Back in April, I took a bad fall off a stepladder at work and fully tore my ACL, and about 4 months later reconstruction surgery was approved. The day after my pre-op visit, I had to put my cat, Nia down after her kidney disease advanced to the point she had gone blind, wouldn’t respond to me in any other way, and just started endlessly marching around the apartment for places to wedge herself. Next Friday, I go in for the operation itself and it’s fucking me up every time I remember this time while I’m on medical leave, I won’t have the little one around to snuggle up with.
At the same time, those around me have been so kind and helpful, it’s really helped keep me hanging on. I don’t exactly have a lot of self-esteem, like, on a fundamental, existential level. Like, I’m amazed people bother to remember my name at work, let alone offer to help me out. I feel like once this surgery is done and the red tape is in place for my recovery period, it’s time to stop holding back and do more shit I want to do while I’m able.
Sorry for the lack of… much, lately, but that’s where I’ve been. Work, PT, Discord and gaming ’til bedtime. I miss my baby kitty a lot and keep expecting her to slink around a corner or start yelling at me for food at the usual times. But I’m holding together, and I don’t feel so alone.
Knee is still on the mend, waiting to hear whether or not reconstructive surgery will be covered or not but feeling a lot less antsy about it after hearing from my PT specialist and the second opinion doctor that it’s pretty common and even if it isn’t approved, I can still get around decently if I strengthen my upper legs to compensate for the instability. I’m very slowly getting the nerve to draw again- very, very grateful for the patience of everyone who has work they’re waiting on right now. It’s been kind of difficult to set up a good work space when my usual ‘work mode’ involves rearranging the living room to accommodate a folding table and for the first good chunk of my leave of absence, I couldn’t figure out a comfortable way to rest my XP-pen on my lap in bed. Now the the swelling is pretty well gone and I can plug or unplug cables without making a production of it, I’m catching up on a big job followed by some smaller gigs that should come out pretty fast.
I’m trying to decide on a price/product list to formally post soon since every little bit helps these days and it has felt nice to have people so interested in my work as seldom as I’ve posted lately and as crabby as I can get about commissions sometimes. I admit in the past I’ve been kinda shitty on social media when I was feeling overwhelmed and/or wanted to focus on personal projects instead, but I’ve been lightening up on it lately. Maybe it’s seeing how excited everyone is when I turn out a new character design for them, maybe I just needed a good break. Part of me is kicking myself for not getting more work done while I was out on injury, but I wound up shaking some bad habits like trying to juggle too many gacha or getting excessively down on myself for missing streams or forcing myself to stream when I wasn’t really in the mood. My biggest roadblocks right now are trying to keep my energy up outside work and trying to keep up with all the PT sessions and other appointments while work jerks my schedule around more. I have… ideas though.
Been getting into ‘boomer shooters’ after binge watching Civvie 11‘s stuff, and geez, I feel bad for sleeping on stuff like Duke 3D. It’s so much more interactive and cleverly designed than I would have expected, and I had written it off as “Doom, but with dirty jokes.” (Still not huge on Doom, I guess I prefer games with a little more of a screwing around factor.) I picked up Ion Fury from the Steam sale and while cool, I don’t think I like it as much. I mean, they made the grenade launcher an alternate firing mode for the shotgun, which I use at close range out of habit so sometimes I switch to it without noticing which barrel is attached and blow myself up with the splash damage.
disclaimer: i play these on a gamepad which i believe is the equivalent of putting ketchup on a well done steak to die hards
It’s been a while again, less than happy reasons this time. Had a little accident, was off work for like a month, and it turns out that given plenty of time doesn’t increase my productivity if I’m vibrating with anxiety waiting for my phone to go off. I’m recovering pretty well, even if not everything is settled just yet. Once things stabilize, I need to finally buckle down and make some changes, including actually getting some shit done again.
Hiiiii, absentee internet guy here! I actually started a bona fide article back in December then didn’t finish it because it was pretentious as fuck and now isn’t even topical! So I just thought it was a good time to check in and report on some games I’ve enjoyed recently, dump some sketches, then come back in another three to four months. You’re fine with that, right? I like that about our relationship.
Alchemy Stars: Aurora Burst (Mobile)- First off, yeah, a lot of these are going to be mobile games. I’ve played entirely too many of them lately, and keep trying new ones just to see what looks promising and which turns into a dull slog of daily quests and template generated moeblobs and/or gijinka. Alchemy Stars is really cool, though, since it has a unique battle system involving drawing a line through like-colored tiles to move your squad around and attack enemies. It’s goofy as hell watching a conga line of characters run in awkward panels to either do a hit and run or just burn up tiles on the far end of the map, but I love the ‘gameyness’ in the same way I love STING RPG’s. It’s simplistic, yet has some nuance in how you build your teams and trigger your active skills. I broke my rule about joining games for collaborations since a Dragon Maid crossover was going on at the time, but I like the game itself enough to keep picking away at it a while every day.
I give it a 3 out of 2.
Guardian Tales (Mobile)- Okay I broke the rule again with this one due to peer pressure: there was a Slayers collab going on and other members of the fan discord I’m on were really enjoying it, so I bit. Guardian Tales is a surprisingly fun sort of Zelda-like title that gets bogged down a bit for me with Gacha Things. Overall, I’d say it’s worth a play but I prefer the bite sized stages, puzzles and exploration parts of it to the resource grinding, active and passive PVP, and vestigial but compulsory co op elements that every mobile game (or ‘mobage’ if you’re like that) and kind of wish it was just a stand alone thing that was just that. It’s got an interesting sense of humor and likes to casually slide dark notes in your way, which really made that Slayers crossover make sense.
I’d call it a 2 out of 2. Fun, nothing glaringly bad but I wouldn’t say I’m hooked.
World Flipper (surprise, it’s also Mobile)- I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for video games that take a physical game and do things with it that you couldn’t do on a real pinball table/race track/line at the urgent care. World Flipper is a pinball RPG where you build teams of adventurers then fling them violently at enemies and obstacles to score points and charge up for Power Flips and active skills. I love the presentation (tiny sprites for the actual game, colorful clean character art for dialogue and menus) and it’s pretty easy to get a fix in short bursts since each stage is usually just a two-screen ‘table’ that can be beaten in a couple minutes. The flip (heh) side of the whole thing is it’s a very light, fluffy kind of experience so don’t go in expecting LORE! or anything especially deep. It’s just a really good game to toss on when you’re in ‘head empty, actual RPG take too long’ mode. Given that’s been the philosophy of most of my attempted game projects myself, I can’t help but love it. Also worth pointing out the game just automatically ticks off daily quests and achievements as you hit them, so you’re never consulting a checklist and being compelled to do all of the menial bullshit on it on a daily basis, so it is a surprisingly guilt/FOMO free experience for what it is.
2 out of 2.
Final Gear (Mobile)- I like mechs. This shouldn’t be remotely surprising for long time readers, new readers, people I’ve sat next to on a bus, or those who quietly just stop responding on Discord after several paragraphs explaining the different VF-1 Valkyrie variants and who used them in Classic Macross. Final Gear is a mecha RPG that plays a bit like a side scrolling beat em up with guns added, until you can turn on Auto battle and much like Azur Lane, there’s rarely a reason to go back. Of course, these mechs are piloted by cute, merchandisable anime girls. They seem to have pretty frequent collab events, which could be a selling point if you’re into mecha because if there’s anything we mecha fans love is seeing a mecha we know in something else. The guest character art seems to be all done by their own staff though, which isn’t outright *bad* so much as kind of uncanny in some cases. A smiling, moe-fied Major Motoko Kusanagi is one of the more cursed examples. (Original characters look fine though.)
Final Gear is a tough recommend for me. I like mecha, the construction system is cool (if you get the full parts set and pilot for a Custom unit, you can transform it into a cooler looking, more powerful version) but resources for upgrading can get really grindy and as far as I can tell, whaling is about mandatory for some machines (you get points from making gacha pulls on a banner which can be used to buy parts of a character’s Custom from the banner, but going through the Eva collab f2p only ended up giving me enough parts for Eva-02’s backpack and arms.) It’s worth playing if you just can’t get enough robots in your life, but it has a lot of annoyances that might dampen your enthusiasm including crashes, typos, and a high maintenance base that seems to consume a baffling amount of system resources when you visit.
If I gotta be real, this is a 1 out of 2 but has potential to improve if it survives. On the other hand, my Research on -booru sites has yielded mostly official art rips and barely any risque fan art so that may not bode well for its popularity.
Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack (Switch)- I bought the individual games at launch on my 3DS, plodded through them, then never touched them again, but I’ve been on a major Inti Creates fanboy kick lately and decided to go back to the beginning of the series to see how I like them now. And, as happens to me a lot, really, I enjoyed the replay a lot more. I’ve heard that some tweaks were made to the collection, like additional platforms in Zonda’s upside down flipped sequences and the script to GV1 was essentially de-4Kids’d, but I barely remember the first time around so I got to just appreciate it as is. Hunting for jewels for… Joule was less obnoxious than I remembered, but the bosses remain as tough as I thought. I think I’m just more welcoming of challenge than I was back than- at least not counting attempting the good end- fighting those bosses a second time without prevasion on sucks. I like GV2 more overall, due in no small part to just liking Copen’s play style a lot. Gunvolt’s tag and zap mechanic is neat, but physically ramming enemies to tag them, ricocheting off walls and air dashing is just plain fun. I jumped at his spinoff when it came out. Overall, it is two good games bundled together, so it’s easy to suggest.
I’d give the Striker Pack a 3/2 but the limitations of my forced point scale means I can’t give iX a slightly higher score, I guess.
Luminous Avenger iX (Switch)- Gunvolt’s edgy boi rival Copen gets a spinoff where it turns out he was right to want to kill all the Mutants Adepts, actually, because in the future they’ve taken over the joint and hunt the surviving humans through their ruined cities. This game is a joy, it’s all about mastering Copen’s movement and weaponry to rack up combos and score, and it’s been polished and streamlined a lot since the 3DS entries. Since I didn’t get too deep into it before, basically the GV series are Mega Man X-likes as they appear, but designed more around getting through stages quickly, untouched, and chaining up points. Survival itself is actually pretty easy since both characters have an ability called “Prevasion” that basically trades their electric gauge or bullets to take a hit before you start losing health, and either of those things can be reloaded by double tapping down at any time. So if you play deliberately, it’s usually pretty simple to get out of the way and quickly reload before going on the offensive again.
Also, considering Copen’s play is based around different kinds of dashes, combos, and the bosses in iX2 are more or less expies of Mighty Numbers, the entire thing kind of feels like a big flex on Mighty No. 9 and I love passive aggressiveness in the games industry.
Luminous Avenger iX gets a 3 out of 2 in my book, nudged slightly higher than the previous games as mentioned above, though honestly, play ’em all!
Gal*Gun 2 (Switch&Steam)- Yes, I own this game. Twice. If you have to pick, I would pick PC for mouse aim. I don’t know where to really begin breaking this down while still keeping things kind of snappy since this list is getting longer than I planned, but do you like rail shooters like House of the Dead or Lethal Enforcers? It’s like that, but horny. You play a nondescript loner boy who is given a Pheremone Shot and Pheremone Goggles that will help drive out and defeat the mini-devils serial prankster Korona is spreading to cause mischief. The side effect of this demon busting gear is it makes every female member of the school irresistibly, violently attracted to you, so you must take them down by ‘satisfying’ them with Pheremone Shots to their weak points. It is exactly the kind of game you think it is assuming you know they stop short of actual nudity because it’s a console game for Grodd’s sake. GG2 has a surprising amount of content in it though, in the form of numerous side missions, different types of stages including defense stages (which suck), hidden object searching (which kind of sucks), and the route-ending Doki Doki stages where you just get right in there and drive the devils out of your chosen gal pal’s body at point blank range while they writhe and my friend judges me and tries to think of an excuse to go home.
Really, it’s just a goofy as hell anime fanservice game that’s more fun than it has any right to be. I was laughing my ass off when it gets to extremes like the girl next door revealing her pet project of an Anti-God Laser or classmates chasing you in the air vents like Xenomorphs. If you miss light gun or shooting gallery type games, it’s a pretty fun one though it feels like a missed opportunity to let you use the detached joy-con to aim like a pistol instead of doing the awkward Splatoon whole-Switch tilt on console. Steam’s port has mouse aiming which makes things much easier (much, much easier- they probably dumbed things down a bit expecting console aiming response times.)
I give it a solid 2/2. I had a blast playing through it (Chiru best gal, classic gaming five-ever) but I’m not really itching to return to it any time soon.
I think that about does it for stuff I want to dish on right now, I’ve been in aggressive CONSUME MEDIA mode for the past month or so and felt like sharing. I haven’t gotten as much PRODUCE CONTENT done as a result unfortunately, but hope to turn that around once things stabilize a bit. Had a lot of vet trips for Nia over the past couple months and work is jerking my schedule around for the first time in a good while, so here’s hoping it’s stable hours even if they’re not the ones I prefer to work. Friday Raffles have also been getting back in swing over on RGL, so I can be caught there most Fridays when an event isn’t going on. But I’ve been thinking lately, I really need to just nail down a project and get it out there instead of talking endlessly about My Game that doesn’t actually exist as yet so I can’t show it off.
Until next time, adios.
DotturricanTried giving Eishi + sign eyes for a while, dunno if I like itMerry Eishmas!I love drawing Flanker but in the back of my head I keep thinking of her as Evil EishiZelame drawing for quietwriter in the Secret Santa exchangeTomcat, rawr.BlackbirdHornetFlanker, drinking a Yourtears-accinoThe stripe says “MEDIC” but the armband kind of makes it look like “NO DIC.” Which is technically right…I very specifically made the roses Zelgadis colors.MiG-chan wants to cuddle.
Girl Cafe Gun taught me that waitresses don’t like 18 hour shifts but a probably racist penguin plushie will cheer them right up and also you only need to make 2 cups of coffee and the shop just runs itself for 4-6 hours
As part of an on again off again ‘thing’ to do on my Twitch channel, I’ve played a handful of different mobile games to see which ones are actually fun as games and which ones are just kind of mindless clickers and Adventure Quest looking cash-ins. Girls’ Frontline remains my favorite overall, but Honkai Impact is mashy and engaging enough I’ve stuck with it even though it’s probably the worst time sink of the lot. But I’m not really here to talk about specific games right now, I thought I would take a bit to dump some thoughts I’ve had about mobile games (or ‘mobage’ if you’re… like that.)
When smartphones were propagating and the first mobile hits started spreading around, I wasn’t really impressed, and didn’t really mess with them until Fallout Shelter came out and my device could actually run it. My first droid was actually a burner I bought so I could test projects for an app development course so it had minimal onboard storage and stubbornly refused to use the memory card to install anything. Shelter was fun, but beyond that I got the impression everything was shallow puzzle games that occasionally liked to cozy up and ask for twenty dollars to go to the malt shop, daddy. Even the first one I actually enjoyed is basically a simple SRPG that happened to have a story and setting that jibed with me well. As time and technology waltz onward, though, and games look more and more like they’d be at home on a console, and stuff is coming out that *actually looks good.* I’m still kind of processing this as a thing that is happening, in the actual world. I routinely leave my Switch at home when I visit my dad less to travel lighter and more because that day, maybe I’m in more of an Arknights mood.
At some point I’ve kind of come to realize being a snob about mobile games was kind of a dumb thing for me to do given that I like simple, creative games more than cinematic AAA eXpErIeNcEs. Maybe some of the What Happened? binge watching and mentions of Konami and others switching focus to pachinko and mobage sparked the realization that “wait, they’re not just being stupid trend chasers, these games are making mad bank on smaller budgets.” I like indie games, they’re done on small budgets and are the closest thing creatively to what we saw in the olden days, so what’s the difference?
Weeeell… there are differences.
As alluded to before, there are a lot of ones I’ve tried that felt kind of like cookie cutter RPGs without a real hook, or even worse, like low effort asset recycling when they come from larger companies. There’s also no denying the array of psychological tricks and manipulative design elements they employ to try and loosen the wallet. When I find a game I really enjoy, I don’t mind sending a bit of money their way to keep things running, but in most of those cases, the key phrase there is ‘I don’t mind’ doing it vs basically needing to do it to progress. For example, one of the first games I got into was an Armored Core ripoff of sorts called Destroy Gunners that kept closing and reopening as new versions which always felt kind of suspicious. It was a pretty fun game and the touchscreen controls didn’t ruin it, but what did was the occasional boss appearances, Devil Mechs. They’re unreasonably tough and the only way to take them out at low levels is basically to bring out a limited use laser weapon given for free to new players and sold at a premium afterwards. A lot of games I’ve tried do a less drastic version of that where the early game is super generous with gacha pulls and other resources at first, then as you clear early game achievements and such, the rewards slow to a trickle and you’re still kind of riding the high of the initial shopping spree… It’s rough, buddy!
I think I’ve identified my personal weakness in these as that I really like playing from a “gotta catch em all” angle and just want as many shiny new units as possible. After all, who knows if there won’t be an event in like three months where the pigtailed can opener woman with heterochromia has just the right combination of skills to break the difficulty wide open even though she kind of sucks now and I already have a full party of max level, max promoted characters that clear everything just fine? I can resist cosmetic items and skins pretty easily, and equipment I usually can wave my hand and go “as long as my characters are good, I can make up for the gear, right?” but when an actual character is paywalled or worse, RNGwalled, boy that does a number on my resistance. Honkai 3rd especially has my number because I enjoy character action games and each suit has a pretty unique fighting style. Very early on, I spent an embarassing amount of (gift card) money to be sure I got Herrscher of Reason because she was a blast to play with in demo levels. Later I also splurged on Flamescion, but didn’t get her, only to actually pull her on a handful of free tickets that were given out the next morning, which made me go “wait, this is actually stupid.”
I’d probably forget how to speak English if I walked into a coffee place and this happened.
I’ve kind of scaled back the amount of gacha game streaming I do partly because they’re not especially popular most of the time, and also, as both hypocritical and cheesy as it feels, sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t encourage others to pick them up. Some are definitely more susceptible to blowing large sums on a game and almost all of them are designed specifically to waste your time. I never even really thought about *why* so many of them have daily task lists and/or shitty UI’s, until my friend Sophie pointed out that if you’re playing one game longer, it’s more or less physically preventing you from doing something else. Time is precious, and normal games can already help waste it just fine. I’ve dropped a couple regulars recently and frequently go into ‘bare minimum’ mode with the ones I do keep playing because I’ve been in more of a mood to create than absorb recently.
I realize this has been a largely unstructured ramble, because it’s a largely unstructured ramble patched together from thoughts rattling around in my head for several weeks. It probably comes off as half starry eyed “golly, the world of tomorrow is here, and if you’re lucky, you can put a maid costume on it” and half DARE program. I think the mobile format has a lot of advantages as well as things that I don’t see it doing better than PC/console. High action games on a touchscreen which means your big meaty thumbs are covering a portion of the action are horrible, and few things take me out of a moment faster than Messenger popups or YouTube notifications sliding into view. Not all designers seem to handle the problem of “what if someone playing on their phone actually gets a call?” equally either. Things that I do enjoy though, are the smaller scale and simplification that portable platforms call for. It’s actually probably why Peace Walker is my favorite Metal Gear. The gachas I play have also probably been the best application of episodic content I’ve seen since updates come regularly and automatically, instead of having to remember to go back to Steam or whatever and see if Episode 3 of Polygon People Sure Love To Talk has dropped. It’s more of a drip feed of new story and game content than having an expansion dropped on your lap to finish in one sitting. Personally, I like that, though I also don’t like that many such events are limited time and prey on people’s fear of missing out. Basically, if there’s a game I’m enjoying enough for free, I’ll show my support with a monthly gem pass or something like a tip jar every now and then.
Enjoy responsibly, like the beer commercials always say, I guess.
