This week's been a little stressful, both for actually stressful reasons and pure badbrain ones. On the flip-side, that also means I got to poke and prod at games to frantically try to distract myself, so there's that? I guess? I'll do this like my normal multi-game setups, I suppose.
PICROSS e8
lord help me i'm back on my bullshit again.
Honestly, at this point, this is little more than a formality; Picross e hasn't changed since the fourth or fifth installment and they just keep pushing them out and I keep snapping them up. I am a picross slut.
Notable largely for its numbering and how awkward that is to say. Picross e-eight. Picross EAT IT. yes i shall consume this pie. cross.
LINK-A-PIX COLOR
This kinda falls into the "picross slut" category, too, doesn't it? Draw Puzzle awakened my inner urge to deal with squares and colors and numbers and this is the same thing, except it uses white space in the puzzle itself. That naturally makes it a fair bit more awkward to solve puzzles in some scenarios. The control scheme is also ever-so-minorly different than Draw Puz's, input device aside, that I find myself not quite being lured into this as well as I was that.
DAGEDAR
What the fuck is a DaGeDar? I don't even know. Googling it and staring glass-eyed at Amazon suggests that it's a toy line that's basically the freakish crossbreed of Hot Wheels and marbles, made by the same sweatshops responsible for Zhu Zhu Pets. You roll these allegedly indestructible balls down plastic tracks and they go fast. The balls have weird designs and goofy faces on them.
There's a game about them and I got it for two bucks back at the same time as I got Michael Jackson: The Experience. This one, I regret significantly more. To be fair, I should have expected the worst when I saw the name "GameMill Entertainment". If you don't recognize the name, well... you might recognize the name of their most (in)famous product: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
Yeah. This was published by those guys. The devs aren't much better: Black Lantern isn't nearly so well-known, but MobyGames tells me they've made almost nothing but Nick Jr. cashin titles in the early 2010s, with their most recent game being... Duck Dynasty for the 3DS.
In other words: this is shovelware of the highest caliber. This shovelware has a pedigree.
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xyzzysqrl mentioned when I told her that I got this that she thought it looked like Uniracers 2. To that, I can safely say: Uniracers 2 has controls that work, mechanics that make sense, and don't require you to grind your face against the game a million times to unlock all the assumedly indistinguishable spheres. Uniracers 2's "slow you down goop" spots on its track are easily visible and avoidable.
More importantly, Uniracers 2 doesn't fucking rubberband.
This... well. At least I got two good games out of that eight dollars. And one very, very tangible kusoge.
VALKYRIA CHRONICLES
I have to say, I had heard the hype for this game for years and was beginning to believe that it was going to be something that wasn't anything but a shadow of what people thought it was. I was expecting less Undertale and more Final Fantasy 7. Admittedly, I'm only on chapter 4 (it's a bit on the tricky side and my stress hasn't let me dig at it for long) but...
...well, this is a Good Strategy Game. Playing something more like a hybrid of third person shooter and turn-based strategy game, gameplay comes across as sort of XCOM-lite in the emphasis on squad placement and movement tech.
More notably, the game is beautiful (though with a few graphical glitches on my PC - get the PS3 version if you look for it) and surprisingly well-written for a game based on an Alternate World War 2. True, there's no shortage of cheap heat from the NotGermany faction, but from what I've heard it does a good job painting things a lot more black-and-grey than black-and-white. I'm definitely looking forward to digging my heels into Tank Game a little harder.
PICROSS e8
lord help me i'm back on my bullshit again.
Honestly, at this point, this is little more than a formality; Picross e hasn't changed since the fourth or fifth installment and they just keep pushing them out and I keep snapping them up. I am a picross slut.
Notable largely for its numbering and how awkward that is to say. Picross e-eight. Picross EAT IT. yes i shall consume this pie. cross.
LINK-A-PIX COLOR
This kinda falls into the "picross slut" category, too, doesn't it? Draw Puzzle awakened my inner urge to deal with squares and colors and numbers and this is the same thing, except it uses white space in the puzzle itself. That naturally makes it a fair bit more awkward to solve puzzles in some scenarios. The control scheme is also ever-so-minorly different than Draw Puz's, input device aside, that I find myself not quite being lured into this as well as I was that.
DAGEDAR
What the fuck is a DaGeDar? I don't even know. Googling it and staring glass-eyed at Amazon suggests that it's a toy line that's basically the freakish crossbreed of Hot Wheels and marbles, made by the same sweatshops responsible for Zhu Zhu Pets. You roll these allegedly indestructible balls down plastic tracks and they go fast. The balls have weird designs and goofy faces on them.
There's a game about them and I got it for two bucks back at the same time as I got Michael Jackson: The Experience. This one, I regret significantly more. To be fair, I should have expected the worst when I saw the name "GameMill Entertainment". If you don't recognize the name, well... you might recognize the name of their most (in)famous product: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
Yeah. This was published by those guys. The devs aren't much better: Black Lantern isn't nearly so well-known, but MobyGames tells me they've made almost nothing but Nick Jr. cashin titles in the early 2010s, with their most recent game being... Duck Dynasty for the 3DS.
In other words: this is shovelware of the highest caliber. This shovelware has a pedigree.
xyzzysqrl mentioned when I told her that I got this that she thought it looked like Uniracers 2. To that, I can safely say: Uniracers 2 has controls that work, mechanics that make sense, and don't require you to grind your face against the game a million times to unlock all the assumedly indistinguishable spheres. Uniracers 2's "slow you down goop" spots on its track are easily visible and avoidable.More importantly, Uniracers 2 doesn't fucking rubberband.
This... well. At least I got two good games out of that eight dollars. And one very, very tangible kusoge.
VALKYRIA CHRONICLES
I have to say, I had heard the hype for this game for years and was beginning to believe that it was going to be something that wasn't anything but a shadow of what people thought it was. I was expecting less Undertale and more Final Fantasy 7. Admittedly, I'm only on chapter 4 (it's a bit on the tricky side and my stress hasn't let me dig at it for long) but...
...well, this is a Good Strategy Game. Playing something more like a hybrid of third person shooter and turn-based strategy game, gameplay comes across as sort of XCOM-lite in the emphasis on squad placement and movement tech.
More notably, the game is beautiful (though with a few graphical glitches on my PC - get the PS3 version if you look for it) and surprisingly well-written for a game based on an Alternate World War 2. True, there's no shortage of cheap heat from the NotGermany faction, but from what I've heard it does a good job painting things a lot more black-and-grey than black-and-white. I'm definitely looking forward to digging my heels into Tank Game a little harder.
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