#summary

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is awesome! All the main characters are people of color, voiced by actors of color (fuck Avatar, btw). The only romance in the show is between two gay boys. How rare is that?! It is also just a very fun cartoon in itself, with great animation, an amazing soundtrack, goofy characters, and, maybe a bit simplistic, but overall good message. It got all the important parts right, for sure!

In contrast to its sequel, I have even less to say about the first Quake. But I finished it and all the official mission packs, including the new ones from MachineGames.

Point of Mew is a little silly free game about a cat that helps its human. No, really helps. Sure, there is some destruction along the way, but who cares! Ahem.

I played Chasm: The Rift back in the day, but never finished it (probably got stuck in one of the maze-like levels). It was a sort of an answer to Quake. It has a similar hodgepodge of levels and enemies, tied together by a more coherent story, puzzle bosses that were dropped in Q2 and even enemy dismemberment and some destructible environmental elements. On the other hand, it has flat, Doom I/II-like levels. Is it worth checking out? As a piece of first-person shooter history, sure.

Zombie Hill Race seems very similar to Earn to Die games, to the point of confusion. Drive a little, earn some money, upgrade your car, drive a little more, repeat. Turn your brain off kind of game.

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.

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.

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:

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.

While Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom shake up the open-world formula, Horizon: Zero Dawn proves that if you have a good checklist, icons-on-a-map, classic-style open-world game, I probably still like it.

And to call it just classic is unfair: it aptly borrows some gameplay from the Monster Hunter games, and while the story isn’t entirely unique, it has plenty of its own takes on post-apocalyptic genre tropes. Is it Nausicaä-like? Without a doubt!

But the game is not without its flaws: unfortunately, it borrows very heavily from indigenous cultures. I’m not the best person to go into the details, but there are plenty of articles about it. It is doubly unfortunate, because it does good representation too.

Speaking of which, I finished reading the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind books and rewatched the movie. The difference between the two is quite significant: sort of like between the pilot for the TV show, with an early version of a script and a different take on the characters, maybe even different actors, and said TV show.

The whole thing is kind of huge – and maybe this is my only complaint about the books, that some of the storylines are a bit complex, and some stuff can be cut down without much loss – so I just want to mention two things that I particularly liked.

First, while Nausicaä is a very proactive character, she also inspires other people, but not through words, but through actions and just being. I am not sure how intentional this was, but this is what I get from sociology: this is what changes people’s minds, not arguments or debates, but the existence of people with different opinions.

Second, is it’s take on nature. There are a lot of people who use words like “fix,” “repair,” and the like in relation to climate change. But that attitude is what got us into this mess in the first place! We must learn to be part of nature, not above it. Including the things we have already broken, they are already part of it too. Pretty big topic to go into right now, but yeah, people should read the Nausicaä books carefully.

The completionist in me forced me to finish the original Twin Peaks. By social osmosis, I knew it was weird. Now I know that it is weird. There’s some cool stuff, a lot of bad stuff, overall kind of pointless, both as a show and as a story. In other words, I have no desire to see a movie or a third season. The completionist in me is fine with that.

I can’t really say that Fuel is a good game and I recommend it. It is mediocre or decent, depending on how generous you are. So I’ll just explain why I finished it and enjoyed it.

I like games where you travel. Fuel has a huge map, one of, if not the biggest one. I just did races – there are some cool ones, but a lot of them are just a chore – so I could uncover collectibles, and then I would drive around while listening to a podcast or a video.

This other part is debatable, but from this game I get vibes of what I call quiet apocalypse. The first paragraph of the plot of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō on Wikipedia explains it very well, and it is easy to see why something like this can actually be not terrifying, but comforting. It is also the least spoiler-y example I can think of. No, Fuel is not Nausicaä-like :)

I also finished Sudocats. The developers found their thing (their company is called Devcats, very subtle), it’s not a bad thing, but there is not much beyond that. Also, in this game I just switched to working with numbers instead of cats, you know.

I finally did it! I finally beat Picross S9! Oof.

So, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, huh? Some things still good, some things got better, some things got worse.

Looking at the gameplay as a whole, without going into too much detail, it falls into the “still good” category. Tweaks, additions, replacements are good, but some things got, if not worse, then maybe more annoying.

Story is an area that I feel is clearly worse than in Breath of the Wild. Not only did we lose the simplicity and some, dare I say it, bold choices of the previous game, we just went back to the magical bullshit that is a dime a dozen in fantasy games.

Or, another way of looking at it, Skyward Sword did it better.

And Zelda is still out there somewhere, doing important things, I promise. It is no longer Nausicaä-like either.

When looking at changes from one game to the next, it is interesting to try to figure out if it was something the developers themselves saw as a flaw, or if they were listening to criticism. One area of particular interest is representation. I haven’t counted, but my general feeling is that there are more characters of color, even in species that used to be “monocolored,” like Gorons. They at least tried (not for me to judge if they were successful or not) to address the Gerudo situation. We may even have a gay character, gasp! But they keep hiring white voice actors to voice characters of color, so it’s still a mixed bag at best.

In the end, I can’t say that TotK is better than BotW, and there’s no reason to ever go back to it. And I can’t say it’s worse either, far from it. If I try to be objective, it’s a sequel, through and through, that I enjoyed very much because it’s a sequel to a game that I also enjoyed very much. But if I’m honest, I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t get at least one significant improvement in at least one area.

I don’t know what it is about most point-and-click games that makes them so repulsive to me, while The Case of the Golden Idol is so brain-ticklingly delightful. To say “moon logic” is unsatisfying: what is logical to me may be illogical to someone else. Anyway, I liked the deductive challenge of this game. The story is the least interesting part. On the one hand, this is understandable, since it should be simple and familiar enough to have as few logical leaps as possible to avoid said “moon logic”. On the other hand, I think it should have pushed more boundaries, so to speak, “dudes being dudes” is boring.

I also finished Zodiacats a small puzzle-ish game, just to relax.

As I said, I wanted to find Nausicaä-like games. And I found plenty, but before the big release¹ I only managed to finish two.

Light of Alariya is a The Wind Waker-like game where you sail the sands and solve some puzzles on islands. It takes a bit of imagination to see the similarities to Nausicaä specifically, but it is certainly in a similar vein. There is some junk in controls and performance, but it is free and quite short.

Without spoiling the Wavetale story, the premise alone – there was a war, then a catastrophe, now the world is covered in gloom, etc. – is quite similar. With spoilers – even more. It’s not one-to-one, not at all, but it can easily be qualified as a Nausicaä-like. The gameplay is fun and breezy, especially because of the fluid movement. Not a long game, just the right length helps too.

I’m still reading through the Nausicaä books, so that also might be a theme to return to.

¹ – Picross S9, obv.