All right, I'll level with you. I may have gotten myself into something of a rut of late. If it's not spending the first week of July (and the last week of June) with Tales of Xillia, it's been spending the subsequent two weeks with Stardew Valley. You always think that you're going to make a lot of progress with your backlog over the Summer, when there are fewer new releases to worry about and it's way too hot to leave the house, but something about the heat just slows everything down. The best tonic for a long Summer is a long game or two that doesn't require much in the way of constant alertness. I just chill, feed my chickens and ducks (and rabbits, I have those now too), maybe find a geode and break it open and luxuriate in the pastoral milieu while a thousand more important things I could be doing slip by me. Like actually writing something this week that isn't the regular Sunday Summaries you're reading now.

Though talking of something more active and challenging, the Ziff Davis/YouTube eSports expert Patrick Klepek and I have been racing through the SGDQ Super Mario Maker stages (he is entirely incognizant of the "us racing" part) and let me tell you - that walljump level is a doozy. The only way I can feel better about myself when I consider it took one of those runners about five to ten minutes to beat the stage and me closer to 90 is that it involves a lot of difficult techniques common to "kaizo" SMM stages like those, which the runners are probably more familiar with. I mean, they're a lot better at the game and there's no denying that, but knowing certain tricky-to-master techniques already undoubtedly made that stage a little easier to handle. Techniques like throwing a trampoline in such a way that you can wall-jump and catch it in mid-air directly after, and then repeat that for as long as it takes to reach the top of the chute with the trampoline in tow. Like throwing a shell against a wall at the exact point when you can jump off it as it rebounds, it's something that seems impossible but becomes easier after a little bit of practice where the exact timing eventually becomes second nature. Still, though, that stage was aggravatingly precise, and I suspect Klepek's going to skip it and move onto the next stage for his subsequent morning stream. I don't blame him either. (It is worth noting, if only to Dan Ryckert who is probably still writing down anti-Klepek SMM level creation tips to this day, that Patrick actually picked up the whole trampoline toss thing quicker than I did. He's pretty good at that game.)

Anyway, the temptation is to make a promise that next week will not have any Stardew Valley content, having exhausted almost all discussional value, and that I'll either play a bunch of smaller games like the contents of the fairly decent Indie Legends 4 bundle from BundleStars (to whom I am unaffiliated - I'm just happy to spread the word of any Indie bundle worth the price) or finally move onto Metal Gear Solid V and the now-requisite "reactions" blog series that accompanies each of those games.

Man, I had genuine plans to complete the PS4 backlog I began back in December before the end of Summer, but it looks like I've got a few games left to go. Still, that's better than having nothing to play at all, I guess. Speaking of which...

New Games!

Welcome to the drought zone! Like California, we respectfully ask that you don't spray games on your lawn or fill up a swimming pool with Nintendo tapes until the drought is over. There's very little to talk about this week, but here goes (figuratively) nothing:

Phantom Brave is coming to Steam! Following Disgaea PC, Phantom Brave PC is joining its NIS SRPG sister to the platform with a graphical update and all the additional content that the PSP ("The Hermuda Triangle") and Wii ("We Meet Again") enhanced ports saw. Phantom Brave is sort of an odd duck as far as NIS's PS2 output went, as it does away with grids for radius-based movement and features an odd system where you summon ghosts to possess objects in the environment before they can have any affect on the material world and fight for you - the object you summon them into, whether that's a rock or a tree or a bush, can also have a strong effect on their stats. The story's a giant bummer for the first half of the game, so get ready for some downer moments. Disgaea is very much NIS's flagship series, but Phantom Brave is probably their most challenging game from a structural and conceptual standpoint.

Talking of conceptually challenging, this week also sees the long-awaited release of Quadrilateral Cowboy, the cerebral hacking game from the makers of Thirty Flights of Loving, Blendo Games. From what I've seen of the game it looks like total coding gobbledygook with Blendo's distinctive blocky graphical style, and I'm looking forward to a Quick Look that'll help explain what precisely is going on with that game. The other big Indie release this week is Double Fine/Adult Swim Games's Headlander, a B-movie featuring an astronaut's disembodied head that is able to take over the bodies of various robotic creatures. Feels a bit Geist-y, maybe Space Station Silicon Valley, and I'm hopeful it turns out all right. We wouldn't want any heads to roll, after all.

In JRPG news, we have: Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force for PS4 which appears to be a remastered version of the original Fairy Fencer F for PS3; the sesquipedalian Mystery Dungeon successor Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate for PSP; and Blade Arcus from Shining: Battle Arena which isn't an RPG strictly speaking but a 2D fighting game based on an RPG series, sorta like Persona 4: Arena. It's also yet another PS3-to-PS4 remaster, but who's still counting.

For episodic and DLC updates, we have Episode 7 of the Minecraft: Story Mode Telltale adventure game (I had no idea Telltale could count to higher than five) and the new Vault-Tec DLC for Fallout 4 that lets you create your own Vault using the same tools as the settlement feature. I neglected to mention it last week, but we also saw the fourth episode of the sublimely weird Kentucky Route Zero recently.

All right, so that isn't exactly "nothing", but there's not a whole lot here I'm particularly excited about. I guess I'll know for sure when Giant Bomb covers all of the above (except for the JRPGs, of course).

Wiki!

To make up for the relative dearth of work last week, and the fact that I postponed a few extra podcasts to this week, I've managed to complete the Giant Bomb wiki pages of Super Nintendo's October 1995 release schedule and take a decent chunk out of November 1995's to boot. The difference in quality between October's releases - which saw Secret of Evermore, Terranigma, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, Magical Drop and this week's Tetris Attack, all of which could feasibly end up in a SNES expert's top twenty or thirty games for the system - and November's is fairly stark. November is weighted heavily with what I've dubbed North American Premieres: games that were released first in North America and then localized elsewhere, and are chiefly from western studios. November is of course pre-holiday season, and is generally when Acclaim and EA dump the majority of their games for the gift-buying throngs around Black Friday. I'm just saying... don't get your hopes up for this week's list.

Finishing October's remaining games, we saw two brand new wiki pages (consult the usual list as always) and not a whole lot else of anything noteworthy. I mean, the only game that seemed halfway interesting from that bunch was Tenchi Muyo! Game-Hen, a Fire Emblem-style strategy RPG based on the inexplicably popular harem anime. Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack is in there too, of course, but I covered that for one of the GDQ wiki projects already. One of many great competitive puzzle games for the system.

For November, I managed to get fourteen games into the list of sixteen North America Premieres for the month. Prepare yourself for some licensed crap:

Naturally, there's the EA Sports line-up: Madden NFL 96 and FIFA Soccer 96, following NBA Live 96 from October and NHL 96 from September. Some of those sports games are starting to feel their age a bit, and others like FIFA are already jumping to the next console generation with polygonal athletes and player-controlled cameras rather than the fixed perspectives of before. EA Sports is not one to abandon a console, however, and they're regularly the last guests to leave when a console reaches the end of its lifespan. The last EA Sports game to be released on the SNES was also the penultimate North American release for the system, but let's save that for another wiki update.

Let's not forget that there were still some good western-developed console games back then too. Earthworm Jim 2 and Super Turrican 2 are fantastic (well, subjectively) run-and-gun shooters that tried to mix things up with various vehicular levels and, in the case of EWJ2, some surreal humor. Dirt Trax FX was a surprisingly acceptable motocross game that, despite using the RAM-intensive Super FX Chip, ran fairly smoothly and responded the way you'd want it to, as opposed to the disastrous (and similarly-titled, making it easy to confuse) Dirt Racer.

Then we have the licensed games...

Emmitt Smith Football and Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball are two sports games that, in lieu of the official licenses for the professional organizations those sports pertain to, instead brought in a couple of ringers to endorse their nondescript sports games. Big Hurt Baseball has a reputation for its impressive (at the time) graphics, though I'm not sure if that reputation extends to the gameplay.

We have AAAHH!! Real Monsters, perhaps the only Nickelodeon cartoon where Klasky/Csupo's impressively ugly art direction was put to congruous use in a pre-Monsters Inc. universe where meek monsters go to school to learn how to become terrors that bump in the night. That the three main characters - Oblina, Kromm and Ickis - perfectly fit the Harry Potter trio's roles of "the overachieving snooty girl", "the dimwitted but loyal best friend" and "the self-conscious prodigy with an impossible legacy to live up to" years before Rowling ever began her seminal work is sort of curious as well. The game? Oh, it's a janky side-scrolling platformer.

Doom Troopers, Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.S: Covert Action Teams and Spider-Man & Venom: Separation Anxiety are all both pretty decent exemplars of what was wrong with licensed comic book games in the 90s as well as 90s comic books in general. Way too much posturing and edginess, not a whole lot of substance. We got the requisite Spawn game last month, but there's clearly still more of this Liefeld-esque nonsense to come.

And then there's the bottom of the barrel: Izzy's Quest for the Olympic Rings, an Olympics mascot no-one liked in a licensed video game no-one asked for. A bizarre, out-of-touch marketing team's concept for a video game that, unlike the similarly doomed-to-fail Socks the Cat game based on the Clinton kitty, actually managed to see a release.

Even if the rest of November involves some pretty unexciting Super Famicom games, it'll be less of a trainwreck than this lot.

Stardew Valley!

So I'm reduced to talking about the game's secrets, having nothing left to discuss about this unassuming but oddly habit-forming 16-bit throwback farming/life simulator that has taken over my life. If you're determined to discover the mysteries of the valley on your own time, and I strongly suggest you don't spoil yourself if only for the first year, then maybe skip this section of Sunday Summaries this week. If you're already familiar with the game though, maybe you'll learn something? I've been digging up all sorts of little secrets through exploration, at least whenever I find the time to explore, and it's impressive just how much has been packed into this game. And will continue to be packed in, if what I've read of the developer's notes is true.

1. The first is the Secret Woods, which I mentioned last week. In the Cindersap Forest, directly south from your farm, there's a blocked exit to the northwest. If you have a decent enough axe, you can remove the large log blocking the way and find an extra bit of forest that has distinct foraging items (including the area-specific chanterelle and morel mushrooms) and slime enemies wandering around. What's more is that the stumps in here regenerate every day, giving you as much hardwood - a rare type of lumber - as you can be bothered to fetch. A few farm structures, including the last house upgrade, require hardwood so it's useful for that alone. There's also a unique fish here: the woodskip. Doesn't sell for much, but is required for 100% completion as much as anything else.
2. Then there's the Skull Cavern in the Calico Desert, a region you can only visit after fixing Pam's bus service. This area works the same way as the mines, but doesn't have an elevator and always starts you back at floor 1. It's an endurance run - the further down you get through its randomized floors, the better the spoils. Specifically, you're more likely to find the priceless Iridium ore, needed for all the top level tool upgrades. There's also plenty of OmniGeodes down there; the only geode type likely (though not very likely) to give you the best gift item in the game, the Prismatic Shard.
3. All farm animals give you better artisan items for selling if you've bothered to get their affection towards you up. That's done by petting them every day and making sure they don't go hungry. What's odd is that rabbits leave rabbit's feet behind at high levels of affection. Don't they need those?
4. If you beat the two Arcade machines in the Stardrop Saloon bar, the manufacturers send extra cabinets to your house. One's a Smash TV style dual-stick shooter and the other's an endless runner. You also get an achievement for beating the former, and it's not easy.
5. You eventually get a greenhouse on your property! You can grow anything in there out of season, even during Winter. It does mean having more plants to water in the mornings, though.
6. There are lots of buried books. You can sometimes see hints that there's something buried nearby by three twitching brown weeds that sort of look like earthworms. Dig at that spot and you'll likely get some forage items or coal or clay, but you'll also unlock books at the museum which give you hints about one of the game's better guarded secrets.
7. On Fridays and Sundays, there's a weird travelling cart merchant in Cindersap Forest a little west of the exit to your farm. This shop randomly assigns price values to a randomly selected pool of items that include off-season crops and flowers, random trash, rarities and furniture items. It's also the only place that sells "rare seeds", which I've yet to purchase.
8. If you donate enough junk back to the museum, you eventually unlock the way to the sewers. Down here is a friendly shadow creature from the mines who talks and can be given gifts (his name is Krobus and he's my friend) and sells you the incredibly useful Iridium sprinklers and an energy-increasing Stardrop. You can also talk to a Dwarf in the mines if you have a strong enough pickaxe to break the wall at the entrance, and he also sells you decent adventuring gear. The dwarf and Krobus hate each other though.
9. The game has many, many different types of fish, some of which are well-hidden due to very specific conditional requirements or the difficulty of reaching their location. There's two uniques in the desert, three in the mines at different levels, and five "legendary" uniques that only appear on specific seasons in specific areas, like the far right pier in the ocean area. You will probably want to use a guide for all those, though there's also in-game hints about where to find them.
10. There's eight "Rarecrows": these work like scarecrows, keeping birds from eating the seeds you've planted, but they're only sold at remote locations and often only at specific times. I've bought five of them so far and have no idea what happens if you find them all.
11. If you head directly south from your farm until you hit the cliff, there's a mouse here at night that sells you hats for 1000G each. They're all cosmetic-only and more become unlocked in the store as you get new achievements. He sends you a letter about his shop, but his (her?) actual location takes some probing around to find.

I could go on, but I hope I've proven the point I made a week or so ago that one of the keys to the way the game keeps your attention is that there's always something new to discover by regularly poking around. The game is liberal with its cryptic hints, but doesn't explicitly tell you too much unless it's a core mechanic, like learning how to grow crops, go fishing or marry someone. The game respects your ability to make your own way, whether that's through efficiently scheduling your finite time to maximize gains or figuring out its mysteries via experimentation and your own insight.

(I'll play something else next week! I swear!)

Phantom Brave was pretty neat. I liked the originality of the systems, even if "dumb" best describes the plot. Now we just need a PS4 release, which can't be too far behind, right?

I really wish we had a Shiren on PSN too. Those look rad. Never played Fairy Fencer. If anyone has and recommends it, let me know.