Game EXP: Last Labyrinth (MQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Last Labyrinth 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.] 

Last Labyrinth

Systems: PlayStation VR, Meta Quest 2/3, Steam VR, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: November 13, 2019

Publisher: AMATA K.K.

Developer: AMATA K.K.

Time Spent: 6 Hours 31 Minutes

Playthrough Playlist on YouTube

From what I was reading on the Meta reviews about Last Labyrinth, I was a little wary about how well the game would function on the aged Oculus Quest 2 (I deadname here because I bought the system when it was still the Oculus Quest 2, before the Meta rebranding of 2022.  First, a bit of context.  In Last Labyrinth, you play as a person strapped to a wheelchair, and your primary method of control is by pointing your cursor/head at an object, and either nodding or shaking your head when your companion asks if you want something done to/with the object.  Most of the negative reviews talked about your companion not recognizing your head movements, and even though the game has been out for six years at this point, I was afraid that something in the Quest 2 wouldn't recognize the less HD head movements.  With the exception of one room (I'll get into that later), I never experienced any problems with the companion being able to recognize my head movements.  It could also have been that, having read those reviews, I was very deliberate and over-exaggerated my own nods more than I would have done in real life.  It's a video game after all, and nothing was time sensitive, so why bother trying to nod quickly?

The premise for Last Labyrinth was pretty unclear from the start, but still very intriguing.  You play as a person strapped/chained to a wheelchair with your hands also chained together.  With you is a young girl of indeterminate age who only speaks, I presume (and I apologize if I'm wrong), a fictional language based somewhat on Japanese.  The mechanic, since you cannot talk (because of hardware limitations) and you cannot understand your companion, is to point at the objects you want her to interact with, and to either nod or shake your head when she walks over and points at an object.  You hold a device that lets you point a laser beam at objects, a lever, for instance, and when your companion walks over to the lever, she'll stop and point.  That's when you either nod if you want her to pull on the lever, or shake your head if you accidentally told her to interact with the wrong object.

The performance on the Quest 2 was fine.  The game itself is six years old at this point and the Quest 2 is five-year-old system so everything is a little antiquated.  There were times when the visible world/screen would shake within the visor, but that never seems to come across in the gameplay videos.  I never experienced any motion sickness and the fact that you play as an immobile person in a wheelchair meant that you could take in the whole room, look around meant that it was easy on the stomach.  The downside though is that you're not able to move around to try to get a better look at the puzzles and the different mechanics in each room.  But that's a limitation that's baked into the game, so I can't really complain.

The game is made up of single rooms that contain elements of a single puzzle.  Once you think you've solved the puzzle, there's a final button/lever to operate, and you then watch to see if you solved the puzzle, or you both die.  Thankfully, after the first time you're forced to watch you and/or your companion die, the game allows you to skip the sequence by pressing the A button, rather than sitting through what is sometimes a lengthy sequence of events that look like they were rough drafts of devices from the SAW series.  From one perspective, it's nice not to have to watch a long sequence when you know you're about to watch a child get their head sliced off by a guillotine or crushed by spinning columns of spikes.  The other is that you don't have to spend 90 seconds watching your companion die, yourself die, and a final atmospheric death sequence of a goblet filling up with blood because you didn't solve the puzzle correctly.  Last Labyrinth may not be a perfect game, but including this type of functionality is when you know that a developer at least somewhat respects your time playing their game.

Depending on what you're looking for out of a VR game, how you personally play VR games, and how quickly you're able to solve the puzzles, the gameplay loop could either be perfectly paced, or could be very short and reptative.  The game is somewhat broken up into two sections.  In the first, which is made up of six puzzles spread out betwee three rooms, the puzzles are relatively easy to complete with only the first train puzzle causing me some grief.  That being said, some of the puzzles do require a bit of trial and error especially on the initial playthrough as you soon realize that you need to often need to wait for lights to turn green before pressing the final button in the room to set off the final mechanism or put into motion the final step that opens the door, or sets off the trap in the room and kills both you and your companion.

In the second half of the game, there are now nine new puzzle rooms and the introduction of Animal Shogi, a simplified version of the Shogi, an early board game akin to Chess although significantly more complicated as the game progresses.  I had never played either Animal Shogi or standard Shogi before so the first time playing took me a while to figure out what the rules were.  With very few exceptions, I lost on purposed because during these final moments of path I was taking through the various puzzle rooms, you were playing against either your companion or the hooded figure who seemed to be the one responsible for your predicament.  If you won a round of Animal Shogi, your companion would either be injected with a syringe of green fluid or a gun would be pointed at them as in a game of Russian Roulette.  Given the implication that if I won more rounds of Animal Shogi, that would mean the likely death of my Compansion, who by all accounts was a young girl.  So rather than be responsible for the death of this child, I sacrificed myself in the hopes that whatever rules the hooded figure was playing by, that they would let my Companion live.

The end of each sequence of puzzle rooms, be it in the first of second half of the game, was a primary source of confusion for me.  There were times when we would solve all of the puzzles and make it out alive.  We would be out on the cliff and some event would happen.  My companion would fling her red ribbons into the wind, or she would throw the pointing device I was holding into the ocean, or she would slip and fall off the cliff.  In the second half, there were times when it would only show my Companion in a field of flowers, seemingly fine with the world, while others would have the hooded figure climb up the side of the ciff and drag my Companion back down the cliff face like some kind of Michael Meyers figure who wouldn't die.  At the end of each of these sequences, the screen would fade and you would "come to" again in the starting room with a new tchotchke around the pull string on the lamp.

Apparently the meaning behind the game was utterly lost on me, even with the two scenes when you woke up in a hospital room with a window view of the ocean and recognizable cliff face.  The frequent respawning at the end of each puzzle sequence was an obvious indicator that the story being told wasn't as straighforward as two people stuck in a series of rooms with escapable puzzles, but I couldn't quite figure out what that story was supposed to be.  Throw in the chalice that fills with blood every time you fail a puzzle (thankfully only the first time) and the Sefirot from the Kabbalah and it almost felt like there was purposefully too much information given to be able to make sense of.  And then I read on the Steam Discussion page someone's explanation behind how they interpreted the game and endings and it truely makes complete sense now; so thank you Earthplayer.  From what I could tell, I did not experience the "true ending" because there were endings I didn't see as there are either four or six possible endings for the Animal Shogi game involving syringes, I think depending on how many times each person wins and looses.

Do I think the ending and meaning was a little obtuse?  Very much so yes, but not to the detriment of my enjoyment of the game.  Had Earthplayer's explanation come out of left field, then I would simply dismiss it, but a lot of what they wrote makes a lot of sense and does connect most of dots that I had questions about.  I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles and at the halfway point when the hooded figure started walking towards me and I knew I couldn't do anything was genuinely terrifying.  

Overall I had a mostly good experience with Last Labyrinth.  My fears based on reviews I'd read about the game not registering head nods was mostly unfounded, although there were times when my nods were not recognized.  There were moments of frustration with puzzle design, although thankfully a walkthrough from Composer LOST was comprehensive to help me through some of the harder to comprehend solutions (looking at you weights puzzle, torch and rope puzzle, escape room puzzle, light projector trio puzzle, and the laser and box puzzle; about 2/3rds of the puzzles from the second half of the game).  And kudos to AMATA K.K. for a fun and novel approach to a VR horror-puzzle game.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

So Beware of a Mask and a Friendly Stranger

P.S.  I also genuinely appreciated a lot of the steps AMATA K.K. took towards not making the game potentially offensive regarding watching a child frequently die in horrible ways.  Never actually seeing your Companion/daughter die (as in seeing her head cut off, or her dangling body from being hung) was a nice consideration, although there are plenty of moments when you see her die either off screen, or in a way that doesn't leave you looking at a mangled and bloody corpse.  Additionally, I appreciated that in the few instances where you're literally shot in the face, that the screen cuts to black before you see and/or hear the gun go off.

MIDI Week Singles: "Garden of the Gods" - Chrono Cross (PSX)

 

"Garden of the Gods" from Chrono Cross & Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition on the PlayStation, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One, & Nintendo Switch (1999 - 2022)
Composer: Yasunori Mitsuda
Album: Chrono Cross Original Soundtrack
Label: Square Enix Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Square, Squaresoft, & Square Enix
Developer: Square

"Garden of the Gods" is the literal translation of the song from the Japanese soundtrack, while the English translation uses "The Sea of Eden," which is where this song plays apart from the opening titles.  I decided to use the translation of the Japanese title because that's how I had titled the MP3 file when I first ripped it from the CD, and I'm not about to change it now.

That being said, I've only ever heard this song during the titles after "Time's Scar" plays because the two times I have played Chrono Cross, I've never actually made it to the late-game area of the Garden of Eden.  The furthest I've gotten in the game was from my last attempt back in 2008, when I was plodding around the islands and grinding levels for Pip and trying to get them to evolve; I don't know where I was specifically regarding the overall story.

So unfortunately, that's my only experience with "Garden of the Gods."  It's an absolutely beautiful song performed by a choir and a harp.  That's it, because that's all it needs.  I love it.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I'll Take Them to the Sea

Parenting and Video Games Part 2: Engagement

 

Good morning.

This article is Part 2 in a two part series about parenting and video games.  Part 1 was published last Monday, August 18th and went into my own personal history growing up with video games and the involvement of various parents and parental figures during the 80's and 90's.  I wrote that to help add some context for today's article wherein I talk about the approach both Conklederp and I take with our five year old, The Squire, not only in regards to video games, but visual entertainment, aka "screens," and I'll also delve a bit into other forms of entertainment (audio, physical media, physical games, etc) as I attempt to create a cohesive article that y'all'll want to read to the end.

A quick disclaimer that I'm reiterating from Monday's article.  What I'm writing here isn't meant to be a How-To article about how to raise your or any child in regards to video games.  All kids are different, and I won't claim to have any expertise about raising kids in general, let alone my own kid.  I don't know if I'll ever be able to say that I'm an expert at being a parent, as I'm constantly growing, taking in everything I learn, especially from The Squire.  So with that in mind, let's get to it.

I genuinely don't know the first time we introduced "screens," primarily phone screens, to The Squire.  We have these expensive bricks of wires, microchips and plastics in our pockets nearly 24 hours a day, not only as a communication device, but also as a way to take pictures and relay them from other people.  He was born in the early months of the COVID-19 Pandemic, when communicating with our families via video call/FaceTime was our primary way of communicating.  Phone calls themselves seemed trivial when you could video call someone and talk to them face-to-face, when it was advised not to mix households or quarantine for 14 days before doing so.  It's perfectly normal for new parents to want to take pictures of their brand new child, and with today's technology, those photos and videos are instantly available, so rather than a baby looking a a large black box with a circular lens, they're essentially looking at a digital mirror.  They've grown up with these devices nearly everywhere.  I mean, I have a picture of The Squire resting against Conklederp literally 20 minutes after he was born.  There was no way I wasn't going to be taking pictures and videos of this child and not be sending them to our respective family members because his grandparents weren't able to physically meet him until two weeks and two months after he was born.  So we took pictures and videos.  A lot.  Which meant he became accustomed to these devices being out pretty frequently.  I have an adorable video of The Squire from June 19th, 2021, where he's looking at the screen of the phone I'm holding, facing us, and as he smiles, he starts emphatically waving at himself, and his smile increases tenfold.  I regret nothing.

The point is, The Squire knows what screens are.  What's also interesting is that because of his time spent with phones and Conklederp's iPad, he habitually thinks that most screens are touchscreens.  My non-touchscreen laptop, he'll frequently touch the screen to try and scroll or select things.  He'll sometimes try and touch our TV screen futilely.  We even bought him a phonics word tile game-thing because of how much he loved to play Words with Friends with Conklederp's parents.  He was less interested in the physical game than the digital one, likely because the physical game didn't have built-in sound effects and because there weren't any reactions to The Squire accidentally tapping on a button to pay money to Zynga in the app; this would often elict a reaction that he thought was hilarious and would then try to recreate it every couple of seconds.

In July 2022, I first introduced The Squire to games on my laptop because our TV and consoles are in the basement, and I didn't want to show him something where he might be inclined to try and walk down a flight of stairs on his own.  Games like the Peggle series, which he's named "Old Horse Game" and "New Horse Game," Plants vs. Zombies ("Zombie game"), and Boomerang F.U. ("Watermelon Game") were some early titles.  Basically, games that required a mouse to play, which is pretty funny because I have a picture from when he was two years old and he's sitting at our kitchen table holding a much-too-large mouse in his right hand (even though he's predominantly left-handed) and trying to click on my homescreen.  Over a year later, he really got into Crumble ("Silly Face Game"), being an early controller game, although it was another game that he wanted me to play.  He didn't so much play Crumble so much as enjoyed watching me play it.  "Watching" being the key verb there because it's hard to determine how much he was able to comprehend about video games, but that's perfectly fine, too, and a definite step up from just plunking him down in front of a screen and leaving him be.

I think I've come to the crux of my article.  In the early days of him sitting on my lap watching me play either Plants vs. Zombies or Icewind Dale, or Tears of the Kingdom, it was a visually stimulating activity for him (to some degree) and engaging for both of us.  Maybe?  I would try to explain to him what it was that I was playing and what I was doing and it was something that we were doing together.  The Squire would also like to watch Conklederp Mario Kart 8 Deluxe in handheld mode on the Switch for slightly the same reasons that he would sit on my lap, although I was significantly less animated than when Conklederp would get hit by the Blue Shell or get knocked off a track.  We were playing video games with The Squire.

I think if Conklederp and I used the Switch or our phones/computers as the only way to keep him occupied and didn't pay attention to anything he was doing on said screens, we would likely have a problem, but that's not how we've decided to raise our kid.

However, I have been guilty of using video games to help me out during certain circumstances.  On Friday morning (August 22nd, 2025), I booted up Super Mario Wonder in the basement on our TV because The Squire wanted to play, but I was upstairs making waffles for breakfast and getting his lunch ready for preschool and my own lunch to take to work.  He did frequently call up to me to see something that he had done, and I did go down to watch him every second waffle to still be somewhat engaged with him.  It's not something that I do all of the time, sometimes you just need to get something done that will take 10 minutes by yourself or 45 minutes with a kid running around underneath, wondering why Cull Obsidian doesn't have his own movie, and can I lightsaber battle with him, and if I can pull up the Lego Murder video (it's more innocent than it sounds), and can he have another popsicle?

Over the last year, since he's really been trying to read everything in existence, which is great, and I will foster that desire forever, he has asked about video games and movies to a lesser extent that are very inappropriate for him.  Games like Layers of Fear, or Conarium, or DOOM (2016), or movies like The Terminator, or The Exorcist, or Suicide Club.  Most of the time, we'll generally tell him that a game or a movie is "too intense" for him and that he could watch/play when he's older.  He's currently stuck on the response, "Oh, when I'm 20 I can watch Terminator," or "When I'm 20 I can play Skyrim"; this fascination with 20 is from a Lego YouTuber who points out that he's 20 years old on a slightly more than irregular basis.

Speaking of YouTube, let's briefly touch on that subject before we sign off.  There's a lot of crap on YouTube and YouTube Kids, but Conklederp and I have somewhat whittled down what the Squire watches on a semi-regular basis.  Everything that he watches has been pre-approved by Conklederp and me, and The Squire will frequently ask to "watch liked videos" rather than let YouTube's algorithm offer what they think is appropriate for a five-year-old, and I'll be damned if they try to suggest Cocomelon or Blippy.  Even stuff that he likes to watch that neither of us are a fan of, in that we don't see it as harmful but it's not something that we would ever watch, we will still watch those videos with him.

Showing him that we have interest in his interests by either actively or passively participating is really what I've been trying to get at these last 3,200+ words.  Lord knows I watched Chitty Bang Bang and nearly wore out our taped-from-TV-VHS copies of Return of the Jedi and Superman 2 as a kid and if The Squire wants to watch the same Lego YouTuber do silly self-imposed challenges for the third time in a row or wants me to play the "Jump! Jump! Jump!" stage in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, then sure, I can oblige him.  He's my kid and I want to show an interest in his interests.  And I know for sure that 10-year-old me would have been beyond psyched knowing that one day I would have a kid that asked him to play Donkey Kong, and not the recently released Donkey Kong Bananza, but the 1981 NES port of the original arcade classic Donkey Kong.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Game EXP: Car Quest (NS)

Car Quest

Systems: Nintendo Switch, Windows,

Release Date: October 25, 2018

Publisher: Ezone PTY LTD

Developer: Ezone PTY LTD

Time Spent: 9 Hours 42 Minutes 23 Seconds

Highlight Playthrough on YouTube

Playing and completing Car Quest took me an embarrassing long amount of time, and I don't just mean the nine hours and 42 minutes.  I first bought and started Car Quest on December 23, 2018, and only just beat it on Monday (August 18th, 2025).  I only played for about 15 minutes and got a feel for the gist of the game, and then apparently stopped to play (checks notes) a whole slough of games I picked up as part of the now-defunct #IndieSelect, created by IndieGamerChick to help promote indie games initially on Xbox Live Aracade, but evolved to be across various platforms. And I have no explanation as to why I didn't return to it.  New Gift Syndrome (formally Christmas Present Syndrome because there's already a CPS that's more important), I guess.

It wasn't until May 28th of this year of our sanctimonious president that I started Car Quest again when I sorted the digital games on the Switch by chronological date purchased and thought, "Yeah, I should play Car Quest.  It's only a 7.5-hour (read 8+ hours for me) game, I could knock that out in a week or two."  Well, three months and 9.7 hours later, I have returned and have mixed feelings about Car Quest.  I mean, I guess if you know what you're doing, you can beat the game in just over three hours.  Or in under 30 minutes if you're playing on a higher-end system and you're just better at those waddle-skips.

Throughout my time playing Car Quest, I found that I could only play for about 30 minutes at a time, and only one of those times did I actually get motion sick (car sick???).  The game runs well on the original Switch, the Switch OLED, and the Switch 2, so I know it wasn't due to any optimization issues.  I think part of it was due to the general gameplay loop of remembering where the last artifact I found unlocked, figuring out where that location was, collecting enough batteries to open the (next) portal, collecting those batteries (because I apparently wasn't great at either collecting or maintaining a supply of batteries)*, and then passing through and exploring the new area.  Some of the areas you go to were manageable and could be completed within that 30-minute gameplay loop, but others, like the ice world, the island world, and the ocean world, were all pretty large and required more time than I felt like I could give in a single sitting.  

This is one of my biggest gripes with Car Quest, and maybe it's really just me, that I couldn't play for an extended period.  I could play The Elder Scrolls Online until the battery died on the Steam Deck, or Tears of the Kingdom for literally hours, but with Car Quest, I just felt I was losing interest a lot faster than other expansive adventure games that were (more or less) about collecting pieces and unlocking new areas.  That's a purely subjective take, however, and doesn't actually reflect the quality of the game overall.  My only other issue was how the game would show you where the relic you just collected unlocked the next area, and trying to determine where specifically the location is, as the camera literally flies through the world, passing through buildings.  Getting your bearings, especially in the early game as you've unlocked larger swaths of the map but are still trying to figure out where everything is, frequently feels a bit taxing mentally.  Perhaps an aerial view could've been accomplished, although that method might've been too complicated.

The rest of the game, I have nothing but good things to say.  The driving felt good and intuitive, although I never felt like I had a great grasp on the drifting mechanic, which is probably why some of the challenges to drive over plates/markers on the ground in a specific time and/or specific order gave me so much grief.  The animation of the King of Blocktaria was wonderfully done to show such a wide variation of expressions and emotions, as well as wonderfully voice-acted to be helpful but also endearingly annoying.  And the click-clack sound of those batteries is audible serotonin boosts, which is probably why in the early game I was collecting each and every one I came across; I also didn't realize that they respawned.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Blind Eyes of Old Light

*There was also a spat of time when The Squire wanted to play Car Quest, and he thought it was hilarious to drive off the edges of the world to watch the car explode into what presumably were the 25 batteries it drained from you in order to respawn.  So there were quite a few times I would turn the game on only to find that I was down to fewer than 10 batteries.  So I had to go collecting again.

And tangentially related, I was always super annoyed when I had to drive over a sequence of plates on the ground in a specific order or in a certain amount of time to unlock a portal, only to find out that I was five batteries shy of being able to enter; usually for portals that required 150-250 batteries.  So the portal would close up, and I'd have to go find enough batteries to pass through the portal, but only after completing the often aggravating unlocking sequence again.

P.S.  I did have to use a YouTube walkthrough (the same one I linked above by SolarPellets) for the endgame when you're driving around collecting the museum artifacts.  I just couldn't remember the location of the specific portals to the ice world and the beach world since it had been a while since I was at those locations.

MIDI Week Singles: "Chrono Town" - Chōsōjū Mecha MG (NDS)

 

"Chrono Town"* from Chōsōjū Mecha MG on the Nintendo DS (2006)
Composer(s): Masafumi Takada & Jun Fukuda
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Sandlot

There're going to be a lot of asterixes in this article so rather than clutter everything up, let's just get it all out of the way here at the beginning.

First, there was no soundtrack to this game, which means all audio found online, including our video, was ripped from the game.  The file name for this particular song is "08 BGM #08 [BGM_IGM_0]".  The title "Chrono Town" originated from a YouTube video by levi mcpolytank San. Since I prefer "Chrono Town" over "BGM #08," we'll use "Chrono Town" instead.  Lastly, I could only find two instances of the credits from Chōsōjū Mecha MG, and none of those were from in-game video or screenshots, but both Masafumi Takada and Jun Fukuda have composed video game music prior to and after 2006. I am going to assume that either one or both of these people wrote this particular song.

Now that that's out of the way, the only context I have for this song is a couple of YouTube videos where it is used during the opening mission.  Piloting a mech to gather what looks to be either a giant block of garbage or possibly the remnants of a former mech, I can't quite tell.  But this has got to be one of the most heroic-sounding opening songs to a mission that lasts only 30 seconds that I've ever heard.

And sometimes we just need some gallant music first thing in the morning while we take out the literal trash.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

Parenting and Video Games Part I: My History

 

This article is not and will not be an attempt at how to tell parents how they should regulate video games with their respective kids.  Nor will it be a guide on telling parents how to decide which games are right for their children or appropriate for their respective age range.  This two part series (today, and the following Monday, August 25th) will comprise of a retrospective on my own upbringing around video games and Part 2 will cover how both Conklederp and I are approaching the same topic with The Squire, who is a bright and young 5 years-old who will be entering public elementary school in a few weeks where he'll be interacting with kids upwards of seven years older than he is on a semi-regular basis and thereby might be drawn into conversations about Roblocks, V-bucks, and why any game your parents decide you're allowed to play is totally cringe.  We'll all be entering a strange new world here, folks!

Let's start back at the beginning.

The first time I recall playing any kind of video game with either of my parents was sometime prior to 1987 before The Kid was born.  I think we were at Dr. Potts' house, and they might have recently gotten their Atari 2600 because I don't know why else the adults would've been playing it in the evening.  All I really remember was asking to play whatever game was being played and my Dad saying something like, "Not now," or "In a bit," or "You have to wait," or something to that effect.  Whatever it was, it made me upset enough that I remember crying in my bed later that night.  Typical 4-6 year-old stuff.  What's funny about this amusing little anecdote now is that my Dad is the most un-video-game person I know.  My Dad's always been of the mind that video games are something that other people do because they're apparently beyond his comprehension.  I recall trying with different games that I liked, like Tecmo Bowl, John Elway's Quarterback, Major League Baseball, and Al Unser Jr.'s Turbo Racing, but why play a video game when you can watch the real thing?  He never said that specifically, but that was the feeling I got.  

All of that being said, he was responsible for our family getting the Nintendo Entertainment System Power Set for Christmas in 1988 because it was the biggest set that either Toys R Us or Price Club had and my Dad is definitely one of those, "Well, I'll just buy the biggest one because that must be the best one" kind of person.  I also remember that he had something to do with us renewing our Nintendo Power subscription in time so that we could get the copy of Dragon Warrior along with the November 1990 issue.  There's also a memory of him calling into Nintendo Power to renegotiate whatever our subscription was after we renewed, but didn't receive issue #26, the one with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves on the cover.  He wasn't an active participant, joining us whenever us kids would play video games, but he also didn't tell us that "video games will rot your brains," or that we were only playing "those dumb video games."  For what it's worth, my Dad's also not a big reader, so we never heard anything like, "Why don't you read a book instead of playing those stupid video games?"

My Mom, on the other hand, actively played some of the games we got over the years.  I've mentioned several times the summer my Mom, Shramp (older sister), and I played Gauntlet, keeping track of our progress through several sheets of passwords, only to get stuck somewhere around the 70s (it might've only been the 50s for all I know, but it definitely felt like the 70s).  She also played a bit of The Legend of Zelda, along with Super Mario Bros.  After we got Tetris, that was where she found her niche.  Us kids would regularly ask her to beat Type B Level 9 Height 5 because we all knew we couldn't do it, and Mom could, sometimes taking a couple of tries if she got a poor selection of blocks at the start.  After Tetris, it was Dr. Mario that I think Shramp got for Christmas, but my Mom was able to beat all of us in vs. mode.  One year, we got her a used copy of Tetris Attack because it had "Tetris" in the title, and that was another game that she would handily destroy us at.  The same thing happened with Tetris vs. Dr. Mario on the SNES.  In the N64 era, she stuck with the SNES and the NES since they were both hooked up to the TV and would remain so until I moved out in 2000, and I took the SNES with me; eventually, the NES went out to the proverbial pasture in the garage.

I have Dr. Potts' Dad to passively thank for some of my early RPG purchases on the NES.  I bought Ultima: Exodus because of how much fun I had creating characters at Dr. Potts' house.  I remember being told by Dr. Potts when we were kids that I could play their copy of Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but I wasn't allowed to save because it could ruin his Dad's save file.  I also remember Dr. Potts telling me that his Dad really liked a game called Final Fantasy, but that the instruction booklet gave away too much information, although I might already have gotten the Final Fantasy Player's Guide from Nintendo Power at that point.  I recall seeing the game somewhere, but nothing specific about it like Ultima: Exodus.  I do have a memory of wanting to buy and play Final Fantasy just to see if the instruction book gave away too much.  I don't have an answer to that 35-year-old thought.

Something important to point out is that the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board) didn't exist for the majority of my childhood.  Formed in 1994 in building and direct response to specifically "violent" video games (the original arcade version of Mortal Kombat and the SEGA CD home console title Night Trap*), during the tail end of the SNES run.  So any NES or SNES games we bought with my parents' money, they had to rely on the word of kids, possibly Dr. Potts' parents, and their own research rather than a simple rating.  But that didn't stop my parents from being informed on at least some level.  When I bought the SNES for my birthday in 1993 (after the price had dropped to $99 and I had that amount saved up), my parents specifically told me that I could not borrow Street Fighter II from my neighbor Chuck with my Dad later saying that him and my Mom talked it over and they decided they didn't like the game because you could play as a man and hit women.  Yeah, I was pretty upset about that, although I did still play the game.  Sometime in 1996, I was able to convince them that I could buy Killer Instinct on the Game Boy because the graphics were severely reduced compared to both the arcade game and the SNES port.

By the time the Nintendo 64 was released in 1996, and I got the system sometime in 1997, every Nintendo game that came out had a rating emblazoned on the box.  I think if Goldeneye 007 had been rated M, they would have said something, but because it was rated T and I was playing the game out in the living room for everyone to see, I never heard anything from them about the amount of violence in the game.  The first M-rated game I played, I think, was Turok: Dinosaur Hunter at Dr. Potts' house, but that's because Delaños' Splatterhouse had already been out before the ESRB existed.  The first M-rated game I bought was Perfect Dark, which was released in 2000. Not that it mattered, but I was moving out a few months later to live with Dr. Potts and some high school friends who were also attending the same college.  In 2001, I would also buy Conker's Bad Fur Day, partly because it was an M-rated game, but also because of the history of the game and how it ended up as an M-rated game made it all the more desirable.

Looking back, what involvement there was from my parents, specifically my Mom, was primarily around the beginning when we got the NES.  I'm sure that they would sometimes ask what game I was playing and likely ask me to turn down the TV so that the noise wouldn't bother them.  With the exception of Street Fighter II and Killer Instinct, I don't recall us butting heads, and that could also have been likely from Nintendo's continued position as an entertainment system that put out family-friendly games.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

The following are tidbits both related to the article above, but also anecdotes that either didn't fit my attempted narrative above, or were simply edited out.

*I had played a little bit of Mortal Kombat in our local arcade, probably sometime around 1993, but usually only when other people weren't lining up to play because I didn't know any of the moves, so I would've regularly gotten my ass handed to me.  The same goes for other fighting games like Primal Rage and Killer Instinct.  I also watched a bit of Night Trap during a sleepover at a friend's house with a couple of other friends, where I also watched people play Sewer Shark.  The only game I played that entire night was one that I can't remember the title of, but was, I think, an FMV car chase game where I kept crashing into a large construction vehicle and eventually gave the controller back.

The first time I ever saw DOOM (1992) was either in 1994 or 1995, after tennis practice.  One of the players on the team took a bunch of us into a side office at the country club where we had our practices, and played the first couple of levels.

Demo Time: Static Dread: The Lighthouse Demo (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Static Dread: The Lighthouse Demo 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.]

Static Dread: The Lighthouse Demo

Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux

Release Date: August 6, 2025

Publisher: Polden Publishing

Developer: solarsuit games

Time Spent: 1 Hour 26 Minutes

Playthrough on YouTube

I've tried a couple of times to write this article for Static Dread: The Lighthouse and it feels very similar to when I wrote about Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace on the Switch several years back.  I get this feeling too whenever I write about anything that pays homage or is derivative of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.  I feel like I need to provide context because I have a hard time seperating what I know of Lovecraft's story and how it is intergrated into the game I've been playing.  And this is where we are with Static Dread.  There are obvious Lovecraftian references, but none that I could see that were so obvious as The Shadow Over Innsmouth, At the Mountains of Madness, or even The Music of Eric Zahn (this concludes the portion where I list off short stories so I sound like I know what I'm talking about).

What Static Dread: The Lighthouse does is combine localized sea-based Lovecraftian horror with game mechanics similar to Papers, Please, the game where you play as a border and immigration inspector with ever increasing responsibilities and regulations to follow with each subsequent day that further complicate your job.  In Static Dread, your job is to opperate a lighthouse during the night and direct boats to their destination through a very rocky bay.  You communicate with boats through a radio that can also pick up local radio stations, local police chatter, and other strange signals akin to Numbers stations.  When you start, you only have to direct boats to their desired destinations, but as the nights progress, you're ordered by your supervisor to direct ships to different locations based on specific circumstatnces such as the type of vessel, if anything "strange" can be verified, or if their desired destination is inaccessible.  Any deviation from your orders results in a fine that's immediately faxed to you so the threat of having docked pay because of a mistake is constantly present.  In this way, it felt very similar to the dread of making mistakes in Papers, Please.

One way that Static Dread is different from Papers, Please is that you're working an overnight shift and like anyone who's ever worked an overnight shift, there are times when sleep wants to creep in and take over.  To counteract drooping eyelids, you can consume food and drink, some of which will also "heal" any mental strain brought on by your job as well.  Food, drink, and other supplies are purchased from a visiting merchant with the money from your salary.  It's a fun and tricky balance to stay awake, or have your pay docked, and to work quickly to let boats into their desired harbor without making any mistakes.  I wonder how much the sanity mechanic plays with your characters perceptions and if the night when the doors were opening and closing by themselves was a result of lowered sanity or if they were simply scripted events.

Another major difference from Papers, Please is that you will often have several visitors to your lighthouse over the course of a night.  Some are functional like the travelling merchant, others add both worldbuilding and flavor to the setting.  Some of your visitors are directly tied to your job as a wicky while others might be related to storylines related to you letting ships into the harbor and directing them to their desitination.  During the demo, I did make the effort to answer the door anytime I heard someone knock, so I do wonder how that affects the overall game and the story.

The last big difference I'll discuss from Papers, Please is the general upkeep of the lighthouse.  There were times when the light went out and the power needed to be flicked on and off to kickstart the power to the lighthouse.  One time, I had to climb up to the light to restart the light at the souce, although that might've been my own fault, flipping switches without knowing what would happen before "clocking in" and starting my nightly shift.  Another time the power generator needed repairing.

The demo for Static Dread: The Lighthouse only lasted three nights and honestly, those were a very stressful three nights.  The game never felt like I was expected to physically fight off anything despite the game being in first-person and I was only somewhat sure that there wasn't going to be a Five Nights at Freddies event where something was going to jump through my window out to the bay and immediately end my play session.  The threat of making a mistake and having it taken out of my pay and not being able to afford supplies or ultimately be fired was the biggest driver of dread.  And I loved it.

The demo was very fun to play, despite and because of the anxiety and dread that the game created.  The save file looks like I might be able to continue if/when I buy the full game, but I think I'd probably like to start over just because.  And I do love a good lighthouse story.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

We'll Do It In The Rain

P.S.  On a side note, when I requested this game through Keymailer, I legitimately thought I was requesting for the full game, not the demo since the demo was readily available through Steam, although it has since been pulled; maybe stay tuned for the next Next Fest?

MIDI Week Singles: "BGM #02" - Ace Combat Advance (GBA)

 

"BGM #02" from Ace Combat Advance on the Game Boy Advance (2005)
Composer: András Kövér
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Namco Hometek Inc.
Developer: Human Soft Inc.

I'd like to say that I love the Ace Combat franchise, except I think I like fewer games in the series than I've actually played.  Ace Combat Advance is one of the early games that I have not played, and by the look of it, I think I like it more in concept than in actual execution.  A top-down aircraft shooter like 1943 but in free-roam does sound pretty cool, but apparently wasn't executed all that well.

What I like about this particular song is that it gives me stealth mission vibes and I can't quite place why.  When I listen to it, there's something about it that makes me think of Pefect Dark running around either the Carington Villa or the snowy mountain airport.  It's just a groovy little tune that I enjoy listening to and for me at least, makes those six minutes fly by even though the melody repeats nearly a dozen times.

That's really it.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

And There Are Many Paths to Tread

A House in the Blind Spot of a Smart Home

[First off, I don't know who this article is for.  Is it a self-own?  Is it an attempt at some kind of humble-bragging by way of self-deprication?  What is someone else going to get out of me describing the house that I live in, and my feelings about smart home appliances reinforced because our house was built in 1917?  Why did I even think that this was a good idea?  But here we are, over 1,200 words later, and I've saddled myself with an article about how I have a form of technology that I know I could live without and have no deep love for, but use on a near-daily basis in a way that has helped Amazon lose upwards of $25,000,000,000 as of 2021; so probably an additional $10-15 billion since then because I typically only ask Alexa what the weather will be over the weekend and what time the sun will set on Sunday August 10th in Lake Arrowhead, CA.]

I don't mind smart home devices.  We have two Amazon Echo Dots, one in the living room and one in our sous-sol, which is where our TV and video game consoles are hooked up, along with three of our bookcases.  We also have three smart plugs connected to lights in the living room, the sous-sol, and the bedroom.  We also have a portable A/C unit and a wall-mounted heater in The Squire's bedroom, both are connected to our Alexa app.  Our house is also 108 years old with no central A/C or heat: central, gas, hydro, or otherwise.  Two of our rooms have electric floor heaters, while three others have those internally mounted electric fan heaters, you know the ones.  This is to say that very little in our house is centrally connected, although I can turn on and off lights and the A/C and heater from the comfort of our bed if I really wanted to.

For our two Echo Dots, we predominantly use the one in the living room, asking the temperature for various locations, what time sunset will be on a particular day, to play a particular song, or to tell The Squire what day of the week it is when he's convinced that it should be the weekend at 6:45 AM on a Wednesday morning; me too little Dude, me too.  The first thing I did after my older sister gave us our first Echo Dot, after the obvious steps to set up the device, was to disable voice purchasing from Amazon.  What I was most afraid of with this smart device was accidentally ordering something while drunk, not that I got drunk often at that point, but I have been known to make impulse purchases online after a couple of beers or an exquisitely tasty edible.  So I really didn't need a 55-gallon drum of lube showing up at our house and a $1,969.69 (heh, nice) payment on my credit card statement.

Maybe it's because I'm a geriatric millennial, or a Xelenial, or a Gen-Xer, but I like some semblance of tactile response when buying something, which is probably not the right word.  I don't necessarily need to feel a pair of earbuds or a cookbook before buying it, but I do like to look at something before I buy it.  I also like to look at the price history to know if I'm getting a good price for something, and not that something last week saw a 25% price increase and yesterday saw a 10% price drop.  Do the black earbuds cost the same as the orange earbuds?  I've never actually used our Echo Dot to make phone calls, partly because I carry my phone with me, but mostly because I use aliases for all of the contacts in my phone, and while not Echo Dot specific, I've never had a great experience using the voice-activated calling in my car.  And how would you pronounce "Mümer and Püper" in a way that Alexa would understand?

That's another issue I have specifically with the voice recognition of Alexa.  Some of the bands I like to listen to don't have English names, or if they do, they're not always understood.  How would you pronounce "Feuerschwanz" in a way that Alexa would understand?  Because saying the band's name the way you would pronounce it with an American accent doesn't work, because Alexa is expecting to hear an English word, and instead, you're speaking German slang.  If you throw in Roman numerals, all bets are off.  If I want to hear the soundtrack to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, specifically the score from the video game and not someone's interpretation of "From Past to Present," I have to say "The Elder Scrolls Vee, Skyrim by Jeremy Soul-lay," even though that's not how you pronounce his last name.  I've never had any luck getting Alexa to play the soundtrack to LIVE A LIVE HD-2D Remaster even before the album was delisted from Amazon, despite having purchased it through Amazon; it's the same issue with Equilibrium's album "Erdentempel."

So last year, when Amazon announced that they were looking into charging for an upgraded Alexa experience with Alexa+, I scoffed at the idea of paying for an upgraded service when their existing service was, more or less, doing alright.  Sure, Alexa doesn't always play the correct song/band/album when I say, "Play the song Leshiy by Arkona," but I would need to actually test the product myself before even considering paying an additional $10/month to communicate with an upgraded learning-language model.  On top of that, though, I also have no interest in any of the upgraded services that come with Alexa+, such as account linking with Uber, Ticketmaster, or OpenTable.  I genuinely have no desire to request an Uber by voice command or order tickets to a show without specifically seeing where all possible seat locations are and the breakdown of all of the fees, hidden and otherwise.

I get that people, myself included, are not using their smart home devices in ways that are designed to make someone else money by way of additional convenience fees, and in doing so, were and are part of Amazon's problem.  I have no problem being inconvenient for Amazon's higher-ups.  If Amazon were to require any kind of fee for use of their voice assistant, I would only be minorly inconvenienced at now having to unplug the string of lights in our living room and not being able to play (occasionally) play music upon command, but then I would also be saving the price of Amazon's music service too.

But this is all based on my own personal biases.  Just because we have a handful of limited smart devices that we limitively use doesn't mean that other people aren't excited by making purchases from Amazon or scheduling an Uber pickup using only voice commands.  I recognize that.  But I thought that it was something worth talking about as we enter the era of paid AI LLMs as in-home assistants, and remember all of the people who are not participating in this branch of the economy for whatever reason.  It's all computer after all.

If you like, you can go back up to the top and reread that opening paragraph, because it also works as a great closing statement.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

There's a Man with Tattered Clothes who's Cursing at the Air

MIDI Week Singles: Mutated Derek Simmons III" - Resident Evil 6 (VSD)

"Mutated Derek Simmons III" from Resident Evil 6 / Biohazard 6 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, & Nintendo Switch (2012 - 2019)

Composer: Akihiko Narita, Akiyuki Morimoto, Kota Suzuki, Azusa Kato, & Laurent Ziliani

Album: Biohazard 6 Original Soundtrack

Label: SULEPUTER

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom

I wasn't initially sure if I was going to post this song for today since I was unable to find it on the official soundtrack, but it does appear in two places during Leon's campaign in Resident Evil 6 (Biohazard 6).  The track (sound file?) is titled "Mutated Derek Simmons III" because it is the third of 900 times that this absolute bastard comes back from being run over by a train, blown up, blown up again, set on fire, probably blown up a few more times, dropped from a flaming building while he himself is on fire, and probably blown up again just for good measure.  This version of the Simmons fight theme crops up while Leon and Helena are scaling a building towards the end of Leon's campaign, while trying to flee from the aforementioned Simmons, who, as the title suggests, is on his third horrific transformation.  Something else that's interesting about this scene in particular is that you're not actually fighting Simmons, but instead climbing a building while Ada fights/runs away from the monster.  

What drew me to this song was that it was also used during the end credits as a closing song after the actual staff roll song, "Back for More," and followed by another song I can't quite place.  I don't know if it was intentional or not, but there are a lot of sections in this song that remind me a lot of "ROAR! Cloverfield Overture" by Michael Giacchino from the 2008 monster movie, Cloverfield.  There's the five-note theme played by the bass instruments that really sound like what the composers for this song were aiming for, and for me, it's hard not to draw a comparison.  All it needed was a choir to chime in throughout, but that might've been too on the nose.  I do like how the main theme of the game (or is it just Leon's campaign?) is sprinkled throughout in a dark heroic manner.  It helps add a sense of familiarity that carries through the entire campaign and this fight in particular, as you fight your way through the city in ever more ridiculous situations.

Considering this was the first campaign of four that I've played from Resident Evil 6, this song was very fitting for what felt like a two-hour-long sequence involving an ever-larger mutating monster that keeps hunting you down despite losing every previous encounter.  Great monster track.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Don't Think There is Much Hope For Me