Monthly Update: August, 2025

 

I don't even know where to start with today's Monthly Update.  I'm coming off the heels of writing my article for Monday, August 4th, and getting into a jovial video game headspace is a little awkward, which might make more sense once y'all read that article.  There's so much shit going on, not just in the US, with the checklist execution of Trump's transition plan, aka Project 2025, along with the lesser-known Project Esther and the hijacking of real-world anti-semitism by conservative right-wing white Christian nationalist organizations (aka, the current Presidential Administration and the architects, The Heritage Foundation), and their desire to database healthcare records of US Citizens in the name of obesity and diabetes is utterly rediculous, that this would just be a run on sentence of humanitarian atrocities and ongoing war crimes.

And no one wants to read that here at 6:30 on a Friday morning.  That's what NPR, Reuters, and the Associated Press are for. 

As I write this, I'm currently sitting at a table in Victoria, BC. Like any good geriatric millennial, I brought along the Switch OLED and the Steam Deck, and obviously my computer, as there's no way I'm typing this out using the virtual keyboard on the Steam Deck. However, I do have a Bluetooth keyboard for the Steam Deck, but that's at home.  I bring this up because I sucessfully signed up for the current Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program, and while I was able to download it onto the Switch OLED, I wasn't able to access it due to the whole Switch virtual game card semi-minor-debacle.  The playtest runs from July 28th through August 10th, so I'll at least be able to play (and not report because of NDA requirements), but I'll probably have some general things to say in September's Monthly Update, just nothing that could get me perma-banned from using Nintendo's online services.

So instead of participating in the playtest, I've jumped back into Triangle Strategy, and I've likely chosen (again) the more difficult path because I didn't feel the persecution, imprisonment, and enslavement of a group of people just because they have rose colored hair by an authoritarian religious government overseen by an invisible oligarch was not the route I wanted to take.  I'd rather be the last ruler of a region in the long term than actively participate in a form of ethnic cleansing in the short term.  I don't know, call me naive, I guess.

There have actually been several announcements in the last couple of days, including those from the Nintendo Partners' Direct yesterday (July 31st).  There was the Final Fantasy Tactics announcement and subsequent semi-fallout a few weeks ago.  In short, content from the PSP The War of the Lions version is not all there.  There was the announcement of SOMA coming out on the Switch (also compatible with Switch 2).  There was the announcement of Octopath Traveler 0 and then the subsequent fallout about its Switch 2 release on a game card only, and the Switch 1 edition not having additional content that is on the Switch 2.  I finally watched something regarding Bloober Team's new game, Chronos: The New Dawn, during the direct, which surprised me that it's also being released at the same time on the Switch 2.  It looks like some kind of combination between >observer_ and what I imagine their work on the Silent Hill 2 remake was like; still need to play that game too.  I'm also super-hyped for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment because of how much fun I had with Age of Calamity and how much world-building that game did for me with the Breath of the Wild setting/timeline.  Interestingly, it's advertised as being "canonical events," a feature that was denied to Age of Calamity.  As with Chronos, I'll probably wait to see some kind of comparison between how Star Wars Outlaws runs on the Switch 2 compared to the three-year-old Steam Deck.  Lastly is the game that's quite a mouthful, The Adventures of Eliot: The Mellinium Tales.  And no, I'm not at all sick of Square Enix's HD-2D.

On the Steam Deck, I've been playing the usual, The Elder Scrolls Online.  But I've also been playing more frequently, Resident Evil 6.  I'm not sure if I'll write a First Impressions article, as the game consists of four separate stories, and I may end up writing separate Game EXP articles, followed by an all-encompassing one once I've finished everything.  I also finished Final Fantasy - Pixel Remaster, but just the first/original Final Fantasy.  I'd intended to use it as a cool-down game after Resident Evil 6, but I just got hooked and sank 23.5 hours into the game that introduced me to the JRPGs and Nobuo Uematsu.  So I started up Final Fantasy II - Pixel Remaster with the same intent.  It's been about 21 years since I last played Final Fantasy II on the Game Boy Advance, so I'm eager to replay this title (and really looking forward to Final Fantasy III, since I've only played the 3D DS remake from 2006).

I think that's it for now.  So I'll see you out there, or likely not.  Unless you're between my commutes to/from home and work.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

In the Joyous Days of Childhood

Monthly Update: July 2025

 

I'm sure that I'll probably write more about the Switch 2 as a system in the coming weeks, although maybe I'll relegate it to Monthly Updates as I don't see myself having much of any kind of technical information regarding screen ghosting, 4K visuals, or how the Switch 2 version of Cyberpunk 2077 compares to a liquid cooled RTX 5090 with 256 GB DDR5 RAM.  Right now, I'm only playing Mario Kart World as a Switch 2 exclusive and playing a couple of other digital releases (Car Quest) that I'm not playing on the Switch OLED (see Monday).

I did finish a couple of games and one DLC last month, specifically Fallout 4, Super Mario Wonder, and the Morrowind DLC for The Elder Scrolls Online.  I already wrote about Fallout 4 last week, and I'm not sure if I'll write about the other two in a typical Game EXP article.  And it's not from not enjoying either, but Super Mario Wonder was strange in that I played it a lot with The Squire, both in single player and couch co-op.  Sometimes he'll want me to play as Blue Yoshi in single player if he's having a hard time, because that's his favorite color and because Yoshi is nearly invulnerable.  At other times, when we play co-op, he'll want to play in a silly way that isn't really conducive to making progress, and he always wants to choose which level to play, which again doesn't always lead to progress.  For the Morrowind DLC, I spent probably around 150 hours in Vvardenfell, and while I loved returning to that inner island during the 2nd Era, I don't really know what I would write about.

Back on the Switch OLED, I'm jumping back into Triangle Strategy since I'm somewhat self-relegated to playing only physical game cartridges and Virtual Console titles (see Monday).  I was surprised and relieved that I hadn't left off where I thought I had, in a difficult story battle, but instead in the middle of a level-grinding battle.  I think when I finish this game, I'll look up a flow chart to see how the different paths and choices affect the game, because right now, our group is doing about as poorly story-wise as you could expect.  Our duchy has been framed and blackmailed, we've lost multiple attempts to sway a court in our favor, and our region has essentially been taken over by a hypocritical and morally corrupt official from an overly religious kingdom.  I'm really hoping there'll be some positive resolution, and I didn't just accidentally make ALL BAD CHOICES.

With the recent trailer release of Resident Evil: Requiem, I decided to jump back into my chronological Resident Evil journey and started the 3rd-person action shooter with some horror elements, Resident Evil 6, on the Steam Deck.  It doesn't quite replace Fallout 4 as an easy game to jump into and out of, as I found out that reaching checkpoints is not the same as saving, and saving is only done by the game at specific times.  As a winddown game, I'm also playing Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, as in the first Final Fantasy and the only two negative things I have to say about this game (and collection) at the moment are that I don't like that your character can move diagonally, that just feels weird.  And two, that the "soundtrack" that comes with the pixel remastered collection seems to only be three songs from the arranged soundtrack; mostly disappointed by this but I guess I shouldn't be surprised otherwise the collection would've been closer to $150.

So that's June going into July.

Oh, and I've got lots of words and thoughts about Trump's billionaire tax break and 12,000,000 less people on Medicaid bill, but I forgot my charger at home (I'm not currently at home) and I don't have to time to research, write, edit and publish a coherent rant about how dumb this bullshit is before my battery dies, so I'll just leave it at that, and you're welcome to further extrapolate at your leisure.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Да-ли смерть встречать уж пора

Demo Time: No, I'm Not A Human (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for No, I'm Not A Human 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.]

No, I'm Not A Human Demo
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: June 8, 2025
Publisher: CRITICAL REFLEX
Developer: Trioskaz
Time Spent: 2 Hours 12 Minutes
Walkthrough Video on YouTube

The best way I can describe the demo for No, I'm Not A Human is that it's a mashup between The Twilight Zone episode "The Midnight Sun" and Papers, Please.  Kind of.  The plot is moderately simple.  You play as a person during a time when daytime temperatures reach unsafe levels for people to be outside.  There are characters called Visitors that the player is warned about as being dangerous, and who look like regular humans.  The player is told that Visitors will often ask if you're home alone, and you should always say that you aren't, otherwise bad things might? happen, and you validate your answer by allowing people whom you suspect to be real humans inside after they knock on your front door, and after you have a conversation with them.  At the start, you are given only one criterion for knowing that someone might be a Visitor, and that is that they have impeccable teeth, but as the demo progresses, more information comes out in the form of news broadcasts about the state of the world and on how to identify Visitors.

The game progresses through two cycles, day and night.  During the night, you answer your door when people knock, which feels like it happens too soon after you turn someone away or allow them inside.  As in literally seconds after you finish one conversation with someone, whether you let them inside or not, and someone else knocks on your door, like there's a literal line right outside your line of vision from your peephole.  This is likely the only negative aspect to the game that I can think of, and that was only since I started writing this article.  You're also able to look out your windows at your neighbors across the field, at the field behind your house, and at a path or street next to your house.

During the day, you're not able to look out of the windows or your front door because the sun is out, and in this world, it has reached dangerous temperatures due to what's described in-game as an explosion on the sun, reaching temperatures possibly 130°F / 54 °C or higher.  If you have people you've invited into your house the previous night, you can talk with them about their own personal stories, and this is where part of the paranoia comes in.  Using the growing information you receive from the news, you can interrogate people, using a finite amount of energy which is used up with each interrogation, and if you believe them to be a Visitor, you're able to pull a shotgun on them and decide whether or not to kill them.

This is where No, I Am Not A Human really shines, because for each accusation you lay against someone staying in your house, they will often have an explanation or an excuse as to why their teeth might be straight and white, or why their eyes are red, or why there's dirt under their nails.  The game does a great job of not specifically telling the player if a Visitor needs to have all of the known signs or if one sign is enough to kill someone because you believe them to be a Visitor.  There does seem to be a psychological effect when you kill someone, which I noticed in my first playthrough; in my second playthrough, I didn't kill anyone.  The long-term effect of killing people is unclear, but I am excited to find out in the full release of the game.

The demo for No, I'm Not A Human lasts only five full night/day cycles and from what I can tell, the people showing up at your door are all the same, although I filled out a survey from the developer that implied that either the order of the people showing up or the people themselves is supposed to be random or will be random at the time of the full release.  You also have a limited amount of space in your house and a limited amount of space in specific rooms, as it seems that specific characters will only stay in specific rooms; eg, the woman whose husband died will only stay in the bathroom.  I am very eager to see how the full game plays out and what the end game is, hopefully not being just a "How long can you stay alive?" mechanic, but I really don't get that impression from the demo.  And this is a really fun demo, it you already like games dealing with apocalyptic scenarios and paranoia about other people staying in your house.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And We Don't Have The Time

Monthly Update: June 2025

 

Holy damn it's June already.  How did that happen?  Where did the time go?  When did The Squire level up again!?  

I almost feel like I could copy/paste May for June and it would probably work.

I'm still playing through Fallout 4, although I've started fast traveling between locations, mainly because I maxed out the Strong Back perk that now allows you to fast travel when overencumbered, and I'm overencumbered around 80% of the time.  I've also started the Underground Railroad quest line, which I think I was supposed to have started before doing most of what I've already done because there's a lot of character dialogue about your character, the Sole Survivor, not having met a synth before and talking about Dr. Amari in Good Neighbor as if I hadn't already spliced into Nick Valentine's brain.  There was one bit of dialogue from P.A.M. that hinted that I had done a lot more than previously thought.  I might be nearing the end of the main campaign, too, as I'm delaying "transporting" into The Institute, which feels like one of those points of no return I've been hearing so much about.

I'm also definitely coming to the end of the Morrowind DLC in The Elder Scrolls Online because stuff is now falling from the sky, but only around Vivec city, so it's probably nothing to worry about.  Also, RIP Chodala, since we all know the real Nerevarine is Valgrin of Markarth.

There were a couple of games I acquired from Keymailer, Silverpine Creek and Goblin Slayer -Another Adventurer- Nightmare Feast, and I think something I gleened is that is a helluva lot easier to get long-form video footage from the Steam Deck even with all of the video exporting and uploading and downloading compared to the 30 second clips from the Switch.  I guess I just have used OBS and the Steam Deck dock to record long-form Switch footage after running into so many issues with OBS.

Speaking of the Switch, still no Switch 2 pre-order yet.  I'm still kinda hoping that  I'll get a delayed email from Nintendo locking in that sweet-sweet-pre-Trump-Tariff cost of $499 because I'm not below paying $20 fewer dollars for a digital-only copy of Mario Kart World; and I don't need to have the Switch 2 on launch day.  Maybe just a couple of months after would be nice; kinda like when we picked up the Switch around July 2017.

I've also decided to go through my backlog of Switch games, and I'm handling this the easiest way I know how.  I'll sort the games by date of acquisition, and starting from the oldest, I'll look through the games and determine if it's something I can actually play and beat.  So now I'm jumping back into Car Quest that I picked up oh so many years ago.  So far, it's a low-stress puzzle game with an emphasis on exploration in a low-poly environment where you don't actually have to pick up everything on the screen, but you do have to pick up enough to unlock the next area.  Although I would still like to finish Triangle Strategy and that other queue I said I would work on.

I think right now we're TV show-less after finishing the second season of Andor.  My general, short-form thoughts are that knowing that each 3-episode arc this season was originally planned to be its own season (but then scrapped once Tony Gilroy realized how long it would take and how much specifically Diego Luna would age in an additional 8-10 years), that I wish that there was a little more meat in these story-condensed episodes.  Or at least, some storylines felt like they were condensed to get the important bits into each arc.  I also wasn't as excited about the acquisition of K-2SO, and not because I knew anything about the one-off comic, but because I felt like we were never shown Cassian to be interested in Imperial droids or his specific reasoning for lugging this one on his getaway ship when haste seemed more of a priority.  Even a quick, "What are you doing!?" "Its memory banks could have some useful intel!"  Simple as that, and I personally would've felt a little better.  But yeah, in the censored words of Marva from the first season, "Fuck the Empire!"

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Monthly Update: May, 2025

 

What have I been doing these last 30 days?  Huh.  Stuff, I guess.

I've been plodding through Fallout 4 and at times wonder how and why I don' just b-line through the main quest and finish the damn thing so I can move onto another 170+ hour game that isn't The Elder Scrolls Online.  Then I finish a quest adjacent to the main storyline, having to do with the Minutemen, and I get an achievement.  Sure, there's the little serotonin boost when that bleep-bloop sound effect pops up and that's nice and all, but it really sinks in after I've turned the game off and look at the Steam Global Achievements page and see that only 29.8% of players of Fallout 4 have gotten the "Old Guns" achievement by creating artillery placements at Fort Independence.  Or that only 14.8% of Steam players have completed the "Far From Home" questline that is the Far Harbor DLC.  Don't get me wrong, it's not the rarity of the achievement that is driving me to play more, but more having to do with that, based on this one number for this one quest, 70.2% of the 15,200,000 who have purchased and started Fallout 4 have ever completed this far into the Minutemen quests; maybe they are that universally hated?  To me, that's wild.  Sure, some of it could be chalked up to people playing offline and the achievement not being recorded/counted, or some other function of the game not working, and that information not being recorded/collected by Steam.  But yeah, wild.

I feel like I'm nearing the end of the main quest in the Morrowind DLC in The Elder Scrolls Online, and I wouldn't be surprised if I take a little break after that happens.  Being able to explore Vvardenfell in a higher resolution than the original 22-year-old classic was one of the primary drivers behind starting that DLC in the first place.  Maybe I'll also start the Elseweyr DLC, too, since that's a region that's never been explored in the mainline series outside of Arena.  The same could be said for the Black Marsh DLC and the Aldmeri Dominion quest line, and it delves into both the Summerset Isles (not counting the Summerset DLC) and Valenwood.  Shit y'all, I think I'm stuck doing another 300+ hours in this game.

As of this writing, no, I didn't snag a Switch 2 pre-order.  I did briefly try when Best Buy went live on the 24th, but I seemed to have been sitting in a queue long enough that my phone timed out, and I got kicked back to the store page.  I wasn't bummed since I really couldn't afford it at the time.  I think if I do order one within the year, it'll likely be once Nintendo sends out their order form for people who signed up to register for pre-orders (although now it looks like they'll just be regular orders at this point), but I guess we'll find out by May 8th when order forms may or may not go out.  I mean, I didn't buy the Switch until it had already been out for four months, so it's not like I've ever felt like I needed to buy a console at launch.  I think it's more likely that I buy a new laptop since this one I'm using I bought back in 2020, although the only major thing wrong with it is that the sound driver is crap; always has been too.

I know I said last month that I wasn't really excited about the release schedule for this second season of Andor, but I would like to say that I've changed my mind on the three episodes dropped every Tuesday for four weeks.  Granted, Conklederp and I aren't binge watching all three episodes at once, instead, we're spacing them out over three nights.  So by the time this article goes to the proverbial printers, we'll have finished episode five (early night on Wednesday so we only watched the fifth episode on Thursday night).  I do really like that each three-episode arc encapsulates a series of events that happen during a year, or at least that's how it's currently established.

Oh, and I just picked up the Watch Along edition of Godzilla Minus One because it contains both the -0 (or minus color) edition and a new commentary specific to the minus color edition.  I figure that if I'm ever going to buy a Godzilla movie, it's going to be the one that nearly brought me to tears while I was donating platelets last year; not because it's not masculine to cry during a Godzilla movie, but because it would've been inconvenient to have one of the phelbologists constantly wiping away my tears while hooked up to the platelet machine.

Let's call it there for now.  I'm sure I could think of more things that have and will happen, but there's plenty of time to mill that over for the next 31 days.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Riding the Grid, Riding the Word

Monthly Update: April, 2025

 

Well, a lot happened there at the end of March.  There was the Nintendo Direct on March 27th, then there was the Switch 2 Direct on Wednesday, April 2nd (which, as of this specific sentence, hasn't happened yet).  In the March 27th Direct, I started making a list of the games that interested me and by the end, I realized how old I am; I mean, I know how old I am, but looking at my list of what interested me really hit home that I'm of a different generation than what it felt like the main focus of Nintendo's marketing arm.  The Dragon Quest I & II 2D-HD Remake, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered, and then the news about the Nintendo Today news app and the Virtual Game Cards (although there're still plenty of questions I have about that beyond being able to lend digital copies of games to people in your family network.  So two remakes, and a sequel to a 40-year-old franchise (The whole of the Metroid franchise, not just the 23-year-old Metroid Prime franchise).

And there was a lot to cover in that hour-long presentation, but then on Thursday there was also a four hour-long Nintendo Treehouse: Live presentation where several of the games announced in the Switch 2 Direct were played for 15-20 minutes a piece; probably similar to the demos that a lot of publications played immediately after the initial presentation.  I enjoyed both presentations for what they were, although I had hoped there would be more first-party Switch 2 exclusives to be excited about.  But huge shoutout to Nintendo for featuring one of their announcement titles,  Drag x Drive which looked like Murderball meets basketball, but just the fact that it's a video game featuring all players in wheelchairs; don't tell the Trump administration or they're likely to sue Nintendo of America for not doing away with any semblance of DEI initiatives.  But we'll cover the Switch 2 presentation in greater detail on Monday.

You know, we actually covered a lot of games last month, with about half I wasn't able to finish for various reasons specific to the specific game, but there were some good games in there too.  S4U: CityPunk 2011: and Love Punch, DeathOmen, and Ashen Arrows were the highlights although with some caveats.

Conklederp and I are finally watching Skeleton Crew (although I had already watched the first four episodes while donating platelets a few months back)  and have been really enjoying this Star Wars take on 80's kid-centered adventure Goonies-style story telling and we're alos looking forward to the second season of Andor; although I'm still not on board with the release schedule of three episodes released every Tuesday, with all 12 episodes being released by May 13th.  I'm sure there's a reason behind Disney's decision, but I just don't like it.  I'm also in the camp of not liking an entire season released on Netflix on day 1.  Again, it's likely because I'm old and grew up in the era of episodic TV where there was one episode released once a week for 22 weeks, and if you missed an episode, you might be able to catch it whenever your local affiliate decided to show reruns.  It's a thing, ask your local Xennial. However, I feel like my older sister (she's 2.5 years older) and I are of different generations, whereas I feel closer to the Millennial generation that Dr. Potts and The Kid (she's 7 years younger than I) are a part of.

Let's cap it there, and we'll see y'all on Monday.  I woke up and my back hurts after all.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Monthly Update: March, 2025

 

And somehow, we're already in March.  Or just 17% of the way through the year, or if we really want to get snarky, only 4.4% of the way until our current scenario either is upgraded to the non-shitty version, or we sink deeper into this experiment in white christian nationalism and fascist oligarchy we currently call the United States; I don't expect you to watch all 65 minutes right now, but I highly recommend it if you havne't already watched it.  And major kudos to Volodomyr Zelinsky for rebuking Russian State Media talking points that came out of the mouths of Trump and Vance.

And then there's the bullshit in the SAVE Act reintroduced as a proposed bill by Chip Joy which would bar people from voting and registering to vote if the name on their birth certificate differs from that of their "legal name" (e.g. the name on their driver's license, hunting licenses, passport, school ID, etc).  And while the wording in the current "wording" of the SAVE act allows people that this would affect to "provide additional documentation," there was no specific definition as to what that documentation would be.  This means if this travesty passes, it could be left up to the states/counties, which means a return to Jim Crow-era voting laws all over again.  One state/county could require that a woman who changed her name after getting married to only supply her current government-issued ID and a copy of her marriage certificate, while another state/county could require the following:

• Copy of Government Issued ID:
• Only passports, state driver's licenses, and hunting permits accepted.
• College IDs, High School IDs, not accepted.
• Copy of long-form birth certificate.
• Copy of marriage certificate.
• Signed affidavit from an official notary that all of the documents are legal and present at the time of signing.
• All of the above are required every time a ballot is requested.
• Likely forbidden from using mail in, or absentee ballots.

Yes, I'm getting into nothing but speculation here. The only people that's not good for are the same ass-hats who want to try and enact these kinds of laws, decrying that it's all part of a nationwide mandate when Trump was elected by an overwhelming majority; Trump received 49.8% of the popular vote, which if we're going to be pedantic, is not the definition of "majority" in the context of the voting population of the United States. Still, yes, Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, so I don't think I'm trying to engage in election denialsim.

And Musk is trash, too, while we're at it, mainly because he's a nazi sympathizer, but less damaging and still related to his character is his acquisition of attempted gaming cred.

Now that we've successfully transitioned to gaming culture, we can now continue with our regularly scheduled program.

Unintentionally, despite the last 8 months or so, there've been a lot of Game EXP articles from games I've received.  I had thought this well was drying up, but then there was an uptick on the YouTube side of things, and that just makes me look more attractive to indie publishers.  Maybe.  There'll likely be a continued slough of Game EXP articles for the next coming weeks, at least through the middle of March and then I'm going to let things slow down a bit so I can play more of the games that I've actually paid money for: Fallout 4, Triangle Strategy, The Elder Scrolls Online, Wolfenstein II: The New Collosus, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Dragon's Dogma, and that list of crowdfunded games I said I would get to back in my January 17th article.  And all of the games in my Ultimate Spreadsheet Database.

Movie-wise, nothing.  New TV show-wise, nothing.  I did start Hand of Fire, the final book in the Shandril's Saga trilogy by Ed Greenwood, which continues my chronological journey through the novels in the Forgotten Realms setting; which if you're just joining us, I began because the D&D module, Rime of the Frost Maiden said that it used several older D&D novels and source books as inspiration and reference materials for this and I hadn't read those yet, so now I'm in the middle of 1357DR, although several hard-to-find books happen earlier that I've yet to read.  And I'm still reading House of Leaves, and I couldn't tell you how many pages I've read in that book because of all of the jumping around in the text.

Lastly, all this week we'll be releasing a series of playthrough videos for an interesting visual novel and immersive typing sim, S4U: CityPunk 2011 and Love Punch, along with playlists for The Voidness, Goldenheart, Death Omen, and Ashen Arrows, so stay tuned for those as we progress/survive through this month of March.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Mistä voimme täällä elää?

 

Game EXP: Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! Part 2 (PC/VSD)

  [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! 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.] 

Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party!

Systems: Windows, Linux

Release Date: February 5, 2025

Publisher: Svinta

Developer: Svinta

Time Spent: 4.4 Hours*

Today we'll look at the eight remaining games I was able to play in Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! on the Steam Deck and my explanation for why I was unable to continue with game number 18.  Part 1 of our series published on Monday looks at the first nine games and the general approach to the game, so go back and read that if you haven't already because we're going to jump right into game number nine.

And our playlist up on YouTube is located here.

Smartly Sort

The basics behind this game are pretty simple. Pick up and place the running blobs in the box based solely on their color. Each color is associated with a different shape, too, but they're hard enough to see with the filter on, and it's really just easier to focus on their color instead. What's hard about this game is using the touchpad on the Steam Deck quickly and efficiently.  You also cannot let any of the running blobs make it across the screen as that counts against you the same way that sorting the runners incorrectly does.  What I found worked best for me was to use the Steam Deck's touchscreen functionality as I found it worked better and allowed me to sort at a faster rate.  But not fast enough to catch the orange runner or to figure out where you're supposed to put this one.

Face Fixing Frenzy

Hoo boy.  I thought for a while that this game was going to be the end of the road for me.  In the first section, you're expected to button-mash the keyboard to wake up Sally, and for the first half, I was only using the L/R trigger buttons, but then once I figured out that I could also use the directional pad and buttons along with the triggers, you'll notice this section passing a lot faster; except that times that it wasn't because this was apparently pretty loud and was waking Conklederp up.  The second section of this game caused me some serious grief.  I just couldn't get the mouse to move as quickly and as accurately as I needed it to pop every pimple (which I also found to be a pretty disgusting portion of this mini-game).  Then the apparent accuracy needed to click and drag specific objects to their corresponding other half before applying them to Sally's face was equally frustrating.  Like Smartly Sort, I ended up reverting to using my finger to play this mini-game, but even then, it was only after coming back to the game and turning off the filter (believing that part of my issue might have been the warping of the image from the filter, or just me being a shitty player) and I was finally able to make it through.

Crazy Clown Cafe

The concept of this game was rather simple: play a modified Shell Game but with cakes, then deliver individual cakes to a customer, but avoid the banana peel on the ground.  What made this game maddening were the controls which only used the mouse.  Getting the clown to move requires you to slide the mouse, or in the Steam Deck's case, your thumb across the trackpad, then click the R trigger to jump, but you have to maintain the movement of the mouse/thumb through the jump as the Clown does not maintain forward momentum.  Now, I don't know how the real estate of the trackpad on the Steam Deck relates to an actual standard size mouse pad, but it genuinely didn't feel like there was enough room.  On top of that, the Clown starts moving the split second you're on that screen.  The first half-dozen times I started, I thought that the Clown was falling over as part of a "this is what happens," but no, it was because the "start" button is on the right side of the screen, so when you click the button the start the game if the cursor (which sadly is not visible in the video) is still hovering over the start button, then the Clown will start running right into the banana.  This also made selecting the cake when it landed on the far side of the table in the Shell Game portion, all the more anxiety-driven because you almost had to select the cake while you're moving the cursor back over to the left side of the screen.  And even after feeling like I had a good grasp on the controls, moving always put me on edge.

Pill Puzzle

I don't want to say that I was made for this mini-game, but I know that for at least the time I was ranked #1 (I'll need to jump back in and double-check), I can say that my Mom could be proud of me; The Kid would probably comment that I should've gotten to at least 300.  So Pill Puzzle is essentially a mix of Dr. Mario, Tetris, and any generic match-three game on the market.  The game wasn't difficult perse, but you could only rotate the blocks in one direction since you could only use one button, then once the blocks started speeding up, that's when it became difficult to get them where I wanted them to be.  Obviously or I would've gotten 300+ points.

Downer Diver

After the fun and relative easiness of Pill Puzzle, I was worried about an underwater stage, but Downer Diver was a lot more relaxing than I had feared.  While the game did start you out with 5 HP, I was afraid that you would have to do the run flawlessly without getting hit, which would send you back up to the surface to attempt your descent all over again.  I also feared that upon reaching the treasure chest at the bottom, you would then have to go back through the stage all the way to the top.  But no.  Instead Downer Diver is a more-or-less semi-relaxing descent into the water while avoiding often slow-moving sea creatures and once you get the chest, that's it.  You're done.

When Pigs Can Fly

This mini-game is essentially just Downer Diver but in reverse.  Instead of a diving duck, you're a flying pig.  The basics are pretty much the same although there are some tweaks to the mechanics.  Instead of pressing down, you press the A button to flutter your wings and can release A to slowly drop down to avoid mid-air obstacles.  The one thing that threw me in this game was how to effectively avoid the wind and not get pushed into the clouds.  I obviously was able to make it through the windy section, but I feel like you should be able to beat this without taking a hit, but I don't know how to maneuver around the wind gusts without just trying to occasionally dodge while powering my way through.  And honestly, that end of the level. . . just a little sad.

Trivial Timed Tasks

What is it with the collection of games and accuracy?  Trivial Timed Tasks is made up of four separate games, all with a 30-second time limit, and failing to complete the task in the time allowed kicks you back to the game select screen.  So this one is pretty brutal as evidenced by the fact that it took me 22 minutes to figure out all of the sections.  Getting through the cheese section unscathed took an embarrassing amount of attempts.  Even the fact that one-hit-kills here, which makes sense because they're mouse traps and you're a mouse, makes this one of the many unforgiving mini-games not just in this collection of tasks, but out of all of the mini-games in this entire game.  In the second game, the claw game, once I figured out that you should grab the clock, it became a lot easier to get through; and thankfully the hit box for each item was very forgiving.  The fly-swatting game felt more hectic although once you realize the trick to this one* it becomes a little easier.  The final game, the ship battle against the pirate, is the definition of simplicity.  Unless you're me and you don't realize you're supposed to sail off-screen at the end to actually beat the stage.

The Painful Platformer

You know, despite this one also taking nearly 20 minutes to complete, it wasn't nearly as difficult as I feared, it just takes a long time to get through.  If there had been a countdown timer for different sections, this would've been significantly more difficult.  I also like the inclusion of two other characters to play as, both with different jumping heights.  Sunny Shyon has a shorter jump which requires them to take longer, often having to double back after obtaining the hard-to-reach key to progress through the stage.  Hopper has a higher jump which means you can skip having to redo sections and just, jump up and grab a key.  The problem with Hopper is when the stages get more compact which even with Sunny, often requires you to jump and then move laterally to not hit the ceiling spikes.  So not overly difficult, just a long stage that gets more stressful as you near the end.

Disco at Dusk

This is where my Mr. Goofer adventure sadly came to an end due to some kind of incompatibility with the Steam Deck.  Before you play the game, you have to select the song that you want to play, but you're also able to load and play your own custom songs, as long as they're in an OGG format.  Now, for whatever reason, the Steam Deck didn't like how the game brought up a separate window for song selection, and while I was able to move the mouse cursor around on the screen, I wasn't able to click on anything (as in my clicks weren't registering).  I tried multiple times but to no avail.  Unfortunately, you have to go through this process since if you select the option to play the mini-game, the game tells you that a song needs to be selected first before you can play.  

Yeah, I was pretty sad that this was how the game ended for me.  I did boot it up on my laptop to see if I could just play this level and then go back to the Steam Deck for the rest of the game.  I did try to locate where the game saves its save files to then transfer that single file to my laptop, but since that's apparently not a uniform location, I wasn't able to find it either.  My last option was to replay each of the mini-games to continue and finish the game on my laptop, but as I started playing through the first six games again, I began to feel that that wasn't something that I wanted to do all over again.  That being said, this was a decent collection of games that you're not likely to find outside of an Atari 2600/Intellivision or your local Wunderland/Quarterworld arcade.  There's charm here, but some of that charm is hiding a nasty-looking and unforgiving mouse trap.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Let Him Croon and He Lets Me Steer

P.S. I promise that if I figure out where the save files are located or if I make it to Disco at Dusk on my laptop, I'll continue and hopefully finish this fun/frustrating/endurance-driven collection of games and upload the videos to our existing playlist.

Game EXP: Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! Part 1 (PC/VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! 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.] 

Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party!
Systems: Windows, Linux
Release Date: February 5, 2025
Publisher: Svinta
Developer: Svinta
Time Spent: 4.4 Hours*

Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! is at its base, a collection of 25 individual unconnected arcade games that you might find at a nickel-and-dime arcade with some modern adaptations.  You start out with access to only one game, and after completing a specific requirement, you unlock the ability to play the next game.  Of the 25 possible games, I was only able to play 17 as I ended up being soft-locked out of the 18th due to compatibility issues on the Steam Deck with the 18th game, which we'll get to on Friday.  Like any collection of 25 games in a single package, there are going to be some great games, some good games, and some bad games so we're going to break down each game and give our brief thoughts on each.  One of the connecting factors for a lot of the games is that they are unforgiving and require a lot of patience and fortitude to reach the required number of points to unlock the next stage.

We also have a playlist up on YouTube here which we'll be uploading videos to throughout the week.

Coin Catch

A pretty simple game where you have to catch the right things and avoid the wrong things.  Thankfully, you don't have to catch all the things, only just don't touch the bad things like bombs and dynamite.  But then there's me during my first playthrough where I mistook the grey circles for bombs or at least something bad because the gold coins, gold bells, and red fruit looked like the things you were supposed to catch.  I never did figure out about the fruit bonus, if you're supposed to only catch fruit, but I wasn't about to find out.

Jumper

This game went on waaaaaaay too long in every way shape, and form.  You can only jump one height, from what I could tell, until you get the propeller hat and that just gives you a higher jump and changes the rhythm that you established in the previous 79 jumps.  I also couldn't tell if the pace of the barrels changed at all throughout the game, but it feels like they stayed at the same rhythm and momentum the whole time.

Recker

The first of several multi-stage mini-games that actually do a pretty decent job of introducing mechanics that help in later stages.  How ladders will launch you into the air once you reach the top instead of a traditional climbing mechanic.  With each timed stage, if you don't wreck all the things and reach the end flag before the timer reaches zero, you have to start the whole sequence of games over from the beginning.  What kind of annoyed me a bit was that the second stage where you have to avoid the union workers and smash the glass they're carrying requires almost near-constant movement and down-to-the-wire precision, that even two missed jumps will eat up too much time and you won't be able to reach the flag before the timer reaches zero.  Frustrations aside, a pretty fun and satisfying mini-game.

Laser Launch

Like Recker before it, Laser Launch introduces the first of several games that offer two distinct mini-games, but this one changes the fundamentals of the second game.  In Recker, you're Recker breaking things with your mallet in each stage.  In Laser Launch, you're first playing a Space Invaders-like game except the aliens don't progress down the stage and there is no timer, only lives.  After defeating all of the enemies, you then play an Asteroids clone on a much smaller screen with a larger ship, but instead of having a set number of lives, this is more of a bonus stage to rack up as many points as possible within a two-minute time limit.  Neither Space Invaders or Asteroids are really my cup of tea so I didn't find this game overly interesting.

Icebreaker

Just like Laser Launch, Icebreaker is a two-part game, starting off with a Pong-like game where you have to survive an unbeatable snowman where the snowball that bounces back and forth slowly increases speed as the seconds count down.  Oddly enough, with 5 seconds remaining the timer starts broadcasting an audible "tick" sound each second which makes the game all the more nerve-wracking as you fear missing hitting the snowball back and having to start the game over from the beginning.  The second phase of this game is a Breakout-clone, but like the second half of Laser Launch, is purely optional in its completion if you just want to continue on to the next game.  I will say though that the ball physics in both games leave a lot to be desired and the direction that the paddles move when they hit the ball doesn't seem to have any effect on the trajectory or speed of the ball, which only made the Breakout-clone frustratingly difficult towards the end.

A Gridlock Maze

You know, this was kind of an interesting take on the Pac-Man genre, and unrelated, the first time in this collection that I ran into any kind of compatibility issue with the Steam Deck; which is also slightly my own fault.  In A Gridlock Maze, you control a chicken as they move through a maze filled with trucks that move vertically and horizontally and you have to collect every pellet on the screen to proceed to the next level.  The compatibility issue came up after collecting the larger pellets in the corners of the maze as the Enter key wasn't mapped to any of the buttons on the Steam Deck I tried the Right Trigger, R Shoulder Button, and all of the A/B/X/Y so I was never able to use the speed boost.  There is a second stage that is slightly more complicated in that it requires the player to keep the lines that the trucks move in their mind since the grid is more open with less obvious "lanes."

Goofball Pinball

I know of at least one person who would absolutely hate this game, but I won't name-drop her here.  Goofball Pinball was a strangely created pinball game on so many levels.  First, there's no door/stopper from having the ball re-enter the hammer chamber either after your initial hit to start the game, or at any other time the ball is in play.  It can just end up back in the alley where it started.  Second, the flippers are useable only with the directional pad, meaning you can't press both flippers at the same time; except this only applies to the Steam Deck since you're able to press two keys at the same time on the keyboard, which the game was initially designed for.  Thirdly, the ball has horrible unweighted physics.  I don't know how else to describe it than just that the ball physics is absolutely horrible.  Lastly, because there was no ball limit, this game just felt, like so many other games in this collection, like a test of endurance.  The second game, required to actually pass this stage, the Skeeball section, was a lot more difficult than it initially looked because you only have 12 balls and 10 targets to hit, which means you're only allowed two misses while you try and figure out the right angle to throw the balls.  And since trying to get the ball up the ramp on the left portion of the screen feels more like luck than any actual skill required, you really feel like messing up the Skeeball is tantamount to restarting from the beginning.  The good things I will say are that the sound effects for the bumpers and slingshots were very satisfying.   

Whack-A-Gopher

While as simplistic as both of the games in Whack-A-Gopher are and considering the difficulty with down-to-the-wire timers in previous games, I was surprised that there wasn't a timer of any kind here.  Even a "whack the mole, but don't whack the bunny" mechanic since the pinwheels at the top felt like stand-ins for lives.  Or even if you miss a gopher you lose a pinwheel since there never seemed to be more than one gopher pop up at any given time.  So this was just, whack until you get a score then play a simplistic match three and just really hope that the game is forgiving enough to give you at least one possible match.

Odd Hue Out

This was probably one of the stranger games in the collection.  The first of the two games is to simply fill in the playing space while the second game is to click on the one square on the grid whose color doesn't belong.  And then do that 100 times to move on to the next game.  This is another example of a game that just goes on way too long.  There's no bonus square to hit or any other way to boost your score.  It's all just a test of patience and endurance to make it to 100.  I guess nerves could be factored into the equations, which is what happened to me when I missed the second time.  The first miss was getting the yellow square that turned red and blended in with the other red squares around it.

So those were the first nine games in Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party!  Like I said waaay up there, there are some fun games and some not much fun games and most require the player to maintain a level of patience and an exercise in monotony I feel is not often seen in arcade games.  We'll cover the other nine games on Friday, but if there's a future patch, we'll likely cover the rest of the games, which I will also get into more in Friday's article.

How's that for a cliffhanger?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

*P.S.  I spent an additional 18 minutes earlier today, and that will make more sense on Friday.