I've never played Running Battle, but the gameplay itself seems like a lackluster side-scrolling beat'em up through a repeated warehouse set, not so much as running as you are sauntering a la Richter Belmont. The highlight is that a lot of the music is excellent for an early '90s action video game and the title screen theme is my favorite.
I'm a bit sad on two fronts. First, the music here is used only for the title screen, and the opening cinematic. There's so much excitement and energy here that it feels a waste to not reuse the theme as either the Stage 1 or Stage 2 theme or even before you go up against the final boss, "M." Secondly, there doesn't seem to be any information about the composer. Every site I looked up that information about Running Battle did not have any information about who the composer was, or anyone else who worked on the game apart from the
So this is what we are left with. An amazing introductory song to a mid game with an unknown composer. Maybe it'll just be time before they're uncovered. Hopefully.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Seed of Life through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Seed of Life Systems: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, Release Date: August 11, 2021 - May 30, 2024 Publisher: GS2 Games Developer: MadLight Time Spent: 3-3.5 Hours
I wanted to like Seed of Life, I mean, I requested a review key for the game after all because I liked the idea of a 3rd-person adventure puzzle game from an indie developer that I had never heard of, and I wanted to support publishers and developers who list Switch games on Keymailer. "Wanted" is the key word here because while there were times when I enjoyed Seed of Life, there were just too many little things that prevented me from enjoying the game any more than I already had. I know that there are different versions and ports of Seed of Life, but I will focus on the Switch version rather than try to compare this to other versions. Yes, the port on the Switch is a pretty massive visual downgrade, but that doesn't immediately mean it is a worse game or that it's not playable. A visually downgraded game is still 100% playable and enjoyable, especially if you're not comparing it to other iterations.
The plot is pretty straightforward. You play as Cora who tasks herself with finding/locating an alien artifact that will help revitalize her dying planet, the seed of life if you will. The game is played as a third-person adventure game with environmental puzzles and some platforming elements. Where I stopped in the game, there was no combat system, only a runaway system from enemies that largely ignored the player and would follow a pre-set path.
The problems I had with the game, at least on the Switch, became evident early on. First, the frame rate wasn't great, but not such a red flag that I stopped playing immediately. Games don't need to run at 60 or even 30 fps to be playable, and while the game likely ran into the single digits in the clip below, I still felt that there was something here that could be enjoyed.
The second issue had to do with how Cora moved. When I started, Cora could only walk, which only made the game feel slower. Yes, there is a toggle in the settings menu before you start the game and I did select walking, but I had interpreted that as what your base-walking speed was and thought that I could hold down ZL or another button to have Cora sprint when I needed her to. This was not the case as I found out after an hour of playing. I then discovered that to have Cora run at all, you have to exit back to the main menu to turn running on, then continue. There is no in-between which is a very bizarre design choice and one that I don't recall having ever seen in a third-person game before. Had I not toggled the option for Cora to run, I don't think you could actually beat the game as the large canyon area where I stopped requires the player to quickly reach landmarks because your health is drained (like the timer life mechanic in the original Gauntlet). Why then have the movement speed be anything but running or even have this atrocious mechanic where you can only toggle via a menu only accessible from when you first turn the game on? There are platforming sections in the canyon area that would have been easier if you could toggle between walking and running. It doesn't make any sense to me and just makes me irritated the more I think of it.
The combination of these two issues ultimately contributed to my needing/wanting to stop playing the game. A couple of hours in, you come to a sprawling canyon area where the point is to reach far-off Lumia Capsules while you make your way through an area that automatically starts draining your life once you cross a threshold, so in essence you have a timer that is counting down until you die. There are large worm-like monsters that patrol this area that will further deplete your life and large Lumia plant-things that will recharge your own Lumia (an energy source that lets you track where you're supposed to go and fuels certain special abilities) and prevent your life from draining. So this whole area is a series of puzzles that require the player to determine where they need to go, and how to reach the goal while navigating a hostile environment, while also using the environment to their advantage. It makes a good case for why this should be a fun area and overall, a fun game, but because of how the game was ported to the Switch, it makes navigating platforms and jumping incredibly difficult. Case in point:
So the platforming itself isn't complicated, but only being able to run while the game fps stutters makes timing jumps very difficult. At least the load time between dying and respawning is only a few seconds, which I guess makes dying in the exact same area twice in 30 seconds all the more frustrating. But then when you compound the situation with additional elements like the game needing to render the environment along with particle-like smoke elements and enemy movements, the game becomes what I would define as unplayable.
This is what really frustrates me about Seed of Life. When I started the game, and I was only walking around, because there wasn't a need to run around apart from getting somewhere faster, the game was fine. Not great, but playable and fine. But once you really needed to run to traverse locations faster because of the life timer mechanic, that's when the lag and stuttering became more pronounced because the game was becoming more difficult. But that's fine that the game was becoming more difficult, it makes sense otherwise the game would be too easy and less interesting. It all comes to a head because the company that ported Seed of Life to the Switch* did such a poor job that it negates any positive aspects that MadLight put into the creation of the game.
Obviously, I can't recommend the Switch port of Seed of Life at any price point and I would need to watch a thorough review of the original PC game before I think about trying to play this on the Steam Deck.
* All I could find about the company that ported this was "NXY Digital, LTD." from the review site GameHype, but I couldn't find anything about the company itself. All searches tried to direct me to NXT Digital, which is an integrated cable service provider, with no mention on their site about porting video games. So I'm not really sure at this point.
P.S. The other thing that really irks my gourd, is that all of the pictures on the Nintendo eShop page are all taken from the PC version of the game, not the Switch port. It's really obvious in the second and third pictures and the fact that there isn't a video trailer either on the eShop page or one released by the developer/publisher on YouTube.
You may've noticed that we hadn't posted much apart from MIDI Week Singles the last couple of weeks and I just wanted to quickly jump in to give a little bit more of a post-explanation to accompany what I said during the Monthly Update.
So during the first three weeks of July, I spent with my Dad's side of the family on a trip to celebrate my Grandma's 95th birthday in a way that Conklederp and I could normally not afford. So we flew out and spent three days in Oslo, Norway, followed by a 10-day cruise that was supposed to start by taking us to Skagen, Denmark, but the Skagerrak was too choppy the morning we were supposed to make port and the captain made the decision an hour before and decided to head back to Norway for our second port. Then we proceeded as planned, stopping in various ports along the southern Norwegian coast until our last stop in Måløy, Norway, after which we arrived in Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands. Then we spent our second (originally planned only) day at sea and landed in Southampton on the 16th. We then spent time in London until we flew out of Heathrow (I can't comment on the baggage retrieval system, but kudos to Central Security who recovered my phone and promptly called Conklederp's phone after locking it from my laptop upon discovering that it wasn't in my pocket) on the 20th and back in Portland that same evening. We had some delays due to the Crowdstrike Windows Update Outage, but nothing compared to what my parents and The Kid had to deal with; everyone is back home and safe, so no worries on that front.
During the trip, we did have decent WiFi in our hotels in Oslo and London, with piss-poor WiFi on the boat because we didn't opt to pay the $99 for higher speed access, but I was able to post a few MIDI Week Single articles that I already had queued up. On our second day in Oslo, I discovered that my mouse had died so I was relegated to using the touchpad on my laptop, which isn't great, but it got me by with at least being able to write articles here and there, but I couldn't play anything. I also lost motivation to write articles since I knew that trying to create our S+ tier quality banners would have been an absolute pain with just the touchpad. But that was why I brought the Switch. And a handful of physical cartridges because the Tears of the Kingdom OLED Switch I primarily play is not the Switch that my primary account is on, although Conklederp also brought hers so I was able to start, but not finish, Layers of Fear 2.
I had been wanting to play Layers of Fear 2 since it was announced back in 2019 before we went on that cruise (for my Grandma's 90th birthday), but it hadn't been ported to the Switch yet and I couldn't've run it on my laptop then or now. I also finished The Outer Worlds, sinking about 95 hours into that game and I'll try to have an article up for that sometime next month. The rest of the time I played Kingdoms of Amalur since it's an easy game to put on and lose a handful of hours while relaxing in your concierge stateroom.
I didn't do as much reading as I thought I might, but I did blaze through Shadow and Bone on the flight home. While donating platelets, I watched the first two or three episodes of the Netflix series (of the same name) some months back and really enjoyed what I saw. And now having read the first book, I'm intrigued to find out about the B-story involving Kaz, Inej, and Jesper, whom I assume are in another book altogether.
So now that I'm back, we'll return to a more regular posting schedule.
The Humans came out in the time of Lemmings, being a side-scrolling puzzle-based platformer that uses caveman-esque humans with differing abilities coupled with context-specific item usages to reach the end of a stage within a certain amount of time. The game was initially released on the Amiga, but the ports for the SNES and Genesis had the odd setting that required the player to either play with sound effects or music, but not both. I bring that up because music is the whole reason we're here on Wednesdays and we've seen over the years (not decades) how different games manage to cram both music and sound effects into games, often requiring a sacrifice between one of the two options that produce sound on limited sound chips.
Anyway!
All of that preamble because I don't have a lot to say about this song apart from that I like the intro and I find the rest of the song really catchy. It works both on its own and as music that plays during a side-scrolling 2D platforming puzzle game that is less focused on action (in the early levels before Dinosaur enemies are introduced) and seemingly more on entertaining the player while they solve the puzzle. That is, unless you're playing either of the aforementioned ports with the music turned off. Then it's your loss.
It took a little while to figure out, but by my calculations, this is the 500th MIDI Week Singles article we've posted between our original site, Two Boys and Their Blog, and here. We started this column way back on July 23rd, 2014, and with the exception of a handful of Wednesdays, we've managed to post nearly 500 different tracks from video games over the last 10 years**. There was one time were we used music from a film that was never used in a video game. There have also been a couple of times we've either reused the same track or used different variations or arrangements of the same song. The point is, we love music here and for the last 10 years, this has been our primary avenue to share that with you all.
So go us for making it 10 years with this one column. Self-congratulating and everything.
* Final Fantasy VI has been released so many times on different platforms over the last 30 years that I didn't feel it necessary to list them all right here, and decided to just list it as Final Fantasy VI on the SNES.
What I love about "Wicked Child" is that I have such fond memories of this song despite the fact that this stage is usually where I really start dying a lot and either end my run in Castlevania or have to continue more than once. Something about that driving drum beat when the level starts and you find yourself outside of the castle with a brighter color palette from the previous stage just makes for a great start to the level. Then you get jumped by a Hunchback and all hopes of making it to the parapets without taking damage is just as quickly dashed. And then to say nothing of the crows that blend in with the statuary then swoop in to knock you back into the bottomless void while trying to jump a gap. Despite all of the annoyances in the stage, to say nothing of the Mummy fight when you don't have the Holy Water equipped, I love this track.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Whispering Lane through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators. The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience. Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]
Whispering Lane Systems: Windows, macOS, Linux Release Date: June 18, 2024 Publisher: Airem Developer: Airem Time Spent: 3 Hours, 12 Minutes
Whispering Lane (currently titled "Whispering Lane: Horror" on Steam) is a first-person survival-horror indie game from Airem, which is a bit of a departure from some of their usual fare, although this isn't their first-person survival-horror. It is currently 100% not rated for the Steam Deck and if you watch my prologue playthrough below, you'll see that nearly half of the time I spent messing around with the button settings on the Steam Deck side of things. Admittedly some of the confusion on my part came from not saving the control settings in-game when I first inverted the y-axis, but there were also issues with the control button not always making the character crouch as it worked once with the Right Control but then stopped working and in Chapter 1, I remapped the Left Control and it worked there as well. Eventually, everything ended up working out fine and I didn't have to return to the control settings (much).
Next, we need to discuss the text and AI voiceover. While I don't inherently dislike using text-to-speech since Airem is a one-person developer and I don't think it necessarily takes away from the game, it feels like the speech was "recorded" with a slightly different script than what is in the game. This might be just me, but when the voiceover diverges from the text on the screen, I find it a little off-putting. Also having the text not fit onto the screen is a little distracting, but I'm not sure if that's a Steam Deck issue or something that needs to be fixed on the back end of things. The second strange thing about the prologue sequence is the floating >> icons throughout the level which teleport the streamer Ghostseeker to the next zone, but there is some kind of invisible wall that teleports Ghostseeker back to the start of the current zone and repeats the dialogue if you try to go backward. I understand the reason for having this in the game, because you can't have the player exploring a map that isn't meant to be explored narratively, but it feels clunky. One possible fix would be to have Ghostseeker spawn behind a closed or locked door, so there's no chance for the player to attempt to backtrack.
Let's move now to Chapter 1:
Here, you take on the character of police officer Jackson Harrowfield, who is sent to investigate reports of noises and presumably Ghostseeker's incursion into the house on Whispering Lane, although there isn't anything mechanically that separates Ghostseeker from Jackson. You start out in the same location as the prologue and explore the same areas, but this time, you can fully explore the whole time without any >> teleports. This section plays like a walking sim in that there is nothing that can kill you, it's just environmental changes as you collect keys to unlock doors.
Once again, the translation is either a bit off, or there's a misplaced text file because when you pick up an errant backpack (which as expected increases the number of storage slots for things to carry), the game gives you a "You took the apple" notice. Even the second backpack that you find later in the game, the game still tells you "You took the apple." I have no explanation as to why a backpack is being called an apple, but I couldn't not bring that up.
The last thing I want to mention about this section is that I had to do a little figuring out the controls on the Steam Deck in regards to equipping the axe. Having recently come from BAISU where I used the left touchpad like a secondary directional pad to use commands on your dog Bella, I probably should have realized that the 1-4 keys were already mapped to that left trackpad, which is what you need to use when equipping any of your weapons. So that was in part why I died at the end of this chapter.
Now onto Chapter 2 (although during the following chapter, I discovered that this might still be considered Chapter 1 by the developer if we're only going by the load file names).
This is the chapter where the game changes from a walking sim to a first-person survival horror where you have melee and ranged weapons against monsters that take multiple hits to kill in a small confined area with no real indication as to how much ammo you're going to find while exploring. In reality, though, the enemies in this section were relatively easy as you could attack while moving forward after the enemy attacks, then pull back before they either start or finish their attack animation. Of course, it's easier to explain than in practice as I did get hit quite a few times.
So the white elephant in the room in this video is that I accidentally soft-locked the game because of what I didn't do in the previous chapter. What I discovered/realized was that the mechanisms that operate the house in this chapter are directly connected to the previous chapter. I came to this realization after watching a walkthrough to confirm my fears. What happened was that there is a door on the second floor in the first chapter that is barred with wooden planks that you're supposed to remove to open the door, but you don't actually have to remove the boards since you can still exit the bathroom through the bedroom. However, you need to remove these boards in order for this door to open in this chapter (Chapter 2), otherwise you cannot get through to the bedroom and gain the last brass plaque to access the basement, which is your goal for this section of the game.
Then we come to Part 2 of Chapter 2:
I was thankfully able to load a previous autosave right before I finished Chapter 1 so I didn't have to start the game over from the beginning. What I thought needed to be done worked. I removed the final board and was able to open the bathroom door. Also, what is up with hands raking across the from of the face? This is the second time in just as many games where this effect has happened, although here it felt less effective than in BAISU. Did this happen in a
I probably should have noticed that something wasn't quite right on this playthrough since I was able to interact with items that seemed to have been leftovers from the first Chapter, like emptying the bathtub that wasn't full or picking up the lockpick in the basement. Additionally, my quests seemed to have been duplicated, and the front door was again barred by boards. The game then said that an objective was "Pre-Completed" when I unbarred it only to find that this exit was blocked by a portcullis-like gate; now it could be that this gate was purposefully there to force the player into the basement.
I then ran into another soft-lock when I was killed by the spikes in the hallway in the basement. Upon dying, I respawned back where my load game had started. I had a feeling something bad was happening when I was trying to manually save and there was no indication that the game was being saved. Later, Airem released a hotfix to fix several bugs, this apparently being one of them, because, with version 1.04, this soft-lock was fixed.
This brings us to Chapter 2 Part 3:
I played separately without recording just so that I could get myself to where it soft-locked last time, at the entrance to the hallway with the swinging blades. I also added the "Left Shift" keyboard key to the back L4 button for sprinting because pressing the left joystick button down for short sprints felt awkward and I knew that trying to walk through that hallway would be nearly impossible. And let me tell you, that hallway went on too long and should have been half as long. I get it, dying by one hit by a bladed post can be stressful, but since I can technically save after everyone, it takes a bit of the tension away.
And then there was the boss battle against the spider that, I admit, accidentally managed to find a safe spot behind whatever that tumbled piece of furniture was that put me out of range of its attacks. Yes, I accidentally cheesed it, but I'm okay with it because it meant that I could continue the game.
Now, I don't know what those scorched-looking anthropomorphic spider-looking creatures were supposed to be after the boss battle, but holy damn do they move fast and hit hard! I get that the game needs to introduce more difficulty but these ones feel inconsistent in how they hit. It probably also doesn't help how the game overall shows Jackson taking damage feels almost nil, but because they move so fast and there's no noticeable "agghhh!" "oof!," or flashing on the screen when you get hit, that I immediately just assume that I've been hit when I encounter these things.
The last thing I want to touch on is the Shifty Man (because I don't know what this creature is referred to in-game yet. It's an enemy that doesn't move all that quickly, but is still fast enough to be inconvenient when you're trying to keep away from it, and is designed to kill you in one hit regardless of your current HP. During my first encounter with I treated it like any other monster thinking it could be killed, but then upon dying from it, quickly realized that you were supposed to stay away from it while scouring the darkened maze for the key to unlock the drawer which presumably has the key to unlock the door to exit this section. Spending 15 minutes and being killed eight times (along with an 18-second loading screen) did not feel as productive as the same amount of time spent in a FromSoft game having figured out what I needed to do and I lost motivation around death number five.
And that is where my playthrough of Whispering Lane currently rests. I don't currently have access to my Steam Deck (it's a few thousand miles away) but I will give this a go after I get back. There are times when the game feels not quite polished enough which has nothing to do with its compatibility on the Steam Deck as I knew going in that I would likely need to tinker with the controls. If I were debugging the game (which I don't interpret the purpose of keys from Keymailer to be) I would likely just play the first two chapters over until everything that I had issues with worked flawlessly. There might need to be some modifications to level design in regards to getting soft-locked, and figuring out why objectives were duplicating. There is a mostly playable game here, it just needs some additional QA work before I would consider it to be a viable game. Again, reiterating that I haven't completed the game, I can only speak to how far I've made it, from the prologue up to the maze with Shifty Man (or whatever its name is).
I haven't played any of the games in the Game Boy Wars series, but from what I have seen, it appears to be similar to other Conflict-type war games. Maybe a little more dynamic in the music department as it seems that different background tracks play based on whatever in-game metric there is to determine if you are in fact winning or not. What I like about this song is that despite the snare drum-esque percussion line, there isn't a whole lot here that makes me immediately conjure images of a military campaign. Yes, it's cheery and bouncy and does bring up a feeling that things are going well, but this could fit just as well in another non-aggressive setting.
The B-section I find really interesting in that I'm not actually as interested as I am during the rest of the song. This part sounds like it could be from a Kirby or Bubble Bobble game, something with verticality. And I don't know why I feel that way either. But that section only lasts about 15 seconds before we return to the main theme.
We've been playing a lot of games received from Keymailer this month, which is not to say that we've finished all of the games that I've paid cold hard cash for, far from it, but I do purposefully have a large number of games that I've requested keys for since I know stream (much) on Twitch and the gameplay videos on YouTube and Twitter aren't blowing through the roof with views, so I'm kind of taking what's offered to me. Throwing peas to the wall and seeing what sticks and all. Plus some games have deadlines of 14 days to accept and produce content while other games (BAISU and Seeds of Life had deadlines of 54 days) so that kind of requires a semi-quick turnaround. Plus, being a parent and all means that finding time to not only play a game, but also record footage and, god forbid, write/edit/record/edit dialogue for said video can eat up a lot of time that I don't already have between being at work (although I am writing this on my lunch break, which explains why my reading habits have plummeted) and when the Squire goes to bed, there's maybe 45-90 minutes. I need coffee.
Conklederp and I had planned on starting season two of The House of the Dragon, but we've been unable to get the new updated password to HBO from the in-laws, so right now we're just watching Star Wars: The Acolyte, which I talked a bit about a few weeks ago. The article originally was going to be a First Impressions-style take, but that quickly devolved into a semi-rant-fest towards all of the hate that the show is getting from all corners of the incel-Internet. Yes, you're allowed to criticize the show. Star Wars is easily criticizable because it has never been perfect. If you're so offended by space lesbian witches, then there's socially isolating religion/cult for you somewhere...see, there I go again. The point is, Star Wars has always been political. It has always been anti-fascist. It has always been about smaller people outnumbered by oppressive forces and overwhelming odds. Conklederp and I are enjoying The Acolyte. I also want to add that I think that Lee Jung-jae's Master Sol, so far, is my favorite live-action elder Jedi since Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jinn; if we ever get a live-action Plo Koon in more than a cameo, that might change.
I'm sure that there's stuff that I'm missing or just not talking about. Like the Steam Summer Sale going on. Like Nintendo's last Direct and the reveal of actual gameplay from Metroid Prime 4. Or even the announcement of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom being the first Princess Zelda-fronted LoZ game and then the following incel-theories on how the trailer is a misdirection and how it's really going to have Link as the main character instead of Zelda because his sword is different on the cover than it is in the trailer.
Finally, a heads up that we might be posting a little less frequently for the next couple of weeks, and we might even miss a MIDI Week Single or two for the first time since June 2020. I'll have access to limited internet so I'm trying to get as much stuff queued up beforehand, but that's contingent on me actually getting up to eight more articles ready to go before the 6th. It's possible. It's not overly likely, but it's still theoretically possible. Just like it's theoretically possible that I can get eight hours of unbroken sleep between 11pm and 7am.
