What I Played and Read This Week - '25/12/28

Happy holidays! Check out my sick tea haul:

On to the usual.

Games

After finishing my Dynasty Warriors 4 rare item collection, I took a look at Xtreme Legends, the expansion disk. Unlike DW3XL, it doesn't add new Musou Modes, just standalone stages (one for each character!) and Xtreme Mode, a pseudo-roguelike mode where you build up officers, troops, and stats over a series of procedurally generated stages, with the end goal being to conquer all of China. I wasn't too into it; the stages are missing the strategy feel—large forces clashing, reinforcement gates—that makes Warriors so appealing to me. Perhaps I would've found the prospect of infinite randomly generated Warriors content more appealing if it were 2003 and I didn't have two decades of hand-crafted Warriors games ahead of me.

Instead, I got really into Samurai Warriors 1. Initially, I was a bit put off by it: during battles, it bombards you with "Missions" to capture such-and-such a point, defeat so-and-so, and so on, marking them on your map and granting you EXP if you complete them. This struck me as rather different from Dynasty Warriors, which has similar in-battle events where your commander suggests killing so-and-so to prevent their fire attack and such, but doesn't push you to do it; there is typically no benefit beyond the simple strategic gain of not having your troops decimated (though rare items and unique weapons usually require you to clear these events). In fact, I thought it might work like Dynasty Warriors 7, where story chapters require you to clear a series of scripted missions, instead of letting you ignore them to go murder the commander or rout the map if you want. But I was wrong: in SW1, you can ignore missions all you like and clear the chapter all the same. It's funny how much some simple quality-of-life UI tweaks can change one's entire perception of a game.

Ninja Gaiden (NES) is surprisingly fair and gentle and I don't think it'd have such a reputation for difficulty (at least relative to other NES games) if not for one thing: seemingly everything is designed to make monsters knock you into bottomless pits! Being hit bumps you into the air and puts you into a completely inactionable, disconcertingly quick knockback state until you hit the ground! There are enemies at the edges of platforms everywhere! I think I died ~20-30 times on Acts 2-3 and all but one or two of them were from being knocked into pits. Starting from Act 4, it gets harder in general, though. As of writing, I'm stuck on Act 5-2's horrifying walljump segment.

I've been playing Genome Guardian, a Vampire Survivors-like with a stationary character. The big gimmick is that weapons are genetic codes: you start out with C (pistol), A (submachine gun), G (shotgun), or T (bomb), and from there can add additional codes—C, for example, can become CC (sniper rifle), CA (scout rifle), CG (hunting shotgun), or CT (dumbfire rocket). To keep the number of combinations sane, order is ignored (e.g., AC is identical to CA) and you can't go past four letters. Enemies work the same way. This is all very fun and interesting, but runs, as usual for the genre, are too damn long! There are thirty waves and I frequently run out of challenge, and upgrade slots, by the early twenties! Also, weapons sometimes become radically different with upgrades in a way that obsoletes (irremovable) attachments you've bought for their limited slots, which can be a nasty surprise given that you can't preview the effects of weapons you haven't bought yet.

Everyone on earth has played Megabonk so I won't say too much about it. I think that the Risk of Rain-style interactables it brings to Vampire Survivors encourage you to be exploring all the time rather than none of the time, which does a lot to make it less braindead.

I played a couple of hours of Nubby's Number Factory and found that any given run became dull as hell as soon as I put together a working build, so I don't think I'll be playing more.

Books

Evolution: A Very Short Introduction was a nice look at a subject briefly studied and long forgotten, and the details went well beyond what I learned in Biology 11 & 12 (which I recall being more focused on the structure of the body, particularly the human body, rather than the development thereof). The author's metaphors were a touch cheesy but not forced or unhelpful.

Despite being busy playing loads of video games for the holidays, I managed to sneak in some Anne of Green Gables. I'm quite taken by Anne's flights of fancy:

“I suppose you are Mr. Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables?” she said in a peculiarly clear, sweet voice. “I’m very glad to see you. I was beginning to be afraid you weren’t coming for me and I was imagining all the things that might have happened to prevent you. I had made up my mind that if you didn’t come for me tonight I’d go down the track to that big wild cherry tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay all night. I wouldn’t be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think? You could imagine you were dwelling in marble halls, couldn’t you? And I was quite sure you would come for me in the morning, if you didn’t tonight.”

I'm also struck by her terribly tragic backstory. There's something funny about how common children with dead parents and abusive guardians are in popular children's fiction—consider Matilda, Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events. But Anne surely takes the record for Most Orphaned:

"[Mother] died of fever when I was just three months old. I do wish she’d lived long enough for me to remember calling her Mother. I think it would be so sweet to say ‘Mother,’ don’t you? And Father died four days afterwards from fever, too. That left me an orphan and folks were at their wits’ end, so Mrs. Thomas said, what to do with me. You see, nobody wanted me even then. It seems to be my fate. Father and Mother had both come from places far away and it was well known they hadn’t any relatives living. Finally Mrs. Thomas said she’d take me, though she was poor and had a drunken husband. She brought me up by hand. Do you know if there is anything in being brought up by hand that ought to make people who are brought up that way better than other people? Because whenever I was naughty Mrs. Thomas would ask me how I could be such a bad girl when she had brought me up by hand—reproachful-like.

“Mr. and Mrs. Thomas moved away from Bolingbroke to Marysville, and I lived with them until I was eight years old. I helped look after the Thomas children—there were four of them younger than me—and I can tell you they took a lot of looking after. Then Mr. Thomas was killed falling under a train and his mother offered to take Mrs. Thomas and the children, but she didn’t want me. Mrs. Thomas was at her wits’ end, so she said, what to do with me. Then Mrs. Hammond from up the river came down and said she’d take me, seeing I was handy with children, and I went up the river to live with her in a little clearing among the stumps. It was a very lonesome place. I’m sure I could never have lived there if I hadn’t had an imagination. Mr. Hammond worked a little sawmill up there, and Mrs. Hammond had eight children. She had twins three times. I like babies in moderation, but twins three times in succession is too much. I told Mrs. Hammond so firmly, when the last pair came. I used to get so dreadfully tired carrying them about.

“I lived up river with Mrs. Hammond over two years, and then Mr. Hammond died and Mrs. Hammond broke up housekeeping. She divided her children among her relatives and went to the States. I had to go to the asylum at Hopeton, because nobody would take me. They didn’t want me at the asylum, either; they said they were overcrowded as it was. But they had to take me and I was there four months until Mrs. Spencer came.”

People expect children's books to be (relatively) child-friendly, but it's as if there's a special carveout for awful parents (or adoptive ones, anyway). I think that, to a child, there's something very appealing about being a miserable orphan uplifted from miserable circumstances into beauteous ones; we all, as children, see ourselves as unfairly put-upon and deserving of something better. At least, I did!