#IndieSelect: Mekorama (NS)

I received a copy of Mekorama on the Nintendo Switch from publishers Rainy Frog and Ratalaika Games and developer Martin Magni for Xinthus' #IndieSelect event last week.  The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared through social media channels.  All words unless otherwise noted are my own and all pictures included in this article, unless otherwise noted are from my own experience playing the game.

Judging by the pictures included in Xinthus' initial post about Mekorama, I was not sure what type of game I was getting myself into but it looked like some type of Minecraft isometric puzzle game.  It is not that.

I have not played a lot of games that fit this mold of isometric environmental puzzle games with FEZ and Captain Toad's Treasure Tracker come to mind, but Mekorama is not a clone or love child of either of those titles.  In Mekorama, you play as a robot who has a B on its chest (who I have and will be referring to here on out as Bryan) and you have to get them from their starting location to the goal of the stage.  Along the way, you have to manipulate certain pieces of the environment to manually move Bryan along, with objects like sliding platforms, moveable blocks, elevators, and rotating whirligigs all the while avoiding hazards like lethargic robots, aggressive robots, and electrical traps.  I would say that for 90% of the time I spent playing before writing this article (about three hours) I used exclusively touchscreen controls as I found them to be very intuitive (if you are already familiar with touchscreen controls).  Two-finger pinching zoomed-in, two-fingers apart zoomed out, moving your finger would rotate the screen, et cetera.  I never felt that I needed to use the controller, especially on later levels (Level 17 

I want to bring up the music early on because it is just so good in the way that it integrates into the game without being in the way or too ambient.  But, it is pretty ambient in the way that a lot of the music in Breath of the Wild is ambient, but the music in Mekorama has another layer to it.  According to Martin Magni, the music is both procedural and dynamic which is always cool when it is pulled off well.  And here it is pulled off very well.  There have been a number of instances when clicking on a place for Bryan to move creates a specific tone on a piano and then the next couple of notes in the music seem to play off of that one note, either building on it or just reusing it in a laid-back jazzy kind of way.

The game is split up into Easy Levels, Medium Levels, Tricky Levels, and Hard Levels with each set of levels being comprised of 25 individual levels, which is quite a lot of content for a game that retails for $4.99, but you could also argue quality over quantity.  After the first 25 levels in Easy, I feel that a lot of the levels were fairly well-paced in terms of difficulty.  The first handful of stages do a decent job of explaining the basic mechanics of the game and never feeling that there was a significant jump in difficulty that made a level feel impossible.

Except one level.

The Number of Times I Was Killed Here Is Slightly Embarrassing.

Level 17: Bot Bypass gave me a bit of grief in that was the introduction of a new mechanic, the antagonistic electrified  R-Bot who will zap you when you get within one square (both adjacent and diagonally) of them.  Knowing the type of game this was trying to be 17 puzzles in, I felt that being able to deftly avoid the R-Bot was not supposed to be the point, and I eventually decided to use the Hint system, which ended up not being as helpful as I was expecting, but that was because after trying to pass the level for the last  7 1/2 minutes, I failed to let the R-Bot do a full rotation of its patrol, otherwise, I would have seen it do what I needed it to do.

I Feel You, Bryan. I'm Tired of A-Bot's Antics too.

Patience.  I should have realized this from Level 7 Pagoda Push, being one of the levels that I have seen some people post about on Twitter, being one of the more frustrating levels in the game (along with Level 15 Back Track) which does require a lot of patience.  Pagoda Push introduces A-Bot, a computer-controlled robot whose only purpose is to get in the way.  In Pagoda Push, there really does not seem to be a specific puzzle, but more of a waiting game as Bryan inches forward forcing A-Bot to also move forward up until you reach the Goal. In Back Track, you just have to help A-Bot down the tower and then move after it passes your starting hovel and then backtrack back up the tower to the goal.  For these two levels, in particular, I feel like a shorter level would have been more appropriate and less time consuming to get across the same point.  But I am not a game designer, just a player.

And with that, Martin Magni also included a custom level designer that is unlocked from the beginning.  When you boot it up, you are greeted with a blank screen and nearly endless possibilities.  Kind of.  I did tool around with the level designer, not so much knowing what I was doing, but trying to create something that looked more like Level 1 Crash Course than Level 21 Dual Controls.  I feel like I went in expecting a toolset that was easy to use like Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, but that was not was I ended up working with.  I am also not sure if this is the same toolset that Martin Magni used as I do not know if I would be able to recreate Level 20 Factory Run or Level 27 Magical Number 7.  Those two levels specifically have a lot going on behind the scenes and outside of using graph paper to plan out each level/layer of the stage, I would be and was overwhelmed by making something that was both functional and akin to the levels in Easy.  This really goes to show the level of creativity that was put into each of the 100 puzzles in this game, which were probably not created on the Switch.  My biggest gripe with the level creator on the Switch, using either the touchscreen or the controller, was being able to line up anything that was not a block.  I did try for far longer than it should have, to simply place a pipeline as a track for the block to run along, but it took so many tries to even get the right pipe attached at the right spot that my screen was littered with misplaced pipes; then deleting them and not anything else I had purposefully placed made me a bit anxious.  The last negative thing I have to say specifically about the Switch port is that there is no way to share levels either between friends, or an online marketplace-of-sorts where people can share their creations.  It looks like this functionality exists on the mobile versions of the game (as there are QR codes you can scan), but an update to the Switch game would be do greatly in this era of Super Mario Maker.

My only other critique is how the game operates when you either die (zapped by electricity) or fall off of the playable area.  What I mean by that (you can watch below or just continue reading my rambling) is that in some of the stages there are elements like spinning gears or blocks that pop out of walls (think Wipeout) knocking Bryan off of platforms, ledges and anything else they're standing on.  Or in the case of any number of levels, moving a platform too quickly will cause Bryan to loose his balance and fall to the ground.  The issue that I take is that if Bryan does fall, you are freely able to walk around the area (or swim if Bryan lands in water) doing nothing but walking (or swimming).  The level does not restart.  When you die (as in the case with Level 17 above), Bryan's body will float for eternity.  The only way to restart a level is if you manually press start (or the pause icon in the upper right corner) and press the reload button.  Now, I would not expect the game to immediately restart the level if there is no way of recovering, but maybe a three-second gap between when Bryan dies or gets up off the ground after falling would have been nice.

So, after about three hours of playing through the Easy Levels, the first four of the Medium Levels, and spending about 15-20 minutes with the Level Creator, I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on Mekorama although I still could not tell you what the name of the game means.  The physics surrounding Bryan can be a little wonky sometimes but Martin Magni knew this when he was developing the game as the B actually stood for the way that Bryan would bumbling walk through levels (and also why its color is yellow and black).  Would I recommend this game?  Sure, and especially at the $4.99 price point, playing through all 100 levels will probably take some time (although hopefully there are not too many that require the player to wait for the A-Bot to do anything) and from what I have played (just over 25% of the game), the puzzles are still fun to figure out, even if Bryan is far from the most coordinated walker.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Now I Understand


P.S.  As I play through the Medium Levels (and possibly through the Tricky and Hard Levels as well) and fool around with the custom level generator some more, I might write up a follow-up article in the coming weeks.

Game EXP: Outlast II (NS)

I'll be honest with you.  This was a hard article to write.  There were multiple times that I started writing, reconsidered what I wanted to cover in this game, then would catch myself not having been writing for the last 15 minutes.  

I played this game on the Switch for the same reason that I play most games that were released after 2014 not on my computer because my laptop cannot handle a lot of what graphically heavy games require of the necessary hardware.  So that is where this experience is going to be coming from.  I also played the first game in the Outlast series back in August, 2018 with a First Impressions and a Full Review article, so I was familiar with the series coming into the second game.  Having watched the announcement trailer I got strong Jonestown vibes, what with the religious iconography and the preaching from a megaphone or speaker with a forest in the background, then the full trailer following, I felt like I knew what I was getting into.  A Christian cult against a guy with a video camera.  But there is plenty more to this game than that, and it is not a simple rehash of the first game.

First off, it is established that your character, Blake Langermann is working with his wife Lynn Langermann investigating a story about a woman found dead in the outback of Arizona.  The game opens with a helicopter crash and Lynn taken, so there is a bit of the cliched saving the captured woman bit going on.  In a couple of instances throughout the game, you manage to catch up with Lynn and she takes your hand and you are now controlling two people.  Each time this happened, you no longer had the ability to run, only walk, which meant or seemed to mean that I would not be harmed.  This immediately took me out of the game as I was thinking more of this action, being lead, as a game mechanic rather than a continuation of the story.

Looking a Little Rugged, But at Least There're Three Bandages Left.

Early on, I recognized the handful of other differences between this game and the first, most notably that you have an inventory system consisting of only batteries and bandages.  Yes, in Outlast II you have health somewhat, or more correctly, you can sustain, usually, up to three attacks from enemies before you are killed, although there are plenty of enemies who will one-hit-kill you if given the chance.  Also knowing that you "collected" information when the camera was up, I tended to have it up a lot in this game, although it seemed that this still drained the battery whereas in the first Outlast it did not, but I could be wrong on that note. The other update I enjoyed was that a list-of-sorts was showing you how many either documents or videos each section of the game had.  Sometimes I found that I had missed something, so I ran back the way I came trying to find what it was that I missed, but more often than not, I only discovered the missing media after collecting others noticed that I was missing more than one; I will talk a little more about this later on.

I would say that there were a handful of changes from the first game to this one.  The first being that a lot of this game takes place out in the open, whereas in the first was primarily indoors.  This meant that the night vision on the video camera was less effective.  Or at least that was how I interpreted it to be.  The less effective night vision could also have been a design choice as in the first game I often found myself not using my last battery as the zero power night vision would work well enough for me to be able to see.  In this game, it was nearly impossible to see anything when the battery light was blinking red and the battery was out.  Now that I think about it, I think my anxiety from Amnesia: The Dark Descent and running out of lantern oil/tinderboxes played a bit in my fear of running out of batteries while trying to navigate a cornfield in the middle of the night or in the bottom of a mine (because finding compatible batteries in the bottom of a nearly abandoned mine is completely plausible, but this is a video game so we can be forgiving).  All of that being said, the fear of being alone in the dark while being chased by aggressive zealots was pretty real in a virtual sense.

This is Probably Not a Happy Place.

The second change was that the events happening around our main protagonist Blake Langermann in the present trigger hallucinogenic memories that blend realities, but this is not made clear early on in the game, which is not a criticism.  These moments can happen when Blake is running from a zealot brandishing a rusty knife, runs into a ramshackle cabin slams the door closed and then finds himself in a classroom lit only by an overhead display, are more disorienting than anything else. There were times when I felt relieved to be experiencing hallucinations because that meant that I could not be killed in the real world, but that does not mean that there were no threats present.  At some point, as it becomes more evident that when Blake "goes" to the Catholic school, that he is reliving a traumatic event from his past, specifically when he, Lynn, and another classmate were in fourth grade, which made me dread the idea of a demonic priest chasing Blake throughout the school.  I feel like I never fully understood the design choice for this creature that chased you through your memories other than something that looked frightening to both a nine-year-old (being the average age of a fourth grader) and a 39-year-old (the average age of me).

But. It's. Right. THERE!

There were a couple of things about Outlast II that I was not a fan of, most of those being design choices on the part of the developer Red Barrels.  The first came across more as a humorous troll move than anything meant to be serious.  Throughout the entire game, as you are running and slinking through ramshackle huts, to farmsteads, to underground mines, I came across I do not know how many flashlights.  Both flashlights that looked like they had been discarded as well as ones that were carefully placed on a shelf or table waiting to be picked up at a moments notice.  But because this is Outlast, this was merely set decoration, you could neither interact with them or actually use them.  Rather frustrating when your primary source of light is the night vision that eats up battery power at a stupidly fast rate.

Who's Doing What Now?

The other frustrating thing about Outlast II was the same issue I had with the first Outlast as well as similar survival horror games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is how much of the story is communicated through found documents.  Because Blake Langermann carries a camera, that is his primary source for collecting information.  Anytime you come across a document, he will pick it up and take a picture, which his camcorder, which then gives you a visual record of that item.  Because these are optional items, some of which you have to go out of your way for and be actively searching for (often eating up more battery power than if you had just continued down that path instead of wandering off into the woods), there is a real chance that you could go through a majority of the game without understanding the overarching story.  Why was Papa Knoth trying to capture and kill Lynn?  What was with the splinter Heretics group that was working against Papa Knoth but also against outsiders?  What was with the encampment of sick and dying people covered in blisters and sores doing that canyon?  How was the Murkoff Corporation from the first Outlast game connected with the events in this game?  You could hypothetically play the entire game without any of this knowledge in your quest to save Lynn.  And that last bit about Murkoff Corporation having an off-site experimental station in the surrounding area I only found out because I missed that leaked corporate document at some point.

Get the Recording, Or Die Trying?
I ran.

I think my biggest criticism is that the story happening around Blake and Lynn was oftentimes confusing.  In the first game, documents help tell the story of what was happening at Mount Massive Asylum (operated by the Murkoff Corporation), what experiments were being conducted there and such, but here there were two different factions essentially at war with each other with Lynn caught in the middle and Blake trying to rescue her.  With very few exceptions, every person that Blake came across was considered a potentially deadly enemy that needed to run away from, regardless if they were on the side of Papa Knoth or a member of the Heretics.  And it felt like a lot of the documents you find in various buildings or tucked away behind rocks in a ravine (why?) merely added flavor for this world you found yourself in.  Then there were Blake's hallucinations that acted as a B-Story that I felt was good character development for Blake (somewhat), but may not have been as effective in helping to tell the A-Story.  Yes, I recognize that they are connected through religious iconography and how religion can be twisted from its original meaning for the benefit of a single person and that this had been done in Blake and Lynn's past and was being perpetrated by Papa Knoth. . . I don't know, maybe I am missing something either in the context of the letters I found or the ones that I missed; I did end up missing 22 out of 108 so that is highly probable, but hey, a 79.6% rate on a blind playthrough isn't too bad.

But you know what?  I did really enjoy Outlast II and looking back, I feel like there were fewer instances of getting frustrated with being killed over and over again by the same enemy or group of enemies like I experienced in the first game.  There were a few instances where I was unsure where to go which was pretty frustrating although I did look up a walkthrough while on the farm because there was a path around a corner that I was not seeing, and another time that I had missed a hole in a fence that was obscured by a young cornfield.  And yeah, there were several enemies that performed one-hit-kills and one in particular (above) that straight up killed me while I tried to get away from it (and would have been frustrating for no death speed runs).  What my takeaway was that felt that the insta-kill deaths were meant to be like a puzzle to solve in that one approach did not work because I died, but the following attempt did work.  I realize this is a bit immersion breaking, but that was just a way I tended to think about how this game operated.  I did enjoy the outdoor areas as the frequency with which Blake found himself outside and indoors was spaced in a way that never made me feel that I was in a single environment for too long.

This is Probably a Bad Sign.

I ended up spending just about 10 hours in Outlast II, which is a good amount of time for a first-person survival horror game where all you can do is run and hide (although I found myself hiding a lot less considering all of the places you could hide).  The tension remained high for nearly the entirety of the game and I did like the inclusion of the hallucinations partly because of how seamless they were (as above) and because I love when games can give the impressions that what the character is seeing is not there but you are still forced to act around what is happening.  Having played the game on normal difficulty, I would be a little afraid to see what the higher difficulty settings are, and I do not know if I will be revisiting Papa Knoth and his followers in the near future, but I cannot guarantee that I will not be back.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Pray For You

Ya'll Come Back Now, Ya Hear!?

MIDI Week Singles: "Stardew Valley Overture" - Stardew Valley (NS)

"Stardew Valley Overture" from Stardew Valley on Nintendo Switch and Every Other Platform (2016)
Composer: ConcernedApe
Album: Stardew Valley Original Game Soundtrack
Label: Bandcamp
Publisher: ConcernedApe / Chucklefish
Developer: ConcernedApe

The other day, Monday specifically, Conklederp decided to revisit Stardew Valley, a game that she played a lot about three years ago but has not played in much over the last couple of years.  But when she started the game and the opening theme came on, I think that we were both hit with a sense of familiar calm.  I am pretty sure that this desire to play came about from two sources.  The first being that over the weekend Conklederp and I started up our garden out front again, planting bell pepper and some strawberry starters (only finding out that the seed packets from last year had fallen on the ground in the shed and had since gone bad).  The second source was probably from all of the Animal Crossing postings going around the last five days.  And with us not having Animal Crossing: New Horizon, Stardew Valley looked like the next

I think that both of us just really needed something familiar and soothing and calming at that moment (and probably for the next month or so).  And what is better than nostalgia about a stress free gardening experience?  ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barone) really nailed the style of the music to go with this type of farming sim and there is really nothing more to say.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

You Deserve A Break

FFVIII mini guide, tips and tricks

I've repeatedly said that FF VIII is better with a guide.  My experience of the game improved dramatically when I started consulting a GameFAQs guide.  It's noteworthy that I only used 1/10 of what the guide had to offer-- this game is *very* deep.  So, I thought it would be nice to assemble a series of tips taken from the guide in order to make the game more enjoyable the first time through.

Final Fantasy VIII essential tips

• Enemies level with you, so for the most part there isn't any reason to grind for levels, however, it is a good thing to grind for Magic and AP.  
• It is worth it to sit in a single battle and draw spells until you have 100 of them.  Gathering a full 100 count is very helpful for junctioning.  
• It is a good idea to set the cursor to 'remember.'  This way, when you're Drawing magic over and over again, you don't have to go through and choose each command every time.  
• Use the 'Draw' command on every boss and enemy-type you encounter, there are items you can miss entirely.  
• Siren Guardian Force must be drawn from the first boss, Carbuncle must be drawn from the encounter with Edea.   Leviathan is drawn from the Garden Master.  You will not otherwise be able to get these until the final dungeon of the game.  Diabolos is gotten by using the Magic Lamp. Save beforehand as you will have to fight him first.   More info here
• There is a pet store in Timber that sells items for Guardian Forces.  One key item is 'Amnesia Greens.'  This allows your GF to lose one of its abilities.  This may seem like something you don't want to do, but it is a good idea.  There are some abilities you don't really use much and you can buy different abilities to replace them.  Also -- some abilities only seem to appear as options when you erase others.  
• Zell has a whole series of character moments that will only happen if he is in your party.  I almost never had him in my party, so I missed these.  
• You can trade magic among your party, and it makes sense to pick a priority order for different spells.  For example, give Squall all of your Fire spells until he is maxed out, and then pick a secondary choice.  

#IndieSelect: Factotum 90 (NS)

Disclaimer: I received a copy of Factotum 90 from publisher Rainy Frog and developer TACS Games for Xinthus' #IndieSelect event last week.  The game was given and received without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played within the allotted time and that the experience is shared through social media channels.  All of the words, descriptions, and screenshots unless otherwise noted were from my own playthrough.

Factotum 90 is a puzzle-based game that was first released back in 2016, but was recently received a release on the Nintendo Switch this last Thursday (March 19th, 2020).  The gimmick here is that the player controls two different characters to get both characters through environmental puzzles and into the next room and the next set of puzzles.

Wait, so I have to go where and do what now?

The overarching story here is pretty simple, in that there is a spaceship that has been hit by a foreign object shutting down various systems shipwide and it is your job to repair those damaged systems.  You control one to two small boxy utility robots throughout the ship, solving environmental puzzles and just trying to get from Point A to Point B.  But to get to Point B, there is a lot of switching back-and-forth between robots, pressing weighted buttons, back-tracking, using lasers to both activate and destroy, traveling through quantum tunnels, and recently, using bombs to access new areas and destroying barriers.  Thankfully Factotum 90 has done a great job of introducing new elements at a pace that makes approaching new puzzles manageable and never like the game is throwing too much at the player too quickly.

Connecting each stage is a human passenger, who kind of acts like you handler, giving you a little bit of context for why you are in a particular part of the ship and just background flavor.  The wonderful thing about this human is that he is fully voice acted in a soothing and charming British accent.  Where I am at in the game, I am a little afraid that he is either going to be captured (assuming that the impact of the ship was caused maliciously), or killed, but being killed seems like a long shot and a direction I do not see this game going in.

The puzzles have sometimes felt overly complicated when I first started out in a room, but then halfway through I can figure out what the solution should be and I am able to figure out the solution.  I was eternally grateful when I found out that the robots have the ability to run and I have yet to find a need to walk slower than the default speed.  There is no jumping ability so there is no real platforming perse since you have to wait for your partner to raise the platform you are standing on.  I was a little surprised that there was no option to play co-op, either local or online since this seems like it would be perfect for that format, but perhaps there is additional coding required or that the developers simply wanted to craft a more concise experience. 

At present, it looks like there are 30 levels and that honestly feels like a perfect amount for this game.  And I love that in-between levels you are shown your progress, how it relates to the geography of the ship and that the path is not just a linear one.  Although I did have a bit of a mental disconnect when I started Level 03, being above Level 02 after traveling down the service elevator.  I could see a publisher of AAA titles wanting a developer to cram in more levels so that the price of the game could be increased, or be able to tack on additional stages as DLC, but what is here feels perfect.  There is no excess that feels shoehorned into what is already a well developed and produced game.

As far as price points go, my first inkling is that $7.99 seems a little high considering that the game is regularly sold on Steam for $3.99 and maybe you could chalk that up to the Switch Tax.  I honestly feel that if the game were sold between $4.99-$5.99, that would be the sweet spot.  But the game is very well made and as previously stated, the voice acting is well done, so people do have to get paid.

You know, that is kind of it, or at least as much as I have experienced as of the writing of this article.  The game is solid, the controls are more-or-less intuitive, switching back-and-forth between the two robots is seamless.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
And Pull Us Through

P.S.  While writing this article I did find out that "Factotum" translates to "one who does all kinds of work" being derived from the Medieval Latin word for "do something."  Seriously cool, but then about 10 years ago I had some friends come over to the house I was living in and we stayed up until around 2 am getting drunk and discussing various etymologies.  That's the kind of person I am.  And I like it.

MIDI Week Singles: "Geralt of Rivia" - The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (NS)

"Geralt of Rivia" from The Witcher III: Wild Hunt on the PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, & Nintendo Switch (2015 & 2019)

Composer: Marcin Przybyłowicz

Album: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt Original Game Soundtrack

Label: CD Projekt Red

Publisher: CD Projekt

Developer: CD Projekt Red

You know, I think this song came up right when I needed it to this afternoon.  Being my first day working from home during this time of sheltering in place and public isolation, hearing the heroic fanfare of one Geralt of Rivia was very welcome.

What is interesting is that the entire song is not as grand or epic as the last minute, but you do hear Geralt's theme from the beginning played softly and as the song progresses there comes an added darkness and foreboding.  All of which suits well for the character of Geralt as he is not your typical heroic figure.  Despite the fact that his profession is that of one that helps people, he often comes across as a reluctant participant in his own story.

It is pretty easy to let the first half of this song slip by, which is not meant as a slight, just that the song itself is somewhat serene, even during the darker war-torn section in the middle, but at 1:27 Geralt's theme is revamped into something that nearly everyone who has played any game in the series might see him as.  The hero, all victorious and such.  Maybe it is a little too cheesy, but right now, this is what I need.

~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian

Born of Kaer Morhen

Mid-March Update, 2020

So this month has turned into something weird, and strange, and new but far from the great kind of new like a new digital expansion to Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition, or a newly announced video game IP from Nintendo.  No, this new is something that a lot of us have never lived through before and here in North America, we are getting our first taste of what China, South Korea, and Italy are already knee-deep in.  Processing all of the events that have happened and continue to happen is going to take some time, and since the situation is developing day-by-day, being able to make these necessary adjustments is exhausting on a physical, mental and emotional level.  

Last Monday (March 9th) there had not been a lot of major declarations about COVID-19 (Coronavirus) in the United States and as recently as February the President of the United States was referring to the outbreak of the virus as "their [the Democrats in Washington DC) new hoax" (yes I realize that he was not referring to the virus itself as a hoax, although at times his rhetoric would seem otherwise, but that the response was from Democrats' outrage that the information being handling by the White House is akin to the Mueller Investigation and the Impeachment inquiry/hearings/trial).  Within a week (Monday, March 16th), all public schools (K/12 through university) in our state are now closed, California has declared that all bars, nightclubs, wineries be closed and that anyone aged 65+ should self-isolate (looking at you Mümer & Püper), the CDC has recommended that any public gatherings be limited to fewer than 50 (uninfected) people [scratch that, make it 10 or fewer], and even Washington State has ordered that all restaurants close their on-site dining facilities but can remain open to delivery and drive-through options, while gyms and movie theaters are also to close.  Then this weekend we found out that our climbing gym and our favorite escape room company are closing at least through the end of March, possibly longer.  And just now (while at work), was told that at least one bank (most likely more) are closed to the public while ATMs and drive-through windows are still open; I realize that these are updates only from west coast states, but it's just so hard to keep up-to-date with all of the state laws/regulations/advisories with this pandemic that I am limiting my references to information that I am aware of, which not coincidentally, is from the states that mostly surround me.

I am trying not to make light of the situation just because I fall into the category or low risk because of my age and that I have no underlying health conditions, but the thought of being quarantined or even carrying the virus and passing it along to someone who is at higher risk  [like my Grandma who is 90 and my parents who are both over 65) is occasionally a terrifying thought.  And last Friday on The Daily podcast, a very important distinction in how illness from COVID-19 is categorized was brought to light in the distinctions between mild, severe, and critical cases.

And in the time it took for me to write that last paragraph and writing this one, a few hours, Oregon has now followed suit with Washington and will be closing bars, restaurants and the like for the next four weeks.  This is an ever-evolving situation that is pretty unnerving.  The morbid part of me wants to rewatch Contagion, Outbreak, 12 Monkeys, and play Pandemic, but I recognize that that might be too much too soon.  I am all about escapism in times of stress and there are plenty of other avenues to take, especially if you are either self-quarantining voluntarily, mandated by your local/state government, or if you have tested positive for COVID-19.

I really have no idea.  I apologize for being all over the place with this.

I got the idea to write today's article about current events from The Kid's Instagram story about keeping a journal during this time and I thought, "Well, I already have a diary of sorts in the form of this site that Dr. Potts and I write for, might as well just write down some thoughts here and post them because we're human too."  And I thought it would be a disservice to write on as normal, ignoring everything that is going on in the world.  Wednesdays will still have their MIDI Week Single articles and we will try to keep as up-to-date as possible with our postings as for the time being, I am still having to go into work.  At least for now.

Please stay healthy and safe out there.  If you can stay home during this time, please do, and remember to check in with friends and family.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental


tl;dr
Times are weird, and neither Conklederp, myself, Dr. Potts or Jane have contracted COVID-19.

First Impressions: Unlock the King (NS)

I saw a trailer for Unlock the King back in late-February and the premise looked like a lot of fun.  Essentially you have a selection of squares from a chessboard, a pre-picked selection of chess pieces, and your goal is to get the king to a goal, using the standard movement of the specific chess pieces.  I have played a similarly styled mini-games as part of Chessmaster: The Art of Learning on the Nintendo DS, so having a chess-based puzzle game on the Switch would be a nice addition and something I could play in short bursts between games.

Wait?  How What Do?

Now, before you go galumphing off to the eShop and plunk down $0.99 (although it is currently on sale for $0.49), these are the main things you need to know.  First off, there is no official hand-holding in a here are how chess pieces move type of tutorial.  You start Level 1 with your board of four squares with one square being the goal, and two chess pieces: one rook and a king.  Let me walk that back a little bit.  The first couple of levels do function at tutorial levels, teaching the player how to move a specific peice, but once new pieces are introduced you are expected to quickly pick up and remember how they all move as more pieces are introduced in subsequent puzzles.  And these are somewhat stylized chess pieces too, like they were designed in the Tron universe; not a bad thing, just an observation.  If you have never played chess or do not know how a knight moves might be confused at first, especially if you are playing either on PC where you have to select the piece and select the correct square you want to move it to, or if you are using a touchscreen which is essentially the same thing.  When using a controller, you would just select the piece then cycle through the available spaces you can move your piece to.

All of that being said, I might be surprised if more than a handful of people quit the game out of frustration at any lack of instruction.  I do not want to be gatekeeping, but you kind of have to know what you are getting yourself into when you buy a game centered around chess piece movements.  You may not be expected to have a rudimentary knowledge of chess pieces and how they move, but I found it to be exceedingly helpful to feel like I at least knew what I was doing.

The only other fault that I have with Unlock the King is that it almost makes the puzzles too easy, not in difficulty, but in execution.  When I started, I expected there to be a move counter, that you had to complete each stage in a specific number of moves, not including the moves that the King needs to make to get to the end.  But no, you have an unlimited amount of moves, which could mean that Minimol Games' own goal was to make the game as accessible to as many people as possible (but then why not include a tutorial?), or that determining a move limit would have been too complicated without subcontracting out a chess master for quality assurance.  The only other mechanical fault of sorts is that once you moved the piece that allows the King to reach the Goal, the computer takes control of the King to speed its way through to the end.  It feels a little anticlimactic, especially in later stages where it takes minutes to move the pieces to the right spaces, often having to double back to get knights and bishops out of the way.  On more than one occasion I found myself finishing a puzzle quicker than expected, with the King suddenly moving before I thought I had finished.

Now that that is out of the way, Unlock the King is a lot of fun.  The game never makes any claims to give the player puzzles that will help their chess game, or teach them complicated maneuvers to outwit future opponents.  It is a puzzle game that might give you twenty squares in a pattern with eight knights, two bishops, and six pawns in the way of the King's goal.  It is your job to figure out how to move the pieces in a way that will allow the King to move through the spaces as a King is allowed to move (forward, backward, and diagonally, but only one square at-a-time).

This is pretty much what you do on each level, except you do have the added ability to rotate the board as well as zoom in and out, which I really only do in the beginning to get what I feel to be the best angle to solve the puzzle; no dynamic camera movements needed, this is chess after all.  Some of the later levels have made me a little anxious though, similar to how I feel about sliding box puzzles, in that I might get frustrated and just haphazardly start moving pieces and hope that a solution magically appears, which goes back to wishing that there was some type of move counter.  That way at least I would not feel that a puzzle could take upwards of 100+ moves to complete.

You know, I feel like that is really all I came to talk about.  I have finished through Level 26 of the available 100 puzzles, some being just a little more difficult than the one that came before, but the increase in difficulty seems fair.  Sure, there are some solutions that I am able to see faster than others, but that is just the way some puzzles are.  In the end, if you have never played chess before, there should be better games out there to teach you the fundamentals, but if you feel comfortable around chess pieces and enjoy puzzles, then you would be hard-pressed to find a more economically priced game for the amount of puzzles contained herein.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Guile's Theme" - Street Fighter II Turbo (SNES)

"Guile's Theme" from Street Fighter II Turbo on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Damn Near Everything Else in the Multiverse (1992)

Composer: Yoko Shimomura (Pii)

Album: [Not Sure If There Is One Specifically for the SNES Music]

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom

Over the years, I never did play a lot of Street Fighter II, either in the arcades or at home.  Growing up and being a teenager in 1993 with a limited income, I had to borrow games a lot and one of my friends up the street did have a copy of Street Fighter II, but wouldn't let me borrow it because the game was still too new for him.  And my parents were against me buying the game because the did not like the idea of a fighting game, let alone a fighting game where you could have men fighting women.  Then whenever I was in an arcade, I would frequently have my ass handed to me by other players and the computer.  So Street Fighter II was never in my wheelhouse of games that I excelled at.  

For this reason, I was never too familiar with the music in the games and never gave the series much of a second thought, especially after Killer Instinct came out and sided myself in the rendered goodness of Rare's fighter over the cartoony appearance of Capcom's seemingly aging series.  And then seven years ago (holy hell) Smooth McGroove did an amazing acapella cover of the song and whenever I hear this song in-game (or anywhere else for that matter), I cannot help but think of that cover.  I mean, Yoko Shimomura is an amazing composer, and I do think Guile's theme is one of the catchier ones from the game and stands by itself without any assistance, but I definitely think that Smooth's cover has helped elevate this song for me from something of a nice tune to one that I actively listen to whenever it comes on.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
ᛒᛟᚱᛖᚨᛚ ᚺᛁᛗᚾ



P.S.  I decided to use the song, mainly because every night when I go to clean out our cat's litterbox, I will usually find him going to use it at the same time, so I'll pop into the next room, boot up the SNES Classic and play a couple rounds of Street Fighter II Turbo, hence using this game specifically and not the original 1992 SNES release.