Game-related ramblings.

Month: September 2020

Scratching That Itch: Anime RPG Tile Pack – Vol.1 School [PIXEL OF LIFE]

This is the twenty-fourth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1704 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,175,279.81 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Readers, it took twenty-four tries for the random number generators to select an entry in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality that is not actually a game. It’s Anime RPG Tile Pack – Vol.1 School [PIXEL OF LIFE], by rbatistadelima AKA Raphael Batista de Lima. Its tagline in the bundle reads:

modern / minimalist

That’s right, we’re about to get into some minimalist modern art here, folks.

Scratching That Itch: Space Mayhem

This is the twenty-third entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1704 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,175,279.81 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Interesting. This next random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is — like the last one — about space. It’s Space Mayhem, by Chronic Vagrant. And, also like the last selection, it has no tagline in the bundle. I guess when you’re caught in the midst of some space mayhem, a few things slip through the cracks.

Scratching That Itch: SpaceHole2018

This is the twenty-second entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1704 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,175,279.81 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our next random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is SpaceHole2018, by Zimmbous, AKA Sam Atlas. It does not have any tagline in the bundle at all. I presume this is because the tagline was sucked into a space hole.

Back Into The Tunnels Of Metro: Last Light

You may wish to read my post about Metro 2033 first. As always, you may click om images to view larger versions.

Long time readers may recall that I quite liked Metro 2033. The sequel, Metro: Last Light, released back in 2013, beating my post about the original game by a few months. But, since my PC at the time was already struggling with Metro 2033 in places, I decided to hold off on playing the newer game until I’d upgraded. Then I spent literal years putting off that upgrade. Now I’ve finally built a new PC, so I can at long last play Metro: Last Light after its sequel, the critically lauded Metro Exodus, has already been available for a year and a half. Maybe I’ll manage to play that one this decade. For now, I was happy to return to the highly evocative post-apolcalyptic Moscow Metro, to see if I could keep humanity alive a little longer. I’ve tried to keep this post as spoiler-free as possible, but there are inevitably some very light spoilers for the events of Metro 2033 below.

I should point out that in 2014 remastered versions of both Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light appeared, with “Redux” appended to their names. These were developed mainly for the new (at the time) Playstation 4 and Xbox One consoles, but they appeared for PC as well. Since the improvements for Last Light were more minor in comparison to Metro 2033, I decided to just play my copy of the original release rather than shell out for the upgrade.

Scratching That Itch: Blitz Breaker

This is the twenty-first entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1704 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,175,279.81 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

The next random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality was supposed to be Blitz Breaker, by Boncho Games, with a tagline in the bundle that reads:

A fast paced platformer without…running?

But I guess that tagline is literal, because I can’t get the game to run! I get the error pictured above. Some internet searching suggests that a very small number of players experienced a similar (but not identical) issue, but I couldn’t find a solution anywhere, and my attempts to contact the developer were unsuccessful. It’s a shame, since the game actually sounds really cool: it’s a riff on the super-hard platformer genre, but the player character must navigate without traditional movement. They can only jump straight up, and perform an airborne dash in one of the four cardinal directions. Bumping into a non-deadly obstacle during a dash bounces the character back slightly and recharges the dash, allowing for sequences of dashes through dangerous levels. It sounds really clever, most players seem to like it a lot, and it has some impressively good chiptune music by Fat Bard. I’d love to give it a try, but I don’t know what else to try to get it to start. If anyone has any suggestions, I’ll happily try them and return to Blitz Breaker later. For now, however, I must move on, because there sure are a lot of other games left in this bundle.

So that’s a regretful 21 down, and 1683 1720 left to go.

Keeping Score: Gonner

This is Keeping Score, a series about games and their soundtracks. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

I think I got Gonner in a bundle at some point, since it came with its digital soundtrack. I’d read good things about it as a sort of quick-play action game, so I was happy to nab it along with some other games. More recently, Gonner appeared in the Humble Fight for Racial Justice Bundle, so if you picked that up you may find you have a copy yourself. Developers Art in Heart announced a sequel a few months ago, predictably titled Gonner 2, so there’s more visually striking action platforming coming soon. A good time, then, to give the original a spin.

Scratching That Itch: Don’t Move

This is the twentieth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1704 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,175,279.81 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. This particular entry in the Scratching That Itch series is also an honorary member of the Keeping Score series, which discusses games and their soundtracks. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our next random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is Don’t Move, by STVR. Included in the download is the Extended Original Soundtrack, also composed by STVR, which means this post is also an honorary Keeping Score post! Don’t Move’s tagline in the bundle reads:

Ninjas, failure, and player investment manipulation.

I like that Don’t Move is up front about the player investment manipulation, and isn’t trying to pretend it has the player’s best interests at heart. It’s refreshingly honest. It makes me want to try out the game… hey, wait a minute!

Scratching That Itch: Zenodyne R

This is the nineteenth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1704 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,175,279.81 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

The magic of random number generation has provided another selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. It’s Zenodyne R, by Team Grybanser Fox (although it’s listed under the name of Team Grybanser Fox’s founder, Jack Darx). Its tagline in the bundle reads:

90s 16-bit YM2612 Shooter Strikes Back!

Ah yes, of course, YM2612. I’m sure everyone is familiar with this famous 90s… thing, providing some of the finest Y and M of that venerable decade. And we all know that it was, uh, much better than YM2611, which leaned too hard on the Y, and didn’t provide nearly enough M. Yes. Those are all definitely true facts that I didn’t just make up.

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