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I was totes okay with not digging the game but I don’t think I was prepared for what lay below the digital shrinkwrap.
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My problem with Mazaica is different – I got bored before I got hooked. I understand making things easy at the start but I was spending more time waiting for visual effects to finish than I spent in a level. And then map appeared and lengthy (for mobile standards) loading screen, so I stopped at 4th level.
Which is good, because I am very much not interested in all the monetization aspects you elaborated on, yuck.
I don’t have another Corru Works level of distraction for you this time, but I’ve recently (read: today) watched this video essayesque thing on Youtube about an obscure horror game which I thought was super cool so here is a link to a video about Scratches.
Also Pixel a Day link! I still haven’t watched most of her videos. Not because they are bad. Because they expect things of me which I rarely have the time to give.
On a side note, my game, Trans Neuronica, is finally near the release. Seriously this time! I’ve even opened up a beta on Steam where I am posting new updates (new one coming tomorrow). All levels are done, story is 95% done, editor is done (will be out before the end of the week). Can’t wait to have the time to work on something next!
i appreciate it everytime you post! i also wanna say i don’t mind at all that it’s not often, being alive and healthy is much better than hurting yourself to write about videogames!
congrats on the two years of thinky! even though i don’t watch streams anymore, it was always cool to see that you were streaming.
not much to say about the main topic, but i have recently gotten into doing puzzmo…. it’s the perfect crossword for me! i’m pretty bad at them, so it’s nice. i anticipate every day.
i got a retro handheld (rgb30) that runs pico-8 splore, it’s fantastic and feels like it’s the absolute best way to play p8 games. i definitely recommend it for anyone who loves that FC.
(i’m also using it to play homebrew gameboy games as well, that’s great)
my game club finished INFRA earlier this year, i didn’t know those articles existed, thanks for pointing them out!
this comment isnt here just because i appear in it.
okay, that is the main reason. but i got another couple of things to read/watch out of your newsletter. thanks!
I’m signed up but didn’t receive any mail.. and haven’t for some months now that I think of it. Checked spam too
Nothing says ‘zen’ like psychologically manipulative monetisation/engagement traps. Yeesh.
Reminds me a bit of a game financier who was recently interviewed on Designer Notes. The interviewer (Soren Johnson) gave him a lot of leeway to build up his bonafides as a real human being who loves art, but it was hard not to notice that he was just really into stealing other people’s games – sorry, “reutilizing play patterns” – and jamming them to the gizzards with microtransactions and bullshit daily chores. When he got to the part where he offhandedly referred to his pitch to take over EA and fire 15% of the workforce, the mask was off completely. I think Soren was too embarrassed to point it out.
Meanwhile, gachas have gone fully mainstream. Studios like MiHoYo are pumping out one a year to all major platforms, including PC and console, and games sites seem mostly to be lapping it up. The idea that a game is something you play on your own terms seems increasingly under threat. I’m not thrilled to learn this model is encroaching on the indie space as well.
Best of luck with that work/life balance, Joel, and with your project refocusing.
Any thoughts on Kagi? I’ve been deliberating taking the plunge myself. I am increasingly feeling driven to de-Google my life.
Upsetting to hear about Mazaica – I love the kind of relaxing toy-like puzzle games that Hamster on Coke and Rainbow Train make. Oh well. At least the last Rainbow Train game (No.9) was on excellent form.
I’m going to try to get these comments responses out but I’m having to spend time on final prep for the Thinky Stream tomorrow 🙂 It’s also the school holidays so I also spent an hour and a half watching Veronica Mars and Lost episodes with my family. Yes, the children are now old enough that they can do this.
Quick response to Nate: Do you want me to add the email attached to your comment to the mailing list? I can’t see it in the list of subscribers.
And one for ShaunCG: I’m much happier with Kagi. Clean layout, no sponsored results. Image search isn’t quite the best and the maps not as cool as Google Maps. It uses Microsoft Bing as the backend. You can try out 100 searches for free.
Hey, it’s Maurycy: It’s either too easy or catapults into busywork. The final straw was a level which looked like a 40×40 grid which required zooming in to solve and it was no zen trip, no sir.
Ah, I remember Scratches – the developer went on to make Asylum. I played neither!
Best of luck getting Trans Neuronica to its end state. I played a little more after the stream last year, but did not finish it.
Wait, here’s Phlebas: I don’t think I ever played No. 9. Push was amazing.
vfig: You get a thanks. Here it is. Thanks!
On your left, it’s CA: In Mazaica’s case, the microtransaction stuff is really offputting, especially if you were not expecting it at all. It doesn’t have that addictive quality that make all that “corruption” of the pure game pay off.
Eesh, gachas. I’ve never tried Genshin Impact but I don’t think I want to. AppUnwrapper has got something like 1500 parts to their playthrough series which still continues. Is it really that interesting?
And I should not forget Daniel: Thank you for your kind words.
I haven’t tried Puzzmo myself although we almost did it for a stream last year.
Oh wow, I’d never heard of the RGB30 (I’m not much into handhelds these days) and it’s crazy that you can have it run PICO-8 games. I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised, but I can’t help being surprised.
Got halfway through the transcript of the Pixel a Day video and… I am being personally attacked?
…ooohh, “what is an indie game?” (I already solved this though, a game is indie if the developer distributes it on itch.)
Yes please Joel! I tried subscribing again but got an ‘already subscribed’ error so maybe you could add me instead.
Nate – I can see you’re subscribed and Mailchimp says it sent you an email. Let me cancel the subscription and let you sign up again, see how it goes. you should get the welcome mail again.
I’ve “permanently deleted” your contact so hopefully it should be a fresh start…?
I never did comment on this newsletter, really! It was pretty dispiriting except for the part where you’re taking steps to reclaim your work/life/thinky stream balance–that is inspiring–but the game with its “try to get you to spend money by making your experience crap” mechanic, brrr. And I guess the same thing is true of Google. Unfortunately I think the problem is that Google lost the battle against its results being filled with garbage and then decided to go for monetizing garbage anyway, not to mention using its ad model to destroy the news sites that would produce non-garbage occasionally (or really to finish the job after Facebook wiped most of them out by using fake numbers to convince them to “pivot to video”). My default search engine is Duckduckgo now which (like Kagi) is built on Bing but there is a lot of stuff it is pretty crap for, like finding where someone said some thing, such that I wind up back at Google anyway.
The videos! Or rather the transcript of Pixel A Day, and the minute of the other one I watched. (As I’ve said I don’t like videos much.) Pixel A Day on Dave The Diver made me think of what makes genre mashup games work or not. Evoland 2 was charming for a few hours but I got to a part where there was some side-shooter or something that I was not good at and I quit, also because it became apparent that the game was loooong and this was less charming. I also ditched Frog Fractions 2 because it seemed like I was having to do a lot of trudging and it was hard to figure out how to progress and just plain hard. The most successful genre-mashes I’ve found are Frog Fractions 1 and A Dark Room, partly because neither of them ever get so hard that they kill your progress. I guess the hazard of genre-mashes is that it is hard enough to make a good game in one genre, and making the parts relatively easy means that you don’t wind up trapped in the worst part. A Dark Room also has the thing that idle games are best when they switch up genres, because then there are things to do, and also that means the designer winds up not only giving the game an ending but an ending that can be reached in a reasonable time.
About the other one, I just got to the part where he talked about you solve puzzles and you get more puzzles and that was the exact opposite of the problem I have with The Witness. Right now, by which I mean six months or so ago the last time I opened it, I am at the top of that tower. I did one of the puzzles which involved trudging up and down from the tower several times to recheck what the hedge maze solutions were. (Saira gives you a camera so you don’t have to do this.) The other one is some big thing with a bunch of symbols I haven’t really practiced with, and I don’t want to do it. But if I want to do another puzzle–I have to trudge somewhere else. I don’t even know where the tutorial for the pentominoes is and I remember I had a hard time finding it the first time I tried this years ago. Which is to say I am not being rewarded with more puzzles. I would like to try more puzzles, maybe, but at any given time there are not a lot of different puzzles I can try unless I want to traipse around for fifteen minutes looking for puzzles that might depend on some tutorial I haven’t found yet. Which is to say that I am complaining about the level select screen. It feels like the game is trying to make it hard to flit from one puzzle to another because it doesn’t trust that the puzzles stand up on its own, and frankly it is right about that!