Underneath my yellow skin

Category Archives: Video Games

Gaming, me, and all is bad; part three

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In the gaming industry, there is a saying I keep hearing. “Put out a bad game–get laid off. Put out a great game–get laid off. It doesn’t matter.” Sometimes, people will add, “Put out an OK game–get laid off.” The point is that no one is safe. It doesn’t matter how well your game does–you can be on the chopping block.

The biggest example of this is id Software–the developers of the DOOM and Quake games (both of which are considered the grandparent of the first-person shooter). They have been consistent with their games coming out and being warmly received. Their last DOOM game came out last year to much fanfare, and it had an update this year.

In Xbox’s current brutal ‘off with their heads’ rampage, they laid off 136 employees at id Software. The co-founder of id Software (who has long since left), John Carmack released a milquetoast statement that said nothing and included a tasteless and, quite frankly, cringeworthy remark. He would have been better off not saying anything at all, quite frankly. Greg Miller from Kinda Funny Games and Tamoor Hussain from Gamespot talked about it passionately on KFG, and I’ve included the clip below.

With Obsidian, they did not get laid off, but they got yanked off the Forsworn sequel they were working on and told they were doing the new Fallout. This is where mixed emotions come in. No one was asking for a new Forsworn (or rather, very few people), and everyone was clamoring for a new Fallout. The last game in the main series (Fallout 4) came out in 2015! No wonder people are hungering for more.

In addition, there is a Netflix Fallout series going on, and it would have been a perfect time to have a new Fallout game come out. This is Bethesda I’m talking about, by the way. They are the ones who own the Fallout name, but Obsidian made what is arguably the favorite in the series–Fallout New Vegas.

The CEO of Microsoft has said that since being hands off hasn’t worked, it’s now time to be hands on (I’m paraphrasing). I can’t say that I disagree with the premise. Bethesda has two IPs that are basically printing money, and they haven’t done anything major with either series in several years (and, no, Elder Scrolls, I’m not including the countless time Skyrim has been remastered, remade, repackaged, and put on different devices).

On the other hand, it feels really tyrannical to order a team to make a new game that is not the one they intended to make. Yes, even though they have made one before. They were in the middle of making a sequel to their latest game! To be ordeerd to stop that and do something completely different, well, that would not sit well with me.

Everyone is angry about it, and rightly so. It’s been a bloodbath, and the worst part is not knowing when or if it will stop. Also, are any of the upper C-suite taking paycuts? I think not. They can’t do without their third home in Martha’s Vineyard, now can they?


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The state of gaming and me, part two

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So, amid all the wild shenanigans that Xbox and PlayStation have been wading through creating, EA decided that they had been quiet for far too long. EA, once voted the worst company in America for two years running in the tens. Watching PS and Xbox get so much pub f or self-imploding must have really gotten on their nerves. “I got to get me some of that!”–some muckety-muck at EA, probably.

Why do I say that? Because they did something so bonehead and unfathomable (well, it’s fathomable when you remember that companies are souless entities who only care about making a profit and not at all about people or their customers), people are calling for a…boycott of sorts.

In a nutshell, they released their new college football game and took out the “easy mode”. I have included a video down below from SnowBike Mike who works at Kinda Funny Games in which he explains what the issue is. As I understand it, there was a slider that allowed you to adjust to how much experience points you earned in two of the offline modes. Andy Cortez read from an article written by Lewis Parker at Kotaku that outlines the problem. Spoiler–microtransactions. It’s microtransactions. Actual, there’s nothing micro about it. It’s just transactions, really.  There’s more to it, but basically, they’re saying you have to pay actual real life money to get the XP rather than use the slider–which no longer exists (at least the easier side of it).

Now, you gotta pay a hundo to get your coach leveled up properly. Someone calculated that you would have to win something like a hundred championships to do it ‘naturally’.

Well, well, well. Reading through the article, it seems that EA has backed down. I don’t know if it’s enough for the people who want to buy the game/bought the game, but at least understood that what they did was not cool. So very not cool.

Some content creators were really upset, too, because they promoted the game and played a demo of it that did not have microtransactions in it. In other words, EA knew what they were doing was shady, and they deliberately hid it forom the very people they were depending on to promote their game.

Which is astoundingly short-sighted. Content creators can generate so much good will for your game–or, by contrast, call for their followers to ‘play, not pay’–which one content creator did in response to the news of the microtransactions. Also, it wasn’t as if EA could have hidden it for very long–and, indeed, the outcry was swift and vicious. The reviews on Steam are mostly negative (we’ll see how that changes with the new news from EA), and all of them are clear about the fact that it’s because of the greed and not the gameplay. Most people think the actual gameplay is great.


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Indie games, physical discs, and why I should care (as a PC gamer)

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I have spontaneously added a new tag–gaming hell. That’s because gaming is hell right now. Not literally, of course, but metaphorically. Some of it is out of the control of anyone in the industry–such as AI driving up the prices of RAM (long story, don’t want to talk about it) so that new consolse/PCs are going to be absolutely ridiculous in prices. I was thinking of buying a new PC a year ago, but I decided to wait it out beacuse graphic cards were already outrageous (because of tariffs), and I was hoping things would calm down.

Oh wait. At the end of the last post, I was talking about a game that came out yesterday that I so wanted to like (after talking about it in a previous post). I don’t know why I’m being so coy about it. It’s Moonlight Peaks (Little Chicken Game Company). I had my eye on it from when I first heard of it–when was that? Was it the Wholesome Games Direct in February? Was there even one in February? Anyway, it was a vampire farming sim. Yeah, you heard that right. OK, it’s not exactly a farming sim, but there is farming in it. And romance. And other life sim stuff.

You will forgive me if I was reminded of another game that was similar to it. One that I played the shit out of, had a chibi-ish style to it, too (well, more cartoony than chibi, but reminiscent of), and was a farming sim. It’s called, Wylde Flowers (Studio Drydock), and I enjoyed it so much, I platated it. Here is the post I wrote about it for my game of the year awards last year.

I played it for several dozes hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have written many posts about what I loved and didn’tt like about the game, so I won’t belabor the point. I will say that I really loved the heart of the game, the fact that it incorporated magic into it, and how much diversity was in it.

Quite frankly, I was looking for something to replicate that feeling. I like a good sim, but I’m quite picky about what works and doesn’t work for me. I was really hoping this game would scratch that itch because on paper, it should be right up my alley. You’re a vamp who runs away from home and into a community filled with discord and strife? And you have to find a way to make the warring factions make nice (I’m assuming). There are werewolves, vampires, and other manners of fae (I think), which is great for me. I love that shit.

What I’m trying to say is that there was everything that I liked in this game. A farming/life sim. Magic and fantastical creatures. Not the chibi look, but I can grit my teeth and deal with that. Benig a vamp! I love vampires. I should have been all over that. But I just wasn’t.


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Birdigo, indies, and when a game just misses, part four

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I have one last post in me for the 100%ing  of Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin), and then it’s time to move on. I’m so relieved that I got the plat so that I don’t have to play the game again. That is no diss against the game, but a diss against my obsessive nature.

Side note (yes, this soon into the post): In the Discord I’m in, there’s a joke that me and a woman who is very similar to me are the same person. She recently moved to Minnesota, too, so that makes it even funnier. Separately, there is another woman who I’ve become quite close to offline (meaning in DMs). We like to joke that we are the same person as well. Shes’ the one who alerted me to the fact that I might be neurospicy, and I’ll be forever grateful to her.

Today, in the Discord, they were cracking wise about being neurospicy (ADHD for one and ADHD/autistic for the other) and how they had to pay the neurospicy tax. One penalty was the result of getting interested in an activity, being passionate for about ten seconds, and then losing all desire in it. They both commented earsier than I did, so when I wake up, I get a bunch of fun posts to read and respond to.

The two I mentioned above were commiserating about all the things they had stored in their closets because of this neurodivergency trait. They joked that this is how it was for children, obviously, as they were adults and most definitely did not do that. I laughed in rueful recognition when I read their comments because I most definitely did not do that, either. I was a grown-ass adult who most definitely did not have closets filled with jigsaw puzzles I’d never even opened (which I posted).

Anyway, this is the reason why once I go past a certain point in an activity, I have to keep going until I do it. It didn’t matter if I was happy about it or enjoyed it; I just had to do it.

Let’s talk about that final achievement. It was winning one run for the last route (Short-Tailed Shearwater). This route had 22 stops with the last stop being 20,000 flaps (points). This is middling when it comes to number of stops and number of flaps. I don’t know why this was the last to unlock as it wasn’t special in any way. In fact, I think that’s part of the reason I struggled with it. It was just meh–and a grind. Oh, here’s my post from yesterday in which I talk about the second achievement and indie games in general.

It’s funny because in looking up the name of the last route, I ran across a guide as to how to win. The first tip was to stick to one strategy. I laughed ruefully because I learned that way too late. I would say this is probably the most important tip as it’s too easy to get swayed–especially for me and my neurodivergent brain. But it really benefits you to establish your strategy early and stick with it.

It also benefits you to try to find the synergies that will boost your strategy. Of course that’s where RNG plays a part in that you have to decide which strategy you want to use and stick with it. That means that you have to pass on oter legit strategies even if they show up later.


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Birdigo after 100%ing it, part three

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I have a bit more to say about Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin) and indie games in general. At the end of the last post (which you can read here), I mentioned that I was surprised when I got the ‘win each round with one word’ achievement. It was anticlimactic because I did not realize I had won it until after it was over. I had been going at it for so long, I didn’t know quite what I was supposed to do when I actually won or how I was supposed to feel.

It reminds me of when the boys fought

*SPOILER*

Malenia for three days in their Elden Ring (FromSoft) playthrough. And, yes, it’s amusing to me to spoiler tag a boss from another game in this post. Part of the series evolved into Rory soloing every boss as long as there were no NPC summons to summon (and even sometimes then). In Elden Ring, they decided through trial and error that he would not use the spirit ashes for bosses. Krupa said to Gav that he (Gav) would one day rue that decree, but to Rory’s credit, he adamantly refused to use the spirit ash during the Malenia fight.

They edited down the footage, obviously, but they revealed that it was fifteen hours in total over four days. They did not even show any of the footage for one of the days. I think? They split it into three episodes, and each was over two hours. The last was almost two-and-a-half hours. It was epic, and the struggle was so real. The reason I mention it is because when he fginally beat her, the celebration was muted. I mean, the initial celebration was pretty hyped, but it subsided quickly. It became much more an expression of relief than excitement. Rory said something about not knowing what to do because he should be running back to fight Malenia again (massive paraphrase). He died 265 times to her, and you could see it wearing on all three of them in the last episode.

Anyway, this is me whenever I go for a plat. I go blank on the inside and something deep inside of me almost gets angry. Like, “You’re not the boss of me, and I’m going to do this!” Who it’s saying it to, I have no idea. Also me, probably. This is why I don’t do competitive sports–I’m way too hard on myself when I do.

It’s funny. It’s not so much that I care about winning and losing–though I do to a certain extent. It’s just me feeling like I’m not doing enough. It’s all about me winning and losing against myself–not me winning and losing against anyone else.

I just now realized that Birdigo sounds like vertigo. D’oh! Huh. The video I’m including is an interview with the two devs. I didn’t realize that the game was a card game first (called AlphaBird). Huh. Made by the same two guys. Thats’ pretty cool!


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Birdigo–those last three achievements, part two

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I’m back to write more about Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin), 100%ing it, and my gripes with indie games in general. Before I get into it, here’s my post from yesterday. I started talking about the three achievements I needed to 100% this game, and then I justt migrated (heh) all over the place.

I am so bad when it comes to sticking to a subject because everything is connected in my brain. So, I may start out by mentioning that I 100%ed the game, and that makes me think about the game, of course. Then, I think about what I didn’t like about the game and/or what frustrated me. That got me to thinking about what I didn’t like about indie games in general, which then led to me broadening that out to games in general.

Then, I give in to my to rant about how much I hate certain things in tutorials–and then I forget what I wanted to talk about in the first place. Or I run out of time/desire/will to talk about it. This is how my brain works, much to my dismay.

Speaking of, I just tried the demo for a typing game that has absolutely no tutorial; it was frustrating as hell. Also, here is one of my pet peeves in games: limited inventory. In the demo I tried, it’s a farming/cooking sim with something like 10 slots of inventory. 10!!! It encourages you to go out and explore so you can pick up ingredients for your recipes. Except I can go about two steps and pick up ten things (I can pick up several of each item, but 10 different items total). I can barely go to the next area before I have to return to put tihngs in my box.

By the way, I had to find that on my own. They don’t tell you there’s a box. Also, I got into the restaurant biz because my grandfather died and deeded it to me (of course).

I don’t mind a nonsensical or unbelievable premise, but I do mind not being able to figure out what to do. I will give a shout-out that they allowed me to type in Dvorak without switching up the keyboard.

Anyway. Back to Birdigo.

I used the Lean Deck to tackle the win a route by using one word per round. I didn’t think I could do it with the Feral Deck because I did not have the confidence that I could consistently–wait. I think at some point I changed to the Feral Deck because I realized that if I could only use one word per round, then I might as well use this deck and have six wild cards.


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Birdigo after 100%ing it

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I have finally 100%ed Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin). Here was what I had to say in my A Quick Review about it. As usual, the one achievement I thought would be the hard one was the easiest (and the first of the three that I got). Let’s review. The three achievements I had left were–

Before I get into how I did each of the three achievements, I want to talk a bit about the different decks. The first is the classic deck. It’s the most well-rounded of the decks and it has no penalties. It has two or three of each consonant and four of each vowel. And one wildcard. It’s what I used for most of my gameplay until I realized the usefulness of using the more thinned out decks.

You have to unlock the other decks under certain cirumstances. Some of them are joke decks like the Pirate Deck, which you unlock by playing one word with 3 Rs in it (I had to look it up, obviously). There are three decks that I consider joke decks (Gadsby Deck, Pirate Deck, and Alphabet Deck. Well, the last one is not a joke, exactly, but it’s a deck that only has one of each letter. And you get one extra word at the start. You unlock it by playing each letter at least once in the same run.

The Pirate Deck has 9 Rs in it and one wildcard. The Gadsby Deck is unlocked by winning a run without using an E. The deck has no E, but you start with 10 seeds. (Seeds are used to buy feathers and songs, both of which will help with the run). And it has one wildcard. I have never won a run with any of these three decks because the wackiness of them did not appeal to me.

Oh! The two decks that I consider more serious. One is the Lean Deck. It has one of every consonant (well, two of a few like S and T) and three of every vowel (except U. Only one of that) And one wildcard. But you also get one less discard.

Finally, there’s the Feral Deck. This has the same letters as the Lean Deck, but it gives you six wildcards instead of just one. And you get one less word. Normally, you start with three words, which means you start with two (there are ways to add words). This is the deck that is often said to be the best overall–if you’re comfortable only making two wourds per round (for the first few rounds at least).  This is the deck that most people seem to recommend for–well, just about everything.

As a reminder, these were the three achievements I had left:

1. Win a run by passing each round using only one word.

2. Win seven daily migrations (daily run. I don’t know how they were seeded, but you had to finish them in the same day. Or rather, the same run. I’ll get more to that later).

3. Finish the final route (Short-tailed Shearwater). It’s not the longest or shortest of the routes, but–I’ll get to that in a minute, too.


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What matters to me in gaming (and what doesn’t), part two

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Let’s talk more about everything that is wrong with gaming. It’s been a shit week, and it just seems to be getting worse. Plus, the weather is so gross. It’s been in the eighties to ‘feels like’ in the hundreds–which suuuuuuucks. It’s definitely summer, which means sticky slimy. And insects coming out to play. Bah. Let me get back to winter, please. I’m doubly mad that we skipped spring because I hate summer so much.

My brother taught me a really cool trick to help with CPU. I usually have about fifty tabs open–up to a hundred or more. (He has over a hundred). You can group together tabs and then ‘shrink’ the group so all of the tabs are hidden. All you see are the the tab group names. It really celars up space, and then you can click on the group tag to let the tabs come out to play.

I was so excited when my brother taught me this, which made him laugh. It was the coolest thing, and it makes my life so much easier. It brought down my CPU usage by around 30%! I joked with my brother that I would be doing this for the  next following hour or two. Onrce you put a bunch of tabs in a group, you can name it and give it a color. It’s seriously the coolest thing I’ve learned in quite some time.

Back to games. We, the consumers, are part of the problem . We are not the cause of the problem, and there isn’t much we can do to stem the problem–but we are definitely part of the problem. Meaning, we’re going to buy the games no matter how expensive they get. There was talk about how expensive  Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games) would have to get before people wouldn’t buy it. $80 for the base game hasn’t stopped it from selling pre-orders like crazy. The fifth game sold roughly 230 million copies world wide. It came out in September of 2013, so that’s nearly 13 years ago.

This is mind-boggling, but, honestly, it’s not as many copies as I thought it would be. A content creator I watch sometimes said to guess how many copies the game had sold. I thought it would be over a billion, quite frankly. But a quarter-billion is still an astounding number.

I’m sure this game will match if not exceed the number. Or maybe do slightly less, but it’sll be around the same number. People are not NOT going to buy the game. I think the only glitch is that there is no physical copy being produced (which, just, sigh). I said in my post yesterday why I personally don’t care about physical copies, but I do think it’s a shame that there won’t be any. Why? Because a lot of people may not be able to afford the game at full price, and without any second-hand copies, they will have to do without.


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Indie games, Dark Souls III, and me

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Let’s talk more about indie games and Dark Souls III (FromSoft, definitely not an indie game). Here is my post from yesterday in which I talked a bit about both. Well, I talk about indie games and FromSoft (if not specifically the FromSoft I’m currently playing) I’m in The Ringed City DLC, and I have finally attained my beloved Black Witch Set, which is after the first boss of the DLC. The armor is also in the second Souls game, but it’s harder to get in that game. Or rather, there’s a chance that the game will glitch and not give it to you after killing an NPC invader. And that invader only shows up in the Scholar of the First Sin edition after you light up all the torches in the area (there’s something like 20 of them? Oh, wow. There are 49 of them. So more than double what I estimated.

Because the level is very vertical with many ladders, the drop can get hung up on a ladder in a way that you can’t reach it. Quitting out and logging back in (something that usually works for drops you can’t reach/didn’t get as the NPC falls to their death) doesn’t do anything. This happened to me once, and I was so mad that I had taken the time to do all the torches, kill the invader, and I got nothing for my efforts.

In this game, you just have to get to the mid-point of The Ringed City DLC (well, not quit mid) and defeat a different NPC invader to get the armor. There’s a veil that you can get a bit later that you can wear instead of the hat. I don’t wear either, though, because I’m wedded to my ridiculously big hat. It’s my favorite piece of armor in any From game, bar none. And it’s not even close.

Anyway, I want to sing the praises of Dorhy’s Gnawing once again. It’s a miracle that sends out little bugs to chew away at the enemy, and it procks bleed really easily. That means that after a certain amount of damage, there’s a burst, and the enemy takes a big chunk of damage.

It takes 25 Faith, which is quite a lot in this game. I tend to spread my points, and my beloved Chaos Bed Vestiges takes 20 Int (and 10 Faith). Plus, I need 18 Strength for the Executioner’s Greatsword (my early-to-mid game sword) and 26 Strength for my beloved Lorian’s Greatsword (my late-game sword). It takes 30 (!!) in Attunement to get 5 spell slots. I knew it was a lot, but I didn’t realize it cost THAT much.

One of the best QOL changes Elden Ring had was that the number of spell slots was not depnedent upon any stat. You started with two regardless of class, and then you had to find Memory Stones around the map. Each one gave you a slot, and there were a total of 10 of them in the game. Plus a talisman (ring) that gives you two extra slots. So you can have a  total of 12 slots! Luxury.

I need to find an indie game to play now that I’m done with Creature Kitchen (The Rat Zone). I’ve tried several word game demos, but none of them have quite hit the spot. I’m still playing Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin), but I’m hitting that “I want to quit but I can’t” space. I have two achievements left, and I’m going to get them done if it kills me. It won’t, but it’s killing my joy for the game.


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Indie games are (often) my jam

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Let’s talk about indie games. As AAA games are getting more and more bloated, and more and more expensive, indie games are holding the line as far as scope and cost. And yet, they are still innovating and creating experiences that are thrilling, charming, chill AF, engrossing, etc. They continue to delight me even as there are many indie games that are, to put it politely, hot garbage.

I think one of the reasons I have such a good time with indies is because I am much more open when I try an indie game than a triple A. Or rather, I go in with less preconceived notions than I do when I play a triple A game. In addition, I have different expectations when I’m buying a triple A versus an indie game.

Side note: I rarely buy triple A games. I mentioned this in the post yesterday how the last one I reviewed was Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions) in December of 2024. Again, we are not talking about FromSoft as they are in their own category. The last game I reviewed from them was–well, it was Elden Ring Nightreign, but that doesn’t count. The last real FromSoft game I reviewed was Shadow of the Erdtree, which was released in June of 2024. Wait a minute. I did review Nightreign, and it came out in May of last year. So that’s the last AAA game I reviewed. I’ll be honst with you. If it wasn’t a From game, I wouldn’t have bought it.

(Restrains from going down the FromSoft path.)

I don’t do multiplayer games, either. I don’t do shooters, sci-fi, or  strategy games. I do do RPGs, adventure games, action-adventure games, and cozy games. Within the cozy genre, I like story-driven games, games about death, and cooking sims. Cooking sims and other kinds of sims.

We have to talk about price point as well. I rarely pay more than twenty dollars for an indie game. There are a few that were twenty-five or so, and even that made me hesitate. But, I still forked over the money, and I was glad I did. I don’t usually do the money per hour conversion, but one particular game I’m thinking of that was twenty-five bucks, I put over 250 hours into it. That’s 10 cents an hour.

When I say I don’t expect the same things from AAA games versus indie games, I don’t mean that I expect less from one or the other–I just mean I expect different things. With a non-From AAA game, I expect great graphics, sweeping narratives, thrilling action, and just everything to be epic. I swear to god, I am not being snide or snarky when I say that this is a good thing.


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