Pixel doodle of an anthropomorphic vampire hedgehog writing on paper

Updates – RSS, Cool Links, Replies and More!

Posted on 1 October 20241 October 2024 by DarkOverord in Site Updates

It’s been a while since I did a general update about the website. It was last time just about the fact I was adding more header images to my site, and it was five years after the last time where I was sorting the tumblr export for my 365 blog and a couple other things. That’s the fun of a site that just lets you post whatever you want and you run it, you don’t have to care when you spin up over 1,000 posts containing art.

Artist rendition of me doing things on my site. Yes it counts if I was the artist

This is very much going to be a longish post as I have a lot of thoughts and also updates to mention, I’m not saying I was putting things off but Cohost’s shut down has spurred me to work on things.

Continue reading “Updates – RSS, Cool Links, Replies and More!” →

Eggbug, a squished purple toned squircle that has small doodle limb legs and wings, with a cute ":3" face

So Long, Cohost

Posted on 30 September 202430 September 2024 by DarkOverord in General

A delightful creature

Today’s the last day we can post to the site. We only know it’s going read only on the 1st of October “at some time in the morning UTC-4 (US Eastern Time)” so I’m going to assume that’s 2024-10-01 00:00 UTC (so 1 AM my time) for myself for the sake of actually putting in the final post, so I best do it. When they get a site export going I’ll probably yoink the posts I like that I made and cross post them here on my personal site, like I did with the Tumblr posts. Thankfully 2 years is a lot less stuff to sieve through unlike Tumblr so I will honestly have the time and energy to preserve more.

Cohost was a unique experience in today’s bland corporate washed internet. The fediverse spinning up with the ActivityPub protocol and various Mastodon instances (some literally with only the webmaster running it to act as their own personal island!) started to recapture a bit of what the internet was like before social media became very heavily corporate and clean. Of course this was also part of Cohost’s downfall, in the modern internet while running a social network and the sheer storage and bandwidth costs for that type of venture is genuinely not really something that is even remotely sustainable without capital I Investors to inject regular cash, there was no way Cohost+ or the Artist Ally ads would ever cover the full costs without massively downscaling what the site was and I think most people knew that, even if they didn’t want to admit it to themselves. I certainly realised that when the site effectively ran a roulette where it felt like I only had a 1 in 10 chance of being able to load the site let alone post but the final announcement still fucking sucked. (Amusingly, the staff’s “end of posting” post is completely inaccessible for me so this post may never even show up on my Cohost)

The site’s freedom for “CSS Crimes” as they got tagged, for unfettered nonsense like Tumblr used to be, while also keeping the more modern CW system in place like Mastodoon and similar sites was fantastic. It really recaptured that late 00s feel when I posted on Tumblr, when we’d just post our silly little posts on our silly little mini-blogs (Tumblr’s not really “micro” like Twitter was so I’ll use “mini”) and generally not really care about self censoring to stop The Algorithm or Shadow Bans. Should people have taken care over sensitive topics? Yeah absolutely, that’s what I used fucking “read more”s for when it wasn’t just a long ass post.

In some ways this did make the site daunting because I couldn’t do funny CSS things, but I just went “yeah but that isn’t why I used Tumblr” and used it how I liked. Perhaps a little too much in the early days as it would distract me a lot. But it also meant I had a good place to see the funny creatures I like in my computer screen without worrying that some stupid fucking keyword algorithm has decided “no actually, they’re bad for saying ‘KILL’ once”. Mastodon and Bluesky are also currently not algorithm’d like this either, despite the misconceptions people have about Bluesky because they dared to call user feeds (as in feeds users can create) “algorithms”.

The site I took part of, as you needed to build up your own experience in the end (whoa, imagine that! Like social media used to be), allowed me to actually follow people I care about or found interesting again! But in a longer format than you get on Mastodon, it was great seeing people being able to interject posts with images within the text instead of at the bottom or deliberately threading it.

But sadly, all good things come to an end, as saddening as it is, this would be the… 6th? time I’ve had to deal with this now. The contingency was that I just made a post containing all my links, but since 2018, well, this site exists so I just link my own links page. Plus hell, I’ve been DarkOverord for almost 20 years so so long as you literally copy my username, or remember there’s no L if typing manually, you get me.

Via private browsing, so theoretically should be pretty accurate for me.

So I’ll be around, and now I am working on an actual “links to other people” type page like we used to. But for now, I at least made fun web buttons. I’ll talk more about it in a later, long site update post but for now. (One update you may have noticed is that I have, perhaps foolishly, allowed comments now)

So long Cohost, thanks for the fun

I also made some little buttons that I’ll talk about more in the other site update post I’m doing. They’re simple and not what I’m gonna talk about mostly. A small gif and a static ver ‘cus we’re all collecting them now like pins.

Oops I Beat a Few Games but None of Them Felt like They Could Hold an Entire Post by Themselves

Posted on 24 July 2024 by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

Normally I try to do one of these posts after every game I beat but they all felt a little too short, or similar, to hold their own post so I basically stocked them???

Steam Header art for Terra Nil - Vita Nova update

Tera Nil (Vita Nova update)

Now I know what you’re thinking, “DO, didn’t you beat this at release?” and the answer is yes, but Vita Nova basically restructured the game’s goals as well as new maps and mechanics.

Because of that, I counted it as a “rebeat” and it was enjoyable to revisit a really relaxing game.

English Logo for the Switch version of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

I genuinely thought when I beat TTYD(remake) that I’d be able to go “Here’s a LOAD of thoughts” but honestly when I reflected, no, I don’t. “But DO, it’s a whole REMAKE surely you’ve got a lot to say?”, and sure, I do! But I don’t think it’d last more than two or three paragraphs.

Why is that? Because it’s faithful to the original, and not in a “Pokémon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl” faithful, but like this back when I originally beat it and put some thoughts down:

if you have the GCN TTYD, and an easy way to play it, you can skip the Switch remake. This isn’t because the remake is bad but more that, it’s *incredibly* faithful but not in a detracting way like Pokémon BDSP was.

The big change really is OST, some minor QoL changes and enhanced visuals along with two extra superbosses.

Other than that, it’s TTYD! Which is great ‘cus TTYD is great! But also, you might not wanna drop the full price on it, be it for reasons about Nintendo’s actions or just, again, it’s the same game.

This isn’t to say I regret it, not at all! But it’s value for me was as someone who doesn’t have easy access to the original, and didn’t really want to emulate it was greater than it would be for anyone who can easily set up their Gamecube/Wii and play it (or emulate it.)

That all said, you NEED to listen to the OST! The whole thing is arranged and even has all new tracks, and they even gave every chapter a unique arrangement of the original standard battle theme

Chapter 1 (The “original” arrange)

Chapter 4’s arrangement

You can feel the Origami King’s sound team going wild with the OST. They even added in extra arrangements of themes that weren’t there before, such as giving Lord Crump a unique theme in Chapter 5 instead of reusing his Chapter 2 theme

This trend of new arranges comes in with bosses, as even the final boss of the Pit of 100 Trials has its own unique arrange, and is perhaps my favourite track in the game, but I’ll leave that as a link in case you don’t want to spoil that for yourself.

Other points with the remake is the visuals are fantastic, they took the direction of Origami King’s art style, and then applied it to the TTYD areas. In the concept art they even have physical examples of them using origami and paper craft to visualise how to translate them to the game engine.

And finally, the game gave us a retranslation of the original story and hell yeah Trans Vivian

Logo and Steam Library header art for Balatro

Balatro

Balatro ended up in this list because it’s simple, though fun. Kinda like Vampire Survivors. There’s not much I can say about it. It’s single player poker, but cheating and is just incredibly addictive to keep playing that once I beat the 5 base coloured decks I had to go “I NEED TO PLAY SOMETHING ELSE”… and then kept playing it.

Anyway here’s my flush five of a kind, a totally legal move in poker.

Logo and Steam Library header art for Dorfromantik

Dorfromantik

“You can beat this game? It’s endless right?” and here’s how I categorised this as a “beat”

Unlocked all challenges and earned the first reward in each, I consider that a beat.

It could be argued that this is an endless game, but the rewards (and achievements) kind of make this something that is a tangible end point.

I’ve no other comments other than “It’s a cute little puzzler where you put down tiles to score points and try to earn more tiles, so you can keep building”. Cute and chill! Lovely when you need something relaxing.

Logo and Steam Library header art for Sonic Superstars

Sonic Superstars

I have a lot of thoughts about Sonic Superstars but at the same time I don’t think it’d hold a full post…

…

Okay, breathe in.

Sonic Superstars is a 2D Sonic game which was left to another team who weren’t the Mania team. The game wants to pump too many new mechanics in instead of smoothly, gating them behind a special stage that I personally feel is the worst in the entire franchise and then eventually requiring them in stages.

Sorry I got angry there let me calm down for a moment.

…

Sonic Superstars does not know what it wants to be, it masquerades as a Classic Sonic 2D game but plays like a modern 2D Sonic game similar to the Sonic Advance games and especially similar to Sonic 4 Episodes 1 & 2, as such it seems to struggle with its own identity and not really grasp what made those classic games fun, learning no lessons from Sonic Mania’s success and taking so many of Sonic 4’s failings. The level design has an over-reliance on poorly telegraphed obstacles and bottomless pits, so so many bottomless pits that it’s an issue even in the first zone, Bridge Hill. Jun Senoue has been forced to use his Sonic 4-esque synths and compositions which is one of his weakest musical qualities but trankfully that is partly tempered by Tee Lopes, Hidenori Shoji, Rintaro Soma, Takahiro Kai and TORIENA (who did my favourite track from Team Sonic Racing that I listened to so many times in 2019 that it dominated my “most played” for years, Bingo Party). Jun’s musical ability has moved on from the Mega Drive era, he should be allowed to make music he wants and not clearly forced to attempt to create music from that era.

But the biggest “sin” from Sonic 4 it took in? Every boss wants to be cinematic, every boss. Classic Sonic battles, hell even the Advance games, knew not to give extreme i-frames to a boss, to allow the player to go ham on the boss at great risk to themselves, be it losing rings or even losing a life. It’s simple risk/reward, the reward being beating a boss quicker, or feeling gratified that you could, and then scoring a greater time bonus. Instead Sonic Superstars will make you sit through the boss going through a lengthy wind-up, before maybe even putting the player at risk, before allowing the player the grace of hitting the boss once, very rarely twice. Before then playing the next wind-up animation and so on.

This is worst in the final boss where it is completely out of the player’s range in the background, leaving you to have to wait for it to bump a missile back at it from behind, but only one before it goes to the next attack animation where you can’t hit it. It then has the audacity after being defeated having a second stage that isn’t checkpointed meaning if you died you have to redo that first stage all over again. Why am I calling them stages? When both stages have individual phases where the attacks change etc. in them. But this is semantics, the fact of the matter is that almost half the time in this the boss is completely invulnerable and you have a time limit to deal with.

This design for bosses is at best boring, at worst frustrating, and always boring. 3D Sonic games have a similar “cinematic wind-up” problem too, but generally you’re doing something in that to build up to knocking the boss’ health down, such as say Egg Walker in Sonic Adventure where you need to damage the legs after it attacks to allow you to attack Eggman directly, all the while giving you reasons to dodge his attacks in the process. See also Biolizard, or Egg Hawk, or Frigate Orcan, etc. You don’t feel like as a player you’re being arbitrarily forced to wait because the game wants to fully run its animations first, generally. There are some serious examples of similar “just gotta wait a while” bosses in 3D Sonic such as Chaos 4 in Sonic Adventure or WYVERN in Sonic Frontiers.

The biggest reason I think I’m frustrated by all this is… Superstars has decent potential in there to shake up the classic formula and play itself, but it’s held back by so many factors that the reception means that SEGA absolutely won’t try again. Except the special stages, there’s no potential there forget them entirely.

At least I got to be a dragon

…Okay maybe Sonic Superstars could’ve been it’s own post.

And a vague mention, I didn’t beat it but I put a lot of time in to it so I have thoughts on it.

Logo and Steam Library header art for Loop Hero

Loop Hero

It starts out interesting, the premise is neat, before long it feels like you’re grinding for the sake of grinding while the game just scales itself tremendously faster than you as the player can. It just began to feel more like a job than a game, a pity.

Some Steam Next Fest 2024 demos!

Posted on 17 June 202417 June 2024 by DarkOverord in Games

This will be quick and sweet honestly, here’s some things in Next Fest I tried! I didn’t try loads but I only have so much time!

Dragon Hop

So how was Dragon Hop?

This seemed cute so I grabbed the demo! It even let me make my own dragon from preset customisation options. I think it’d be neat if “colour” let you pick it separately from markings. It has the problem WoW used to with furry races the face deciding the the entire colour scheme before the new customisation system

For some reason entering the game it lost my resolution settings and ended up in a weird windowed full screen (as I set it to windowed on the main menu). The controls are alright though it does feel a little clunky for the fact it wants to be a precision platformer, which is a pity. I feel off early on enough times to be completely turned off by continuing, but still, there’s a decent concept here and I hope the devs refine it.

Yeah I ain’t going up there

Also when I quit to main menu it reset to full screen again :V

Glyde The Dragon™ (Official Site)

So how was Glyde The Dragon?

Amusingly, this isn’t a Next Fest game, it just got the demo released recently and I thought it was. STILL PLAYED IT THOUGH!

So this game is clearly inspired by Spyro, there’s absolutely no doubt about that.

Though it certainly has a lot more serious story to the intro than the original Spyro trilogy ever did. That said the demo clearly takes place on an area after the first major boss because you get this lovely animated intro setting the plot… and then an opening gameplay cutscene that’s completely unrelated to it other than Glyde currently can’t fly, that’s fine though it is a demo and I understand they probably wanted to leave as much of the open plot off it so players can just try it out. It was a little jarring though haha

The game runs pretty smooth but it did weirdly hitch every time I did a new animation… I’ll chalk that up to in development demo issues, because otherwise it honestly played how it expected, you run around as a dragon and instead of a dragonfly you have a little wisp called “wing” who will collect items etc… with an hack-and-slash style system for fighting??? I wasn’t expecting to get in game ratings like I was playing Devil May Cry! You also have health instead of Spyro’s (or Crash Bandicoot’s tbh) hit system

Though audio balancing still needs tweaking, poor Voltraz was being drowned out by the waterfall behind him, Gylde wasn’t so absolutely just Voltraz’s lines being too quiet. It’s in development so I imagine they’re still tweaking that! But overall the sound design is pretty good, music flowing in to each area without sounding out of place. The demo area looked good and relied on stylisation over fidelity, which is always a good point in my book.

There’s also a decent variety on the dragons, which absolutely feel partially inspired by various dragons in media, though the names gave me a WoW vibe, but I’m not complaining. It’s nice to have these as dragons in the world though and not just Spyro’s “oop you rescued me! *disappears*”

Here’s to hoping they hit their goal ‘cus I barely touched the demo apparently (2%… despite playing for over an hour) and they’re still going on Kickstarter (almost there!)

I had played the game enough to at least unlock an elemental form for Glyde and suddenly that UI in the bottom left made a lot more sense. There’s absolutely a lot of potential here and I’m excited to see more of it once it hits funding (because I think it might!)

The size of the demo means I’ll absolutely be coming back to this

Stardust Demon

So how was Stardust Demon?

This was a short and sweet demo but it absolutely sold the game to me and I was already interested! resnijars have a visual style that honestly reminds me of Cave Story and Pixel’s work!

The music was also good to vibe to too! That all said maybe don’t have white enemies on white backgrounds?

Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus

So how was Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus?

I’m opening this simply: If you like Hollow Knight (or maybe Ori too?), wish-list this NOW. What I played of it reminded me of the meachanics seen in it including some emphasis on pogo-ing with your weapon and ricocheting projectiles, basically things I cannot get in the way I was taking screenshots BUT KNOW THEY WERE THERE.

The game is also gorgeous, the art team had done fantastic work and I had to not get too distracted looking at all the details in the scenery.

Also there’s this creature

HomeNaut

So how was HomeNaut?

This was a really short demo, it absolutely will be a fun little puzzle platformer! It takes VVVVVV’s simple mechanic based puzzling except instead of flips it’s rotating your direction of gravity 90 degrees from your current position

It is cute though!

Amber Isle

So how was Amber Isle?

When I watched Socket and Pocket of Hangry Hydra play through this on stream, I did compare it to Fantasy Life and Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. The zones and resource gathering specifically is what reminded me of Fantasy Life, with Recettear’s comparison just being well, Amber Isle also being a shop simulator. It does open up with a simultaneously limited but complicated character creator, but it’s okay ‘cus you’re gonna be cute!

You can barely see it here, but you can have heterochromia! So I made this dino pal based off my hedgehog but I was being dumb about the options and got the colours backwards OOPS

The demo of what I played (it sadly can’t save) was pretty cute but also fairly tutorial heavy. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a point that unlike some other games with similar mechanics, Amber Isle doesn’t just want to make sure you get the mechanics but also slowly feeds them to you so that you’re just swamped with mechanics immediately. But it does early on pose the hardest question… what to name your shop

So many people would take literal hours to decide this question. But overall it’s cute! I love the dino designs and I also enjoy the resource gathering, it’s absolutely got on my wishlist!

Prickle

So how was Prickle?

There’s not much I can say about this! It’s a cute puzzler about being a hedgehog who collects their hoglets either directly or more! Music was cute, and so are the visuals. Not much more to it! You can turn on colours in an accessibility menu which is nice!

Other than that it does add in mechanics on an in-game season basis. The demo covers all levels in summer and the first set in autumn that added a new mechanic. Neat!

Of course my biggest disappointment of Steam Next Fest is often that these demos disappear. I understand why, especially for Stardust Demon for example, as it’s a v0.0.2 build, but it’s always sad for the more complete demos to disappear.

More games are doing demos before release again which is nice, but still not a guarantee, so I’m glad Next Fest at least encourages it, for a short time.

Well, time to wait for most of these to come out in TBC!

The Planet Crafter

Posted on 4 June 2024 by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

Steam Page (Press Kit)

(The) Planet Crafter is an open world survival crafting game with base building elements while you work on terraforming a barren lifeless planet in to a lush world that supports complex life. So… elements of Factorio, Satisfactory and other games like them but in a more casual player friendly way. Yes I mean it that way on purpose, I’ve seen what insane things some of you do in Factorio and Satisfactory.

Don’t get me wrong I have been interested in those games but they’re… a lot! Possibly a little too much for me! Meanwhile Planet Crafter breaks down it’s end game point in to a simple thing for you to track, “Terraformation Index” which as it progresses unlocks blueprints to help you further that goal. This index is then broken down in to the global values for atmospheric oxygen, temperature, atmospheric pressure, and a few stages along the planet’s total biomass which all also have unique blueprints to unlock as well.

This builds the game’s loop:

Collect resources to construct items that raise those metrics
Those metrics unlock new items to construct
Find the new resources you may need and construct those new items
Gradually build machines to take some of that work load

Gradually building up your base while you do it.

Eventually your machines and goals become grander and grander as your require more energy, more space, and more resources. You even launch satellites in to space! Though I have a tip, they are tangible and don’t launch three at once, or do, it was funny and didn’t actually give any kind of penalty for doing so.

It’s an engaging loop honestly. Especially as I was suffering from concrud and just needed a relaxing game to push through it (and couldn’t pick up Paper Mario TTYD for the Switch ‘cus I didn’t want to give it to my relatives ‘cus I had to get it sent to theirs). That said I do have some criticisms.

There’s only one map. While you can choose your starting point it doesn’t really change much once you’ve played once ‘cus you have a rough idea of where things are. Now there are spoiler reasons having a single map works here, but those spoiler pieces are effectively set pieces and can be moved around where needed. It would be neat to have at least a few handful of maps (not even be procedurally generated!) so that there is more incentive beyond challenging yourself to replay the game, especially given you can get all (at time of writing) 55 achievements on a single play-through, I know I did!

If it is an issue with spoiler reasons, then maybe have those new maps unlock on clearing the game. However the game is recently past 1.0 and they’re still working on the game (I got it just after they added explosives in 1.0.3) so maybe this is a consideration Miju Games already have.

We’re also thinking about DLC, like new planets to explore, but that will take a little more time.
From news post: Thank you for an amazing 1.0 launch!

Oh, guess they are!

A few of the machines to automate resource collection actually come along later than you expect because of how slow some of the terraforming factors increase. As a repeat player now I’d know to focus more on that factor to get access to the ore extractor sooner, but on a first time play it’s very easy to fall in to the trap of focusing on oxygen and heat. That’s a rookie mistake, easy enough to not repeat the same mistake later.

However automation of getting those items from A to B comes a lot later in the game with some pretty intense requirements, so because I was used to just lugging myself around I hadn’t even bothered to check out drones worked until I went to get the achievement and realise I was shooting myself in the foot for the latter half of the game because there was no steering, other than an achievement, really to try using them. A lot of other resource gathering and base building games would have some rudimentary automation at this point, usually conveyor belts, so some kind of “dumb” but cheap way to move items before the attentive drones that can easily work out how to move items without a set path, that way you’re primed for the better automation later.

Speaking of automation, there’s no indication that ore extractors at certain points on the map can extract specialist items there until you have at least T3 level of mapping. The base extractor literally just says “Automatically extracts ores from the ground” and an improvement to that literally will make that obvious would be to add on to the end “can extract some rarer ores in specific locations”. It doesn’t tell you where it can do that but it would incentive the player to go “wow there’s a lot of sulfur here, I wonder if the ore extractor would pull more sulfur here?”. Even the final upgrade doesn’t make this clear, “Extracts any ore from the ground depending on the user’s selection.” is incorrect, because there are ores that you need to specifically place the extractor for it to collect those ores, which again could just be fixed by just tweaking the wording to “Extracts a specific ore from the local area depending on the user’s selection.” because it still retains that “okay there’s certain ores that need this item in those locations and not next door to my base” ‘cus trust me unless you’ve built your base somewhere weird, the extractor is not gonna be digging up uranium at your base.

For some reason, of the three biomass categories, insects takes a long time to build up and kind of stifles you TI for a little while, and the satellite to boost it’s rate is locked behind resources you probably don’t want to shoot off in to space. Plants go pretty quick, as do the non-insect animals (fish/amphibians/mammals), but insects are so slow in that regard that it meant it took a while for for me to get some of the animal related structures I needed. One could argue “rookie mistake” again but I don’t think it completely was as I think on a repeat play-through I’d be doing the same desperate search for an “uncommon larvae” to try to get my insect biomass going ‘cus common larvae were pointless at that moment in time as even with my plant output I’d reached insect stage significantly before I unlocked the Butterfly Dome that would’ve made common larvae worthwhile.

That all said, it is still a game I enjoyed a lot and typing all this out I’m still thinking of doing a second playthrough now I’m familiar with the game’s mechanics. But also now I’m well I have to put my time in to other things, like art, catching up on my Obsidian journal, and typing up that Confuzzled recap, y’know. Not base builder things.

It also gave me the itch to play No Man’s Sky again due to it’s similar base building style, except that would be a lot more of a play-through than a maximum of 48.4 hours that a rookie run of The Planet Crafter took :V

I did think my final base was pretty though. A mess, but pretty!

Quick Pre-CFz Game Clear Round-Up

Posted on 4 June 20244 June 2024 by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

So in-between Confuzzled badge coms I was doing quick game clears. I.e. games I could just put a short amount of time in to with each session, ‘cus that way I didn’t go completely nose to the grindstone when doing the comms!

Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart

SRB2 Wiki

Like I’ve known people were playing this forever ago, but with the release of Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers I figured I’d finally give it a try, and I found out all the tracks give medals for doing decently against ghost data so suddenly this became a game with a clearable state beyond just doing time trials. Not played online though but I’d be trounced.

I did after this give DrRRR a try but it’s just so many buttons my head did not like it, maybe I’ll come back to it later but for now I’m good.

Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns

Logo and key art for Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns featuring from left to right: Lance Bean (from Contra), Zi'Assunta Belpaese (from Vampire Survivors) and Bill Rizer (from Contra)
Steam Page

Ha ha, contra go brrrrrrrrr 🙂 Of course we all know the real reason to get this DLC

A screenshot of the announcement trailer of Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns, featuring the silhouette of Brad Fang in front of a full moon.

A screenshot of the announcement trailer of Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns, featuring Brad Fang pointing his gun arm somewhat towards the viewer with his tongue out like a dog when they're hanging their head out of a car.

Sonic Origins Plus

Posted on 2 May 20242 May 2024 by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

Steam Page (Home Page)

This will honestly be very brief. Why? Well it’s repackaged games from 1991 to 1994 (or 96 for the Game Gear games that are included in Plus), what can I add to that beyond “wow the same!”

DO, at least thirty minutes later: Ah. No, I have Thoughts™ regarding this, never mind it’s not brief at all!

Well mostly. For three the four base games included, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic CD and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, these are all repackaged and updated versions of the pre-existing Retro Engine releases that already existed, the difference being until now only Sonic CD’s Retro Engine version had been released on PC (Steam, 2011) whereas Sonic 1 and 2 had only had Retro Engine versions released on iOS and Android. This is all very neat! It’s great to have a chance to “officially” play them without having to get a hold of decomps etc. for PC :V

In addition we finally got a Retro Engine version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles! Finally an official widescreen port of the game that is all in the spiffy engine that also ran Sonic Mania! Neat!

SEGA also pulled out a bit of extra money to pay for an official animated intro to not only Origins, but also intros and outros to all four games with Tyson Hesse involved, directing the animations, alongside Ian Flynn writing them. A third neat!

There’s a little missions mode that gives things like “beat this without destroying any enemies” or “destroy all these airborne enemies with Knuckles’ glide” etc. which are great if you want a little extra challenge I suppose! There’s also a museum mode where you can spend coins you earn through the games and mission that let you unlock content and so on. Coins are also used to retry special stages in anniversary mode, which for Sonic 1 and Sonic CD is a godsend ‘cus I hate those special stages.

The “anniversary” modes as well (which is the widescreen versions of the games) all did away with lives as well, earning a life just gives a coin, or three coins for earning a continue. Personally I wish we had the option not to because there is still a satisfaction in knowing you didn’t completely game over, but I do accept it’s a relic of the past now.

The last thing the base game added was a back to back mode too, where you can play Sonic 1, CD, 2 and 3 & Knuckles back to back in one long sitting, effectively as a (game) chronological look through the series. That’s actually what I considered the “beat” category for Origins Plus, beating that mode in which I gained almost 200 coins in Sonic 3 & Knuckles ‘cus I was obsessed with it as a kid and played it all the time.

And finally Origins Plus added in playable Amy as well as finally allowing Knuckles to be playable in Sonic CD. Not something I was clamouring for but it was a weird omission that Knuckles wasn’t at least in SCD in the base Origins, buuuuuut it was basically a port of SCD2011 so *shrug*

Of course what wasn’t neat that in the process of this SEGA…

Pulled down the 2011 Steam release of Sonic CD
Pulled down Sonic 1, Sonic 2 as well as Sonic 3 & Knuckles from SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics
Chose to charge honestly a somewhat galling $40USD/£35GBP at launch for this despite the fact that we are talking games that until they pulled them off the Classics collection where only a couple quid most. I appreciate that work had gone in to the game to bring it up to speed and the animations, but it was a very hard sell for me to pay for that price at launch (and why I only picked it up recently).
Chose to have more gall to add in a deluxe version which… barely added anything but bumped the price another 5{INSERT CURRENCY}. (Honestly there was a whole pricing TABLE at the time which made it even wilder)
May have slightly meddled with the game after the 3rd party contracted Headcannon that perhaps caused bugs with the game alongside performance issues.
Either didn’t attempt to, couldn’t afford to, or decided it was too expensive, to attempt to reliecnse the music for Carnival Night Zone, Icecap Zone and Launch Base Zone. Which I kind of get, two of them of them are associated with Michael Jackson’s music as he was supposedly brought on for Sonic 3’s music (it’s one of those open secrets at this point, it’s a whole thing I’m not getting in to it) and IceCap Zone turned to be Brad Buxer choosing to use an unreleased track from his band The Jetzons, Hard Times.

Hard Times is honestly a pretty good song btw, I don’t blame Brad wanting to reuse what was at the time a melody that might’ve otherwise not had the public hear it outside of a silly little videogame with a blue hedgehog. I suspect given Brad still being alive and the record label even acknowledging that it was used for Icecap Zone, SEGA probably could’ve got somewhere and reused the track without too much of a cost.But I do understand that the other two tracks likely got immediately shut down by SEGA’s legal team, ‘cus I doubt SEGA would ever want to cough up what MJ’s estate would’ve wanted, if they’d even allow it
Made strange choices regarding Sonic 3 & Knuckles’ audio compared to how S1, SCD and S2’s audio was handled. For some reason, with the exception of the new Super Sonic track that Jun Senoue busted out, all of the music is a lot lower in quality compared to Sonic 1 and 2 which sound accurate to their other releases. Honestly, compare these two side by side

(Gameplay of Angel Island in Sonic Origins)
The typically accepted game rip of Angel Island Act 1

It’s weird! All other releases of S3&K that BGM audio has been fine! It feels unfair putting a gameplay vid next to a BGM rip but also we have that rip for a reason, that’s what the Mega Drive was putting out! It’s what emulators matched (including SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics), it’s also what Sonic Mega Collection sounded like too (because it’s emulating too :V)!

But not Origins, nope! I think, and someone who knows more than me can possibly confirm or disprove it, but they all appear to be using the audio out of the November 3rd, 1993 prototype of Sonic the Hedgehog 3. With the quality they put out, though with some tweaks to the prototype tracks that replaced IceCap etc.

It really stands out when you have this crisp, fairly accurate audio from Sonic 1 and 2, and then it feels like you’re listening to Sonic 3 & Knuckles through a speaker with a bit of muffling in the way that detracts from the experience. I was okay with The Legal Hell being ignored to push for the original compositions that got scrapped, but the way in which it was all done is… shite honestly!

This is fine on the PC version mind, modders were on the case pretty quickly regarding audio and you have so many choices to pick from that you can just shove in the original BGMs or a myriad of other choices to fix the lower quality. Kind of shit if you’re playing on a console version ‘cus SEGA ain’t fixing it!
We then added a Sonic Origins Plus DLC right when the base game was entering the “well it’s worth it in sales” range, which meant no it was better to hold off which retained the increased price. But at lease this was actually adding things to the game.
Plus DLC also added all the Game Gear games that are included in Sonic Adventure DX??? Cheaper to grab ’em there but they do actually allow for save states if you need them (and maybe Sonic 2 8-bit is worth it to do so if you find it too hard)

Speaking of the Game Gear games, I took the opportunity to clear out the Game Gear Sonic 2, Sonic Chaos and Sonic Triple Trouble finally, just to finally say I’ve beat ’em. I’m not reviewing them, they’re emulated games from 30 years ago with no changes unlike the Origins of the Mega Drive games :V

All in all Origins Plus isn’t a bad way to bundle up the original quadrilogy and have a trip down memory lane, and until the 6th of May 2024 it’s currently 50% off on Steam if you finally want to grab it. But also it is games you can already find ways to play already, this just gives the Retro Engine experience an accessible point for console and PC players.

PictoQuest: The Cursed Grids

Posted on 25 April 202425 April 2024 by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

Steam Page

I picked up PictoQuest a while ago, I forget the specific reason but I think it was on a ProtonJon stream? Eitherway I picked it up in 2020 and then unceremoniously dropped it and I’m not sure if it was because I got bored, got frustrated or because something else grabbed my attention later.

It’s not a bad game though, it’s exactly what it claims to be, a nonogram puzzle game (or Picross if that’s the name you recognise more but that’s a licenced name for video games as it’s owned by Nintendo) with the twist of adding a vaguely RPG mechanic to it with “Monster Grids”, where enemies attack you as you solve the puzzle on a timer (or if you make mistakes) but you can slow down the attacks and ultimately defeat the enemies by clearing lines until you complete the puzzle. There’s also items you can buy via gold you earn for beating the Monster Grids as well as the grids with treasure chests etc.

My issue with PictoQuest is that I guess I’m slower than the devs intended and I always felt like I was being rushed along on the larger puzzles. I did it mind, I 100% cleared the world map! But it did leave a bit of a bad taste to me lol. Not the fault of the game though, PictoQuest is doing exactly what it set out to be in the end!

It’s worth it if you like Nonograms but if you like doing them at a leisurely pace, it might not be for you.

Sunshine Heavy Industries

Posted on 23 April 2024 by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

Steam Page (Home Page)

This honestly won’t be very long as it’s a short game but a delight all the way though. You can see how the humour and ideas in this moved on to Cobalt Core, which is very cute. Plus now I know that Dracula is non-fiction, and he requires vast chambers for, liquid! Me too tbh.

It’s a great game if you want to kill time and build silly, I’M SORRY I mean perfect ships that make complete sense!

Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove

Posted on 22 April 202423 April 2024 by DarkOverord in Games, Reviews

Steam Page (Home Page)

Okay technically I did Shovel Knight’s campaign, “Shovel of Hope” before the other campaigns were added so really this is about Plague of Shadows, Specter of Torment and King of Cards! Not Showdown though as I’m not too interested in that currently.

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