2024
I haven't gotten to play as much this year! I've been working on other things, organizing my zine collection, reading, getting into horror literature and movies and 50's style creature features, making my stoat fursona, learning about music theory and different styles of music including different ways of understanding rhythm and musical notation over time and place, practicing my bass, getting top surgery (yay!), trying to make my own art and maybe zines, learning about DJing from my girlfriend Rosy, getting into Star Trek and gomoku. And yet games have still been an important and stable part of my life, and I am grateful for them!
A Year of Springs
A sweet series of games about being trans in Japan, and being trans around both you cishet friends and you "cishet" friends (who are definitely your pre-queer friends who've found their way to you the way queers often naturally do). It displays the spectrum of people you love understanding you, those who will invite you to something and be sad you haven't been coming around because they haven't considered how it is for trans people and thsoe who will think 5 steps ahead of your social environment and dysphoria.
Magical Diary: Horses Hall
This game fit the perfect hole of me being depressed and needing to do something. A classic. Worrying about your friends getting consumed by weird relationships, magical high school love triangles, your anxious friend who will slowly disappear from your life if you let them, a suspicious flirty demon boy (named Damien, even spelled the same way as my name, go figure lol).
The Five Steps to Ensuring Momo Graduates Successfully!!!
Is It That Deep, Bro?
Elebits
I watched my girlfriend Mei play this and I wish Wii emulation was better because I want to play this game so bad. It's just little creatures and sometimes some sick music. I've been on a real creature kick this year and it just really hit. It reminds me of like Pikmin or The Munchables. The art design is cute and fun.
PaRappa the Rapper
Finally got around to playing PaRappa!! I love rhythm games and it just has so much style, it's always fun to see the rhythm games of this era that make their owns music and it's like, describing shit (instead of like what you'd get for an arcade game where it's often like, sometimes just generic EDM). I got stuck at a certain point and haven't been able to get past it since then, but I'm just kind of enamored by this game.
EDF: World Brothers
I just wanted to play minecraft EDF with my girlfriends why did the "world brothers" aspect have to be like, making a caricature of a number of countries as the characters. I've tried writing more about this like 3 times and each time it just becomes a jumbled mess. Can people stop making the most stereotyped characters in the world while also not making a character you have to go through 13 layers of soil to learn is w/e their identity is. Come on.
Parkasaurus
Fixated on this game hardcore the second I played it for like a week straight. I was so serious about this fucking game I joined the developper's discord just to learn the reason I couldn't access like 1/3rd of the map was because I forgot to try WASD movement. I've never really gotten into management games and it makes sense my gateway would be the dinosaur one. I constantly try to manage my own beliefs about animal rights (can you call it animal liberation when you're talking about a game who's basis is to be a dinosaur amusement park, lmao), city planning (thank you college class for making me read Delany), disability, and my experience being a public facing employee. I don't want the dinosaurs to have to be around loud noises, strong smells, bright lights, just so the guests can have fun. But I don't want to make people walk forever in the dark, with nowhere to sit, no bathroom, no food or free water (in my mind, the fountain features are free drinkable fountains like in Italy). I create little spaces that I would imagine loving if they were real, that cannot be used in the game and just sit, unloved, because I refuse to build a path to it. This makes it less accessible -- the terrain is often grass, though I try not to discredit sand and desert ecosystems -- they have their beauty too, and this would make it harder for wheelchair users and possibly cane or walker users as well if it's less stable and less uniform terrain. I am creating my own personal world and trying to balance my loves and my beliefs. I want to live next to a dinosaur park, and walk across some hills or off path a bit to a somewhat downtrodden gazebo, where there's less people, and it's late, with low lights and it's just me, or me and some friends, and the dinosaurs and the other small animals living there, slowly coming out as people cede that space for a time. It's kind of beautiful. Somehow it lets me imagine what a revitalizing space of wonder would be for me.
Metal Gear Solid
Not nearly through all of this, but it's about time for me to play it. So far it's kind of... lovely, in a sense. Watching this I can't help but think, people complaining about FFXIII are just fucking losers, because there's so much cutscening in this. I love the angles, I loved getting in the box and just running around in it, even though it undercuts a bit of the game I suppose (but it's so fun!). It's just fun that the code is on the back of actual package, and that they've kept that this whole time, and that you just figure out things as you go along. I hate pressing X to crawl, yes give me another mechanic to deal with. And I am going to beat cybernetic ninja, to death (that is where I am as of writing, could you guess)