What I Played and Read This Week - '25/12/14

Games

A desperate Google search for 'best SNES platformers' took me to Joe & Mac, a platformer/beat-em-up about Neanderthals and dinosaurs—until the last stage, where you walk into the biggest dinosaur's mouth, explore his guts, and find out that he was controlled by Satan the entire time. He's also pretty nasty; two continues and I still haven't taken him out. The last couple of stages have some pretty nasty 1-tile platforming that doesn't suit the controls very well—they're fine but not THAT good—but I was otherwise completely satisfied. I like the tradeoff between the normal jump, which is low but completely actionable, and the spin jump, which goes quite high but doesn't let you attack until you peak.

Nuclear Throne got a big patch, so, after a long absence, I'm back to that. It took a half-dozen runs to work off the rust, but I got a win. At the risk of being declared legally insane, I think the game looked better at 30 FPS; it made the impact frames pop more and fit well with the 'weird TV cartoon' look. It certainly plays better at 60, though! And having put nearly a hundred hours into the old version, I might just be set in my ways.

Less successfully, I've been trying to clear Brotato on 182% mode (200% enemy damage, 200% enemy HP, 150% enemy speed); a game that has come to be trivial after hundreds of hours of play now feels nearly impossible. It's a credit to the skill ceiling that it's possible at all, if not on every character (if you can't either move fast enough to outrun the enemies or kill them before they get to you, RIP). The furthest I've got is Wave 18. I appreciate how many normally overpowered strategies just don't work on 172%; most notably, stacking enemy count boosts for the massive economy gain pretty much just kills you.

I haven't been playing as many VIPRPGs lately, but I'm still making my way through Natsu no Jin '08. This week, I played one of the last entries, Unko・Rehahidoi ~ Fuuin no Senshi (ウンコ・レハヒドイ～封印の戦士～), a rather strange game that alternates between comedy skits, bad ARPG combat where you can't see your health without opening the menu (the second Natsu no Jin '08 game with this problem!), and simple turn-based battles. The basic premise of the game is that a dark figure is going around kidnapping people's daughters and Brian and Jeanne (the female version of Brian) return to Brian's hometown, Brian Village, where everyone looks like Brian, for answers; it turns out that the kidnapper is Brian's ancestral enemy, Dark Brian. God Brian, the founder of the Brian line, grants Brian his power and he sets off to track Brian down. For all the jank, I was having a decent time until the game refused to acknowledge I had completed a dungeon, leaving me completely stuck. That's one of the downsides of playing obscure free games: sometimes they literally don't work!

Books

I have an intermittent addiction to Oxford's Very Short Introductions series, which provides brief, easy-to-read overviews of academic fields and topics. I'm under no illusion that reading a single 200-page books makes me an expert, or even a novice, at something—certainly not without so much as taking notes!—but however little I retain, I at least escape a position of true and complete ignorance, leaving me less helpless (if not more able to speak) when the subject comes up. Besides, they're packed with interesting facts and many of them are a pleasure to read. This week was Architecture (Andrew Ballantyne); I expected a look at the actual process of building a house, but what I got instead was the human aspect: why buildings are built the way they are; how architects are influenced by their cultures, predecessors, contemporary movements, and patrons; how the way a building, or an architectural style, is perceived shifts massively over time; and so on. Did you know that Thomas Jefferson built his own house? Maybe Americans learn that in grade school; I don't know. There were also many pretty pictures of striking buildings (my favorite was the Sydney Opera House), and as a DRPGhead—that is, a fan of video games defined by (fantastic) buildings—it gave me a lot to think about.

I was in the mood for another one; skimming the list, I saw Ideology (Michael Freeden), and decided, seeing as at the age of twenty-seven I still don't have a clear mental definition of what ideology is, to give it a go. While I was initially put off by the book's enthusiasm for ideology, which I've often seen as a kind of intellectual cancer that universally seeks to become dogma, its balanced treatment of the issue convinced me that ideology is both inevitable and necessary. Certainly many movements I appreciate for their ideas and consequences—feminism and liberalism (not in the modern sense of centrism) foremost among them—would have found little success if they were not also ideologies.

As for fiction, I've started on Anne of Green Gables, a classic piece of Canadiana I've somehow never experienced in any form. I'm not very far in yet, but I'm struck by the narrator, who feels like a halfway point between the conversational voice of children's fables and the soul-piercing omniscience of George Elliot; I can see how it became an all-ages classic.

I'll keep up these blog-like roundups as long as I think they're interesting to write and (hopefully) read. Future reviews will be tagged with 'review,' in case you'd rather stick to those!