by Chezni
I just discovered Aidyn Chronicles in space. And it is…
All right. I’ll admit it. I’m in love with absolutely terrible RPGs. This is one of them. Full warning–I’m rating this at Tier 1. This is probably not even close to a Tier 1 title for most people. That being said, here we go into the world of Anachronox.
by Chezni
Technicolor violence anyone?
Hotline Miami… I feel a bit out of my element here as I lack the knowledge of where to put my gaming thumb on the fanbase of this series. Having beaten the first Hotline, I may be able to start there. HM 1 was a game that celebrated violence, sex, drugs, hallucinations, rampages, rape, cruelty, murder, depression, murder again and insanity to the extreme. What made this all acceptable? Two things: 1. It’s all displayed from a top-down pixelated brightly colored viewpoint, so we as the onlooker don’t quite get a close-up view of it all. 2. It’s presented almost as an art-piece.
by Chezni I just spent the last half hour dressing up a little girl and trying to get birds to poop on her. I’m going to jail aren’t I?
I’ve actually been trying to get this one to work for a while, but have been too frustrated to make any progress. For whatever reason, my gaming PC (well laptop) which so far has been able to run any game I put into it on max settings, could not seem to power through this mobile to PC port with higher than single digit FPS. The fix was actually quite simple, but dredging up the mental energy and fortitude to pursue the fix was something I lacked until now. On the unlikely off-chance that you too are experiencing the same problems, simply open up your BaseEngine.ini file and implement the following changes I found on one of the Steam forum posts:
bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE to FALSE
ImageReflectionTextureSize=1024 to 2048
TerrainMaterialMaxTextureCount=16 to 32
TerrainTessellationCheckDistance=4096.0 to “1024.0”
Ran perfectly fine after that.
by Chezni
… … … click here for 100% realistic simulation of Chezni*
I broke down and traveled through the Uplay realm to play this one. I had to. I’ve been waiting literally years to play this one. Ever since I saw my brother play this back in 2013, it genuinely just looked fun. Like, lots of fun. A game where you wear a Hawaiian shirt, run around and shoot terrorists and boars and have access to a quantity of guns and rides that would make Rambo jealous? I’m in. The problem is (and a big reason why Lepcis and I are doing this Steam challenge to begin with) is that I bought a pack of Far Cry games and *forced* myself to play through and 100% the first two before I’d let myself play this one. Truth is, while the first two weren’t bad games, they weren’t the one I wanted to play. Call it thick-headed gaming machoism or perhaps completionist masochism but it’s the truth. That was the kind of gamer I used to be before we started doing this. Anecdote in mind but out of the way, there’s no way I was going to let even Uplay ruin this one for me.
by Chezni
Just ‘cuz. Just. ‘Cuz. If you’re saying “Just Cause,” you’re saying it wrong. Also the title card for this game is crappy, so here’s a guy jumping out of a plane.
Now this is my kind of GTA. Whereas GTA tries to take itself so darn seriously, games like Just Cause (and Saint’s Row I’m told) are just all about having fun. Why? Just cuz, that’s why. Suddenly it’s easy to not only believe but be perfectly okay with accepting the fact that my character is more lead than flesh by the time I’m done with a mission. I don’t care that can jump out of a moving vehicle at nearly any speed and be fine. I don’t care that my special power is summoning a parachute out of nowhere at any given time because I feel like it. It all happens just ‘cuz.
by Chezni
I dream of electric dolphins. What?
This game is awesome. I hesitate to call it a roguelite but it’s not quite a roguelike either–something in-between. You’re in space-somewhere and the space-plague has broken out. Now you’re off to find the space-cure before things can get anymore space-pear shaped in the pit of some apace-mountains where no one has ever come back from alive before. Sounds promising.
by LepcisMagna 
I’ve been looking forward to this game. I’ll admit, I am one of the suckers for high quality pixel art graphics, and this game offers that in spades. You are Otus, a mute Owl-creature-scout-thing. You fly about your town and scout for pirates, unlocking new areas by making friends and solving puzzles – until pirates attack and you are sent on a mission to save the Owl temple.
I had a lot of fun in my first hour, and the atmosphere is certainly more charming than cliche (which can be a real problem with retro pixel art games). The music is fantastic, and the few mechanics I did unlock promise variety in combat and fascinating puzzles. We’ll see if it can hold up through the rest of the game, but for now it is a solid Tier One entry.
by Chezni by LepcisMagna 
I love bridge building games. I have yet to find one that properly balances a good challenge and detail of strain with the freedom and ease of use of a video game. The closest was probably Bridge Construction Set. Poly Bridge is in that same vein, but also knows that sometimes you are just building something that will launch a car spectacularly.
There’s nothing wrong with Poly Bridge, and it is probably fun enough to pick up at some point. But it doesn’t seem to have the depth of Bridge Construction Set and errs on the side of a consistent and simple visual style (which I can’t blame).
by LepcisMagna 
Sproggiwood is a roguelite with a home town element. You can throw yourself against a dungeon an infinite number of times while gaining gold (though losing your levels each time you die). Once you’ve completed the three level dungeon, you can spend your gold to improve your home. And I hate to say it, but it’s really boring. Perhaps if they’d drawn me in with their story, I could’ve found myself playing it more, but it just didn’t click with me. The endless interruptions explaining the most basic of game mechanics didn’t help either. Overall, though the graphics have a nice style, there just isn’t anything to sink your teeth into here.
This is the sort of game I wish I didn’t have to put into Tier Three. I like game developers, and I hate the thought of telling them that they’ve made something that I don’t find interesting in the slightest. I don’t want to put this into the same Tier as all the games that are just intentional garbage. I suppose that’s the worst part: it’s not that this game is bad – it’s just that there is nothing new or interesting here.
On a side note: one of the top Steam reviews says “I usually don’t care for roguelikes, but this one being turn-based really did it for me.” I suppose this day was unavoidable. People have now used the word roguelike to describe so many things that it no longer has any of its original meaning.
