Guardians of the Galaxy is one of my favorite Marvel movies, and the game is my favorite piece of Marvel media. The gameplay is nothing to write home about, in the late game you just spam abilities constantly there’s not much depth to it. It’s essentially Final Fantasy 7 Remake combat but super simplified, and the game is just going down one long corridor after another (a ghost train ride in terms of Yahtzeeism).

I haven’t played the original Total Annihilation but I’ve played a lot of Beyond All Reason and a bit of Supreme Commander, and I’ve played a decent amount of Advanced Wars and recent indie inspired versions. So when I saw an indie game on my Steam Calendar:tm: I was excited to try a mashup between the two genres.

Unfortunately, when you take two things and combine them, sometimes you end up with the worst of both worlds. I think it’s very hard to combine these two gameplay styles, they are sort of diametrically opposed. Turn based games are more inherently tactical, which means precise unit placement and unit choice is emphasized, while large scale RTS are more strategic, emphasizing more the long term decision making and economy build out. Props to the devs for trying but here’s where I think things went wrong:

I’m working on a project that’s inspired by FTL, so I decided I should do some market research on the one other FTL-like out there: Void War. After playing it for a week, I think it is better than FTL in some small design aspects but as a whole package the balance makes the game very tedious. There are also a number of other areas where the game is a clear downgrade from FTL: limited build options, boring writing, and muddy aesthetic.

It’s been some time since my first post on this topic and I’m old now (or unc as the kids would say) 🧓. And with time comes wisdom, and I just realized there is one particularly gaping hole in my argument last time. I had argued that for something to be art, it needs human intention.

But what about non-human intentions? This means non-human animals, a digitized human brain, or aliens. Surely they can have intentions and therefore be able to create “art” too. Previously, I had been writing with the idea that a human using an image generator cannot call the generated image their art. I forgot about the generator itself… Oops. So is the image created by a generator the generator’s art?

After playing through Fieldrunners 2 I was in the mood for a TD game that was more explicitly innovative. I guess my brain doesn’t appreciate the monotony of slowly building out vast mazes of very loud machineguns over and over. My mind jumped to Anomaly Defenders and Space Run Galaxy, both are fairly innovative yet I never gave them too much of a chance the first time around. After spending tens of hours in both, I have some thoughts on them that other people may or may not have had before. And you are going to be reading them because you clicked on this post and are therefore contractually obligated to listen to my ramblings.

On a recent trip, my brother and I were up late at night lying in bed and reminiscing on our childhood. We do it at an abnormal frequency when we somehow find ourselves in bed in the same room at night, probably due to a combination of undiagnosed ADHD/autism and ADHD/autism induced insomnia. This time, we were talking about our early gaming experiences and how it shaped our childhood. It was quite comprehensive, we went from 00s PC games to DS/Wii to Adobe Flash. Then my brother mentioned Fieldrunners and my brain got one of those flashback unlock moments. For some reason, my brain had hidden those memories away and I had not ever remembered it when thinking about my childhood games.

Can a painting generated by a machine be called art? I would argue no.

Not too long ago I was having a discussion on whether AI art should be labelled, and my thought was that labelling was a good thing because without the distinction it undermines the effort and investment that human artists makes. It is no different from labelling hand made textiles vs machined, or factory farmed chicken vs organic.

TLDR

Shinji got in the robot but it took 35 hours and we had to listen to his every stray thought. This VN is the epitome of tell don’t show. Buy only if you are 14 and think an hour long internal monologue about obeying orders is deep. tbf you’re getting a lot of decent animations and a typical but not bad mecha anime story here, but I wish I could have spent those 30 hours playing a better visual novel that respects my time (the other 10 hours is pretty good tho).

Over the past year or two I’ve been recommended by a lot of people to give FLoDT a try, and I recently finally found the time to. The story was pretty predictable for the most part, and the characters just aren’t really given the time to develop. Art and music was rather forgettable. I also hate the fake choices the game give you, there’s a hundred of them and only like 3 actually matter.

It’s Half Life, but in VR, expect linear corridors and physics puzzles. That wouldn’t be so bad on its own, except the game forces you to scavenge for ammo and supplies so a third of your playtime is just searching drawers and shelves which gets boring pretty quick. This also means you don’t really get to have fun with your guns until the final chapters, which is a shame since the guns are pretty fun to use.