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faea gaming: April '26

Hello, again. I spent a lot of time this month rather demotivated: a two week work break gave me the time to pursue a lot of the creative hobbies I haven’t had the time or drive for in a while, which I all got into a little too passionately… burnout hit a couple of days after an executive function crash, very quickly followed by said break ending and my stupid routine-driven brain having to re-acclimate to work, followed by, I dunno, I guess just an uncharacteristically big motivational crash in general. The plus side of it all, though, is that I did manage to redivert some of that empty time into pursuing my creative hobbies, as well as a few other things I don’t really give enough time to! I feel like I’m starting to make the effort to set out the groundwork to make it easier to refocus onto my other interests when I need to, which feels nice. I’d like to talk about all those other things a little, especially since this is my Video Games site and I don’t really give myself a chance to talk about much else here!, but I’ll save them ‘till the outro. For now...

Games I Played This Month

Panel de Pon
<3 <3 <3

It’s really interesting to build a versus game so heavily around randomness, isn’t it? The downside of randomness is clearest in a format like this, where naturally a board is going to fall better or worse for one player or the other at any particular moment, no matter how subtle it might be, meaning that one player will end up with a more favourable board than the other on average during a round. There’s a few reasons why I feel the negative side feels much less pronounced in this game: tile matches tending to leave large gaps in columns gives a huge amount of control over the vertical layout of your pieces, meaning that control over your board state is still largely dictated by your own play despite the randomness of rising tiles and only having the ability to swap them horizontally; the sheer amount of variables on the board at any given moment meaning that there is almost always one match available to displace the board and get the ball rolling for offense; and the fact that rounds are so short and non-committal! The single-player versus mode has infinite continues, and multiplayer does nothing more than tracking each player’s BO3 wins, gently returning to the character select after a set, and rounds rarely last more than a couple of minutes – there’s absolutely nothing at stake for winning or losing. The strength of randomness then, broadly speaking, is through forcing adaptability, being able to interpret and respond to game states never seen before; the more variance there is in a game’s challenges, the less focus there is on learning each individual sequence and the more there is on building the game-sense required to respond to anything. In this sense, I’d call Panepon the most creative action game I’ve played, in how much freedom there is to pull apart and fully manipulate the ever-changing board to string bizarre combos and ridiculous chains together, but how much doing so demands the ability to quickly intuit and understand new and completely novel board states at such a high frequency. I’m not very deep into this, and I can only set up 3-chains semi-consistently, but the skill cap I’m imagining is so dizzyingly high… I hope I can get close to it some day.

Though it’s got an extremely cute aesthetic, it’s almost impossible to notice while actually playing – it’s hard to appreciate whilst locked in full focus in an extremely frenetic game, and the gentle music does really very little to numb the intensity of a round, especially as it constantly flips between the regular and ‘danger’ versions of the stage themes as the boards dance up and down around the top of the screen. I think that's almost what makes it shine though, at least in singleplayer VS; it's such a hard, demanding game that finishing a play at full adrenaline and being gently lowered back into the contrasting sweetness of it all makes absorbing said sweetness feel even more touching than otherwise. I'm near tearing up to this every time I finish a play.

You can play as not one, but two mermaids in this one so it's basically the best game ever

Space Invaders '95
:) :) :)

Pretty much my platonic ideal of an iterative sequel. It doesn’t commit very hard to any particular ideas, so it’s often a bit scattershot, but rather pushes the game’s core in as many different ways as it can. Almost every stage is something a little bit different, and all the little changes between stages feel meaningful, be it something as small as the regeneration rate or behaviour of the shields, the movement and attack patterns of the enemies, or something as wildly transformative as the many stage gimmicks that change up enemy behaviour so much it starts to feel only tenuously recognisable as a Space Invaders without actually breaking any of the game’s core mechanics, or the.. Space Invaders boss fights that are kinda good! The Parodius-reminiscent wacky cute-’em-up style is the cherry on top; it’s 20 minutes of extremely fluffy, silly fixed shmup that’s throwing as many different ideas out into the world as possible, with all of them sticking the landing by being grounded in the core of “shoot enemies that are moving towards the bottom of the screen”. It’s one of the exceedingly rare fixed shmups that you can play co-operative 2p in, and it’s just easy enough to tease the idea that I could 1CC this thing, despite shovelling in so many coins when I actually get into it. Really lovely little thing to play alone or with a friend. Could drop the subtitle, though!!

I don’t have much better to put here right now so let’s do a ~ SPACE INVADERS POWER RANKING ~ because I played quite a few of these for at least twenty minutes. I don’t even like space invaders very much

~ SPACE INVADERS '95
yay.

~ SPACE INVADERS EXTREME
Haven’t played enough of this recently to have a strong take on it, to be honest, but I like the twist that it’s very much focused around chaining enemies and playing into the game’s scoring systems more than just getting through the levels – to be honest, the idea of survival feels like an afterthought and hitting a bullet is almost like an “oh yeah, that can happen” moment rather than being a constant concern. Chaining lasers into lasers into lasers into lasers and sweeping through waves of enemies in seconds is cool… every Space Invaders iteration always gets that these games are Shoot ‘Em Ups, not Dodge ‘Em Ups, and this is a cool framing of that ethos. I ought to give this one a bit more of my time.

~ SUPER SPACE INVADERS '91
This game and Fukkatsu no Hi (henceforth PCE) feel like slightly different executions on the same framework; they’re both faster, punchier Space Invaders with a few extra gimmicks and, most notably, a power-up system with pickups collected from shooting the UFOs. ‘91 is much slower paced, with enemies starting really, really high up on the screen and firing slow-moving bullets which, despite the joke being aimed at bullet hells, really does feel like dodging raindrops at times when it gets really dense! The first key iteration is the powerup system: shoot a UFO and get an Arkanoid-style powerup capsule, giving either a limited-duration subweapon, a temporary time stop, or a stat (life or shot count) upgrade. Locking health and shot power behind random powerup drops is, like, pretty fuckin’ bad, but numbed a bit by the sheer frequency of UFOs (at least earlier on) and the small powerup pool. It’s still annoyingly RNG-driven, especially as taking a hit drops shot power level as well, but it’s not unlikely to get at least one early shot upgrade, which is all it really takes to turn the ship into a pretty monstrous slaughterhouse. The catch is that taking a hit drops shot power by one level, and since dropping back down to base shot power is beyond disastrous and almost just feels numerically insufficient to clear some of the game’s enemy grids, the amount of mistakes you’re allowed to make before reaching that point is… heavily dictated by RNG. Oops!

But the other iteration, which is really what distances it heavily from PCE, is the pretty high variety in enemy behaviours! Not just content with being a grid of enemies moving across the screen, ‘91’s new enemy layouts all force very different strategies to the standard Space Invaders grid, but the amount of new grids is restrained enough to not make the pool feel too gimmicky or diluted; the typical Space Invaders grids are still the most common, and every other type shows up enough times throughout a play to get used to their specific approaches. I want to say… that this is the closest that typical Space Invaders has gotten to being really appealing to me, even though it’s the game that’s starting to try to distance itself, though I think it’ll take some more plays to see if it can pierce through my typical frustrations with these games.

~ SPACE INVADERS: FUKKATSU NO HI (PLUS MODE)
Feels like the A-side to ‘91’s B-side, in a sense; ‘91 feels to be playing a lot more with the core formula of Space Invaders in how it switches up enemy movement patterns and the conditions for a row to drop, whereas PCE feels a lot more straightforwardly Space Invaders, with its twists feeling more additive than iterative. What’s immediately noticeable is how fast the player bullets are – it’s got the crunchiest, most satisfying tactility out of not just Space Invaders, but really most shoot ‘em ups I've played – the speed of the bullets leads to fast kills, fast refiring, and backed by a really heavy visual knockback on each enemy before they explode – and not just that, it makes hitting that last enemy so much easier!! All the enemy grids act as typical Space Invaders enemies with no catch, so the additions for difficulty’s sake are that enemies fire really fast bullets in response, start really low down on the screen, and also occasionally fire V-shaped fans of bullets in addition to the standard vertical shots – it makes for pretty interesting movement and makes the enemy control feel a bit more involved, since sitting at the edge and tapping down columns at a time feels much more punishable, but also heavily exacerbates the bit of Space Invaders where the enemy is low enough to where you can’t safely approach it because it might fire as you commit to moving and kill you before you can react, because now it might also cover, like, three extra enemy widths to make approaching even riskier. Stage 3 of each level has enemies spawn low enough to do this by default, which really blows! What counterbalances it is the powerups as a whole being ridiculously strong, though the design stumble here is having a select few powerups be ultimately far more desirable than the others – particularly the vertical laser that can clear multiple full grids in one use and can break UFOs from the side and guarantees a re-drop of itself, and the shield which grants two extra hits in this one. There are an awful lot of UFO spawns, but the counterbalance is that they only drop a pickup if you hit them in the middle which, to be fair, would make the game slightly comically easy if it weren’t the case, but leans back onto a high precision demand that is ultimately very characteristic of Space Invaders, but not really what I’d call very interesting.

~ SPACE INVADERS PART II
pretty fuckin inspiring to release the same game with like three changes and call it a sequel

~ SPACE INVADERS
To be honest, I don’t like Space Invaders a great deal. It’s too much of a precision shooter for me, a game about doing extremely simple things very well. Managing enemies (shooting columns to slow them, vs shooting rows to distance them / make them safer to approach) is cool, though – it feels rather straightforward here, but something that could potentially be iterated on very interestingly; this didn’t really happen, though, because Galaxian came out and everyone started copying that and Galaga instead, and Space Invaders’ own sequels started to get more gimmicky with it more often than toying around with the design restrictions of Space Invaders proper (not that I think that’s a bad thing, look at the game at the top of the list :p.). I am kind of warming up to simple endless score-attack games, though. They should make more of those.

~ SPACE INVADERS DX (SOLO MODES)
This one has really detailed backgrounds that extend faaaar beyond the physical play area, which makes the placement of the edge of the screen feel really awkward and untelegraphed. Hitting the wall when there’s still like a tenth of the background left. This isn’t exclusive to this game at aaaaallll – most of these, including Space Invaders proper, do it at least a little! – but beyond that it is just Space Invaders. Space Invaders but a little worse. Unless it’s outweighed by Parody Mode letting you play as the kiwi from newzealand story and the fairy from fairyland story. Which is fair enough.

space invaders is serious

DOOM
Just like last month I fired up DOOM to pass a particularly idle evening, but unlike last month I don’t have another FPS to talk about it under. These games are a little odd to me, since regardless of how much I like or dislike one, I feel I can only play them in really, really short, intermittent bursts – hence the month gap between taking on E1 and E2. But DOOM’s great, yeah? This time I ran through most of E2, bumped it up to Ultra-Violence but stayed without doing pistol starts. E2 is a funny one, because it highlights very different highs and lows to E1. The broader level design is brilliant, and even though the core dungeon-crawler inspiration is there from the first second of E1, I think E2’s fuckass mazes and weirder tricks are really, really fun and charming. DOOM as a dungeon-crawler is always the model I’ve viewed it under, but it really highlights what I like about this game as somebody with no real FPS background: it’s a numbers game, it’s heavily built around managing health, armour and ammo as resources, with the transition from turn-based combat to lightning-fast real-time shooting moving the dynamic away from fully optimising individual game states and towards split second decision-making – having to intuitively understand the best route through any situation, rather than having as much time as needed to unpiece it. In short… it’s Action Games. Yeah!

I think my gripes with E2 are twofold… one is that the enemy composition feels overall less inspiring than E1’s: I described parts of the episode to some friends as Oops, All Cacodemons! while I was playing, and while that doesn’t generalise to the whole episode there is a very noticeable reliance on bulky, projectile enemies that I largely don’t find so interesting. I don’t think it’s a wholly bad way to control space as they demand a lot of ammo and time to kill, expecting you to split up groups in order to take them out safely, set up infights, etc., and even just a couple of them at once can force out weird dodging as they eventually wander in and out of different physical spaces across the duration of a fight, but, like. So many times I am left with a cacodemon or a baron by itself – sometimes they just spawn by themselves! – and I am simply running in circles or side-to-side while putting numbers into it until it dies, and I’m yawning just a little bit. The other is, it felt really, really relaxed on Ultra-Violence, and it’s feeling like pistol start is probably just the best (yet very much unenforced) way to take on these levels. Not only can I imagine it adds a big puzzle-box feel to figuring out optimal routes through them all, but all those slightly limp-feeling cacodemons and barons ought to have a lot more presence and meaning when I can’t bring in 60+ shotgun ammo and a rocket launcher to comfortably pull them all apart as soon as I see them. Maybe I’ll give that a try next time I play. But, then, cacodemons being “big imps”, barons being “bigger imps”, and cyberdemons being “even bigger imps” does make me yearn for a game with a little bit more enemy variety.

I also played SIGIL, which I should probably be listing by itself but whatever. It’s good!!! I’d say this is the best mix of “sick and twisted labyrinth level design” and “actually interesting enemy composition” out of all of these so far. Put a good poison swamp and a good Wizardry dungeon in front of me and I get on my knees and bow. It’s probably my favourite of these by a good mark in terms of design, except the length of some of them got a little much for me near the end, I think – I’m trying not to reflexively call M7 “a bit full of itself”, because really all the stuff that irritated me is genuinely cool, but I prefer these when I’m not pushing towards or past ten minutes per level, I think. DOOM’s good! I think I wanna take on a different shooter next, rather than re-exploring E3 and E4, but I’m sure I’ll be back soon enough.

~*ʚїɞ*~

Thank you for reading, as always. Except… we’re not done, since I said I’d talk about all the other things I’ve been up to lately, didn’t I? So…

First, and probably most exciting, is that I’ve started to dip my toes back into pursuing hobby gamedev. In response to my first project taking about three months of mostly isolated and very unhealthily fixative development, I’m deciding to take what I’m calling… the Space Invaders Part II approach. Inspired by the fact that I booted Part II one time and very quickly clocked it as basically the exact same game but with about three changes, I’m going to similarly push each ‘progress’ milestone for any of these projects as an entirely separate release. For me, this effectively transforms ‘development’ into a series of small, achievable and low-stakes short-term goals, which both shields against perfectionism as any small annoyances can just be dealt with in the next iteration, and breaks down the daunting process of attacking a large project since it, well, just isn’t one of those at all. It lets any small ideas that come up during iteration potentially branch off into their own thing, as iterative cycles are short and non-committal enough to let chasing those ideas feel feasible, rather than boxing them away for another project that’s never going to happen. It lets me explore and take seriously ideas that might be pretty bad in a much more forgiving context, and release games with cute/annoying blemishes that I really value seeing in other games, but don’t really let myself do as the overbearing solo game developer. And the shorter turnaround on single releases lets me take breaks much more easily!, since I don’t have to worry about re-acclimating to a larger project, or that if I put it down for a while I’ll never want to pick it back up.

There’s a lot of reasons for this that I don’t really have the ability to articulate, but I’ve felt a pressure – both self-inflicted and from others – that my games need to be ‘more’ than they really can be. In response, I feel it’s probably more valuable to go the other way. Video games are already enormous multimedia projects to put together, and most of what people are exposed to, even in the slightly-more-enthusiast-than-enthusiast indie scenes, are pretty massive in scope, often to the point of coming with a price tag to fund multiple month or year development cycles – I don’t think it’s good to feel the pressure to aspire to anything close what they’re doing, nor remotely healthy for a solo, hobby developer. Under this model, it’s easier to see a single iteration as something closer to… a drawing that I spend a long time on, or a written article that started out as a really enthusiastic faea gaming note. I think that’s much healthier, and more conducive to both self-improvement as a developer, and, like, actually putting things I’m happy with out into the world.

More importantly, I pushed out my first ‘collection’ of games onto itch last week. There’s two different takes on a very short, simple score-attack shmup, as well as some older iterations of them. I’ve since been hard at work on pushing them in different directions, so you can perhaps expect a second volume soon..? I'm happy with the ones in this collection, but it's starting to feel like I'm hitting a stride with what's coming after, I'm really looking forward to sharing it all. Grab the collection here.

Anyway, besides that, I’ve been making more of a concerted effort to broaden myself in music and film, too, because… I’ve been slacking :p. You will never see me talk about these things critically in any space, because frankly I do not have the knowledge or vocabulary to think about doing so!, but ones I’ve liked lately are…:

~ This month I’ve been listening to a lot of Fishmans (Otokotachi no Wakare’s version of Long Season is basically my fav thing ever right now), Cocteau Twins (Blue Bell Knoll, Treasure), and Lamp (For Lovers, The Poetry of August), with some other good recent listens being Love Deluxe, Hounds of Love, Modal Soul, Fête de la vanille. I am really trying to make a big push to broaden my horizons when it comes to music, so shoot me some recs!

~ My film-watching dropped off after my work break ended, but the original Godzilla was a pretty amazing watch. I've also been chipping away a little bit more at Sailor Moon lately, which I’m finding fun in, like, very very small doses. I’d say to shoot me some recs in this direction as well, but I fear I really haven’t given much to go off :p. (Do it anyway, though!!! especially shows, I don't really know many shows to get myself started)

~ And… I’ve been trying to get back into baking lately, particularly cake decoration. I bake semi-regularly for family stuff and just for fun, but I’m pretty green at the decoration side of things. Haven’t picked up a piping bag since university until now! But it’s a really nice way to apply my artistic side to a medium that isn’t On The Computer.. I can show these to people who aren’t as weird as me :p. I’ve heard people say that baking is a great hobby to take up to get people to like you, but I’ve learned you can thoroughly impress people by picking up a piping bag and learning how to do a pretty bad rosette. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve done:

Anyway, thanks for reading, as always. For realsies, this time :p. Love you all. Kiss kiss. See you next month. ~♡