Spooky – Page 16

My Organ Harvesting Diary: Day Two

Over the weekend, I found a little time between studying and watching the entire second season of Attack on Titan to play a bit more of Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden. And let me tell you, the second chapter was not substantially more exciting than the first.

The gameplay mechanics have grown slightly more complex, without any hope that some of the things that need constant clicking will start to click themselves. First of all, I was given a meat grinder. The idea is that you can pluck organs off a tree before they’re ripe to grind them into mincemeat. It seemed completely arbitrary and pointless up until the point where I learned how to make “excellent” organs. This is accomplished by letting a single organ grow on a tree while chucking any others that sprout into the grinder. So essentially, the grinder is a way of giving you something back for all those perfectly good organs you’re throwing away in hopes of cultivating one really good one.

The catalog hasn’t expanded appreciably yet. In addition to the frogs, I can now purchase moles and woodpeckers. The moles make organs sprout on trees faster (but don’t speed up the ripening process) and the woodpeckers will make the meat grinder run faster. This is all well and good, but the animals get distracted from their jobs very quickly, so once you have a decent sized stable of animals, you’re constantly clicking around to get them back to work. It’s more than a little annoying.

I was also given a third tree to babysit, this new one growing stomachs. It was at this point that I decided that trying to keep all three trees going at once was too much of a pain, and opted to just focus on one or two at a time. It seems like the “grow X number of Y organ” and “get tree Z to level Q” quests just repeat forever with higher numbers, so the best course of action seems to be to just focus on whatever the active story quest is. Sure, you can run the other quests over and over to earn more cash, but there isn’t anything really worth buying yet at this point in the game.

As far as the story goes, it’s mostly just been more creepy customers. One was a little girl who wanted an organ to make her cat talk. Irene told her that one of these magical soul-giving organs can only be put into something that isn’t alive, so the girl left, killed her cat, and then brought it back with the same request. Good lord! I think there was someone else who made a strong impression on me at the time, but I guess it wasn’t that strong in reality, because I’ve completely forgotten. Also there was a mysterious lady in black who came in and the whole screen turned dark, but not much happened with her yet.

So where is this story going? I have no idea. I really just hope that something happens with the gameplay to keep it from getting any more annoying. There is still room for more trees/machines/whatever, and I don’t much care for the idea of having even more clickable things to babysit. In fact, I might just sell all the stupid animals…

My Organ Harvesting Diary: Day One

Most of the time if I’m writing a review for a game, I will start it while I’m in the middle of the game, and then change the review text as I go along. Sometimes the things that I write change quite a lot over that time, sometimes my initial impressions are spot-on and nothing changes at all.

This time, I’d like to keep more of a play diary. Our game in question is Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden. This was a random recommendation from Steam, which I clicked on and decided to put on my wish list, because it was a clicker game that looked a little unhinged. Not long after, it went on sale for a paltry $3.50, so I snapped that puppy up and jumped right in.

Now that the groundwork is laid, let’s dig into the game itself. Hopefully it’s interesting enough to justify using this format.

FMN:MOG opens with a bunch of dialogue, mostly out-of-context stuff that will ostensibly make more sense later. Then you’re given your role: as the assistant in a plant nursery. Only, the plants here grow magical organs instead of fruit or flowers. So far, we’ve learned that putting one of these organs in an inanimate object will give it life, but not a real soul, and that the organs come in differing qualities. Most of the customers have been various degrees of shady, and even your boss seems to have a questionable background.

It’s important to note that this game is from a Japanese developer (CAVYHOUSE), and it’s got an anime feel to it that isn’t overpowering, but is definitely perceptible. From the not-quite-perfect localization to the fact that your character addresses her boss as “master,” it’s clear that this isn’t originally from the Western world. I feel like I was going somewhere with this paragraph, but I’ve completely forgotten where that was. Oh well.

Gameplay starts off simple: water the tree, and it will grow kidneys. Pluck the kidneys and ship them to earn cash. The tree stores so much water, which is used up as kidneys grow, and the watering can will slowly refill over time. You can level up the tree by plucking kidneys, and the watering can levels up as you use it. Eventually you’re given a store, but the only item I can buy so far is a frog. Frogs speed up your watering can’s refill speed, but they lack focus and you’ll have to click on them every few seconds to get them back to work.

In this first session, I’ve completed Chapter One, which ended on a scene of the nursery owner (Irene) and a mysterious friend talking about going on a trip together, leaving me to run the plant nursery alone. I have a nagging feeling that my character may have been brought to life by one of the same magical organs that she is harvesting. Chapter Two also gave me a second tree that blooms hearts, so now there’s twice as much maintenance to take care of and my watering can does not fill nearly fast enough to keep up, even with three frogs buffing it.

So far, it’s been just a matter of juggling fruits, water, and frogs until the door lights up and you’re shown the next story scene. As your things level up and you collect kidneys, you’ll complete missions that give you more cash. It’s a slightly more complicated cycle than most clickers I’ve played, and most other clickers would have given you an option to automate the process by now (which turns them from clicker game into idle game). I suppose I’ll just have to keep playing to see how both the story and gameplay unfold.

Last Month in Movies – September 2017

I watch horror movies all year long, but it’s only once September rolls around that they really begin to feel on point, you know? So that’s basically how I spent my movie-watching time in September. No room for sci-fi or action or whatever else here!

Los Parecidos – This is a Mexican horror film from 2016 (in English, The Similars), about eight people trapped in a bus station during a wicked crazy rainstorm. The first thing that you notice when you start watching is that it doesn’t look at all like a 2016 movie. It’s got a beautiful old-timey filer and style that make it seem almost like it did actually come out of the 1960’s. That’s a really good way to secure my interest right off the bat.

The plot revolves around said group of strangers, trapped, and as per genre, becoming more and more paranoid and distrusting of each other as time goes on and strange events start to happen. The crux of the strange events being that they begin suffering seizures one-by-one, followed by a facial transformation that results in each person having the same head. Oh and also, they aren’t trapped in the bus station because of the rain, but rather because some invisible force is not permitting them to leave.

While it is a slow-burn kind of mystery, it’s done really well. I was engaged throughout the whole film, constantly unsure (but with some close guesses) as to what was happening. It really comes to a head about halfway through, when the big twist is revealed, and that’s when the cast beings dying off one at a time. What was most notable is that Los Parecidos does a really excellent job of feeling exactly like a really long episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s got a perfectly spooky vibe, and of course a little smattering of the supernatural. Needless to say, I quite liked it. An excellent way to start the (extended) Halloween season.

After – Next up, we look to another random suggestion from Netflix that actually had a moderately interesting summary. It’s the story of two strangers, trapped in an abandoned version of their town, with a black mist quickly closing in on them from all sides.

Did you just say “okay, so they’re dead/in purgatory or whatever”? If you did, you’re almost right. The film opens with a bus crash, the only passengers being our main characters, Ana and Freddy. It’s not long before we get the “big reveal” that they’re both in comas, and the black fog represents the time they have left before Ana is taken off life support. So the plot then becomes about how they try to wake themselves up, rather than the coma being a bad twist ending, and I much prefer it this way.

So you might then wonder, how did these strangers end up in the same coma? That’s never really explained. It makes absolutely no sense, and they do actually address it, but end up just handwaving it away. Basically it’s just for the sake of the story, since we end up being show that the two protagonists have a shared event in their past that neither of them know about. Also it’s an opportunity to sort of blend their backstories together to make something a little richer than if it had been a single person’s dreamscape.

Overall, I’d say it was decent. A little plodding at times. There was a cool GCI monster, but it was sort of unnecessary, the guardian of a key that seemed redundant in light of the ever-present ticking clock. One nice twist is that the film constantly flip-flops who they want you to think the “hero” is going to be, and it ends up being Ana who really saves the day. So there’s that little dash of feminism in there if that’s your jam. I don’t know if I can recommend it in earnest, but it’s certainly in the upper echelon of “movies on Netflix that nobody has ever heard of.”

Spider-Man Homecoming – To set the scene: I am not a big fan of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. I liked them at the time, but in retrospect I find them nigh unwatchable. Mainly I just hate the majority of the cast. Additionally, unlike most people, I really like the Amazing Spider-Man movies. I have tried to, but cannot, understand why they get so much hate.

Homecoming, though? It’s perfect. Or at least as close as you get to perfect. It’s placed perfectly into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by sitting it on the fringes of the larger story; tying into the greater lore, but but not reliant on it. I mean, sort of reliant. The ties to the MCU give Homecoming a richer background and context, but this movie’s charm is all in the character development and the action.

While there is a typical super-hero tale here, the thing they really want to do is give you a Spider-Man origin story without telling the same old Spider-Man origin story. It’s not the story of Peter Parker getting his powers, it’s the story of him truly becoming Spider-Man. Following Captain America: Civil War, Peter Parker has a bit of a swelled head from being recruited by Tony Stark to battle with the Avengers. He gets in too deep, driven by his all-consuming desire to prove that he’s Avengers material, and causes more harm than good, leaving Iron Man forced to step in to clean up Spidey’s mess and take away the fancy-pants suit. Left with nothing but his old DIY getup, Peter has to figure out how to be a superhero and save the day without the benefits of the super-suit.

The line “if you’re nothing without the suit, then you shouldn’t have it” truly epitomizes the appeal of the film. That story of growth and learning to find your inner strength was what really made it click for me. Plus, I really like this set of actors! I’ll never get over the loss of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, but Tom Holland is adorable and we all love RDJ’s Tony Stark. Michael Keaton, of course, was so friggin’ good, and I can’t help but hope that Jacob Batalon gets to come back if there is another MCU Spidey film. And Marisa Tomei? Yes, please.

IT (2017) – Yes, I have seen the 1990 mini-series with Tim Curry. No, I will not be directly comparing the two, because it’s been far too long since I’ve watched the older one and I cannot remember any more than the plot. Also I’ve never read the book, so there’s that.

Simply put, I think that IT was really great. Certainly the best thing to come out of the 2017 Stephen King adaptation craze. If you aren’t familiar with the plot, it’s about a group of outcast kids who are being hunted by a nightmarish clown from the sewers. Spoiler: said clown is actually an ancient, inter-dimensional evil that feeds on fear. And, uh, the flesh of children, I suppose. Most of that is barely touched on in this film, though, so it’s not the biggest spoiler.

IT wasn’t exactly scary, despite being an actual horror movie. I mean, I can certainly see how Pennywise the Dancing Clown is a terrifying concept, but this film banks a lot on jumpscares. And jumpscares almost never feel earned in movies. On the other hand, the creature effects were amazing. The way Pennywise’s mouth unfolds to reveal layers and layers of teeth was endlessly fascinating to me, and I almost wish they hadn’t pulled that trick out so many times,because by the end of the movie you almost end up being used to it. It’s always more fun when they keep things like that to a bare minimum.

Do I recommend IT? Yeah, absolutely! I already said that I think it’s really great. What else do you need? Maybe there isn’t quite enough time to give a proper backstory to each of the seventy protagonists, but the ones that are meant to be in the spotlight shine ever so brightly. All the kids do a really great job, too. And we all know that I have a soft spot for stories about a group of kids going on a surreal adventure (see The Goonies, Super 8, Stranger Things, etc…). The one thing that surprised me was the ending reveal that this is only IT: Chapter One. In retrospect, that was dumb of me, because Hollywood would never miss the opportunity for an easy sequel. Also there’s no way they could have ever fit the entire story into one film while keeping it cohesive and under three hours long.

Gerald’s Game – A Netflix production, which much to my surprise, is based on a Stephan King novel. I… that was completely by accident. I didn’t mean to watch three Stephen King adaptations (I also watch the Netflix series based on The Mist) all in one month. But I think that the entertainment world must have conspired for them all to release within 30 days of each other.

Anyway, this movie was far inferior to IT. Gerald’s Game is about a couple who go out to a secluded vacation hone to try to save their marriage. But when the husband, Gerald, has a heart attack and dies after handcuffing the wife, Jessie, to the bed, things begin to spiral out of control. Jessie begins hallucinating, having conversations with a more assertive version of herself and the “ghost” of Gerald. Also a stray dog wanders in and begins eating Gerald’s body.

This film is 70 minutes of boring, 5 minutes of horrible agony that I could not watch and almost made me barf when Jessie comes up with a plan to escape the handcuffs, and then 25 minutes of conclusion. Said conclusion also includes a completely irrelevant subplot involving a grave robber/necrophiliac/serial killer who had routinely visited Jessie during her ordeal, but she thought was just a hallucination of Death. I am not happy that I wasted so much of my time with this one, and cannot possibly recommend it to anyone.

Curse of Chucky – This is not new. See previous impressions here. The only thing I need to add to that review is that I was very annoyed by how two characters died instantaneously when they had either a) an eye gouged out or b) a jaw hacked clean off. Those injuries would not kill someone on the spot! Maybe the eye gouge if it went deep enough and at the right angle to skewer the brain. Maaaaybe.

Mercy – Oh my f**k. Another secret Stephen King adaptation. Netflix really needs to add that to their summaries. The differences are that this film was from 2014, and it lands somewhere in between IT and Gerald’s Game in terms of quality. Also, it’s very loosely based on a short story.

This story is about two boys and their mom, who move out to their grandmother’s house to take care of her as she dies. Of course, as to movie goes along, weird things start happening and eventually the boys manage to discover that their grandma has made a pact with some evil force. This is confirmed by a priest, who states the the woman had given away all of her goodness to gain everything she ever wanted. At the climax of the film, there’s an epic showdown between George, the main character, and Grandma’s possessed corpse.

To be honest, I have absolutely no recollection of how it ended. I can tell you pretty much exactly what happened throughout the film up until maybe the last five minutes. Then my mind blanks. I think that’s probably a sign that I was disappointed in the ending, which is too bad because the rest of the movie was alright. It didn’t exactly have me on the edge of my seat, but at least I wasn’t proclaiming “I am so friggin’ bored!” to nobody, as I did while watching Gerald’s Game.

Last Month in Movies – August 2017

I have so many movies sitting on my “want to watch” list that I will likely never make the time for. Because when I watch a movie, it’s usually some terrible horror film that pops up randomly on Netflix. And that’s your explanation of what happened below.

Insidious: Chapter 3 – I really loved the first Insidious movie for totally playing with my expectations of what a “possession” movie could be. Plus, it had a certain video-gameyness to it that really spoke to me. Insidious 2 was almost more of a whodunit mystery than anything else, and while it didn’t hit the same sweet spots, I liked it well enough to shout at the folks who were chatting in the theatre while the movie was playing.

The third film in the trilogy is…. ehhhhh. It goes back in time to a previous case of the medium from the first two chapters. This one is about how a young girl accidentally calls forth an evil spirit when trying to communicate with her deceased mom. After our heroine gets hit by a car and briefly dies on the operating table, said spirit begins to appear to her in the real world, and all the usual wacky ghost stuff stars happening. There is a neat little twist to how it goes down, but it’s nothing especially exciting.

Continue reading Last Month in Movies – August 2017

Book-reading

I read another novel last weekend. That makes two weekends in a row in which I have read an entire novel. What is happening to me?

The most recent was Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, which is the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. I fully intend to read the next two over the next two weekends. I don’t remember the context, exactly, but I purchased the trilogy because Matt Peckham said something about it on the now-defunct GameLife podcast that clearly affected me on some level.

As a strange twist, I have previously read another book by VanderMeer: Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy through Essays. Which is not a novel, but rather a collection of essays about cryptids and other fantastical animals. This is a twist because my choices of literature are so impulsive that I haven’t ever felt the need to explore a particular writer’s greater oeuvre.

Although, to be fair, a significant portion of the books I’ve read in the past decade have come in trilogies. So there’s that.

Back to Annihilation! It was just excellent. I don’t want to say too much about it because the mystery and suspense are key tenets of the novel, but it was wholly unlike anything I’ve read before. I highly recommend checking it out, and I feel certain that the next two Southern Reach books will be equally, if not more, enjoyable.

I think that the only thing that I had a problem with is that I had a very hard time picturing the events in my head. This issue lies not with the writing, which is perfectly good at building a scene and describing events, but rather with my brain, which has a certain lack of focus. It makes reading a bit of a chore, as my mind will often drift off and I’ll find myself having to re-read up to an entire page. But as far as visualization goes, I often found myself wishing for a film adaptation, simply because I would love to actually see this world (although parts of it will be literally impossible to recreate on film). I can’t help it, I’m very much a visual kind of guy. Ask anyone who has ever tried to teach me anything without flashcards.

Oh, guess what, there’s a film adaptation coming out next February. Hooray! I’ve missed out on a lot of movies that I’ve wanted to see over the last couple years, but this will definitely be one that I see on opening night.

As an aside, the fact that this is all lining up so nicely makes me a bit salty, because the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has apparently gone through the film version of development hell and has got me wondering if it’ll ever be real. Oh well. Win some, lose some.

The FanFic’d Ones

Very randomly, I received a promotional email from Amazon about an upcoming book: The Freddy Files, which seems to essentially be the Five Nights at Freddy’s bible. I clicked on the link, because I’m interested in all things FNAF, and it was there that I found the biggest surprise…

There is a second FNAF novel.

I had no idea at all! I’ve been so out of every loop since I stopped frequenting Talking Time. But that’s besides the point. I read and enjoyed the first FNAF novel, The Silver Eyes, on the very day that it became available. The sequel, The Twisted Ones, has been out for a couple months now and nobody told me about it. How rude!

So long story short, I bought it and read the whole thing last weekend. It’s not a long book by any metric, and the target audience is tweens, but I think it’s still pretty impressive that I polished off a whole novel in a single weekend. I’m a terribly slow reader, and even though I do love to read, it always gets lowest priority of all my hobbies. It’s a little sad that FNAF is one of the few things that really, truly excites me any more.

If you aren’t at all familiar with the Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, the games are about bipedal, animatronic animals that come to life at night and kill any unfortunate security guards that they might come across. There’s also something about how said animatronics are possessed by the vengeful spirits of murdered children, looking for the pink/purple/phone guy(s) who may or may not have murdered them. The lore goes deep, is what I’m getting at, but that doesn’t really matter because the novels take place in an alternate continuity.

While I did like the original book, and the second is by no means bad, The Twisted Ones almost comes off seeming like FNAF fan fiction. It was written by Scott Cawthon, creator of the games, so it can’t be fan fiction. But it feels like it. There are a lot of really weird story conceits and maybe pushes certain ideas a little too far. This is not unusual for the franchise; it’s built on weirdness and FNAF4 absolutely tried too hard in some of the same ways. But it’s easier to ignore that kind of stuff in a video game. I expect better from books, I guess.

Anyway, if you’re a big ol’ FNAF fanboy like me, you can’t go wrong with The Twisted Ones. It’s got its share of issues, but it’s definitely a step above The Silver Eyes in writing quality and it is significantly more focused from a storytelling perspective. Just don’t expect it to knock your socks off. This is Young Adult literature, after all. Still more interesting than Harry Potter, IMO.

Last Month in Movies – July 2017

I don’t know if this is going to become a regular thing or not, but I’m trying out something new. Well, a new spin on something I’ve been doing for years, anyhow. You know that Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up post that you ignore every month? Well, there’s one for movies now.

On the upside, I watch very few movies, so at least this should be a fairly light feature.

Power Rangers – The reboot that came out earlier this year, that I really wanted to see, but nobody I know gives a flip about Power Rangers. This is probably more on me, because I barely know any people at all. Anyway, I finally watched it, now that it’s available on home video.

Anyhow, I went in expecting the worst, and I was… well, it exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed it overall, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The Power Rangers are now straight-up superheroes, which is fine, Jason has a sword-arm, which is awesome, and Alpha 5 was somewhere between terrible and hilarious. I also liked the characterizations of the new rangers, how they all come from vastly different backgrounds and have actual depth instead of being one-note stereotypes. My biggest question about the movie is how in the heck did they land Bryan Cranston and Elizabeth Banks?

So what was wrong with it? It’s the worst kind of origin story. The kind of origin story that runs over two hours (yes, really), but all the action is crammed into the last ten minutes. The Megazord looked too much like a Michael Bay Transformer, and for some reason the Mastodon Zord had eight legs. Also, during those final moments, Angel Grove suffers destruction relative to how badly Metropolis got torn apart in Man of Steel. Not quite razed to the ground, but for a smallish town, you wonder if the residents are even going to bother trying to rebuild.

Three-Headed Shark Attack – Many years ago, I watched a film called Two-Headed Shark Attack, and I remember absolutely nothing about it, other than Carmen Electra was in it literally just to be eye candy. Unlike Sharknado, it left no impression on me, so I wavered a bit before deciding to watch the sequel.

But then I did anyway, and it’s one of those sequels that has nothing in common with the previous movie except for a vague theme. Or specific theme? Mutant sharks. I guess that’s not especially vague. This movie is about a bunch of environmental researchers and hippies working near a massive island of garbage off some unmentioned coast. Turns out the pollution is mutating local animals, the biggest of which is our title monster: the three-headed shark.

The shark somehow destroys the research facility and then attacks a booze cruise that happens to be passing by. The research station survivors desperately try to save the ship, but pretty much everyone dies. Danny Trejo shows up and lops a head off the shark, seemingly killing it. Then it’s discovered that the shark will regrow two heads for every one that it loses, like the mythical hydra. Eventually the shark defeats itself when the many heads end up fighting for food and bite each other to death. Somehow.

Guys, don’t ever watch this. Unless you’re doing a bad movie podcast or something.

Wonder Woman – It’s great. It’s just great. Excellent. I never gave a damn about Wonder Woman, because I’m not really into anything DC outside of Batman, but holy cow I sure do care about the Wonder Woman cinematic universe now.

For one, it gets everything right that Power Rangers flubbed. It’s an origin story, but it’s gripping the whole time and you don’t have to wait until the very end to actually see the hero in action. There’s a bit too long of a lead-in with the background lore, but there’s still a huge battle within the first 15 minutes. And then a journey to collect a ragtag group of mercenaries to stop a foe that may or may not even be real.

I should mention that both Gal Gadot and Chris Pine are superb in their roles, and I really just want to go on more hilarious adventures with them. That’s not to take away from any of the supporting characters, though! Everyone was great and the whole movie was just about perfect. The one thing that I need to gripe about is the fact that the lasso effects did not look very good in combat. But that’s it! that’s literally the only thing I disliked about this movie! Crazy!

Satanic – And so with all that gushing about how great Wonder Woman is, we come to our last film of the month, which was unfortunately pretty bad. Of course, like all the bad movies I watch these days, this was a Netflix recommendation that missed the mark.

In this one, we follow a foursome of young people out on a road trip, who stop in LA to check out some historic Satanist sites or whatever. Along the way, they “rescue” a young lady from a Satanist cult. However, it turns out that the cult wanted her out because she was too crazy, and the young lady curses the group just before slitting her own throat. And so our heroes are stalked by an unseen force that traps them in a nightmare world and kills them one by one.

I feel like there might have been potential here, but every character is unlikable and the acting is terrible, so you want to see them die. But all the kills are off-screen, and the movie ends with the main girl trapped in an empty, black cube, her mouth sewn shut and her limbs amputated. There is no precedent for this. It makes no sense. It’s just there as a weird, shocking thing to end on. Super lame. Also, it’s another one of those movies that just spends so much time building up that all the “action” at the very end, only there’s no real payoff. None of it means anything. Blech.

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – July 2017

~ Game Over ~

Mighty Gunvolt Burst (Switch) – I really adore this one. Played through twice now, as both Beck and Gunvolt, and then just kept playing. Also, the Ekoro DLC came out late in the month, so…

Vaccine War (PC) – I wrote a thing. Kinda meh.

Blaster Master Zero (Switch) – They’re releasing more DLC characters now so I opted to go back and play with the already-out DLC guys. Gunvolt is awesome and makes the game feel new!

Until Dawn (PS4) – I try not to use this word about video games, but I loved this one.

Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (NES) – The Netflix series and a nice My Nintendo discount inspired me to try one of the few ‘Vania games I’ve never played. Decent, but steeped in bulls**t.

Citadale: Curse of Darkness (WiiU) – Second chapter in the trilogy, solidifying the Casltevania “homage” by using an exact Castlevania subtitle. Perfectly average in all ways.

Super Mario 64 (N64) – I did something new this time and finished the game in a single sitting. Only to the requisite 71 stars, but hey, I’m not some kind of superman.

Tales from the Borderlands (PS4) – I wasn’t impressed with Episode 1, to the point where I was calling it Tales from the Snore-derlands. However, it got so much better once Gortys showed up.

BioShock Infinite (360) – A significantly more interesting tale than the original BioShock, but for some reason the gameplay still feels hollow to me, and I can’t figure out why.

Azure Striker Gunvolt (3DS) – Bought this in August of 2014 when it originally launched, haven’t played it until now. Massive oversight. It is excellent, but very difficult to actually be good at.

Resident Evil HD (PS4) – You know, initially I figured I’d do a one-sitting run of this. And then said run took nearly two months to complete. Damned distractions.

Red’s Kingdom (PC) – Quit playing after 20 minutes because I wasn’t having any fun.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – July 2017

8 Teenagers, 1 Ski Lodge – Until Dawn

*Please note now that Until Dawn is a story-driven game and I am about to spoil the hell out of it*

I have been meaning to cancel my PS+ subscription for several months now. Originally, I only signed up for it so that I could play Day of the Tentacle Remastered for free and get a deep, deep discount on TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan. Day after day in June, I kept telling myself to turn off the auto-renewal. And then July 1st came around and I got the email saying that Sony had charged my credit card for another month. Rats!

But this worked out nicely for me in the end, because one of July’s free PS+ games is Until Dawn. I had no idea what it was before seeing it in the PS+ menu, but the description sold it as a horror adventure game (which is 100% in my wheelhouse), so I decided that I might as well take advantage, as my $11 was already spent.

When I began playing the game, it immediately became clear what was going on: a bunch of sexy teens are for some reason caught in a secluded ski lodge and would be killed off one-by-one. Well, that’s maybe generalizing a little too hard. The game has plenty of surprises tucked away in its sleeve. Its gameplay, for instance. You wander around, waving your flashlight at things, occasionally stopping to look at a point of interest or pick up clues. Then spooky things happen, and you slowly unravel the greater mystery. Also you occasionally stop for brief interludes in which you are talked down to by an arrogant psychiatrist and asked to complete simple tasks that will vaguely influence things you see in the game. Sound familiar?

Continue reading 8 Teenagers, 1 Ski Lodge – Until Dawn

Citadale

You want to know something that I’m not done talking about yet? Wii U games. I probably should be, because there is basically nothing but garbage-lookin’ indie games coming out on it anymore. Maybe a Virtual console release here and there, and I guess there was that remastered version of Darksiders that came out last month (which I would love to purchase again on something more… portable). But mostly garbage-lookin’ indie games.

All that aside, today I have a whole lot of things to say about a garbage-lookin’ indie game that came out several months ago. And to be completely honest, it doesn’t actually look that bad if you’re just checking out screenshots. This game is Citadale: Gate of Souls, and I had literally zero interest in puchasing it until I heard about it on a podcast which I very much enjoy. It sounded like a miraculous garbage fire, and we all know how strongly I feel about garbage fires.

So I went right ahead and I plopped down my $5 or whatever it was, and I got me some Citadale. Much against my better judgement, but I think I may have been drunk at the time. I think I bought Wario: Master of Disguise at the same time, which is something I never would have done sober. That’s just a straight-up Bad Video Game. Citadale is, fortunately, entertainingly bad.

Okay, take a moment now and scroll back up a bit. Take a good, long gander at that logo. Remind you of anything? No? For shame. Citadale’s logo looks suspiciously like the logos of most of the Castlevania games on GBA/DS. Like, it’s just a font and differently stylized C away from being a complete rip-off. That’s a little bit gutsy, I’ve got to say. Wearing your inspiration on your sleeve is one thing, but copying it wholesale and then charging money for it is a whole different ballgame. Congratulations on your hubris, Nitrolic Games.

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