Xbox Game Pass is killing me right now. The sheer number of great games released in the last few weeks - Dredge, Expedition 33, Oblivion, Blue Prince - is adding more and more title to my need-to-play pile. And since I’ve locked myself into playing a random game from my Steam library every single day, my hours for discretionary gaming are shrinking. I guess I can always find the time other places. Who needs a mowed lawn or clean dishes, anyway?
I’m calling this project FULL STEAM, and you can follow along with my progress here on Headcanon and on this YouTube channel.
Previous Full Steam recaps:
Widget Satchel
In which I live my best trash ferret life.
Widget Satchel took me back to my glory days of zippy sidescrolling platformers on the SNES. There’s a lot to be said for nailing the fundamentals of movement, art and sound, and Widget Satchel nails them hard, with colorful art, fluid movement and cute animations. The secret sauce in the mechanics here is that collecting pickups weighs you down, which changes your movement - how fast you move, how high you jump. You want to get to the end of the level with as many widgets as possible so you can buy upgrades, but the more widgets you get, the harder it becomes to get there. It adds a neat puzzle element that lifts the game above some of its more been-there-done-that competition.
Star Wars: Empire at War
In which I am the droids they’re looking for.
There are a whole lot of Star Wars games out there, and I’m missing a lot of geek cred because I’ve skipped most of them. In recent years I’ve played Squadrons and Outlaws, and in the 2000s I played Rogue Squadron, Jedi Academy and KOTOR, but my experience is really thin. The only strategy game I recall playing is Force Commander, which I remember mainly because it had an electric guitar version of the Imperial March. Empire at War has overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam, and it was nice to drop into a completely competent (if a bit outdated) Star Wars game. I’m not big on real time strategy, but it definitely sounds and feels like Star Wars - which, when I’m just dipping my toes in for half an hour, is really all I want.
Mini Metro
In which I fail to make the trains run on time.
I think it’s a good sign when you can strip a game down to its barest essentials and it still really works. Mini Metro, at a fundamental level, is about shapes and lines. You connect the shapes with lines, creating the most efficient way for little invisible passengers to travel between them. That’s it! And this game could still work if it had photorealistic satellite imagery, multiple camera angles, and an orchestral soundtrack, but it’s a testament to the strength of the mechanics - and the developers’ confidence in them - that they stuck with this minimalist, beautiful execution.
Carcassonne
In which I square off with the competition.
In my large collection of board games, Carcassonne is one that I keep going back to, whether I’m looking for something to play with my wife or to introduce to friends and family. A big part of this is its simplicity; for a game that has deep strategy and international championships, there are very few actions for you to take. Each turn, you pick up a random tile, place it on the board, and then have the opportunity to place a figurine on it. As the board grows, you have more and more places to put down a tile, and a smaller and smaller pool of tiles and figurines to draw from, so you can find yourself pivoting strategy on a dime. It’s a great board game, and all I can really say about the digital version is that it’s a great adaptation. It feels like playing Carcassonne on a table, but with nice quality-of-life improvements like automatic scoring, highlights of legal tile placements, and AI opponents.
Ultimate Racing 2D 2
In which I vroom vroom.
When I was a kid, Cruisin’ USA was king of the arcade racing games. Sitting in the big bucket seat, with an actual gas pedal instead of a controller button for acceleration, was mind blowing - these machines were lined up like pageant contestants at the arcade, with every seat full. But before playing Cruisin’ USA, I remember playing Super Off Road at Palace Playland in Old Orchard Beach. Not only did this game have some rudimentary 3D-ish graphics (and an actual wheel and pedal instead of a joystick) 5 years before Cruisin’, it had what felt like a novel control scheme: turning the wheel turned your car based on the direction it was facing, not its position on the screen. Ultimate Racing 2D 2 feels like a modern extension of that game, from the top-down view to the controls, tricked out with a ton of extra options, courses, cars and additional racers. It also feels arcade-punishing to me, at least on the normal difficulty, like its goal is to wrench more quarters out of me as I inevitably come in at the back of the pack.
FutureGrind
In which I grind in a future-y way.
FutureGrind answers the important question: What if Uniracers, but Tony Hawk?
Before Your Eyes
In which I try not to blink.
When I think of pieces of hardware like the Kinect and the Wiimote, I think of devices that were a little too far ahead of the software they worked with. On 2010s-era consoles, you could only go so far to make your swooping arm motion translate into an actual tennis swing, or make your full-body scan do much other than check if you’re imitating dance moves correctly. I like that Before Your Eyes approaches this alternative mechanics/input question by reducing it down to a simple action: blink detection. By building the mechanics and the story around this simple, easy-to-translate, easy-to-understand input, they’re freed up to focus on the story - which is really quite good.
*****
Listening: Snitch City | The Boston Globe
Reading: Death, divorce and the magic of kitchen objects: how to find hope in loss | Bee Wilson | The Guardian
Some of the people I spoke to said that they were not at all sentimental about kitchen objects, but then when they thought harder there was always at least one exception. One man told me that kitchen objects did not interest him, only to reveal that after his mother’s death he had held on to some tea towels and place mats because they seemed to carry the “texture” of her.