good old sales

The only thing that jumps out at me in the current promotion is the Journeyman Project which I've heard good things about but never looked into. However, backlog. Enh.

gloombuckets

You can tell I'm moody because I've been playing Spirit Tracks again. "Life already sucks, so shitty game can't make it worse!"

(No, nothing's actually wrong, just general bleh.)

Games I want to play but do not currently have the time to write

Space Hulk Explorer Roguelike: You play a salvager who finds randomly-generated huge spaceships floating around, and you go through them looking for loot. Different skills for different classes (including different abilities to identify the weird stuff you turn up) and your score in the end is based on the value of what you bring back to your shuttle and how long you were gone. If you live.

All-Girl Dungeon Crawl: A yuri game not needing to waste much time with things like plot and explanation! You're an all-girl gang of dungeon divers, you go kill things and take their stuff,when you set up camp to rest you go into dialog mode and then you can argue over loot-splitting and romance people.

pride and prejudice and whips and chains

I'm especially amused because I was just in the middle of trying to start a conversation about adaptations of public domain works for romantic purposes, and after posting that I then ran into Christine's tweets about this other thing. :)

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

Been playing this a little bit on PC (cursing the thoroughly obnoxious Games For Windows requirement every time; having to launch steam was bad enough, having to log into both is REALLY ANNOYING) and have gotten far enough to splash into some underwater sections.

Which may have been a bad idea on the dev's part, as it suddenly makes the comparison to Aquaria inevitable in my mind. They are, after all, both fun cool stylish 'metroidvania' things where you are flying/swimming around instead of walking and jumping. On the other hand, neat as this thing looks, drawing the comparison makes it jump out to me that Aquaria was better in most respects.

If the title screen is accurate about how much of the game I've covered, this thing can't be very long. And while it's cool to fly around in, it's sort of lacking in even a pretense of a plot. I mean sure there was a tiny bit of setup at the beginning but it pretty much vanished immediately, along with all my fellow ships.

It also seems a good bit easier than Aquaria, at least when you're not doing something insanely stupid by trying to use the wrong tool for a section. This isn't really a bad thing, as you may recall me sulking that Aquaria's difficulty seemed at odds with its potential joy of exploration, but... in a way it's the inverse. Aquaria was a pretty place where I wanted to spend more time just chillin'. This place LOOKS so dark and scary that it's surprising to me that it hasn't, so far, presented much of a challenge.

signals

Almost anyone reading this who cares probably already knows, but the Carpe Fulgur pack is on 75% off deal today on Steam.

I HATE YOU

So after a long delay I tried to pick up Spirit Tracks again while waiting for something to download. I had time to kill. I could put up with some really pointless filler. Right?

... that was before the next quest it threw at me is something that if you take even a single point of damage you have to start over from the beginning and each attempt takes about half an hour. Half an hour of staring mindlessly at the screen waiting to reach your destination, with one or two attacks to dodge sprinkled somewhere in there.

Back into the SHIT GAME pile you go, then.