Game EXP: "Dark Trip" Part 1 (MQ2)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Dark Trip 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.] 

Dark Trip
Release Date: February 13, 2025
Systems: Meta Quest 2 & 3
Publisher: iTales VR
Developer: iTales VR
Time Spent: 2 Hours 34 Minutes

[Trigger Warning: While the game doesn't include specific Nazi imagery such as the co-opted swastika, there are textual references to any specific members of the Nazi party and some imagery that when combined with Nazi references could be disturbing to some audiences.]

At it's core, Dark Trip is a collection of escape rooms interconnected by an overarching story that is not particularly necessary to either follow or understand in order to progress.  And in all honesty, I wasn't paying as much attention to the storyline as I probably should have in order to have appreciated the entire story.  Throughout the game, you can pull up a journal that gives a brief synopsis for the room that you're in, but since that book would be towards the end of items that you would cycle through to use within the room, I would often times forget that it was even there until I came upon it by accident.  So the deeper story of something to do with Nazis taking women as children because they believed them to be a superior medium for supernatural purposes and research-related bullshittery that Nazis are known for resulting in one particular woman who had exceptional powers was all I was able to gather.

I have a playlist with an entire playthrough, or at least, most of a playthrough as I wasn't able to finish-finish the game, because in this game, you need to find all the things in order to unlock the true end of the game, and I have found most of the things before the game started glitching out on me.  But more on that when we get there.

So let's break things down as we go through each of the videos because that's going to be the easiest way for me to have some semblance of a coherent commentary about what I played.

#1: Rooms 1, 2, & 3

We start in the opening room, which is the very definition of a tutorial room, despite being very familiar with escape rooms, I did appreciate it since some in-game mechanics may not have been intuitive to me, plus not everyone is versed in escape room logic, so it was nice to have this room nonetheless.  Another thing that I discovered which I'll get to in video #4, is that there will be instances where specific number or letter codes need to be entered to progress, but with each playthrough the code changes.  So in this first video, I need to enter 5629 into the combination lock, but on another playthrough, that code will change.  It might be a little thing, but I think it's great forethought by iTales VR to have some amount of randomization to make replays and walkthroughs/playthroughs not be entirely full of puzzle-solving spoilers.  I also really liked the drug/hallucinogenic mechanic in that it wasn't something entirely bizarre or nausea-inducing and it could just as easily have been a sanity mechanic akin to Eternal Darkness but to a lesser degree.  It's also worth noting that you start out with only five capsules and there are a total of eight rooms and you have to use one capsule in the tutorial room, so there are going to be at least three rooms that you don't use capsules in; this will come into play in video #4 as well.

In the second room, outside the house, it was a great feeling to be outside, which is often not commonplace in escape rooms, but a bit anxiety-driven at the same time because it's not a normal place to be for escape rooms.  Then once I took the drug and the outhouse changed into a statue was a bit unnerving.  Even more so when I turned and saw a body lying on the ground and a headless statue sitting on the park bench.  I genuinely expected an Evil Dead moment when reaching for the picture that was placed on the corpse's back.

The third room, inside the mansion, was fun and well-designed and I liked how you started in darkness with a box of matches illuminated.  This implied to me that I would have to use a lit match to explore the room, something that would have terrified and thrilled me, while also hoping that the developers weren't going to limit me to only the matches that were on the table.  Thankfully after you light the lantern, the entire room is illuminated to see all the steps of the different puzzles you need to solve.

Room #4: Part 1

I decided to include this video even though everything in it is covered in the next video.  Why I'm including it because it contains a bug that the developers have since told me has been patched out but was unique at least to me.  When I started the game in the previous video, I was standing in my kitchen so I selected "Stationary" instead of a "Roomscale" environment, which tells the game that you don't plan on physically moving about the virtual environment.  In this video for Room #4, I selected "Roomscale."  Apparently, this caused something to happen behind the scenes and made all of the button pads under each painting function the way that you see in this video, which made solving the puzzles for paintings #1 and #3 impossible.  Not knowing this at the time, I was very distressed and frustrated.  I probably played three additional times for about another 45 minutes total trying to figure out how to solve this room.  I eventually messaged the developers for a solution, which they gave me in picture form and that was when I realized that their button pads were different than mine.  I recorded another video to send to them, and after that, I tried again to use their solutions, but this time I chose "Stationary" because I was in our kitchen.  For whatever reason, this cleared the problem, the button pads were as you will see in the next video on Friday and I was able to proceed.

Yes, I apologize that I am again splitting this article up into two as I did with Mr. Goofer.  Attaching four videos along with written commentary always seems like a doable feat until you actually get to the writing part and then the entire article just feels too long.  I mean, I wouldn't want to sit down and read something that long outside of a physical newspaper or periodical.  So on Friday, February 21st, we'll cover the final two videos and the last five rooms in Dark Trip, plus some additional video footage of a second playthrough for reasons hinted at up at the top.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
We'll Never Kneel Again

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.

MIDI Week Singles: "BGM #18" - Cardcaptor Sakura: Tomoeda Shougakkou Daiundoukai (GBC)

 

"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.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

No Escape From Reality

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.

Game EXP: Supid Cars (OQ2)

[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.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faeplantman/Jaconian
Pacing Deserted Roads

MIDI Week Singles: "Distant Journey" - Dragon Warrior I & II (GBC)

 

"Distant Journey" from Dragon Warrior I & II on the Game Boy Color (1999)
Composer: Koichi Sugiyama
Album: Dragon Quest Game Music Collection Vol. 3
Label: Sugi Label
Publisher: Enix Corporation
Developer: Tose Co., Ltd.

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.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

Monthly Update: February 2025

 

Jesus H. Onna Bicycle Christ Onna Stick.

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 UFO50 in 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.

There's always something more.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Gute Nacht*

*P.S.  NSFW

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.