and spending all of my points on extra lives since Oak!'s skills are already maxed out.  And honestly, that plan does not excite me.  

And I think that is where I am at now with 99Vidas.  The early game excited me as concepts and the developers' approach seemed novel, but by the beginning of Stage 5, there did not seem to be any new enemies, just re-purposed enemies with slightly different color schemes from previous levels.  I was hoping that by entering the tall glass tower of the final boss's stage, that I would be fighting security guards in suits, but instead, it was the same group of ruffians from the first four stages.  Additionally by this point, I had maxed out Oak!'s skills so there was no more development to look forward to.  Sure I could level up Izzy, Hannah, or two of the others, but I would be starting from scratch, even on easy.

One other thing that not so much bothered me, but did earn an exacerbated sigh from my mouthal region.  As is the case with a lot of beat'em up games that I have played, both console and in the arcade, is that there ends up being a lot of off screen fighting going on.  I understand that the enemies spawn off screen and make their way into the playable area, and that unless there is a physical barrier, enemies can be knocked back or thrown off screen.  This means that often times, as enemies back up from the player, then end up going off screen into the unplayable area, or just barely visible and I feel like I am attacking invisible characters to the sound of fists and feet landing attacks.  I understand that that is how beat'em up works, but it can be a bit too unsatisfying, even if it is accurate to the gameplay and genre.

So, while I do love the humor in the game, the look of the characters, all of the filters, and the promise of being able to unlock six more playable characters, the thought of having to restart the game from the beginning to grind in order to purchase enough lives that I can make it through to the final boss is not something that I am excited about.  Especially that fight against Harddy.  That guy is an asshole



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental