i am a sord lol

2020 is winding down, and the rest of the country if not the world got to experience that horrific time dilation I mentioned last year. People talked about it lasting forever, kjorteo typoed that this year was 2022 and I didn’t have the heart to correct her, and we’ve still got three days left in the year.

Bigotry and hatred run rampant, but one cannot learn in a world free of failure, and these flames have once again cleansed. The phoenix finds itself reborn for the third time since this account was created.

“Sword” has rechristened as Flare Sword. You can refer to us as you normally have before now, or call the system “Flare” if you’d like, both work. And yes, we will occasionally slip from I/me to we/us from here on out; plurality is a certain at this point. Emias, the yang, and Sumire, the yin, have been joined by Kendall, the mu. The system is genderfluid, and still goes by any pronouns you please, defaulting to a cis-passing he/him. Em is he/him genderfluid, Su is she/her genderfluid, Kendall is he/him male and prefers his full name, no abbreviation, if any proper noun is used to refer to him. Names have power.

This year has sucked. Anxiety and doomsaying have gone off the charts, the government has shown active malice towards its people, and we’ve found ourselves unable to do much more than endure. Thankfully, we’re good at that. Temper the steel in the heat.

Unfortunately, it means that for most of the year, games have been an escape, a distraction instead of a hobby, and that escape has been a toxic cesspit filled with Marche Radiujus every step of the way. That said, there are some outstanding picks this year that I will get to when I have access to my own computer again.

Until then: we survived, bitch. A little more fragmented, but still physically in one meaty piece.

It takes a lot for a game to pull that "you made the choice to play this, you could have walked away at any time" card and make it work for me. Spec Ops: The Line didn't do it, because ultimately there was never a choice in the matter. You either commit atrocities, or don't finish the story.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor goes the complete opposite direction.

There's no story to finish. You're a municipal janitor, at a spaceport. You also happen to be genderfluid, but thankfully there exist readily-vended patches with which to swap out your genders as needed to stave off the effects of dysphoria. You're still doing municipal cleanup work for a pittance of a wage, in a spaceport where nobody cares, where the world happens AROUND you but rarely TO you, where you're treated like a third-world citizen just because you exist.

To say this game is Too Real is understating things, is what I'm saying. It's about the Daily Grind, the routine day in and day out. It's about how attempts to deviate from the norm may not change things all that much, or maybe they will. The one mandatory thing in the game is that you find a dropped treasure map early on, dive into the spaceport's sewerdungeons... and end up with a cursed skull floating over your head screaming at you from that point on. It doesn't do anything, except scream and sap your luck. After the first few days it's just another source of background noise like everything else.

You, meanwhile, have to scrape enough money together to eat, and to keep yourself sane. The world happens AROUND you. There's a story here, but it's not yours. Amongst the debris and refuse of the spaceport that you shovel into your handy incinerator, you find things like alchemy ingredients and magic enhancement accessories. You can't do anything with them; you're a janitor, not an alchemist or a mage. If you're lucky, you might find a rusted piece of armor. You can't do anything with it, you're not a warrior. Everything at this spaceport happens out of your view; you merely exist, and pick up the trash.

The moral dilemmas, thus, become far more innocuous and inconsequential, but in a way that still makes you think about them. Do you buy the cheapest thing possible to keep yourself fed, do you splurge for a really good meal, or do you eat whatever you find on the ground and use the inevitable food poisoning as an excuse to artificially inflate your work numbers by cleaning up your own puke? Do you keep patching your gender, or do you just let the dysphoria overtake you, leading to you not being able to focus on or comprehend anything to the point of it destroying your HUD? After all, it's merely a cosmetic effect. Do you cart around that rare-looking artifact or trading card in your woefully limited carrying space, looking for just the right vendor willing to pay more than pocket change for it, or do you chuck it in the incinerator for your Municipally Approved Pay? None of it really matters, none of it changes the game's end result, but it's still choices you make. The choices change the gameplay, but they still change nothing at all.

Also, the spaceport is huge. Labyrinthine, and non-euclidian. It wraps around on itself in ways that bend space, but also it's impossible to orient yourself, and the game provides no map whatsoever in-game, and only a cheap mockery of one in crayon in the manual. Instead, you'll have to learn to figure your way around by the colored arrows on the ground, each pointing you towards the centerpoint of that colored district. Why do you need to get to one district or another? Well, you don't really, unless you're trying to do something. But none of the choices really matter, so it's just a personal achievement thing of learning to navigate on your own.

Oh, right, I mentioned a luck stat. You do have one of those. It's raised by praying to any and all of the nine goddesses of the spaceport (one for each day of the week, you see) and lowered by burning religious items, lucky charms, or dealing with cursed items. (Like the floating skull following you around, constantly). Ostensibly it affects what kind of debris you find on the ground, but ultimately it's just a number. Luck is what you make of it, and you're a janitor with no respect and even less money.

This is a game about monotonous grind, about the attempts to escape that grind being largely futile, and about simply existing in a world that doesn't give two shits about you.

Eventually, if you manage to fight the tedium and go on your own personal exploration to find the items needed to cure you of Cursed Skull, you wake up that very night, face to face with said skull, who goes "oh hey, sorry about the screaming constantly and hanging around you like a dark cloud thing, it's just how curses go, but i'll tell you something. I've seen how you live and the real curse is this rut you're in. You can get out of it if you try, but you'll never actually be happy until you do."

It's a strangely powerful message, in a game centered around the exact opposite of that message. All at once, the denouement of the game is basically the game itself telling you "yeah, I know this is miserable, but if you don't want to, you now have the power to walk away at any time you like. You always did, of course, but now it's something you can do without just quitting the game."

Symbolically, of course; you still have to exit the game to stop, but that's the end of anything resembling a narrative in the game. It's let you go, and if you keep playing, that's on you. There's no more to see if you want 'adventure', or an experience even. It's just more monotony for goals that are pointless to achieve. And some people want that, and some people don't.

This is not a game for everyone, and in a lot of ways it's soul-crushingly bleak. But that's by design, and I'm ultimately glad I played through it.

ughhhhhhh.

ughhhhhh I wanted to like this hack, it has so many good ideas and ughhhhhhhh

i even waited from 1.3 to 1.6.1 to 2.0 and a lot of things have changed but there's still ugh

To quote what I told a friend: Okay. I've played through the whole thing and yeah. Even now, I can't recommend BNW. It's... complicated to actually put into words, but the long and short of it is that for every fantastic thing it does, it also does something I can't fucking stand, and it does a lot of fantastic things.

If that sounds like damning with overwhelming praise, you're right!

For those curious, Brave New World is a full overhaul/rebalance hack for the SNES version of FF6 (or, rather, FF3) that has a whole bevy of under the hood changes including a touched up script, greatly improved character diversity (through character-limiting espers and thus spell access/stat growth) and a complete reworking of the game's stat formulas to pull it out of the trap the original game has of Magic being your god stat and the overwhelming statistic push to turn everyone into roided out spellslingers.

Unfortunately, it has a lot of problems, both in-game (balancing difficulty is hard, it turns out, and while they managed to get the first half of the game almost pitch perfect, the second half devolves into the same FF "You Can Only Win Through Overwhelming Force" game as every other FF endgame) and out of game (off-hand comments in the readmes combined with a few throwaway lines and attack names make me really question about the maturity of the writer, someone who thinks using words like 'retarded' and 'trigger' and constantly badtalking the game they're modifying is an acceptable way to act).

I was willing to give it a chance again with the newest update. I was willing to give it more than the chance it deserved, even, given that kjorteo has been playing Dragon Quest 2 and I've been thinking heavily about the very oldschool-oriented difficulty curve that expected you to grind for a substantial amount of time for levels and gear.

Unfortunately, it all fell apart at about the same point for me as it did the last time I tried, despite those considerations in mind. Somewhere between a third of the way through the World of Ruin to halfway through, difficulty becomes a binary. Either you're an adequate level and just kind of shrug off everything, or you're so much as a few levels behind and suddenly you're playing trampoline with the phoenix downs and struggling to put out fires as bosses and even random enemies counter most of what you throw at them with party-wide nukes. By the end of the game I was probably underlevelled, because random encounters were torturous, and so I spent the entire final boss violently abusing my SNES Classic's rewind function. There is no more comfortable middleground where you actually have to think about your choices, where the gameplay matters. It's either too easy or too hard, with no median.

After all, if we let you use those wildly debilitating status ailments on the enemy, or if we let your characters be immune to more than two or three at a time, well, then it's too easy, isn't it?

I'm done with romhacks for now, and if anyone wants to hear my opinion on difficulty/accessibility in video games:

I cheated the game, because it was cheating me.

I didn't play this to grow.
I didn't play this to improve.
I have enough room to do that living my life, which is an unending cavalcade of misery.
I took a shortcut and ended my suffering.

I experienced a hollow victory over a poorly-tuned game.
Nothing was risked and my sanity was gained.

It's sad that you think the difference matters.

In case you didn't see my reply on kjorteo's post, I am not going to be doing a gaming-year-in-review, really.

Kind of hard to do when one of your favorite games at the beginning of the year turns out to be made by someone who is literally on record hating everything you and your friends represent, and thinking they don't exist.

Wasn't all bad, honestly. Romancing SaGa 3 is just as good as the first two (which is to say it's still a 20 year old SNES game), Hypnospace Outlaw gave me warm fuzzies and big sads at the same time, Bloodstained is a top tier IGAvania with some glaring flaws, and Celine finally got me to play A Bird Story and Finding Paradise, which destroyed my feelings.

All of those games are good and worth your capitalism.

But, like. Fuck 2019, fuck TERFs, and fuck the game I refuse to mention by name because thinking about it sends me into PTSD-rage.

I'm still here. I still exist, I've just found myself not wanting to do long-form posts much any more. A lot of my conversation has gone on on Telegram, or Discord, or Plurk. Hit me up if you want to prod me there.

I might do more at a later date. Not sure.

Yeah, I've been out of it again. Happening more and more lately. It comes and goes, honestly, but... mmh, I think anxiety about life, finances, and my wife's health are just weighing down on me mostly.

Still been playing stuff, though I dunno if I can go into full rundowns of everything. In my more energetic states I can work up the creative energy for that sort of thing, but that's also the times where I'm actively willing to, well, do literally everything else.

So a quick rundown, I suppose!

DRAGON QUEST 3 sure is a Dragon Quest game. Such dragon, lots quest, wow. It has a few bad ideas and a few okay ones that got pushed into later games in the series. Kind of wore on my patience by the end, though.

Speaking of wearing on my patience. BATTLE CHEF BRIGADE is very, very good but given how bad I am at match 3s and how much my anxiety spikes with hard time limits on things I'm not good at, I kind of petered off halfway through. I may go back to it, but I kind of lost momentum on it. It's a good game though and its aesthetic is 100% top notch.

SQUIDLIT was a dollar and was about as much of a game as you'd expect to get from a dollar. It's a cute little gameboy aesthetic thing where you use your ink-shitting doublejump to attack enemies and it's over in about an hour if you're taking your time.

DRAGONWARD, however, is a very, very grindy hybrid of roguelike and infinite runner where the goal is to just keep going forward grinding out gold and stats and EXP while random events constantly try to screw you over. It's an okay timewaster but there's not really much depth to the game.

MINIT is the first game I actually made a concerted effort to clear since DQ3 and is absolutely worth looking into if it's on sale. The whole "you have to rush to make meaningful progress in 60 seconds before you die and it resets" thing is surprisingly well-balanced, and honestly if you don't care about how high or low your death count is, it's perfectly willing to let you take your time, sixty seconds a life, to figure things out.

HYPNOSPACE OUTLAW is a Web 1.0 nostalgia simulator where you play as a volunteer moderator for the alternate universe equivalent of sleepytime CompuServe. There's plot there (and the plot kind of hit me in the emotions) but really it's about digging through a very, very faithful recreation of the internet circa 1999. It's naturally not as diverse as the real internet, but that's what Steam Workshop support later on this year is looking to fix. It shot up my charts super quick in the same way Return of the Obra Dinn did last year: Saw TieTuesday streaming it, instantly dropped every other plan I had to buy it, pushed through it in about a day and then beat it two or three more times while getting a high off the music. Definitely worth the price on the same level that Obra Dinn was.

Honestly, video games are good.

Okay, so. As has come up in a few other places, this year's theme (since 'try one thing a week' failed miserably last year when RL burnout hit, and the 52/52 seemed to prioritize quick popcorn clears) is that I'll be trying to tackle a short list of things that friends/colleagues insist I Absolutely Must Consume.

Naturally, this list is open to all who are reading this, too, since I know the amount of friends I have is small enough that I won't get overwhelmed. The only "rules", as it were, is that it has to be something I have easy access to - either a game I already own or a book I can get at the local library or a show that I can use my wife's Hulu account for or that sort of thing. If I don't have easy access, I can't promise anything.

I can do other things, of course, but I absolutely want to give these an honest attempt before the year's up.

• Dragon Quest 3 (or DW3 if all I can access is the NES version)
  
• Heartbeat (no friend requested this, this is my one personal hat in the ring)
  
• Trails in the Sky (requested by chaoscheebs)
  
• A Bird Story/Finding Paradise (technically all part of the same 'story', unspoken but heavily assumed request from kjorteo)
  
• Karmaflow (If I acquire it)
  
• Trial and Error (TV show)
  
• Jing - King of Bandits (manga)
  
• Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works (anime)
  
• The Good Place (TV show, semi-subtle nudge from xyzzysqrl)

I'll probably add and remove from this as the year goes on.

Sometimes superstition is the weapon you need to use against depression. While I've been fine drowning myself in endless f2p games like gachas and digital TCGs (which are also sort of gacha-like, come to think of it), I've been letting games pile up in the backlog, especially with the slew of holiday giftings I've gotten from friends.

Then I noticed on my Backloggery that I had 666 games unfinished on Steam.

That naturally could not stand, even if Valve is ostensibly Satan. So I looked through what I had been gifted, grabbed something that seemed rather light and workable, and hammered through it.

Donut County is a relatively new indie game, came out in August of this year, about donuts.

wait, no. It's about that thing that makes donuts what they are. It's a game about holes. And naturally, anybody who orders a donut gets a hole, right?

In Donut County, you are the hole, a tiny little pit in the ground that slides around casually, sucking in rocks and grass and wadded up paper, getting progressively bigger as you do so. Then you can suck in crates, and tables... then people, buildings, the landscape, until you've left a vacant lot where a house once was. And then you repeat. Where does all this junk go? About 999ft underground, where most of the titular town of Donut County lies in shambles, subsumed by this hole and trying to get someone to confess to who did it.

Basically, it's Katamari Damacy, but with sucking things up into the planet's core instead of shooting them into space, set in a surprisingly Animal Crossing-esque world (what with its only one human and quirky animal cast, plus a healthy dose of Simlish 'voice acting'). Granted, it was only really made by a handful of people, so it's nowhere near as intricate or fleshed out as Katamari is... but it doesn't really need to be. It's not a AAA game, it's an indie title made with a lot of love and attention to detail, and quite honestly, if this came out for the PS2 instead of Katamari? It would have gone over just as well.

This year, admittedly, was a good year for indie games. I haven't given new stuff enough love and probably never actually will. But I've seen this on a few 'best of' lists alongside my personal choice Obra Dinn, and I have to say, if you're okay with the overall length of the game (I beat it in about 2 hours) then it's absolutely worth the price.

Just watch out for holes.