Myst: Masterpiece Edition Review

Myst is a name I’ve heard a lot but never actually got around to playing. Until now, that is. As I’ve heard, it’s something of a landmark in adventure games, bringing a new and much calmer atmosphere removed from gag-filled action or the fear of death around every corner. Myst is a game where you make logical connections instead of trying every item on every item, a game where clicking blindly is not a real possibility.

Last Command Review

Last Command is a game by Crespirit and No Game Stuck Studio where you play as a program travelling around a computer getting into shmup battles with various opponents for the purpose of some mysterious goal. As of the time of writing I just finished the game and haven’t really touched the bonus content that came with my pro bono Ukranian copy.

Shmups are kind of a genre you can come into expecting what to get. You play as an airplane or flying superhero and weave around glowing spheres while trying to shoot down everything that’s making those glowing spheres. Last Command is a bit like that, but you’re also playing Snake while doing it and you’re in the middle of a giant adventure game that actually has a story to it.

Hero Shooter Balance

Hero shooters are games where you play as a wacky cast of miscreants doing objectives on a level to win against the enemy team. They’re characterized by having like 90000 different characters to choose from that all basically fall into like 4 different archetypes and have varying levels of usefulness in their specific archetype. Ever since Overwatch got made these games have popped up like mushrooms after a rainstorm and even in spite of the fact that I don’t play them I’m frankly fucking sick of it.

Nekoweb RSS Feed

Hey look, Nekoweb has a built-in RSS feed now. Man my posts are gonna start doing numbers.

Since Google suffocated them in their sleep, RSS feeds have always been a little more complicated than the name ‘Really Simple Syndication’ might imply. If you’re not already aware what RSS feeds are, they’re essentially just a different kind of HTML file. You define elements in it, such as a title, a time, an author, a description, and parsers read those elements and display them to you.

Death in Storytelling

Spoilers, people die. You also die at the end of your life. Broadly speaking across the entirety of human history we only know of one man who was capable of coming back from death, and even then it’s contested whether or not that such an event even happened. Yet, in the land of fiction, such restrictions do not apply and you’re free to whisk people to and fro the land of death like it’s absolutely nothing.

Metroidvania Analaysis

Depending on who you ask, metroidvanias are either the first or second most obnoxiously named genre in close competition with soulslikes. The term is completely meaningless to most and the best you can hope to understand about metroidvanias is that they are inspired by Metroid and Castlevania. What is a metroidvania really? Does it have to be limited to such a static and boring amount of inspirations? Let’s talk.

First off where exactly does this stupid name come from? Well, Nintendo made Metroid, and Metroid had an interesting gameplay style that was based around getting powerups and using those powerups to unlock new areas throughout a giant level. Was Nintendo the first to do this? No, and many people who despise Nintendo’s reputation for being “innovators” will mention this in response. However, Nintendo hit an important metric with Metroid, and that’s making people actually give a shit.

Bad Review Stagnation

Reviews can be a lot harder to make than you might think. Good reviews can be incredibly in-depth, spanning hundreds of pages to acknowledge all facets of the work, its inspirations, and its legacy. Bad reviews can be incredibly dismissive, revelling in their purely negative cynicism and often coming across like little more than hatred no matter how much the reviewer tries to argue otherwise. Bad reviews can also lead to fear on the creator’s part, which is probably why everything seems like it’s stagnated so much these days.

Snakes on a Plane Review

Snakes on a Plane is a film about Snakes on a Plane featuring Samuel L Jackson and a bunch of other people who aren’t cool enough to be known on a first name basis. In it, a bunch of Snakes on a Plane get really violent for some reason and ravage the entire crew and passengers. The film makes absolutely no sense at all, but what do you expect from watching a film called Snakes on a Plane?

Forgiveness for Failure

Saw some channel that talks about arcade games. Arcade game players, undoubtedly being the ones who’ve been shafted most by the trends of both high-budget blockbusters and rinky dink one man crafts, tend to have pretty big and loud opinions and those opinions basically boil down to “pls make gaem more like arcade”. This works better for some genres than others, but the notion is understandable especially in the face of games that get way too overbloated with meaningless shit that detract from the experience.

Roger Ebert Comments on Video Games

In a not terribly notable blog post but one that’s so hilariously worded that it still trolls people to this day, Roger Ebert proclaimed that videogames would not be art in our lifetimes, if ever. He also claimed that people trying to debate him on this had made him weary and that he was going to make no attempt to defend his opinion, which makes people even more salty when they read it. Years after his death, lets poke at his corpse and analyze what exactly he had to say about video games as a medium.