Category Archives: Software

My Friendly Neighborhood

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If you ever found the puppets on Sesame Street a little creepy[1], have I got a horror game for you! My Friendly Neighborhood tells the story of a kid TV show from an alternate, slightly darker turn of the millennium America. Somehow, their unnamed Vietnam went even worse than ours did, and kids / parents just kind of stopped watching children’s programming, or maybe I’m wrong about that cause and the true cause is public television was never invented, so ratings were the sole driver of a show’s survival. Either way, after a pretty successful 15 or so year run, the show was canceled in the early ’80s, and now, ten or twelve years later, it’s suddenly broadcasting again, overwhelming the signal of intended shows.

So you, a broadcasting engineer named Gordon[2] are sent to the old abandoned studios to shut down the signal and restore everything to normal. Only, when you get there, everything is weird and creepy and oh, right, dangerous, because I left out something important. Apparently another facet of this alternate America is that the puppets are and always were alive. And sometime between the show’s cancellation and now, they’ve gone kind of crazy. And not the normal kind of crazy where they’re just trying to kill you for interfering with their nefarious plans, although, okay, yes also that, but the creepy kind of crazy where you start to listen to what they’re saying and it sounds like what the puppets in H.P. Lovecraft’s Sesame Street would say, and also they’re not so much trying to kill you as they are incidentally killing you while enthusiastically hugging you.

Needless to say, this is all pretty great, and were I of an age where I had countless hours to fill and not enough entertainment to fill them with, I would happily play this again with cheats enabled and on a higher difficulty level, just to see what all else I could unlock that I didn’t find the first time around.

Fantastic atmosphere, occasionally legitimately scary, yet with a surprising amount of heart. Easily recommendable.

[1] I never did, and the game still works
[2] ie the main adult character on Sesame Street for a good long time, and boy howdy am I certain that was on purpose

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury

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I have played not one but two games! Well, okay, I finished Bowser’s Fury yesterday, and didn’t finish Super Mario 3D World at all plus last played it months ago, but I for sure have enough data to make a fair review of the bundle.

First, the one I did not finish. Super Mario 3D World is basically the same game as Super Mario World, the one from the ’90s I think? SNES era, anyhow. You wander around a track from level to level, and then complete the level to unlock forward progress.

I mean, yes the graphics are better, and the levels are more 3D wander around instead of side scrolling, plus there are different things in each level to collect, so maybe it’s like a combination of Super Mario World and Super Mario 64? And also there are new-to-me conceits, like a cat suit for climbing walls, and a white raccoon suit they give you if you fail a level like 5 times in a row, that makes you invulnerable to everything but lava or infinite falls, and helps you with those too. So it’s pretty forgiving, at least until like three levels from the end, where they introduced a rolling log mechanic that I find impossible to adapt to, and came close to running out of lives over. So that’s why I’m stuck. All the same, I can visualize what is left of the game well enough to be satisfied with what I’ve written here.

Bowser’s Fury, on the other hand, does not have any lives, and is actually almost its own thing. The deal is, Bowser Jr. who you may remember as a mini boss in some prior games, shows up asking Mario for help, because his dad has grown massive and is way way way angrier than usual. So Mario runs around a giant lake collecting things that help him defeat Bowser and clean up all the crazy oil slicks laying around. It is less like Super Mario Sunshine than this makes it sound, but that game was certainly on my mind a lot. Eventually, you finish going everywhere and win, which I did. Hooray!

It also has a second player mechanic similar to Cappy in Super Mario Cappy[1], which would be great to play with the kids except that Bowser Jr. can also control the camera angle, which makes it a miserable experience instead. Maybe when they’re older?

If you like Mario games, these are certainly two more of them. Bowser’s Fury is shorter, but also, I think, better.

[1] I forget the real name[2], but it’s the one that debuted with the Switch and has a talking hat that guides you around. You’d think I would have reviewed it, but nope. I finished, but finishing left like 50% of the game unexplored, so I wanted to play more before reviewing it, but then… didn’t. You’d be surprised how often something adjacent to this happens to me.
[2] My wife informs me it’s Super Mario Odyssey.

Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends

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Last year, I played a game, and I was trying to finish it 100%, only I had misunderstood a part of the early game, and ended up skipping out on a lot of information that only showed up every seven days game time, so now at the end of the game it was a lot of pointless busywork to get to the several pieces of info I needed to finish. Which would still have been okay, because kid friendly games are hard to come by, but then I started playing some Mario stuff instead, and it never happened, and now Rolling Hills: Make Sushi, Make Friends has fallen off of Gamepass, which means it will never happen, but unlike a lot of games I played enough to form an opinion of but then never finished, at least I’m here writing a review of it.

The deal is, you’re a robot who makes (or maybe more appropriately, serves) sushi, and you’ve been hired by this old mayor to make his town popular. Half of the game is, every evening you open your restaurant and tell your sushi-making machine to start, er, making sushi, which you then try to match to what your patrons are in the mood for. They give you money and acclaim, if you do well at this. Then in the other half of the game you use the money and acclaim to buy things. Furniture, ingredients, costumes, that kind of thing. But you also are trying to make friends with all the people who live in town and newcomers as the town grows, because doing so will allow you to unlock newer, cooler things to buy as well as letting you delve into the (improbably, sushi-based) mysteries of the town’s origins.

Anyway, I did all of that, but didn’t quite get all of the possible sushi recipes, because some of them were locked behind a traveling sushi chef who visits once a week, but I didn’t start talking to her until pretty late in the game, because I didn’t know when or how to find her at first. Oops.

It was pretty fun, though towards the end even before this sushi chef fiasco, it started to feel more like work than fun to unlock the last few bits of relationships, mysteries, etc. I think maybe a lot of games do that, towards the end. Which is a pity.

A Plague Tale: Requiem

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A couple of years ago [let’s say], I played a game set in medieval France wherein a teen sister and young brother are on the run from deadly swarms of rats and the Church, because of alchemists. The sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem, picks up some short time later, with the reminder that. yep, younger brother Hugo’s affliction is not resolved.

Except for the plot, this is basically the same game, so don’t come looking for innovations. The sling is still pretty cool as weapons in games go, and the mechanic for creating and removing light as a means of progressing under various circumstances is a clever one that never got old. As far as the plot, though… I guess the best way to look at it is as a fantastical re-imagining of the Black Plague, and to then not be surprised, in either this or the previous game, when just absolutely loads of people die. Inevitably, some of them are people you care about.

The goal of the game is to cure Hugo, whether via alchemist or following his dreams[1] or delving into the history of previous small children who have been afflicted with the Macula, a word which may have some meaning outside of this game that I have not researched, but probably doesn’t[2]. There are, as you might expect, lots of soldiers stalking around, lots of rats, lots of nooks and crannies to find secret story beats for completionist achievements, and a few too many “trapped with multiple waves of enemies” scenarios for my personal tastes, but on the other hand, I did finish the game, so.

It wanted me to play again on highest difficulty but with all my unlocked abilities. I will not be doing that, but I can imagine past me, with access to many fewer games, giving it a go.

[1] I mean, dreams he is having when sleeping, not like dark ages self-actualization.
[2] It turns out to be a part of the retina, which seems completely unrelated to anything in the game. Beats me!

The Last of Us Part II Remastered

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It has been much longer than it should have been before I played the sequel to The Last of Us, especially when you consider how very much I love that game. I’m not sure why I didn’t get it in the first place, but not long after that it was Playstation 5 time, and I waited until I had one because why play it on the old busted graphics? ….and that turned out to take maybe longer than one would expect. But when I got one for Christmas this year, I also knew the second season of the show was coming down the pike, and I had to hurry up if I didn’t want spoilers[1].

The Last of Us Part II is (mostly) set about 5 years after the events of the previous game, which I will continue to not spoil, even though it perhaps hamstrings me a little for this review. It is, as the last one was, an intensely character driven narrative, with themes of parenthood still present, but being replaced by themes of… there’s not a word for this. When one says parenthood, one envisions the responsibilities of the parent to the child. This game is first about the responsibilities of the child to the parent.

The second thing it is about by chronology, and the first thing by weight, is vengeance. There’s a Chinese(?) proverb that advises if you embark upon a quest for revenge, dig two graves. Whoever said that I think underestimated the volume of digging needed by possibly more than one order of magnitude, but then again, many video games of this type are violent by nature. Still, there is an obligation and a cost associated with revenge, and the narrative provides an exemplary portrayal of both.

Also: it’s beautiful. This may of course be my review of the PS5 more than of the game qua game, but nevertheless. Also, the controller is the best game controller since the XBox 360.

All in all, it was a great story and a great experience, and I look forward to watching it play out on the small screen over the next few weeks via HBO as well as to any future game sequels that I think I expect to be coming sometime soon in the next year or two. Of course, at some point I’ll be obligated to talk about these in terms of plot, lest I get too abstracted. But not today! …unless forced, which seems unlikely.

[1] As it happens, I got spoilers, but nothing too intolerable. A scene in the first episode of the show was a flashback from the last 2-3 hours of the game, which, well.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

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In December, Game Pass got a big Day One release[1], Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This is a graphics intensive first-person puncher in which Indy races a rival Nazi archaeologist to solve the mystery of why Vatican giants are stealing cat mummies. Aside from the punching and the field archaeology, it’s mostly a puzzle and collections game, which is a style I’ve been enamored of for most of my adult life, and then I’ve been enamored of Indiana Jones for even longer.

So you can imagine how cool it was to see the introductory scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark in a somewhat controllable scenario, before the actual game (set a year later in 1937) kicked off. From there, it’s all a Nazi-punching, globetrotting, graverobbing good time, interspersed with cut scenes that really could have come right out of an unfilmed script.

Plus, there are definitely plots left unresolved enough for a sequel or at least a substantial DLC release. …which they might make me pay for, but I hope not! Especially because I might fall for it, you know? This thing was like catnip, as evidenced by my 100% completion and 970 of 1000 gamerscore points over the course of a month and a half. I basically never finish AAA games anymore, but, here we are.[2]

Downsides: I can only think of one, which is the game started nagging me to move forward / how to move forward, much too early. I like the idea of the helpful voice, whether internal or external, telling you to investigate the thing you might have not been able to find or understand. But wait like 5 minutes, not 30 seconds. (And then the time I really did need help, there was no help forthcoming, which is also sort of a problem when you’re nagging so hard the times I don’t.)

[1] This is to say, for those out of the loop, it arrived on Game Pass the same day it became available to purchase outright.
[2] Continuing to help: DLC = DownLoadable Content, ie expansions instead of sequels; gamerscore is points that mean functionally nothing that you get for completing main or side plots, or doing difficult or implausible things that the designers thought were funny. (Bragging rights, maybe? But functionally, worthless.) AAA = I don’t know what exactly, just big budget big studio or something,

Escape Academy

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This week in “We played it just before it fell off Game Pass, so now you can’t!”, I bring to you Escape Academy. The conceit is, escape rooms, but what if there was a Hogwarts for them? And really… there’s not a lot to talk about here. There is a story, technically, and the graphics are pretty terrible, but what actually matters to your enjoyment of the game is if you want to play escape room puzzles, some of which eventually get pretty tricky.

It has 2 player co-op (nice), 2 player vs (I was not a fan, but it’s not actively bad, and we only tried one mode of many), about 12 levels, and several expansions that weren’t on Game Pass and thus we did not try them, but since now none of it is on Game Pass, arguably the bundle is worthwhile I suppose?

All in all: pretty good if you like co-op games, maybe not much of a much if you don’t?

Close to the Sun

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In the second half of December, right after I started the new Indiana Jones game and got my new PS5 Pro (halfway or more through the 5’s lifecycle), I… played none of those games, because I learned that a Nikola Tesla themed game I had been interested in was leaving Game Pass. Hence, another entry in my ongoing series of timely reviews for games you can no longer just get, as in for “free”.

Close to the Sun tells an extremely alternate history of the 1890s, where Tesla was successful enough with his electricity plans to corner that market worldwide, and then he built an enormous scientific research vessel, to which the main character has been invited by her sister. When the reporter sister arrives (as opposed to the scientist sister, you see), she discovers that nobody is home, but there’s a giant quarantine sign[1] and a lot of damage and weird shimmering images of people walking around.

Thus commences the barely not a walking sim exploration of the ship, to find and rescue her sister, figure out what went wrong, and ultimately escape, one hopes. As a game, it was I think only okay except for my interest in the whole Tesla / Edison thing, which elevated it somewhat. The four characters were all pretty good, the mysteries were mostly compelling, the ending was, I will say, “rushed”. All in all: decent and short enough to not crazy overstay its welcome, but marred by a truly awful save system that meant if for any reason I did not finish a chapter, I would have to start it over. So, be prepared to play for a while at a time whether you like it or not, since the XBox’s quick resume system is a complete failure on this game in particular as well as the lack of good saving I already mentioned.

In further conclusion, maybe it’s better as a game than I’m giving it credit for, and mostly the technical issues are why my estimation rounded downward a bit.

[1] I cannot explain precisely why, but it was particularly affecting to me that the quarantine sign was painted over the exit to the internal docks, in case anyone wanted to leave, but with no hint of any warning to anyone coming in.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

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Although I notably skipped a recent one (so far), I have played the vast majority of Zelda games that were not originally released for Gameboys. As such, it is not surprising that I wanted to play the new one. In fact, funny story, my wife bought it for me for our anniversary which messed up my having bought it for her for Christmas. Either way, she has other things going on, so I played it first.

Echoes of Wisdom is notable for being the first Zelda game with a playable character that is not Link.[1] It is further notable for being the first game titled “The Legend of Zelda” with a playable character named, y’know, Zelda.[2] See, there are these rifts that appear in Hyrule on a fairly regular basis, and people and things get trapped in them, but later they close up by themselves and the people and things return. Only, lately, there are a lot more and they aren’t closing up, and the king’s daughter has just fallen into one and been captured by someone pretty familiar-looking to long time fans of the series, and then rescued by someone also pretty familiar-looking to long time fans of the series, only she gets out of the rift as a result of the rescue, but he is left trapped.

Not long after these events, Princess Zelda is accused of causing the rifts, for reasons that make sense in-game but would be pretty spoilery, and she teams up with a little yellow ball to save Hyrule, since this Link kid that everyone is talking about has vanished. Somehow. Also, the little yellow ball can help her make copies of things, and then use those copies to help her make her way through a failing world. Examples of things she can copy include beds, tables, crates, pots, and those little jiggly green things that you farmed for XP back in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, which I mention mainly because of how much more accurately named it is that any other game in the series that isn’t this one.

Anyway: it’s by and large a Zelda game, you know? You wander the land looking for collectibles and fairies and rupees and upgrade items, and you enter ruined temples to find keys and boss monsters and heart containers, and eventually you fight, well, I won’t tell you who you fight, but I bet you have guesses.

I have some ambivalent feelings about the manner in which Zelda deals with all the fights and things, in part because other Zeldae have been more proactive. But I think my doubts are mostly unfounded. At the end of the day (the little blue power bar aside), Zelda is not Link, and having her not take a direct hand is almost certainly the more correct way to set her up as a playable character.

In conclusion, I’ve played well into the 90th percentile of what the game has to offer and I’ll probably try to wrap up a few more loose ends before I move on to the new Indiana Jones game, and I can say without question that it’s a lot of fun. It reminds me of A Link to the Past in many ways, and all of them positive. Well worth the time! And largely kidsafe too, which isn’t nothing.

[1] At least, I’m pretty sure that’s true.
[2] This, on the other hand, I’m 100% certain of.

Still Wakes the Deep

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Sometime after I learned that there’s a game about Lovecraftian horrors on an oil rig, I learned that there’s a TV show about strange goings on in the all consuming mist (which may or may not be Lovecraftian or for that matter Kingy[1]; I wouldn’t know, as I have tried to avoid spoilers for The Rig since it seems cool enough to look into), and I have no point other than that’s a weird coincidence. Like, even if they aren’t both Lovecraftian, what are the odds that two media regarding oil rigs would both come across my radar at the same time, much less of both tweaking my interest?

None of that is I suppose especially important to Still Wakes the Deep, a game named after a particularly evocative phrase from a Scottish poem and set on Christmas Day 1975 on an oil rig in the North Sea. This is how I learned that oil rigs are not just built in relatively shallow water, but that rather they float. It is horrifying in its own right to be floating on the surface of the ocean, connected to the surface below not by four legs, but just by the drill with which you are penetrating the earth’s sunken crust. Imagine how much more horrifying, then, were the pocket you opened to contain not oil, but instead colors out of space, growing tentacles, and madness.

Caz McLeary is a man on the verge of losing everything, and his new job as electrician on an oil rig is partly effect, partly cause of this imminent loss. At least, that’s what he seems to believe and what all the evidence in the early game shows us, as he reads an angry letter from his wife, and then faces a somehow even angrier boss waving an arrest warrant in his face. But moments after that scene plays out, we and he learn that in fact he was nowhere close to losing everything, at least not then. It’s all a matter of properly defining “everything”. …and for that matter, “lose”.

I wasn’t expecting this to be a walking sim. That did not make it a bad game, but I sometimes wished for a little more control over events. Just a little, you know? Actually, as I think about it, the most proper audience for my plaintive request for more control over the events of December 25, 1975 is one Cameron “Caz”[2] McCleary, innit?

Is it apparent I liked this game? Well, I did. It was both mostly likable and immensely affective. Definitely worth a look.

[1] Why don’t we have a proper adjective for the way King writes? Probably because he doesn’t mostly write in a specific way, other than when it’s about the human horror of small towns. But it still feels like he deserves one, is all.
[2] British (in the imperial sense) people are really bad at name-shortening. Cameron = Caz? Jeremy = Jez? Come on, chaps, get it together.