The [NEW] GRcade Gaming Alphabet 2024 - NEW ALPHABET NOW LAUNCHED PG. 21

Some thoughts on games I've played so far:

Football Manager 24 Mobile
I've tried and failed to get into football management games before - I usually want to play as Arsenal and as we're usually near the top of the pyramid that denies me a lot of the fun that people say is to be had in these games (e.g. taking a non-league team to European glory). I tried CM 00/01 a free years ago and it didn't click with me. However this was free with my Netflix so I thought I'd try it. It's grabbed me more than I thought it would! I have found myself more invested in Venezia's fortunes then I thought I would. Unfortunately I've Wayne Rooneyed hard and we're currently bottom when we were hoping for promotion. I did knock a Serie A team out of the Italian Cup though! The reasons for this are many. Firstly I am bad at football management and tactics. Secondly my centre halves are bad. Like, really bad. Thirdly, I struggle to navigate the stats in the mobile version and this makes pretty much everything difficult. I have an unplayed copy of FM22 (thanks Epic!) which I might double up on later in the year to see if I will have better luck with a mouse and a big screen.

Knittins
I like match-3 games, so much so that I actually got into the Champions League section of Toon Blast a few years ago. I stuck with Toon Blast because it actually had a fair progression system, didn't force you into buying boosters to finish, and actually gave you boosters fairly easily. It was a fun game to play, whereas Candy Crush always seemed to put the invisible paywalls up. I haven't sensed much of the grift with Knittins yet, possibly because I am again using Netflix so may have a premium version. I also have played about fifty levels of Knittins as opposed to around five thousand Toon Blast stages so it's not an exhaustive comparison. But basically it's Candy Crush for people who shop at Hobbycraft. The main gimmick is you pick a cat to be your character. When you complete levels you earn balls of wool and every ten levels or so you get to knit your cat a woolly hat or scarf. Seriously. It's going to be awkward when someone catches me playing this...

I Commissioned Some Bees
I really love this! I just spend a few minutes a day actively looking at a beautifully detailed painting while listening to calming music. But there's definitely a challenge there too when you're down to your last 2-3 bees. I'm sad there are so few levels of this to be perfectly honest - I almost don't want to finish it! The only downside of this is that my job is...er...looking really closely at images to detect the presence of very small lesions, so this is basically work

I want to talk about Garten of Banban but I just don't have the energy right now. Safe to say it's bad. Really bad.

OrangeRKN wrote:

No Christmas name wrote:

OrangeRKN wrote:> Site23 - Outer Wilds

A few hours in and I think my thoughts on it so far would really frustrate you but I'm committed to giving it another few hours so we'll see!

I can't wait to find out you've been mistakenly playing The Outer Worlds

A brief update on this:

I think I'm slowly settling on not really liking it very much.

I have at times really enjoyed the space exploration. The solar system has some really interesting places in it and the process of flying around, landing on things, and checking them out has been a lot of fun. I also like the alien lore and the various little puzzles you do to turn on bits of technology, traverse weird caves, or find shortcuts. I think it's a pretty game, and it's not afraid to get weird, which is great.

That's a big chunk of the game that I think is cool, so I do understand its appeal.

But actually making progress is incredibly frustrating. For example, I've just been trying to explore the hollow planet with the black hole inside it, and I keep having to restart the loop because I slip off and fall down. It's really annoying! It's hard to even remember where you were when you get there the next time! (I do know about the white hole station but because it sends you to the middle of nowhere it's no faster than killing yourself and starting a new loop!)

I'm sure that's totally a skill issue on my part, but I'm just not invested enough to 'get good'. If a game is making me do five minute boss runs it had better be by FromSoft, you know?

Also - and I could easily look past this if the game were shorter and a bit less punishing - I don't really feel any inclination at all to follow the 'Outer Wilds Ventures' side of the story. Little lobotomised weirdos sitting around campfires waiting to deliver their three lines of cutsey dialogue -- it's just too twee for me.

I really wanted to like it so it's a shame. I actually think a quicksave + quickload mod could save (ha) the experience for me. But it doesn't exist, ho hum!

site23 wrote:I think I'm slowly settling on not really liking [Outer Wilds] very much.

I have at times really enjoyed the space exploration. The solar system has some really interesting places in it and the process of flying around, landing on things, and checking them out has been a lot of fun. I also like the alien lore and the various little puzzles you do to turn on bits of technology, traverse weird caves, or find shortcuts. I think it's a pretty game, and it's not afraid to get weird, which is great.

That's a big chunk of the game that I think is cool, so I do understand its appeal.

But actually making progress is incredibly frustrating. For example, I've just been trying to explore the hollow planet with the black hole inside it, and I keep having to restart the loop because I slip off and fall down. It's really annoying! It's hard to even remember where you were when you get there the next time! (I do know about the white hole station but because it sends you to the middle of nowhere it's no faster than killing yourself and starting a new loop!)

I'm sure that's totally a skill issue on my part, but I'm just not invested enough to 'get good'. If a game is making me do five minute boss runs it had better be by FromSoft, you know?

Also - and I could easily look past this if the game were shorter and a bit less punishing - I don't really feel any inclination at all to follow the 'Outer Wilds Ventures' side of the story. Little lobotomised weirdos sitting around campfires waiting to deliver their three lines of cutsey dialogue -- it's just too twee for me.

I really wanted to like it so it's a shame. I actually think a quicksave + quickload mod could save (ha) the experience for me. But it doesn't exist, ho hum!

Obviously you're wrong but this is all fair enough. I don't think the game is meant to be difficult in an execution sense or require many repeated runs at the same objective, so it's a shame you're finding that. I too would have found that annoying (if I weren't a pro gamer etc.). When things go wrong I found that to usually be part of the discovery, for example I probably only fell into the black hole a couple of times accidentally, the rest was then deliberate. If it helps at all (I suspect not unfortunately as you've already given it a good go) I think that's one of if not the riskiest area to explore, and once you know your way around it becomes significantly less dangerous (for example once you find a shortcut from the surface into the city area, you don't have to repeat the more dangerous platforming journey to get there).

As for the Outer Wilds Ventures, I found that "questline" much less involved than the other (interconnected) questlines and it wasn't the driving force behind my play for the most part.

If you give me your personal OrangeRKN guarantee that I don't need to do anything as fiddly as the upside down platforming ever again now that I know the ice-water shortcut then I'll give it one last chance. Maybe the black hole planet was just a super unfortunate first planet to really commit to exploring after my initial look around the solar system. I do want to like it and it's, like, almost there!

I genuinely do think that specifically is the fiddliest bit of execution in the game (unless you count a couple of trophies/achievements which I never got, but you can just ignore those).

I know a lot of people find piloting the ship quite fiddly too but I found the autopilot and automatching speed made it much more manageable.

I completely failed to keep this updated last year, going to make more of an effort to conquer the alphabet in 2024!

Garten of Banban 2
My son watches a load of YouTube streamers on the internet - only the kid friendly ones (Cookie Swirl C, Kawaii Kunicorn, Cherry Pop, Combo Panda etc). This led him to want to play Roblox. He's officially a bit young for it but other kids in his class play it and I directly monitor him playing it so he's safe.

A lot of the stuff on Roblox is garbage. And I mean hot, stinky garbage. Rainbow Friends is a bit of a phenomenon right now and is okay for what it is and who it's aimed at, but for the most part Roblox "experiences" make the worst Wii shovelware look like Zelda. There must be a template or something for "obbys" (which is the risible and completely unnecessary name for platformers on Roblox) because they are all identical. Seriously. Escape the Jail. Escape the Principal. Escape SpongeBob. Escape Bugs Bunny. The same sections. The same order. The same game. The trademarks I mentioned above are another weird thing - Roblox creators just steal IPs from other companies and subvert them for their own ends. This goes from fairly benign - and relatively playable - "collect the licensed characters across a map" games, to what is almost certainly copyright misuse and infringement ("ESCAPE KILLER SONIC OBBY"). And these aren't harmless fan projects, they're all monetised and pay to win, so why companies are allowing this to happen I don't know.

My son wanting to play gooseberry fool he'd seen someone stream on the internet brought me to Garten of Banban. I played the last one with/for him on Steam last year because it was free and my son wanted me to get the others. I agreed to wishlist them and get them when they were on sale. He likes the idea of the game but it too scared to play it so he watches me. It's a cliché-ridden jump scare horror game series written by absolute morons. Your child attends a kindergarten but all the kids have disappeared. You have to look for clues in the dimly lit preschool with all the fun bright coloured characters that definitely aren't the bad guys adorning the walls. So far so written by a teenager trying to be edgy. At the end of the first one (on my Alphabet last year of I recall) you go down a lift chased by one of the big monsters - WHAT LIIEEESS BENEEAATTHHH?!?!?! No, don't say a secret research lab because this is a really original game and they - oh.

So you're walking around this research lab doing shitty fetch quests and solving simple puzzles when you have a discussion with somebody over the intercom who has the acting ability, cadence and enthusiasm of a male porn star having to pretend that the girl in front of him with her tits out is his stepsister. They then betray you (obviously) and you do more shitty fetch quests (herding chickens), hampered all the while by bad mechanics (you can't pick up the chickens reliably), random death events (answering questions on pain of death using a tape recorder where you don't know what it'll say) and terribly positioned checkpoints. Except they're not terribly positioned when you learn that the modus operandi of these developers is to make a terrible half hour game last so long you can't refund it. It ends with a pisspoor cliffhanger and...another lift!

In summary, this is one of the worst games I have ever played. It is badly designed by design. I didn't enjoy it and spent the last third of it ranting at my son about how games should be. My son didn't enjoy it because he found it too scary, and then kept my wife in his room for ages at bedtime because he couldn't sleep. So one person played it, two witnessed it, and three had their evenings ruined. Catastrophic.

site23 wrote:If you give me your personal OrangeRKN guarantee that I don't need to do anything as fiddly as the upside down platforming ever again now that I know the ice-water shortcut then I'll give it one last chance. Maybe the black hole planet was just a super unfortunate first planet to really commit to exploring after my initial look around the solar system. I do want to like it and it's, like, almost there!

I'm kind of with you on this too! I fell off it after unfortunate stumbling point or being blocked off and not quite figuring out what I needed to do or where to go.

Games like that give me anxiety. There is potentially the best game you'll ever play in there - everyone loves it! But make a few wrong decisions and you're on the outside looking in at everyone saying what a masterpiece it is.

Dowbocop wrote:
Knittins
I like match-3 games, so much so that I actually got into the Champions League section of Toon Blast a few years ago. I stuck with Toon Blast because it actually had a fair progression system, didn't force you into buying boosters to finish, and actually gave you boosters fairly easily. It was a fun game to play, whereas Candy Crush always seemed to put the invisible paywalls up. I haven't sensed much of the grift with Knittins yet, possibly because I am again using Netflix so may have a premium version. I also have played about fifty levels of Knittins as opposed to around five thousand Toon Blast stages so it's not an exhaustive comparison. But basically it's Candy Crush for people who shop at Hobbycraft. The main gimmick is you pick a cat to be your character. When you complete levels you earn balls of wool and every ten levels or so you get to knit your cat a woolly hat or scarf. Seriously. It's going to be awkward when someone catches me playing this...

The cat bit made me want to play this.

Ironhide wrote:

Dowbocop wrote:
Knittins
I like match-3 games, so much so that I actually got into the Champions League section of Toon Blast a few years ago. I stuck with Toon Blast because it actually had a fair progression system, didn't force you into buying boosters to finish, and actually gave you boosters fairly easily. It was a fun game to play, whereas Candy Crush always seemed to put the invisible paywalls up. I haven't sensed much of the grift with Knittins yet, possibly because I am again using Netflix so may have a premium version. I also have played about fifty levels of Knittins as opposed to around five thousand Toon Blast stages so it's not an exhaustive comparison. But basically it's Candy Crush for people who shop at Hobbycraft. The main gimmick is you pick a cat to be your character. When you complete levels you earn balls of wool and every ten levels or so you get to knit your cat a woolly hat or scarf. Seriously. It's going to be awkward when someone catches me playing this...

The cat bit made me want to play this.

I was wondering why my name was asterisked on the leaderboards and then this reminded me what I named my cat

Dowbocop wrote:I like match-3 games, so much so that I actually got into the Champions League section of Toon Blast a few years ago.

Same here! I kicked the habit not longer after, but I’m back on board now. Still not up to CL yet, but there are nearly 9000 levels now!

Dowbocop wrote:I Commissioned Some Bees
I'm sad there are so few levels of this to be perfectly honest - I almost don't want to finish it!

I fancy trying this. You know there are 15 instalments?!

rinks wrote:

Dowbocop wrote:I like match-3 games, so much so that I actually got into the Champions League section of Toon Blast a few years ago.

Same here! I kicked the habit not longer after, but I’m back on board now. Still not up to CL yet, but there are nearly 9000 levels now!

Dowbocop wrote:I Commissioned Some Bees
I'm sad there are so few levels of this to be perfectly honest - I almost don't want to finish it!

I fancy trying this. You know there are 15 instalments?!

That's my ten games from the same letter sorted (I won't do this unless I'm desperate because it's a bit of a cheap tactic, I try and do no more than a trilogy for each letter).

I can't reinstall Toon Blast, I got my life back

One unintended realistic touch in Knittins is that if you collect fifteen cat biscuits your cat puts a booster onto the board, but because it's a cat they put it in the most irritating place and strawberry float up your plans because that's what cats do.

When it comes to mobile games, we're happy that mobile ports of PC/console games count, right? Netflix have a glut of these now.

What about PC ports of mobile games?

site23 wrote:What about PC ports of mobile games?

Only if you're running it through an Android or iOS emulator.

Munch Mobile
THE YEAR IS 1983. YOU ARE A SENTIENT CAR WITH GIANT ARMS, OR A TOP SECRET AGENT WITH GIANT ARMS. EITHER WAY THE MAN IN THE CAR IS HUNGRY AND THE GIANT ARMS OF QUESTIONABLE OWNERSHIP PICK UP FOOD TO FEED HIM. ALSO FUEL FOR THE CAR, AND MONEY BUT THAT'S HARD TO GET. ALSO I'M INFORMED THE FISH ARE COLLECTABLE BUT THIS GAME DOES NOT HANDLE WELL AND I CANNOT DO THAT. THE MAN JUST WANTS TO GET HOME TO HIS LADY SO HE CAN DRIVE HOME AGAIN ON A SLIGHTLY FASTER ROAD.

YOUR NAME OR THE NAME OF YOUR CAR IS...MUNCH MOBILE. THIS IS CHALLENGING FOR GOOGLING AS MANY REAL WORLD BURGER VANS ARE ALSO CALLED...MUNCH MOBILE.

Dowbocop wrote:Munch Mobile
THE YEAR IS 1983. YOU ARE A SENTIENT CAR WITH GIANT ARMS, OR A TOP SECRET AGENT WITH GIANT ARMS. EITHER WAY THE MAN IN THE CAR IS HUNGRY AND THE GIANT ARMS OF QUESTIONABLE OWNERSHIP PICK UP FOOD TO FEED HIM. ALSO FUEL FOR THE CAR, AND MONEY BUT THAT'S HARD TO GET. ALSO I'M INFORMED THE FISH ARE COLLECTABLE BUT THIS GAME DOES NOT HANDLE WELL AND I CANNOT DO THAT. THE MAN JUST WANTS TO GET HOME TO HIS LADY SO HE CAN DRIVE HOME AGAIN ON A SLIGHTLY FASTER ROAD.

YOUR NAME OR THE NAME OF YOUR CAR IS...MUNCH MOBILE. THIS IS CHALLENGING FOR GOOGLING AS MANY REAL WORLD BURGER VANS ARE ALSO CALLED...MUNCH MOBILE.

That reads like something off Rick & Morty

First finished game of the year: VA-11 Hall-A.

Not sure I would strongly recommend it as I think the writing bites off more than it can chew in places. But I enjoyed it -- I liked the characters and its sort of 'anime' / 'old school internet culture' sense of humour enough to see it through.

Think my first completed game of 2024 will be I was a Teenage Exocolonist, I'll probably replay it a few times too, as there's several different endings.

Couple more ticked off this weekend:

20 Minutes Till Dawn

A game inspired by Vampire Survivors that unfortunately just makes me want to play Vampire Survivors instead. I’ll put more time into it to unlock more of the levels and characters to experiment with but I from what I’ve played I’m doubtful it has the aspect of “wait what’s happening now?” that makes up quite a lot of the fun of VS.

Star Trek: Resurgence

About two hours into this and it’s not too bad! Feels much more of a visual novel with random minigames/QTEs at the moment rather than resembling anything from Telltale or Life is Strange but it’s snappy enough from scene to scene to keep me engaged. So far it has the kind of plot you could definitely see in a mid to good tier TNG episode but it obviously has to last a lot longer than that. I’ll definitely be finishing this.

Some games I’ve now played for the first time this weekend but can’t say I’ve ‘experienced’ yet:

The Case of the Golden Idol

I can see where all the praise has come from for this. It’s a good attempt at getting around the problems with actually doing detective work in detective games. It does enough that while brute forcing the answers is possible, it’s never practical.

Outrun 2006: Coast to Coast

This came free with Football Manager 2010, the first game I ever bought on Steam, and has sat unplayed for over 14 years. Quite fun but I think the AI cheats a whole bunch.

DmC: Devil May Cry

Never played anything in the Devil May Cry series so what better place to start than the reboot people didn’t like? It’s ok so far, I trust Ninja Theory to make a good game. Is the edgelordiness here better or worse than the rest of the series? It’s pretty cringey so far.

Sonic Adventure DX

This is absolutely terrible. I don’t think this is making the list.