Blogging the experience of gameplayhttp://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7932Funny FMV game about working in a TV news editing room over nearly a decade during a period of political change. First off, I read somewhere that this game has the most recorded video of any game (at least at its release). It's impressive how much video content is here to watch. Well, to edit. You WANT to watch the videos, but your job is to edit. It sometimes takes away from the watching that you would rather be doing. The game reminds me of something like a cross between Don't Feed the Monkeys, Orwell, and Papers, Please. You watch people on the TV screens (like Don't Feed the Monkeys) but in doing so can influence the political direction of the country (like Orwell). And since cutting the TV footage is your job, and you have to earn a wage, there's a little Papers, Please in here too because your decisions at work affect your family, finances, and home life. That home life part is more of a simple textual narrative and serves to pass time, connect you to family, and add additional social context to the news broadcasts. So you work at this TV station manning an editing board. The various buttons and things on the control board engage you while the TV show is being filmed. You can switch between four cameras, play commercials, cue sound effects (laugh track, clapping, etc.), adjust volume, and you have to deal with various other distractions or problems (a political group trying to hack the station, power outages, wiring issues, maniacal dolls [in a bizarre dream sequence], etc.). The goal is to effectively edit the live feed to increase viewership. You do this by switching to the correct camera (general rule: focus on who is talking), by changing cameras (general rule: don't linger too long on one shot), by minimizing interference, by cuing appropriate audio (e.g., don't cue the laugh track when something serious is happening), and so on. Doing well increases viewership; doing poorly decreases it. If enough viewers leave the channel, you lose and start the broadcast over. The live news TV show that you'll be editing is so well done. The writing and acting are excellent, the stars of the game. It's so creative. There are news anchors, special guests, recurring segments, and more. The devs have really created a whole universe here, a parody of real-world news, celebrities, and politicians. My favorite actors were the first news anchor and the guy in the first DLC (which was my favorite chunk of the playthrough). In that DLC, the network is airing an old telethon from the mid-20th century. Your job is to edit the broadcast live. The telethon host is this horrible man who is inappropriate with the women answering the phones. They don’t play along with him. When he makes sexist remarks, they roll their eyes, don’t laugh at his jokes, and seem to revel in the fact that his telethon isn’t raising any money. All the guests for the telethon are stuck on a bus in traffic, and so guests are improvised from the telethon staff on hand, including a deadpan Indian performer, a Chinese worker, and a little person. A lot of the jokes rely on the fact that this is race- or body-based humor that we would find offensive today, but was totally normal for the 1950s. So you have fun with the censor button and watching the minorities, man with a disability, and women completely undermine the white male host. Anyway, that is a DLC…the main game is set over like 8 years and has a political story; it’s not a single event like a telethon (which is, for the record, related to the political story, in a way that I guessed about 5 seconds before it was revealed!). Because of that difference, after the main game the DLC felt cohesive and concise. Broadcasts in the main game will regularly occur a year after the previous broadcast. I’d definitely be curious to buy more DLC when it goes on sale. Broadcasts were usually like 30-45 minutes long, so it’d be a couple bucks for a long episode of funny, interactive TV basically. dkirschnerMon, 08 Sep 2025 20:20:21 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7932&iddiary=13435http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7934Is it weird that the first hour or so of this game had me thinking of God of War? (the remake not the old PS2 games) It might just be the tribal costumes and the snow? Anyways, this game is certainly not that - probably predates the remake as well, but I've been having a lot of fun so far. I think I'm past the tutorial and prologue parts of the game where things have opened up and we've hit Ubisoft-Open-World design levels of "icons on maps for you to follow up on". I am torn between trying to focus on the main quest quickly and exploring the world and environments which takes time...and I also get distracted by inconveniences like running out of inventory space so I have to hunt wildlife to get the resources to upgrade that! Is it weird that I really enjoy hiding in the tall grass and taking down robot dinos? I think it's the same pleasure I got from Ghost of Tsushima.... I guess it's the pleasure of appearing skillful while not really being skilled? Ha!jpSun, 07 Sep 2025 15:20:59 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7934&iddiary=13434http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7933I played the first chapter of this way back when. (it looks like I never wrote a gamelog about it either, oh well)...and this semester I thought it would be a nice game to play in the context of "tactile" thinky games since it has a real sense of physicality to the puzzles and the manipulations - sliding switches, pressing buttons, spinning wheels, etc. I thought it was interesting how, while playing the first chapter, I vaguely remember some of the things I had to do - it was familiar in a way I did not anticipate (it's been, what 15 years at least?). It's not like I knew the solutions - it's just that I remembered, "oh, there's a secret switch I need to find" and "oh, this thing rotates". I love how self-contained the game is, you're mostly rotating a giant puzzle table and looking out for changes, etc. - and it's also reasonably linear in the sense that you don't have multiple puzzles going on with bits and pieces that might be required for one but not the other. One of the chapters is a giant puzzle table - and the game does tell you to focus on the sides if you start poking around on the top. So, I appreciated that! I don't remember the ipad version having a hint/clue system - this one does and it's rather surprising how quickly it "dings" to let you know you can get a clue if you need. From what I can tell there are three levels of clues - with I'm guessing the third one telling you what to do (though you probably still have to do it yourself, which can be a bit tricky in the viewing-puzzles, the ones where you need to rotate stuff and adjust your view to form/create a picture). I'll admit I was a bit worried going in to the last chapter (the Epilogue) since it seemed like there would be music-themed puzzles. Uh, oh! There's an interesting tension in these kinds of games which has to do with the amount and kind of external knowledge you required (or expect) the player to have. I'm thinking of stuff like escape rooms where you're supposed to go "oh, this is in morse code!" and then use that knowledge to decipher something. I was worried that reading music might be something required. Thankfully that was not the case - at most there was some pattern matching which was pretty easy and the musical thing happened to be more of a theming thing than a gameplay thing. Phew! (I'm sure there's an extra layer of meaning to the music in terms of the game's story - but this wasn't something I was paying any particular attention to to be honest. Overall I was done in less than 2 1/2 hours, which was perfect. Bonus is this might be the only game on Steam for which I have ALL the achievements? (simply by virtue of finishing the game...)jpSun, 07 Sep 2025 15:07:29 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7933&iddiary=13433http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7930Really enjoyed it, got to the end - only to learn, there's MORE! So, I've been slowly whittling away at the game - I still don't have the 8 keys, so who knows what THAT will unlock, but I've been doing the red birds. I think what's so amazing - especially in the context of the red birds, is that the carefully tuned puzzles sometimes serve more than one purpose! So, tuned for the puzzle within it's world/area, but there's a 2nd puzzle on top (is there a secret red bird here?). I think that's pretty wild!jpMon, 01 Sep 2025 12:29:20 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7930&iddiary=13432http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7914Really, really enjoyed it. So much that I decided to go for the "all items and secrets" trophy just because that would scratch the exploration itch this game had been scratching for me. I'm also thankful for the "easy mode" - which was, as advertised, easy - but like I said, I was really into exploring the levels, finding secret stuff and just enjoying the places. I was reminded of Bungie's level design for Destiny - more precisely Bungie's art direction for its levels. Destiny levels tend to be super, super linear (which is fine) even if they twist around in interesting ways. This games' levels are much less linear - Zeffo in particular is a nice version of a contained sprawl... I even had fun trying to remember how to get to different parts of the level I wanted to re-visit because I was missing a chest or secret. The only thing I wish I had was, once you've finished it, some indicator of whether you had all the Jedi memory things - I'd sometimes stumble across ones I'd missed (and some were secrets) - but a counter for that would have been nice. I get that you may want to hide them away - since many are about the game's story - but once you beat the main story, why not give people the chance to know what things were missed where? (you know which ones you're missing, because of counters in the encyclopedia thingie - but you don't know in which parts of which map if that makes sense). I'm now genuinely excited and interested to play the next one! (not so much for the story/characters to be honest - the addition of the night sister at the end felt odd and forced, but the action was great, and the environments as well) (ok, now that I think about it, and because of the surprise appearance of one Lord at the end...what happens in the sequel? I also forget when in the Star Wars timeline the game takes place? I mean, I know it's before Return of the Jedi...but is it before A New Hope? I think so?)jpMon, 01 Sep 2025 12:25:34 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7914&iddiary=13431http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7894A classic, completed! I never had an SNES or a DS, so I never found my way to Chrono Trigger. It's one of Sasha's favorites, and a classic JRPG, so I found the Steam port and played over the past several months, most of which was concentrated in the past few weeks. I know it's 30 years old and was revolutionary at the time for the multiple endings, time travel, side character-focused side quests, detailed sprite work, and so on. I'm playing in 2025 around the time I'm playing JRPGs like Clair Obscur and Persona 5. Chrono Trigger doesn't hold a candle to those games, but those games wouldn't be possible without decades old games like Chrono Trigger paving the way. So, my playthrough of Chrono Trigger was one of trying to appreciate something classic rather than thinking, "This is going to be a great [by today's standards] game!" Indeed, I was often frustrated or bored, going through the motions of leveling up or grinding, making liberal use of the auto battle option, and following occasional walkthroughs to speed things up. The story and characters were less serious than I thought they would be. I was thinking that this would be more on par with FFVII, but the "silliness level" of this was a middle ground between FFVII (which could be profound) and Earthbound (which was often funny). The characters and story weren't that interesting to me. Chrono could have been a jug of milk. The 65,000,000 BC cave woman (whom I so creatively named "Wolfy" because she wore animal skins) made me laugh because of how dumb she talked, and at the end because she basically says she's ready to have a lot of sex with her boyfriend. The frog was over-dramatic. I named him Queen (I don't remember why), which became really confusing because there are actual queens in the story. Characters also often referred to the frog with his original name instead of what I selected for him. But what was cool was the centrality of Lavos, this ever-looming threat across time. I liked that you could challenge Lavos whenever you wanted. By the time I was ready to give him a serious attempt, I was around level 50 and he annihilated me with a magic attack right off the bat. I changed my party composition and used the three characters with the highest magic defense, which worked like a charm...until he used a massive physical damage attack. Turns out characters with high magic defense often have low physical defense. I only had two characters who were fairly balanced with defense (Chrono and the frog), so I figured I should do some of the side quests that the game offered me. That would get me some more levels and probably some better gear. Turns out I had done a few of those side quests already, and I did almost all the rest. Yes, better gear and a few more levels. Now we're around level 55 and have significantly improved defense and attack, having gotten ultimate weapons for most characters. I annihilated Lavos and saved the world. Hooray! This is something very "classic JRPG" about Chrono Trigger. If a boss defeats you, you can just go grind away for a while, come back, and smack it to death. I did this two or three times during the game. And given that you can turn on auto battle, the grinding feels almost automated. I would just sit by Sasha, watch an episode of something, and run back and forth through whatever area auto-battling my way to higher levels. It took no thought. I think that's a larger critique of this game for me, is that I didn't have to think much. Sure, some enemies have strengths and weaknesses, and bosses often had a trick to figure out, but that was such a small percentage of battles. I'm comparing it to something like Clair Obscur where EVERY battle could go horribly wrong, where you could parry and dodge. Or something like Persona 5 where the combat system is predicated on enemy strengths and weaknesses that you need to pay attention to (plus 10 other combat mechanics). Chrono Trigger (understandably) feels basic in 2025. It was really cool getting to experience a classic, basic as it feels today. Next time I play a game with time travel, I'll compare it to Chrono Trigger! Next time the hero's mother steps through a time portal at the end of the game (cue laugh track), I'll also think of Chrono Trigger! And the next time someone refers to Chrono Trigger, I will confidently say that yes, I have played Chrono Trigger (instead of being shamed for having no gamer cred)! dkirschnerFri, 29 Aug 2025 08:02:10 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7894&iddiary=13430http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7931Okay, this was REALLY good. It's from the people who made The Red Strings Club, which I also liked. Deconstructeam has a knack for thought-provoking philosophical narratives, strong writing, diverse characters, and novel mechanics for a point-and-click. I don't even know if I'd describe this as a point-and-click because most of it takes place in one two-story building and you don't really move your character anywhere in the sense of typical point-and-click adventures. It's more of an interactive visual novel with cards. But it's not a card game either. Let's back up... In The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, you play as Fortuna, a witch with the power of divination. You've been exiled for reading in your Tarot deck that your coven will be destroyed. 200 years into your 1000-year exile, you summon a Behemoth (very illegal), who helps you reflect on your circumstances and regain power. Regaining your power involves learning to create your own (non-Tarot) deck of cards. As the story unfolds, you end up being allowed to get visitors whose futures you can read with your cards. So, depending on the cards you create, which are imbued with different elements that have different affinities (i.e., fire is fear, earth is power, water is emotion, etc.), your readings are flavored differently. For example, if you create a ton of fire-heavy cards, your readings will be related to fear, lust, violence, revenge, and so on. Now, there is a huge and awesome narrative twist that I will not give away that makes the divination system so interesting and makes an already cool game even cooler. This is contextualized in the overarching story of your exile, regaining your powers, reconnecting with witches in your coven, meeting witches in other covens, and dealing with the political upheaval in your coven. Without discussing that twist, I really can't talk much more about the game, except just mechanics stuff. Suffice it to say, if you like playing politics, you'll be surprised. The game does a lot of interesting things in its relatively short time and confined space. One interesting thing about this game is that it takes place wholly (except for some flashback sequences) in the place of Fortuna's exile, a two-story home in the middle of space. There are like four things you end up being able to click on in the house, so nearly all interaction happens via dialogue windows and the card creation and selection screens. Despite the simplicity, nothing ever got boring or repetitive. The game regularly changes up what you are doing and the story moves at a good pace. At the end, I find myself curious about a second playthrough, or seeing if my girlfriend is interested in it so I can watch her play. It seems like your choices have massive impact on how the game unfolds, but sometimes this can be deceptive. I would like to see how much things change if you make different choices. HIGHLY recommend!dkirschnerFri, 29 Aug 2025 06:56:47 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7931&iddiary=13429http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7930I heard people sing it's praises - but usually for a puzzle game I find that means that I think it's "fine" - and then move on. But, I must say that for a straight up mostly abstract puzzle game there's a lot of REALLY clever game design going on here! This is a game where you need to "select" a word from a jumble of tiles - but the word is special (unique to the game), once selected the word provides a secondary selection, and then you have to select a new word until the tiles on each level have all been selected. It's pretty simple - but as you make progress new words are introduced with different secondary selection effects and the layout of the tiles changes such that the rules for selection also begin to open up (e.g. what counts as adjacent for selection purposes). It's a clever game - and I even have the paper copy that I now really want to play. The onboarding is really tight - with new things introduced such that you're both surprised (when you figure it out) and get a sense of the new thing and how it works. And then, there's new things that make you go "what? this can't possibly work" but it does. I'm particularly appreciative of: a. The endgame adds a new word, giving you a reason to go back to find it in order to unlock a bunch of bonus levels. I know there's more to find yet - but I'm still working through. b. The hint system is basically the list of words you need to select - but it doesn't tell you WHAT you need to select after each word. So, it's helpful - but if you were really stuck you'd still be screwed. But it's helped me confirm that I figured out the solution without figuring out the full details. So, like I'm "on track" rather than barking up the wrong tree. c. The undo system is wonderful - it's fast and easy to use - making it really smooth and easy to try out ideas as you're trying to solve each puzzle.jpMon, 25 Aug 2025 19:19:41 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7930&iddiary=13428http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7887I'm most of the way through the third case and retiring this one. I played most of it (about 10 hours) while walking on the treadmill over the past 4 months or so. I do walk on the treadmill more often than that! The first thing that struck me about Ace Attorney is that it totally inspired Paradise Killer, which I really liked. I had never played anything quite like Paradise Killer, and now its pedigree is obvious. It even uses some of the same sound effects, like the chime noise when something is suspicious. I liked the first two cases; they were a good introduction to the game and its characters. The detective work does get tedious, moving the magnifying glass around the screens to hear Phoenix's comments and to try and find clues. This gets worse as there are more places to explore. By the third case, which involves moving around a movie studio, the detective work was getting boring. The trials were more fun, but even those were getting boring by the third case. I think the trials suffer from the problem of being too scripted. You listen to witness testimony, cross-examine the witness (wherein you hear the testimony again and yell "objection!" [always amusing] when you want to press the witness), successfully press the witness, listen to their revised testimony, cross-examine the revised testimony, and so on. If you mess up on any of these parts or want to hear something again, you have to click through all the dialogue from that part again. The third case is more complicated than the first two, so I have been listening to testimony over and over trying to figure out when and how witnesses are lying. If you accuse them too often by presenting incorrect evidence, you lose and have to start over, which is annoying. So, you can't just guess over and over, even though the game's logic is such that you'll have to guess sometimes. Sometimes, you know when and how the witness is lying, but it's unclear what dialogue option is the correct one. For example, I have been cross-examining a child in the third case. He witnessed fight that ended in a murder, but didn't actually see the murder. He didn't see the murder because he was fiddling with his camera, which I had figured out. When you press him on this, there are three options. You can claim that he didn't see the murder because he couldn't see it, because he was looking at something else, or you can present evidence. Well, if he was looking through his camera, you could imagine that he couldn't see the murder because he had it pointed in the wrong direction or something. If he was messing with his camera, you could also say that he was looking at something else (the camera). Or, you can present the camera as evidence. These all seem reasonable to me, but the game is so scripted that you have to present the camera as evidence; the other two are wrong, even though the second one especially makes sense: he didn't see the murder because he was looking at something else, his camera. Other times, you just have no clue what you are supposed to guess. Like, now this kid is talking about how he took photos but deleted them. I've pressed him on every part of his revised testimony, but don't know what I'm supposed to present as evidence when. I presented the camera a couple times because it seems to me the photos might still be on the camera. I presented the photo of the Steel Samurai because like somehow that might be his photo (even though it came from security footage, who knows?!). I presented the spear (murder weapon). I was wrong enough that I got a game over. This has happened enough times that I'm just going to call it quits on Phoenix Wright. I like the game. It's funny. The character animations especially are great. I love watching the witnesses get all bent out of shape. I like the absurd narratives. But that does make it hard to impose logic to solve a case! The game has its own logic and I'm tired of trying to follow it. I did look up rankings for cases, and it seems that cases 4 and 5 in this game are among the best ones. Of course I got tired of it during the 3rd case! I can't imagine another 10 hours of this though, even if the next two are supposed to be really good. I've got other "treadmill games" lined up to try.dkirschnerFri, 22 Aug 2025 15:46:42 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7887&iddiary=13427http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7914I just picked this up again after not playing for...months? (I have to check my last gamelog for this one - assuming I even wrote one). I was worried that I would have forgotten everything - and that re-learning would be such a chore that I'd just give up and move on to something else. Thankfully, I had last set the game to "easy" (whatever it's actually called in the game) which made the process of remembering/re-learning it NOT a chore, and actually kind of enjoyable. I then looked at the controller mapping to see what actions I had missed in my re-learning process. I've been having a lot of fun playing it on "easy" - I was really looking for an adventure, not so much a challenge. But it made me realize - typically when a game has difficulty settings they only affect ONE "vector" for that game's difficulty. In this case, the "vector" relates to the games combat - you have shorter windows to react, enemies might have more HP, they might be more aggressive, that sort of thing. But, this game also has environmental puzzles - and I've assumed that the difficulty of these is basically fixed: it doesn't vary depending on the difficulty level. From the perspective of "designing challenge" - having varying difficulty for puzzles is a tough design problem. Really though. Generally it is "solved" by having some sort of clue system to hopefully give the player some guidance on the puzzle at hand - and the more sophisticated systems might have different levels of clues, with each one giving more information and thus allowing the player the "minimum" amount of help needed to solve the puzzle. Anyways... that's where I'm at in my headspace - since I'll be playing a lot of "thinkygames" and I've also been thinking about challenge in games. In terms of progress I've unlocked Kashyyyk as a destination - but I'm currently exploring other parts of Zeffo just to see what's going on. I've also appreciated the fact that the collectibles are all cosmetic stuff. Ok, ALMOST all - there's a few that help with your health and force stats..but most so far are cosmetic and related to your lightsaber (multiple components, each with their own cosmetic), poncho/cloak, spaceship look, and little robot look.jpWed, 13 Aug 2025 19:11:18 UTChttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=7914&iddiary=13426