summary

There seems to be no consensus on how well mental health is portrayed in Hellblade games, and since I’m not an expert, I won’t say more.

What I can say is that it leans a little too much towards punishing the protagonist for my taste. It makes the comebacks more powerful, but I don’t know if it justifies the whole thing. To put it another way, I was curious about the first game when it was released, and felt compelled to follow the story in the second, but wouldn’t be upset if I never played both.

For me to consider something problematic, both the good and the bad should be on a comparable level. It’s not perfect, but Doctor Who seems to have been pushing diversity for a while now. I even started watching it after they announced that there would be a female Doctor.

At this point I have watched everything with the Ninth, Tenth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth and now Fifteenth Doctors. Yes, I skipped the Moffat era.

On the other hand, the BBC seems to be pretty bad in many areas. Is it worth it? Well, I don’t give money to BBC, so sure.

The show has a somewhat weird and unique tone, where it tries to be for as much of an audience as it can, so sometimes it can be too silly or simplistic. But the premise means that almost every episode would lead main characters on a pretty unique adventure, and if you like those characters, then at least it would be fun, if not provocative, gut-wrenching or awe-inspiring, which occasionally happens too.

Botany Manor is brilliant. There is nothing more frustrating than illogical puzzles. It is subjective, but I never got stuck on one in this game. The overall pleasantness of the world with a touch of, shall I say, melancholy also helps.

Gylt is a more light-hearted Silent Hill, I guess. Not particularly scary, but spooky atmosphere, with lots of world to explore, secrets to discover and enemies to fight.

Indika left me cold. Not a bad game, not at all, but if the story does nothing for you, like it did for me, there is nothing else there.

Stitch is an interesting variation of nonogram-like games. You have numbers that tell you the size of rectangles that should fill the whole area. The overall picture kind of helps because you can guess which colors go where, but it can fail in places if you’re colorblind. There are a lot of penguins!

There’s not much more I can say about Star Trek: Discovery now that it’s finished its final season. Also, I tend to judge the thing as a whole, not individual elements. In the end, I’m glad I watched it, but I wouldn’t give it a medal, so to speak.

Fallout is a comedy. A dark, violent, crude, bloody comedy. That doesn’t mean it’s funny, the structure is comedy. Ridiculous and awful things happen to ridiculous and awful people. But yeah, sometimes it is funny. And very good!

Princess Peach Showtime! has an inherent problem: rarity. Mario seems to appear in a dozen games a year, but Peach may appear as a playable character in two, if that. So no matter what happens, the game will be at a higher level of scrutiny. I’m not saying that as an excuse, Nintendo doesn’t deserve it. They should do better!

But if you ignore that for a second, I think the game is pretty good. Not great, but good. Would be a great start to a series! *stares at Nintendo*

Also, it seems that the premise of the game – Peach playing many roles – is the answer to the rarity problem. They want to bridge the gap faster by having 10 games in one. That is probably not the logic the developers had, but it is funny to think that way.

I am a “Hey, listen!” liker and Water Temple defender. Can I list a bunch of flaws of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? Sure! Can I praise it a lot too? Of course! Does anyone not know about this game and I would be wasting my time doing both? Definitely. So, yeah, it’s good, really good.

Lutris installs Ship of Harkinian. I also installed Malon (Heroine) and Female Pronouns mods.

And that’s about it. I started a couple of games and then abandoned them or put them on hold. I tinkered with a few things, but nothing really finished. At least nothing worth sharing. One of those months, I suppose.

My logic for the month was: if I have a new PC, with a new (-ish) OS, and a new gamepad, it would be logical to test it all with something familiar. Besides, something familiar is comforting, which is nice these days.

I started with Dungeon Keeper. Then I remembered this post and went from there. But not just to replay those four games, I also used them as jumping off points to look at other similar games. Oh, and I narrowed it down to games that are 20 years old or older, in addition to the usual restrictions.

Dungeon Keeper is a very atypical RTS. Something of a god game, something of a management sim, something of a first-person shooter. At this point I do not trust myself to judge it properly, it is undoubtedly one of my favorite games. Except for a couple of levels that are actually evil.

KeeperFX is a good improvement, and works great in Lutris.

Dungeon Keeper → Project Nomads is also an atypical strategy/action hybrid. You have an island that can go on a predetermined path. You build structures on it in a sort of RTS fashion. But you can also control turrets and planes, and there are even levels where you are mostly on foot. If you try to be careful, you will spend most of your time flying ahead and destroying enemies before they can even get to your island. Also, while it is clearly a huge stretch, I decided to put it in sailing games. Sure, your island is more like an aircraft carrier that you can barely control, but why not!

I have written a lot about Quake II.

Quake II → Unreal had a lot going for it back then. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the negelect we see today from an apple-biting Fortnite maker, it would have been a series on par with id’s Doom and Quake.

We have a story of sorts, told through logs and books. We have interactions with friendly NPCs. Heck, it was even occasionally shown in promotional art that you could play as a woman. And it is a legit choice, not a hack, like in Quake II.

And, of course, it was a pretty impressive technical achievement. Huge maps. It had good gameplay tweaks (alt-fire for example). The multiplayer was not bad, much improved in Unreal Tournament.