Saturday!
You try to be good. You try to say stuff like “I already have fifty games that I never play.” You mostly manage but then Steam has a sale of some kind.
Mostly during the year, if you’re lucky, you see the games that you want stay at the price they’re normally at with the occasional bump to 10% off (if you’re lucky, 25%). But, man, during that sale, you see stuff like 50%, 66%, 75%, 80%… sometimes 90%.
And it’s under those circumstances that you find yourself with little gems like Genius Greedy Mouse on your desktop.
This is a puzzle game. You have a mouse in a maze and it’s your job to eat a certain number of pieces of cheese to leave the map and get a gold star. If you eat a certain number of additional cheese on top of the original number, you’ll get fat and if you leave the map with a fat mouse, you’ll get two gold stars.
Simple and straightforward, right? Well, they’ve got a number of little touches that mix it up and make it interesting. There are spaces that contain stuff like mushrooms that will kill you if you try to pass through… but there’s also gravity dynamic for some of the things in the maze. If you remove the foundation of what they’re sitting on, they will fall down and squash such things as mushrooms. Other things in the maze (jellyfish) will float up if you remove the ceiling above them. Yet other things (bullets) will travel to the right or left if you remove the walls preventing them from flying free. There are locks and keys, railways that demand you travel a particular path, tunnels that take you from the very bottom of the map to the very top, and all sorts of puzzle dynamics that I’m sure you’re already familiar with.
It’s the aesthetic that will make you smile, though. The animation is Claymation. A Claymation mouse running around a Claymation map to eat Claymation cheese while setting up Claymation chain reactions is charming as heck. The music is a somewhat lo-fi guy playing an acoustic guitar while whistling a happy tune.
The game is charming as heck. If you like puzzle games at all, put this on your wishlist. You might forget about it for a while, sure. But the Winter Sale is right around the corner…
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
Went and saw The Big Sick with my wife; we both agreed it was a nice first effort by the couple as writers but would have benefited greatly from a non-involved editor (or a better editor if they did have one).
Its not much of a RomCom as the Rom falls quite flat (even bracketing the whole coma thing) in that the wife and I thought the Pakistani ladies rather lovely and (plausibly) more interesting than his eventual wife – even in the tiny amounts of time we spent with them. I don’t think that was supposed to happen. See above about editors.
Structurally they didn’t stick the landing… boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girlfriend in a coma*, girl emphasizes he lost her, boy loses girl again, girl reminds boy he lost her, girl maybe changes her mind, Boy gets girl. The end.
That might have been how it happened in real life… but it wasn’t a good use of screen time. And, in the end, there’s still no real reason why they should get together – or one that we could see… but they do, so we just take their word for it.
* Scratching that sentence off the bucket list, it took me 20-years but I used it in a real sentence without ironyReport
Kudos for your non ironic use of “girlfriend in a coma.”Report
And, in the end, there’s still no real reason why they should get together – or one that we could see… but they do, so we just take their word for it.
How many real-life relationships does this describe, though?Report
In a metaphysical “why does anyone fall in love at all anyway” sort of way, sure; in the face of deep cultural, personal, and repeated emotional rejection… I guess I’m looking for a little help.
The coma is doing both too much and too little as a narrative crutch; that’s what I mean by needing editorial help. It’s hard to write a good RomCom; it’s *excessively* hard to write a RomCom that subverts (or surpasses, if you prefer) the rules of RomComery. They shot for the latter and missed the mark on both leaving us with a sense of, meh… mazel tov?Report
Futurama did a better girlfriend in a coma story. No snark; it was the first step in showing how much Fry really cares for Leela.Report
March,
Try “Heartbreaker” — great B plotReport
in the face of deep cultural, personal, and repeated emotional rejection
Maslow is a harsh taskmaster.Report
and a terrible companion.
heh, edited out “mate” because I was sloppy.Report
Pimping the game that is my thing – Shadow Warrior 2013 reboot plus all DLC is $4.99 this weekend on Humble. I still think it’s a better game than the Doom reboot, and better than its own sequel…
Still playing an occasional SW2 bounty mission with Oldest Surviving Friend, but we’re starting to work more on Don’t Starve Together. We’re just about at the transition point where instead of dying to stupid things while being hunter-gatherers we can die of stupid things while being primitive farmers.
Progressing in Endless Space 2, but two games in a row my mid-game progress has had a wrench thrown in when my aggressively pro-immigrant and minor-integrationist strategies have led to the newly enfranchised throwing out my government.
Considering re-installing the last playable[*] (gridiron) football game that allowed you to design your own plays – in honor of the 20th anniversary of its release – Front Page Sports Football ’97… A lot of strategic developments since then are probably not compatible with the AI, and I suspect that despite the existence of the Run-n-Shoot, bunch formation with 11 personnel would probably be an I-WIN button. And read-option and even RPO would be right out. And from what I remember of the play designer, actually making a playbook would be more hours of frustration than hours of nostalgia.
[*] There was a FPSF ’98, with better underlying modeling, but they scrapped the functional UI for a console-inspired piece of dreck in which you can’t get any summary views of important things like, oh, your roster, or potential trades – everything requires drilling down, which is just too many mouse clicks for the 2000s, much less the 2010s.Report
A-pparently, I’m not allowed to reference the game I’m playing, because of Dr. Who.
… yes, really.
SO, we’ll just say it’s the latest game from the folks who developed Chthulu saves the world.
(I know at least one other person around here’s played that one).Report
I finally finished Mankind Divided (putting Xcom2 next on my list, unless Skyrim, Fallout 4, or Saints Row 4 tickles my “want to play again” fancy).
It was an overall solid game. Got rid of the annoying boss fights mechanics from the previous game — you had one “boss” fight per se, which actually could be entirely avoided. I didn’t because To avoid the fight requires utilizing a lethal option, and I was going pacifist, but even then it was surprisingly easy to handle.
I think my biggest irritations were the third night “curfew” (turned getting around the hub city a lot more annoying) and sudden timed missions at the end coupled with the first DLC being clearly “A single quest we didn’t finish in time for the game and/or removed to make this DLC”. The second and third DLC’s were much more meaty.Report
Xcom2 is downright amazing. Like “This would have been worth $60 if I pre-ordered it” amazing.
I still haven’t played Mankind Divided… I want to. I just was hurt so very badly by the boss fights in the other one.Report
The prologue mission was…jarring. You’re all Adam Jenson, with every aug working, and running around for some group of people you don’t know for reasons you don’t understand, except “terrorism” and you’re fighting it.
Once past that, your augs get reset (because of course, right?) so you can spec how you want (you don’t get them all, because then why would you hunt down Praxis kits and what would be the point of leveling?).
Then crap gets explained and the game settles down.
And it’s solid. Prague feels much larger and more open than Detroit, there’s the usual wealth of tiny stories hidden everywhere, and a lot to explore. The new augs are interesting (did you know Typhoon could be non-lethal?) — remote hacking is great, but might make ninja play too easy…
About the only tips I could give you: I waited WAY too long to play with the TESLA system, take-downs only work on guys in EXO suits if you zap them with the stun gun FIRST, and the penalty for overclocking is peanuts — and when you fix the overclocking problem, the “locked out” augs (assuming you did that) are unlocked again.Report
Cool, I’m sold. I’ll put that back on the top of the pile.Report
I also endorse this game. My only real bitch is the first dlc I played lasted like 9 hours, was rather linear, and had little “open world” aspect. I’ve not yet played the second….will do than when I’m done with fallout 4. Hopefully it’s a bit longer.
Regardless, it’s still a bargain given my play style (see and do everything)Report
The Breach DLC (I forget the name, but you’re doing a favor for a guy from Human Revolution, breaking into the Paliside Blades server) was lengthy and mostly opened up Breach Mode for play. It was pretty fun.
A Criminal Past I haven’t finished, because I’m trying to stack pacifist and Don’t Do Drugs achievements which is…..difficult due to my playstyle and the fact that whomever designed that DLC loved screwing with ninja players.
(Although to be honest — by far the most effective weapons in the game are the stun gun and the tranq rifle.)Report
(Although to be honest — by far the most effective weapons in the game are the stun gun and the tranq rifle.)
Yep. I think I carry both those, an assault rifle and some grenades. I usually go stealth / thief mode. I’m looking forward to getting back to it. But then I’ll have to find something else to play…not sure what.Report
Well, if you want fully ridiculous Saint’s Row IV was a blast. It started out like GTA, but then I stopped driving cars and using guns in favor of flying around like Superman and using a dub-step gun, which is exactly what it sounds like.
I picked it up, the full Borderland’s 2 collection, and the remastered Skryim recently for PS4. I’ve also got Xcom2 and I really should get back to ME: Andromeda some day.
I hear Civ 6 is pretty good, but I’m still trolling along on 5.Report
Morat20,
oi, that reminds me of Worms3D, and the person who was expert at using the dildo as a weapon.
… was that not supposed to be what we were thinking about with a dubstep gun?Report