Slay the Spire is a game that is fairly perfect for me in all the wrong ways. Last year I had it on PS+ and found myself having difficulty disengaging from it whenever I played. Then I let my subscription lapse and let the game go.
Then it was on sale for the Switch, which makes the game even more convenient to play. Couldn’t help myself. But at least I was more mindful of my plight. And after a few days, I finally defeated the final boss.
I haven’t had the urge to go back to playing yet. This is a game I don’t have a mastery mindset about, thankfully. But there is a sequel coming out and a boardgame I could pick up…
It’s always concerning when a fairly new game, still sold at full price, is offered for free on the Epic Game Store. At that price, though, it’s still worth trying the game out.
It was only a matter of time until someone came after Vimm’s Lair. What’s surprising is that it didn’t result in the entire site’s closing. What isn’t surprising is that these games may not end up legally playable every again. Taking games off of sites like this is almost like erasing them. (And Nintendo’s current means for playing old games, when they are made available, is trash in that they require a subscription and their availability is up to the whim of Nintendo.
This is a funny way to not commit to creating a feature for a game. But since the game is about being a mercenary, this should make people ask more questions.
When members of artist collective turned game developer Studio ZA/UM thanked Marx and Engels in their 2019 Game Awards acceptance speech for the RPG triumph Disco Elysium, I felt like I was looking at the future, the ecstatic debut of my new favorite developer, but that isn’t how things panned out. Disco Elysium has been #1 on our yearly Top 100 games list four years in a row, but for much of that time, ZA/UM has been engulfed in an existential crisis.
Since 2019, A Disco Elysium sequel, a sci-fi RPG in a new setting, and a full-size Elysium spin-off game have been canceled or “paused,” while a heated personal and legal dispute between founding members hangs over ZA/UM’s every move. That last canceled game, described as “a spin-off about one of the most beloved characters in Disco Elysium” and spearheaded by one of the first game’s principle writers, wowed other teams at the studio in an internal demo at the end of last year. It could have been on our SSDs as early as 2025.
This project was cancelled in February, much to the shock of most ZA/UM employees, and nearly the entire team—including that Disco Elysium writer, Argo Tuulik— was laid off. I spoke with 12 current and former employees, including Tuulik and fellow X7 lead writer Dora Klindžić, to find out what went wrong. Studio ZA/UM itself did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Axelay is probably the best shmup on the SNES, and it’s surprisingly fair with its (hard) difficulty. This trademark renewal probably means nothing. I’m optimistic this might mean a rerelease – ideally a modernized rerelease with save state and rewind. A brand new game night be nice, too, but only if they can get the right team to develop it.
I’m one that picked this up on discount. I haven’t played a lot of racing games since Test Drive on PC in the 90s, and a little bit of Mario Kart over the years. I’m glad I picked this one up. I like driving around the map and checking out the sights, the selection of cars is massive and fun, and when I actually race, I usually end up making liberal use of the rewind button to fix my flubs. Laid back fun.
ETA: I think all of the cars from the original Test Drive are available in FH4, too! Graphics are improved somewhat, though.
Hades is currently $10 on Switch. For the amount of play you can get out of it, that’s a great value. I love a good roguelike in which I can challenge myself on each run and even in failure move some needle in the game some way. And I’m failing a lot.
I just wrapped up playing Hades a couple of weeks ago and loved it. Wonderful voice acting, the characters are still living up in my brain. If the gameplay starts to feel wearisome at all, I highly recommend turning on god mode, granting a little bit of damage reduction every time you die. It’s a great way of auto-scaling the difficulty to where the game continues to feel fun and not too grindy.
Among other things, I’ve been enjoying the 1.0 release of Blade and Sorcery. The new crystal hunt progression mode is a bit bare-bones but it’s fun - there’s some impressive verticality in some of the new levels. Also lightning magic seems pretty overpowered as it makes stunning everyone around you a breeze.
I’ve managed not to accidentally punch the wall any more after my first session with the new version, as well.
God Mode sounds like a good suggestion. I’m enjoying the gameplay enough right now to die and die again against the final boss, by you’re right that’s bound to come to an end sometime. I’m really enjoying the fact that games these days often have features that support players in actually completing them.
For sure, I played Control recently, which isn’t so rogue-like/lite, but has a bunch of features for that. One of them actually ended up being a necessity to quickly beat a boss the game kept crashing on. You never know how having more options might come in handy!
On that note, I don’t think that Hades ever crashed on me. I don’t think it got glitchy in any way for the whole playthrough. Very solid.
Some tips for anyone attempting to play Fallout:London. Doing this has made it at least a little more stable for me, it’s actually playable instead of crashing every 5 minutes. Still haven’t been able to get rid of all the crashes.
Set to Windowed / Borderless
Turn off Weapon Debris / Lens Flare / Motion Blur
Install Buffout 4 (do so manually. No need for the dependencies, they’re already there)
I took a break from playing Hades to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, since it just released on the Switch. My first impressions were that it was a Hades-lite. Later impressions are that it’s more of a “sloppy” Hades. The developers were very clear about taking inspiration from Hades. They also wanted it to be clear that this was a different game. Instead of choosing your prize before entering a room, you get a selection of rewards after clearing a room. Instead of several upgradeable weapons, you get four non-upgradeable turtles. Instead of customizable heat to add difficulty to playthroughs after defeating the final boss, you get random gates that spawn as you play that tweak your gaming experience.
The biggest difference and main reason I call the game “sloppy Hades” is that there’s overall less precision in the game. The original version of the game was designed for Apple Arcade. It was a touch-control game. Players can hold down the attack button and their turtle will automatically fight the closest enemy. That’s cool. However, manual dodging was not seen as a priority, so enemy attacks are either largely splash damage attacks or their projectiles are frequent and hard to see. You can hold the dodge button to dodge multiple times (so long as you have enough dodges), but it doesn’t feel as good as in Hades where attacks may be more direct and projectiles are bright and colorful so you know what you’re doing (and can get bonuses for dodging at the last minute). It feels like a different experience. Funny enough, Shredder feels the most like a proper Hades-like boss, making him the most fair and strangely the easiest…
And I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. As much as I complain, there’s a lot of good in the game. The game’s take on the Turtles is fun. (Don’t expect nearly as much recorded dialog as in Hades.) The elemental upgrades have a great variety that offers plenty of ways to customize how you run through, which also can play off of which Turtles you choose. And the game plays up to four players simultaneously, with no one knocked out of the game so long as at least one Turtles survives the room. So there’s plenty of replayability and couch co-op family action available.
I never played the original Dead Rising. This sounds like a welcome change, though. Games really need to move past adolescent ogling and objectification.
