Hey howdy and oh god this edition is a little bit late! Sorry about that, but I guess that’s what happens when I sleep in until 8pm. Anyway, regardless, welcome to my weekly blog about videogames, visual novels, and some other stuff! This week I admit was pretty weak on the actual... fun, I had, I guess, as this week was submission week at my university. And as any good university student does, I decided to leave everything last minute! So within a week I had to make two videogames and write four reports, leaving not that much time for playing videogames. But whatever, let’s see what I managed to sneak into this week anyway!

Mighty Switch Force

In my constant desire for actually owning games for my Nintendo 3DS, my focus went towards the eShop. While I’m still annoyed that VVVVVV doesn’t have a European release, I decided to get Mighty Switch Force. The game revolves around a rather simple switching mechanic there are yellow blocks in the world, some are transparent and some are not. You can press R to switch between the two, turning the transparent ones whole and vice versa, allowing you to jump on top of the whole platforms. It’s a really simple mechanic that gets surprisingly complicated as the game goes along.

Eventually three other kinds of platforms are introduced; purple blocks that can fire characters and enemies around like the blast barrels from Donkey Kong Country, and then red and blue platforms, that only flip when the main character is not standing on top of them. When all four types of platforms are in play the game gets really challenging, having to find blue platforms to stand on just to not flip them, or make them in time with yellow platforms so you can use a purple to blast through them... I think that makes sense.

Anyway, the actual objective of the game is to collect runaway prison inmates, who all happen to be girls because, well, why not, I guess. Once all five have been collected in one level, a robot appears (again, why not) which signifies the end of the level. Each level also has a ‘par’ time, and saves your best time, allowing for a good amount of replay ability to try and beat the par time, which on some levels seem just impossible. If you don’t care for time trail stuff, however, there aren’t that many levels, and if you’re good at the game all the levels can be done in an hour at most.

I should also point out the art is amazing, but that probably goes without saying considering the team behind this game is Wayforward, I haven’t actually played any of their games before this, usually just admiring them from afar, and to be honest this game makes it clear that that was a mistake. I might just end up getting some of their DSi releases as well. After all, having games to play on this game console is a good idea.

Q.U.B.E.

I have a weakness for indie games, I think anyone who reads this blog should know that by now, so when I saw Q.U.B.E. I bought it without even knowing what it even was. Luckily, my instincts worked perfectly again, and this turned out to be a really cool puzzle game.

The game has that serene white wall look that the first Portal had, and combines that with block pulling and pushing. Blocks take can be pulled and pushed have different colours. So the whole thing is white, but red blocks in the wall can be pulled and pushed up to three times out of the wall or floor. Blue blocks can be pushed in to the wall, and act as bounce pads. Yellow blocks come in groups of three and work in sync with each other, by pulling one of the sides that one will be pulled out to three blocks out the wall, the one next to it two blocks, and the furthest away one.

The further and further into the game you get the more kinds of blocks appear, and the game doesn’t really stop to explain any of it. I think I really like that about the game, there aren’t any real tutorials, instead opting for the play to figure out the rules of the new kinds of blocks as they appear. It’s a technique that could have backfired tremendously but it works really well with the aesthetic of the game. Without spoiling anything about where the game goes in a ‘post Portal world’, there’s a part in chapter 3 in which there’s a straight corridor to the next puzzle room, and suddenly the corridor moves and forces you into a different puzzle room... so make with that what you will!

LEAVEs

In the interest of time I decided to play a short visual novel this week. While short visual novels have their place, as a more condensed well told story is usually preferred over a paper thin story spread out over tens of hours, this was just because it was a busy week. With that in mind, here’s a freeware visual novel called LEAVEs, to which I’m linking to the concept page for Leaf, a visual novel company, because fuck the police.

It’s a pretty short story so I may as well go over the majority of it. The game involves two main characters, Tomohiro and Touka, childhood friends who have grown up together and are now living together. The story doesn’t really have much more than that for a premise, there are no user decisions or anything like that, instead the visual novel is adamant about telling a story based around how these characters are trying to survive adulthood. The no choices aspect of it makes the story a little bit interesting, because it also makes the user a bit powerless to stop whatever is going on at any point. Anyway, the story involves them and their friend Matsuri as they struggle with the idea of surviving as adults. Touka gets lead astray and ends up getting hooked on drugs and that’s your story.

And that’s literally all I can say about this visual novel! If you’re interested you can get it here. The only really critiques I can lobby against it is that there are some incredibly unnecessary sex scenes, like betraying the character kind of sex scenes, at part of the story, which is never a good thing. I’d also advise to stop reading before the epilogue, because while the concept of the story can be incredibly powerful to some people, the entire thing is completely betrayed by the epilogue. Like seriously, the epilogue might as well have said ‘well that was all a dream!’ and just ran an unskippable video of the trollolol song.

But who knows, maybe you’re like it!

As always I decided to make some mashups. There are two again this week, also there are technically six as the first one is a compilation of five different mashups.

So you guys remember Katawa Shoujo right? Well I decided to make a mini album called ‘Katawa Mashup’, out of sheer love for the visual novel. Well, when I say sheer love, I mean sheer inappropriateness. Where else will you see the main theme of Hanako, the burn victim, being mixed with Lil’ Wayne’s “Fireman”, or how about the blind girl Lily’s theme with Busta Rhymes “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See”? Yeah, exactly.

The other one is another mashup featuring those stupid ponies that I can apparently never shut up about and because I have an interest in the show that interest completely defines my entire character and no matter what I do I have to be doing it while thinking about ponies right? I mean, obviously there is literally nothing I do in my entire life that isn’t dictated by my enjoyment of this own TV show.

Anyway it’s ponies and Deadmau5.

Well this was a short one! And it was also a late one! Hopefully both of these facts will be fixed by next week. So if you’ll excuse me I’ve only watched the new My Little Pony episode 5 times, that’s clearly not acceptable.