Marty, a hotel detective who suffers from diarrhea attacks thinks he’s got only a few days to live but then his eager wannabe cop son uncovers a big crime leading to his hospitalization. Marty has given up on life but feels compelled to solve the case. He’s racist and unlikable but the noir atmosphere is dense and entertaining.
The first part of this one feels like a classic giallo with a woman being stalked and eventually attacked by a mysterious man. Then Charles Bronson shows up to manhandle his way to catching the attacker. He’s basically playing the same character as he does in Once Upon a Time in the West where he borderline roughs up a woman for her own good. I liked it but I wish it kept the tone of that first part.
This image was mostly worked out by drawing directly on the block rather than attempting to transfer it from paper. This is probably the best way to go but it makes seeing the final image reversed a little more jarring than usual.
It has been a while since I last talked about QBob: Remastered. In fact it’s been just about a year. I have been wanting to do a major update for some time now and I’m happy to announce that this week we will be updating the game with a bunch of new features.
First, there are twelve new bonus levels that will mix things up and offer a nice challenge for experienced players. These levels tell the story of QBobbi’s escape from her alien abductors. In addition to the new layouts, there are new intermissions, music, enemies, and achievements.
If you already own the game, this update will automatically be applied to your game. in celebration we are dropping the price down to its lowest level during the Steam Summer Sale. Get it while you can!
This game has wonderful visuals and music and a pretty good story that takes its time to introduce you to the characters. Unfortunately it’s only just a shade more interactive than a walking simulator. It has the look and feel of a stealth game but everything is to planned out and linear it feels like you are just going through the motions to get to the next cut scene. Really it’s just a puzzle game where you need to find the correct order in which to use your tools to get past a locked area.
The novel game-play element is the swarms of rats that move like a procedural liquid. They look cool and play an important role in the story, but you are basically turning on and off lights to clear paths through the swarm or direct them at guards. Only in the last two or three levels does it feel like an actual video game with some player agency. The story is good enough to give this a weak recommend.
Heinlein strikes me as being a bit of a perv. Ostensibly this a the story of an alien invasion about “slugs” that can latch on to victims and control their bodies. But what it really is is a means of world-building a hypothetical global nudist colony. As far a Heinlein books go, it’s okay with the usual paper thin characters and simple plot.
So, I guess “southern gothic” means stories about rural simpletons who are always getting scammed by hypocritical preacher-men. This is an anthology so some stories are better than others. I did like Wiseblood. Lots of, “I don’t reckon that…” and “ain’t n’er been to no big city…” types of dialogue.
Kill Knight takes the tried-and-true mechanics of an intense twin-stick shooter and seeks to complicate them with melee attacks and weapon reloading. The controls here are very difficult to get a handle on. It makes use of all four trigger buttons to shoot, reload, dash, fire your secondary weapon, and trigger your magic attack. On top of that you have a melee attack that is assigned to one of the face buttons. It took me hours to finally get comfortable with everything.
However, once I got going it really hooked me in. The fighting is the right level of difficulty where each death feels like you could have avoided it if you had just been paying better attention. There are also a number of challenges that keep replaying the levels interesting, and they eventually reward you with more powerful and intense weaponry.
It doesn’t quite rise to the brilliance of Robotron: 2084 or Geometry Wars but it comes close.
It’s a fishing sim with an H. P. Lovecraft twist. During the day you take your boat out, catch fish, and sell them for money to upgrade your gear. At night you need to stay near light or various horrific creatures will emerge from the depths and attack you. Your best bet is to dock and rest until morning then wake up and repeat the process. It feels like one of those cozy games that brain-dead zoomers enjoy but with just enough of an edge to it to make it seem more deep than it really is.
The dark lore is not terribly interesting, or at least it’s not presented in a way that captured my fancy. I was surprisingly engaged by the fishing parts of the game. The act of fishing is mostly just simple timing-based mini-games. Any upgrades you buy just give you access to more of the same. The game would have been much better if your skill at beating the mini-games actually determined the quality of your catch. That would have given some real purpose to the upgrades. As it is, capturing your 1000th fish is the same challenge as the very first one you caught.
In the end, this is just relaxing but mindless item collection. I enjoyed it but it could have been so much more.
Film noir starring the guy from My Three Sons as an insurance agent who comes up with the perfect murder plot. Yeah, it’s a classic.
