Castle Magus

This game is sort of like what you'd get if you took Vampire Survivors and made it a 2D side-scrolling arena (without the scrolling), in which you run back and forth, jumping around, throwing knives at monsters, and collecting bones (the game's currency), until you dieget knocked out. During the arena part, you get level ups that let you gain new (temporary) powers and abilities.[1] You start in a tiny hub town place, to which you return when you dieget knocked out. It has a shop (which only opens after you've lasted at least 2 minutes in the arena part) that sells permanent upgrades, and there are other doors that open after you last increasing amounts of time. I've only lasted 7 minutes so far, so the only other door I've opened so far is the one to the item mixing guy. I've only played it for 35 minutes as of this post, though, says Steam.

The game is free. If it had cost even just a dollar, I probably would have just clicked Next in my discovery queue, but I'd say now that it's probably worth at least a dollar. Maybe even almost the same money as Vampire Survivors.

My only issue with the game is the weird effect that is on the text font that makes it annoying to read. It's kind of like that Zalgo shit, but not really. More like just a weird repetition/echo effect or something. Still, in any case, I wish there was an option to make the text not do that.

[1] - I could see the game becoming super easy if you lucked out and got a bunch of the power ups in a row that increase base damage and increase healing per kill, though. On the other hand, you could get unlucky and get two "choices" of the same power up that doubles your damage but sets your health to 1 (i.e. near instant deathunconsciousness, unless you have godlike reflexes or something).

Another reason in a very long list of reasons why I don't play online multiplayer video games involving random people.

That said, as far as this particular video goes, everything from "family annihilation" and onward was pretty interesting.

Coming to PC, Mac, Linux and Switch in Spring 2025!

Jump with Fia into seven time-travel cases spanning two centuries in New York City, from the speakeasies of Prohibition to the vicious gangs of the Gilded Age to the World Trade Center on September 10, 2001. Solve temporal problems, survive paradoxes, and resolve the mistakes of the past or die trying—as many times as it takes.

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/13...
Wishlist on GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/old_skies/

Developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games
Trailer voiceover: Sally Beaumont, Abe Goldfarb
Trailer music by: Pond5.com

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Above is the trailer for the next game from Dave Gilbert to be published by his company Wadjet Eye Games. So far, I have written half a dozen posts about their games over the years (this will be the seventh), and this one looks pretty good, too. More than just "pretty good," honestly.

So... that's at least one thing I have to look forward to at the start of this upcoming hellish quadrennium, I guess.

And... damn, now I want to start yet another playthrough of all the Blackwell games, Unavowed, The Shivah (all of which take place in the same universe [and I wonder if Old Skies will as well]), Strangeland, and Primordia, which I've all finished at least once... or else do playthoughs of the ones I still have yet to complete (or even start, in some cases), like Gemini Rue, Resonance, A Golden Wake (it used to be published by Wadjet Eye at one point and still shows up under the Steam developer page, anyway), Technobabylon, Shardlight, and The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. Or maybe do both of those things.

No spoilers. I'm just going to say that everything about the final boss from lead-up to aftermath is by far the best thing in Vampire Survivors so far, and it will be incredibly tough to top it with anything else in the future, assuming there's more updates/DLC to come at some point down the line.

The Ode to Castlevania DLC, as far as I can tell, is around half or so of the game now, and that's if you include all of the base game and all the rest of the DLCs combined, probably. It was certainly worth that "1 less money than VS."

(EDIT) Oh, and fighting the "final" boss seems to be only the halfway point. So maybe there is something else later. (/EDIT)

The best parts of this video were the parts where they weren't talking about Sparking Zero or Dragon Ball, which were significant portions of that 47 minute runtime.

Yeah... I'm pretty much with Pat and Woolie in that most or all of these will probably never see the light of day (especially anything from ZA/UM itself). I'll personally believe they've succeeded when I see them available for sale on Steam, without being infested with shit like Denuvo, and probably on a 50-75% off sale (depending on whatever their initial price points are).

G.O.D. stands for "Growth Or Devolution."

It is an old SNES RPG released in Japan in 1996 that never got an official release outside of Japan. There is, however, an English fan translation available. I just finished it, over the course of a week or three. My final time was 30-ish hours, and my characters' levels were in the high 50s or so by the end.

( Lots of text and a Youtube embed behind cut )

"When Mats Steen died from a muscle-wasting disorder, his parents believed that his life had been a tragically lonely one — until hundreds of emails from strangers arrived. It turns out that he'd found friendship and even romance in a gaming community"

Just goes to show that "online gaming communities" like that of WoW aren't always the terrible, unholy horrors that they tend to be depicted as (or all too often prove themselves to be) 99% of the time, I guess.

"The story of Mats' double life, and of the emotional impact its discovery has had on his parents, is told in a new documentary called The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. It is a moving and often deeply philosophical work that tackles questions around the nature of reality and relationships in an increasingly online world."

I am potentially interested in seeing this documentary, at least as it is described in the above article, I will admit. (Though I fully realize that this article is as much or more plugging the documentary as it is actually talking about the subject of it.)

I still have absolute zero (K) interest in playing online games with the general public, myself, of course, but that's just me being my typical asocial self. *shrug*

The legend of Karnacus Freehorn begins! This is the first of three "Session 0s" we made, playing out the backstories of each character! Expect Maud's Story next Thursday, then the final one the week after that!

Content Warning: Descriptions of hanging - 57:40 - 1:06:00

Featuring:
Nick Landis as Karna
Stephan Krosecz as Everybody Else

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Yeah, this is Nick's "session 0" as Karna. I hope the other two are at least as good as this one was.

(EDIT) And here is the Tales Unraveled discussion video for Karna's episode zero. (/EDIT)

(EDIT 2) I've since read the Group Ibex translation, and I believe it is indeed better, or at least more readable, than the one I initially read, as mentioned below. It's also somewhat more consistent, terminology-wise, to Disco Elysium. (/EDIT 2)

Or Püha ja õudne lõhn in the original Estonian, written by Robert Kurvitz, of Disco Elysium fame. The book, written before the game, shares the same overall world/setting, but otherwise has little to do with the game. I.e. you won't be seeing Harry or Kim in this book, or even mentions of them. While Revachol is mentioned, the story never actually goes there, outside of one seemingly unrelated, added-after-initial-publication epilogue. Available in English via unofficial fan translation, here. If an official translation ever became available for sale, I might consider buying it, but only if the money actually goes to Kurvitz, and not to the current ZA/UM asshats. (EDIT) As it turns out, it seems that I read an earlier translation, different from the one above, which is, apparently, inferior to the one linked above? Well shit. Guess I'll need to read it again with the later translation at some point. (/EDIT)

I just finished reading it last night/this morning. I'm honestly not sure I would recommend it to anyone who hasn't played Disco Elysium, but I liked it well enough. It was interesting seeing references to places and historical figures mentioned in DE, and things like the Pale are definitely involved, but other than that, there isn't anything to connect it to DE (not that that should be the only reason to read it, but I probably never even would have heard of the book, let alone read it, without the existence of Disco Elysium).

Plot summary, without spoilers. Four young girls, the Lund children (Maj, 5, Anni-Elin, 12, Målin, 13, and Charlotte, 14), disappear pretty much into thin air, as far as anyone can tell. Twenty years later, three men named Inayat Khan, Jesper de la Guardie, and Tereesz Machejek, all of whom were around the same ages as the Lund girls when they disappeared, are still obsessed with finding out what happened to the girls. Over the years, there have been vague clues/hints/leads that keep hope alive for them, so to speak, on which they follow up. The story is told in a very back and forth way, splitting time between the present, where the three men are still searching, and the past flashbacks of their interactions with the Lund girls. Along the way, there are also shorter chapters of world-building tidbits of some obscure history or concepts that may seem unrelated at first, but which usually come into play in the following chapters, or which provide context to otherwise no-context references in earlier chapters, at least a little.

On a technical level, though... the book... uh... well... it's not the best book I've ever read. Let's go with that. It's rather obtuse, in a lot of ways. That may be a translation issue, though, I don't know. (EDIT) See above edit about different English translations floating around out there. (/EDIT) In any case, the writing of (the English version [EDIT] that I read [/EDIT] of) Sacred and Terrible Air does not hold a candle to the writing in Disco Elysium.

Also, the book was, apparently, intended as a sort of prologue to a much longer series of books, which never got written, because of how poorly this first book sold. That... well... puts the ending of the book in a different light, if nothing else. Also, if Kurvitz had wrote more books, that means Disco Elysium probably wouldn't have ever existed, and I may or may not have ever heard of the book series, as a result.

I won't say more, for spoilers, but I will say that it has made me want to play Disco Elysium again, even if the specifics of the story of Sacred and Terrible Air has little to do with the story of DE overall.

I might watch/listen to the Woolie VS "Let's Read" of the book at some point, as well, as I'd avoided doing so until now, since I hadn't read it myself yet.

Also, considering what "ZA/UM" means in the actual book (which I won't say here, because spoilers), it's kind of ironically appropriate that the company that made Disco Elysium was named ZA/UM, given what ended up happening with that. ¬_¬ (That's a new tag there, only created today, so while I think I got all of the posts I made about ZA/UM and DE there, I might've missed some. In any case, most of the ZA/UM related bullshit is there, anyway.) Seriously, current ZA/UM needs to die, with extreme prejudice, and the entire Elysium IP needs to revert back to Kurvitz, et al.

"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead."