Noyb

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Yeah, the real thread is here:

Been listening to these great mixtapes of "strange video game music" assembled by composer and game developer Liz Ryerson: A Digital Abyss The Digital Void

Great find! Obligatory link to Olde English's Breakfast at Tiffany's sketch, which engages with the titular work to a stronger degree than the original song.

The Daily Click or its predecessor Click Cafe? (The Daily Click has a timeline to dig through of other prominent sites if it's neither of those.) Side note: I can't believe The Daily Click is still running! The newest game was uploaded twenty days ago. There's a frontpage post from one of the same old mods dated yesterday!

Really enjoyed Super Mario Galaxy 2, but I'm bailing on this postgame. After beating the game and getting all 120 power stars you're asked to collect 120 green stars scattered across every level in the game to unlock a final challenge. Some are hard to collect, asking the player to chain together moves to reach heights or distances not required in the main game, while others are hard to find, hidden behind walls or otherwise invisible to the normal camera angles, and some are both. It's fun at first to do a triple jump into a spin jump to collect a star high above the level, but not enough to sustain 120 extra challenges or to deal with all the cruft around it. Replaying parts of levels for third and fourth and fifth times just to reach the planetoids with the star, being unable to skip repeated cinematics the first time you re-encounter them for new stars in the same old levels, combing every inch of a level looking for tiny light rays, stars positioned where failure means instant death, missing a star floating in the middle of nowhere because it doesn't cast a shadow to help depth perception.

I keep trying to figure out why there are two ropes dangling near where you found the backpack, one shorter than the other. Did Ned encourage Brian to dangle off that terrifying cliff from those ropes, leading to him dropping his backpack? Are these the first steps of his never-finished Goldbergian contraption to retrieve his backpack? There's another letter behind a thick brush to the northeast right near where you find the dead deer, which (along with some commentary from Delilah) sheds light on why Dave initially left home, with a fantastic Chris Remo-sung track giving closure to his arc. (I know this is a spoiler thread, but it's a really nice moment that might be better to experience yourself?)

Two letters (Black Spectre + nightmare multiball) away from wizard mode! I realize I've never once activated Nightmare Multiball, which apparently happens when the on-table clock strikes midnight? I keep getting timeouts in Black Spectre, resetting which lanes are available, and I think putting me in walking dead states where I don't have enough time to finish the mode? Is how fast the lane lights flash the only vague indicator of how much time I have left to take a shot? Is there a global timer which limits how long the mode runs or just a relative timer that resets or refills after shooting an active lane? Far cry from the visual clarity of Morpheus' tentacles or the blunt hovering numbers in that one car chase mission.

(Two villains + a fairly productive copter multiball.) This table is both narratively and mechanically overwhelming! The taxi-driving, day-trading, politician-brawling vigilante possessed by an Egyptian god -- as portrayed by snarky banter and a table which changes modes with nearly every ramp you shoot -- almost feels like a spoof of both superheroes and pinball tables. Knowing nothing of the lore, it's interesting what hints of characterization filters through to the pinball design. Marlene, known only through a kidnapping mission and a line about why Moon Knight wants to continue living. Frenchie, seemingly named after his ridiculous accent. The uncomfortable racial undertones of a violent black man wearing facepaint being named Bushman. The back-and-forth between Moon Knight and Khonshu works well as a backbone framing. The dialogue already feels denser than Sorcerer's Lair, often spending multiple lines of dialogue establishing new modes and characters, I wonder just how much is lost in the adaptation process, or if the original work also trades heavily in old archetypes and 90s irreverence. It feels like the dialogue assumes the player doesn't know anything about this world, so it needs to introduce everything, but all this never really forms a coherent picture in my mind. Reading through these comments and the table guide (and watching Clyde and Chrissy's videos!) helped to make some sense of the table's chaos, but I'm still finding myself reacting to the current board layout more than making active plans. It also feels relatively tough to active the kickbacks. I'm having a lot of trouble hitting the crime scene even by accident, and like everything on the table you need to repeat the shot multiple times to have any effect. (Maybe activating kickbacks by manipulating the Crawly reward with the right orbit spinner might be easier? Oh man Crawly, what even is his deal? Got a Baker Street Irregular vibe from him, maybe.) The stock market scene is a lot less complicated than it feels. The stock prices seem to go up until it hits the maximum, then down until it hits the minimum, then back up to the maximum, etc. No erratic fluctuation. So it doesn't seem too difficult to cradle the ball until the price drops to ~15, switch to buy mode, make a few ramp shots, cradle the ball again, wait for the price to get high, make some more shots. You also automatically sell everything when you hit the center hole, so I think a quick way to finish the mode with a profit is just to end it early when the price is near 100.

See also the forum's playthrough of 50 Short Games.

There's also a "Decorate with Badges" button in the menu you get when tapping the top-left icon on your home screen, the one with a house icon and a wrench. (I also thought I was the only one it was loading slow for. And I totally didn't spend $2 to get a few Rhythm Tengoku Badges in a fit of weakness I'm choosing to now interpret as a microincentive for them to localize the latest one.)

Emily Short just wrote a positive piece on it, largely praising the character work and narrative structure: https://emshort.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/black-closet-hanako-games/

This game. This fucking game. I never played a commercial console game -- a game funded, manufactured, and shipped to stores -- that so actively despises the player the way Flower, Sun, and Rain does. Rubbing your face in constant failure. Stretching out fetch quests to their breaking point. Mid-game, when you finally leave the hotel, the roads of the island start opening up, but the game forbids you from driving your car. So you run. The same run that felt so slow in the confined space of the hotel, now even worse as you're trudging back and forth along these massive highways while entire movements of Gymnopedes play out. Your eight directional movement rarely aligns with the camera, so you have to constantly course-correct as you run back and forth, a design choice which strongly evokes Desert Bus. (Oh,and only cheat the step counter if you want to subvert the designer's full masochistic intent, Davey Wreden.)

If you finish a level making at most one mistake, then the level icon will turn shiny! Positive reinforcement!

Hexcells is great! What Toblix didn't say is that all of the main puzzles are hand-designed, generally with a design ethos which emphasizes this linchpin structure. The random levels in Hexcells Infinite's endgame feel so sloppy and inelegant in comparison, large swathes of redundant clues, so many possible ways forward at any one time that it feels less like a guided tour of the board and more like an uncontrolled fungal growth. Pokemon Picross is a weird beast. Capping the amount you can spend on a kid-marketed F2P game is an important step towards shaking common exploitative practices, and the puzzles are still fun, but everything surrounding it still leaves me sour. The game follows the now-standard design of constant timers and energy and grind and upsell. One Gamefaqs poster calculated that to unlock all the puzzles and upgrades without buying soft currency would require over a year of playing the daily training levels. Early on I fell into what appears to be an intentionally designed trap of wasting soft currency on an upgrade during a time when it had no value to me. Finishing a puzzle gives you a Pokemon. Equipping a Pokemon while entering a puzzle lets you use that Pokemon's ability, generally a hint (which columns or rows can you make progress on) or a cheat (reveal random tiles, slow down the timer). One of the few ways to earn soft currency is by completing missions on puzzles, which involve solving that puzzle under a time limit, bringing in specific numbers or types of Pokemon, and using specific cheats, with a small bonus if you complete every mission in one go. One of the first 15x15 puzzles includes a mission asking you to equip 3 Pokemon. The maximum party size at the end of the tutorial is two, upgrading the party size costs soft currency, and until that point all of the missions were possible to complete. So I upgraded the party size. And only then did I learn that Pokemon can only be brought into puzzles when the width of the puzzle you used to catch it is at least as wide as the current puzzle. Convoluted garbage.