Otawong

Pure nostalgia: The Civilization 4 menu music, enhanced by Leonard Nimoy’s in-game narration.

I finished Saros today. What a great game! It clearly drew inspiration from works like Alien and Solaris to wonderful effect. Haunting, beautiful, and delightfully challenging. I included some screenshots from my play through. Wild to think it’s all realtime and 60fps.

I’m not sure what sort of cursed AI prompt was used to put together this key art for Seinfeld on Netflix, but it has absolutely mangled Kramer.

@oliemack.bsky.social what’s your feeling on the ROG Xbox Ally X at this juncture? I have a launch stream deck and I see the RXAX on sale sometimes and wonder if it would be a nice upgrade. Maybe with Bazzite?

Buying Steam games and playing Steam games really are 2 different hobbies

I liked Doom: The Dark Ages so much I got it on Steam and 100% it again.

Epic fires 1000+ employees because Fortnite engagement is down. Fortnite engagement: Some Epic developed modes have low player counts and fight for visibility against “Steal a Brainrot”. Epic pays the makers of Brainrot a revenue split instead of promoting the work done by their own employees.

I can’t imagine what my wife thinks when she hears me watching speed runs. “I’m Gonk Droid 7, today we’re running the truly awful Casper The Ghost for the NES. Let’s get right into it with the first trick we call the backhand of God. I have my co-host PickleLegs here to tell you how it works.”

It’s my yearly “The Games I Played Last Year” post. See if I liked the same games as you! Feel justified if I did or perhaps seethe if I did not.

Another amazing year of work from the great people of Digital Foundry! Absolute best in the business. Consider giving a follow to: @dark1x.bsky.social @oliemack.bsky.social @dachsjaeger.bsky.social @cataferal.bsky.social @digitalfoundry.bsky.social

Finished Baby Steps today. Is it my game of the year? Maybe! What a delight. It’s a hard game to be sure, though to some degree it is only as hard as you want it to be. You can, for example, climb these stairs or you can take hours climbing around them instead. I did. Now they call me Lord.

Pauline: You sure love bananas, DK! DK: Pauline, to call it love is too simple. I need bananas. They are my master, and I am their slave. Do you love air, Pauline? Or does it control you? Its very presence, an unnoticed necessity driving your very life. Pauline: I’m too nervous to sing!

I think I’m almost finished FF4. This game is pretty wild. Definitely not my favourite in the series, but it’s interesting for sure. There’s humour, death, sacrifice, and a giant robot fight against tanks and airships. Giant mech was not on my bingo card for this game.

And FF3 is also complete now. Moving on to SNES era next with FF4 and FF5. FF3 was pretty good, and would have clearly been pushing the NES about as far as it could go with its system complexity. Not a lot of story, but the job system was neat.

Well, Final Fantasy 2 was the next game in my quest to complete the series. It’s an interesting one, but it felt pretty flawed at times. The levelling system was pretty inspired, but it ends up feeling unbalanced. Also, there are some wild difficulty spikes in the game. Still, it was fun!

I would love a book of Miyamoto’s criticisms and thoughts on games by other developers.

The glamour shot of Toad on his motorcycle in the Mario Kart World menu is divine.

Well, it’s been a long time since I 100% a game, but Doom: The Dark Ages is a delight. Also, a very accomplishable achievement list for anyone interested.

When the cat’s away, the mouse will play a bunch of niche records.

When I hit any adversity in life, I often think back to the Persona 4 difficulty selection screen that encouraged me to “please experience the tension”.

Took the plunge on a 9070 XT and then proceeded to play Duke 3D all weekend.

Finished Astro Bot today. Fantastic game from start to finish.

In other news I took a break from Astro Bot to return to playing Outer Wilds. Finally finished it all these years later. Incredible game with a mind boggling amount of care and detail poured into it.

In these trying times I just want to live in the PS2 boot up sequence.

I don’t think I can accurately describe how good Astro Bot is. The art is gorgeous, the worlds feel deeply alive, and there are gameplay ideas that are used once that could be entire games. And then suddenly you can take a photo of Astro Bot pretending to clean bird poop. Amazing stuff.