game thinkies

08 Jul, 2023

over the past few months i've been playin a lot of GAMES lets talk about GAMES

(chronological order because i like order ok here we go)

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advance wars remake

• my friends worked on this game!!! an official title published by nintendo and maddievision and mklachu were a part of the music team aaaaaaaa
• it is very clear that so much love and attention and effort went into creating the arrangements and the implementation systems, it is so good
• other than gushing about the music, this game is very fun and complex, it's got a really clean and elegant presentation and makes a lot of quality-of-life changes that help the flow of a match super well
• the only issue is that i am absolute fucking dogshit at the game, like brain too small kinda vibes
• i'm particularly bad at basically any strategic game that involves careful positioning (like chess), something about the instinct to forge ahead aggressively or stay back defensively is really difficult and confusing for me
• i'll make my way through it eventually, just...you know...when i'm brave enough
• whats an airport

huniepop

• this is the equivalent of "i just look at playboy for the articles"
• 8 years ago i saw one of my favorite let's players play this game and she went through the whole thing, i revisited the LP and wanted to try it myself
• and i love it
• it's a dating sim/match 3 porn game on steam, and even though i kinda just get through the dating sim aspect, there is zero irony in my love for the gameplay
• the match 3 system they've created is genuinely super fun, imagine bejeweled but you can move a tile freely either horizontally or vertically
• it's strategic and engaging in a way that really meshes well with my brain, this kind of forethought and planning is soooo fun
• what i'm saying is, i fully beat the game and didn't jack off to it once which is hilarious

picross 3d

• this is my decompress game
• i got this game when the wii u eshop was closing down, and it's such a smart take on picross
• logic puzzles are extremely fun to me, and although i like picross, it does start to get stale and repetitive once you've played enough of the default version, especially with the solving process being so heavily focused on counting
• this game makes the puzzles themselves cubic which naturally introduces unique restrictions and patterns, and it just injects new life into picross in a very long-lasting and satisfying way
• it also helps that moving around and navigating the puzzle is super tactile and responsive due to the ds touch screen (or uhhh wii u gamepad)
• but yeah, putting on some warm jazz piano in the background while playing this and drinking tea is maybe one of the best things ever

we love katamari: the remaster idk it's a long title

• i love this remaster so much and i love katamari, i'm so happy this came out
• i also have thoughts
• my biggest complaint (that existed for the original version as well) is that the text auto-scrolls when you wait like, 5 seconds...and no one is talking about it and it drives me insane
• so let's say you get a text, you take a moment to respond to it, and you look back at the game and it went through 3 text-boxes without you pressing a button
• i genuinely don't understand the purpose of refusing to allow the player to experience dialogue at their own pace
• another thing is that i feel like they go a smidge too far on the insults post-level, like hey cmon chill out let me be happy i finished the level you know
• it sounds like i don't like the game but these are just noticeable nitpicks overall, i absolutely loved the game, i love it more this time than when i originally played it
• the music is absolutely phenomenal and extremely inspiring, the levels are creative and take the katamari concept so much further than before, and this specific remaster includes small quality of life changes that are purely beneficial and really make this the definitive version of this game
• also they brought back eternal which is amazing
• so buy this game, it's worth it i promise

not zelda

• i'm not playing zelda lol
• this isn't for any specific reason, it's not a protest or refusal, i'm just......not interested
• which feels strange considering every human being who has a switch is playing totk for hundreds of hours and adoring it
• the first thing is that i still want to play through botw
• i've been putting it off for years because i've been intimidated by how people had described their experiences as massive timesinks that encourage getting lost and wandering, which to me is very intriguing but also very overwhelming
• the second thing is that totk, as it's been described, is characterized by density and mechanical exploration, and that focus is something that has been largely and widely praised by...literally everyone lol
• but for me, those qualities (which seem to lean towards a traditional AAA open-world experience) don't excite me in the same way, i much more strongly identify with the thesis statement of botw, which is space and stillness
• of course with the release of totk, many people are saying that botw now feels outdated, and the emptiness of botw is currently being called into question in terms of how intentional its design is
• there's a real argument to be made about skipping botw, and i'm happy people are finally understanding the experience that so many people had back in 2017, one that feels more fleshed out and expansive
• but i enjoy (theoretically at least) what botw provides in its intense focus on quiet reflection, regardless of the retroactive lens that clouds it
• so yeah i'm not playing zelda lol

wheel of fortune

• meanwhile i'm playing the switch version of wheel of fortune lmaooooo
• i bought it on a whim years ago and hadn't fully realized how genuinely fun the game is
• i've even maxed out my level, i am truly fucked
• there are things to criticize about this version, the response time when moving your cursor highlight is abysmal and easily the roughest part
• like i just wish i could move from A to B to C to D without having to deliberately pause slightly to account for delay
• but there are multiple things that help me get through the input lag and actually enjoy myself
• one is just the fact that i love the general construction of language, solving a puzzle involves scouring my brain for potential phrases and concepts, filling in prefixes and suffixes and prepositions, making consonant decisions based off of current statistical probability, and vowel decisions through a cost-benefit analysis
• tldr i like words
• another big thing that helps this version in particular is the music, it's royalty-free straight-ahead jazz tunes, and even though it's painfully generic, for some reason it soothes me
• jazz and puzzles, something about it.......
• there's other stuff like the computer guessing things like Q for me to figure it out by myself, the host's voice lines getting rudely cut off when i click skip, generally just feeling like a genius for solving shit like Frosted Mini Wheats
• so yeah, i'm playing that and it feels really weird and funny to click the game icon and know that my switch friends are going "what the fuck why is ryan playing wheel of fortune"

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ok that's it! it seems like people are doing a light second migration to cohost which is cool [2024 ryan's note: rip], so that'll give some good motivation to ramble about brain stuff and thinky thoughts soooooo yeah stay tuuuuned~