And so goes anoth-wait, is this from the Saira people? Well, it turns out it was a person, not people. Anyway, it's pretty striking how completely different these games are. You might even call them exact opposites. For instance, remember how Saira looked kinda crap but had decent gameplay to make up for it? (Of course you don't! I'm the only person who played it, and nobody read the damn blog.) Well, NightSky is exactly the same, except it isn't.

Right down to the graphics, which are as good as Saira's were bad.......NightSky looks good, is what I'm saying. I don't even really know how to praise it without turning you off. The game combines the color black with almost nothing else, but again, I should state that this is a good thing. There's something of a calming effect to it, as there's nothing but you and the game. I could carry on and tell you how crisp, minimalist, striking, and other nice words NightSky is, but I'll just leave it at "artistically, this is one of the best games I've played since BIT.TRIP Runner". (Let's just say that I've been playing quite a few good looking games this year.)

But here's the thing: it's very hard to carry a game on graphics alone, since gameplay problems are going to shine through anyway. (This includes graphics that are artistically good in addition to technically good.) Need an example? NightSky. It's a physics puzzler thing where you move right. That's pretty much it. You get two directions to move in, two buttons, three screens per level, and not a whole lot else. Think the level design itself is going to make up for that? Let me set the scene: I beat the first level without pressing a button or even paying attention. Now, not all the levels are like this. I'll get into it more later, but some of them require some actual thought, and predictably, these are usually the most fun. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of these. There are just too many levels where you really don't have to do a lot to get through them. Pardon the pun, but it's simply going through the motions.

Don't get me wrong; the game has plenty of ideas. It's just that it never really does anything with them. NightSky lives on novelty, and will abandon a concept as soon as it's discovered. For instance, VEHICLES! You're no longer playing as a ball; you're driving a-no, wait, you're a ball again. Forget the vehicles. Now remember them, because we're interested with them again. To be fair, though, the vehicles are fun to use in the brief time that you actually use them. Each one has its own strange logic, and a lot of the fun is simply in figuring out how you're supposed to make them move. The problem is that that's all there is to the levels. No puzzles or anything; just figuring out something over the span of a few seconds. And that's the most thought NightSky gives to...well, anything, really. Anything else, like the secrets (just a secret repeated a lot) or the rapid fire length of the levels, only demands about a second of attention. It's almost like ol' Nifflas couldn't figure out what he wanted to do with the new toys he discovered.

Or maybe he just didn't have a lot of control over these toys in the first place. That's not really a comment on the controls (they're iffy, but otherwise get the job done), but more a comment on the double-edged sword that is a physics puzzler like this. That's as close as the game comes not only to focusing on something for more than a second, but also the closest the game comes to drawing me in. No longer can I beat a couple of levels with the window minimized in the background. These new levels require me to study the level design in just the right way...and then completely destroy it all in the process. This is sort of where the game falls apart....yet again. Why bother going for the difficult solution that the level designer planned out when you can simply rely on cheap exploits like leaping over the entire level? Maybe that's where the appeal of the game lies, but for me, it felt too much like I was cheating the game. It's more or less the wrong way to work my brain, which makes it all the more depressing that this is the best aspect of the game. Well, aside from the graphics, but I have to imagine you could replicate that through YouTube. Hey, guess how I'm going to end this part of the blog?

Review Synopsis

• Wow! What a great looking game!
• Wow! What an absolutely nothing else!

This is it. This is the week where I show you guys the song that launched Nanako'Sho's career...behind a link. Because there are some people out there who somehow don't know what Nanako'Sho is.

Oh man, it's not often that you get to see Sonic bust out the starry eyes for a recommendation. Well, except for almost a month ago (I'm not linking that again), but that simply means I've been playing a few amazingly good games lately. Yes, I'm aware of the emphasis. It simply means that you're in for a game I'll pester you for not playing...and possibly a blog that's bad enough to compensate for the game's goodness, since I have a lot of trouble thinking up serious flaws and criticisms for the game.

I'd try challenging myself by listing off flaws right at the start, but since I'm almost certain you don't know how the game is played, these complaints would make no sense. No, this isn't a golf game....well, it sort of is, but the goal isn't to suck up Tiger Woods and gain his powers. Instead, you get a few enemies on the course, and a certain amount of shots with which to kill them all. This is where I'd sarcastically say something like, "Because that's exactly what golf needed: more violence", but it turns out that's exactly what it needs. It adds so much strategy to the game, lining up your shots to bounce off the walls perfectly and applying just the right spin to get around that dickhead tree or whatever. And that's just to finish the hole without dying (presumably from shame). Don't get me started on winning medals or a hole in one or any of the other extra stuff. You have to fucking earn that hole in one, which probably explains why the screenshot I used wasn't my own. And this stuff only gets more co-

Why are you cowering in the corner? I'm going to assume it's because I'm scaring you with all these gameplay mechanics to manage, and not because I can see you from across space and presumably time. Don't worry, though; the game's not that hard to pick up. Hell, if you want to relax a bit with Kirby, go right ahead. Each hole takes, what, a couple of minutes if you like to be really careful? And it's not like the concepts the game's dealing with are terribly overwhelming. You get two buttons to interact with the ball, and aiming amounts to holding left or right. That's really it. And if that's still not enough, you also get some cute little cinematics to help teach you the more advanced stuff. Granted, a lot of them come long after you've figured them out for yourself, but the important thing is that the game has them. That way, you can toss aside basic understanding and get to the meatier strategy stuff I was talking about before. It's probably the rare type of game that can balance the things that Kirby's Dream Course balances, and this game is exactly that type of game.

Wait, I think I forgot to mention the power-ups, because this game totally has them. I'd talk about them in more detail, but what more could I say that I haven't said before? Just take the "the tactics, man" tone from a couple of paragraphs ago, get it caught in some type of electrical fire, and you have a good understanding of how the power-ups work. The only exception is the UFO, whose only purpose is to make the level designers cry. That UFO turns any course into a two step process of aim at the UFO and then just steer toward your targets, because fuck strategy. Fortunately, the UFO only comes up very late in the game, so it doesn't hamper the experience too much. But man, what does it say about Kirby's Dream Course that this is the most significant fault I could find with it? (I'd say the only fault, but isometry and a final boss greet us both.) It says that I'm probably going to creep the shit out of you for not having played it, yet.

Review Synopsis

• Apparently, combining golf, pinball, and murder results in something fantastic.
• Mainly because it leads to a ton of strategy and accessibility.
• But fuck that saucer, man.

Note: Renegade Ego's taking a break next week, since my birthday falls on the day immediately after I post my blogs. But you forgot that, didn't you? BROOKLYN WAS RIGHT ABOUT YOU! *runs out of room crying*