Hey [%target] Whatcha Playin'?

[Friday]

Yeah if you continue through the main story, you'll see that the gang (and especially Arthur) are very anti-slavery. They are also very inclusive of minorities. Lenny and Charles are close to the top of my favorite characters. In Dutch's case, his acceptance of non-whites is a little more complex. He's ultimately self-serving, but his constant preaching of his ideals seems to have rubbed off on most of the gang anyway.

Most of them. Micah is still a racist piece of shit.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I mean the various anti-slavery bits have shone through often enough (I'm at over 250 hours played now... finally went to Chapter 3 lol), but that was almost 4th-wall breaking. Not that I'm complaining! I was just more used to the usual Arthur chiding a field of reb corpses with "Y'all just... so angry!" (lolol), this was almost like an easter egg.

Dutch seems to be a believer in the "Noble Savage" trope, with all its baggage, especially when he gripes about settled folk as European peasants. But Dutch has always been a huffing-his-own-farts kinda guy. Which, mentioning Lenny, also reminds me that watching Lenny school Dutch on the shitty poseur authors he reads is one of the better interactions you can come across.

Also, speaking of random mobs, goddamn I've only had a handful of run-ins with them, but the Nite Folk are no fucking joke. Those fuckers are NASTY even when you know they're coming.

[Thad]

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is out, and I'm just going to gush one more time that Digital Eclipse's interactive documentaries are one of the most exciting developments in video game history in years.

Minter's something of a blind spot for me. I've heard of Tempest 2000, of course, but had never actually played it until a few weeks ago (it's as good as people say; I don't think "timeless classic" is an exaggeration). Beyond that I wasn't really aware of him or his work before now.

I heard one of the DE guys, maybe Kohler, on Retronauts not too long ago, talking about how there's this kind of conventional wisdom about game history, and it's really America-centric and really console-centric and it's not the only story; the evolution of gaming was a whole lot different on American PCs, let alone in Europe and Japan. Minter comes from a world of British microcomputers that I'm only vaguely aware of, and I'm extremely excited to learn about all this stuff that I missed growing up.

I'm only about 20 minutes in but I've gotten as far as his ZX81 version of Centipede, a game which he had never played and had only seen in still photos. It's delightful -- extremely primitive, slightly off and maybe a little more Space Invaders-y (you can only move left-to-right and, after the first couple of levels, the centipede starts shooting at you), but very playable. I love that artifacts like this have survived and we can play them.

[Thad]

I wonder if they tweaked the difficulty on CT or I'm just overleveled, because I've breezed through a couple of early bosses I remember being pretty tough (the Guardian and Masa/Mune).

[Niku]

Balatro really is as stupidly good and addictive as people have made it out to be. "Poker Roguelike" is brilliant just because most people have a concept of how to play poker, so if you know what poker hands do, then you're already onboarded to the way you interact with the game. That frees up your mental space to understanding how the bigger layer of the game works, how you need to earn chips via your poker hands to continue progressing, and how the Jokers in the game will then begin to warp your play style. Because the Jokers are the roguelike gimmick here: random cards that will change your deck and scoring in different ways. Multiply your score by 15 any time you play a Full House. Give an extra 30 chips for playing any Face card, etc. And as you play more, you unlock more Jokers that do more esoteric things, and find new ways to combine those Jokers in interesting ways, and suddenly you're doing the Poker equivalent of firing a howitzer at a squirrel when you set off a chain of x18 multipliers to score over a million chips against a blind that only required you to hit ten thousand chips.

Good game. Great way to disappear an evening.

[nosimpleway]

Palworld is
a) still in Early Access and may get better as new versions come out
but
b) does not appear to have a single creative or innovative idea to explore

April Fool's Day make your heart go doki-doki

[Friday]

Hey guys, did you know that in terms of male human and female Pal breeding,

[nosimpleway]

Yeah the fandom is going "you made Chillet the extremely shy boy who secretly loves to be cuddled you definitely know your audience also please release this game for realsies"

[Friday]

If they can fuck, they must be made to fuck.

[Thad]

Went ahead and snagged Hi-Fi Rush in that Humble Choice bundle and I'm only about half an hour in but it is a gorgeous game with a soundtrack that rocks and I was already mad about the studio being shut down on principle but now I'm also mad because they made something genuinely great.

[Niku]

Grabbed Animal Well yesterday -- it's a new side scrolling indie game made by one creator and while most outlets are calling it a metroidvania for lack of a better term, to sell it to THIS forum it's much more of a Knytt-like. You're a little blob who can run and jump, and that's it until you start picking up a couple of tools, all of which are various real world toys.

The first two (slight mechanical spoilers hidden) I found for an example of the mobility in the game are a bubble wand that puts a single bubble platform in front of and slightly above you -- when you stand on it, it will slowly sink downward until you jump off, at which point it pops. You can only have one bubble on the screen at a time, so this becomes effectively your double jump, but can also be used to descend long vertical passages safely. anyone with platforming prowess will immediately also realize this is the game's infinite bomb jump as you can jump off a bubble, spit out another one, and land on the new one to ascend as long as you have horizontal space to allow you to do so

The second tool I found was a frisbee, which you can throw in a direct horizontal line in front of you; it will bounce off of solid objects it encounters and go back in the other direction until you catch it or it hits one of the environmental objects that destroys created tools and can be used to do things like flip distant switches. Also try jumping on it while it's in flight, and it will carry you along with it wherever it's going.

So basically every tool you get is going to have several different use cases and little quirks that are then used for platforming and switch-flipping puzzles of increasing complexity. There's no traditional combat to speak of in the game aside from throwing items to distract certain hostile elements or to nudge creatures around, and so far any boss encounters have been basically "puzzles but with timers / things hustling you". The atmosphere of the game is "rainy, quiet little environmental nooks and crannies full of various animals and critters" and both the feel and the level design is Extremely Fucking Knytt, just with far more mechanical complexity in the tools you have to traverse and interact with the environment. And supposedly once you finish the "main game" there's tons and tons of increasingly esoteric postgame puzzles and environmental clues a la games like Fez or Tunic to solve greater mysteries beyond "how do i get past this gnarly ghost cat" so I've started stamping my map up with shit that looks suspicious.

I put a bunch of hours into it yesterday and just collected the fourth major macguffin the game sends you after and it has been scratching a Knytt itch like nothing else, so yeah, absolutely recommend it to anyone missing Knorpsin'.

[Friday]

a Knytt-like

*slams down money*

[KingRoyal]

(Picture of the kid from the Simpsons as he looks on in horror at Animal Well beating my wallet to death on the street)

STOP! STOP! He was already sold when he saw the neon on black aesthetic! *crying*

[Mongrel]

I need some fun suggestions, for a particular RDR2 form of entertainment.

You see, the first time I ran into the Eugenics guy (heretofore referred to as 'Eugene'), I went through all the basics in my head and thought, no a teachable moment would be a lot more fun than simple execution - what would be the... fitting thing to do to this asshole?

So I hogtied Eugene, threw him on the back of my horse, and dumped him in the middle of Butcher Creek (and pissed off all the townsfolk because I drew my knife to cut his bonds, I guess?), and left him to his fate at the hands of the game's finest examples of the master race. Well, actually I first tried to give him to the actual Murfrees, but they kept running away.

To my eternal amusement, he somehow escaped and found his way back to S'not Denis after a few in-game weeks. Oooh! This also allowed me to get to hear more of his speeches, which become progressively (haha progressive - get it?) more ridiculous with each encounter.

Second time, I just lassoed him straight out, which I discovered was a no-no, because the cops started blasting like mad (over a $5 bounty, lmao #GTAthings), in fact THEY killed Eugene that time - their missing the crook, yet riddling the victim with holes was right on the mark for the cops. Unfortunately, while I did somehow escape town and had an amusing odyssey back home with no horse, all while being chased by a few mounted cops on the roads, I had to reload after a bit of a fuckup.

No problem! Let's do it again! So the third time (second from Eugene's point of view, I suppose), I discovered he won't offer you a pamphlet and trigger the free hits any more. Instead I just hung around making him increasingly uncomfortable (there is in fact dialogue for this, lol), then shoved him, at which point he apparently became "fair game" again and I successfully nabbed him once more (tipping your hat to the cop as you pass by with a hogtied Eugene on your shoulder is a nice touch.)

Anyway, this time I left Eugene tied up on a small muddy island surrounded by gators outside Lagras where he could barely keep his head above the mud. I wonder how ol' Eugene will wriggle his way out of this one? Will the locals take pity on him? If they do I'm sure he won't change his ways, but ah, we must try diligently in our reformation efforts, with the sort of firm-yet-fair compassion befitting Gilded Age America.

If Eugene pops up again, I might cut him free - only this time right outside of Beaver Hollow. But beyond that, I'm not sure what else might be suitable for the reeducation of Eugene, so... any suggestions?