Summary for August 2023

Now it is about Quake ][

A girl with light-colored hair and a sprout growing out of it is sitting in a boat. Behind her is an island with banana trees and a dark wooden pier, a lilipad, cattails, and a pearl shell in front of her.

Luna’s Fishing Garden is a short, chill farming sim. You fish, plant, gather, and so on. There is no pressure whatsoever and that is great.

Lots of kappa-looking enemies swarm around a robot-looking main character who shoots all kinds of projectiles, from energy beams to ninja stars, back at them.

In the never-ending search for what I call a podcast game, I tried a few of these roguelite, movement-only games: I played and liked Vampire Survivors before, and now there are a lot of similar games out there. Army of Ruin is probably the most accessible, it doesn’t hide anything. There are a lot of things to do and I have done them all. No, really, I did everything and I have proof :)

For more tricky stuff, this spreadsheet was very helpful.

Remedium: Sentinels is just an okay one, kind of in a why not category.

First-person view of a character firing a BFG10K at the final boss, Makron, who controls an exoskeleton that resembles a goat-like demon. There are on-screen indicators of at least three other players, one of whom is a human male soldier, another is a cyborg, and the third is obscured by a pillar.

The re-release of Quake II is great. You get the original campaign, two mission packs (DLC of the time), an all new mission pack from MachineGames and a Nintendo 64 version.

If I remember correctly, while the N64 version is unique, the PlayStation version is a modified version of the original, so the fact that it is missing is okay, I guess.

There are improvements from lighting to accessibility, gamepad support on PC and keyboard/mouse support on consoles, and also small changes to some levels and an AI, oddly enough. I don’t want this to sound like an ad, so here are the release notes.

I don’t think I can judge the game properly. The fact that I write “2” as “][” is an indication that I spent too much time playing solo and with friends. In a computer club! Do people even remember/know about those? I also recognize something like this right away.

But I still have it in me to point out its flaws. I even hinted at them in a previous post with a picture of two achievements:

Two images representing two achievements. On the left, a scantily clad female enemy, a cyborg with metal legs, a weapon for a hand, and many other metal parts embedded in flesh. On the right, a human soldier, a prisoner of war, cowering in fear on a conveyor belt, ready to be crushed by a metal device with spikes. — [Quake II achievements]

The portrayal of women is kind of bad. While yes, technically you can play as a female character because the game will take your model from your multiplayer config, and, hey, for the time that was something, all the cutscenes will still show a story of a dude – three different dudes for three original campaigns. Other than that, you only have one female enemy, and she is depicted… as she is depicted.

The portrayal of prisoners of war is shallow at best. “At best” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What to expect from the company that used to write game stories in a glorified and sometimes actual .txt file. Also, while you can change skin color in multiplayer, everyone in the game is white. Or at least they all have the same skin color, it is hard to tell with Borg-like creatures.