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northerngoshawk · 3 years

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Author Self Interview

Technically, no one tagged me. But I saw @thinkingisadangerouspastime‘s self interview on my dashboard, and she opened it up to anyone who wanted to do this. So here I am!

Name: Northern_Goshawk (sometimes with, sometimes without the underscore in between), but you can call me Northern or North, whatever variant works for you!

Fandoms: MSCM* (formerly), Bakugan* (formerly), Ninjago* (state of limbo), ATLA**, PJO & HoO (in revival), TKC (lowkey), Spirit Animals (in revival), Magisterium Series, Maze Runner, Minecraft: Songs of War* (formerly), Harry Potter, there’s probably a lot more but I can’t think of them all rn.

*Fandoms I’ve written for

**My main fandom so far

Where do you post: FF.Net is my main account, but lately I’ve also been posting on AO3. I do have a Wattpad, but it’s basically dead right now. Oh, and sometimes I post drabbles here, on Tumblr. Just drabbles, though.

Most popular multi-chapter fic: In terms of having an actual plot and being structured like a book? It’d probably be The Water Trials, my still-ongoing Maze Runner AU ATLA fic; it has 12 favs & 13 follows on FF.Net and 3 kudos & 2 subscriptions on AO3. Tallying that up, it’s the most popular. But if we were to look at the term literally, as in having multiple chapters, then my drabble series Too Late takes the cake, with 27 favs & 31 follows. I guess everyone likes the angst 🤷‍♀️

Favorite story you’ve written so far: Definitely my introspective Aang-centric fic the avatar’s fear! This 13.8k oneshot is my pride and joy, what I consider my crowning achievement; I like to say that if there is any fic you want to read from me, this is the fic. I really love it because when I set out to write it, my goal was to portray Aang as this complex, three-dimensional character (and subtly address a lot of the slander that goes around the internet about him), and from the feedback I got from a lot of the comments, I succeeded!

I want to take a moment to acknowledge @thinkingisadangerouspastime (yes, I tagged you twice, but this is important!), because it was her two fics, broken pieces still belong (a Katara-centric fic that focuses on the complexity of her grief and rage) and all i know is gone (but i am not alone) (an Aang-centric fic that focuses on his grief), that served as inspiration and even a guide for me while I was writing “the avatar's fear.” In fact, I even made a reference to “all i know is gone (but i am not alone)” in it:

iii. all I know is gone, but even when I had everything, no one wanted me around… I guess it's just a feeling I need to get used to (they see me as a weapon, but they forget I'm human too)

I highly recommend those two fics to anyone who is a Katara and/or Aang stan!

Anyways, this oneshot was well worth the effort of creating, and I’m so, so happy I was able to do Aang justice!

Fic you were nervous to post: Oh, definitely dragon blood, with several reasons why:

- I spent a total of 2 days on this fic, which is... a lot less than what I usually spend for anything that’s not a drabble. So I was nervous, wondering if I was rushing it, going back and editing it over and over and over again.

- It’s from Suki’s POV. Now, because we don’t see much of Suki in the actual series itself, I didn’t know if I managed to nail down her voice all that well. I was also worried that it focused too much on Aang, so I added in edits that intermingled Suki’s experiences in the war with the present.

I might’ve also been nervous in posting The Water Trials, since it’s a Maze Runner Future Dystopian AU ATLA fic, and I wasn’t sure how many people would actually enjoy something like this. But a surprisingly decent amount of people seem to like it, or even just the concept of it, so I’m happy about that.

How do you choose your titles: Most of the time, I like to look at the main “point” of the fic, the main topic/theme, and make up a title based off of that, but sometimes I make up the title based on the recurring motif in the fic.

Do you outline: Boy, do I! There are rare cases in which I don’t; “dragon blood” is one such rarity*. Otherwise, most of my fics have either a detailed outline or general idea blurb on what to include, how to structure it, etc. For multi-chapter fics, I tend to do a chapter-by-chapter outline, in which I figure out what I want to happen in each chapter (with ideas thrown under the chapters I want to include them in).

*The first draft had an idea blurb on how it would be structured, but it was scrapped entirely, and the final version was written without an outline.

Complete: It would be easier to list the fics I haven’t completed yet: The Water Trials and “Too Late.” I’m not counting my discontinued fics from MCSM and Bakugan (I was going through a weird phase) since I’m no longer in those fandoms.

Do you accept prompts: Sure. In fact, my entire Kataang: Kiss 22 (20) series is based upon @lanjunlazy’s Kiss 22 prompt artwork series (minus the ones that are NSFW); check out her artwork, btw. However, I will have to say that there are certain prompts I will not do if they don’t align with my own belief set, being a Christian. Don’t let that stop you from talking to me, though! Even if we might disagree, I want you to know that you are always welcome on my blog :)

Upcoming story you’re most excited to write about: The rest of The Avatar Experiment series, the series that The Water Trials is in! I can’t wait to share it with the rest of you guys.

And maaayyybe that Deathless One AU I was talking about 👀

Stories you’re most excited to read: The rest of Ogro’s/Baithin’s Distorted Reality! It’s such an awesome ATLA Role Swap AU because instead of the swapped characters being carbon copies of their canon counterparts, they still retain their own personality as in canon, and every character has their backstory or role reinvented so that the story is fresh while also being familiar!

Also any character death fics and/or introspective Aang-centric fics (recs? anyone?).

Tagging: @flameohotwife @shameaboutthedilettantism uhhhh I really, really don’t know that many fic writers. If you see this on your dashboard, then consider it as me tagging you to do this!

#northern's fanfiction bts #author self interview #self-promo #did i cram in as many fics as i could for self promo? yes #do i feel guilty?#no actually. not really

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za3k · 3 years

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2020 Videogames

In 2020 I’m newly retired, so I’ve had free time. I think it’s fun to do reviews, so without further ado here’s every video game I played in 2020!

I recommend:

(4/5) Among Us – Very fun. It’s only fun with voice chat with friends, so I’ve only gotten to play once or twice. I’ve been watching it more than playing it. Also free to play for mobile gamers–I’m tired of the “everyone buys a copy” model of group gameplay.

(4/5) Brogue. Brogue is an ascii-art roguelike. It’s great, and it has a nice difficulty ramp. It’s a good “quick break” game. I play it in preference to other roguelikes partly because I haven’t done it to death yet, and partly because I don’t need a numpad?

(4/5) Cook Serve Delicious 3. One of the more fun games I played this year. You get really into it, but I had trouble relaxing and paying attention to the real world when I played too much, haha. I own but haven’t played the first two–I gather this is pretty much just a refinement.

(4/5) Green Hell. Price tag is a bit high for the number of hours I got out of it, but I haven’t finished the story. Great graphics, and the BEST map design I’ve seen in a 3D game in a long time. It feels like a real place, with reasonable geography instead of copy-pasted tiles. I love that as you walk along, you can just spot a cultivated area from the rest of the jungle–it feels more like it’s treating me like an adult than most survival games. Everything still gets highlighted if you can pick it up. I played the survival mode, which was okay but gets old quickly. I started the story mode–I think it would be fine, but it has some LONG unskippable scenes at the start, including a very hand-holdy tutorial, that I think they should have cut. I did start getting into the story and was having fun, but I stopped. I might finish the game some time.

(4/5) Hyperrogue. One of my recent favorites. The dev has made a fair number of highly experimental games, most of which are a total miss with me, but this one is fun. I do wish the early game wasn’t quite as repetitive. Failing another solution, I might actually want this not to be permadeath, or to have a save feature? I bought it on steam to support the dev and get achievements, but it’s also available a version or two behind free, which is how I tried it. Constantly getting updates and new worlds.

(4/5) Minecraft – Compact Claustrophobia modpack. Fun idea, nice variety. After one expansion felt a little samey, and it was hard to start with two people. I’d consider finishing this pack.

(4/5) Overcooked 2. Overcooked 2 is just more levels for Overcooked. The foods in the second game is more fun, and it has better controls and less bugs. If you’re considering playing Overcooked, I recommend just starting with the second game, despite very fun levels in the first. I especially appreciate that the second game didn’t just re-use foods from the first.

(4/5) Please Don’t Press Anything. A unique little game where you try to get all the endings. I had a lot of fun with this one, but it could have used some kind of built-in hints like Reventure. Also, it had a lot of red herrings. Got it for $2, which it was well worth.

(5/5) Reventure. Probably the best game new to me this year. It’s a short game where you try to get each of about 100 endings. The art and writing are cute and funny. The level design is INCREDIBLE. One thing I found interesting is the early prototype–if I had played it, I would NOT have imagined it would someday be any fun at all, let alone as amazing as it is. As a game designer I found that interesting! I did 100% complete this one–there’s a nice in-game hint system, but there were still 1-3 “huh” puzzles, especially in the post-game content, one of which I had to look up. It’s still getting updates so I’m hoping those will be swapped for something else.

(5/5) Rimworld. Dwarf fortress, but with good cute graphics, set in the Firefly universe. Only has 1-10 pawns instead of hundreds of dwarves. Basically Dwarf Fortress but with a good UI. I wish you could do a little more in Rimworld, but it’s a fantastic, relaxing game.

(5/5) Slay the Spire. Probably the game I played most this year. A deckbuilding adventure through a series of RPG fights. A bit luck-based, but relaxing and fun. I like that you can play fast or slow. Very, very well-designed UI–you can really learn how things work. My favorite part is that because it’s singleplayer, it’s really designed to let you build a game-breaking deck. That’s how it should be!

(4/5) Stationeers. I had a lot of fun with this one. It’s similar to Space Engineers but… fun. It has better UI by a mile too, even if it’s not perfect. I lost steam after playing with friends and then going back to being alone, as I often do for base-building games. Looks like you can genuinely make some complicated stuff using simple parts. Mining might not be ideal.

(5/5) Spy Party. One of my favorite games. Very fun, and an incredibly high skill ceiling. There’s finally starting to be enough people to play a game with straners sometimes. Bad support for “hot seat”–I want to play with beginners in person, and it got even harder with the introduction of an ELO equivalent and removing the manual switch to use “beginner” gameplay.

(4/5) Telling Lies. A storytelling game. The core mechanic is that you can use a search engine for any phrase, and it will show the top 5 survellance footage results for that. The game internally has transcripts of every video. I didn’t really finish the game, but I had a lot of fun with it. The game was well-made. I felt the video acting didn’t really add a huge amount, and they could have done a text version, but I understand it wouldn’t have had any popular appeal. The acting was decent. There’s some uncomfortable content, on purpose.

(4/5) Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS). Delightful. Very silly, not what you’d expect from the name. What everyone should have been doing with physics engines since they were invented. Imagine that when a caveman attacks, the club moves on its own and the caveman just gets ragdolled along, glued to it. Also the caveman and club have googley eyes. Don’t try to win or it will stop being fun. Learn how to turn on slo-mo and move the camera.

(4/5) We Were Here Together. Lots of fun. I believe the second game out of three. Still some crashes and UI issues. MUCH better puzzles and the grpahics are gorgeous. They need to fix the crashes or improve the autosave, we ended up replaying a lot of both games from crashes. It’s possible I should be recommending the third game but I haven’t played it yet.

The Rest

(3/5) 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel. More fun that it sounds. If you play to mess around and win by accident, it’s pretty good. Definitely play with a second human player, though.

(1.5/5) 7 billion humans. Better than the original, still not fun. Soulless game about a soulless, beige corporation. Just play Zachtronics instead. If you’re on a phone and want to engage your brain, play Euclidea.

(3/5) A Dark Room. Idle game.

(1/5) Amazing Cultivation Simulator. A big disappointment. Bad english voice acting which can’t be turned off, and a long, unskippable tutorial. I didn’t get to actual gameplay. I like Rimworld and cultivation novels so I had high hopes.

(3/5) ADOM (Steam version) – Fun like the original, which I would give 5/5. Developed some major issues on Linux, but I appreciate that there’s a graphical version available, one of my friends will play it now.

(4/5) agar.io – Good, but used to be better. Too difficult to get into games now. Very fun and addictive gameplay.

(3/5) Amorous – Furry dating sim. All of the hot characters are background art you can’t interact with, and the characters you can actually talk to are a bunch of sulky nerds who for some reason came to a nightclub. I think it was free, though.

(0/5) Apis. Alpha game, AFAIK I was the first player. Pretty much no fun right now (to the point of not really being a game yet), but it could potentially become fun if the author puts in work.

(4/5) Autonauts. I played a ton of Autonauts this year, almost finished it, which is rare for me. My main complaint is that it’s fundamentally supposed to be a game about programming robots, but I can’t actually make them do more than about 3 things, even as a professional programmer. Add more programming! It can be optional, that’s fine. They’re adding some kind of tower defense waves instead, which is bullshit. Not recommended because it’s not for everyone.

(3/5) A-Z Inc. Points for having the guts to have a simple game. At first this looked like just the bones of Swarm Simulator, but the more you look at the UI and the ascension system, the worse it actually is. I would regularly reset because I found out an ascension “perk” actually made me worse off.

(5/5) Beat Saber. Great game, and my favorite way to stay in shape early this year. Oculus VR only, if you have VR you already have this game so no need to recommend. Not QUITE worth getting a VR set just to play it at current prices.

(1/5) Big Tall Small. Good idea, but no fun to play. Needed better controls and level design, maybe some art.

(0.5/5) Blush Blush. Boring.

(3/5) Business Shark. I had too much fun with this simple game. All you do is just eat a bunch of office workers.

(3/5) chess.com. Turns out I like chess while I’m high?

(3/5) Circle Empires Rivals. Decent, more fun than the singleplayer original. It shouldn’t really have been a separate game from Circle Empires, and I’m annoyed I couldn’t get it DRM-free like the original.

(3/5) Cross Virus. By Dan-box. Really interesting puzzle mechanics.

(4/5) Cultist Simulator. Really fun to learn how to play–I love games that drop you in with no explanation. Great art and writing, I wish I could have gotten their tarot deck. Probably the best gameplay “ambience” I’ve seen–getting a card that’s labeled “fleeting sense of radiance” that disappears in 5 seconds? Great. Also the core stats are very well thought out for “feel” and real-life accuracy–dread (depression) conquers fascination (mania), etc. It has a few gameplay gotchas, but they’re not too big–layout issues, inability to go back to skipped text, or to put your game in an unwinnable state early on). Unfortunately it’s a “roguelike”, and it’s much too slow-paced and doesn’t have enough replay value, so it becomes a horrible, un-fun grind when you want to actually win. I probably missed the 100% ending but I won’t be going back to get it. I have no idea who would want to play this repeatedly. I’m looking forward to the next game from the same studio though! I recommend playing a friend’s copy instead of buying.

(2/5) Darkest Dungeon. It was fine but I don’t really remember it.

(2/5) Dicey Dungeons. Okay deck-building roguelike gameplay (with an inventory instead of a deck). Really frustrating, unskippably slow difficulty curve at the start. I played it some more this year and liked it better because I had a savegame. I appreciate having several character classes, but they should unlock every difficulty from the start.

(2/5) Diner Bros. Basically just a worse Overcooked. I didn’t like the controls, and it felt too repetitive with only one diner.

(2/5) Don’t Eat My Mind You Stupid Monster. Okay art and idea, the gameplay wasn’t too fun for me.

(2/5) Don’t Starve – I’ve played Don’t Stave maybe 8 different times, and it’s never really gripped me, I always put it back down. It’s slow, a bit grindy, and there’s no bigger goal–all you can do is live.

(3/5) Don’t Starve Together – Confusingly, Don’t Starve Together can be played alone. It’s Don’t Starve, plus a couple of the expansions. This really could be much more clearly explained.

(1/5) Elemental Abyss – A deck-builder, but this time it’s grid-based tactics. Really not all that fun. Just play Into the Abyss instead or something.

(1/5) Else Heart.Break() – I was excited that this might be a version of “Hack N’ Slash” from doublefine that actually delivered and let you goof around with the world. I gave it up in the first ten minutes, because the writing and characters drove me crazy, without getting to hacking the world.

(2/5) Everything is Garbage. Pretty good for a game jam game. Not a bad use of 10 minutes. I do think it’s probably possible to make the game unwinnable, and the ending is just nothing.

(1/5) Evolve. Idle game, not all that fun. I take issue with the mechanic in Sharks, Kittens, and this where buying your 15th fence takes 10^15 wood for some reason.

(4/5) Exapunks. Zachtronics has really been killing it lately, with Exapunks and Opus Magnum. WONDERFUL art and characters during story portions, and much better writing. The gameplay is a little more varied than in TIS-100 or the little I played of ShenZen I/O. My main complaint about Zachtronics games continues to be, that I don’t want to be given a series of resource-limited puzzles (do X, but without using more than 10 programming instructions). Exapunks is the first game where it becomes harder to do something /at all/, rather than with a particular amount of resources, but it’s still not there for me. Like ShenZen, they really go for a variety of hardware, too. Can’t recommend this because it’s really only for programmers.

(1/5) Exception. Programming game written by some money machine mobile games company. Awful.

(4/5) Factorio. Factorio’s great, but for me it doesn’t have that much replay value, even with mods. I do like their recent updates, which included adding blueprints from the start of the game, improving belt sorting, and adding a research queue. We changed movement speed, made things visually always day, and adding a small number of personal construction robots from the start this run. I’m sure if you’d like factorio you’ve played it already.

(3/5) Fall Guys – I got this because it was decently fun to watch. Unfortunately, it’s slightly less fun to play. Overall, there’s WAY too much matchmaking waiting considering the number of players, and the skill ceiling is very low on most of the games, some of which are essentially luck (I’m looking at you, team games).

(3/5) Forager – Decent game. A little too much guesswork in picking upgrades–was probably a bit more fun on my second play because of that. Overall, nice graphics and a cute map, but the gameplay could use a bit of work.

(3/5) Getting Over It – Funny idea, executed well. Pretty sure my friends and I have only gotten through 10% of the game, and all hit about the same wall (the first tunnel)

(3/5) Guild of Dungeoneering – Pretty decent gameplay. I feel like it’s a bit too hard for me, but that’s fine. Overall I think it could use a little more cute/fun art, I never quite felt that motivated.

(1/5) Hardspace: Shipbreakers. Okay, I seriously didn’t get to play this one, but I had GAMEBREAKING issues with my controller, which is a microsoft X-box controller for PC–THE development controller.

(2/5) Helltaker. All right art, meh gameplay. But eh, it’s free!

(3/5) Hot Lava. Decent gameplay. Somehow felt like the place that made this had sucked the souls out of all the devs first–no one cared about the story or characters. It’s a game where the floor is made out of lava, with a saturday morning cartoon open, so that was a really an issue. Admirable lack of bugs, though. I’m a completionist so I played the first world a lot to get all the medals, and didn’t try the later ones.

(3/5) House Flipper – Weird, but I had fun. I wish the gameplay was a little more unified–it felt like a bunch of glued-together minigames.

(2/5) Hydroneer. Utterly uninspiring. I couldn’t care about making progress at all, looked like a terrible grind to no benefit.

(1/5) io. Tiny game, I got it on Steam, also available on phone. Basically a free web flash game, but for money. Not good enough to pay the $1 I paid. Just a bit of a time-killer.

(3/5) Islanders – All you do is place buildings and get points. Not particularly challenging, but relaxing. Overall I liked it.

(3/5) Jackbox – I played this online with a streamer. Jackbox has always felt a little bit soulless money grab to me, but it’s still all right. I like that I can play without having a copy–we need more games using this purchase model.

(3/5) Life is Feudal – Soul-crushingly depressing and grindy, which I knew going in. I thought it was… okay, but I really want an offline play mode (Yes, I know there’s an unsupported single-player game, but it’s buggier and costs money). UI was pretty buggy, and I think hunting might literally be impossible.

(2/5) Minecraft – Antimatter Chemistry. Not particularly fun.

(3/5) Minecraft – ComputerCraft. I played a pack with just ComputerCraft and really nothing else. Was a little slow, would have been more fun with more of an audience. I love the ComputerCraft mod, I just didn’t have a great experience playing my pack I made.

(3/5) Minecraft – Foolcraft 3. Fun, a bit buggy. Honestly I can’t remember it too well.

(1/5) Minecraft – Manufactio. Looked potentially fun, but huge bugs and performance issues, couldn’t play.

(4/5) Minecraft – Tekkit. Tekkit remains one of my favorite Minecraft modpacks.

(3/5) Minecraft – Valhelsia 2. I remember this being fun, but I can’t remember details as much as I’d like. I think it was mostly based around being the latest version of minecraft?

(4/5) Minecraft – Volcano Block. Interesting, designed around some weird mods I hadn’t used. I could have used more storage management or bulk dirt/blocks early in the game–felt quite cramped. Probably got a third of the way through the pack. I got novelty value out of it, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it if I had ever used the plant mod before–it’s a very fixed, linear progression.

(5/5) Minit. This is a weird, small game. I actually had a lot of fun with it. Then I 100% completed it, which was less fun but I still had a good time overall.

(3/5) Monster Box. By Dan-box. One of two Dan-box games I played a lot of. Just visually appealing, the gameplay isn’t amazing. Also, Dan-box does some great programming–this is a game written in 1990 or so, and it can render hundreds of arrows in the air smoothly in a background tab.

(3/5) Monster Train. A relatively fun deckbuilding card game. It can’t run well on my computer, which is UNACCEPTABLE–this is a card game with 2D graphics. My MICROWAVE should run this shit in 2020. Ignoring that, the gameplay style (summon monsters, MTG style) just isn’t my cup of tea.

(2/5) Moonlighter. Felt like it was missing some inspiration, just didn’t have a sense of “fun”. The art was nice. The credits list is surprisingly long.

(2/5) Muse Dash. All right, a basic rhythm game. Not enough variety to the game play, and everything was based around perfect or near-perfect gameplay, which makes things less fun for me.

(3/5) NES games – various. Dr Mario, Ice Climbers. Basically, I got some Chinese handheld “gameboy” that has all the NES games preloaded on it. Overall it was a great purchase.

(2/5) Noita. “The Powder Game” by Dan-Box, as a procedurally generated platformer with guns. Lets you design your own battle spells. Despite the description, you really still can’t screw around as much as I’d like. I also had major performance issues

(3/5) Observation. I haven’t played this one as much as I’d like, I feel like it may get better. Storytelling, 3D game from the point of view of the AI computer on a space station. I think I might have read a book it’s based on, unfortunately.

(2/5) One Step From Eden. This is a deck-building combat tactics game. I thought it was turn-based, but it’s actually realtime. I think if it was turn-based I would have liked it. The characters were a bit uninspired.

(1/5) Orbt XL. Very dull. I paid $0.50 for it, it was worth that.

(4/5) Opus Magnum. Another great game from Zachtronics, along with Exapunks they’re really ramping up. This is the third execution of the same basic concept. I’d like to see Zachtronics treading new ground more as far as gameplay–that said, it is much improved compared to the first two iterations. The art, writing, and story were stellar on the other hand.

(3/5) Out of Space. Fun idea, you clean a spaceship. It’s never that challenging, and it has mechanics such that it gets easier the more you clean, rather than harder. Good but not enough replay value. Fun with friends the first few times. The controls are a little wonky.

(1/5) Outpost (tower defense game). I hate all tower defense.

(3/5) Overcooked. Overcooked is a ton of fun.

(4/5) Powder Game – Dan-box. I played this in reaction to not liking Noita. It’s fairly old at this point. Just a fun little toy.

(1/5) Prime Mover – Very cool art, the gameplay put me to sleep immediately. A “circuit builder” game but somehow missing any challenge or consistency.

(2/5) Quest for Glory I. Older, from 1989. Didn’t really play this much, I couldn’t get into the writing, and the pseudo-photography art was a little jarring.

(4/5) Raft. I played this in beta for free on itch.io, and had a lot of fun. Not enough changed that it was really worth a replay, but it has improved, and I got to play with a second player. Not a hard game, which I think was a good thing. The late game they’ve expanded, but it doesn’t really add much. The original was fun and so was this.

(3/5) Satisfactory. I honestly don’t know how I like this one–I didn’t get too far into it.

(4/5) Scrap Mechanic. I got this on a recommendation from a player who played in creative. I only tried the survival mode–that mode is not well designed, and their focuses for survival are totally wrong. I like the core game, you can actually build stuff. If I play again, I’ll try the creative mode, I think.

(3.5/5) Shapez.io. A weird, abstracted simplification of Factorio. If I hadn’t played factorio and half a dozen copies, I imagine this would have been fun, but it’s just more of the same. Too much waiting–blueprints are too far into the game, too.

(2.5/5) Simmiland. Okay, but short. Used cards for no reason. For a paid game, I wanted more gameplay out of it?

(0.5/5) Snakeybus. The most disappointing game I remember this year. Someone made “Snake” in 3D. There are a million game modes and worlds to play in. I didn’t find anything I tried much fun.

(1/5) Soda Dungeon. A “mobile” (read: not fun) style idle game. Patterned after money-grab games, although I don’t remember if paid progress was actually an option. I think so.

(4/5) Spelunky. The only procedurally generated platformer I’ve ever seen work. Genuinely very fun.

(4/5) Spelunky 2. Fun, more of an upgrade of new content than a new game. Better multiplayer. My computer can’t run later levels at full speed.

(1/5) Stick Ranger 2. Dan-box. Not much fun.

(3/5) Superliminal. Fun game. A bit short for the pricetag.

(3/5) Tabletop Simulator – Aether’s End: Legacy. Interesting, a “campaign” (series of challenge bosses and pre-written encounters) deckbuilding RPG. I like the whole “campaign RPG boardgame” idea. This would have worked better with paper, there were some rough edges in both the game instructions and the port to Tabletop Simulator.

(4/5) Tabletop Simulator – The Captain is Dead. Very fun. I’d love to play with more than 2 people. Tabletop simulator was so-so for this one.

(2/5) Tabletop Simulator – Tiny Epic Mechs. You give your mech a list of instructions, and it does them in order. Arena fight. Fun, but I think I could whip up something at least as good.

(3/5) The Council. One of the only 3D games I finished. It’s a story game, where you investigate what’s going on and make various choices. It’s set in revolutionary france, at the Secret World Council that determines the fate of the world. It had a weak ending, with less choice elements than the rest of the game so far, which was a weird decision. Also, it has an EXCRUTIATINGLY bad opening scene, which was also weird. The middle 95% of the game I enjoyed, although the ending went on a little long. The level of background knowledge expected of the player swung wildly–they seemed to expect me to know who revolutionary French generals were with no explanation, but not Daedalus and the Minotaur. The acting was generally enjoyable–there’s a lot of lying going on in the game and it’s conveyed well. The pricetag is too high to recommend.

(0/5) The Grandma’s Recipe (Unus Annus). This game is unplayably bad–it’s just a random pixel hunt. Maybe it would be fun if you had watched the video it’s based on.

(3/5) The Room. Pretty fun! I think this is really designed for a touchscreen, but I managed to play it on my PC. Played it stoned, which I think helps with popular puzzle games–it has nice visuals but it’s a little too easy.

(3/5) This Call May Be Recorded. Goofy experimental game.

(4/5) TIS-100. Zachtronics. A programming game. I finally got done with the first set of puzzles and into the second this year. I had fun, definitely not for everyone.

(3/5) Trine. I played this 2-player. I think the difficulty was much better 2-player, but it doesn’t manage 2 players getting separated well. Sadly we skipped the story, which seemed like simple nice low-fantasy. Could have used goofier puzzles, it took itself a little too seriously and the levels were a bit same-y.

(2/5) Unrailed. Co-op railroad building game. It was okay but there wasn’t base-building. Overall not my thing. I’d say I would prefer something like Overcooked if it’s going to be timed? Graphics reminded me of autonauts.

(2/5) Vampire Night Shift. Art game. Gameplay could have used a bit of polish. Short but interesting.

(4/5) Wayward. To date, the best survival crafting system I’ve seen. You can use any pointy object and stick-like object, together with glue or twine, to make an arrow. The UI is not great, and there’s a very counter-intuitive difficulty system. You need to do a little too much tutorial reading, and it could use more goals. Overall very fun. Under constant development, so how it plays a given week is a crapshoot. The steam version finally works for me (last time I played it was worse than the free online alpha, now it’s the same or better). I recomend playing the free online version unless you want to support the author.

(1/5) We Need to Go Deeper. Multiplayer exploration game in a sub, with sidescrolling battle. Somehow incredibly unfun, together with high pricetag. Aesthetics reminded me of Don’t Starve somehow.

(2/5) We Were Here. Okay 2-player puzzle game. Crashed frequently, and there were some “huh” puzzles and UI. Free.

(3/5) Yes, your grace. Gorgeous pixel art graphics. The story is supposed to be very player-dependent, but I started getting the feeling that it wasn’t. I didn’t quite finish the game but I think I was well past halfway. Hard to resume after a save, you forget things. I got the feeling I wouldn’t replay it, which is a shame because it’s fun to see how things go differently in a second play with something like this.

These are not all new to me, and very few came out in 2020. I removed any games I don’t remember and couldn’t google (a fair number, I play a lot of game jam games) as well as any with pornographic content.

2020 Videogames was originally published on Optimal Prime

#games #review #reviews #videogames #yearly review #cross-posted-from-blog

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New Post has been published on PC Invasion

New Post has been published on https://www.pcinvasion.com/dead-rising-4-pc-technical-review

Dead Rising 4 PC Technical Review

There are whispered rumours that Dead Rising 4 actually released awhile ago, on the Windows 10 Store. These rumours are obviously unverifiable because nobody actually uses the Windows 10 Store. With its recent Steam release, though, now seems a good time to have a look at Dead Rising 4 and figure out if its PC version is a shambling corpse, or the sort of lean and mean beast that runs full-pelt for your face. Which is probably a bad analogy considering most people agree that slow zombies are the better zombies, but shush.

I’m running this on my usual system: an i7-3820 with 16GB RAM and a GeForce GTX 970. As ever, please bear in mind that my computer is apparently powered by a wizard, because it has a tendency to run things it should not be able to run. Nonetheless, this should give you a rough benchmark for how a comparable system will handle Dead Rising 4.

First up, the options, which are wonderfully abundant. Resolution goes all the way from 5120×2880 at 144Hz down to 640×480 at 24Hz, so you’re almost certainly covered – although I’d dread to see someone trying to run this game on a system that has a maximum resolution of 640×480. Not sure if it handles some of the odder aspect ratios, but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised considering the wealth of options it has.

There are a grand total of 16 visual tweakables, ranging from the usual stuff like Texture Quality through to, uh, Translucency Lighting and Dynamic Load Scaling. I don’t really know what those do, and that’s a little disappointing as Dead Rising 4 actually has really good menu help in most of its other sections. Selecting a language has a zombie say (in the text of that language) “Graagh… If you can’t read this… grrrh… you’d better pick another language”, while all of the keybinds have snarky little asides. For instance, highlighting “Move left” displays a tooltip that reads “Scientists have recently discovered that this is the opposite of going right.” A little touch, but a nice one, so it’s a tad disappointing that the options that would actually benefit from some detail are completely ignored. Oh well.

The other disappointment is that there’s no Motion Blur setting, because Motion Blur is awful, and as far as I can tell it’s not parcelled in with another options. Those two little niggles aside, this is an excellent set of options which can be carefully tweaked to your optimum.

We’ll get into how it looks and runs shortly, but first let’s glance at the other options. Audio is basic volume/subtitles. Heads-Up Display lets you turn on or off a number of pop-ups and HUD elements, from tutorial updates right up to having a reticle and minimap on screen; there are enough of these that you might as well have a screenshot.

Language offers a wide variety of languages (surprise!) far past the usual, including two types of Spanish and three types of Chinese; while Gameplay offers up the usual control sensitivities along with aim assist, control inversions, and whether you want Sprint and Aim to be held or toggled with a tap. Finally, keyboard settings let you rebind whatever you like. I haven’t experimented a great deal with this as the default keyboard controls seem spot-on to me, but it’s there!

So: lots of options, and I’m really rather pleased with them. Plenty of graphical tweakables, plus keybinds, HUD adjustments, and a bunch of other stuff that’s often overlooked. Really good stuff.

Direct comparison screenshots are quite hard to do with Dead Rising 4 because of the zombie-filled nature of the game and because you have to quit to the main menu for texture quality changes to take effect, but here are a few showing the differences between Very High and Low.

Very High.

Low.

Very High.

Low.

Two things of note are the shadows (which on Low appear to have been stolen from Minecraft) and the environmental texture quality. Low also has a bit of noticeable aliasing (check out the straps on Frank’s harness in the Cammy costume), but the character models and the like are still alright. They do seem almost like they’re pasted onto the rest of the environment thanks to the huge difference in quality, though.

For the hell of it, here’s another Low quality screen showing the game in action rather than a still of Frank.

Not great, sure, but not as bad as the non-action stills might’ve led you to believe.

There’s less of a difference around the middle of the spectrum. The other screenshots you’ll see on this page are around Medium/High, and I don’t think there are any particularly huge differences between them. In a non-screenshot sense, there is a bit of pop-in on the lower end of things (an item halfway down a corridor faded into view as I approached it, and on Low, store marquees notably fade from incoherent blurs to readable textures as you approach) but for the most part it’s the shadows and the environment textures that have the biggest changes.

I’m hard-pressed to say that Dead Rising 4 looks particularly great, though. I mean, it’s fine: even on Low, zombies explode into wondrous amounts of gore and the blood-splatters soaking the clothing are really quite lovely… which is a sentence you probably shouldn’t say out loud in public. I think it’s more an issue with the game’s art style than anything, because unlike most Dead Rising games, Dead Rising 4 is – so far – unrelentingly grey. It’s quite a departure, and not one I’m too keen on.

It does, however, run really well. On 2560×1440 Very High, I get around 40FPS. Medium and High both sit around the 50FPS mark, while Low is around 60FPS. Drop it to 1920×1080 (which, really, is what my graphics card is aimed at) and Very High sits comfortably at 60FPS while Low skyrockets up to about 90FPS. So yeah, it’s just fine on 1920×1080, and not too much tweaking is needed for higher.

Although it obviously looks a hell of a lot nicer on Proper Quality. And no, this doesn’t really impact the framerate much that I noticed.

It’s worth noting that even the 50FPS bits seemed to be running really well. This is either down to the way it handles frames, or it’s G-Sync doing its impressive trickery to fool my eyes. Either way, it’s within the region I’d consider playable.

It controls just fine, too. I haven’t even bothered trying a gamepad simply because the mouse and keyboard controls are great. There is a weapon wheel (several of them, actually) but taps of 1, 2, and 3 swap between your throwable, melee, and ranged weapons respectively, so the only time you need to dip into the wheel is to combine weapons… which you can generally do just by holding E when near to an ingredient that’s not in your inventory anyway. Otherwise, any three-button mouse can handle just about everything you need. The only iffy part of controlling it on a mouse and keyboard so far has been trying to steer a vehicle, but if memory serves, that’s never been Dead Rising‘s strong point on any control input.

Gamepad controls aren’t manually rebindable, but there are a bunch of different presets that… probably work? Look, I don’t know; I don’t use a gamepad if I can help it. I was tickled when I saw this loading screen, though:

I have no idea if this was a default thing or if it detected that I’ve previously used a Steam Controller or what, but hey, that’s one of the only times I’ve ever seen a Steam Controller referenced within a game. Nice.

Three quick and relatively minor issues with the PC controls. Firstly, one tutorial (combining weapons) got a bit confused when I wasn’t using a gamepad, but luckily it was incredibly easy to figure out what to do. Secondly, one pop-up told me to press the Back button to check something, which is not a button I have on my keyboard. Third, one of the unlockable skills makes the controller vibrate when a particular collectible is nearby… which isn’t much use on a mouse and keyboard. Hopefully that has some sort of visual or audible indicator too, or that’s going to be tremendously useless on PC. I mean, I once tried combining my mouse and a motor, but the last time I saw that mouse it was rocketing through the sky while making a noise that sounded like the mating call of a lawnmower.

On the plus side, despite looking more grey and gritty than usual, Dead Rising 4 still has tremendously silly bits even early on.

So! Good options, good optimisation, good controls, iffy art direction. I’m also a little uncertain on the game itself, honestly. I’m happy to be back in Frank West’s shoes, but based on the early chapters, a lot of what made Dead Rising into Dead Rising appears to have been stripped out. No time pressure, no escorting, significantly more linear (although it may just feel that way because there’s always an objective), and so far at least the Maniacs have been both less threatening and totally lacking in horrific intro and death scenes. On the plus side, combining items into improbable weapons and using them to bash the unliving shit out of zombies is still as chunky and brilliant as ever.

Unsure if I’d recommend the game just yet, then, but if you know you want it then I’d happily recommend the PC version. Nice work, Capcom.

#Dead Rising 4

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