Too Many Games

Here’s something of an absolute nonproblem. I’m starting to think I have just too many video games. Sometimes, I look at the size of my library, and the expectation that I’m going to actually play all these things, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get near to do that.

I’ve been collecting games all my life. So at the point when, years ago, I started this quest I’ve mentioned several times here, to beat every game I own, or come as close to it as I can, the task was already staggering. But still feasible. After I started that, however, I got myself a gaming-capable pc. And that changes things. It is ridiculously easy to build up a massive digital library on PC with little to no investment. It started with the Steam sales, letting me build up a pretty big library for cheap. Then I got into Humble Bundle, which get’s you buying curated collections of games for really cheap, oftentimes getting the one game I wanted on there along with a bunch of others for less than the usual price for that single game. And it pitches in some to charity too, while you’re at it! Can’t complain with that. Oh, and they give away free games every once in a while if you subscribe to their newsletter. All well and good. But then one day, Amazon started giving away five games a month if you link your Twitch account with an Amazon Prime account, plus extras. Daedalic Entertainment and SNK both seem to be dropping big chunks of their back catalog on there basically whenever they feel like, on top of the usual Amazon collection. Then Epic Games came around, offering 1-3 free games every week. And now it’s starting to get overwhelming.

At this moment, I own 410 games on Steam, of which I’ve only bought 108 directly, and the rest came from Humble Bundles, Humble’s free giveaways, or the occasional gift or offer. I have 182 games on Twitch, all given through that Amazon Prime connection. I have 90 on Epic Games, all of which I got through their weekly giveaways. I’ve got a more modest 40 on GOG, many I bought myself, in addition to the freebies they offer, free games on purchase threshhold, copies they make of games in your Steam account, and one gift. On Uplay, I’ve got 24, from one Humble Bundle, some free ones they gave away, and copies of games I got through other clients that require a Uplay log in. On EA Origin, I’ve got 16, all Humble Bundle gains or games they once offered for free. There’s a decent amount of overlap in those numbers, but still, a massive amount of games in my digital PC library. Which isn’t even considering my sizable console games collection. Although, as an odd point, at this point I’m pretty sure I own more games digitally for PC than I do games for my console, in spite of the fact that I’m generally a console player. And between Twitch Prime and Epic Games, I’m adding double digits numbers of games to my library each month without dropping a dime (well, outside of my Amazon Prime subscription, which I’d be maintaining even without the Twitch deals.) I don’t even play through double digits worth of games each month.

I feel like what it means to own a game has shifted. During my developmental years, new games were somewhat of a rarity, while time to play was more ample, so my peers and I absolutely consumed games, beating them over and over again, exhausting their content, overcoming every challenge. As I came older, I was able to afford more games, but had less time to spend on them, and games themselves were designed more as full experiences in isolation rather than things that could sustain the kind of repetitive depth-plunging play of my youth, so I had more breadth of experience in games but less time spent with most individual games. Now, driving by the likes of the backlog producing deep and wide sales, the bundling, the free giveaways, etc., I feel like a lot of the games marketplace, especially Humble Bundle, Twitch Prime, and Epic Games, or itch.io’s recent 1,000 games deal are creating a games culture where you have libraries of games. You’re not intended to, and for many partaking of it, it’s not even possible to, play absolutely everything in there. But digital keys don’t take up any space, they don’t need upkeep, and as long as your machine can run it, they don’t degrade, so you have it in your collection, and who knows, maybe one day it’ll come up in conversation and get you interested or you’ll play something else by the makers and want to come back or you’ll just find a really weird itch that needs something particular to scratch. And there’s something to be said to that, too, having the virtual library where you may not check every book but they’re all there if you need it. I recently had the classic FPS Strife come up in a conversation I was following, describing how groundbreaking it was at the time. I would never buy the game myself. It’s too old, probably blown past by industry standards, etc. But, given that context, I’m kind of curious to check it out. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s right there in my Twitch library.

As I said, sometimes it’s overwhelming. I’ve still got this quest, beat all the games I own. And this is making that quest impossible. I’m also actively avoiding bundles now, even when it has games I want in it. I really don’t want to be making my Steam library run away any more than it already has. I just have too damn many games. But that’s really a problem with me, and my perceptions, and how I’m approaching it. It’s not a problem with all these agencies wanting to throw games at me for free, and all these developers happy to get into my library and take whatever financial benefit they do from the Humble Bundle/Twitch Prime/Epic Games giveaways. It is kind of ridiculous of me to be complaining that I have just too many games that I got for free or alongside games I was wanting to buy anyways that I got to pay an even lower price than usual for.

It does mean I’m going to have to rethink my quest though. Not cancel it, because I’ve been enjoying how it structures things for me. But it needs to adapt to the new realities of the online personal library the industry’s using, at least in part, now. So far, my thoughts are to keep it as normal for all my console games, as those are all things I’ve invested in. Same thing with any PC game I’ve actually paid directly for, or the games that were the reasons I bought a given bundle. Those are all getting beaten. I have my challenge to myself. The hundreds of other PC digital games…. well, at least my Steam list, I’d like to at least give everything a try. Maybe not a full beat, but either play it until I tire of it or at least give it a sample. I’d like to do that with the UPlay list and EA Origin as well, as those are finite. Those aren’t getting added to. I’m already most of the way there on my GOG.com library, outside of the games there that are duplicates of those in my Steam library, so… good show I guess. As for the ever expanding Twitch Prime and Epic Games, I’d really like to do the same thing I’m doing with Steam, at least sampling of giving a run to everything on there, but I don’t know if it’d be possible to keep up, the rate they add games. I’ll probably just do what probably everyone else is, and play if I’m interested, leave it if not, and not sweat the growing size of the lists there, as it’s really a personal library I can check things out from whenever, and not a backlog. And although I have this drive to beat everything I have, likely driven by the way things were in my past, it doesn’t really fit the environment we’re in now. And I need to grow comfortable with that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an hour before my next commitment, and I got Cultist Simulator from Twitch Prime a while back, and that game is absolutely baller. I need to get some of that on.

Snap Judgements on the Humble Originals

The Humble Bundle is a pretty fantastic thing. Get yourself a curated selection of games, plenty of which are probably completely new, unfamiliar, and surprising to you, and drop some money towards charity while you’re at it. A while back, they started up their Humble Monthly, a sort of book club for games, wherein you get a bunch of mostly mystery games every month as long as you subscribe.

Humble Monthly did well enough that they were able to bring a bit of funding to bear for the purposes of producing games. Doesn’t seem to be all that much, as all the games produced under that banner seem to be very small projects, but it has brought to life plenty of games that might not have seen the light otherwise. They’re all relatively small games, but they trend towards the experimental, the risky, and the unusual experiences.

And these Humble Originals, as they’re called, are somewhat exclusive. Only a handful of them have seen release outside of the Humble channels. It used to be they were divvied up, granted one per month through the Humble Monthly releases, but now, they’re part of the collection of games offered for free download for any Humble Monthly subscriber. And this month, and this month only, I’ve got access to them.

And as always, my gain is everyone else’s gain too. Given that these games aren’t available for most of the general audience, I thought I’d do my part to let everyone know what’s going on here. Build up that good old public repository of knowledge. Of video games. Important stuff. I’ve played all of them. Some of them, all the way through, some of them until I got bored, and some, I only got a taste of. Here’s my quick impressions of what the Humble Original catalog has in store.

I can’t wait to get started. Can you imagine? Free of the traditional game funding structures, this is where the true High Art of gaming can flourish! I’m looking forward to a lot of incredibly deep experiences with multifaceted plotlines and intensely crafted atmospheres and…

Cat Girl without Salad

Yesssssssssssss. High. Art. Achieved.

Cat Girl without Salad originally started life as an April Fool’s joke from Wayforward, developers of the Shantae series and a lot of surprisingly good classic game revivals. Way, way back in the prehistoric days of 2013, they had announced this game as a Fool’s Day gag, promising to build a game that combined elements of pretty much every genre out there. Then April Fool’s was over, everybody forgot about it, the end.

Until years later when those Humble guys started throwing money around, and brought this to life. This silly, ridiculous game idea. And you know what? It’s one of my favorites of this collection.

It still brings elements of all sorts of game genres together. Sort of. It’s primarily a side-scrolling shooter, but all your weapon pick ups are from different industries. I didn’t get to play long, but in the course of my time there, I picked up a sports gun, which used classic golf game mechanics to fire, a puzzle gun, where you matched orbs a la bubble bobble to clear the screen, a rhythm gun, where you had to play DDR to fire your weapon, and more.

You may guess it’s pretty silly. You’d guess write. The dialogue backs this up. It feels like playing a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s creative and funny and manic. So yeah.

The art is pretty neat, if a bit simple. Animation is nonexistent, everything is just a static sprite. Sometimes, they’ll switch to a different pose, but no actual movement. The game’s pretty short too, just three levels as far as I can tell. But I had a great time with it. This is already on my list to play more later.

Disc Room

It’s a challenge game, akin to Super Meat Boy or 10 Second Run. You’re in a room with a bunch of spinning saw blades. They move around and bounce off the walls. Some have special properties. Your goal is to survive 30 seconds. Which all sounds like a typical Tuesday, really. Do so, and you unlock different challenge rooms with new fun ways to murder you with saws. Yay. Fail, and you’re pretty much right back in the action right away. It’s a really snappy game.

I enjoyed it, but this isn’t a type of game I typically spend a whole lot of time plugging into. I can see myself playing it in short spurts when the mood strikes, but not really giving it a dedicated play session.

Copoka

If you ever wanted to be a bird in a totalitarian country, (I know I’ve dreamed of that every single day), then Copoka is the game for you.

Yeah. You’re a bird. Just a bird. You fly around. Pick up stuff for your nest. Eavesdrop into the dreary, horrible lives of the general populace. That last bit is where the real meat of this game lies. It’s an environmental narrative or art game or walking simulator of whatever the blazes you want to call it. Not much in the way of actual gameplay unless you really, really like flying aimlessly, but you can follow the breadcrumbs to pick up little glimpses into the lives of the citizenry of the oppressive regime.

I kind of like the way things are told through this game. I think it’s interesting being a completely unconcerned observer just casually picking up a bunch of tidbits of life behind the wall as you’re going along. I just wish it was deeper. The totalitarian government is same typical one you find in storytelling, the wrongs being inflicted on it’s people aren’t anything different from what you’ve seen before, and the game doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to actually say on it’s subject matter. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to walk away with. Look at these sad people and be sad too? Totalitarianism is bad? Not much room for insight in this tale.

Elephant in the Room

Continuing the animal-themed games, in Elephant in the Room, you are an elephant. In the room. This is about as self-explanatory as games get. Your job is to make it out of the house without being acknowledged. There’s a party going on, and you’ve got to stealth your way through. If you’re spotted, you have to trample whoever sees you before they can tell anyone else you’re there. That is exactly how I make my way through parties, so I can relate to this concept.

I’m not convinced the house actually has any doors to the outside. I haven’t found one yet. Although I haven’t tried very hard. This game just doesn’t feel very good to play. The controls aren’t horrible, but for whatever reason, it just feels wrong, tactilely. It’s missing some kind of mechanical cohesiveness that would bring it all together. It doesn’t help that there’s a fair amount your elephant can do, but all you have as far as a guide goes is a quick controls screen when you first start up that you’ll likely forget half of pretty quickly.

So yeah. Not recommended.

Gunmetal Arcadia Zero

This is a giant love letter to the NES era. Oddly enough, rather than aping the most well known titles of the generation that everyone remembers, Gunmetal Arcadia Zero feels a lot more like the average game your grandma would have bought you from the random garage sale going on down the street. Rather than aping the classics from Nintendo, Konami, or Capcom, this game feels like it draws more inspiration from the likes of Sunsoft or Data East. I’m not sure where I’m picking up that distinction, but honestly, it feels very nostalgic to me, and it draws me back to my childhood a lot more than the average Castlevania clone would.

Design, sound, most everything presentation-wise feels very much like an old NES game. The only thing that really seems out of place is the text. The phrasing is not nearly as awkward as those old NES games always were, and it’s pretty clear that the developers were not under a memory limitation in how they plotted things out. It’s not a bad thing, having dialogue and a plot that’s actually parsable, though, so I’ll forgive them this one diversion from the old school.

Otherwise, the game is fun. Lots of equipment and upgrade options that actually impact gameplay, the action-platforming is fun and responsive, and the whole experience feels very well designed. I’m not a fan of the lives system, I feel that’s a gameplay feature the industry outgrew for a reason and it doesn’t really jive well with the more limited time I have to play these days, but at least the checkpoints don’t seem horribly far apart.

Spoolside

Eh, it’s a puzzle-platformer where you’re a 2d character situated on a 3d cube that you can rotate and navigate according to a fixed perspective. It’s got a lot of character. There’s a very solid visual design going throughout. I gave up on it pretty quickly though, as I lost track of where to go next and I found the navigation and the way the game would completely reset your progress every time you fell off the cube to be rather frustrating. It’s one of the things that’s part of the way I play games now vs. the way I played years ago. I hate having to repeat myself. And it may be coming from my lack of grasp of this games level rotation mechanics, but I just lost patience with having to do things over and over again.

Keyboard Sports

Do you love your keyboard? I love your keyboard. This is a game that’s a big love letter to your keyboard, before the preponderance of gadgets such as phones and tablets make it obsolete. You play it with the entire keyboard. Forget your WASD, you’ve got to use all your QWERTY here.

It’s a very simple concept. Press a key, and your character moves to that relative position on your screen. It’s applied in so many creative ways, though, and that builds quality into it. Keyboard Sports is creative and varied and always fun and way too short. Luckily, the developers seem to be using this as a proof-of-concept for a full game, so we may be seeing more keyboard goodness some day.

Yojimbrawl

This is a multiplayer-only game and I am too intense to have friends, so I’ll let you guess what my experience with it was.

Kimmy

Kimmy is a visual novel with a unique art style where you’re babysitting the titular Kimmy and helping the shy, reserved child make friends by teaching all the neighborhood kids how to play classic schoolyard games lack jacks, kick the can, and bloody knuckles, which is appropriate for young children apparently.

I played it for a couple of in-game days, and its story never got to a hook. There’s obviously something going on with Kimmy and her family, how her mom works two jobs while her father’s at home all day and Kimmy doesn’t want to be alone with her dad, but details on any overarcing plot are very sparsely distributed. Most of the game is just explaining the rules of kids games, which yes, I remember, good for me, but it wasn’t compelling.

To be honest, I’m probably not going to be the best at judging a visual novel at the moment. The same issue I’m dealing with that’s changed the way I’m writing posts has also affected my ability to read, so take this impression with a grain of salt.

Oh Deer!

So Oh Deer calls back to all those great driving games of the 16 bit era, such as… um… I’ve got this, just give me a moment…. errr….

This is… it is certainly a game. You drive. Sometimes there are lines of deer. You can drive right through them. Or not. It really doesn’t matter. At first I thought there were only two levels, because I always ran out of gas in the middle of the second area. Eventually, I learned to powerslide, which is a more fuel efficient way of moving about, and I ran out of gas sometime later in the second area. I don’t know if it’s actually possible to proceed. I don’t know if there’s any real objective here. I don’t know about this game.

Uurnog

What, you can’t tell exactly what this game is from the name? It seemed obvious to me.

Uurnog is a very visually stylized puzzle-platformer, mechanically similar to Super Mario Bros 2. I didn’t get the chance to play very much of it, but what I did, I enjoyed. You pick up stuff. You put down stuff. All the stuff you pick up has some sort of special function you can use to alter the surrounding area. I saw some weapons to pick up, so I’m guessing there’s combat which… kind of feels like it might be a pain in the ass, but other than that? It’s charming, the earliest puzzles at least were simple without being brainless and I enjoyed my time with it. Another game I’m looking forward to spending more time with later.

Jawns

A strategy board game. If you’ve ever played stratego, it’s like that, with all the pieces revealed and the board scaled down. Every piece has a number. Pieces beat other pieces of a lower number. It’s kind of like checkers, simple on the surface, but I could see it getting some real strategy to it. Jawns does have a single-player ‘practice’ mode, but the AI is very simple, so you’d have to pull in a friend to get the full experience. I invite you to check out an earlier description for my position with regards to friends.

A2Be

All these Humble Originals are obviously small experiences. Didn’t have a huge team or a huge budget, and creativity is valued here over spectacle or in-depth mechanics, for the most part. Apparently, it’s valued over playtesting, too. Apparently, after the intro, something went wrong with the game’s code and it placed me in the very last area of the game, rather than the first. So I saw the intro, and I saw the final scene and the ending, and nothing in between. Kind of color’s one’s perspective on the game.

It’s a sci-fi point and click adventure. Seems very dialogue heavy, from the bits that I saw. From the presentation and the ending, I would imagine it has a lot more emphasis on dialogue and storytelling than on traditional gameplay. Full of purple prose, more emphasis on saying something poetically than saying it clearly, but it did explore some interesting, if not exactly novel, ideas in the bits I played.

I did get it working properly, but between the frustration I had with that weird glitch and my current problems in reading such a dialogue heavy game, eh. Not going to give it a recommendation.

Tiny Echo

A point and click… environmental narrative, I think? I hesitate to call it an adventure. Nothing I’d really consider puzzles, seems most things are on a course. Which, yeah, it’s environmental as all get out. The experience just oozes somber and surreal. You’re in an odd land, delivering mail to the souls of odd beings, all beautifully arted and sounded. It’s an interesting experience. I wouldn’t imagine you’d enjoy this if you’re not into environmental narratives already, but I found it rather fascinating. I’m calling out a few other art games on this list for their lack of substance, but I don’t think this one fits that denigration. It doesn’t give many details, but it does trigger my imagination in a way that others here have failed at.

2000:1: A Space Felony

Take a look at that name. I’ll give you one guess as to what movie it takes after. I’ll also give you one guess as to what game it takes after. Ok, maybe that second one is a bit harder.

This is 2001: a Space Odyssey meets Phoenix Wright. And as far as the film influence goes, homage is an understatement. The serial numbers aren’t filed off, there’s just a clear piece of packing tape over them. They changed things from the film the minimum amount required to maybe not get sued. I mean, I only saw the film once. And I was drunk then. And the wholesale borrowing was still very blatant to me.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad experience. I actually quite enjoyed it. Basically, you’re a detective, investigating this spacecraft that has been out of contact for a while. The only thing still active on the craft is it’s AI, Mal. You collect evidence, confront Mal with it, and point out holes in his testimony by presenting conflicting evidence. If you find he’s behind any foul play on board, it’s your job to deactivate him.

The writing is sharp and clever. A lot of dry humor that I really resonated with. The mystery isn’t exactly hard to uncover, and the controls can be very persnickety, but I enjoyed it for what it was. Not exactly a lot of replay value here and it’s over really quickly, but it’s a good experience for as long as it lasts.

Quiet City

I’m at a real risk of spending more time writing about this game than I did playing it, so I’ll have to be brief.

Quiet City is an art game, almost without a subject. You make stuff happen. Then it stops. There is no substance here. Nothing to say or consider or think about. When you’re pushing riskier games, not all of them are going to work out, and for me, this was a massive swing and a miss.

Volantia: Kingdom in the Sky

I believe this is the most recent Humble Original. And it’s a really solid one. It’s a city management sim, set in a land floating in the sky. You need to pull in other floating islands to grow your kingdom, take advantage of their resources, and eventually connect your landmass with the ziggurats that keep everything from falling apart again.
This game is deeper than any of the others here except for possibly Uurnog and Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. Resource management is the game of the day, and you’ve got a lot of resources to play with there. The game evolves significantly as you play it, as you exhaust the simple resources and have to move down your tech tree to build up more complicated ways of building and maintaining the necessities you need. It seems all your functions are interrelated, and it takes a lot of balancing in order to keep your city stable. You need fruit to keep your workers going but that same fruit is the easiest way to produce your building material once your dust trees run dry, often leading to choices on whether to devote fruit toward more efficient production or to growing your city in other ways. And that runs completely down the line.

The game is beautiful too. Very well developed and charming visuals, it carries a very interesting appeal. I really liked this one. I did reach the point where my city was no longer in danger of collapsing to the earth below after an hour of play, and wasn’t really compelled to play on after that, but if you’re motivated by something different than I am, you may enjoy yourself even longer than that.

And that’s the Humble Originals. When you’re specifically bringing the more experimental and risky games to fruition, you’re going to land a couple of downers, and there are definitely some disappointments here. But there are also a few real gems. And really, they’re all interesting, in their own way. I’m glad Humble Originals is around to bring these to life, even if they’re not all that accessible most of the time.

Running Down the Haul Part 2: The HIB 17 Additions!

So, we did a thing with the Humble Indie Bundle 17.  Reviewed all the games I got off it.  Then I got more games.  So now I haven’t reviewed them all.  The expansion has taken my accomplishments away from me.  Let’s correct that.

So here’s the HIB 17 review part 2, covering the games that got added to the bundle since the last post!  So sometimes the surprise games are a big deal.  Sometimes they’re not.  Very not.  This one is the latter.  But hey, maybe we can have some fun with them nonetheless.  Let’s go!

Hexcell Complete

It’s Minesweeper.  There, that’s the review.

Okay, maybe a bit more than that.  The Hexcell Complete pack gets you the three Hexcell games.  Only played the first one, not sure what the difference between them is.  It’s a puzzle game.  A bunch of six-sided cells laid out.  Some of them are part of the pattern, some aren’t.  You left kick to mark the cells that are part of it, right click to eliminate the cells that aren’t.  Every cell that’s successfully eliminated has a number showing how many of the neighboring cells are part of the pattern.

So yeah, Minesweeper.

I have a small irritation in that I keep mixing up the right and left clicks, but there seems to be very little consequence for failure.  So there’s that.  I do enjoy puzzle games for stress release, and I could see myself coming back to this game for that, but don’t know if I’ll ever become very enthusiastic about Hexcell.

Expand

So Expand is a ‘minimalist game’.  The developer’s listing says so, and you know, that’s pretty accurate.

Basically, you move a simple box around a simple circular maze that’s constantly shifting as you go through it.  And that’s about it.  The music is pretty nice and atmospheric.  Controls take a little getting used to.  Up and down really control your box’s position in relation to the center of the screen rather than its absolute position.

Only played a little.  Haven’t seen anything worth sticking around for just yet.  Feels more like a Newgrounds-style flash game than a full commercial release, but I’ve only skimmed the surface.

There, a minimalist review for a minimalist game.

Regency Solitaire

Someone saw me playing this game.  So I’ve spent more time explaining that I’m still totally manly and my ability to play feminine things only reinforces this fact than I’ve really wanted to.

Probably my favorite games of these additions.  Regency Solitaire poses card games to you in between visual novel-esque story scenes going through a simple regency romance story.  The card game is simple at first, draw a card, then you can pick up one of the cards in the playing area that’s one number higher or lower than that card, then pick up that’s higher or lower than that, and so on, until you eliminate as many of the cards in the field as you can.  It does have some tech to it, though, as you unlock new abilities, new cards pop up that need to be eliminated in special ways, and the challenges grow a little bit tougher.

That said, there’s not really all that much to the game, and the story’s not exactly stellar.  Still, though, this is probably the only one of these additions I could see giving a few hour into.

So, that’s that.  Overall, nothing I think that’s really going to sell you on the bundle.  Maybe some fun things to kill a few moments with if there’s already something else you’re interested in there, though.