faea gaming: June '26
Hi, again. To start with some good news, I submitted my blog to the Warp Point site, which is a directory / webring of RSS-driven games blogging sites; effectively other spaces similar to mine. A space like this is an incredibly important initiative to uplift this style of indie blogging, where exposure comes almost entirely from word of mouth from alternative platforms; I’d recommend giving the whole directory a look – I certainly still need to myself! – but friends lakespirit, pang, and Deemon are all on the directory as well. They’re already linked on this site, I just wanted an excuse to link to them all again… :p.
I also got to draw a cool button for it :). Only a matter of time until my indie webspace had a button for people to link to it with. This’ll all be on the ‘about’ page as well either as of posting, or as of when I get around to it, but if you want to link to my site on your own via a button, then that’s there for you now.
Anyway, if I can be honest, and hard shift to starting the month’s entry off on a low note… I’ve been sort of going through hell for the past couple of months, with both physical and mental health having been close to all-time lows, and I haven’t really been able to spare much time or energy towards my passions beyond what I’ve needed to keep myself afloat. Unfortunately, most of the entries this month are ones I carried over from last, that I didn’t have the time or energy to finish off before publishing… and also aren’t all the most positive :(. Things are looking up, I think, and I'm starting to piece myself back together, but I'm still quite a bit de-energised… I think July is going to end up a bit of a month of recovery, and I'm hoping I can get back into the swing of things after a while. No rush, though.
Games I Played This Month
Kirby's Dream Land 3
At best when it’s embracing its adventure game DNA: running through a level, seeing but not understanding its side objective, then later intuiting it from visual context clues and solving it after playing through said level perhaps a few too many times. Its visual style is sort of perfect for its slower, looser meandering taking in all the silly, bouncy animations and ridiculous frame stills and the sometimes a little too dinky soundscape; being attached to my friend as Gooey and not just having my own slightly hyperactive pace reined in a little, but having tiny extra details open up, like having the door transitions freeze the other character in whatever comedic animation frame they’re in the middle of. It really is just one of the cutest and most delicate games out there, early Kirby was just back-to-back putting out some of the best-looking games out there. And though it’s not exactly interesting co-op design-wise – some parts are very clearly not designed with it in mind at all! – but this is a Friend Game to me; I couldn’t imagine playing it without somebody else.
But the levels aren’t there, and the puzzles aren’t there. Heart Star side-objectives peak when they’re driven by said intuition-driven problem-solving DNA, but those ones are extremely few and far between; rather usually feeling like trial and error to figure out what the puzzle actually is, and which specific copy ability / animal combination is needed to solve it, and, at least in my experience, to remember what each combination even is – since you have to go far out of your way to put together different combos, can only bring one into a level at once… and the main purpose for said experimentation is ultimately for the purpose of solving said side-objectives, rather than for their organic applications to the challenges within a level. And I don’t even think said experimentation is even fun, because the copy and combo abilities are really lacking here: most either feel like a very slightly modified version of the base ability, or silly but impressively impractical; I was picking the few that actually felt good, and never wanting to swap away from them. And the levels are just… noooooot interesting to run through more than once, often being very slow-paced without much really going on; it’s obviously much more of a killer for those repeat runs for the heart stars, but a lot of those first plays felt trudging and slow as well. I’m starting to wonder if Adventure was just a bit of a fluke.
Mushihimesama Futari: Black Label
I’ve spent a few hours in the past mainly running the first 3 stages, but got a pretty deep survival PB and decided to run off that to credit-feed through the rest of it for the first time. I just don’t think these things are very interesting!! When I started screensharing that run to a friend, I said half-jokingly near the start that this is kind of a game where you tap to the left until you have to tap to the right, then on Stage 5 she randomly remarked that I’ve been doing nothing but streaming aimed bullets for ages. That’s really what it feels (and looks!) like in motion, but what I feel my disinterest comes down to is these games only feeling like they test two specific skills: routing (can you position yourself on a big enemy to kill it before it becomes a problem) and movement precision (for micrododging bosses and big enemies, or for awkward restreams). And this game really feels like it has very little of the former! Futari’s Stage 2, of all stages, is where its routing and consequent positioning demands feel the most pronounced, being a stage that, even on Maniac, floods incredibly suffocating bullet density without a decent grasp on when to use its frequent bullet-cancelling enemies to break through it all – but it feels like it really collapses past that, being lots of streaming with the occasional “kill this enemy before it floods the screen with bullets” routing demand. In contrast, Mushihimesama is much stricter and more up-front about its routing, featuring as early as Stage 2 a static enemy that fires bullet walls during the few occasions it stops being invulnerable, and ramping up to a really strict routing demand in Stage 4 to not get totally flooded. I appreciated Mushi 1 for this a lot when I first played it, but nowadays I’m much more cynical about it… I put some decent time into learning said Stage 4 a while ago, and it wound up just feeling like rote memorisation of where I needed to be stood at what part of the stage in order to not get overwhelmed; no interesting puzzle-solving to the routing, and no particularly interesting execution on it either. I dunno if my ire here is aimed at bullet hells, CAVE games, these specific few games, or something else… but I just think we can do so much more interesting things than this.
Faxanadu
The funniest part of this game: the password system. Presumably to not complexify passwords by orders of magnitude, everything in this game is password-saved except for your money count; instead, the money you load in with is determined by your current level. This is obviously highly abusable!! You can buy items and then save/reload to regain all the money you spent, stockpile consumables to then reload and sell them to exceed your current baseline without fighting anything… it’s not all that practical, to be honest; there was only a single time I actively made use of it, and only a couple where I could imagine somebody else would. But these sorts of bizarre, abusable systems that feel like solutions to problems I wouldn’t have even conceptualised… that stuff makes my brain light up like fireworks; it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say my realising how these systems actually worked was the highest point of my playthrough, by probably a fairly significant margin.
What’s probably more interesting to most people, and what was immediately striking to me, is how pretty this game is. I got immediately interested after being shown a screenshot of it – the highly-detailed art on the tilesets that, when actually used to put together levels, often feels distorted and mismatched, almost like incorrect tile placement in something like an amateur romhack – but at the same time, feels just measured enough to feel like coherent aesthetic intent – regardless of whether it actually is so or not. Even the times when entire castles are being sliced in half by a fog tile! I started this one around the middle of my Zelda 1 play last month, and… I don’t want to sound like I’m being mean to that game, because its low-detail, more abstract sprites work really well to their own effect, but… wow, the comparative detail on the tiles and the sprites in this game was mindblowing. Really, I don’t know which is more typical for a mid-lifespan NES game, but the difference for two games with about a year and a half between them really stuck out to me. It’s a visual style I can see myself coming back and referencing for a long time.
OK but enough of all the other stuff the bombshell drop is that this game doesn’t actually play very good oops! There’s some immediate cute nuances to how combat plays out: hitting an enemy flips their direction away from you, which can cause projectile enemies to fire the wrong way and encourages being fast and aggressive against them; and weapons (other than the starting dagger) are long enough to multi-hit an enemy if standing at near point-blank which rewards slightly riskier positioning. But… those are but nuances, and the game by and large starts with very basic, perfunctory-feeling combat, and ends with… very basic, perfunctory-feeling combat. Enemies begin with basic movement behaviours and end with basic movement behaviours, all but one of each weapon and spell acts identically, and, even if it isn’t particularly interesting... it’s just too easy to stuff your entire inventory with full-heal potions and damage tank through what intrigue there still is. The most praise I have is for the level layouts, which are overall somewhat mazelike without being too extreme and with a little mean streak near the end, but the navigation being a sideline to the combat just doesn’t cut it without there being interesting combat. I did, uncharacteristically, see the game through to the end – probably a mix of it being both just easy and just effortful enough to hang onto my attention, and an earnest desire to see and hear the later spritework and music tracks.
Mischief Makers
Turns out Treasure’s aesthetic style does actually work on me when it’s focused more on being cute and silly than it is on being aggressively and excessively difficult to look at. When not placed in a game beingt drowned out by oceans of explosions of noise, it’s all too easy to fall for the wonderful Norio Hanzawa soundtrack – there’s a clear throughline with their previous dissonant, techno-ish work on Gunstar Heroes et al. that’s easily audible here through thick soundscapes built by atypical instrument choices, that’s brought into contrast by bright, bouncy melodies and a general heavy lean towards more typical videogame music tropes – World 2’s music is audibly Lava World Music, 3’s is Ice World Music, etc., but the contrast of said tradition against the more eclectic sounds of Treasure makes for something wholly unique and captivating. And the visuals, when not placed in a game being flooded by screen-shake, flickering or explosions, are really, really pretty! I’m always a huge fan of pre-rendered 3D, and these sprites look amazing bolstered by a nice CRT shader – Marina’s own sprite is probably one of the prettiest I’ve ever laid eyes on – but I want to give a mention to the level backgrounds as well, Stage 3’s in particular – the single background image reused across so many of the levels, with a different harsh colour filter laid on top of it each time; both implying the passage of time across each stage, and bathing an already fairly strange set of visual motifs in a strong, almost abstract-feeling set of aggressively high-saturation hues. The cuteness extends to the tactile feel of the game, too; Marina’s movement being free-flowing, but the strongest and most applicable movement abilities just stiff and sudden enough in animation to feel good as you accidentally dash-jump into a lava pit without looking for the fifteenth time in a row. Shake-shaking a clanball while midair and having the whole screen bob along with you is just the most adorable thing in the world to me.
and then you get to 2-4 and the entire screen shakes violently for the whole level. treasure might be the worst to ever do it
It’s a bit of a disjointed, oddball game in structure, but oftentimes I’d say that works to its benefit. What stuck out to me initially was the time-attack ranking on every level, and the almost obstacle-course feel to the level structures and the resulting open-ended routing to getting a low time; as early as 1-3 I was sinking upwards of twenty minutes into, getting a strong familiarity with the movement systems and puzzling out the best way to move through that thing to even just get an A-rank, and then pushing it lower and lower to then make it look smooth and impressive on a re-watch. Having a game with a speed-play dimension, with its levels being individually selectable and replayable while not often going past the forty second mark on a strong play, is a really healthy way to encourage short-burst grinding and self-improvement while keeping a lessened risk of being too much of a compulsive time-sink – I’ve spent hours trapped in the subsuming haze of other time-trial focused games that offer perhaps too much convenience to repeatedly quick-retry endlessly with no enforced breaks, removing all barriers possible that separate one attempt from the next, removing all barriers possible to separate one hour from the next… it makes a game that isn’t so razor-sharpened around this specific mode of play stick out positively: the fact that its levels are really that short, and the lack of said ease of retry, both combine to make a game with easier mental backdoors to a time attack-grinding session – no individual level has taken me more than 20-30 mins to clear to a satisfactory degree, and a quit-out retry takes maybe five good seconds of waiting through loading screens before letting you back in. It’s all quaint in the grand scheme of things, but still very welcoming.
But what stuck out to me next, was… that I’ve sold you a lie, and most of the game is not like this at all – levels predominantly full of strange, one-off gimmicks or hyper-linear platforming stages, neither of which play into what I considered the strengths of the game. It’s numbed down in a few ways – the levels are really short so a dud doesn’t last very long, and there is so much variety that any particularly irritating gimmicks will very likely never appear again – but most interestingly to me, are… the levels whose strange, awkward gimmicks bristle against the speed-play mentality encouraged by the rank system. Sometimes you’re playing the worst autoscroller ever put to paper, and it sucks a little; other times you’re routing out the fastest way to complete the awkward, deliberate act of depositing four bombs into a barrel, and then skipping the last two gimmicks of the level because they just aren’t worth it – and it’s kinda awesome!! It feels like the sort of game where, depending on your own priorities and interests, a totally different set of levels will stick out and appeal more to you compared to someone else, and I think that’s cool.
~*ʚїɞ*~
Thank you for reading, as always. At the end of last year, some friends and I had the idea to loosely ‘rank’ the games we’d all played that year in terms of enjoyment, and though I didn’t share it anywhere outside of our group, it’s an exercise I kind of enjoyed a lot. I try to avoid quantifying my enjoyment of things in that way to any degree, nowadays, especially as a recovering Logging Sites user, but taking a few hours to reacquaint myself with and reflect on everything I’d played that year helped put my relationship with my time spent playing games sort of into perspective… am I liking, appreciating, or at the very least remembering the things I put so much time into? Am I understanding my own tastes and interests, or ought I re-prioritise a bit? I thought afterwards about carrying through the same idea bi-annually to the journal, as a way to see if I’m keeping myself on track and feeding my own interests well enough, but… well, things fell through a little bit lately :p. Instead, as the little half-year bookend, I’m going to share a selection of games I really appreciated that I’ve played this year, and a selection of games that are on my mind right now, that I’d like to get through perhaps before the year’s out.
Interestingly, this is still bringing to mind the whole arcade-style game stint I had for a good few months. All things considered, I think it was a very good little phase for me – I spent a lot of that time playing them with and alongside friends, and due to aforementioned personal stuff I haven’t really had the energy or executive function to sit down with bigger commitments – but reflection is making me realise how many of them just went straight through me. Not being able to commit, interestingly enough, also means not being able to put the time into grinding most of these for as long as they really deserve :p. Having the right sort of social environment is good for motivation in that sense – the ones I put the most time into were either games I grinded out directly in co-op, or had a small circle of people playing alongside me – but they definitely don’t have the staying power for me as a purely isolated endeavour. Not unless they’re as manageable as, like, an easy Touhou game :p. That said, I still found a decent selection that I’d like to put more time into over time… Streets of Rage 2, Judgement Silversword, Snow Bros., Flicky, TwinBee Yahho!!, Parodius Da!, and Radirgy, to name a few. In part, I think think it’s a long-term investment more than anything… I’m not that likely to put heavy time into them in the short term, but they’d be fun to get really, really good at over the years.
I know I’ve needed to reprioritise for a bit, and now that things are starting to look a bit brighter on my end, I’d like to put a more concerted effort towards it. I’ve been starving myself of ‘completable’ games when I have a very harshly goal-oriented brain, so I’m fiending for some shorter games that feed into RPG and adventure-ish sensibilities that I’ve been drifting away from; I think my recent Zelda 1 play has been making me realise how much I’ve missed this slower-paced, effortful but consistent progress style of game. And in terms of the more action-arcadey space… I think games with a slightly more bite-sized, less committal grind might be more palatable for me right now; games with much shorter runtimes, or ones focused on individual levels or otherwise shorter than full-game runs. I think Mischief Makers’ IL grinds have awakened that a little for me :p.
I’d also like to get back to more small indie stuff!!
Incidentally, most of the games I have been playing this month I haven’t gotten deep enough into to write about… but as a contrast to the unfortunately sorta negative tone of this month, I’ve been liking them all! Monster Hunter tri, an EarthBound replay, Judgement Silversword and Cardinal Sins, and Kingdom Hearts… the latter alongside a couple of friends, one of which loves the game extremely dearly. tri is shooting up to contend for my personal favourite Monster Hunter game, in a series I adore almost wholeheartedly; Judgement Silversword and Cardinal Sins are just two shmups almost perfectly aligned with my sensibilities, and the latter in particular is far, far stronger than I gave it credit for when I wrote about them back in January; and EarthBound is just, like, one of the most important things to me in the world. Kingdom Hearts I just haven’t played enough of yet :p.
On this site in general.. I haven’t written an article in a while, but I have quite a few half-finished pieces in the backburner that I haven’t really touched over the past couple months. I do hold myself to a very particular level of quality when I write a more formal piece, but, really? The reason I got passionate about taking analytical writing seriously is pretty much solely because I wanted to share the word about games I like and find interesting. I enjoy this journal as a bit of a space to do that, but it feels more impassioned to dedicate a full piece to a single work, rather than it being buried in one of these. So I think I’m going to try being a little looser on what I decide to publish, so I can get more articles out into the world. Not that there’s going to be a distinct drop in quality or anything, they might just look a little different sometimes. I’d also like to make a separate page for my visual art, since that’s something I’d like to start pursuing more again. That might mean there’s a little change in terms of how the site’s organised, because if I put one more category on the top bar it’ll probably be too cluttered, and I don’t want that :p.
Another last note on the personal side… earlier this month I deleted my bsky, in part due to long-term growing pains towards modern implementations of social media, and in part… on an impulse on a particularly bad day. I don't really feel very compatible with social media for a host of reasons, but I've reflected on it a lot the past couple of weeks, and I think it has a lot of benefit to me as well, that I've sort of taken for granted. Which is all to say, I remade my account today, with some ideas and renewed willingness on how to strike a better balance, where it benefits me more than it swings the opposite way. So, if you're reading this, and we're ex-bsky pals, come say hi to me over there again.
Hopefully this little reflective outro is a bit of a boost to an otherwise kind of dour month. Here’s hoping things’ll start to look up soon. I’m hopeful. Hope you’re all doing good, as well. I appreciate you lots just for being here, even if we can't see each other. Keep yourselves safe, and calm, and healthy. Tell your friends you love them. We'll get there. Thank you again for reading, and see you next month, hopefully in a bit of a brighter one. ~♡