Cozy Grove and Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

Two games starting with C that get old quick.

Cozy Grove

This game has you play as a spirit scout sent alone to a small island that is haunted by spirits! But no, it's not a horror. The silly bear spirits all need help and its pretty cool that as you do help them remember who they are which adds more color to their section of the island, and expands the island to unlock more spirits to help. It's got easy controls and cute graphics but THE WORST collect and deliver quest system I've seen. You'll need to scrounge the place to find things that only SEQUENTIALLY SPAWN. Need three branches? You need to find the first one somewhere before the second one EVEN SPAWNS. That's just absolute shit and a complete waste of time. Not recommended.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone

This voxel arena battler has you fighting robots using swords and bows with the main catch being that all weapons are vorpal - any piece hit of you or your enemies is easily chopped! You also get to upgrade after each match but one death and you get to start from the beginning again. The robot commentators are intentionally annoying and occasionally funny but the repetitiveness of the actual play isn't great.

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank and TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Two repetitive games starting with "T".

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank

The follow up to "Turnip Boy commits Tax Evasion" continues the story of the cute veggie people, and Turnip Boy has now signed up with a band of crooks to rob a bank. Over and over (yes the same bank)! How it plays is that in the bank you've got to fight off the guards, shake down the civilians, collect loot and... help NPCs in the bank do mundane things? All in 3 minutes. After that the veggie cops show up and you need to get back to the getaway van and back to the hideout where you can spend your stolen cash on the dark web to upgrade things... and then go back into the bank to do it all again. It's very strange and you'll quickly get that feeling of doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result...

TOMAK: Save the Earth Regeneration

Do you like Tamagotchi games? The ones where you have to care for, feed and nourish your pet friend? This is just like that, except your friend is a female head growing out of a flower pot that you need to care for and you have a time limit to prove to the gods that love exists by doing so (or the Earth is destroyed). Sure, it's strange - but what lets it down is the usual repetitive boringness of Tamagotchi games. Not recommended.

Rustler and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Two games inspired by other games.

Rustler

This game tries its hardest to be GTA but set in medieval times (though this includes medieval graffiti,  beat boxing bards you can hire to ride along with you so that you can have some tunes, and guardsman knights whose horses are equipped with red and blue sirens). You can get the gist from its live action intro. :P

You play as the titular Rustler who is out to make some gold by doing illegal things, the least of which is stealing horses actually! I like that horses also have various "makes" (like the cars) and that you can re-color your ride through the paint station. Alas its somewhat repetitive, and the fixed top down view doesn't really do it for me, so it doesn't get a recommendation from me. 

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

This side scrolling platform game is basically Castlevania, except your protagonist is now a sexy shard caster named Miriam who has trouble jumping to places unless she wears kung fu shoes and does the correct sequence of moves to "air walk". Her proficiency in the many weapons available does somewhat depend on player skill and knowing the combos that you learn from library shelves, while her stats improve not only from the gear you wear (and craft) but also from the first time you eat any cooked dish so expect to be ingredient hunting a fair bit! 

There's a bit of a grind and more than a little back and forth through respawning enemies but what irritated me most is that you lose any unsaved progress between save points and there are no real hints of where said save points are meaning you might be doing pretty good until you get locked into a non-telegraphed boss room and if you die - hope you have fun replaying that whole segment again. I didn't. 

The Darkside Detective and Definitely Not Fried Chicken

Two games starting with the letter "D".

The Darkside Detective

This small pixel point and clicker has you play the titular Darkside Detective, which includes cases involving ghosts, zombies, and things not of this world! Yet due to the awesome writing and humor, it's always funny and never actually scary. Each case is also self contained with all the items you need to solve it being at the scene, along with easy hints on how to proceed built into the character's musings (so you don't have to press a big "hint" button or anything). On top of all that are some good ideas making this a really easy game to recommend. 

Definitely Not Fried Chicken 

This voxel game is a management one, starting in the tutorial chicken shop where you need to make rooms and decorate them with functional equipment like toilets in the restrooms and friers and chicken huts (for freshness) in the kitchen then hiring staff to handle said equipment. The colonel fires you right after the tutorial though so that you can go use your newly learned skills in building some other enterprise... drugs!? Yep. Not really my style so this one is a pass for me.

Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel and My Night Job

Games in perma-horde mode!

Jotunnslayer: Hordes of Hel

This slow loading game has you playing in various Norse arenas against swarms of beasties, ghosts, and others while you do repetitive objectives within a time limit to ultimately summon the Jotunn boss of the level. While there are multiple characters, weapons, and maps and difficulty modes you could possibly choose from the vast majority are locked and you must do specific tasks to unlock... the game basically (grind mode activate!). I also wasn't too keep on the game pausing every time you level up to pick a perk, but given the game play I can't really think of a better way to have done that. Ultimately not for me.

My Night Job

This small and silly action platformer has hand drawn characters and you play as some guy recruited by the military to save x number of civilians from a haunted house (at least in level one) which endlessly spawns all sorts of violent spooks that range from ghosts, goblins, and zombies to robots with gatling guns (I hate those). You're also under the clock since if rooms get too full of bad guys not only do they kill the people you're meant to be saving, they start stomping until they break the room entirely - causing no more spawns to occur there! All up the game is a short and crazy experience that you should try out if you can find it for free. 

Cleaner and Nobody 2

Two movies where the hero gets loads of plot armor.

Cleaner

Joanna "Joey" (played by Daisy Ridley) has always liked climbing, as depicted in the opening of this flick where she is climbing around some super strong furniture. Fast forward and she's working as a window cleaner for some high rise building when a bunch of murderous eco-terrorists (who are incredibly slow with their trigger fingers) show up to take some corporate suits hostage. Too bad for them they didn't count on the ex-military cleaner chick hanging outside the window... and her autistic brother. It's... not great. I actually think G20, which has a very similar plot, is a better film (by just a little).

Nobody 2

Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) is back and needs to take his family on vacation but his "work", which involves gratuitous and hilarious violence, continues to follow him everywhere. The action and the humor are about the same from the first movie with just a different set decoration this time around, with some minor plot progression in tow - just like a holiday special right? If you liked the first movie, you'll enjoy this one too.

Today I Smiled: Random Funnies and Musics

Hmm, its been a minute since I've used a title like that. Anyway, here are some random things that I'm enjoying at the moment - starting with Vought International. If you're a fan of the Boys and/or Gen V, this has a fair bit of extra content in here that ranges from intentional cringe to really hilarious. I've also been enjoying the FreeMMAGyms channel for both its humor and instruction.

Onto pure silliness we have this Catan clip that anyone can enjoy (sound on), translations of Westeners Chinese Tattoos, stealing a girl's car skit, and proof that live action anime style openings done well can work for anything. As I am compelled to add music stuff, here's Lord Vinherio playing some chickens!?

If you prefer some better musics, here's the One Voice children's choir with a Wicked Medley and their rendition of Golden from KPop Demon Hunters, and an orchestral one of Soda Pop. Note that last one is purely just the music, the visuals are "fake". Speaking of fake, Rick Beato has a quick vid of how easy it is to make an AI Artist. If you prefer something more live and less produced, here's Laufey on tiny desk.

Samorost 2 and the Battle of Polytopia

A pair of super simple games.

Samorost 2

This funny point and click hand drawn adventure sees you journey through space to save your dog who has been captured by aliens. It's a short upbeat game (unlike Happy Game) and while there are some obtuse trial and error bits to it, its not nearly as bad as Machinarium. This is a fun short ride if you can get it for free. 

The Battle of Polytopia

This is basically a boiled down version of Civilization with block graphics. You spend turn based action points to grow your villages, move your troops and basically try to either wipe out all the other civilizations on the map or just be the "best" after [x] amount of turns (usually 30 in the base mode). It is super simple to learn and quite fast and relaxing to play - but it does feel a bit... hollow? Not a bad little game, but it probably only serves as a bridge to actual Civ games.

Make Way and Road Redemption

A pair of racing games.

Make Way

This cartoony party racing game (with NPCs able to fill empty slots) is a pretty fun one with colorful and possibly armed vehicles on offer. The race itself is one of point accumulation across a number of segments. Each segment each racer picks a segment of track to attach to the course, effectively building what everyone is going to be racing on. Then the race and mayhem begin. Falling off the track or getting left behind (because the camera only follows the lead car) is instant death, but its ok because you'll respawn at the start of the next track segment. 

I must admit it's a pretty clever way to avoid player elimination and at the same time rewards survivors by giving them a bigger share of the points to reach whatever the "total goal" selected was at the start. Pretty fun though I suspect it will get tiring quickly.

Road Redemption

This is a four player bike race (plus many NPCs) where riders are armed with pipes and machetes. There's a story of chasing an assassin but really you'll just be wanting to win each leg for bonus money to upgrade your bike or killing skills. Nice enough graphics but very basic racing and combat. Even for me, who doesn't like racing games to begin with, I can confidently say there are better racing games out there.

Dodo

One for the kiddies. 

In this cooperative game there's a cardboard "mountain" atop of which a giant dodo lays an egg. Said egg (which is an interestingly constructed ball) slowly then makes its way down and its the players job to attach the ramps that will let it gently fall into a waiting boat below. Of course, you can't just attach the ramps...

On a players turn you roll the die which will show 1 of the 6 resources available on scattered face down tokens. If you flip up the correct token great, it goes towards building the next ramp piece and if all the "token spaces" on the ramp are filled then it can go onto the mountain and the used pieces discarded "into" the mountain. If you picked up a mismatching token, flip it back down and hopefully everyone remembers what it is. Then its the next players turn!

Very simple, very fast, and easily scalable where the ramps can need more resource slots to complete and the villager "wild card" resources are removed from the random pile to make it harder. Can get pretty exciting for such a simple little game. :)

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

Roll for initiative suckas!

This Borderlands off-shoot is all set in the in universe RPG world of Bunkers and Badasses, featuring Tiny Tina as your resident "Bunker Master" and all the humor and a few cameos from familiar faces from the original franchise. It's the most woke of the games (because its Tina's world after all) and got swords, magic and ... guns? Yep, looks like they kept that bit but added a touch of magic to them with my favorite firearms eventually being the ones that fired multiple enemy tracking magic missiles and "regained" ammo when not being fired.

While the voice acting and story is ok (don't expect it to advance any Borderlands related thing) it is certainly a smaller game. Major areas are still medium to large sized maps but everything else is set on the "Overworld" which is a much more convenient way to reach exploration sites (at which point you unlock the teleporters there and can fast"er" travel around). Getting ambushed or going into the mini dungeons there just puts you in a randomized map (maybe 12 variants at most) where you simply have to kill everything that spawns.

It feels a bit cheap but also very on brand. Other than the main quest there's lots of things to do on the side and things to collect for those with a knack for exploration. While it did get repetitive at times it was quite enjoyable. The ocean blessing song in particular was super effective!

Deliver at all Costs

A mismatch of tone. 

Set on the small island of St. Monique in 1959 you play a young man looking for work at a delivery company to get enough money to pay the rent, but in reality you'll probably be spending it on gadgets or gadget parts to make your cars perform better. Primarily a driving / exploration game that is in bulk made up of fetch quests this has some decent graphics and cut scenes with a good dose of humor due to the nature of the things you end up transporting on your vehicle that include active fireworks, loose fruit, and hungry fish. 

The destructible environment is fun, especially since your car is easily repaired and it seems no one can actually die. The locals do get very violent if you annoy them though, which leads to them attacking your car and yourself until they feel vindicated. You can't game over on that but will experience a much more difficult drive once they start latching on. My issue here is they really make it feel like work, which I guess is fine - but if you just want to have a joyride and go fast there are more than a few things to dampen the mood and that just kills the game for me. The seemingly mismatched tone of the game also doesn't help...

Deadtime Defenders and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

Games with clichéd humor.

Deadtime Defenders

A crazy doctor has opened portals to hostile realms and its up to you to shoot your way through them in this 2D looter shooter to kill em all with your ever improving arsenal of weapons. The art style is very cartoony and they lean into the silly monsters a fair bit, especially since you can technically only shoot left and right making enemies "up and down" from your position safe from your attacks - but they're not super smart and won't exploit that fact. It's addictive enough to go through the very short story but has no real staying power there-after.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing 

In this Diablo-esque action RPG you play a descendant of the famous hunter and you have a bound spirit to assist you in everything from telling jokes, carrying stuff, and eliminating the many baddies on the many maps. As the camera is fixed it is easier for range focused characters to start at the bottom of each map and make your way "upwards" as you can see more which is a bit annoying, but the rest of the game is quite solid with a big variety of foes to deal with and a surprise tower defense section in the middle which keeps it interesting. I did enjoy the humor in this one, especially on the various bulletin boards but the final bad guy is a bit over the top. 

Fast Foursome

Four Epic games that didn't manage to hold my attention for very long.

Wild Card Football

This is all about American Football (not soccer) and presents well with some nice music and cool cartoony but stylized characters (because its football with super powers!), and obviously was designed with head to head play in mind. The downsides for me are that there are a LOT of controls. It doesn't help that I don't really know football either.

Super Crazy Rhythm Castle

This party game (for up to four) is basically guitar hero with side tasks to annoy you while you do it. Some cool songs in here though but man is the villain really annoying in that he talks way too much. Probably a better experience if not solo. :P

TOEM

A very relaxed black and white game about casually wandering around and taking photos of things to earn enough stamps to buy a train ticket on to the next zone to do it all again. There is some humor in the odd ball characters that give you your tasks but some of the targets are quite annoying to find.

Rugrats

Easily the worst of this set that seems to be relying on the nostalgia factor from the TV show. Yes you get to play as the titular rugrats to collect... things through very simple levels. The silly theme and lack of tutorial doesn't do it any favors.

Evil Genius and Evil Genius 2: World Domination

For those who want to take over the world! Muahahahaha!

Thanks to DL (and Wro as it was his idea) I was gifted these awhile back and have spent a decent amount of time with each of them now because yes, I like to pretend I'm a genius. :P These games are basically base builders with the twist that you are a bad guy trying to hide from the forces of justice while you build up your criminal empire. Usually I dislike such games with micromanagement but thanks to an excellent soundtrack and very easy controls where your minions run themselves based on what is available to them, this was rather enjoyable!

I did lose in the original Evil Genius though, as the super agents (among whom are basically copies of John Rambo and James Bond) smashed my minions and defenses to pieces and I could never recover because I could never find out of to actually kill them. The other forces of justice either are rogues who want to steal your stolen loot, saboteurs who blow up stuff, soldiers who kill your guys, or investigators who basically just scout and report back which spawns one of the earlier types to come raid you if they found something worth stealing / destroying / or murdering. :P

I do prefer Evil Genius 2 not only because I won it, but the graphics got a much needed upgrade and the tutorial actually helps you deal with those investigators and teaches you how to manage the "heat" (high heat = high level attackers). It's also slightly easier to avoid the super agents until you get the relevant side quests to take care of them. While there is violence ranging from "brutal" interrogations that can involve chucking people into shark tanks and all the way up to scorching parts of the globe with your doomsday device, all the violence is very comical with not a drop of blood to be found. All up very fun and one I recommend, though if you're only going to play one of these, Evil Genius 2 is the obvious pick with its much needed updates.

Scattershot

It's time for a random bits containing all the miscellaneous stuff I found just never got around to posting over the past few months!

Starting off with an unposted [Chess Campaign] post (remember those?) where I actually beat Stockfish 4 (as White) using a London vs its Pirc and got its queen early with a pawn push, then had two games against Rose, the first one I was White and sed a London but found myself constantly on the backfoot, staving off checkmates from Queen + Rook and Queen + Bishop but Queen + pawn finally got me and in the second game I played Black. Caro Kann won early pawns for me then we went into a LONG game where both sides were attacking and I lost pieces for her pawns. Eventually got a slayer queen to constantly check her king to clean the board and she resigned when it was just her king left against five of my pawns. I also discovered Josh's ELO is 1300, and then promptly stopped playing Chess entirely because I got sucked into Elden Ring (then forgot to go back).

I had also tried out a solo card based RPG called Deathship where you are a slave aboard an alien ship you must do your best to ... get a high score? What? Yep, your escape will only end in your death - but you might be able to make some friends and kill some guards on your way there. Not recommended. I can't even find the link to this anymore.

Speaking of RPGs, do you need to generate a city map really quickly? This free online Medieval Fantasy City Generator might be just what you need. Other things I found interesting was this method of watering plants using a fog condensation net, weapons testing against a Prince Rupert's drop glass and the Sphere Stadium in LA. That exterior just looks amazing and can be lit up to look like almost anything!

As I usually spruik a musician in these types of posts, for this one I'll highlight the young Aimee Carty who has some good composition and performance skills. Also if you just want some free music, check out NEFFEX. Props to Heartlessgamer for that bit of info! Switching into something funnier, here's an AI's attempt at close captioning the German National Anthem. Might as well follow that with more funnies from Yoleendadong, ISMO, and this old but amazing clip of how to win a cotton candy eating race while maintaining composure. :P

Saints Row (2022) and Astro Duel II

Still clearing out those Epic giveaways...

Saints Row (2022)

This reboot of the franchise drops the characters and continuity from the original (where the protagonist has possibly fought aliens, been to hell and had the Earth destroyed) and gives you a brand new "boss" who happens to have skilled room mates that are already part of other various gangs, but are still unable to make the rent. They're pretty cool, as is the gigantic map you can play in. Alas most of the crazy side jobs tend to be locked by a grind, so its likely you'll complete the main mission first and once you do that, well... there's no real incentive in going back to do the unlocked stuff. Also, the towing type minigames suck which is a shame because that's one of the few new things they tried to add here. Everything else is just a "hey remember this from the other game... where it was better?". Only recommended to people who haven't played any Saints Row previously.

Astro Duel II

This is a strange pixel game where you fight other players (or NPC monsters for solo players) on maps that are both top down asteroid-type shooters with you piloting a spaceship, but if you fly into an area with gravity (or get destroyed) you hop out as your anthomorphic avatar to continue the fight. After a few moments your spaceship form returns too, but somehow being outside the spaceship gives you more options in the way of attacks. A very odd game and not one I recommend.

Snakebird Complete

Do you remember the old snake game? The one where you are constantly moving, eating things, getting longer and trying not to run into obstacles like your own body? This is a much updated version of that which does away with the constantly moving bit and change the perspective from top view to a platformer to form the basis of an interesting and challenging puzzle game.

Your snakebirds are very cute with their funny facial expressions and they are pretty sturdy in that as long as one part of them is touching ground they won't fall. Yet I can guarantee that you will fall off ledges or tie yourself into knots at some point but not to worry, there's a handy undo button (1 step back) or reset button readily available at all times while you try get all the fruit and make your snakebird (or in some cases snakebirds) way to the exit portal.

So yes, it's a silly little game but much better (and harder) than I thought it would be.

Just One and Magic Maze

Party games with limited communication!

Just One

In this three to seven player game (though you can easily add more), one player is the "guesser" and after giving a number from 1 to 5 then leaves the room while the remaining people take one of the many cards from the box which has five words and the guesser has to say the one next to the number he chose.

Now, everyone has to write down a one word clue to help him out, and the clue can't be the same word in a different language or have the answer in it (eg. if the word is King you can't use Kingdom). You can use onomatopoeia (words that sounds like something, like "Oink") but can't invent a word that just changes a letter from the target word. The tricky part is once everyone has a word, they first show it to each other and any duplicates eliminate each other on the spot.

Once there are no more duplicate words, the guesser comes back in and hopefully gets the word right! A very easy game to get people involved with a low barrier for entry, and requires zero table space. Big thumbs up for this one - recommended!

Magic Maze

In this chaotic and funny one to eight cooperative tile laying game, there are four different colored pawns trying to steal items from a fantasy mall. From the starting tile you must explore to find each of the items and each of the exits because you are always on a sand timer clock!

Of course this is not so easy because each edge is color coded and can only be explored by the pawn of that color,  all the pawns must be standing on their chosen item before any can escape, pawns can't move through each other, and players usually only have one move they can do... like... move North. That means any time any pawn needs to go that way, you need to be in charge of doing it.

The biggest challenge is that no one is meant to speak, grunt, or point! All you can do is stare intensely or use a "do something" pawn which looks like a 3D exclamation mark that you can put in front of someone. Rules also get added as you play through the 17 scenarios like having to pass your move to the player to the right and each colored pawn getting a specific ability. Easy to setup and again quite fun but as this one needs table space and isn't as welcoming as the above to non-gamers I'd have to recommend Just One over this if you are after a pure party game.

Honkai: Star Rail and Godlike Burger

Two games I got on Epic for free.

Godlike Burger

This is another cook to order game where you are running a space traveling burger joint and are under time pressure to make the correct orders for the various aliens that wander in. Luckily you don't need to deliver it to them as they come to the counter when its ready, however expect to kick your equipment often as they break down and if you REALLY are efficient you can even murder your customers to get some free meat, just be careful not to be caught and who you feed that to as it might attract the space cops!

An interesting twist for sure but one that I couldn't really utilize because I hated the burger assembly interface (there is none). You can't remove wrong ingredients once placed and by default you put anything you are holding (up to 2 things) into a burger automatically so you can't get lettuce for one and tomato for another because both will go to the first one you interact with. Maybe I'd enjoy it more if I ignore the cooking component and just treat it as a murder simulator, but there are so many other games that already do that. Not recommended.

Honkai: Star Rail

After the feeling of incompleteness from my run of Genshin Impact followed by enjoyable exploration in Tower of Fantasy comes Honkai: Star Rail, another gacha game of collecting characters to help you fight battles, often with some elemental alignment that is stronger against some enemies and weaker to others. This time around it is turn based combat and features a train that travels through space! But I've got to say, this must be the WORST of these three.

What? But the graphics and music are nice! The characters are also pretty good and the story is... short, but they're working on it! Sure. My biggest gripe is unlike those ones, the grind in this is put right in your face early on. The main story is level locked and you can't unlock future chapters just by playing through the main chapters. And there aren't even enough side quests (some of which have built in delays of "come back tomorrow to do the next part") to get you to the required ranking to advance. Instead it asks you go through the same few map zones via "Virtual Simulation" (at least two different forms of this too) to grind your level up.

That is ridiculously BORING! Especially when they start adding HP sponge bosses just to draw out combats. Lastly the clearest way to know if the designers are making a grindy turn based battler is if they include an AUTO COMBAT feature, aka "we know its boring so, press this button to make it go faster". This game introduces it to you IN THE TUTORIAL. Strongly not recommended. Stay away from this garbage.

Decluttering Day 10: An old small, and now unused bin. Why the heck were we still hanging on to that one?