I love a side-scrolling platformer video game. I love the first Yooka-Laylee game. I love Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair…or, at least all but the last 10 minutes I played of it.
Tag: burningbooks
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Yakuza Kiwami is a good serious game for a laugh (a review of Yakuza Kiwami)
Yakuza Kiwami isn’t exactly a fun game. It’s a game that leverages many different things, in small amounts, to pull the player through. It’s a bit funny, its combat is a bit good, its narrative is a bit engaging, and its cutscenes are a bit long (this last “bit” is sarcastic; the cut-scenes are very long).
Yes, I finished the game, so it has to have some merits. But I won’t be playing any of the other Yakuza games.
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Do Goose Stuff (a review of Untitled Goose Game)
Untitled Goose Game is my favorite type of game. It’s a video game that takes a small number of mechanics and stretches them in increasingly chaotic ways. Here, you play as a goose with the ability to waddle, honk, and pick things up. Your mission: sew the seeds of confusion among the citizens of a small town. You know, goose stuff.
Here’s the essay I mentioned: https://calebjross.com/being-a-ninja-is-easy-in-a-world-full-of-idiots/
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Link’s Awakening is Sad (The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening review)
The remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is here and it is amazing. But, having not played the orignal since I was a child, I was surprised by the story. It’s,well, it’s pretty sad.
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Trover Saves the Universe Review. Is it Funny?
The credits have rolled on Trover Saves the Universe. Well, actually they haven’t. Not yet. But they will. I’m still playing it. And I do intend to finish it. I just feel confident that the endgame won’t surprise or delight me enough to make this early review an invalid review. Incomplete, perhaps. But not unfair.
See, Trover saves the Universe is primarily a showcase for Justin Roiland’s brand of noncommittal riffing. Imagine you were to accuse a drunk neighbor of pooping on your carpet, and that drunk neighbor insists he did no such thing, delivering his appeal with all the incoherence and verbal hurdling over swallowed-down almost-vomit that a drunk neighbor would of course exhibit, and proudly so. That’s essentially every one of Roiland’s characters.
Basically, you get the sense that Roiland’s voice recording sessions are just him, probably high, vocalizing every single thing that comes to his mind. Sure, he’ll pause to gather his thoughts or jump into an alternate take, but where less confident writers may insist the pauses and jumps be edited out, Roiland seems to insist the opposite. It comes across as brash laziness.
And I freaking love it. (more…)
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The Talos Principle Review. Puzzles vs. Religion?
The credits have rolled on The Talos Principle.
The Talos Principle is a first person puzzle game in the vein of Portal, Q.U.B.E, and probably Myst and Riven, but I’m not sure because I didn’t have a PC when Myst and Riven were popular. Still I feel I had to mention them here to avoid angry comments about my lack of knowledge of the first person puzzle genre.
The puzzles are the best kind of puzzles. Just a few mechanics to keep track of and each series of puzzles builds upon the rules of previous puzzles. It’s near puzzle perfection. Each solved puzzle rewards you with a tetromino-shaped sigil. Collect enough sigils and you advance in the game. But depending on which direction you choose advance, you’ll either suffer the wrath of or enjoy the praise of Elohim, the godlike narrative voice. Advance as Elohim commands, and you’ll be praised. Advance up the forbidden tower, and you’ll be chastised.
This choice in either defiance of or honor of a religious deity is where the game tries to be more than a game. But I’m not sure it succeeds. (more…)
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Should You Feel Bad for Playing a Videogame Created with Crunch?
Hey Future Caleb, I know it’s been a long time since we talked, but my silence should be expected. When you agree to go halfsies with your past self on a timeshare, and then refuse to pay up when you realize that a timeshare means we’re splitting the use of a dirty beach condo and it doesn’t mean that we’ll be sharing the same timeline so as to allow you to live once again with arms and legs, you can expect me to be a bit mad. Yes, I agree that considering our impossible dialog we have going here means that time-based term confusion is inevitable, but come on, if humanity really invented a way to exchange lives across time and space, we’d come up with a much better name than timeshare…like, swap, life swap…okay, timeshare is a pretty good name. You’re right to have been confused.
But that’s not why I’m reaching out to you today. I want to talk about why you should feel bad buying a videogame. Okay, not really, that may be an unfortunate side effect. So, I just finished a really great book called Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the fight for Art and Soul in Video Games by Walt Williams, and some interesting ideas came up about the crunch periods in videogame development. Crunch time, or just Crunch, is the period of a game’s development in which staff are working 2-3 times as many hours as normal, usually leading to work-life imbalance at best and severe mental and physical health issues at worst. One surprising tidbit I learned: Crunch is not responsible for the lack of time and attention needed to properly spell videogame, as a compound word. I’ll blame your editor, Walt. Because I don’t want to stop believing in you. And don’t cite Google. Google is wrong, too.
I’m not here to defend or condemn Crunch. For the purposes of this video, I’m just going to say overall the damage caused by Crunch outweighs the good. Lots of articles have been written with whistle-blower sources recently. Crunch is real and it can be damaging. (more…)