SEARCH RESULTS

Maybe it's post-Steam-Next-Fest syndrome but I've felt inclined to play short games for the moment. Steam Link I very much like games that don't attempt to give you an 80 hour experience. It's ok to make a game that doesn't last very long - RPGs in particular seem to regard that notion with disdain. We begin with the purchase of a very affordable house. My man you don't even need to promote the treasure, a single-family house anywhere in the United States (or the U.K., given the decimal-comma?) for that price? Sold. The game is not subtle. I have a trowel, X marks the spot. But... I COULD dig anywhere... Maybe I'll keep the X! I start to dig in a circle around it but my 'battery'? gets low and my inventory gets full of the rocks that I'm unearthing. I guess when you score a 10K house you have the money to afford fancy things like a battery-powered trowel. The game mentioned something about the shovel exploding if the battery runs out. Since I just started there's no time like the present to find out if this is fatal and what the consequences are. Dig until you die! That's reasonable, I lost a stone. A battery recharge now costs a whole dollar, so it's already worth recharging rather than running out - each stone sells for $1. I also lost a bunch of health but this is my own backyard and there's nothing here that will hurt me, I don't need to refill health yet. Behold, a perfect circle. This is the garage where I can somehow sell stones on the internet and spend the money for battery / health refills and various upgrades. I'm not very far down but I'm already starting to find coal. Money here we come! I'm going to have to widen my hole-circle so that I can fit into it like a trench. Come to think of it, if this gets too deep won't I be unable to climb out? Maybe I should dig it like a spiral staircase? Ah, I see there's a technological solution to the problem. This is nice, just you snipping away at the dirt, making progress in bite-size chunks. My idea for a spiral staircase is taking shape. There's no physics for unsupported dirt so it won't collapse on me. I assumed this brown mineral was copper but it's actually iron. There's no putting dirt back so if I screw up my staircase or find an underground cavern or something I'll still need the jetpack to get out, but I don't plan to use it much - I'll save a fair bit of money if I don't need to burn energy getting into and out of a vertical hole. You know you could have maybe put in an autosave but this is better than just losing your progress. Saving does take a second or two so I guess an autosave could have been annoying. The spiral stairs / tunnel are taking shape. You can dig any sort of hole you want - I'm sure lots of folks just tunnel straight down and jetpack back up. Others probably strip-mine their yard and end every speck of dirt on their property - barbarians. But you've gotta make room for art, and do what makes you happy. Do what makes your yard happy. This game has reminded me that when I was a kid, a friend and I actually did dig a hole deep enough to stand in, in my parent's backyard, I think it was deep enough to stand in up to our shoulders or so, that hole felt like a hell of an accomplishment. 8 meters deep I find my first copper, sells for $10. The upgrades look like they're half done already.  Found something interesting, there's an air pocket underground that I've dug into. It's pretty extensive! It goes much deeper than I've already dug and it's getting very dark. I suddenly have this device that's beeping at me. Good thing I did buy that jetpack or I wouldn't have gotten back out. The shiny metal on the walls turns out to be silver ($20, seems like the mineral values are growing exponentially). I see something unusual in the dark but can't make it out, so I grab the silver and go up to get a lantern. The beeper is showing me I'm close... where is it? WHAT is it? A mineshaft with an arrow sign! I put the light there, that's what you get with the 'lanterns' you can buy. Also the rock on the right can't be dug out with the shovel. I got overly eager to explore this and ran low on energy, then I got lost on the way back (found a different way out of the air pocket that led to a dead end), ran out of energy, and lost the valuable ores I collected down here. Easy come, easy go. Before descending again I buy some more laterns to leave a trail back to the spiral staircase. I hadn't even gotten the staircase to spiral entirely around the yard before finding this! Back at the mineshaft, I find some additional copper and a gold nugget! I dig into it and break through to see this: The faint outline of.... TREASURE! But not... THE treasure! I try using the dynamite on the 'unbreakable' rock at the mine entrance - dropped nearby, the dynamite doesn't harm it. Dynamite placed directly on top of the rock however removes it and leaves a nice big hole. Ok, I think I've explored the air pocket enough-I could use it as a basis for going down further but I still like the staircase. I went back to where I broke through to it and tried to smooth out the stairs near the air pocket so I can still walk up / down them and will continue the stairs beyond that. My upgraded shovel is making larger 'holes' so it's actually getting more difficult to create a smooth, walkable slope. Actually I think the happy face X would look better if I dug out the whole area around it and made the first layer of the staircase open-air. So I'm going to go back to the surface and work on that. I found the air pocket about 3/4ths of the way around the face-pillar so I'm getting close to being underneath my original starting point anyway. My 8-year old son saw me digging and wanted to see the game. Showing him the mineshaft I was wandering around in the air pocket when this other thing-detector popped up saying 'object detected'. It appears to be directional, going to try to find it. It's a key! At this point my son wanted to play and got into it, the staircase was abandoned in favor of digging straight down and screenshots and blog documentation were abandoned in favor of letting a child have a good time. We found some voles in the garden, home inspection should have caught it, won the game, don't own the house anymore. A really solid, zen game for five bucks - good times. My HOA was very unhappy.

Me VS. sword. Let's do this. Or pull it out yourself if you're so inclined, usurper. This is first game I've played where my opponent is the sword I'm holding. You pull out the sword by holding the mouse button and moving the mouse up, but since you run out of room and you have to lift the mouse to move it back on the mousepad it's easy to 'lose your grip' on the sword and drop it by moving your little cursor sideways off the sword accidentally. Got to about here and dropped it. It's really alarming when you drop this thing, almost like a jump-scare except all that happens is the holy music cuts off and the sword just falls back down, but it's abrupt! I didn't get as far with my next couple attempts. It's easy to screw up, I have to develop a technique. I drop the sword several times and start to believe that it's because if I don't put sufficient pressure on my mouse button as I'm picking up the mouse, even if the mouse button is still physically 'clicked', the signal can shut off - and if this happens the sword drops. Ooh, I may have found the secret. You get much more leeway laterally if you hold it around the hilt which helps a ton. I think this sword is taller than I am. As you keep pulling, a beautiful chorus rises to signify your impending achievement. It's definitely taller than me! POP! My Retinue awaits! I guess we're just going to leave the sword here? It's far too big to actually wield, even for JRPG protagonists. The ending is so much more elaborate than the game itself. They made it worth the effort! A fun, free title, with some challenge to it - I found pulling out the sword to be fairly difficult! If you want to see the ending but have too much trouble with the sword, these sliders can make it trivial. My first act as King is going to be to change the method of succession.

I love game demos. For one, they're free - come and try our game. If you don't like it, no big deal, move on. I generally don't write about demos that don't click with me because I don't feel like I've given the game a fair shake, and in part because enjoyment of a game is different for everyone and I wouldn't want to dissuade someone from just trying out a game themselves. Another point in their favor - I really enjoy the initial parts of encountering a game and figuring out what it is, how to play it and become good at it, those first moments of being lost and not understanding what you can or should do, when the possibilities of what this thing could be are wide open and you embark on discovering something for yourself. In this case, the journey of discovery begins as I start off by choosing the one visible city on the campaign map(?), picking a class and profession (Dude with a bow), and was immediately thrown into a Vampire-Survivors style fight with a 10-minute timer, painfully slow skeletal opponents, and now I'm currently just attempting to fight them by punching them. What's the good of choosing a bow proficiency if I ain't got no bow?!? I manage to knuckle-dust one and thankfully it had just what I need. I hope you like naked, armed men. Now we're talking. The bow is good, and I leveled up and got a fan of knives skill that wrecks shop. Things are looking up. One difference from Vampire Survivors is that it's a twin-stick system, you can aim and move independently of each other, but our hero auto-attacks constantly and your main job is to move him around to kill things while avoiding damage. As the timer ticks down I'm seeing more enemy variety - both these centurions and some archer groups showed up. Commander Urien here and his two huge balls had a cool graphical change from this to a withered skeleton as I did damage to him. With the ritual completed at ten minutes, these wraiths show up and end you. They can be damaged so they appear to be killable but they're too tough and too fast for me to stand any chance at all. Thus endeth the first character. I am unclear on why we are performing rituals that will definitely kill us. It appears to have unlocked or affected many things that I don't understand yet. Back on the campaign map, it looks like each 'level' is a separate vampire-survivors esque setting with different enemies and unlocks. There are cool things like Factions that you can level up for character-wide bonuses. My next character at the next ritual site ends up being a Barbarian with a primary melee attack that sends out massive shockwaves after hitting someone with her mace a couple times or using her dodge / leap ability. It's really fun, plus she has a neat passive called 'Execute' which randomly smashes three enemies every second if they're 'injured' (I suspect that means < 50% health). It's very satisfying to hit a group with a wave and then hear the 'crunch, crunch, crunch' beat of them dying from Execute after the hit. This is a fun game! Unlike Vampire Survivors where it's mainly just outrunning the enemy horde while you let your attacks run on autopilot to clear the screen, in this so far there's a more intentional balance of you aiming to kill enemies or choosing some to pick on in melee targets - boss fights with this Barbarian were interesting because I still had to get close to them to do damage while dodging their attacks. The campaign map is a nice replacement for a simple upgrade menu for general power unlocks. I like this demo a lot, you may want to give it a whirl for yourself if you like Vampire Survivors type games.

Feels weird to say this is not the first time I've beaten things to death with a key. Thanks for the heads up, I actually do listen if you recommend keyboard / mouse or controller. I cut my gaming teeth on NES controllers which I suspect may have been too small even for my hands as a child and are definitely too small for an adult. Some games just work better with keyboard and mouse and others work better with controllers and at this point I'm comfortable with either, but if a game is 'about the same' with either one my preference is to use a controller, it's just a little more comfortable and lets you play in a more natural position. I digress, let's figure out what's going on here. I am Clef, purportedly the Antagonist of this game. I'm pissed off at the Queen and want to bring her reign to an end. This feels very similar to Hades It's an isometric action roguelite game, you have discrete encounters with enemies and bad things that will hurt you are generally pink. I'm enjoying the combat, I like games where you move around a lot and hit things. Traps? Check. Traps can hurt enemies? Check! My main weapon appears to be a combination jouster's lance and key that the game says is a 'Javelin'. Finishing off most enemies consists of sticking the key part in them and 'unlocking' them. I started to think 'this feels a little too easy' and then I died. The queen witnesses my demise. Between deaths you spend things you collect for permanent upgrades before doing another run. I don't know if Hades is the original game of this type but I'm going to think of this as a Hades clone. The boss is no joke! One more run... I got a new Javelin and it does lovely things. The new weapon is strong and we beat the first boss with it! But this not the end of the demo, I guess it's a mid-boss? We don't make it to the end this time. We must go further! I hate to continually bring up Hades but I've found that you talk to different characters to start a fight and then winning the fight grants you a power themed around those characters, it's not my fault the games are so similar! I've made it to the final boss. Of the demo at least. This fight came down to the wire but then I died. Was able to beat it on the next run. Demo beaten, it's a pretty solid game! Not a bad thing to play while I'm waiting on Hades II so it's earned a spot on the wishlist.

Finally, I can die in a dungeon I built myself! I love the concept - make the dungeon and then go fight in it. This is pretty cool. You get additional room cards for your deck as you level up and your character auto-attacks foes while you control their movement. The room shapes and door locations are important for making sure the room you pick can be usefully placed. There's limited time to wander around and kill monsters for experience so each run is kept very short. I have to get back to the entrance each run before either this horde overwhelms me or my torch runs out. I'm building up the dungeon room by room to try to connect it to what I suspect is a boss room. I managed to build myself into a dead end on the right side so my hope for victory is a winding path on the left. Ah, that's not good - my visual radius gets smaller as the torchlight fades - and I notice I'm not healing between rounds. I need to be more careful to not take damage. On the plus side, I found a bow which is giving me a great ranged attack on top of my default sword attack. I have reached the Boss chamber. On your rewards for each run you can pick various options and I scored a one-run 500% damage card earlier, so I'm popping that sucker for the boss run. The bow immediately scored a critical hit and I one-shot him. More like "Am Fear Liath Less"! Seems like a fun game, it goes on the wishlist.

I'm honestly surprised that Microprose is still in business. It just feels like a company that we would have lost at some point - props to them for sticking around, they have made some great games over the years. Task Force Admiral on Steam Task Force Admiral is a simulation game for World War II carrier battles, and it comes with a manual that they recommend you read. I suspect there's a correlation between simulation developers and outdated interfaces / manual reading. The people interested in developing a more realistic simulation are also the people who believe their audience is down for flipping through several pages of material in order to understand how to play a game, and they may be right, but I think that for developing something today it's not the right call, In videogame days of yore, you absolutely needed to read the manual for some games. I did it then and I can do it now, but if you want to reach a wider audience, some form of tutorial is much appreciated, and the more complex the game, the more it needs one. The Demo has one scenario so we're playing out the Battle of Coral Sea. We have command of the carriers Lexington and Yorktown escorted by a group of support ships and we're facing a group of Japanese carriers currently somewhere north of us. Our objective is to find and destroy their carriers while preserving ours. The game looks decent for a strategy game but the one scenario you can play in the demo starts at midnight so when I went to look at the 3-D world all I could see is a black screen. Advancing time to dawn, the game looks pretty good as I launch a sortie to search for the Japanese.  I also figured out how to put up CAP so that fighters will launch and protect my carriers, the interface for which is in an entirely different screen than the air search function. There's a lot of waiting in this game. With planes searching I can only change the timescale to about 20x normal - that's going to still take quite a bit of time while waiting to see what the results of a search are. I think games like this are just better suited to turn-based.  CAP spots a bogey and I get a realistic-sounding radio report. They're moving to engage. Looks like a Japanese floatplane! Get 'im! The F4F approaches but the floatplane maneuvers rapidly - the F4F doesn't line up a shot while the scout's rear gunner pings a few bullets off the Wildcat's armor. The F4F turns around to try again when my search planes report a surface contact. I don't even care what the contact actually is - I'm playing a demo and I want stuff to blow up. I launch every plane I have on my carriers at it.  While I don't find these interfaces intuitive I do like the art style they're using for them. The Yorktown has CAP recovery / relaunch planned so unfortunately their strike has to launch after that, so the strike will actually end up being in two waves - the Lexington starts getting ready immediately, but the Yorktown's planes will only launch after the current CAP fights land and new ones take off, which will take a good chunk of time. One of the Wildcats finally lines up a shot and hits the enemy scout a couple times. It starts to dive - did they get it? The enemy plane falls towards the ocean and disappears from view. The Lexington readies its aircraft for the strike mission. I'm digging this. The task force automatically turns into the wind when conducting air operations. The first aircraft of Lexington's strike takes to the sky. American planes at Coral Sea and Midway wouldn't wait to form a huge attack with all aircraft - and from what I can tell this game has done the research.  This section of dive bombers doesn't wait for the rest of the planes to leave the deck and starts heading to their target. The lead bomber is piloted by 'R. Dixon'. Plane detail looks good. We get a radar contact of multiple aircraft approaching. I hope Yorktown can get its planes in the air before they get here. The two strike groups spot each other as they pass by. My escorting fighters break off to attack! After a head-on pass that appears to knock a Japanese dive bomber out of formation (another possible kill), their escorting Zeroes get into the mix and a dogfight ensues. The Zero was no slouch, as this unfortunate F4F pilot is finding out. That's a kill for the Japanese. Looks like the pilot got out, but he's going to be alone in the water a long way from surface ships. The air combat does not go well for me. All of the fighters that broke off to engage the Japanese have been shot down. On top of that, a second group of attack aircraft is approaching. This does not look good... Lexington has finished launching all her planes but Yorktown's got a full deck with the Japanese closing in. 'Planes fully fueled, armed, and on the deck' is not the state you want to be in when the enemy aircraft arrive, but here we are. Flak bursts dot the sky. U.S. Flak brings a couple down. Torpedoes are in the water. The Yorktown tilts in a hard starboard turn to evade torpedoes. This is a lot closer than I am comfortable with. Zooming out gets me this cool view of the engagement. Visually this is a wonderful game to look at, especially for a simulation. Here come the dive bombers! Whelp, the Yorktown couldn't dodge everything. The investigation's subhead is going to be 'The Admiral Fucked Up'. The dive bombs miss but Yorktown takes two torpedoes while trying to evade those. Her steering is damaged and she's on fire, cruising in a circle. She can't launch her planes now. I love a sophisticated damage model but I prefer that it be applied to enemy ships. Lexington is (I think) hit by a bomb. Both American CVs are burning. Damage control gets the fires on both carriers out, but the second wave of aircraft is coming in. Lexington is hardly moving when the attack comes in despite still having propulsion, and I'm not sure if there was something I should have done to make it take evasive maneuvers but I suspect it's because Yorktown is going in circles and the rest of the fleet is more or less holding position around her. The second wave pounds Lexington, hard. Finally, many miles away Lexington's strike aircraft have spotted their target! Turns out the surface contact was actually their carriers! Let's see if I can inflict some revenge. The strike group appears to have formed up en route, there's a lot of US aircraft here. Enemy Zeroes on CAP come up to engage us but there's not very many of them and most of the attack planes will get a shot at this. A Dauntless dives toward its target! American bombs straddle the carrier and one finds it mark! The surviving American aircraft start the long journey home, leaving one Japanese CV burning badly, and I see another but I don't know if any planes managed to hit it. Meanwhile, the Lexington goes beneath the waves. I end the scenario there, it's only a demo and right now the pain point in the game is the time compression - when the game is processing strike planes flying around sometimes the max time-rate it can process is x5 times real time. That ends up involving a lot of waiting and at this point I'd just retreat with the Yorktown when its steering gets repaired. I think we got beaten pretty badly but at least we managed to hit the Japanese back, when you end the scenario you get to learn the outcome. I think this is a very fair assessment. This outcome doesn't feel all that far off from how the battle of the Coral Sea actually went down. If I were to play the demo again I'd hold off on launching CAP until I found the enemy fleet and had launched the strikes first, or at least hold off on launching CAP until I detected enemy planes approaching, you actually detect large aircraft groups via radar far enough out that I think you have time for CAP to get up in response to detection. I enjoyed this a fair bit, more than I honestly expected to - it's a game that would require some investment in learning how to do things with an unintuitive interface, but I can't fault them on the simulation aspect which is fun to watch. Really, the main downside to it right now is not being able to fast-forward time very well when you're just waiting for the next thing to happen. If they can improve that and the interface it'll be be a solid game.

It's me vs. Ugly Purple Sky Bug Black Skylands on Steam The game opens with a bearded man stealing a clearly evil egg from a cave on a floating island, which triggers some sort of technological sky forcefield. I'm playing as Eva, a 12-year old kid with an eyepatch. The nearest adult just handed me a firearm, I hope you don't need depth perception to use these. And now I've found the guy who took the evil egg - it's Dad! Dad admonishes me while being an egg thief. Hypocrite. Dad wants to book it out of town, the tutorial ends, and 8 years later it turns out I was wearing that eyepatch just to look cool. The eyepatch DID look cool and I'm sad to have given it up. --- Well we're off to an exciting start. My "Fathership" is under attack from pirates! This game features both airship combat and then getting out of your airship to run around and shoot enemies on foot - clearing the pirates is the latter form. After clearing the pirates out, someone rudely blasts the Fathership with a massive rocket barrage. The ship itself is ok, but sadly the Captain is mortally wounded - he hands command over to me. My ship now! The pirates that attacked us were a group called the Falcons and the remaining crew are gung-ho about hurting them. It looks like the Fathership is going to be my main 'base of operations' - I can build buildings like an Armory and a Bar on it for resources, and for adventuring I get in smaller skyships and drive them around the world. I'm not sure what that enormous thing way down below is, but someone did mention 'whales'. I flew to a nearby island and cleared it of bad guys and it's been 'liberated' - suck it Falcons! I spoke too soon, the Falcons just showed up with this chonker of a ship. Instead of just blasting me, likely killing our hero, preserving the long term future of the Falcons and generally winning the day for Villiany, this 'Kain' fellow wants to use the moment to offer me a deal. No dice, of course. I have integrity! After I politely decline, he politely leaves and why can't we all just get along if everyone is going to be this nice to each other? --- Ship combat is pretty fun! Even on this starter ship you get a shield that can reflect bullets, a side-mounted cannon broadside and a front-mounted rapid-fire turret. Damage is somewhat location-based, I was stripping armor off of different sections of this not-at-all-compensating gunboat. Various characters are showing up at the Fathership. Elsie, (from my childhood tutorial) is here offering to help build small arms and what passes for a 'science team' has also arrived. 'I accidently switched bodies with my pet' does not look good on the resume. At the point the game is getting more open-ended and I need resources to build more buildings on the Fathership, so I'm heading around to the nearby islands, clearing them of Falcons and harvesting resources. Exploring the nearby islands I find Harold, the self proclaimed 'Best gunsmith' in the area. I'll have to take his word for it. Some pirates show up to ruin the meeting but my Man In Gorilla Body scientist has whipped up a lovely flame turret and a personal shield for me, the Pirates come off worse in the encounter. There are explosive barrels lying around and they are powerful, one of them wipes out 5-6 of the enemies.  Even in the midst of intense combat our hero's portrait on the lower left is unruffled. After a third wave of bandits falls, Harold thanks me for the help and heads to the Fathership.Harold rewarded me with 'The best thing he ever made' which is this 'Twisted assault rifle'. It's damage is better than anything I have, but unfortunately the 'Twisted' part apparently means that the bullets curve left, as seen by my attempt to shoot directly to the right here. This was an unpleasant surprise when I first used it in battle. --- The Main Quest so far appears to start with my immediate subordinate Peter disobeying orders and running off to 'go save hostages'. Since he disobeyed orders I assume he got captured doing it, so I left him there to think about what he did while I liberated the nearest island. After that I sighed and went off to get him and ran into my first boss fight with 'Crash'. Crash simply crashed his own ship into the ground to force me to fight him. That's right Peter. Never disobey orders again. Oooh, looks like Crash dropped some new weapons for my ship! --- Back on the Fathership, I get a message saying the Falcons are now attacking the island I was raised on, so I head off to stop them there. I've figured out that I can liberate ships as well as islands! I attacked this chonker of a pirate vessel, and was able to board and clear it out. When you liberate an island it gets populated with friendly NPCs and you get one that gives you a reward - this ship ended up with a friendly crew once I cleared it. Sadly the additional crew / NPCs don't seem to do much other than be cosmetic but it feels good. --- Combat in Black Skylands is fun but not particularly challenging. I have yet to die, though I've come close a couple times against larger groups, any group of four or fewer enemies (at least at this point in the game) isn't much of a threat. Enemies fire a lot of bullets but they are slow and don't do very much damage to you. There's a 'backstab' mechanic where you can sneak up behind unaware foes and knife them for huge damage, stealth-killing lesser foes. And I've been finding giant flowers on various islands that are permanently increasing my max health. The explosive barrels that are just lying around are my best weapon. Thankfully you can set your difficulty anytime, so I'm going to turn it up to 'Very Hard'. Also I liberated a very large island and after doing so two of the NPCs there wanted to give me quests to help restore the island's vineyards, I was pleased to see a more tangible result from island liberation other than changing color from red to green on the map. In clearing the skies of some of the larger enemy ships I've unlocked waypoints that I can move the Fathership to now that I have a pilot, so my home base is now mobile. --- I arrive back at Moth Island (the original island from the Tutorial) to defeat the pirates there when I find that someone has beaten me to it - lots of dead pirates here already. But the enemy of my enemy turns out to not be my friend. The culprits, some sort of horrible creatures, attack me. Eva decides she needs to free the moths trapped around the island to clear the debris in front of the gate and enter the main village (I've had a trained moth Luna with me who's been carrying resources back to my airship for me).No sooner had I cleared the gate and learned that the village inside is still safe when this Mother shows up. It was a close fight but she dead now. The grateful residents reward me with a new Skyship! She's fast, just the way I like it! After that I returned to the Fathership, immediately fell asleep, and had a totally normal dream. What the hell is this? --- Random airships like these are docked all over pirate-controlled islands. I should quit being a hero and just go into the business of hotwiring and selling these things, but unfortunately the game won't let me fly them. Some ancient civilization left behind puzzles which unlock crystals that I give to my scientist-ape guy to upgrade my special abilities. The puzzles so far are fun, the downside is that they've started to repeat the puzzles. This was fun the first time but it's not particularly interesting to solve after that. There are some Metroidvania aspects to this game - I've run across 'X marks the spot' holes that I can't dig yet, dynamite-able rocks that I lack explosives for, swarms of 'air fish' that I cannot yet fish... Add 'the ability to call giant bids' to the list. --- Continuing the story I went to help with an issue with the Mines. We're back to fighting Falcon Pirates here - I find Ewing, the first NPC apparently able to stand up for himself. He's held a chokepoint with a couple of turrets and appears pretty much invincible, so I kite enemies on the island to him. The enemies here have ramped up in terms of difficulty - one of the elite sniper guys hit me and it took about 80% of my health.After a minute or two of endless foes I figured out they've also changed the way spawns work - before there'd be an enemy spawning tent that would spawn a flat number of enemies and die. Now there are spawn tents that appear to spawn infinite enemies and I have to actively destroy the structure. WHAT EXACTLY ARE YOU ALL DOING TOGETHER IN THAT TENT? After defending Ewing he asks me to attack the Falcon camp on the island. One of the Falcons, Mort, apparently just likes to shoot artillery at any and all intruders, potentially killing his allies in the process. It's wonderfully chaotic. In that artillery chaos I suffer my first death. When you die your moth takes you to wherever your ship is and you lose a heart. If you're out of hearts you'll be taken back to the nearest fuel station, which are also fast travel points. And BOOM I have Dynamite. --- The pirates have chained up this absolute unit, this 'definitely evolved in the sky' beauty. Now I have to break through a ship blockade that's stopping 'Stoneater', one of the major transport ships, from getting through. We're planning to use Stoneater to assault Kain's fortress. Ewing gives me a great weapon for my ship - it's highly effective. --- Blockade broken, we reach Turtletown, one of the larger islands I've seen. Also one of the very few islands not overrun by Pirates when I show up. The shops here have some real fancy stuff! Including weapons that can do full damage to the 'swarm' creatures I was fighting earlier. Shopkeepers here will be having a profitable day! --- I ran into Harold the blind engineer again and he proceeded to build a flying turret which he accidentally programmed to kill all humans. After I killed the turret I was rewarded with a rocket launcher which.... fires directly backwards. I don't understand why my character can't simply hold it the other way around. Time for another boss fight, this time it's Blast. You'll be shocked to learn that he employs explosives. Kain seems to be a good boss at least, well liked by his employees. We need a engineer to fix up the Stoneater to be a warship, so I go off and defeat Blast to obtain the services of Four Arm Frank. Coulda been Four Foot Frank if you stuck those on lower. --- The plan now is to get a second massive transport ship, the Sawduster, refit that, and use the pair of large ships together to attack the main pirate base. The pirates took Sawduster and made it inaccessible, but thankfully a huge bird called the Mother of Falcons decides that now is a great time to 'rescue' me from the pirates. She has a human helper that tells me her egg was taken (why she doesn't rescue the egg herself is unknown) but that's my job now, I suppose. My Moth can carry me back to my own skyship whenever I want, so I'm not sure why IT can't just fly me to the Sawduster. Enemies at this point in the game are bullet sponges and take awhile to kill with normal bullets. One of the abilities I unlocked is a 'time slow' which lets me run around and backstab foes during a fight and it helps, but combat is taking longer than it used to and it's not an improvement. --- Having saved the eggs, Mama bird is willing to carry me from large bird nests to predetermined spots. Off I go! More glowing employer reviews for Kain, I bet the Falcons look great on Glassdoor. This boss is actually pretty tough, I've died several times. I have to grapple between three floating platforms while dodging shots and homing missiles. With persistence, she drops. I have captured Sawduster from the Falcons, and found a note that implicates the local governor, Shantal, as working with the Falcons! Shock and betrayal! Also always use your own initials when communicating with criminals. Bitch I am the LAW Kain's plan unveiled! Who could have guessed that 'swarmlit' comes from the Swarm? --- I've made a terrible mistake, I was holding off on these upgrades until I had my 'ideal' skyship - turns out that they carry over to whichever skyship you pick. Oops. I've been pointlessly underpowering myself in the name of being overpowered later. I head off to find Sawduster at a wood processing island, but something has gone terribly wrong here - the Falcons here are already dead, except this guy who is transforming into a Swarm creature! It's PEOPLE! SWARM IS PEOPLE! These enemies are actually easier than the last island, they're not as tough and while their bullets are homing, they're also slower than I can run. I also find a barrier that prevents the Swarm from crossing, but I can cross. Oh, I think this is probably the skyshield from the intro. Even though nobody wants to live here because it's got 'turn you into swarm' disease, I still get fireworks when liberating the island. Hooray for being an uninhabitable wasteland! The only living person left happens to be Jim, Elsa's engineer Dad. He suggests that we armor up our massive transport ships to attack Kain's fort and recommends killing a monster to get it. Jim we need to discuss the moustache. --- Ok, the hunter I'm supposed to find for this armor is deep within the 'Swarm Region' - off I go to uncharted skies. Uncharted aside from getting a precise waypoint to head for. Found him, thank you waypoint. I suspect he's not a particularly good hunter. The Swarm Region is teeming with nasties, devoid of human life... Except for THIS dude who thinks it's a great place to run a store. Location, location, location! And he won't even make a sale today because I'm 9 copper short. Cut a girl a break! All right, we've found the Devourer and we get to fight a boss in ship-battle mode. Sadly the Devourer doesn't get stuff blown off him like ships do, he's a bucket of hitpoints. --- On returning to my home village - and Ewing - with this armor I find that we spent so much time making me - and only me - run around to try to get two massive ships converted into war rigs that the Falcons finally decided to lay waste to the village they hadn't conquered while I was out. Maybe one other person could help out with some of these problems? Must I do everything myself? I head back to the Fathership and meet... this... What the fuck The extraplanar polyglot wants me to go kill a Swarm that invaded the mines, but I just found out what happens when Kain is left alone, so screw the side quests - time to assault Kain's fort. I'm sorry, I thought this was the goddamn sky Let the final battle commence! Sawduster is flinging logs and Stoneater is, contrary to its namesake, vomiting rocks. The pirates have a chonky defense turret to fight back with. They also send out this heavily armed airship, which I dispatch quickly. Following the sky battle, we assault with ground forces! That force consists of... me. I am all the ground forces. I chew through a few dozen pirates and audaciously demand Kain's surrender. Kain responds with a sales pitch, and you know, it's actually pretty tempting. The reviews from his former employees have been stellar! But alas, there's no real option to switch sides and we must fight! Peter shows up and I actually get some assistance from other characters for the final battle. Someone is finally helping me, credit where it's due. Boss Phase 2 is another 'move between the platforms' deal which is challenging, but with some judicious equipment choices he goes down on my third attempt. The platform battles are the most challenging in the game. After Kain falls, Peter convinces me to not just shoot Kain right here, right now. We're all about law and justice on these here sky islands. Kain owns up to his various machinations and misdeeds, but claims he doesn't know about any 'experiments'... and says I should ask my father about them.... --- Back on the Fathership, Ruth has injected Peter with something and run off. Who the hell was Ruth? I've completely forgotten. Kain tells me where he thinks Ruth is and I'm off to stop Ruth from letting the Swarm out of the shield. And also figure out who Ruth is. The island has people in science containers and humans-turned-into-swarm. Ruth, you monster! Oh, Ruth is THIS lady! She's appeared in like two scenes as a doctor occasionally helping me. I never even screenshotted her prior to this, she felt like a very minor character. Damn you Dr. Ruth!!!!! Unlike the actual Dr. Ruth who's life's work culminated in another video game (Dr. Ruth's Computer Game of Good Sex) , which is a real thing that I did not make up, this Dr. Ruth is much more evil. She goes on about being a servant of some entity named Horos and then transforms into a fancy hairstyle. She goes down after a long-drawn out fight - thankfully she would occasionally drop canisters that would spawn medkits. Then her freak of a son comes out to see his Mom's dead body. Life's tough kid. I rescue my father! Excellent summary of the game, Dad! I find the antidote for Peter... and then DAD PULLS A GUN ON ME? I just rescued you! And you're my father! Double plus uncool! Ok, Dad says I'm actually a Swarm-thing. I was inside the egg he stole at the start. This is one hell of a way to find out you're adopted. I think I'm somewhere in the 400's in terms of people killed at this point? Seemed weird to me too, but it's mainly because nobody else wanted to help! Dad decides not to kill me because he can't bring himself to. I do like this plot twist, it's pretty good and I like that there's an explanation for why I'm able to take on dozens of foes at a time, lots of games just shrug and let it be. ---Time to go back to the Fathership to save Peter from pirates, again. Once that's done, folks here want to throw a party - we beat Kain and we're waiting on backup from the Capital to take on the Swarm, and they're still mostly trapped in the skyshield anyway. Everything's looking good. When you start the party, you get a warning screen - much appreciated, it's nice to know when you can't go back to the open world in a game. I'm good, I've seen what the game has to offer. Let's end this. Fireworks and a buffet - a righteous reward for saving the local island chain! Sadly the festivities are interrupted. God damnit Dad could it wait until after the party? Apparently the Dome has been destroyed and the Swarm is free to do it's thing. I suppose that qualifies as urgent. A bunch of these things latch onto the Fathership and start disgorging Swarm boarders. I have to hold out until reinforcements arrive. Hold on long enough and reinforcements show up! The Unzayans finally show up with some actual goddamn warships. And they've been smashed. Quite the military debacle, considering my civilian ship is still floating after facing the swarm alone. With the fleet destroyed and the Swarm temporarily distracted destroying the fleet, I guess it's up to me to head in by myself and find and defeat the big boss of the Swarm, Horos. Peter actually offers to help but I gallantly tell him to stay behind and guard the Fathership. Guard it from the Swarm that just smashed an entire battle fleet. Good luck Peter! Props to the devs for including this option that I presume lets you warp back to before starting the final sequence. I fly to the egg chamber I originally came from and meet Horos. Horos seems like a cool bug, I appreciate the compliment. Horos is protected by crystals that need killing before I can get to him. As with many forcefields in movies and games, the forcefield generators are outside the forcefield. After a difficult boss battle (he hits hard!) Horos begs for his life. Apparently he's an alien that's been sustaining the islands in the sky. I kill him anyway, and my innate Swarm-ness activates and I take his place as leader of the Swarm, calling them off from savaging humanity. Eva is a kinder, gentler bug creature. Peter becomes Marshal and writes about the fate of the other characters, and that's a wrap!

"AAAAAAAGHHHHHHHH" - Me falling into a pit again. Impossible Mission was a Commodore 64 game that people were dedicated enough to that they recreated it so you can play it on a web browser, which I am doing via this site: https://impossible-mission.krissz.hu/ This site is really great as it not only lets you play the game but it includes a menu where you can view the game's manual (which is often necessary for older games like this). It even lets you play the game via a controller, which is how I'm playing it. Graphics have come a long way since then Impossible Mission gives you a time limit of six hours to infiltrate Professor Elvin Atombender's stronghold by avoiding pits and robots and searching furniture for password fragments. After my first attempt I was able to search a couple rooms successfully but ran out of time because apparently when you die it adds ten minutes to your total time, and I'm dying quite a bit - the platforming is very touchy and jumping moves you an exact distance forward so there's no opportunity to correct your landing - you're going to make it or not based on where you start. The 'AAAAAAGHHHHH' sound effect for falling in a pit is far, far worse than being killed by a robot. --- Exploring! My second attempt is going far better than my first - I'm learning a delightful variety of robot patterns via trial and error (And there is quite a variety! Some robots actively charge you and others only try to shock you if they can see you - some just wander and fire randomly, and occasionally they'll just stand in place), and I've been able to clear the furniture in most of the rooms on this map either via dodging the robots or shutting them down via a limited number of 'shutdown robot' passwords you can find. The rooms themselves are not randomly generated and come from a set, so I plan to practice the difficult rooms when I find them so they can be cleared in future games. I took this screenshot with about 20 minutes left on my timer so I expect this run will end shortly.  --- Sound Puzzle! Without the manual it would have been tough to figure out that this isn't a 'Simon' type puzzle where you click the squares in the order they were shown - the puzzle shows you a sequence in a random order and then it's up to you to press them in ascending musical tone. You can solve it as many times as you like with each puzzle adding another square to the sequence. Each time you solve it gives you a one-use 'shut down the robots' or 'reset the lifts' password - the latter to be used whenever you accidentally fall in a room and you've left the lifts out of position to bring you back up. You can always die in the room to reset the lifts if you need to but this costs valuable time. --- Solve the Puzzle, Save the World. I've been collecting these 'puzzle pieces' shown at the bottom of the screen (the manual mentions these are for the solution to the final room) and I initially assumed that you had to join them up the same way you would a jigsaw puzzle, by matching their edges together to form a larger picture. Not so! You actually overlay the pieces on top of each other - so that center-bottom and top-right piece actually combine to form the bottom-right image there. Pieces have to be of the same color to be matched but you can change the puzzle piece colors as well as flip them vertically or horizontally, so I'm going to need a chunk of time still available by the last room to solve this. --- Fuck this room in particular! I mean, just look at it! How do you go up? You'd think the 'stairs' on the left, but no - you're a long jumper, you have no chance at those. You have to take the center lift platform up and jump between the center platforms and the ones occupied by robots. And the floor pits kill me half the time I'm trying to get to the lift platform in the first place.  --- The password is obviously 'CORMOBANT' I had an incredible run that came within a hair's breadth of beating the game. Each puzzle you assemble gets you a letter of the final password, and here you can see I had 8 of 9 letters - and 3 of the 4 remaining puzzle pieces. I died my last few deaths trying to search the few furniture items I had bypassed - but you really probably do need to try to get all of them to win. If I can get a run like this, victory is within my grasp! --- Robo-balls! There is this one other 'ball' enemy type that usually just follows you slowly, and unless you let it trap you isn't much of a threat especially because you can kite it into the regular robots and for some reason it dies with the other robots touch it. This one however moves in a rapid 'infinity' pattern and makes the upper part of the floor extremely hard to navigate. This is a room worthy of using one of your limited 'shut off the robots' passwords. Despite the primitive graphics I want to say that the robot lighting zap and the disintegration of the player look great - here's me showcasing both! --- No.... NO!!!!! MISSION..... POSSIBLE! After several more attempts and figuring out which rooms I wanted to use the robot snoozes on I made it with less than 10 minutes to spare (thus it came down to my very last life). This really was a solid C64 game and I can see why people loved it, and thanks to the website at the start of this post you can give it a shot yourself if you're inclined. I don't recall how many attempts it took me, it wasn't a huge amount but I did begin just restarting an attempt rather than continue it if I starting dying early. Also, the password changes each game (for what that's worth). I won on 'SWORDFISH'. My final score. One game down, many to go!