"BGM #18" from Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoeda Shougakkou Daiundoukai on the Game Boy Color (2000) Composer/Sound Team: Kiyohiro Sada Album: No Official Release Publisher: MTO Developer: MTO(?)
No, I've never played Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoeda Shougakkou Daiundoukai or any game in the Cardcaptor Sakura series, but something drew me to the penultimate track from this game. I watched/sped-through a walkthrough of this game and didn't hear this tune anywhere, but the video did seem to skip the credits if there were credits and that was one of two thoughts as to where this track would go. Considering the rest of the game is about challenging your classmates to various athletic activities during a sanctioned sports day at school, this track feels either a little out of place or perfectly in place as a victory march full of pomp and circumstance.
This could just be me, but I hear a lot of similarities between this and some of the music in Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II, specifically "Ending Theme - FFI" and "Finale - FFII." So, you know, music that closes out a video game. I wasn't able to find a lot of information about this game, let alone the specific composer, but I did find that Kiyohiro Sada worked on the sound team in the role of "Sound Driver." Maybe he just worked on some aspect of the music in the game without being the actual composer, but we're going to list him as at least working on the Sound Team until I can find something more conclusive.
[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! 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.
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.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Stupid Cars 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.]
Stupid Cars Release Date: January 9, 2025 Systems: Meta Quest, Windows, Nintendo Switch Publisher: Gimbal Studio Developer: Gimbal Studio Time Spent: 1 Hour 17 Minutes
It's probably my fault for not looking too closely at Stupid Cars before I established in my brain what I thought the game was going to be. Even after watching the trailer, what I was expecting it to be, a VR puzzle game that would be filled with individual puzzles kind of like the board game Rush Hour but played in real-time instead of turns. Even the trailer almost feels like it leaves a lot to interpretation, not even once focusing on the fact that there is a score counter at the top of the screen.
Stupid Cars is instead closer to what is presented on the surface in the trailer. A large arcade cabinet with cars and motorcycles zipping by that you're able to manually speed up and slow down, and for each vehicle that safely makes it through to the other side, you get one point. The highest score. . . is the highest. There is an online leaderboard but I never felt compelled to attempt to even get close to any of the listed highest scores. The score is also there as a way of keeping the next level locked, so you have to earn at least 50 points to continue on to the next stage. There are some modifiers to the score, such as random gold cars that are worth two points, and an unlockable mechanic that speeds up the cars and doubles your score while it's turned on; you're able to toggle the Turbo Mode on and off. You're also allotted a continue if any of the cars crash to carry over your score when you start the same stage again, although it seems that the rate of the cars driving out is the same as when the car crashed, but the board starts out clear.
Let's go through each level because as you're probably aware, I have some thoughts.
Level 1: Classic
You know, just your basic poorly planned out intersection immediately after a series of eight tunnels. I don't know why it didn't stick out to me at first, but the cars are driving on the left side of the road, but that obviously didn't bother me as it wasn't something I noticed until level 3. The tutorial itself is pretty rudimentary and I still found it a little misleading. I thought that along with being able to speed up the cars, that you could also slow them down beyond their initial starting speed, so three speeds altogether. I think that's what I was trying to do at 1:40, was to slow the Jeep down, not drive it right into the convertible. That's also why I was looking down at the control panel, convinced that I missed something about the controls and looking for where the "slow down" button was, not just the "speed up" button.
"Classic" was the only stage I actually felt moderately compelled to get a higher score beyond 50, which is why I played for an additional seven minutes. It was fun, but at that point, still only about 12 minutes, I decided that with no additional gameplay elements in this mode, I was going to stop.
Level 2: Bus Rush
Yeah, I went into this stage a bit cocky. Getting 92 points in the previous level and feeling like I had a decent grasp of the mechanics along with fewer intersecting roads felt like this was going to be a proverbial cakewalk, but this one really put me in my place (or did it?). Not even a minute into the Bus Rush I was barely able to score 8 points, distracted by the bus and where the various roads were intersecting, and seeing two gold-two-point cars got me excited.
The buses ended up being harder to predict how they would affect the rest of the traffic, despite the in-game warning that a bus was coming. I just found it hard to factor in their length and speed with the rest of the cars on the road, which is kind of the whole point of the game. But even after the second attempt where I got 43 points, I still felt like I had a decent grasp on the mechanics. I think the difficulty I faced with this level cemented my desire to not try and go for not a leaderboard high score, but a personal best high score, higher than the 50 required to unlock the next level.
Level 3: Bike Blitz
If I had thought that Bus Rush was hard, I had no idea what was in store for me with Bike Blitz. This was also, surprisingly enough, the level where I realized that the vehicles driving on the left side of the road, as opposed to the right side like here in the United States, was throwing off my perspective and previous knowledge of traffic circles. The other complication here was keeping track of the motorcycles/mopeds once they entered the traffic circle because once you get two or more bikes in there at the same time, it's all a manner of remembering when each vehicle entered and where they're going to exit.
I do love how around 19:00 I just gave up a kind of meddling just to see how many points I could score without touching any of the bikes. Like, maybe that was the trick to this level, was to just let the bikes to their thing and you could get to 50 points. But, as evidenced by the video, leaving the bikes alone will net you zero points on average. And it's not like I could feel myself getting any better at this, like it all just felt like luck. Which is probably why at 21 minutes in, my high score was still only 39. And then on the next run, I managed to score 39 on my first try, briefly thinking that I would turn Turbo Mode on and off anytime a gold car was about to finish, but I found that tactic to be too risky. That excitement you see in my magnificent attempt at a laser light show at 22:57 is 100% real. I wasn't doing that for the camera.
Level 4: Train Wreck
After the chaosness that was Bus Rush and what felt like an exponentially increasing difficulty curve in the game, I was so thankful that this level was easier and thereby, actually felt fun again. The train moved faster than I thought it would and was on its own dedicated track (as opposed to the bus also using the road) and came at a regular 15 seconds. I mean, I got 49 points on my second attempt. Then after only about three minutes, I got 50 points. I briefly thought about quitting, but because I was feeling more joy than I'd felt since the first level, I decided to continue and just see how high I could get my score; it was 90.
So while it took some getting used to keeping my eye on the track and the rest of the cars on the road, overall, I really enjoyed this level.
Level 5: Loopy Lanes
Like Train Wreck before, Loopy Lanes was more fun than I expected with the return of traffic circles (traffic quarters?). This level actually feels like it should have come before Bike Blitz as it felt easier despite there being two traffic circles instead of one. That being said, this level was still pretty challenging having to time the delayed turn of the traffic circle in cars making an elongated right-hand turn; like I'm genuinely curious what the road sign prior to entering that intersection would look like.
Level 6: Chaos
You know, for a level titled "Chaos," I expected the culmination of all of the elements from each previous level to actually feel more chaotic. I don't mean having cars and bikes and trains and buses all in the same level, and while that would have been entertainingly chaotic, this didn't feel chaotic. Just busy. Instead, we have 20 straight lanes of traffic and four intersections with only cars to deal with. I would have at least expected there to be both cars and bikes or maybe a turn or two. Maybe an overpass or something. But sadly no. Apart from there just potentially being more cars on the roads, the actual playing area was pretty disappointing.
Now, that doesn't mean that this level was easy because dealing with 10+ cars on the screen at the same time is mentally taxing and hard to keep track of. I probably could have tried additional plays after getting to 69 on my go (at 5:14), but with how uninspired Chaos felt, I didn't really feel like trying to get a higher score than 70.
So that's Stupid Cars, or at least most of it. I only unlocked two medals which can give you bonus points, which is probably how people get 350+ points on Classic, although I never looked into how to unlock all of the medals or how to actively try and score bonus points based on the medals I did have. I'm not a big multiplayer person, but something about this game feels like it could somehow benefit from multiple players, although not even the Nintendo Switch version is multiplayer, so it's not just an issue to get it to work in VR. I don't really know how much this game benefits from being a VR title as the controllers basically felt like mouse pointers and even though I was equipped with two of them, I never felt coordinated enough to use both at the same time; plus I felt that one was more than enough in most situations. The environment was neat, but it was always the same skybox and ther was no change in the decore as you progressed through the game. I guess I just feel like even without trying to unlock all of the medals, there didn't feel like there was a whole lot of game here. Six levels that are already in endless mode so there really isn't anywhere to go unless you're trying for the leaderboard.
So yeah, I did have fun 60% of the time, with two of the middle levels causing me all manners of grief. But if high-score hunting is your thing, then a VR game for less than $6.00 might just be your thing.
I'm not currently playing Dragon Quest II or any game in the Dragon Quest franchise, this song just came up because I used The Squire as an RNG and this is where we landed.
"Distant Journey" is the song that plays when the Prince of Middenhall, a descendent of Erdrick leaves on his journey to stop Hargon from summoning the demon Malroth and destroying the world. Pretty standard fantasy fare, but the music is what makes this moment so much better. The first two notes are a direct callback to "Unknown World" from the first Dragon Quest, this being a rearrangement of an arrangement of the original 1987 song. But I do love the music from this series and I do have a hard time reconciling the beauty of this music while also knowing that the composer was a horrible person.
That's my assessment of the last two weeks here in the United States. I'm not going to speak/write in hyperbole because that's not going to do anyone any good, but just know that we do not support Project 2025 or the current Presidential administration or the people who kowtow or prostrate to the current President as a way of saying "notice me!" Was that hyperbole? You also cannot convince me that Steven Miller isn't a massive racist and xenophobic piece of hyperbolic shit.
In other news, I have a handful of playlists for games that I've played coming to light in the next couple of weeks. All this week we'll be releasing videos of my playthrough from the recently released Stupid Cars, a VR game that involves getting vehicles safely across an ever-complicated area, culminating in a Game EXP article up on Friday. The following week we'll do something similar with Unreachable, an interesting first-person psychological thriller involving a cop and his kidnapped family. Probably towards the end of the month, I'll hopefully have a series of videos and an article (or five) for Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party!, which is similar to UFO50in that it's a collection of retro-styled games. There might be another game or two thrown in before the end of the month, but we'll have to see.
In non-Keymailer games, I started Everybody's Gone to the Rapture as a pallet cleanser to Unreachable and I'm loving it, which probably explains why the recent reviews on Steam are negative; it's a walking-sm after all with no option to run, so the Dear Esther debacle all over again. I'm also still uncovering more and more of Vvardenfell in the Morrowind expansion in ESO. I also realized that I haven't played Fallout 4 in a couple of weeks, as Jacqueline is now just hanging out in Far Harbor, waiting for me to return to maybe, finally, finish the majority of the quests on that island so that I can return to the Commonwealth and finish finding out what happened to her son. My head-canon is that after discovering that he's likely much older than he was when he was first taken and that he's in no immediate "danger" she's coming to terms with that information and after hearing about the family whose daughter went missing (which was the catalyst to the Far Harbor DLC), that that was something that she could immediately help with. That was my justification for my 30+ hour detour.
I also realized that I haven't played Triangle Strategy in some time, mainly due to how bad everything seems to be going in the story, possibly due to decisions I've made in the story and how some battles have turned out. But, the story is happening so it means that the writers had a plan for this possibly happening, and right now it's happening to me. But I guess I shouldn't get too downtrodden since I've gotten the bad-bad ending in the original Resident Evil and I find that ending to be so much more impactful than the good-good ending where you fight Tyrant on a helipad with a rocket launcher.
Lastly, I've been reading House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski and have been having a blast with that. Conklederp got the book for me for Christmas after blatantly hinting that it was a book I've been wanting to read for several years now. I tried explaining it in its most basic form to a doctor earlier in the week, and the best I could do was that it's a journal written by someone who collected the writings of an acquaintance who lived in the same apartment who recently died, and those writings were about a documentary movie that never existed. I then showed him several of the pages to show what I meant when I said that the book is a publisher's nightmare as the format of the text gets weird as the story progresses. Probably only second to "S." I also picked up nearly a dozen D&D novels from SecondSale, an online used bookstore after combing through several bookstores here in PDX. This means that I'll now be able to finish the Knights of Myth Drannor series and start the Shadow series once we get to the Time of Troubles. I also finally found a copy of Arcane Age: Sword Play that wasn't $50, but now I just need to find/buy the rest of that trilogy.
P.P.S. I also started up Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus on the Switch although it is pretty tempting to pick the whole deluxe package over on GOG since it's under $10 right now and comes with all of the DLC whereas the version on the Switch is just the base game.
I started Everybody's Gone to the Rapture a few weeks back after deciding that I needed a bit of a palette cleanser after playing Unreachable (stay tuned for that article in the coming weeks). Initially, I had started filming my gameplay like I've been doing for a couple of games over the last several months, but then I decided that this was just going to be for me. I might take some pictures here and there, but the experience of playing the game I was going to leave to myself and not worry about recording it to upload it to YouTube. This was for me.
Then I reached the scene in the chapel and then the music came up and after reaching the outside of the house, I knew that I needed to exit out of the game and replay it and film it, again just for myself so that I could view this amazing sequence of visuals and music all over again. And so today we have the song that played during that second half of the sequence, "The Mourning Tree."
I've tried looking up what is being sung during the first half but those lyrics currently are eluding me. The lyrics for "The Mourning Tree" are easily accessible although I'm not going to do a lyric analysis about that*. I will say that the first time I played through this, I wasn't paying attention to the lyrics until the line, "I heard you coming home." And that's when I was hit hard in the feelings department.
*Although I will say that the mention of "the bomber's drone" and that the game takes place in 1984, makes me feel like this would be a WWII song, although this is an original song composed for the game.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Benign Land 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.]
I am, admittedly, woefully ignorant about the Troubles, the time predominantly in Ireland between 1969 and 1998 when Irish republicans fought for Irish unification and separation from the United Kingdom, while Ulster loyalists along with the United Kingdom fought to keep Northern Ireland part of the UK. There is a whole lot more to it than that inadequate sentence, but that's the best I can do right now without just copying verbatim the entire Wikipedia article. So I knew that going into Benign Lands, a video game adaptation of an immersive visual arts experience about Ireland's history with the latter half focusing on the Troubles, what I was getting myself into, but only just and again, admittedly most of the imagery went over my head.
Beforehand, I knew the generalities of the conflict. I knew about Bloody Sunday, but couldn't give you an exact date, and to be honest, I'm not great with remembering specific dates of historical importance. I knew about the Good Friday Agreement, but again, I couldn't give you any kind of specifics. I knew that there were bombings carried out by the IRA, but I couldn't give you locations. I'm sure that it was covered to a certain extent in any of my World History courses from Jr. High through High School, but only that the conflict was still ongoing because I graduated High School in 1998 and I couldn't tell you when our textbooks had last been updated. I knew that certain neighborhoods in Belfast were separated between Catholics and Protestants, but I didn't know that they were called "Peace Walls." I also knew nothing about the Prison Maze, the multiple hunger strikes, or any other dozens of things that were not deemed important to go over in the flurry of information during history classes.
So this is where I was going into Benign Land, pretty bad I admit. I was hopeful though because the game says that the original experience was created from an outsider's perspective, which I misinterpreted as meaning that the player didn't have to know anything about the Troubles in order to get the message of the game. What I didn't know was that the outsider was actually the developer, Leandros Ntolas. Again, that was on me for not being better prepared before starting.
Now, before we get to the actual gameplay, there needs to be some hardware context. I played on the Steam Deck because I knew that my laptop would not be able to handle anything that uses photorealism as its basis. I first started the game on Wednesday night and immediately knew that I was going to have to make some graphical adjustments because just in the menus, the game was maxing out at 12 fps. I also noticed that the GPU was running at 99% while the CPU was hovering around 45%. Not a great sign. So I lowered the graphics down to Low and was able to get a max fps of 24, but even that felt exceedingly sluggish as you'll be able to tell down below in the playthrough video.
First, I couldn't tell what was going on when I tried to invert the Y-axis for the right joystick. I could hear and see the click, but the box itself never changed so I had to go into the controller configuration in the Steam settings to make the necessary changes. I can't always tell from the other playthrough videos I watched, but the way the game felt to me was that I was swimming through thick viscous water, that the controls were sluggish and response-delayed. The first time I played (and the video I recorded) there were countless times I found myself looking up at the ceiling or down at the ground as I found that I was often overcompensating with the right joystick. There also seemed to be a baked-in mechanic that slowed you down if you were going in the wrong direction of where the portal to the next scene was, coupled with invisible walls hampered my desire to explore. There were also two instances above where the portal didn't seem to initially take and made me think that there was something else I needed to do.
Sadly a lot of that last paragraph made it hard for me to either enjoy and/or understand everything to do with the visuals. True that I didn't catch most of the visual references, but I can only blame myself for that. The rest of the blame lies with the Steam Deck and that this game, even on low settings was too much for the system to play smoothly and in a way that felt enjoyable. While a lot of the visuals were impressive and beautiful to be in the presence of while I walked/floated through each environment, I was saddened that I felt more frustrated than anything with how the game played than anything else.
The Climb Systems: Windows, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, Oculus Quest 2 Release Date: April 28, 2016 - December 3, 2019 Publisher: Crytek Developer: Crytek Time Spent: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This isn't going to be so much of a regular Game EXP article because I didn't really have one planned before I sat down and started writing, but I couldn't think of what else to call this. So Game EXP it is.
The whole point of this is self-promotion, but why else use a website to talk about video games if this isn't self-promotion? Anyway! Over the last week, I've been keeping the Oculus Quest 2 headset at work to play with it during my lunch breaks, and because I have more arm, leg, and ceiling room at my office. And I've jumped back into the first The Climb game having already gone through The Climb 2 several years ago. I also found out that I can record videos in a slightly wider than a square screen, so that makes for better YouTube videos too. And this last week, I uploaded an unremarkable video of one of my playthroughs and it was hitting around 75 views every hour, which is pretty bonkers for me. So I started recording more videos of each of the climbing routes and uploading those.
And thus we now have a playlist with five and growing videos up. I preface that there's not anything great or groundbreaking in these, it's just me playing The Climb and in the case of the Hard climb in the Canyon stages, failing miserably for nealry nine straight minutes. In my defense, I am vocal in my opinion that the 'cleaning off the holds' mechanic in The Climb is so intuitive that the actual mechanic is broken and thankfully was fixed in The Climb 2.
But just to give you a quick taste, here are two climbs, one from the Bay stage, and the viral video from the Canyon stage.
The Bay - Zen Bay (Easy)
The Canyon - Red Rock (Medium)
Over the coming days/weeks, I'll upload more climbing videos and I'll probably do the same with The Climb 2, because I really do love this franchise, even if some of the mechanics in The Climb are just bat-shit horrible. We'll talk more later.
Playing The Elder Scrolls Online DLC/expansion Morrowind has me frequently visiting Vivec City, primarily because it's the only city that I've found in the south (thereby starting area) that has both crafting tables, shops and banks all in a fairly confined space, all within short distance of a wayshrine. That means any time I log in (so, daily), I'll usually spend 10-15 minutes in the often crowded area to fulfill equipment writs and deposit more consumables into the bank so my inventory isn't overflowing with ingredients, 50+ potions, and scrolls.
So with all of that in mind, I hear "Grazelands Dawn" a lot, which is wonderful because it's a gorgeous peace on its own, but one that also integrates "The Road Most Traveled"* from the original Morrowind soundtrack. Yes, both the title of this song, and its integrated homage suits roaming the wilds of Vvardenfell more than it does running between crafting stations and the bank, but I don't really care. Having that little motif crop up at 0:43 and 4:1 while blended seamlessly with the rest of Brad Derrick's composition here brings a little skip to my cockles.
[Disclaimer: I received a review key for Fourth Time Around 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.]
I have to keep reminding myself that the Fourth Time Around Demo is only a demo because, holy hell, it was effective. The disclaimer is upfront that a fair amount of the demo is not going to make sense or tell a cohesive story that the player will be able to follow or fully make sense of, but that really played to the strengths of establishing an uncomfortable and tense feeling throughout the whole 28 minutes. So rather than try and parse what I played, I'm just going to embed it right here.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. Kind of? My biggest hangup, and what hampered my otherwise perfect cinematography, was that there was no option to invert the Y-axis on the camera, but since the game is more of a walking sim and less of a first-person shooter, I found I was able to adapt somewhat well.
The Itch.io and Steam descriptions tout that this is a game without jump scares, which I think is true for the most part, but there were several sudden moments that creeped me out. When I first gained control of the camera on the train and saw the woman's face scribbled out, it gave me a bit of a start. The frequent camera glitches seemed to always put me on edge. Then the green cabin scene when you click to "Leave" and when you turn there's a field full of the same woman in all of the poses you previously saw her in earlier in the stage gave me literal shivers down my shoulders and back. And once you get the gun both times made me woefully uncomfortable both in the game and its implications on the story. I also loved the moment at 12:27 when the kitchen started filling with white noise that became the phone ringing as I found it played on my anxiety about talking on the phone.
I don't really know how else to talk about this demo any more than this, which I recognize is fairly paltry. It really felt like the whole of the demo was informing players on how they're going to feel when the full game is released and even if only half of the game makes me feel as unsettled and tense as these 28 minutes, then I'm all in.
And if you want select moments from this playthrough, I made a couple of trailers, I guess you'd call them because just like Liminal Dimension, Fourth Time Around lends itself very well to creating unsettling snippits.
I'm not against pledging real-world money to a crowdfunding campaign, even if that pledge is essentially a pre-order for a game that doesn't have a release date. Such is the case when you pledge on one of the many crowdfunding websites, which I have done for several games over the years, thankfully with a relatively high success rate of the game being released on time. But the gamble of crowdfunding a video game isn't the reason we're here today, instead, we're here to talk about actually sitting down and playing those games once they're released.
Going back to 2018, I've sponsored/helped fund six games that I thought looked like they'd be fun to play. But then, why haven't I played them, or at the very least, why did I only start them up and not continue. I don't think it was a lack of being fun because I did enjoy what I played of 9 Years of Shadows and Lords of Exile, but I've never started Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. So for the remainder of our time here, I'm going to go into List Mode with a little bit of commentary. I'll order games chronologically by the date that the crowdfunding ended along with when I finally received the game and the system I picked it up on, because additional context is always helpful.
I'd been a fan of Atooi for several years and have played several of the games that Jools Watsham developed and released over the years. I received a review copy of his last game, Chicken Wiggle and for the most part enjoyed that game, so when this Kickstarter came about for a revamped game with added features, I thought, "Sure, why not!?" Well, by now you can read almost anywhere about people being upset at Atooi for the six years between the end of the campaign and when the game was finally released, later evolving from Chicken Wiggle Workshop into what is now Hatch Tales.
Now, I have played Hatch Tales a bit, more so than any of the other games listed below, but that is primarily because The Squire really likes to play it and wants there to be more playable levels on my Switch profile, so every once in a while, I'll boot it up and try to 100% a level or two. It is a fun game that plays a lot like Chicken Wiggle so I'll give it that, and there'll likely be a Game EXP article later in the year.
I had finished The Sinking Cityabout a year-and-a-half before this campaign ended and I was pretty excited to play a Lovecraftian Sherlock Holmes game. I knew about the original game released in 2007 but had never played it, and I do have Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter which I had read nothing but good things, so I thought, "Why not?" I like what Frogwares had done with The Sinking City and this seemed like another way that I could support this company.
I haven't yet played this, likely because I keep going back and forth about wether or not I should play the original 2008 game first, or just jump right into this one. And if I didn't already have a copy of it through GOG, I would probably go and buy it right now (as it's on sale for $0.99). Maybe I will play that one after all.
9 Years of Shadows - Campaign Ended: 4/21/2020 ; Rec'd: November 9, 2023 - Nintendo Switch
I can't remember how or where I first heard about 9 Years of Shadows, but I really liked the aesthetic and I think at the time I was really hankering for a solid Metroidvania that harkened back to Syphony of the Night and the DS era of Castlevania games. I also loved that the playable character was a woman wielding a halberd. That seemed pretty bad ass. That was really it.
I did play the game for a bit after it was released, maybe less than an hour and I enjoyed what I played, but I think I got distracted by some other games at the time, likely still playing Tears of the Kingdom. Yeah, we'll blame The Legend of Zelda on that one.
Lords of Exile - Campaign Ended: 5/19/2020 ; Rec'd: February 14, 2024 - Nintendo Switch
I first heard about Lords of Exile because the developer, Carlos Azuaga, kept popping up on my For You feed on Twitter (since bought out by right-wing racist-enabling billionaire and first gentleman Elon Musk) where he would ask for comments on various aspects of his game development. Again, I loved the NES-era Castlevania look of the character sprites, but also that the look of the game wasn't hamstrung but the limits of the NES; similar to Curse of the Moon.
I played the first stage in the game to get a feel for it and was a little surprised that it wasn't quite what I was expecting. Not just a Castlevania homage, there were mechanics I wasn't expecting that I will get to when we cover it in an upcoming Game EXP article later this year.
Just like Lords of Exile, I had been seeing posts by developer SpaceDuck cropping up a lot on my For You Twitter feed and I like the isometric view and the overall world aesthetic. That was about it. I watched several short videos showing in-game animations through development and I like it. So I threw money at 21cDucks.
Being the most recent game I've received, I haven't yet played it. I know I should, just like every game on this list and it was Chrono Sword that actually inspired me to make this list and in turn, this article. I began wondering how many games I had pledged money towards and why I hadn't played m/any of them.
Meifumadolike the last two games I saw crop up a lot on Twitter and liked the look of something akin to Blasphemous, set in a post-apocalyptic world, but with a different regional feel. Granted this wasn't a Japanese company, but one based in Belarus, which therein lies a lot of the issues with this game. Their crowdfunding campaign started March 1, 2022, less than a week after Russia invaded and declared unofficial war on Ukraine. As the campaign came to an end a few weeks later, the government of Belarus supported Vladimir Putin's war machine and so economic sanctions were placed on Russia and their supporters, including Belarus. This meant that foreign money that had been pledged to Old Bit Studio was now being withheld, which is the short of it. You can read their May 19, 2024 statement on Kickstarter here.
My reason for not playing Meifumado yet doesn't have anything to do with any of their troubles or being angry that this video game developer happened to be from a country that was supporting another country's hostile invasion of Ukraine. I understand that the game released is not exactly what was promised or by some reviews on Steam simply call an unfinished game. I just haven't gotten around to it. And like I've said a lot about other games, you can look forward to a Game EXP later this year.
And that was kind of the whole point of this article, well one of two points. The first was to put down in a list the games that I've pledged money to, and to say that this is the year that I play all of these games, and gods willing, will write about all of them too. I haven't looked any of the games up on HowLongToBeat, but I don't imagine that they're any 50+ hour epics in there, maybe closer to 20+, depending on my skill and surviving an onslaught of enemies, especially in the last four games.
But that's my declaration this Friday, January 17th, 2025: I will play all of the games listed here and likely write about them, either in their own Game EXP article or en masse.
P.S. What do you mean the Switch 2 was announced yesterday morning!? Great, this is going to eat into my crowdfunded game time now.
P.P.S. And don't get me started on Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs box that I have sitting in my office after playing successfully through the first card once after two failed attempts. That game ended up being more complicated than I had anticipated and not exactly what I thought I was getting into. And did I mention that the rules were written in a classic 2015 fashion? Whooboy and not for people who were not already familiar with Gloomhaven.
"Mount Crystal" from Conquest of the Crystal Palace on the Nintendo Entertainment System (1990) Composer: Tomohisa Mitsuyasu Album: No Official Release Publisher: Asmik Corporation of America, Quest Developer: Quest
There's just something about that driving drum beat that starts out the song that gets you pumped about getting ready to climb a mountain filled with aggressive golems, birds, slug-crab-things, piranha plants, and skeletons. That's really all I know about "Mount Crystal" from Conquest of the Crystal Palace although I do recognize the cover from when I would visit Placer TV/Video in the NES era.
I'm not even going to try to analyze the melody because I'll get most of it wrong. So I'll just say that I really enjoy this song, be it for climbing a mountain early in your quest, or just as background while you plod away in QuickBooks hoping that your meeting that's supposed to happen in 20 minutes is canceled because you've already had one meeting today. And then the song loops back to the beginning and you now have the sudden urge to drive out to the forest and climb a mountain; even if there aren't any crystals involved.
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