Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: casual games

Oh, the games I’ve played (this year), part three

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I want to talk more about the games I tried out this year and did not get along with. There have been severeal, I see, as I have been looking over my Steam Replay timeline. Some of them are just the demos, whereas others are games I’ve bought. Oh, here’s the post I did yesterday on some of the games I played this year.

The first one is The First Berserker: Khazan (Neople), a brutal soulslike. I have one word to say to this game: NO.

To expand a bit more, I was sighing within two minutes of playing. I will say, though, get paid, Ben Starr–get your bag! He’s in everything, and he’s the main character (the player character) in this game.

I am so tired of soulslikes glomming onto the brutal difficulty part of From games and thinking that’s all it takes to make a good soulslike. Oooooh let’s make it so you can die in two hits by a scrub! Ooooooh let’s have mob after mob attack you in a way that you can’t see them coming, nor can you separate them. Ooooh let’s make it so that the opening saps your will to live. And then let’s have a mini-boss who will break your back, your spirit, and make the game not fun at all to play.

Oh, and ever since Sekiro, let’s include a parry/deflect that is an integral part of the combat because god forbid a dev dare make a soulslike these days without it. God forbid that the combat be hefty enough on its own so that you don’t have to use the parry/deflect. And god especially forbid that you don’t crank the difficulty up to a billion before I’m even out of the tutorial area.

I don’t blame From for this, but I can’t help feeling a bit bitter. I was already the dregs when it came to From games, and now, I cannot hang with many of the clones. The only way I made it through the base game of Lies of P (Round8 Studio/NEOWIZ) was by maxing out a consumable-forward build and using said consumables to beat every boss from the fourth one on (or fifth?) in their second phase (and they all had second phases after that point). That’s even how I beat the super-hard optional secret boss at the end of the game, plus a drastic change of my build in general. I didn’t feel good about it or proud (well, some pride on the last boss), but I did what I had to do.

I played maybe an hour of The First Berserker: Khazan and quit without hesitation. It was not enjoyable at all, and it was missing the point of Souls games, at least for me. The vast majority of people play the From games for the bosses. I felt no joy in playing the game, and I knew I would have quickly been at that place where I could no longer play the game.

I don’t know when it happened, but I’ve gone from being eager and excited when a soulslike is announced to being disenchanted, jaded, and ‘ugh, no’. It’s almost a revulsion at this point. Take, for example, Nioh 3 (Team Ninja). It was announced at… I want to say The Game Awards, but I’m not sure. It was recent, though; I know that much.

I have earnestly tried to play the first two games and got my ass relentlessly whupped. I was not having any fun, and I eventually gave up on each (for different reasons). I was numb when I saw the trailer for the third game. It did not move me in any way, and if anything, the trailer turned me off of it. I can’t think of the last soulslike that excited me. It’s not that I’ve outgrown the genre, but that it’s grown in a way that does not include me. In other word, it’s dumped me and not vice-versa.

Side note: I don’t have loyalty to any brand, not even FromSoft. Currently, I buy their games on day one or even pre-order them, but I was deeply disappointed by Nightreign and their decision to make The Duskbloods a Switch 2 exclusive. If they eventually bring it to other platforms including PC, I’ll probably buy it–but I won’t be happy about it. PvPvE does nothing for me. I’m sure they’ll do it well, but it’s not my thing at all.

Look, just because I love past From games does not mean that they earn endless grace from me. I mean, they can make whatever games they want. Clealy, they don’t need my approval to do that. But, I don’t have to buy those games if they don’t appeal to me.

I’m curious if they’ll do a sequel to Elden Ring. I can’t imagine they won’t given how successful it was, but I would rather see them move on to something else. no, I don’t want them to return to Dark Souls, either. I would like a game in which the combat was not so emphasized (and hard) and there was more focus on the exploration.

Another game that I was really looking forward to was Date Everything (Sassy Chap Games). It had a very interesting premise in that you receive this pair of glasses that make it possible for you to, ah, date everything (well, not everything, but most things) in your house. And by things, I mean things. The microwave, bed, your diary, washer, dryer, vacuum cleaner, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Erika Ishii is in it, and they play ben-wa balls named Ben-hwa. You can bet I ‘dated’ them as soon as possible. It was pretty damn hot, but also weird, which is a good tagline for the whole game.

Ben Starr is also in this game; as I said, he’s getting PAID. He’s the doors in the game, and he’s one of my favorite characters. I like talking to him, and apparently, he’s 17 doors. I have found maybe five of them?

The dialogue is snappy for the most part, but it just does not gel for me. It’s trying too hard, and I did not vibe with it. All the names are puns, and all the dialogue is written as if for a sassy sit-com. Itt’s well-written, but just not for me. Also, I learned that once you ‘date’ someone (read, bang), that’s it. There are no long-term relationships. Granted, I don’t know how long the person who told me this had played the game, but they seemed to be pretty confident about it.

I did feel it was way too easy to woo a few of the people I banged, including Ben-hwa. I felt like I was enacting a main character fantasy with the support of all the NPCs. I would have liked it to be…I don’t even know what. More authentic? But that’s not the point of the game. I mean, the very premise is weird and wild, so why would the rest of it be grounded in any way?

I played maybe a half-dozen hours of it and never really warmed up to it. Regretfully, I put it away after twice giving it a real shot. I don’t think I’ll be going back to it.

 

 

 

What I want in a game these days

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I have played several demos this year, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I have played a few meaty games, too–well, at least one–and by the time I was done with it,I was exhausted. There have been several soulslikes this year, and I have been very reluctant to play them. Not only because I don’t actually like most soulslikes, but because many of them are just so intense.

Side note: I have been a fan of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! (Vertigo Gaming Inc.) series since the very first one. The sceond game, Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! is my favorite, mostly because I could decorate my restaurants to my heart’s content. Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! was fun and had a different premise, but failed completely in the third act. Still, it got me through the beginning of the pandemic (in Early Access), and I still think of it fondly.

When the fourth (and presumably last) game in the series came out in Early Access, I was disappointed that the gameplay had changed drastically. In the first three games, each dish you made had a list of ingredients that you had to memorize by the letter you used to signify that ingredient. Like M for mustard. But, be careful because the same letter can mean diffecrent ingredients in different recipes.

There was something immensely satisfying about memorizing different recipes and tapping them out as fast as possible. It wsa hard, yes, and after my medical crisis, impossible to get perfects. But still satisfying and fun to play.

This game?

*Deep sigh.*

It felt like a mobile game, honestly. Instead of typing letters, you just hit the arrow buttons. Seriously. It was repetitive and boring. Plus, the animations weren’t as good as in terms of making the food look delicious. While it was only four buttons to press, having to constantly press them in different orders made me ignore the visuals completely. Though, to be fair, I rarely looked at the food while playing the other games, either.

The game was officially released on July 31st. I had already uninstalled it, so I just reinstalled it to check it out. Apparently, the devs (no longer just one guy. Well, it was always more than him, but he was the primary. Now, it’s him and one other guy, I think. Plus a team backing them. Oh, by the way, they wiped my game from Eary Access. Once I started playing, I knew saw why, but it was still annoying.

Anyway, much to my chagrin, they added buttons, but in a mad way. They have things you have to do with both hands at the same time (like holding down the LB, then holding down the left arrow, and then releasing them both. But while holding them both down, having to tap A, B, Y, X with the right hand in succession). I have a hard enough time with QTEs with one hand. Add another hand to it, and there’s just no way I can do it.


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The frank truth about casual games, part three

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I have one more post in me about casual games. Here is the last post I wrote about it in which I wondered if there was any practical way to make casual games better. And, more to the point, was there any motivation to do it when casual gamers were willing to buy just about any slop? I’m including myself in that, by the way. I will buy games that satisfy the itch for a casual game, even if said game isn’t very good.

I will buy any basic solitaire game or match-3 game because my standards are so low for those kinds of games. As long as the games run ok; I can read the font; and it’s has decent visuals, I’l lbuy it. Actually, I say that these are very low standards, but there are many more games than you would probably think that don’t meet even those base standards. There are some that won’t even start. There are some that take forever to load. And there are some that crash somewhere during gameplay.

I’m not saying hardcore games don’t do that because they do, but not with the frequeny of casual games. Also, hardcore games have more of an excuse than do casual games. The amount of money poured into hardcore games is astronomical whereas I’m assuming that it’s much less the case for casual games.

I mean, let’s do the math. A hardcore game costs anywhere from $60-$80, if we’re talking Triple A. Indie games are much less with most of them falling in the $20 range (give or take five bucks). A casual game is $6.99 for the standard edition and $13.99 for a collector’s edition. A Triple A deluxe edition tends to be ten dollars more than the standard edition. The collector’s edition can be anything over a hundred bucks and is usually outrageously expensive because of some included trinket. Trinket meaning statue or something like that.

Interestingly enough, I just played the demo for the next MCF (Mystery Case Files) Hidden Object Game (HOG), which is a BigFishGames original. Not developed by them directly, but published by them. Or at least it was. They call this a spin-off game of the series so it might not be canon. It’s called Fragments of Truth (GrandMA Studios), and it’s been interesting.

Huh. It turns out that the first few games  of the series were developed internally (the first in 2005), and then other studios took over. I remember the first three or so, and they were really good. In fact, they were considered the gold standard for HOGs for the next several years. Hmmmmm. I was thinking that the quality started dipping with the game that starred Lea Thompson, which I thought was the sixth or seventh game. It turns out that it was the ninth game, called Shadow Lake. It was released in 2012, and it was the last game developed by Big Fish Studios.

No wonder I thought the quality had dropped after that one. Well, to be brutally honest, during that one. There was something missing, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I was dissatified with it, though I could not tell you exactly why.


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Casual game devs are stuck in the last millennium, part two

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I’m back to talk more about casual games. Yesterday, I wrote about some of my issues with casual gaming and what needs to change. I only touched on the latter, so I’m going to go more into that in this post.

I have to emphasize once again that they NEED to put their options before the prologue. In this day and age, making me sit through a prologue without being able to silence it is inexcusable. This is why I skip the prologue 99 out of 100 times. Well, that and because the stories for all the Hidden Object Games (HOGs) are all the same so the prologue doesn’t matter.

By the way, the voice acting is stridently competent at best. It’s rarely terrible, but it’s rarely good, either. The best I can say is that mostly, it’s eminently forgettable. But to be fair, I rarely have the sound on when I’m playing a casual game.

Today, I tried a demo for one that had no options before the prologue. Fine. Whatever. I know this is the way casual games are. After the prologue was finished, there still was no options menu. What the fuck? This was not acceptable. I could not believe that there was a game in 2025 that did not have an options menu.

I kept playing, but I was irritated by the fact that I could not turn off the sound. Finally, after doing the first hidden object scene, the menu came up, and it included options (and I could turn off the sound). It was a good thing, too, because I was not going to play the whole game without being able to turn off the sound.

It’s just amazing to me because in hardcore gaming, the options are every growing. Being able to mute from the beginning is taken as a given, and there would be an outcry if it wasn’t there.

Hell, there are even some accessibility options in some games. Granted, there aren’t nearly enough options in not nearly enough games, but it’s not even a thought for casual games. There are no accessibility options, and most of the time, it’s not an issue because the games are very basic. There isn’t movement, for example, except for brief action moments in HOGs.

I will say that font is an issue sometimes. The font chosen and how tiny it can be. So if that were an option, I would appreciate that. Plus, dialogue speed. I read very fast, and once I’m done reading, I want to move onto the next bit of dialogue.

Everything seems so twenty years ago. As I said, I played casual games fifteen years ago, and the looks of them have changed very little since then. There’s a lick of paint and a bit of glitter, but that’s it. If I showed you stills from a casual game from twenty years ago, especially a HOG and one from now, I bet you prrobably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.


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Casual game devs need to up their game

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Before I played hardcore games, I was into casual games. Hidden Obje.ct Games (HOGs), Match-3s, and Time Managements, mostly. I also liked word games and solitaires. One really interesting thing was back then, maybe 90% of the games had women as protags. In fact, one of the rare times there was a male protag, a user commented in approval. It was a guy, and he said that it was nice to have a male protag for once.

I kinda laughed because welcome to the other side, bro! Every other anything at that time was heavily male-dominated, so I didn’t have much sympathy with that complaint. In fact, I was thinking, “Let us have this one, my guy.”

I mention this because I think the fact that the gamers in this case are overwhelminingly female is a big part of the reason why what I’m about to complain about happens.

In the hardcore gaming community, there is always griping about how certain devs just make the same game over and over. Two of the most notable examples are the endless iterations of Call of Duty (which I call Collar Duty, and the dev is….well, ultimately, now it’s Microsoft. Let’s leave it at that) and AssCReed (Ubisoft).

They come out seemingly every year, and there is very little to differentiate between them. At least that’s how it seems from the outside. I will give some credit to AssCreed in that at least it’s in a different country each time.

You can’t say they don’t spend money on each iteration, though. You have to give them that. And, they do iterate and innovate in some of the games. From what I’ve seen, anyway. I’ve only played one AssCreed game (Syndicate) and no Collar Duties.

I still have a membership to BigFishGames, which is a site that sells casual games. And develops some of them (though not under their own name). They’re the Steam of casual gaming, but unlike Steam, they have not really pushed casual gaming forward in any significant way. Plus, their client is not great, and every iteration of it seems to either stagnate or be slightly worse.

I still play casual games in between my sessions of hardcore gaming–especially if I’ve gotten obsessed with a hardcore game for several weeks. And, wow. There is such little innovation in the casual gaming world.

On the one hand, I can see why. The genres are pretty rigid and rely on so many tropes. In addition, they are an easy sell–especially because the standards are so low.

To be clear, I’m part of the problem. I will buy a casual game if I’m halfway interested because I get a free game per month with my subscription to BigGameFish. I have so many freebies, I will spend them on anything halfway interesting. Or, to be brutally honest, repetitive enough to scramble my brain weasels.


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All and asundry

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heyboohey
Qadir is hotter than the burning sun.

I want to find a new game, but I haven’t. Not really. I’ve dabbled in Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York by Draw Distance and–by the way, the name irritates me every time I see it because it’s so pretentious. A colon and a dash? Please. Anyway, I’ve never played any of the other VTM games even though it should be my jam (love vamps!) because they’re old. It’s old. One game thus far with a sequel being teased. I was gifted the game by Ian and decided to give it a try the other night. There are three clans from which you can choose (classes, if you will), two of the three which intrigued me. The anarchist class and the artistic/lover class. The third class is the blue blood (wealthy) class, which leaves me cold. I will try it at some point, probably, especially as it’s the only female character of the three, but I have no interest in it.

I started with the anarchist, naming him yanluo–the Chinese god of the underworld. I never capitalize names in games and I don’t know why. After roughly fifteen minutes, I started over again as the artist, naming him gamab–the African god of death. Sense a theme? The basic story is the same. Oh, it’s an interactive graphic novel, by the way. All the characters are impossibly hot, but that’s to be expected because they’re vampires. Well, there’s one who isn’t because he belongs to the Nosferatu clan, which is the hideous monster clan.

It starts with a mysterious vampire (I presume) talking to you at the beginning and explaining that some powerful vampire had died. Then it goes back to how you became a vamp in the first place. It’s a different story for each character, but it ends up the same. You get turned, your sire deserts you, and the *sigh* Sheriff, Qadir, comes to clean things up and whisk you away. I’m sighing because he is yuuuuuuuuuumy. I was Googling the game for reasons and there are quite a few people thirsting for him.

I like the game. I’ll try the blue blood character at some point, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll play it. It’s interesting, but none of the dialogue choices are ones I’d choose. It’s the bane of dialogue-driven games, unfortunately. One of the choices is usually close enough and I haven’t had a situation where all three choices are completely off. While I like it, however, I just don’t have much compunction to play it. There’s no burning desire so we’ll see if I actually go back to it.

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Lost my game

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I’m still dealing with some sinus issues even as I’m getting better every day. One of the side effects of being sick is that I just can’t play anything too intense. I don’t even mean intense in the way of Dark Souls intense. I just mean anything that I have to engage a lot in, which actually doesn’t include Dark Souls. Which, by the way, I still haven’t played since the twin not-plat runs. I was worried this would happen, and it makes me sad because I could do with some comfort Soulsing night now. Instead, I’ve played Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?!!, which sounds like a contradiction to the no-intensity thing, I know. But, however, there are ways to make the game more or less intense, and I’m doing it as easily as possible. There was a recent update with a new area, which was a little more stressful. However, once I finished that (one of the new achievements was really frustrating because I couldn’t figure out how to actually do it. Once I read about it in the forums, however, actually doing it was simple, and it was worth it. It was so funny), I went back to cruising through each day as easily as possible.

I’ve also gone back to my roots and playing Hidden Object games. It’s mindless especially when I play ones I’ve played a million times before, and it’s something about the repetitiveness that soothes me. I still find comfort in the games, but I can acknowledge that most of the games are just lazy reskins of previous games. Most companies just crank out a game per series a year with the smallest tweaks to the story. I’m all about fantasy settings and the paranormal, but if I have to play one more game where my husband/wife/daughter/son/other relative  is snatched away by some shadowy figure that may or may not be aliens, and then you have to go to some mysterious world in order to save them, I may just scream.

In addition, they still do the thing where you can’t mess with any of your options before the opening cutscene, which means I will skip it rather than mute it every time. I play with the sound off for casual games because that’s just the way I do, and all the intro scenes are the same, anyway. I saw a remake/remaster of a HOG for the first time, and I laughed my ass off because it was so clearly a cash grab.

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Monster Hunter: World grinding harder and faster

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rathalos is having none of my shit.
Oh, shit. Rathalos is pissed!

Before jumping into Monster Hunter: World, I have to vent my spleen about casual games, which I’ve played for years. Before I was a ‘hardcore gamer’, I played Hidden Object, Match-3, Solitaire, and Time Management games. Big Fish Games is the Steam of casual games, and I have a membership there, which means I get one ‘free’ game a month. I should stop my membership, but I do enjoy a casual game now and again when I want to give my mind a break. The thing is, though, once I started playing hardcore games*, I noticed things about casual games that would not fly in the hardcore world. One, unskippable opening cut-scenes. Look. Devs. We need to talk. Cut-scenes need to be skippable, especially before I’m allowed to fiddle with options. The first thing I do when I play a casual game is go into the options and turn off all the sound. Why? Because I can’t stand the background music that usually plays, and the voice acting is usually atrocious. Besides, when I play a casual game, I usually have a video/stream in the background, so I want to concentrate on the latter. It’s different when I play a hardcore game because I want to be immersed in that case.

Two, the code is atrocious. There are so many more bugs in a casual game than a hardcore one, and I don’t know why. Theoretically, it should be easier to make a casual game than a hardcore one, but then again, the people doing the development probably don’t have as much knowledge. That’s just a wild guess on my part, but it makes sense. I’m playing a solitaire game that’s a murder mystery at the same time. I played the first in the series and noted a few major problems. But, because there aren’t many murder mystery solitaire games, I gave the second a shot. Well, it has the same damn problems. One, it randomly crashes. Or, should I say, not so randomly. It’s when I try to use a power up. After I click on the power up and use it, the game either freezes or I can click, but I can’t pick up any cards. Sometimes it simply freezes on its own. The other bug is that sometimes the gold cards you need to collect can’t be clicked. And, finally, at the end of a round after I’ve cleared every card, it won’t exit into the ‘you won’ splash screen.

This doesn’t happen every round, but it happens enough for me to be frustrated with the game. They are the same goddamn problems I had with the last game, and you’d think they’d fix them between games. Here’s another issue I have with casual games in general–they keep putting out the same shit. There’s one solitaire company that puts out the same game once a month or so with just a palette swap, a change in themes, and nothing else. They’ve wised up a bit and write game descriptions for a much more exciting game than they provide, but they don’t change the games at all. I’ve bought a few, and they’re good enough to pass the time, but they’re nothing to write home about.

It seems as if casual games are stuck in a rut. Devs put out the same game over and over again with a slight story change. Everything is paranormal, and there’s usually a family member who’s gone missing. I will say the Hidden Object games usually work fine, and they look good, but there’s no heart to them. I haven’t found one in a long time that had a good story or that really captured my attention. I know that’s not why I’m playing them, but I would like more than mind-numbing boredom when I play.

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Suggestions From a Filthy Casual

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mad libs in effect.
I need to find a shoe, a hammer, and a cellphone!

Way before I ventured into the strange world of hardcore gaming, I was a dedicated practitioner of casual games. I’ve never given them up completely, and now while I’ve been sick for three months, sometimes, a casual game is all my brain can handle. Hidden Object Games (HOGs), Match-3, Solitaire, Time Management, I like ’em all. I have a much lower expectation of them than I do hardcore games because one, they’re churned out like processed meat at a rapid pace, and, two, they’re much less expensive than hardcore games. I am a member of BigFishGames.com, and a Standard Edition (SE) game is $6.99, whereas a Collector’s Edition (CE) is $13.99. In addition, the expectations are different when I play a casual game than when I play a hardcore one. I play casual games just to relax, so I’m not as critical about them as I am with hardcore games. That being said, there are several tropes in casual games that are way past their expiration date, and I would like to make some suggestions as to how to make them better. Most of my suggestions are for HOGs, but some of them apply across the board. I’ll indicate which games are the worst offenders for each trope I’m going to dissect.

Let’s start at the beginning. Literally. When I start up a HOG, I know I’m going to be greeted with a cutscene. Here’s a weird fact about when I play casual games–I play them with the sound off. It’s weird because I always play with the sound on with hardcore games, but I play with the sound muted for casual games. Why? First of all, the sound is jacked up in comparison to how loud it should be. Additionally, many of them have music that plays throughout the whole game, and I don’t want that in my ear the whole time I’m playing. Secondly, voice acting in casual games is usually atrocious, and I’d rather read the text than hear them speak. Anyway, the fact that I can’t fiddle with the settings before the cutscene starts is irritating to me. I would sit through the cutscene and read the text if that were an option, but because it isn’t, I simply skip the cutscene instead.

By the way, there are some things in casual games that will make it a no-go before I even get started. Oh! One of the best things about casual games and using a client service like BGF is that every game has a free demo. It used to be an hour, regardless, but now it’s more like a set amount of story/scenes that a developer wants you to see. I’m fine with that, but it seems as if more and more games are creating their games for that hour point and end on a cliff hanger, which is understandable, but somewhat irritating. Anyway, my top egregious sins are: One, not allowing for windowed mode. There is no excuse for this. None. Two, not being able to mute the music. Again, there’s no excuse for it. I have a hunch that the developers of casual games are not as experienced or knowledgeable as are hardcore developers, but it can’t be that difficult to code window mode or muting the sound. Not being able to skip cutscenes is also a non-starter for me. Basically, if I’m not in control of my gaming experience, I’ll tap out. I’m not as strict about resolution settings because that doesn’t matter as much to me, but sound and window? Yeah.

Here are some of my micro annoyances with casual games. One, making it so I have to continually press a button to mute the sound–especially if you have to do each aspect separately. I don’t even like sliders, but they’re better than having to repeatedly press a button. I wish more games had a ‘mute all’ button, but that doesn’t seem to be a thing. Another is once I’ve fixed all the settings to my liking, as the game continues, it ignores what I’ve done and reverts to previous settings. If a game does that (say with cutscenes and sound), I instantly stop playing. Another weird thing many HOGs do is that you can change the difficulty in the settings, but if you do it before they specifically ask you to select your difficulty, they’ll still ask you, even if you change the difficulty. In addition, some games will change your whole computer’s resolution when you choose window mode, and that’s another game stopper for me. Obviously.

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