And here comes August. As anticipated, Summer continues to be particularly slow and humid this year and despite all my grand designs to accomplish a lot of catching up while the world of culture in its many forms takes a seasonal siesta, I've proven to be just as languid and (ironically?) glacial. It's the end of July and I've seen the conclusion of just three games after thirty-one days. Not quite what I had in mind.

I've been busy outside of video games though, at least in terms of consuming media, if not perhaps in getting outside and meeting people and learning more about myself and what I want out of life, or any of that exhausting jazz. The new season of BoJack Horseman devastated me, despite being as good a season of a television show as you're likely to find. I laughed at the antics of trollface super robot Jet Jaguar as he helped Godzilla beat up two monsters with hooks for hands and drills for hands, respectively, in 1973's Godzilla vs. Megalon. I caught up with the last Bond movie, SPECTRE, and found it to be fairly plodding and disjointed in the same way that Skyfall was, though without its tense final act. I also managed to catch Zootopia which, despite being a little on the snout with its moral about prejudice, was a great Disney movie with a sharp script and excellent CGI.

For August, I think I'm going to try and shake the doldrums off and commit to writing more. I did all right this week, creating three new pieces on Giant Bomb that doesn't include last week's Sunday Summaries: an article that attempts to find a satisfying "end point" to Stardew Valley, because I've pretty much lost my entire July to that thing and need to move on; a look at how the Square Enix of today might learn from the Squaresoft of twenty years ago for an episodic take on a traditional JRPG, since that's where their mind appears to be at given the segregated Final Fantasy VII Remake and Tokyo RPG Factory's throwback I Am Setsuna; and another list that looks at how a particular climate, in this case volcanoes and other dangerous areas filled with lava, inspires a certain style of atmospheric music. I'm actually feeling a little nostalgic, so maybe I'll bring back my Brief Jaunt feature and check out some old-ass CRPGS or adventure games or the like next week.

All right, let's get this show on the road already:

New Games!

The first week of August is definitely some "calm before the storm" business, and I suspect No Man's Sky made the smart choice by aiming for the end of Summer. That's a whole lot of mostly empty release weeks to get everyone hyped for a game release, and still gives Sean Murray and his team at Hello Games a whole month to themselves for reviewers and gamers to talk endlessly about their discoveries on- and off-planet. We still have a few releases to discuss this week, however:

ABZU is perhaps the game release this week I'm most interested in, though I've yet to see or hear much about it beyond its trailer with its Journey-esque visuals of a picturesque aquatic adventure. I'm fairly sure it won't be the sort of in-depth (as it were) diving exploration simulator of the type Endless Ocean and Everblue were, but I have high hopes for it at least being a compact, beautiful excursion through some photogenic stylized environments with, one assumes, something akin to Journey's dialogue-light and context-heavy plot. If it ends up being the only thing the staff are talking about during the Bombcast this week (as well as whatever the hell is going on with Dan's whole "loser leaves town" video shoot), we'll know if it swims the swim as well as it can talk the talk.

Manic kitchen game Overcooked! hits Steam, PS4 and XB1 this week, presenting one of those co-operative games that still feels kind of aggressive and stressful if you're the one member of the team that isn't pulling their weight. I like the imagination it has for some of its stages, like sticking the kitchens on the backs of moving trucks in such a way that it forces you to take your opportunities to cross over when they arrive, or a ship that constantly changes the layout of the kitchen whenever it keels to one side. Still, if you have a group of comparative ability to play with, Giant Bomb's footage has shown that it's a lot of fun.

This week sees the premiere of Telltale's new episodic series featuring everyone's favorite growly orphan Batman. What seemed like an odd choice for the subject of a Telltale game started making sense fairly quickly: Telltale came to prominence with the likes of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, both of which were licenses that started as serial comic books. Who better than DC's most popular character to keep that streak going? If nothing else, it's probably going to appeal to Batman fans more than that recent The Killing Joke movie where he bones who, in most depictions, is treated like the daughter he never had. That's what happens when you get Woody Allen to write the script treatment.

We also have Tricky Towers, that physics-based multiplayer block-stacking game from the last UPF that... I dunno, something about putting real physics behind Tetris pieces just causes me anxiety in a weird way. I think it's because you're taking something as wonderfully ordered and structured as Tetris and adding an element of chaos that destroys its orderly serenity. It's hard to explain precisely what I mean by that, but I always thought this Achewood comic - where the perpetually nervous Roast Beef is starting to lose his grip through fear, and a nightmarish Tetris scenario is used as an visual metaphor for his frayed nerves - is a brilliant example of how the rational nature of Tetris can represent our own calm center, and how easy it is for that calm center to be warped through stress or concern. Anyway, the game seems neat, but I dunno if I have the stones to actually play it.

Oh right! Before I leave off, I recently got word that the original 2009 Wii version of Little King's Story is heading to Steam and GOG next Friday. The site has an ancient Vinny/Ryan Quick Look, but I think the reputation and appreciation of that game has grown over the years. Between its light city-building, Pikmin-style group-based exploration and combat, and its surreal sense of humor and shocking twists, it's an appealing little game that never really got its due. The Steam version's going to see a few enhancements, but they're sticking closely to the whimsy of that original version rather than whatever new, unwanted direction the Vita version took it. I'd absolutely recommend picking it up this week, if there's nothing on your backlog jumping out at you and no new releases that catch your eye.

Wiki!

I could've done more this week, but finishing the month of November 1995 seemed like a good time to call it quits for the time being. That's nineteen games total, the majority of which were Super Famicom exclusives. Naturally, that includes a few new pages as well, and you can check out the updated list for the two new arrivals.

I mentioned last time, or perhaps the time before last, that while October featured a string of big names that helped cement the Super Nintendo as a continued force to be reckoned with even as the superior technology of the PlayStation and Saturn threatened to overshadow it, November is somewhat less impressive. Here's a brief smattering of what I delved into this week:

Urban Strike, along with a disappointing port of the insane WWF WrestleMania: The Arcade Game, were the final two "North American Premieres" of November. Urban Strike is, of course, the third game in EA's open-world (albeit within a scenario structure) helicopter sim series that has you scour a map for objectives to complete, items to winch up and enemies to take down. I recall my days playing those first three - Desert, Jungle, Urban - as a balance of hit-and-run attacks on "high risk" enemy locations while tucking my tail rotor between my... struts, and flying off to recover the health and ammo I'd lost before resuming the next strafing run. Urban sets itself apart with on-foot sections that, as with the recent Star Fox Zero, didn't really do the franchise any favors.

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest is perhaps the stand-out from November '95, taking the blueprint of the original DKC and improving upon it with a second character that could hover, more in the way of secrets and level variety and, somehow, a superior soundtrack. I still love some of the tracks of the original - the ultra chill Aquatic Ambience, for instance, is the makening-outest of make-out music - but it's hard to deny that Rare composer David Wise was on rare form (sorry) with tracks like Stickerbush Symphony, Forest Interlude and Lockjaw's Saga.

Romancing SaGa 3 is one of those games I discussed in the Squaresoft article above, as it appears right in the midst of Square's dalliance with scenario-based RPGs. As with the two prior Romancing SaGa games, the player takes control of a number of different protagonists, each of whom has a different tale to tell and a different perspective on the larger events occurring across the world. Like everything Akitoshi Kawazu made, there's a force of creativity at work that is sometimes at odds with how much fun the games are to actually play, and while it's not going to compare favorably with Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI, it's still a paean to the chances Squaresoft was willing to take back then (though I suppose it's odd to call the sixth game in any series truly original).

Finally, Rendering Ranger: R2 deserves mention for being a German-developed shoot 'em up with a huge amount of technical aplomb and a mix of Contra run-and-gun gameplay and fast-paced ship combat, and is unusual for being a European game released exclusively in Japan with a very limited run. Presumably, there were plans to localize it to its native PAL region that fell through, possibly because everyone had already redirected their energies towards producing games for PlayStation. It would be one of the final projects of Rainbow Arts, who were one of Germany's biggest developers during the Amiga/Atari ST era of European gaming. World Masters Golf, meanwhile, is a Europe-exclusive Mode 7 golf game that didn't get localized elsewhere for what I presume are similar reasons. We'll be seeing more PAL/JP SNES games that skipped US releases as we get closer towards the end of the SNES's lifespan.

Anyway, next week I begin on the final (and largest) month of releases for the SNES. December '95 saw no less than sixty new releases, almost as many as October and November added together, and it'll probably take the rest of August to process them all. Once it's done, though, I can finally relax a bit with the Super Nintendo and look elsewhere for Wiki Project ideas.

Stardew Valley!

I think I've probably said everything that needed to be said with regards to Stardew Valley, except to announce that I've made the decision to stop regularly playing it as of today. As I detailed in the above article - here it is again - there's no clearly defined end point to the game but several places where you could feasibly be happy to mark the game down as complete and move on. One of those points - the completion of the local Community Center's revamp - carries with it a certain story significance (and a snazzy trophy for your house) to the extent that I'm happy enough to make that the finale of my Stardew Valley experience. I've still got a handful of items to ship, artifacts to find, recipes to cook and achievements to acquire, but I think it's probably time to say goodbye. It's been real, Stardew. I don't doubt that I'll come visit every so often. Especially if I get wind of a major new patch with a bunch of added content.

I will say that Stardew Valley is absolutely worth getting into. It takes the best parts of Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing and Terraria to create a game about nothing that I nonetheless found almost impossible to put down. It really has taken all my willpower to stop. Just make sure to clear your schedules for a couple of weeks before you try it yourselves.

Cibele!

Friend of the site Nina Freeman, a.k.a. @hentaiphd, rose to prominence last year with this intimate, autobiographical adventure game that explores how a pivotal moment of her romantic life came to happen, and how an MMORPG helped facilitate it. To reveal much more about the plot of Cibele would be to take away from the overall experience, but the game creates a distinct, almost voyeuristic, connection between its heroine and the player that feels quite fearless on the developer's part.

Nina, that is to say the in-game Nina, is depicted as a lonely teenager going to college at New York that finds it difficult to make connections with the other students around her. The exception is her favorite partner, Ichi, in her favorite MMO, Valtameri. Their online relationship blossoms over a period of months with the game regularly skipping ahead in time after each of its "sessions". These sessions first introduce Nina's desktop - cluttered with personal files such as homework, archived blog entries, selfies and other photos that the player can sift through - before inevitably their cursor wanders over to the Valtameri icon and Nina, as her online persona Cibele, gets into an instance with the deuteragonist, Ichi. These MMO instances boil down the experience of a traditional MMO to a rudimentary dungeon crawl, where the object is to simply kill enemies until a boss arrives, and then kill that boss. Mostly every significant aspect of the genre has been deliberately stripped out - equipment, drops, leveling up, special attacks, healing - so that these sequences can better serve to frame the spoken dialogue going on between Nina and the other player Blake, and how their relationship continues to intensify as they spend more time together online. Between each of these sessions, we see brief FMV snippets of Nina away from her computer, ruminating over her most recent virtual encounter with Blake.

As with any visual novel-style adventure game, the gameplay serves to frame the narrative rather than the usual opposite. The player's agency in going through Nina's desktop files or poking through her chatlogs is simply there to add context to what's going on peripherally in her life and how her relationship with Ichi/Blake has progressed since the last time skip, and the option to dive deep for additional context is one of those few unique opportunities that video games can provide as a platform for storytelling. That aspect reminds me of Christine Love's output or something like Her Story, and how those games provide less of a spoon-fed direct narrative than one the player actively pieces together, even if Cibele's MMO sequences - the meat - are entirely linear and progress the same way every time.

Ultimately, the game is another chapter in a burgeoning vein of interactive fiction that, while telling a deeply personal story with the video game medium at its core, also explores the potential of that same medium to tell those stories. If you didn't care for Gone Home or conflict-light, narrative-driven Indie games of that type, it's probably not going to win you over, but it's a short, intimate portrayal of finding love on the internet that's sweet, awkward, intense and vulnerable in equal measures and I enjoyed it a lot. Well, except for the brief parts where it too closely mirrored my own online experiences to be comfortable, but I suppose that's a compliment of sorts too.