June Media Post


Featuring: Death Note (Anime), The End Is Nigh, Hero Hours Contract 2, Alien Hominid Invasion, and Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits The James Turrell Retrospective
 

Death Note (Anime)

 
This is the kinda story which I figured I'd largely absorbed through cultural osmosis, but turned out to be a lot more intricate than I expected. It was about as good as I expected/heard, which is to say I thought it was pretty great, but it drags a couple of times. Episodes 6 and 7 were by far the most egregious, since Light spends the entire time talking to a lady on the sidewalk if I recall correctly. The love triangle at one point that felt like it amounted to nothing.
 
I'm surprised I didn't know about the tennis scene going in. It's exactly the kind of absurd, 4th dimensional chess mindgames people make memes of. I guess scenes of Light and L sitting around are more flexible for creating memes with.
 
One thing I liked about the later episodes is seeing how society warped around Light's actions. There's this once moment in particular that sticks with me, some kid threatens to post another kid's name online, to put them at risk of getting killed by Kira (Light's identity as the guy who magically kills people), which I thought was a pretty interesting since it's Kira's own fault that fear like that exists.
 
The show doesn't do a great job at showing the positives ramifications of the Death Note though, which is unfortunate because it feels like the show does genuinely try to consider them. There's one instance in which Light actually just straight up saves a woman by using the Death Note, but aside from that it's mostly just shown to satisfy people who feel a sense of justice from criminals dying. What I feel like is the most important positive ramification though is how crime rates are drastically lowered, but it's told to the audience rather than shown in practice.
 
The characters are really engaging. Light is such a fun antagonist to watch struggle, succeed, and fail. The last episode in particular was fantastic because of Light. My main critique with him is that it felt like he transitioned too quickly from morally questionable to straight up evil. Strangely, the middle of the show explores Light's initial innocence more than the start. Ryuk is such a funny contrast to Light, and to himself considering he granted someone the power to comit genocide just out of sheer boredom and curiosity. L is also an amusing contrast to the very professional characters around him, and it's satisfying to see him frustrate Light. The last character I particularly wanna mention is Mello, who I thought was a really interesting expansion on L's questionable investigation tactics, but unfortunately Mello didn't get to do a whole lot.
 
My last complaint, back to the "it drags" thing I mentioned earlier, at some point it stopped feeling like the show was twisting to build up to a conclusion, and instead just twisting to prolong itself. Despite this though, I still enjoyed the twists in the later portion.


The End Is Nigh


This game has some really excellent gameplay. The controls and level design were really solid and fun.
 
I'm not really sure why, but I felt kinda relieved that this game doesn't have walljumping. I definitely wouldn't say I dislike waljumping. The exclusion of walljumping makes this game feel a lot less like Super Meat Boy, and that distinction felt pleasantly surprising I guess.
 
The most distinct mechanic in this game is the ledge grab, and I loved it. They allow for an extra bit of consistency that precision platformers usually don't provide. There's also fastfalling which does a good job tapping into the tryhard part of my brain, since you can use it to make a ton of jumps just a little bit faster.
 
Other than that the game's just about moving left and right, and jumping. Similarly to Super Meat Boy, the jump is incredibly flexible, so it doesn't get stale.
 
Another design choice I quite liked was how every level is contained to a single screen. Granted, there's not one set screen size, and some levels are more roundabout than others, but it generally leads to the game avoiding a common issue I have with precision platformers, in which levels become so long that 1 hit equalling death stops feeling "tough but fair" and becomes brutal instead. The Glitched Cartridges definitely go againt what I just said, but those are optional, and straight up play by different rules (setting you back by up to 10 levels upon getting hit), so I respect them for being their own sort of thing. I ended up beating 2 of them even.

One of my biggest issues with the game was with its visual clarity. Because most platforms and hazards are identical in color, it can be tough to discern where hazards are. It was less than a problem than I expected though, and the stylistic choice does look cool, so that's nice.
 
I also took issue with the fast travel system. The fast travel system only travels you to the beginnings of areas, so backtracking to particular levels can be monotonous, so I was quickly disinterested in collecting things I missed. Bizarrely, a ton of levels appear to be very particularly designed with progressing backwards in mind, which could've made backtracking a bit more convenient for levels in the later halfs of worlds, but not every level is progressable backwards.

One more issue I had was with the momentum. I would've preferred to have been able to stop on a dime, but instead your momentum carries over just a tiny bit after you stop inputting a direction. It's especially prominent in the water levels.

I'm not gonna bother 100%'ing this game. I'm well aware that it gets extremely difficult, so I quit when I was still fairly comfortable with the game's difficulty (I also just don't wanna bother looking up a guide to scrape up all the collectables that I missed). I did beat it though, and I completed like half of the cartridges.
 
 

Hero Hours Contract 2

 
Similarly to the first game, this game's cute. I found the premise, the antagonists utilizing magical girl energy to mine cryptocurrency, to be amusing.

The combat in this game is pretty drastically restructured. Instead of moving and attacking as each character once per tern, you simply get 15 actions across the board. Unfortunately this makes the character imbalance even more prominent than in the first game, because it's oftentimes most efficient to dump all your actions into one or two characters instead of splitting them across all 4.
 
The game makes sure you do utilize every character however, in the new dungeon crawling segments. I wasn't a big fan of the dungeon crawling segments since they're really luck based (which doesn't synergize well with them being seemingly the only place in the game in which you can't quit back to the title screen for some reason), and they restrict you to only using only 1 character at a time. I also kinda shot myself in the foot with how I leveled up 2 of my characters a ton, which in turn made the enemies scale too high for all my other characters to deal with in the dungeon crawling segments, then failed to notice the shop mechanic (which allows you to lower enemy levels) until the end of the game. So I ended up spending like 2 hours grinding all my characters, which was a sizable chunk of my playtime considering I played for about 7 hours total.
 
On the topic of character leveling also, while it was neat how you increased character strength in the first game, I prefer the more streamlined approach in this one. You simply get XP and gems from battles, and spend them to power up your characters. I guess also adding a sense of progression now is the new characters you unlock. They have some neat gimmicks, but unfortunately they're pretty hit or miss in terms of usefulness, and there's never really a great place to experiment with different team combinations. There are these monkey funging levels which inspired a bit of experimentation in me, but not every character is useful for them.
 
The biggest disappointment for me is the lack of any non-randomized levels (excluding the tutorial I belive) this time around, because that's simply what I prefer out of Tactical-RPGs.

There are some weird active battle mechanics. They make sense for the survival mode since that's entirely active battle, but it doesn't seem intentional when enemy attacks linger into your turn for like a second. The antagonists floating around and attacking you during the dungeon crawling segments is pretty surely intentional though considering they only appear then.
 
Anyways this game is free on PC just like the first game, so that's really nice.
 
 

Alien Hominid Invasion

 
After replaying the first game like a year and a half ago, I finally finished the sequel. I actually began playing it directly after Alien Hominid HD, and progressed halfway through, I had to drop it since I didn't have a computer for a little while. Then once I got my Steam Deck, I still put it off for a while because I didn't wanna pick back up halfway through, nor replay it from the start. Once I did get back into it, I just barely game-overed and lost a ton of loot, but then after that the rest of the game actually went extremely smoothly. I ended up doing so well that I now have a top 100 high score:
 
Granted I used an external rapid-fire button, so you could consider this invalid.
 
I think a big issue I was having was that I was too focused on collecting loot. Once I just focused on finishing missions, things went by much quicker. My success was totally in part due to loot though, I got some range-ups which allowed me to comfortably switch to a high DPS starter weapon, along with some health regen buffs.
 
I prefer the original game in a couple of ways, particularly when it comes to your moveset, and the levels. This game's moveset trades some of the offensive capabilities of the first game's in favor of some stronger defensive abilities. The dodge roll being so long is nice, but I don't like how shooting is restricted to 6 directions instead of the original game's 8, and melee attack are far less prominent.
 
While this game's structure is better suited for repetition, it doesn't leave me with as strong of an initial impression as the first game. When it comes to the loot, it feels nice to collect loot, but most of it didn't feel particularly fun to use so I didn't end up engaging with a lot of the games variety anyways.
 
 

Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits The James Turrell Retrospective


This game doesn't really have a ton to do with Bubsy turns out. He's there, you play as him, but he doesn't act much like himself, and the world around him is completely different. I imagine he's primarily there to set the game's tone as a parody. Bubsy's not a series people tend to take seriously, and especially not the game Bubsy 3D, so general audiences are set up with the expectation that this game isn't to be taken seriously either. Maybe I'm reading to much into it, maybe the devs just wanted to include Bubsy in one of their games.
 
I found the game mildly funny, particularly level 3. I went into it knowing nothing about James Turrel, not even knowing if he's a real person or not (he is), so I guess I didn't have the full context. This game doesn't have much else going for it other than the comedy (unless you actually wanna analyze it as art, which you could), so I didn't get much out of the game.
 
Maybe the most amusing part to me isn't even from the game, it's from the Wikipedia article. There are only 2 sources cited for the game's reception, and one of them is Rebecca Sugar of all people:

The game even having a Wikipedia article is also somewhat surprising to me. It feels like this game and Sonic Dreams Collection (another game from the same devs, and the reason I even cared to check this out in the first place) were such small blips in time. It's nice to know they're documented.
 

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