So there I was, finally done with a month straight of playing a new Indie Steam game (almost) every day. I'd actually beaten a handful of the games I played and managed to completely disregard an even larger handful. While I really wanted to move onto something completely different before utterly burning out on even more whimsical/melancholic platformers with time manipulation/clones/physics/hats/whatever, at the same time I realized that I had so many worthwile games sitting on my hard-drive left unresolved. Despite the original intention to seek my interactive entertainment elsewhere, I hunkered down with a few of the remaining gems that I covered last month to give them the full playthroughs they deserved rather than postponing them for what might become an indefinite period of time. For the most part I can't say my opinions about them have changed too much since those early impressions, but all the same I'm going to provide a few May Madness addenda to give these games a more conclusive send-off now that I've seen everything they have to offer. Seems only fair.

Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory is a particularly short game as it turns out. I intimated in its May Madness entry that the then heretofore unsolved later levels will no doubt take a lot longer than the first few sets based on that old axiom that governs all puzzle platformers - that they'll require a lot more trial and error and precision the further you go. Not quite the case, as it turned out. While Sugar Cube does have a respectable difficulty curve, the careful platforming never reaches a difficulty akin to Super Meat Boy's nor do its puzzles resemble the hair-tearing complexity of a late Toki Tori stage. In reality, the game's a very breezy platformer with a neat idea that ends far too quickly. Maybe that's for the best, since there's often a lot of inane padding within games of this type: additional level design takes a lot less time to organize and integrate into a game than creating new art assets and composing new music, so avoiding a lazy path to an overstuffed end product is almost admirable. (I've noticed I can put a positive spin on almost everything these days, regardless of how rampant my cynicism might be elsewhere. Maybe I should see if IGN is hiring?)

Rochard is another puzzle-platformer, though one far more focused on action gameplay and player resourcefulness. There's usually more than one way to skin a cat, as the Southern, idiom-spouting Jon St. John-voiced protagonist might say, and this is the secret appeal of Rochard that I somehow managed to overlook while writing up its respective May Madness account. The game finds ample applications for both its gravity gun and zero gravity contrivances while constantly introducing new tools with which to conceive room-clearing strategies around. While a lot of puzzles are of the simple "how do I get to there from here?" set-up, many more are of the "how do I remove all the enemies in this room without getting brutally murdered?" ruminations. There's usually a direct way (that'll get you killed), a fun way (that'll get you killed even more) and a sneaky way, which tends to require that you to be a little more judicious with the many tools at your disposal rather than wading in with the basic firearm. It's a great system, especially on harder settings where the brute force option is rarely tenable, and reminded me a lot of old Delphine games like Flashback and Another World, albeit far less stringent on following a singular critical course of action. I neglected to mention the soundtrack in that May Madness too, which is also a lot of fun: it ranges from Vangelis-esque ambient tracks to a goofy John Williams Imperial March send-up to a few country/western songs befitting its rugged Dixie hero. I'd say the one thing that lets down the game is its ending, but I obviously won't be going too deep into that.

Cthulhu Saves the World is the third and so far final May Madness game I've beaten in June and is perhaps the one game that hasn't changed at all in my estimation since its original blog went up at the end of May. It helps (if that's even the right word) that the game is incredibly similar to its decedent-starring antecedent Breath of Death VII. It has a few upgrades and a much more entertaining plot but is otherwise functionally identical and still riffing on modernizing the hoary blueprint of the 8-bit JRPG. Perhaps the best part of this game was actually my correspondence with @zombiepie, who was frequently out of his depth (so to speak) with regards to Cthulhu's many RPG references and deliberate design choices due to having managed to completely avoid playing a JRPG of any kind during his years-long tenure as a moderator for a video game website. It's been curious reading his struggles in beating the game and the considerably tougher struggles to understand any of the fourth wall breaking, trope-highlighting gags. Were I to rate Cthulhu Saves the World solely as a JRPG it falls woefully short compared to many (but definitely not all) of its iconic contemporaries, but then the intent is really just to create a throwback to the genre's more primitive era and have a few gags at that archaic model's expense. In that regard, CStW a worthwhile little adventure for genre fans (and, it would seem, for neophytes as well) and the lean playtime ensures that it does not outstay its welcome.

So where does that leave the other half-complete games from this year's May Madness? Well, even excepting the many I didn't much care for, there's still a few more games I intend to see to the bitter end: Noitu Love 2: Devolution I promised I would leave well enough alone until after I have a few more Mega Drive era Treasure games under my belt - fortunately, you can currently buy Gunstar Heroes, Light Crusader, Alien Soldier and Dynamite Headdy on Steam in reasonably-priced bundles. I think that will give me a pretty decent basis for appreciating the particular world that Noitu Love 2 calls back to. Fortune Summoners I've elected to hold off on for a really busy future screenshot LP, because even though the action RPG combat is kind of stale and stilted I've found Carpe Fulgur's translated script to be delightful so far. I fully intend to play through the rest of Vessel, Closure and Cargo! The Quest for Gravity at some point as well, though I really can't muster the energy to play any more puzzle-platformers right now (let alone the exhausting intrinsic madness of Cargo, which I might hold off on until I have a better computer that can handle all its particle effects without slowing to a crawl).

While I'm here pontificating on my Summer gaming plans, here's a few others I'm thinking of playing: Mother 3 (before the VGCW chat completely spoils every part of that game whenever Flint appears), Project X Zone (buying it new since it's so cheap, so that'll be a review), Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (currently the last of the mainstream Zelda games I've yet to beat), the two CING games I'm still sitting on (Last Window and Another Code: R) and either Tales of the Abyss 3D, M&L: Bowser's Inside Story or Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. The latter three depending on how long DQIX takes to beat, which I've been playing on and off for almost a year now. Portable RPGs do tend to strain the eyes a bit; I wish more of them were available on consoles in some manner of an alternative playing mode. Couldn't you play GBA games on GameCube, or was that only for GC games that supported the link cable?

At any rate, the only other blogging plans for Summer, despite my usual Comic Commishes and TurboMento playthroughs, is during E3 itself. As per usual, I'll have another daily series (though a much shorter one, thank Cthulhu) as E3 is happening to give people a breather from the overload of hype and news that tends to follow in its wake. Even though this year promises to be more interesting than usual I still tend to see E3 as this bloated, sweaty overrated mess of a debacle. And believe me, as someone who tends to become a bloated, sweaty overrated mess during the summer months, I know my own.

I'll just end this already overlong blog about nothing much at all with some E3 predictions:

• Microsoft will clarify that the XOne's built-in enhanced Kinect will not "always be watching you". Due to modern improvements in intrusive Kinect camera technology, it'll occasionally switch from monitoring the player's game space over to the bathroom whenever the player's significant other happens to be showering.
• Sony, not to be outdone by Call of Duty Dog, announces a new HD state-of-the-art Blinx the Time Sweeper game. "We grabbed it from right under Microsoft's noses," they'll breathlessly gloat, "it's like they didn't even know about the goldmine were sitting on." "You'll care deeply about this time-travelling feisty feline," confirms Kaz Hirai.
• Mr Caffeine will be rebranded as Mr Backwards, who goes on and on about how he wants to play really old dumb games with really old dumb graphics and are sold at really old dumb reasonable prices. He'll also continue to make the "widdle-dee-woo" Wayne's World noise prior to every one of these statements about games from the distant past. At the end of his painfully long performance (placed either at the start of the Sony or the MS conference so the press will have to sit through it), a slide on the overhead projector will rhetorically ask the crowd, "are you Mr Backwards compatible?". They'll never have to worry about that argument again. Or so they'll believe.
• Nintendo throws a massive spanner in the works when they dress up various anti-next gen activists from NeoGAF and 4chan as Pikmin who then run onto the stage during the PS4 and XOne conferences and symbolically carry away the "trash", presumably to sell to gullible aliens. Nintendo will later claim zero responsibility for the incidents via their spokesperson Wario, between mocking cackles.

But ultimately I suspect it'll be more of this.