I started being fed a ton of ads for Greenland 2: Migration, which sounds like it would be a special presentation by Nat Geo, but I hadn’t seen the first one and also I didn’t know there had been a first one. It seems like that would be the end of this story; there’s lots of things I don’t know, and this was just one more. But then Gabe was talking about how excited his family was to go and see the movie last weekend. In his house, Greenland is apparently a frequently returned-to comfort watch! Which is maybe, you know, a little odd.
I am in what my youngest might call “My Demo Era” and I have been demoing several Steam demos.
– I try to get into Styx games every time because I love stealth shit and have a soft spot for goblins, and every time they’re just too janky and weird for me to invest. That’s why I was happy to see a demo for Styx: Blades of Greed, so I could check in with shit and see where we were at. Even with my desperation for the genre, it just doesn’t feel good to play. You even fly around in an airship, which would ordinarily add roughly one thousand points out of a hundred, but they’d already lost ten thousand points early on because performance in the game’s main menu was so bad it was barely usable. Their Blood Bowl games have been really rough, but there aren’t other Blood Bowl games, and it’s the same sort of thing here – a captive audience, abused. The studio is called Cyanide, which should have been sufficient warning. When they aren’t making fucked up games I assume they’re asking frogs for rides across the river.
– I didn’t have a Backpack Battles phase mostly because I wasn’t partial to the character art, but it is really cool and has absolutely become a genre catalyst like the best indie games can. I grabbed a game called Backpack Jianghu which takes the concept and blows it out – a ninety-nine player, asynchronous roguelite on a Slay The Spire type choice-map culminating in a massive brawl in the center. Items can be combined like in League of Legends, but it often changes their shape and relationship to the board.
Videogames feel like the primary exposure to Chinese culture these days. If you love words – not an impossibility – take a trip to the Wikipedia page for Jianghu which I found mind-expanding. I had an item in my pack called Extremely Venomous Scorpions, and I think we can all get there. We can put that together. These aren’t your grandpappy’s scorpions, no sirree bob. But Extremely Cold Snake? It’s doing something with Yin? WTF is up with this snake, bro? I’m gonna have to read shit now.
The game is not without jank. But it matters if a janky game is asking me to do precision jumps or it is asking me to move a plate of stinky tofu a couple squares to the right in an inventory. The game is translated quite literally, and the text is way goof troop in the manner of games where (I assume) fixed width meets Western font systems. That said, it can absolutely be understood if you want to. And I wanted to. Or I did! God dammit.
I was so obsessed I went back and It wasn’t until I scrolled all the way down just because I wanted more info that I saw the AI Disclosure. If AI declarations are important, and Steam has committed to having them so they must be important to somebody, they have to be prominent. This was the equivalent of putting the organic label inside the fruit. Is it a salient property of the game, like Online Co-Op, or Single Player? Because if it is, it should go over there where the other important shit is hanging out.
(CW)TB out.