Monthly Update: February 2020

Still Got Dem Madd MSPaint Skillz Yo!

Well, I am making it official.  After using the same banner for Monthly Update articles for the past five-and-a-half years, I have updated the look to include the logo that I designed, originally as a parody of sorts, but then I realized that I actually liked what I came up with last December when I was analyzing the games that Polygon.com had come up with for their Top 100 Games of the Decade.  So I am running with it.  I also stole a portion of the Stage Select Logo banner to use a border because I liked that too.

I do not know what it was about January, but it seemed to go on for a long time (in a good way) and with that time, I managed to either start, finish, or work my way through what I felt was a lot of games.  There were a number of games I picked up for #IndieXmas as well as #IndieSelect, some of which I have continued to play long after writing and publishing the articles, while others I put in the ol' college try and have not attempted again.  There were a handful of games I picked up during the Christmas/Winter sale both on Nintendo's eShop and (believe it or not) through Steam.  So in the coming weeks/months, I might be trying to come out with articles covering those games I just picked up, as well as covering games that I finished a while ago, like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Untitled Goose Game, Gris, Typoman: Revised, Type:Rider, Shovel Knight, Demon's Crest, Last Day of June, >observer_, and how the hell have I not written and published articles for either DOOM or Octopath Traveler!?  And then I just finished The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings on Saturday morning and booted up The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt that same night, and then I also have Slain! Back from Hell, A Robot Called Fight, and Snowboarding: The Next Phase.  And on top of all that, I also recently started Outlast II, and Wolfenstein: The New Order (on the Switch and PC respectively).

At least I have been keeping abreast of articles for Resident Evil: Revelations 2, which may or may not get a final Game EXP article after all of the other nine articles I have written that covered all four episodes of the main story and the two DLC chapters.

Speaking of episodic games, it looks like Skybound Entertainment released the remaining seasons of The Walking Dead: A Telltale Series on the Nintendo Switch over this last weekend.  I played the first two seasons including 400 Days back in my Steam Days, and I started A New Frontier (essentially season 3) a couple of years back, but the game kept glitching and crashing on my before I could finish the second chapter so I may just have to pick those games up (when they're on sale?) and restart the series all over again, but then actually finish it.  I have read that currently, the save files will not transfer from A New Frontier to The Final Season and that you instead have to go through a story selection screen allowing you to make the same choices for the larger events of the previous games.  Not a 100% deterrent, but not a great way for the games to be.  Maybe by the time I pick them up Skybound will have a patch out?

And this last weekend we did another escape room with Escapism for our friend Folly's birthday, specifically the Magician's Menagerie.  With the exception of one clue that we overthought due to unintentionally meta-gaming (which required a hint from the host), we managed to complete the room with just under 15 minutes to spare.  I don't know if we are just getting better-and-better at escape rooms in general, or if we are just getting really good at Escapisms rooms (to date having completed four of the six rooms, with one that we missed out before it was revamped, and one more that we haven't attempted yet), but I am going to doot our own horn and say that we rocked that room!

And what the hell is up with this Cooking Crack business!?  That came out of nowhere and just decided to stick around right!?  Well, coming up either on Friday or next Monday, or obviously a week from Wednesday, last Tuesday, you good reader will find out the mystery of this bonkers moniker pseudo-created by the man himself, Hideo Kojima.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Life, This Is Your Time