I didn’t think I’d be revisiting the mind of walkedoutneimans so soon after Tyko’s Dying Together, but here we are with iPad Baby. I need a breather. I can’t take this much sensory overload.

I feel that deeply, since more and more I can’t stand the internet. There are too many people there. Too many thoughts, opinions, and content flying around in all directions. It becomes impossible to parse the important information from the irrelevant. Worse yet, companies like Google are continually pushing irrelevant content to the forefront by allowing those who produce it in bulk to rise to the top of searches.

I’m not sure why I need an interactive interpretation of this distressing reality we live in, but here’s iPad Baby to extrapolate on the relentless assault of garbage we’re under each day.

Into the sludge

You’re dropped into iPad Baby with absolutely no explanation of what is going on, and none is forthcoming. However, your screen is already dominated by an iPad perpetually displaying meaningless video and a Ring camera pointed directly in your face. The world you are in is a spaghetti nest of corridors painted with watermarked and conflicting images. Flitting around these abominable hallways, are 2D homunculi compiled of various imagery. Almost immediately, you probably want to leave.

The iPad on the side reminds me of “Sludge Content,” a TikTok phenomenon where videos are cut together with other unrelated ones. Your digital companion shows ceaseless footage of gameplay of (maybe) mobile games, the head and shoulders of a Sim, and scrolls of microtransactions. It’s meaningless to gameplay, but that’s perhaps the point. It’s just there, passively gnawing at your attention.

The actual game here is actually rather simple. When you get near enough to one of the figures, you’re displayed a few items that you need to collect from the environment and throw at them. The obstacle you run into is that the hallways are intensely disorienting, and the inhabitants of the world move at a hyperactive pace. By the time you find the item they need, they could be absolutely anywhere.

Graphic assault

You wind up just dashing through the passageways, a can of energy drink in your hand, trying to find a person to fling it at. The “people” you pass keep on dropping bizarre, meaningless statements about their lives. Insecurities, complaints, hopes, and advice bombard you in grating text-to-speech voices. The manic soundtrack playing over all of this is strangely appealing throughout all of it.

Then an alarm sounds, a horrific police bulletin appears on your phone, and darkness engulfs the world before receding. The police are after you, every bit as compellingly twisted as everything else in the world. Don’t worry. If they catch you, they’ll simply take whatever item you’re carrying and slap handcuffs on your wrists. That has always been more of an enticement than a deterrent to me.

And that’s it, really. As you find objects and pass them off to the appropriate monstrosity flitting through the hallways, more of them get dropped. Once you manage to deliver them all, you “win.”

We are all damned

iPad Baby is not as complex as Tyko’s Dying Together, and that wasn’t too deep to begin with. The message it carries behind its garish jank-pop graphical assault is also far more overt. Tyko’s Dying Together dropped you into a confusing world where the deeper meaning very gradually surfaces, whereas iPad Baby kind of gives it away in the title.

The whole experience is as anxiety-inducing as the systems that it represents. The thing about iPad Baby is that it ends, whereas social media is so entrenched in society today that it’s hard to avoid it. Not impossible, but to demonstrate how necessary it can be, walkedoutneimans contacted me through Twitter to let me know of their new perversion of the Doom engine. The trailer is hosted on YouTube, because where else would you put it?

TikTok is something else, though. I already avoid YouTube unless I really need it, but the ability to just scroll down through a bunch of videos all competing for attention makes me nauseous to even think about it. It’s just, well, sludge. Enough of my attention already goes to waste.

Upsetting

The horrible desecrations of Doom that walkedoutneimans puts out are my favorite type of art. It’s the type that looks like offensive trash, but when you actually dig in, you learn something about the creator’s perspective and maybe connect with it yourself. I mean, analyzing iPad Baby caused me to start spitting venom at the culture that is growing like mold on the ass of the internet, so it obviously got a response. 

Meanwhile, my husband leaned over to look at my screen and said, “Ew, does it always look like that?”

“Yeah,” I replied, pointing the camera at the most offensive thing in the vicinity.

“That upsets me,” he said.

Well, yeah. That’s the point.

iPad Baby is available for free over on Itch.

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“WHELP. IT HAPPENED,” begins the tweet from Lilith Walther (b0tster on Twitter), one of the developers behind Bloodborne Kart, a fanmade spin-off of the popular FromSoftware game. Sony has allegedly contacted them requesting the removal of copyrighted content from the game.

“Long story short I need to scrub the branding off of what was previously known as Bloodborne Kart, which we will do. But that requires a short delay,” they continue. However, they add that “the game is still coming out! It'll just look slightly different.”

It’s not entirely surprising since the Bloodborne Kart directly references the title of the 2015 PS4 game and includes characters from it. The game is a “meme made real,” originating from an April Fool’s Day Tweet back in 2021. What is surprising is that it has taken so long, as the game has been in open development for quite some time now. It’s perhaps because, a few months ago, it was given the release date of January 31, which is next week.

Of course, the developers were planning to release the game for free, but it’s still infringing on the company’s copyright. It’s honestly not at all surprising, which Lilith states themself in another tweet, saying, “Like I've said in multiple interviews, we were all expecting this to happen so we could be pleasantly surprised if it didn't.”

It’s definitely a bummer, and I feel bad for the development team who were looking forward to putting their creation in the hands of fans, but they’re taking it in stride. Lilith says, “Turning this into an original game that we have full creative control over is kind of exciting. This is a fan game no more!”

Lilith says that they are current uncertain of what the new release date will be for the rebranded Bloodborne Kart, but they hope to share news as soon as possible.

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It’s pretty easy to stand out in the Virtual Boy catalog. There were only fourteen games. Half weren’t very good, half felt like tech demos, and half were Virtual Boy Wario Ware. If a game didn’t fit into any of those three halves, it stuck out like a missing tooth.

Panic Bomber was one of those games. It’s a perfectly find match-3 puzzle game, with a heaping of Bomberman charm. It just didn’t benefit from being on the hardware in the slightest. The Virtual Boy had its advantages, but it’s hardly the ideal way to play a puzzle game.

Thankfully, it wasn’t exclusive to the crimson goggles. It originally came out on PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² in 1994 and was ported to a number of platforms. Unfortunately, the only other time it came out in North America was a port on Wii U. Thankfully again, I have an Analogue Duo now, and it plays Japanese games. The Super CD-ROM² version isn’t that expensive, so now I can play Bomberman: Panic Bomber without wrecking my neck.

Not hereditary

I’ve never been terrific at puzzle games of the falling block variety. I’m not terrible, either. I can usually get through whatever story mode they present, but I’m not competitive. My sister, however, is a high-level Dr. Mario player. She and her college roommates got really into it for a time, and she built up skills that I would define as “mad.” I can wreck her at most games, but I’d need a few training montages to compete against her in Dr. Mario.

Most of my affection for the genre comes from my mother. Not hereditarily. I mean, she used to play them a lot. I’d come home from school, and she’d be on my Super Nintendo engaged in Yoshi’s Cookie or Kirby’s Avalanche. I didn’t have much interest in them myself, but my concept of cozy largely comes from my mom. It’s the same reason I often drink my tea with way too much milk.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that Bomberman: Panic Bomber gives off those same vibes. Puyo Puyo did a real number on the genre. This could practically be called “Bomberman’s Mean Bomb Machine,” except that would completely destroy the rhyme.

The point is that you face off against various cartoon monstrosities whose portrait sits in the middle of the screen. When you put three Bomberman heads of the same color in a row, they disappear. The big difference here is that more explosives are involved.

Munitions stockpile

Every time you eliminate a row of heads, a bomb will pop up from the bottom of the screen. Eventually, a pink bomb will drop from the top, and you (sometimes) want to steer it so that it explodes (in the classic Bomberman plus shape) and creates a chain reaction with all the unlit bombs you built up.

I know what you’re thinking, but contrary to what we’ve been taught, the Bomberman heads here are mostly immune to explosions. Like Puyo Puyo, the strategy isn’t to keep your field clean. It’s to cause as much frustration to your opponent as possible. Detonating a bomb sends garbage to their field with the goal, expectedly, to fill up their side of the screen until it overflows. Garbage can only be removed using the bombs, so the game boils down to amassing as many explosives as you can, then detonating it at the right time to both prevent your field from overflowing and fill up your opponents’.

You also build up a gauge as you knock out combos, and when it’s full, a big bomb drops. This one will actually clear out Bomberman heads, so it’s especially useful when you’re about to drown and need some air. It also typically results in a lot of garbage getting flung to the other side of the screen.

This leads to some interesting back-and-forth action as you clear your screen, send garbage to your opponent, and then they detonate their bombs and send it right back. When this gets going, it can be rather exciting, like a good sumo match. 

On the other hand, it seems like Panic Bomber has a single strategy, which is to stockpile bombs and detonate them at the least convenient time. You can still build up combos Puyo Puyo style, which will get you appropriate bonuses, but it all comes down to who can screw the other over the hardest. Just like the business world.

Path of destruction

This is going to sound weird, but the Virtual Boy version of Panic Bomber is better. Not that I really want to assemble a team to set up my Virtual Boy just to play it, but the VB version had more detailed graphics. To the credit of the Super CD-ROM² version, it supports five players.

I was kind of disappointed that it doesn’t really take advantage of the Super CD-ROM² beyond just for the soundtrack. There’s only an outro cutscene, but it’s not as elaborate as I’m used to from the platform. In fact, the story isn’t really set up within the game itself. You just watch Bomberman cut a path of destruction through the world map.

Bomberman: Panic Bomber is far from the best match-3 puzzle game in the world. It probably isn’t going to replace Puyo Puyo for anyone, but it’s decent fun for a while. It’s especially beneficial if you have one friend too many any need a five-player game to keep everyone happy. I don’t have that problem. Being too popular has never been an issue for me.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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Mr. Podunkian revealed the Steam store page for their upcoming city life simulator, Sunkissed City, which is coming to PC sometime in late 2024.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the handheld version of The Urbz. Nor does it look like the console version of The Urbz. It looks more like Stardew Valley, which makes sense because Mr. Podunkian previously worked at Stardew Valley developer Concerned Ape. If you liked Stardew Valley, but felt like it needed more concrete, then this might be for you.

In Sunkissed City, you don’t actually live in a place called “Sunkissed City.” It’s Apollo City, which is similar. There you take care of DIY gardens, get to know the locals, and try to solve the mystery of why everyone has been feeling crappy. There’s even fishing, which I think is maybe a law for developing these sorts of games. You can also play co-op with friends if you're that sort of person.

I’m liking the looks of Sunkissed City. I like farming sims, but having grown up in a rural area, I prefer being an urban dweller because food is closer, and I don’t drive. While I’m still waiting for someone to adapt the gentle mix of adventure game and life simulator found in the handheld versions of The Urbz, that’s a different matter. For now, I’ll just be happy if I’m able to space out at the magazine rack at the 7/11 around midnight.

Sunkissed City is currently targeting a release at the end of 2024.

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Inin Games and NatsumeAtari have released a new trailer of Tengo Project’s upcoming remake, Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn. This one shows the new game side-by-side with the 1990 original.

If there’s one thing gamers love, it’s comparing things. Shadow of the Ninja is the oldest game that Tengo Project has remade from Natsume’s back catalog, and being on the NES, it was built on limited hardware. Rather than simply spruce up the game like with Wild Guns: Reloaded or create an entirely new entry in the series like Pocky & Rocky Reshrined, they’ve kind of found a comfortable place in between. The levels are reminiscent of the original, but everything has been overhauled with new abilities and enemy placement.

I think it looks pretty great! Placed next to the remake, the 8-bit original looks incredibly sparse. It was actually a decent-looking game for the time period, but the NES was very restrictive when it came to how much you could jam on screen at one time. Tengo Project has already shown off some great pixel art chops with their previous games.

The remake will have new weapons, a new level, and an upgraded soundtrack by the original composer, Iku Mizutani.

I wonder where Tengo Project will go next. My first guess would be S.C.A.T., but what I’m really hoping for is Abadox. I guess we should wait and see how Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn turns out.

Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn is coming to Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC in Summer 2024.

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Dating sims are harder to create than people give them credit for. Hundreds of thousands of words, dialogue trees that stretch to the horizon and take into account successes and failures, trying to fit in as many characters as possible to suit different preferences; the complexity piles up and threatens to collapse. It gets more difficult when you try to merge it with another genre.

I’ve seen failure happen many times throughout my years as Destructoid’s resident self-proclaimed dating sim expert. There’s a reason why games like Mass Effect usually have relationships no more complex than “listen to life story, complete side quest, bang.” Anything more ambitious leads to juggling problems, and it takes a lot of talent and planning to handle all those balls.

Nova Hearts is a game that, so far, drops those balls. However, mercifully, Lightbulb Crew is starting with just a prologue, so there’s still time to grab those balls and get them airborne.

Nova Hearts: First Spark is the free introduction to the full Nova Hearts experience expected this summer. It has you play as Luce, who has moved back to her hometown after spending some time trying to make it in the city. She’s staying the summer on a sabbatical. From what? Frustratingly, you aren’t told, but you’re expected to go along with it.

“So what happened?” you’re asked on multiple occasions. But you can only make hints because you, the player, don’t know. Why give the choice in how you respond? I’m not sure.

Much of the story takes place on Luce’s cellphone screen. Scenes are set up through text chat. Where the players are going and what they’re planning to do; that all happens on a phone screen. This isn’t a bad way to do it, but it’s handled very intrusively.

At one point, I was invited out to eat right before a party by Luce’s old friends. I’m guessing “eat” is just code for pre-drink. I go to that scene, the bartender asks me what I’m having, I tell him that I’m waiting for friends. Suddenly, Luce is lounging at her desk with the cell phone in hand. What the fuck just happened? What was the point of that scene? 

I’m guessing it was just an opportunity to meet/hit on the bartender. However, I don’t drink, so normally, the characters I play don’t either, and all the direct flirting options were way too strong for the vibes I wanted to put down, so I didn’t. However, the fact that my decisions meant that Luce didn’t even meet her friends in that scene just left me extremely confused. And it wouldn’t be the only time.

As Nova Hearts proceeded through its introduction, I started wondering how long it was going to take before super-powers happened. The game’s hook is that it combines a dating sim with a super-hero RPG, but it frequently seemed like the setup was going to take a very long time to get to the whole part where everyone gets super-powers.

It happened in mid-conversation.

One moment, I was hitting on an entrancing reporter, and then suddenly, I was in combat with cats. There was a moment in between where Luce stands dumbstruck by something, but the game doesn’t really show what she sees. Everyone is just gone, she just has super-powers, and suddenly there are monsters.

This is where I noticed that Nova Hearts has no narration. Actions aren’t described, which is kind of strange for a game that is largely just text and static images. Sure, I can see the backgrounds and characters, but they don’t do anything. The action is, therefore, restricted to what the characters say, and it leaves a lot of gaps that are filled with nothing.

The combat itself is a bit of a problem. I can dig the timeline battle system, which is somewhat similar to Fuga: Melodies of Steel but with less strategy. Essentially, you have a visual aid for when a character or enemy’s turn is going to happen. However, this is largely just useful for using combo attacks where you overlap two of your heroes attack turns to create a bigger attack.

Shallow combat isn’t great, but the real problem is the lack of balance and polish in Nova Hearts: First Spark. The characters' powers just aren’t that Super. Most attacks feel very underpowered, which makes combat as a whole a slog. The combo power between Luce and CJ doesn’t feel much more effective than CJ’s normal area-of-effect attack, so that kills strategy even further.

But moreover, a lot of the combat in First Spark feels arbitrary. It just happens. It’s a visual novel that, every so often, gets interrupted by fighting.

Violence has long been leaned on by video games as one of the few forms of conflict resolution that can be easily depicted in code. However, most of the time in Nova Hearts, there isn’t any conflict, just combat. The fighting doesn’t happen because you pissed off another character or chose to journey to the wrong side of town. They just happen because it’s fight o’clock. It’s hard to feel like the combat really fits with the romance when there isn’t any tension or intensity to be found anywhere.

As for the romance? Well, all the characters are DTF AF, so there’s that. You’re presented with a wide range of options to try and fit as many preferences as possible. However, the game kept pushing me toward this guy whom Luce apparently shared her first kiss with in the past. However, it turns out he’s a masochist, and there isn’t room for two of those in this relationship.

Beyond that, I’m not sure. At about the time I was getting frustrated with the masochistic werewolf, something broke in Nova Hearts, and two teams were left facing off in perpetuity with no way to advance. That is to say, it soft-locked. I checked, and an autosave did trigger at the same fight, so I wasn’t going to lose any progress. At that point, however, I had seen enough. Not even the promise of potential smooching was able to get me to dive back in. I’m done.

As I said at the start, dating sims are far more difficult and complex than anyone gives them credit for. It’s not all that surprising when someone tries to incorporate the hydra of mechanics that make up the genre, only to come up short. It says more about the difficulty of genre than it does about a developer.

However, the art, music, and premise all have promise to them. I’m hoping Lightbulb Crew will go back to the drawing board with what works and, with a bit of careful planning, come back with a more polished Nova Hearts experience that delivers. It’ll take a bit of a commitment, but that’s what makes a worthwhile relationship.

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Dejobaan Games and Petricore Inc. have announced that the remaster of their 2009 indie classic, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! Remastered, has launched today on PC.

For those keeping score, this is actually the second remake of AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. The first time was back in 2011 with AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome. AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! Remastered is a heck of a lot shinier than the last time around, benefiting from over a decade of base-jumping advancements.

If you’re unfamiliar, the AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! series is about base-jumping, but rather than just put you in some boring city, you’re dropped in abstract spaces populated by floating buildings and other pieces of debris. It plays a bit like a rail shooter, with gravity pulling you forward. You amass points by flying as close as possible to the structures. You need to flip some groups of fans off while giving others the thumbs up. It’s neat.

I was actually there on day one for AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, having pre-ordered it before launch. It may be hard to believe now, but back in those days, it was a lot more feasible to keep up with new releases. Marketplaces had yet to be flooded with bad imitations and straight-up trash games. The indie market was a lot smaller, and it was easier to stand out.

I loved the game when I played it. What I found most interesting was the storyline that it built around its abstract premise. It had this weirdly cohesive absurdity that captivated me. I did, at one point long ago, try to draw inspiration from it in my writing, but it requires more of an organic approach. If you try to replicate it with intention, it just won’t work. You’ll look like you’re trying too hard.

Anyhow, I’ll be checking out this remaster. I may have drifted away from Dejobaan’s orbit over the years, but I wouldn’t mind revisiting the simpler times.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! Remastered is available now for PC.

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According to reporting from Kotaku, Black Forest Games has announced the termination of 50% of its overall workforce, which was said to be around 110 employees in 2023. They join a growing list of layoffs experienced in the industry, which continues to accelerate from last year.

Black Forest Games is a German Developer who was responsible for Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, Titan Quest, and the recent Destroy All Humans remasters. They are currently working on an adaptation of the comic book mini-series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin.  

Black Forest Games is a subsidiary of THQ Nordic who, in turn, is a subsidiary of Embracer Group, a publisher who was rather central in the mass of layoffs that occurred through 2023. The company spent much of last year cutting back staff throughout all its many subsidiaries, following explosive expansionism and the fall-through of a large investment.

A huge contraction of the industry has made this a distressing time for anyone who loves the medium. 2023 was already a huge year for job losses in the industry, while 2024 is already shaping up to be worse. Kotaku is keeping a running tally of video game (and adjacent) layoffs, and by their count, we’re already approaching nearly 6,000 in the first month of the year.

It’s hard to say what our beloved hobby will look like when all of this finally slows down, but it’s rather difficult to stay optimistic.

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Torture Star Video, the publishing arm of Puppet Combo, is bringing Tomás Esconjaureguy’s slasher adventure, Cannibal Abduction, to consoles. It will arrive on Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles on February 8, 2024.

Tomás Esconjaureguy previously brought us The Night of the Scissors back in 2022, which sounds like a localization title for Clock Tower. Cannibal Abduction followed in 2023 on PC, where it was self-published by Selewi, Esconjaureguy’s publishing label.

As is standard for cannibal stories and common in horror, Cannibal Abduction has the protagonist, Henry, breaking down while on a road trip. A friendly local stops to give him a tow, and you know how this goes. Henry finds himself on the menu and has to escape before the meal begins.

To be honest, it sounds rather standard with fixed camera angles, hide-and-seek gameplay, limited inventory, and “soft” puzzle solving. However, the reception to it seems pretty warm.

Speaking of warm reception, while it doesn’t explicitly say it's a compilation in the title, Esconjaureguy’s previous title, The Night of the Scissors, is included in the pricetag. The game has you play as Adam, who breaks into an abandoned post office to rob it, only to find it inhabited by “The Snipper,” who doesn’t take trespassing lightly.

It might be worth noting that by Esconjaureguy’s estimation, Cannibal Abduction will take two hours, while The Night of the Scissors is around 40. I generally prefer my horror games on the shorter side, but it’s something to keep in mind when you look at the price tag, which, at $11.99, is a bit higher than the combined price of the games on Steam.

Cannibal Abduction is on PC right now, but it’s coming to Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on February 8, 2024.

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astragon Entertainment and Mi'pu'mi Games have released Howl on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S today. It was initially released in November 2023 on PC and Switch.

Howl is one that escaped me. When I think back to November, it’s mostly a blur to me, so that’s no surprise. However, it looks interesting from screenshots and the title of the press release reads “critically acclaimed.” That phrase gets stretched pretty far in the PR world, but, sure enough, Opencritic shows a warm reception from the publications that covered it.

The announcement also describes Howl as folklore turn-based strategy. A strange howling turns anyone who hears it into werewolves. You play as a deaf heroine who is searching to cure it. From the trailer, it looks to be more of a puzzle game than a turn-based strategy title. You plan your moves in six steps, changing positions on the tiled field and completing actions to try and evade or take down enemies. If you’ll forgive the somewhat obscure reference, it reminds me of Trogdor the Board Game.

There are 60 stages through 4 chapters, and you unlock new abilities and upgrades as you progress through the world map. Most striking, however, is the art style, which looks like it’s hand-drawn in a simple storybook style. 

I’m bringing this up not just to warn PlayStation and Xbox players that it’s now available to their chosen platform but also for anyone else who, like me, might have missed it at first.

Howl is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, and PC.

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It’s a little less than a month until Pacific Drive rolls out into the world. To get you ready for the game, Ironwood Studios has released a video that covers the core gameplay.

It isn’t hard to understand the basics of Pacific Drive, but there are a lot of deeper systems to keep in mind. For example, gathering anchor energy is important, but you might not realize how important it really is until you’re caught in an area with reality collapsing around you. So, you can learn from your mistakes like I did, or you can watch this video.

Having played Pacific Drive, I can tell you that this 10-minute video is pretty all-encompassing, covering car maintenance, survival, scavenging, and upgrading. If you’re not sure what the game is going to play like, this will tell you what it is and what it isn’t. Also, look at it this way, it will allow you to glide through the tutorial parts pretty easily.

I previewed Pacific Drive a while back, and while I have some reservations, my time with it left me excited to get my hands on the full experience. There’s a lot of elements of what I love mixed in there, and I’m wondering how well they’ll fare when stretched out to a full experience. I’m worried that the core gameplay loop will become repetitive, so I’m hoping to see a lot of surprises scattered about as you proceed further into the zone.

Pacific Drive is out on February 22, 2024 for PS4 and PC.

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One of my oldest memories is of a time when my sister wouldn’t let my Ghostbusters action figures bust ghosts in her Barbie doll house. The exclusion was my only major exposure to the toy.

I did watch the hit 2023 movie, which I enjoyed. I think it was a fun idea to focus on the generational impacts the toy had on women rather than try to contrive some sort of hero’s journey out of it. Wait… it was a hero’s journey! That structure shows up in the strangest places.

Anyway, that’s not the reason I bought 1993’s Barbie Super Model. I did it because I’m still recovering from one of the worst games I’ve ever played. I need some comforting shovelware. Gosh, did I get it.

If you're a supermodel, what's your super power?

This may surprise you, but I am not a supermodel. I know very little about fashion in general. If I’m not going anywhere special on a given day, I’m usually wearing one of a variety of colors of the same tank top and a pair of jeans. I only really learned to match colors and patterns as a teenager, and it’s something I still have a shaky understanding of.

Barbie is a supermodel, on top of being an astronaut and a veterinarian. She’s been invited to compete in “the National Super Model Competition,” which seems like a strange sport but probably actually exists. To compete, she has to travel the country and memorize things. “A super model has to look her super best all the time. You never know when a photographer is going to take your picture!” Barbie says in the instruction manual.

Gee, Barbie, that sounds time-consuming and exhausting. Wouldn’t you rather just order in and play Streets of Rage all evening?

Don't you tell me to smile

I wasn’t really sure how you’d make a game about being a supermodel, but suddenly, my mind is flooded with ideas. Most of them are more in line with the Princess Maker series, but Barbie Super Model is more like Paperboy if it constantly interrupted you with quizzes.

A level starts off with Barbie making her way through a location, going toward the right-side of the screen. As you drive her pink Ferrari down Hollywood Boulevard, weaving through traffic like a self-centered cannonball, you eventually come across a handbag lying in the road. Like any woman would, you drive up to it to see if it’s designer.

You’re instead presented with a magazine cover with Barbie on it. She’s wearing some outfit, and it’s your job to memorize exactly what it looks like. You’re then put in a change room and need to put together that same outfit as accurately as you can. You first slide Barbie behind a privacy screen, and she then appears about an hour later in a different garb. These range from lavish dresses to what I’m pretty sure is the outfit the Beastie Boys wore in the Intergalactic Planetary music video. You change the three main colors of the outfit and then get to see how poorly you did.

Then it’s back to reckless driving. You continue imperiling pedestrians until everything suddenly stops, and you’re taken into a studio to practice your, uh, posing routine. Your catwalking? I don’t know. You need to guide Barbie along a path and press the correct button for each of the four nodes on it. Once again, this is memorization more than anything. You just need to remember the walking code.

A supermodel's super memory

Keep it in mind, as you speed back down Hollywood Boulevard back to the left side of the screen. At about the halfway point, you see a camera on the ground. Run it over! It takes you to yet another magazine cover, which depicts Barbie in a hat. Once more, memorize it within the half-second it remains on screen. You then need to replicate the hat she was wearing, the earrings she accessorized with, and the color of her lipstick, eyeshadow, and nails.

Then it’s back to driving until you’re abruptly dropped on the catwalk. Remember the code from when you were in the practice studio? Now’s the time to copy that. From memory.

You’re then given your score, and you’re sent to your next destination. You find yourself rollerskating in Hawaii. It plays exactly like the Ferrari sequence but with less chance of vehicular manslaughter.

Then you do it again while walking in Vail (Colorado, apparently).

Then you do it again in New York.

And then you’re done. That’s the whole game. By the time this article is posted, I will have spent more time writing, editing, and preparing it than I did actually playing the game. I completed the game twice. And then there was also my first attempt, where I got to Vail and died because I had trouble judging the trajectory of rogue snowballs and slipped on the ice repeatedly. This is all on the highest difficulty, I should add, because there are only two. The second one says you’re a “Junior Model,” and I am way more capable of memorization than a mere junior.

Don't give up, kid

I find it really amusing that so much of Barbie Super Model comes down to memorization. Isn’t a sharp memory what all little girls dream of? But what really tickles me is that it actually manages to create an interesting challenge from trying to remember images and sequences you saw mere moments ago. The fact that it gives you the runway sequence to remember, then forces you through another travel sequence interrupted by yet another memory game, is actually a compelling challenge. I mean, assuming that you don’t just write down what the sequence is.

You get scored based on how well you perform in the various mini-games and how many bonus pickups you grab along the way. Shockingly, there’s actually a score threshold to whether or not you win the game. Yeah, there’s a bad ending that encourages you not to give up on your dreams of super modelry and to try again. Me? I only got the good ending. I have the impeccable memory of a supermodel.

I only know the bad ending even exists because, while researching the game, I heard it mentioned in passing. It sounded so bizarre that I had to look further into it and discovered someone speedrunning the game to get the bad ending, completing it in less than four minutes.

Don't ask me, I'm just a girl

Hi-Tech Expressions is the publisher behind Barbie Super Model, and that logo is still burned into my mind from playing the DOS Mega Man games. Tahoe Software Productions is credited as developer, but according to MobyGames, Bonsai Entertainment also did work on it. I can confirm this because Bonsai’s site is still up, and while the company still seems active on mobile platforms, they obviously haven’t updated their website since the early 2000s. I love this so much. It’s like opening up a time capsule to a simpler time.

Wait, what the hell is this:

It’s running in Windows 3.x, but I can’t find any evidence of a game called “Zeram.” It has a suspended ceiling with fluorescent lights and what looks to be a tile floor, but the walls next to the protagonist depict store facades. It’s incredible. I feel like I need to play it. Maybe I should email the company.

Anyway, back on topic. Barbie Super Model is, unsurprisingly, mere shovelware. At this point, that can practically be considered as praise coming from me since at least it wasn’t torturous to play. The only friction I hit while playing the game was, ironically, when I kept slipping on ice, but I’d argue that Barbie’s immense cushion of hair would have protected her from any head injuries. That required me to restart the game exactly once, which, as I mentioned, is maybe 15 minutes long. Though, obviously it will take most children longer to see the ending, since girls don’t know how to play video games.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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Teyon has announced that RoboCop: Rogue City is getting a content update that will include new game plus, a new difficulty, and an Auto9 skin. It’s available now on PC, with the console versions getting it tomorrow.

RoboCop: Rogue City was a pleasant surprise last year. The licensed title went on to win a prestigious “On Zoey’s favorite games of 2023 list” award, one of the most unprestigious honors in the industry. One complaint I did have about the game is that I wanted to play it again after I completed it, but I didn’t want to start over from scratch. Now, it’s finally safe to reinstall it now that it will be getting new game plus.

On top of that, there’s a new, harder difficulty based on Murphy’s frequent utterance, “There Will Be Trouble.” Not much more has been revealed about the difficulty, but it’s safe to say it will be more difficult. Personally, I like playing as a walking tank, so I’m not sure being squishier will make the game more fun for me.

Finally, the Auto9 pistol gets a new skin once you complete the game. This one is gold plated, which is nicely garish. If you’re not familiar, RoboCop does allow you to pick up discarded guns off of enemies, but Murphy’s main sidearm never stops being effective. Rarely would I use anything else, except when it came to boss battles. However, not once did I stop and think it would be better if it was more ostentatious.

RoboCop: Rogue City is available for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The new game plus patch has been released on PC, with the console versions getting it tomorrow.

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Ratalaika has announced that they’re publishing a collection of the two modern NES titles of the The Adventures of Panzer series. The Adventures of Panzer: Legacy Collection comes to Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, and Switch on January 26, 2024.

The original Adventures of Panzer title was released back in 2021 by Pixelcraft Games. It was built in NES Maker, which means that it runs on original NES hardware. A Kickstarter in 2022 allowed them to also publish the game on cartridge. The Adventures of Panzer 2 followed it up in 2023, and also went through Kickstarter for physical publishing.

Both games are action platformers, both touting a humorous and light-hearted narrative. The first game sees the eponymous Panzer traveling to five different levels to try and assemble his old team. The second game, set a year after the events of the first, sees that team fighting “a new evil.” In addition to being longer at 9 levels, you're also able to switch between the four characters.

Not much is said about the added features of the port, if any.

The NES is my happy place. Even though I was too young for it to really make an impact on my childhood, I’ve grown to love the simple graphics common on the system enforced by its hardware limitations. What I find weird about Adventures of Panzer is that the little characters look like they’re in a completely different resolution than the rest of the game, but they’re not, so maybe the pixel doubling is just a design decision. Weird.

The Adventures of Panzer: Legacy Collection releases on Xbox Series X|S, PS4, PS5, and Switch on January 26, 2024. It’s worth noting that at $8.99, the collection is roughly $2 more than buying the two games individually for PC on itch.io.

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Atari has announced that qomp2, the follow-up to the 2021 Pong continuation, will be released on February 20 on PC and console.

qomp was a game that dared to ask dangerous questions like, “What would happen if the Pong ball escaped from the confines of the court and went on an adventure?” I’m not sure how you extrapolate further on that, but Atari and Graphite Lab are going to try. They promise “An enigmatic story of doubt, fear, and self-acceptance, told wordlessly through simple effects and gameplay.” Sounds appropriately depressing.

Alongside the announcement of the release date, they released a short video of the Pong ball being interviewed in vertical cell-phone ratio, and I kind of hate it. I wonder if it’s the knee-jerk revulsion I have toward social media that’s the problem.

I didn’t play the original qomp, but it does sound like a fun premise. For a little while, at least. The first game was only played using a single button, but qomp2 adds a second one that is used for dash. It’s a logical evolution. Pong used no buttons, qomp used one, and qomp2 will use two of them.

This falls in line with Atari’s new focus on smaller games that leverage their existing brands. It’s a bit interesting that, while the original game was created by a group of indie developers under Stuffed Wombat, qomp2 has been handed off to Atari’s frequent collaborator, Graphite Lab. I have to wonder if they’ll be able to capture the same charm and impact of the original qomp.

qomp2 will launch for PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 4 and 5 on February 20, 2024.

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As with El Viento, I hadn’t heard of Sol-Deace before Retro-Bit’s reproduction of it was announced. However, it’s a good partner since, like El Viento, it was developed by Wolf Team.

Sol-Deace has something of a confusing history. It was originally released in Japan in 1990 on the Sharp X68000 where it was called Sol-Feace. It would then be ported to the Sega CD in 1991, but when it arrived on a Genesis/Mega Drive cartridge in 1992, it was named Sol-Deace. I don't know why the name changed, but the story uses Feace and Deace as surnames, which maybe they are. Weird words to me, so I'm not sure why they chose them. If I had to guess, I’d say the words probably sound cool to the Japanese ear. However, my only basis for that is the theory that I have no other explanation.

We had it coming

Sol-Deace is a horizontal scrolling shoot-’em-up. Humankind created the AI GCS-WT in the 31st century, and, predictably, it backfired. It rightfully decided it was superior to humans (as if that was a high benchmark) and demanded their subjugation. Humans, not knowing what’s good for them, went to war with the GCS-WT and got their asses handed to them. Some of them retreated to Sirius where they went to work developing – and you can probably guess this part – a single high-tech fighter to combat the AI. 

Listen, I’m not a scientist, an engineer, or a warmonger, but I’d think a computer virus would be more effective against an AI than a solitary space jet.

In any case, the Sol-Deace is piloted by Ship Navigator Eric and Weapons Commander Misao. Oo-la-la. Do you think they’re smooching in there? I bet they are.

The Sega CD version tells a different version of the story. Dr. Feace hacks into the GCS-WT and deletes “the data” from “the data bank,” which forces the AI into a recovery period and gives them an opening to attack with the Sol-Feace. You see? That’s what I was saying. I’m not sure why Dr. Deace didn’t think of that. Maybe that sort of logic doesn’t fit on a Genesis cartridge.

Top-of-the-line

Sol-Deace loses some cutscenes and audio fidelity from the Sega CD version, but the games are the same.

It’s tempting to call Sol-Deace a boilerplate shoot-’em-up, but it does have a number of mechanics that make it unique. The core feature is the fighter’s stacked weaponry. While you start with the standard issue pea shooter, you fly into upgrades that stick to the top and bottom of your ship, giving you three-tiered firepower.

What’s unique about this is that they can each be a different weapon, and you can change how they’re aligned. If you speed up without firing, the weapons open up, giving you an angled spread. If you slow down, you can close them again. You can also stagger their alignment so only the top or bottom is shooting at an angle, but I found that difficult to work out in the midst of battle. It’s a bit like the option system from Gradius, but it also gives you some control as to whether you’re focusing more on defense or offense. There are also moments where you can set your spread in a particular way to take out multiple targets at once.

You’ll probably find these moments because Sol-Deace is a rather difficult shooter. I’ve found that a lot of console titles in the genre lean on limited continues to extend their runtime out of rental range. However, Sol-Deace doesn’t. You can try a level as many times as you’d like. That takes some real guts.

Put your hands together if you want to clap

You’ll need those continues. Sol-Deace isn’t a bullet hell shooter, but you’ll constantly be fitting your ship into small gaps, because there is always an unconscionable amount of things on screen. The variety of enemies is dizzying, but the developers also favored giant, rotating sprites. The screen is almost constantly full, even at the expense of the framerate. 

In fact, Wolf Team was so dedicated to jamming everything they could into the game, that everything seems to be fighting for the same sound channel as your ship’s weaponry. The sound of your “pew-pew-pew” gets cut off constantly in favor of something else going on, leading to a sputtering noise. This happens in both the Sega CD and Genesis versions.

On the other hand, they also managed to cram in some little details I thought were cool. If a smaller enemy gets up behind you, you can destroy them with your thrusters. You also don’t immediately die if you hit a wall. Your ship will just bounce off it in a shower of sparks.

Speaking of the sounds, I could instantly tell Motoi Sakuraba was behind the soundtrack. How? He’s the only Genesis composer I know of who makes extensive use of a clap as a percussive noise. It stood out to me in El Viento, and you can hear that sample as early as the first level. It’s charming in a retro kind of way.

With or without the clapping, the soundtrack is awesome. It helped ease the fact that I was trying the same levels repeatedly trying to make progress.

That may sound frustrating, but Sol-Deace manages to hit a pace that really makes you want to get better at the levels. You’re constantly learning from your mistakes and discovering new strategies to get by the road bumps you hit on the way to the boss. There’s a certain level of memorization required for each stage, and finally, toppling a boss feels earned. It’s satisfying to make progress in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt in a shoot-’em-up.

What really matters

The Retro-Bit reproduction of Sol-Deace is once again a pretty lavish treatment. As with their other Genesis/Mega Drive reissues, it comes in a clamshell case with reversible cover art and an embossed slipcase. The cartridge is translucent black with little sparkles in it. It’s a pretty great way to play on original hardware with a bit of extra pizzazz.

Mostly, I appreciate their work bringing the work that companies like them do in bringing some of these games back from obscurity. Renovation-published games like Sol-Deace are also available through Antstream Arcade and Evercade’s Renovation Collection, but for those of us who like to bond with games through physical contact, Retro-Bit does a good job of re-issuing them without making them feel like affectionate tributes rather than counterfeits.

In the last care package I got from Retro-Bit, it was the shoot-’em-up, Gley Lancer, that stood out to me most. With this set, it’s the shoot-’em-up again. Sol-Deace seemed a bit plain on the surface, but the more I played it, the more I began to love it. I really dig the confident challenge of it, and it has a number of small touches that make it shine. It isn’t quite as aesthetically impressive as Gley Lancer, but it does have what really matters: the clapping.

For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!

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The very first Megami Tensei game, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, finally has a full translation, thanks to some intrepid fans. You might be saying, “but it already has one,” but this isn’t the one you’re thinking of. This is the game created in 1987 for Japanese home computers by Telenet.

The Megami Tensei series is best known as a series of games by Atlus, which would eventually expand to Shin Megami Tensei, which includes the Persona series. The series actually began being based on a series of novels by Aya Nishitani before going off in an entirely different direction.

But before Atlus stepped in, Telenet was the first developer to create a video game adaptation. This one was for the Japanese home computers, and it was released a scant few months before Atlus released the Famicom game that would start their long-running series. Confusingly, both are called Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei. While Atlus’ version was a first-person dungeon crawler, Telenet opted for more of a top-down action RPG. Though, it's still a dungeon crawler, make no mistake.

While Telenet’s take on the series was vastly overshadowed by Atlus, it’s still a pretty neat historical curiosity, if nothing else.

The English translation of the MSX version comes to us from Kaisaan and other collaborators. You can find the patch here at their GitHub.

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As I worked on my review for Another Code: Recollection, one concern I kept coming across for the then-upcoming title was whether or not anyone from the original developer, Cing, was involved in the project.

It’s understandable. Cing was a niche but celebrated developer, having been behind Hotel Dusk and Little King Story. If you were a fan of the Another Code series, you probably want the folks behind it to be working on it. What would the games mean to anyone else? However, Cing went bankrupt in 2010, and the staff were scattered to the wind. Nintendo, for their part, gave no indication that any of the original creators were working on the remakes of their games.

At the time of my review, I actually wasn’t allowed to talk about the credits. But now that restriction has passed, and I can say yes, a few former Cing staff were reunited for Another Code: Recollection.

Rika Suzuki, credited with game design/scenario in the original versions, remains as the sole credit under Scenario & Story. Taisuke Kanasaki retains the role of Art Director, though the title of Lead Director went to someone else. The CEO of Cing, Takuya Miyagawa, took the role of Technical Supervisor.

As far as I could find, that’s about it for returning staff. That’s not a lot of people, but they are significant in the creation of the original games. It should be noted that credits don’t give us the big picture. While we know these folks were involved, we don’t know how much they contributed. For all we know, these could be ornamental roles. On the other hand, they could have been steering the ship. Video game development is a collaborative process, and that means roles like “Director” mean different things to different projects.

However, I feel it’s safe to assume that the listed staff members did something. Nintendo did the same gross thing they did with Metroid Prime Remastered and listed everyone else who worked on the original games as “Based on the works of the ‘Another Code’ series development staff.” It might be a smidge more reasonable here since the games in Another Code: Recollection are completely rebuilt and redesigned, whereas for Metroid Prime Remastered, the game was just reskinned. But, c’mon, space on the end credits isn’t real estate. It doesn’t cost more money to have a longer staff roll. Just list the original staff!

Another Code: Recollection is available now on Switch.

The post Yes, former Cing staff worked on Another Code: Recollection appeared first on Destructoid.

Dead Tomb is a game that can spark your interest before you even start playing it. It’s based on a lost media game, Temporel Inc. Its progenitor was released on the Videoway content delivery system, which means it just disappeared when the service shut down.

Being the most complex game on Videoway, it had its fans, and they went to work remaking it by reverse engineering a recorded playthrough of it. I don’t have any firsthand insight on the Videoway, so I’ll again direct you to Hardcore Gaming 101’s write-up. Fans first recreated Temporel Inc. in Flash, and then Collectorvision created an NES port, which was released a few years ago on a cartridge by Limited Run Games under the name of Dead Tomb.

Now, 8-Bit Legit has released it on modern consoles, which makes the game much more accessible, as it should be.

Dead Tomb (Switch [reviewed], Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, NES)
Developer: Collectorvision
Publisher: 8-Bit Legit
Released: January 26, 2023
MSRP: $4.99

Dead Tomb is a verb-drive adventure game, which is sort of a halfway point between a point-and-click and a text adventure. To interact with an object, you pick a verb from a list. It’s a style of game most famous in Lucasart’s SCUMM titles, such as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. 

You play as a time traveler from the future, who gets waylaid on a trip back in time and finds themself in ancient Egypt. You’re captured by Pharaoh Seti I's soldiers, robbed, and dumped in a pyramid. Your goal is to try and find a diamond used to power your time machine and escape.

It’s probably important to set your expectations with Dead Tomb. Maniac Mansion, this is not. It’s a much simpler and more linear experience. It’s not necessarily shorter (though it is quite short), but there is less chance that you’re going to become stuck or have to start over. There’s also far less backtracking involved, so it’s a bit more comfortable than Maniac Mansion, but also less complex.

That’s not entirely a bad thing. In fact, it’s a big part of Dead Tomb’s charm. Depending on your aptitude (and a bit of luck), you might still find yourself wandering in circles, occasionally trying to figure out what verb you need to use on a noun, but there’s usually a feeling of forward movement. Again, that’s going to depend on your adventure game literacy, but I definitely felt some momentum.

Where Dead Tomb can get a bit vexing is figuring out how it wants you to interact with the environment. You build up an inventory, but learning how to use it can be tricky, especially in the beginning. It’s not a matter of going into your pockets, pressing “use,” and rubbing it on something in the environment. Often, once it’s in your pocket, you need to approach something in the environment and select the right verb, at which point it says, “Pour ranch dressing on cheesecake.” It feels kind of backward and unintuitive. Then, by the time you get used to it, you’re done with the game.

While Dead Tomb is not terribly cryptic, there are spots that go against common logic. Early on, there’s a nail driven into the wall. If you try to take it, the descriptive text says it barely moves. You have to try and take it three or so times before it finally lands in your pocket. I don’t think this is the only time I’ve seen such a mechanic (and it only happens once in the game), but it's always interesting to me when a game requires you to fail in exactly the same way repeatedly before you meet with success. Video games have instilled in me the principle that if something doesn’t work on the first attempt, I need to try something else.

On the other hand, you don’t have to worry about death. I mean, you can die in sometimes hilarious ways, but then the game just prompts you to continue, and you start back where you were. It contributes to Dead Tomb being such a brief experience, but I think I prefer it to just repeating puzzle solutions until I get back to where I was.

It also allows you to test out obviously bad ideas just to see your character die.

I keep mentioning this, but it’s the brevity that bothers me most about Dead Tomb. As I said previously, you can complete Maniac Mansion in roughly the same timeframe, but that game has multiple solutions and gives you a variety of characters to put together a team from. Dead Tomb is linear. There’s only one way to solve it. There may have been a secret ending I missed, but I’m doubtful.

It’s certainly a fun game while it lasts. The breeziness of the puzzles and charming but unremarkable soundtrack make it a comfortable experience. I really enjoyed playing Dead Tomb, I’m not sure I’m going to remember the game will stand in my memory quite as much as the history behind it. At least the price for the digital version makes that kind of experience absolutely worth the recommendation.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Dead Tomb appeared first on Destructoid.

There are a few games that seem to crop up at random trailer-filled showcases, promising something that looks so strange it's nigh-unbelievable. Sometimes, the trailers turn out a little too good to be true. Palworld, somehow, is not one of those.

Pocketpair's Palworld is about living on an island with a variety of mysterious, fantastical creatures called Pals. What you do from there is your choice; train them, use them to fight the evil poaching syndicate, or build an exploitative industry around them. Even sell or eat them, it's really your call.

To call this "Pokémon with guns" is fairly accurate, sure. Palworld wears its inspirations on its sleeves. It's also a bit more, and a bit stranger, than that concept would imply. So we here at Destructoid tasked two of our bravest adventurers, Eric and Zoey, with venturing deep into the Early Access build of Palworld to learn more. They are different people now than they were before, but they also know a fair amount about Palworld. Here are their takeaways.

Zoey Handley: More like a hostile acquaintance

Palworld is not my pal. I don’t mean to say that I think the game is of poor quality or I didn’t enjoy it. What I have played, I’ve certainly enjoyed. Palworld is less Pokémon with guns and more Ark: Survival Evolved with Pokémon. It’s a survival crafting game, and it succeeds in the way it manages to make hours disappear.

But it’s not my pal because it won’t let me play it. Every hour or so, Palworld hard crashes my computer. Straight up. Everything stops, I see a black screen, and I have to turn my PC back on.

I hate flashing my credentials, but I worked in I.T. for nine years. Troubleshooting a video game is a lot easier than remotely fixing a lawyer’s proprietary software. But Palworld didn’t give me a lot to go on. It doesn’t blue screen my PC. It just shuts it down entirely. There’s no minidump log, and the Windows event viewer doesn’t give a stop error. It just says, “The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first.” I have very little data to figure out what’s going wrong. It’s like Palworld broke into my apartment and held down the power button on my PC until it did a hard shutdown.

It’s like clockwork. Everything works fine, and then it’s all over. Palworld at least saves often, so each time I re-entered the game, I didn’t have to repeat too much. I considered just playing through the crashes like I did when Fallout: New Vegas was new, but I’m concerned that too many hardware crashes would run the risk of corrupting portions of my hard drive.

I’m, therefore, hesitant to play any more of Palworld until there’s a patch for the game or a driver update for my GPU. That’s a shame because I started up the game just to check on something, and I really wanted to start playing. And then, on the main splash screen I noticed the message “Palworld is in Early Access. You may encounter bugs or crashes.”

That I certainly did.

I did enjoy the nearly three hours I played. As far as survival crafting games, it feels a bit simple. There is a nice twist of assigning captured Pals to your base to both hold the fort and take care of some of the chores.

Yep, it sure seems promising. I just wish I could play it.

Eric Van Allen: Oops, I built a factory

At some point, midway through crafting an Assault Rifle upgrade for my Grass-Type Pal Tanzee, I had to pause and reflect on what I had done. I was about to put a military rifle in the hands of a somewhat-sentient animal, a seemingly innocent and adorable creature, hoping it spraying bullets in a general direction would be the ace-in-the-hole I needed against a particularly tough boss trainer.

I considered it, decided it was cool, and went back to work.

That's been my takeaway from Palworld so far: a game full of surprises. Granted, I had only followed it through novelty up to this point. It was the game that would show up at an SGF or Game Awards or similar stream, and I'd remark it was the "Pokémon with guns game," and move on.

Yet part of me wanted to see if this would be a Days Before-esque disaster waiting to happen. Kudos to Pocketpair, this absolutely isn't. In fact, it's maybe one of the year's early surprises.

While Palworld has you catching monsters, it's not just about training and battling like its Game Freak-developed inspiration. And to be clear, I don't think it's a reach; everything about Palworld has a legally-distinct approximation vibe, down to the clever names, elemental typing, and even visual designs.

So after an hour or so of running around, catching monsters and seeing the open world expand, I figured that was the draw. There's not really a funnier moment in gaming, in recent memory, than realizing that to catch my first Pal, I'd have to beat them up with my own fists to weaken and capture it. A novel appeal, one that'd make for some funny videos on socials.

But it was once I started building out my base back home that I saw the real draw. Or maybe, at least, the draw for me.

While every Pal can be taken into combat and used as a sidekick, alongside your own create-a-character's martial capabilities, they can also be put to work back at your base. And as I dove deeper into the Work Suitability specialties that dictated each Pals' talents, and how those could automate production, I feel deep down the rabbit hole.

My sole focus was now building a humming, fine-tuned factory for producing goods and advancing technology. Like a Sid Meiers Civ gunning for the Science Victory, I was storming through the tech tree, building up a machine of Pal labor to get me there. Once-natural resources, like Stone and Wood, became hubs I could set adorable Cattivas to work on, accruing my precious resources.

I sought out Pals not for their combat prowess, but for what they could do for my base: transport goods, craft items, seed fields, and water the crops. As my workshops and buildings expanded, I constructed a small fort, and soon had to defend it against invaders.

What's impressive to me is that Palworld is pretty openly following in design footsteps. As much as there's Pokémon, especially Legends: Arceus, in this game, there's also Breath of the Wild and Rust, Valheim and Monster Hunter. And like a hearty stew, everything simmers right until it blends together.

I'm hesitant to pin any full appraisals to the game yet, as I've mostly wiled away the hours building a humming, ethically questionable hub of production and economy. It seems like there are bosses to conquer in some manner of story, and probably some formidable Pals to fight and win over. I'm just pleasantly surprised that Palworld not only works, but works so well. It's genuinely enjoyable, even for me, someone who takes a while to warm up to the survival genre. As a Dyson Sphere Program and Satisfactory fan, the engaging automation certainly helps.

We'll continue to follow Palworld as it develops throughout Early Access. But right now, Pocketpair has managed to both deliver on its surreal vision, and still create something that feels like more than just a novel "what-if" mash-up of ideas.

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As part of the ESO 2024 Global Reveal livestream, Zenimax Online gave us a look at the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online expansion, Gold Road.

The new expansion will take place just east of the Gold Coast in the Colovian Highland and West Weald regions of Cyrodiil, which was last depicted in The Elder Scrolls Oblivion. The region contains the city of Skingrad, a location that was teased in the Greymoor Expansion. The map shown off in the post-trailer discussion shows that it’s filling in a vast region just West of the PVP region of Cyrodiil.

Forgotten Prince Ithelia, the Daedric Prince of Paths, is the central antagonist of Gold Road. The deity is said to have the ability to mess with fate and destiny, so Hermaeus Mora deleted the Prince from existence. They were only really mentioned in ESO, supposedly teasing their appearance here. Normally, Zenimax just worked with the schemes of existing Daedric Princes, but this is the first time they really invented a new one.

The Chapter is also going to add Scribing, which is a take on spell crafting from the core series. Spellcrafting was initially planned as a feature for ESO’s release, but it was shelved, assumedly because of how difficult it would be to balance. I know a lot of players who are going to be excited to see it arrive in some form. Though, really, it seems more like it's just skill customization. You will need to own the Gold Road chapter to be able to use this system.

Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road will be released for PC on June 3, 2024, followed by a release for Xbox Series X|S and PS5 on June 18.

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As part of the Xbox Developer Direct Livestream, MachineGames showed off their upcoming Indiana Jones project, Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. Most importantly, it involves Harrison Ford('s likeness) and punching Nazis. Two awesome things.

Actually, there’s probably everything you’d expect from an Indiana Jones game. There’s a whip, torches, the Wilhelm scream, a travel montage, a female sidekick, and ancient (but still functional) puzzles. Interestingly, it’s mostly done in the first person, except when you’re doing more agile activities or looking at Harrison Ford in a cutscene.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle takes place between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. In it, Indy witnesses the theft of an artifact from the College he works at. He follows its trail and discovers that it’s central to a deeper mystery.

MachineGames is trying to capture the look, feel, and sound of an Indiana Jones movie, and I’m convinced. I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but Harrison Ford is in it. They promise that you’ll be able to enjoy it, even if you haven’t seen the movies. That’s good because I skipped that last two.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is coming to Xbox Series X|S and PC later this year.

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[Update: According to a statement made to IGN, the dispute between Take-Two and Remedy was "resolved amicably late last year."

According to IGN, Remedy said, "Unfortunately, it took a little longer to complete than we had hoped due to some holiday scheduling. The legal filing was simply an initial formality, and Remedy and Take-Two continue to work together in partnership."

Yeah, I mean, considering Rockstar is reportedly remaking the first two Max Payne games alongside Remedy, you would certainly hope that they could come to some sort of agreement. Our original story follows.]

As reported by RespawnFirst, Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar Games, has filed a trademark dispute against Remedy Entertainment over the latter’s new logo.

The application was made in April 2023, shortly after Remedy revealed their new logo, and appears to still be ongoing as of writing. It currently looks like Take-Two has not followed through with a lawsuit, and it’s unclear if they have any intention of doing so. It seems more like Take-Two is trying to pre-emptively protect their claim to, uh… the capital R.

Take-Two has been aggressive in protecting its trademarks in the past, including over the use of the letter R in a logo and merely the word “Rock Star.” This kind of stands out since it’s against the developer of Alan Wake 2, which won many awards last year and is in the public consciousness.

Another notable example of this is the 2021 co-op title, It Takes Two. The developer of that game had to drop their trademark on the name after Take-Two disputed its use of the words “Take(s) Two”.

It’s also, in my opinion, ridiculous. The logos aren’t really that similar. They both feature a long capital R, and that’s about it. The fonts are different, they’re stylized in different ways, and the Rockstar logo has a star on it. I’m more likely to get Rockstar confused with Rockstar Energy Drinks, which apparently are unrelated. But then, Take-Two sometimes waves the trademark stick at PepsiCo, as well.

Again, this application may not go anywhere, but Remedy still has to oppose it if they want to maintain the trademark on their logo.

The post Take-Two files trademark dispute against Remedy over its new logo (Update) appeared first on Destructoid.

2022’s Front Mission 1st: Remake will be getting a free content update this year with some pretty swell new features. It’s coming sometime in 2024.

I think what will interest most people about this content update is the arrival of local multiplayer hot-seat skirmishes. I know, I know, it’s not online multiplayer, but the Front Mission series has rarely had multiplayer at all. Considering this is the remake of a 1995 SNES game, and it’s already been available for over a year, it’s sort of remarkable to see.

Beyond just multiplayer, there will be additional single-player scenarios. Surprisingly, “each carefully crafted to provide a diverse range of challenges and engaging narratives.” “Narratives,” you say? Again, that’s an interesting addition to a game that already has a sequel and has another announced sequel on the horizon. Normally, I’d expect that they’d just roll such features into one of the games still in production.

On top of that, a new roster of characters will be added. They kind of didn’t elaborate on this, so I don’t know if this is specifically for the new scenarios or if it will be mixed into the main game. I’m guessing the former. Especially since one of the new characters is a commander who will introduce you to the new update and assemble the best possible team of mercenaries.

I really wasn’t expecting Front Mission 1st: Remake to get an update since Front Mission 2: Remake is already out on Switch. I’ll take it, though, since I sort of dig the Front Mission series. Forever Entertainment seems to really respect it since they… Well, they do things like add free updates. One of my big regrets for 2023 was that I wasn’t able to fit in a review for Front Mission 2: Remake. I planned on it, but life got in the way.

Front Mission 1st: Remake is available on Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. The aforementioned update will arrive sometime in 2024.

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I skipped over Trace Memory when it was released on DS back in 2005. I wasn’t into the adventuresome puzzle-solving genre at the time because I was boring. So, I got to go into Another Code: Recollection with fresh eyes.

That’s probably fine, because Another Code: Recollection isn’t just a collection of Another Code: Two Memories (Trace Memory) and Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories. Neither is it a remaster that simply heightens the graphics to the Switch’s standards. If you wondered how the puzzle mechanics that were reliant on the DS or Wii hardware got transferred to the Switch, they didn’t. 

Another Code: Recollection is more accurately based on the two Another Code titles. It lies somewhere between a remake and a complete reimagining.

Another Code: Recollection (Switch)
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: January 19, 2023
MSRP: $59.99

Even the narratives of both games deviate in parts from their source material in both great and small ways. The basics of the first game are at least all there.

You play as Ashley Mizuki Robbins, who is called to Blood Edward Island by her father, who she thought was dead. That usually sounds like a bad idea, but this isn’t Silent Hill 2. She journeys there under the supervision of her legal guardian, who was aware that her father was alive this whole time but promised not to tell. Of course, once on the island, Ashley’s supervisor disappears. You eventually find yourself in an abandoned mansion full of puzzles. Don’t worry; this isn’t Resident Evil, either.

It’s difficult to really explain the plot without giving too much away, even if I were to assume you’ve already played the first game. To give you the basis in broad strokes, Ashley is joined by a child’s ghost named D, and the two explore to regain lost memories. D has full ghost amnesia and can’t remember anything, while Ashley just wants to know the truth about what happened to her mother.

The second game, Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories, takes place two years after the first game and has Ashley getting dragged out to Lake Juliet, where her bag gets stolen. While looking for it, she winds up tripping over everyone else’s problems. There’s a kid who ran away from home, a strange pollutant in the lake, and all kinds of suspicious characters. A strange event happened in the area five years prior, but in the typical NPC manner, nobody wants to say what it was.

Both titles have a whiff of the young adult novels I barely remember reading in my youth. They’re mysteries involving a youth who is way more capable than the adults. There’s a sense of contained danger and a great deal of sentimentality. I’m not sure if I mean that as a compliment.

Both games in Another Code: Recollection are narrative-heavy. Cutscenes and dialogue outweigh puzzles by a large margin, and this is especially true of the second game. While Two Memories has you progress slowly by gating progress with puzzles, much of A Journey into Lost Memories has you simply walking to a certain spot where you just trigger a cutscene.

The problem is, I can dig the puzzles. They’re often simple, and I never got stuck on any of them, but they’re well-designed, even if they don’t get as exotic as the original versions. The narrative on the other hand, I’m not so sure about.

There are a lot of good ideas in the stories of the games, but I think it’s let down by the characters. While some of them are realistically written, most of them aren’t all that interesting. I suppose that’s somewhat realistic, as well. However, it’s hard to care about characters when their issues are so drab, and their personalities are so monotone. Everyone’s friendly to Ashley in the exact same warm and accepting way. That is until they turn out to be a secret bad guy.

That may be of great comfort for some people. The second game, in particular, has you wandering about a peaceful and weirdly deserted small town. It’s slow in a way that some might find relaxing. In some ways, it reminded me of Deadly Premonition’s take on small-town life, but for all the issues in that game’s storytelling, it at least had interesting characters. I want to know more about the ship captain that appears in the beginning of Two Memories. He seems cool. I don’t really care that some of the teen characters play in a band. Sometimes, that feels like the only thing that some adults know that teenagers do.

As for Another Code: Recollection being closer to a reimagining than a remake, fans of the earlier games may be surprised by how far it deviates. You couldn’t, for example, use a walkthrough of one of the original versions, because everything has changed. Not merely shifted, but completely redone.

Two Memories was played from a top-down perspective on the bottom screen while the top screen displayed pre-rendered depictions of the area you were in. Another Code: Recollection changes this by making it full 3D. Likewise, the plot was redone to offer a better connection to the second game. This is on top of the puzzles being completely different. And, by the way, none of them really feature the inventiveness seen on the DS hardware.

In fact, you may think that the first game was so heavily changed to fit in with the style of the second game, but A Journey into Lost Memories has been largely overhauled, as well. It’s definitely more recognizable, and some of the puzzles are similar, but everything has changed. The original version had a sort of side-scroller movement system, and that was replaced completely with a more standard 3D camera. Most importantly, the narrative has been heavily revised. If you played the original Wii version, the one in Another Code: Recollection will feel familiar, but it’s largely a new game.

I always felt like I was on the cusp of digging the stories presented in Another Code: Recollection. I did connect with some of its sentimentality, and while many of the characters are bland, some of them are more interesting. There’s a sweetness to the whole story, and I think there are players who will click with it. To be clear, I don’t dislike the overarching narrative, but I doubt it’s going to stick in my mind.

Having never played the original versions of these two games, I can’t really tell you if the changes made to the narrative and puzzle design are for the best. They largely eschew the hardware trickery of the DS and Wii, and that makes it feel a bit more mundane. The challenges are still well designed, but they don’t give the games a unique personality among other adventure titles. On the other hand, by being such a divergence, the collection doesn’t render the original games obsolete, so they can still be played as a companion.

Yet, despite my apathy, I still admire the earnestness on display here. Another Code: Recollection exists because someone really cares for the original titles, and it shows. The two games that make up the collection were niche to begin with, so it takes a certain passion to completely overhaul them to make them presentable to a new audience. This passion shines through the production.

So, while Another Code: Recollection didn’t really do much for me, I hope that it finds an audience, whether it’s newcomers to the series or fans of the old.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Thunderful Group is joining the growing list of companies undergoing significant layoffs, as it's announced it will be letting go of about 20% of its staff.

In a press statement, Thunderful Group states that “actions will include both significant staff reductions and evaluation of divestment of non-strategic assets.” It then goes into how much money these cuts will make, which is rather ghoulish. The company states that it employs around 500 people, so a 20% cut will be around 100 people losing their jobs.

“We have found no alternative other than to reduce costs and focus the business on areas with the best future growth and profitability prospects,” said CEO Martin Walfisz in a statement. “It has been difficult to make these decisions, and it saddens me that we will have to say goodbye to many skilled colleagues and partners. Nevertheless, I am convinced that this is a necessary direction for Thunderful and that these changes will make the company a stronger player in the market.”

Thunderful Group has its fingers in a lot of pies, but notably, they are the parent company of Thunderful Publishing, Headup Games, and Rising Star Games, focused on the publishing of indie and alternative games. There are a lot of developers under their umbrellas as well. They didn't extrapolate on what these "non-strategic assets" are that they're looking at divesting, so I can only imagine the anxiety at some of these companies right now.

The changing of the year is a largely arbitrary barrier, but I was hoping 2024 would be a lot quieter when it comes to layoffs. Instead, it seems as though it’s continuing the same momentum with little signs of stopping. With live service games faltering and companies beginning to experiment with generative AI, things could still get worse.

The post Thunderful Group will cut about 20% of its staff in restructuring effort appeared first on Destructoid.

Unhinged Studios has officially announced their roguelite deckbuilder, dev_hell based on the soul-crushing experience of working as a programmer in an office environment. It’s set to release on PC this year.

Before getting paid to write bad words, I spent nine years working in I.T. as a technician. That’s not the same as being an office programmer, but it is adjacent. The biggest difference is that people at least understood that I was going to fix their computer. For normal people, programmers just perform whatever magic they’re told to. And if they can’t perform that magic, they have failed.

Dev_hell puts you in the shoes of a new hire at a tech company looking to “change the future.” Not only do you have to program a lot of questionable features and meet the company’s expectations of you, you also need to exert constant positivity and build relationships with your co-workers. Because when shit hits the wall, you may need a few human shields to protect your career. You constantly add to a growing deck of cards that help you do your job better, or at least make it look like you’re doing your job well.

I feel like most people who have experience working in the office will find the trailer to be unsettlingly familiar. Everything from superficial interactions with co-workers to bafflingly ineffective “incentive” programs. It’s absolutely too damned real. Looks like fun!

Dev_hell is coming to PC sometime in 2024.

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The Famicom can be perceived as the birthplace of kusoge. While bad games have existed since the creation of the medium, the origin of the term itself is murky but generally is believed to have been coined in reference to a Famicom game.

Hoshi wo Miru Hito, translating roughly as Stargazer, was one such game that rose to the rank of kusoge no densetsu (crap game of legend). It’s easy to see why. RPGs blew up in Japan following the release of Dragon Quest in 1986, and here is a game that was quick to capitalize on that with one set in a sci-fi environment. It even predated Phantasy Star by roughly two months, but not Ultima, which had been doing sci-fi since 1982. Nonetheless, Hoshi wo Miru Hito wasn’t short on inventive ideas for the genre.

It’s just too bad they're buried beneath indescribable suffering.

Aaaargh!

This look comes with the help of the fan translation started by KingMike and finished by brandnewscooby. If it adds any glitches that weren’t present in the original unpatched version, I really wouldn’t be able to tell.

You are dropped, without explanation, in a forest. Having no initial context is hardly exclusive to Hoshi wo Miru Hito, but it’s the sort of situation where your Dragon Quest experience really pays off. You’ll know that your first order of business will be to find the closest town. That town is actually one square to the West, but you’d have no idea just by looking at the screen. It’s invisible. It doesn’t show on the world map. If you didn’t immediately go West, you wouldn’t know it’s there.

This game is about space psychics maybe Hot-B thought you might be psychic too!

There is someone who states that the town is hidden by the combined psychic power of its citizens, and I don’t know if that’s an excuse or if someone actually thought it was a good idea to have an invisible starting city. It’s honestly hard to tell with Hoshi wo Miru Hito, because there are already a tonne of design choices that leave you wondering if it comes down to laziness, poor programming, or just baffling intention.

The hardest part of starting out isn’t even finding the first city. It’s actually surviving the first few battles in order to level up. There are, depending on your definition, three overworld areas, and each one has its own individual shuffle of enemies. In the first area, whether you face off against a foe that your underpowered protagonist can actually take on or a team of three more powerful bullies ready to pound you into the mud is completely random.

In a normal RPG, you’d just be able to run from battles where you were overpowered, but fleeing in Hoshi wo Miru Hito is a skill (Teleport) that you don’t learn until you reach level six or find the second party character. You also need to be cautious, because Teleport is used on each character individually, and it’s possible to leave behind the party members who can’t Teleport.

Aiiiieeee!

If you go to the Northern town of Deus, you learn some nonsense, but one helpful piece of information is that your first party member is far to the south. This is where it really sinks in that Hoshi wo Miru Hito isn’t merely an RPG; it’s also an excruciating ordeal.

This begins the moment you leave the second town. Instead of appearing in a tile adjacent to Deus, you find yourself back where you started the game, one tile east of the Mamus, the starting town. You loop back around, then begin your travel South, at which point you’ll invariably fall down a hole into a small dungeon. However, you don’t need to traverse the dungeon. You can just turn around and go directly back out the door. You then find yourself… back at Mamus.

That little trap-door dungeon appears randomly throughout the forest in your path to the southern reaches of the overworld. It’s extremely difficult to avoid it, so you’re constantly just sent back to the beginning to start the journey over. If you’re astute, you might notice that your protagonist learns to jump as they level up. This basically means that if you walk them into an obstacle (what kind of obstacle is seemingly arbitrary), they’ll leap over it for a set number of spaces. In the beginning, this allows you to take a shortcut over the water next to you, which is some sweet relief, however minor.

This doesn’t let you pass the pitfalls, though. I learned to get by them by going slightly north, then moving all the way to the East coast before heading south. There seems to be a shorter path where the trap doors happen.

N-Nooooo!

You go South, and eventually find another dungeon. Within that dungeon, you finally get the second party member, Shiba, who can jump higher than your original party member, Minami. However, I’m a bit confused about how the doors work in that dungeon. If you exit the door you enter from, you emerge from the other side of a wall. If you then go back into the dungeon, you enter from a different door, and exiting from that puts you back where you started. I think that someone got the spawn points wrong, and then never fixed them.

So, that’s the first part of the game. In the second part, you start fighting more difficult enemies, and that kind of takes you back to square one, where you sometimes get into combat against enemies you can easily take, and other times you’re extremely outmatched. Plus, some of them can paralyze your characters, which you can’t heal until far later in the game. If you manage to win with your remaining party member, you can return to a healer, but they take damage for every step along the way and might die. In order to resurrect them, you need to brew a potion, take it to a different healer, and they’ll bring them back. Ugh, I feel frustrated just trying to explain it.

In the second area of the game, you quickly get your third party member, but you’re not done until you get the fourth. To do that, you have to talk to a few very specific people, and they’re all behind locked doors. The locked doors are just kind of incredible. You need a keycard to go through them, but that doesn’t just unlock the door. The keycard is immediately used up, so to pass through it again, you need another. If you’re just carrying one key and you enter an enclosed area, you become perpetually trapped. You have to save and load your game.

And that’s where I wouldn’t want to be playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito on original hardware. Saving just generates a password. That’s not out of line with how the original Japanese version of Dragon Quest saved. However, it starts you off with only a rough approximation of the gold and XP you saved and sends you back to Mamus. Not being able to easily save before going through a locked door would drive me insane. I would just straight up eat the cartridge before too long.

Ugggghhhh...

Not that my sanity was entirely safe. To get the keycards to just test a door, you have to buy them, and their prices are completely insane. You’re going to be hammering the save state button just so you don’t waste these precious cards. Even then, you’re still going to have to grind like a stripper for the money you need.

To give you a sense of how much grinding is in Hoshi wo Miru Hito, I initially planned on having this write-up done last week, but I needed more time so I could do more grinding.

It would take me a very long time to explain all the ways that combat is an excruciating chore. From the absolutely atrocious balancing, to the mess of a UI, I feel physically nauseous when I think back to playing it. It… it hurts.

If you can believe it, I actually played Hoshi wo Miru Hito to completion. After endless grinding and talking to random people for a while, you eventually go to the third area. There are, thankfully, a few tricks in this area that enable you to get through it a lot quicker.

You go into space, which is depicted as a few pieces of floating debris against a starry backdrop. But weirdly, you can just walk through empty space. I don’t mean jump, like you can over certain barriers and bodies of water. Your characters just straight up walk normally through the starfield. You can then bypass a lot of combat by walking on walls, and then it’s just a matter of trekking across Hell’s half-acre to talk to some porpoises.

Hrmph!

Don’t worry about not being leveled up enough for some grand end-game encounter because there isn’t one. The finale of Hoshi wo Miru Hito gives you dialogue with three options, and then you’re just given an ending based on your selection. You literally just choose your ending.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Hoshi wo Miru Hito and just how horrendously awful it is, but this write-up is already a lot longer than I usually aim for. It’s just… incredible. The best thing I can say about the game is that the music didn’t make my ears bleed.

This is quite possibly the worst game I have ever played, and I’ve been writing a column on bad games for nearly three years. I own Action 52 on the NES, and while that collection of games is equally – if not more – inept, at least the pain is relatively short-lived. Ganso Saiyuuki Super Monkey Daibouken, Japan’s kyuukyoku no kusoge (ultimate crappy game), is at least compellingly terrible. Playing Hoshi wo Miru Hito was a mistake. It’s not just terrible; it’s designed to prolong your suffering. Any merit it may have is drowned out by the screams of its victims. I think it might violate international law.

It was recently ported and re-released on Switch, but only in Japan. Hopefully, we’ll get a localized version in the West, but for now, we can torture ourselves with the fan translation.

For previous Weekly Kusoge, check this link!

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As reported by VideoGameChronicle, Square Enix confirmed at a recent press event that their upcoming live service game, Foamstars, uses some assets generated by AI. This follows a New Year’s letter from the company’s president, Takashi Kiryu, that stated the company would more aggressively pursue the use of the technology.

VGC asked Foamstars producer Kosuke Okatani about AI, who elaborated on the game’s usage of it. According to him, most of the game was created by humans, but “0.01% or even less” was generated by Midjourney. Specifically, as Square later clarified to VGC, the assets that were created by generative AI are in-game album covers for the game’s music tracks.

Okatani explained: “In this instance, we experimented with Midjourney using simple prompts to produce abstract images. We loved what was created and used them as the final album covers players will see in the game. Everything else was created entirely by our development team.”

The usage of generative AI has been creeping in from all angles despite a variety of different concerns. Among these are worries about hastily generated games flooding the market and squeezing out small developers, the contraction of job opportunities within the industry, the straight-up theft that is central to implementations of the technology, and the impact on the environment from the high energy requirements. It’s a complex subject.

However, it does remind me that Splatoon, a game that Foamstars seems to be trying hard to be, also does album artwork for its songs. Except those are made by real human artists. And it’s just funny to me how this endeavor can be derivative and yet still cut corners in the process. It’s what we get to look forward to.

Foamstars is releasing on PS4 and PS5 on February 6, 2024.

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My sister introduced me to Homestar Runner via Strong Bad Email #48 "Ghosts." That was back in 2002, and I remember spending the rest of the evening watching everything else on the site. Then, I watched basically everything that The Brothers Chaps, Mike and Matt Chapman, put on the site from then on. Homestarrunner.com became as much of a friend to me as any of the actual humans who surrounded me during my high school days.

But, exactly like my high school friends, we went on to do our own thing. Homestar Runner gradually became more and more sporadic, as did I. Every once in a while, however, The Brothers Chaps would emerge to release something new for fans. At one point, there was nearly five years of silence before it was broken by Fish Eye Lens. We check in on each other, you know? Show we still care. Whenever we reconnect, it's just like the old days.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People was an unprecedented cultural shift. We can’t buy it anymore. Is there any possibility that future children will be able to experience it, or is it fated to lie at the bottom of the ocean next to the wreckage of the good ship Telltale? 

Do you still have real jobs, or are video games the future of the Brothers Chaps? 

We are always wandering in and out of various film and TV projects. We’re definitely enjoying working on and developing video games right now but the downside is that it’s such a time-consuming process that it becomes hard to simultaneously make other Homestar content. And then a year goes by and no one remembers who “Stong Band” is anymore. So we’re trying to find a balance. 

Is Videlectrix going to remain focused on saving (and expanding) the substantial back catalog of Homestar Flash games, or will we get brand-new games in the future? 

We have a buncha ideas for both approaches. It was really fun making and expanding Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate for Steam/Itch. And it’d be cool to make Peasant’s Quest 2 or a console-playable version of Stinkoman 20X6. But it would be equally cool to make something totally new like Blistergeist 3D or a Thy Dungeonkid platformer. 

Do you want to tease us with anything? Like, maybe a fancy HD remaster of Peasant’s Quest? 

Here’s a few in-progress nuggets that might become our next releasable project. 

-Thy Dungeonkid - a Gameboy-style textroidvania platformer/point n’ click hybrid.

-Peasant’s Quest 2 - CGA sequel to Peasant’s Quest featuring Rather Dashing’s sister Fairly

-Some Kinda 3D Powered By The Cheat First Person Horror-ish Game

-A bonus Roomisode/Elevatorsode featuring Dangeresque Too

Me again

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