Quicker posts, huh?
Alright, you got me. I’m filling time with this one. You’ve probably already noticed the big Letterboxd icon at the bottom of the page. Click it, and you’ll see some quick takes after I finish a movie. It’s mostly stuff I’ve been doing forever in text threads, just recorded now. I’ve been having fun with it!
(more…)Been a little while!
It looks different here!! Weird, right? Expect to see some quicker posts, hopefully more often than once every two years. If Twitter dies and we all scatter I’ll at least make this place fun.
You’ll see the usual indie games here as always, but I’m hoping to do a bit more! I want to make an effort to highlight other people making good things (Duckfeed.tv, NauticalFox, other freelancers, etc!) and this seems like the time and place to do it.
I’m still fumbling my way through hippochippies 2.0 or whatever this is, but updating the site and moving the writing to my phone instead of a keyboard has made this feel a lot less like work. The less I feel like I’m back in school when I do this, the better. Glad it only took almost two decades to figure that out.
Here’s a sneak preview of a very long notes app where I’ve been collecting ideas for the new Getting Spooky post for like two months.
Hi!
If you made it through to February, congratulations, we’ve all been through a bit together. The last year or so has been not great. Couple of cool things here and there, but overall, let’s just call that one a bummer. During my bummer year, I decided to sink hundreds of hours into MMOs I’d never tried, which was good at making hundreds of depression hours pass while spending time with friends, but less good for trying to accomplish anything productive. But hey, I can tell you a whole, whole lot about Final Fantasy XIV and Dauntless now.
So what actually about 2020? I played some stuff! As usual, here’s the prediction list for 2020’s GOTY from an innocent babe I can barely recall, me from 2019:
1. Elden Ring – (lol nope not yet)
2. Doom Eternal – (didn’t like it)
3. Animal Crossing New Horizons – (got bored really fast, it’s cute tho)
4. The Binding of Isaac: Repentance – (didn’t come out yet, understandable)
5. Cyberpunk 2077 – (played for an hour, crashed my ps4)
6. Super Meat Boy Forever – (downloaded it two days ago and it seems not great)
7. The Last of Us Part II – (haven’t played it yet because of time and the devs being bad but soon)
8. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 – (lol not happening)
9. Knuckle Sandwich – (still being made, understandable)
10. Hollow Knight: Silksong – (again… 2020 happened, no rush)
So those were very bad predictions, and I can’t wait to make some more. But first, what does the HippoChippies’ Top 10 of 2020 actually look like? Different.
Since bad year and depression and all that, I have a list of dozens and dozens of games from 2020 that seemed cool. I would love to play through the new Ori, see more of Spiritfarer, find out what The Pathless even is because the trailer seemed neat, and catch up with many, many more games I missed last year. But since I can’t spend forever just catching up, I’ve gotta throw something out there right? My biggest disappointment about this is that I’m 100% sure that there’s some incredible things that snuck under my radar that I would have absolutely adored. Happens every year. So to whatever 2020’s Mibibli’s Quest or Supraland is, hat’s off to you, and I hope somebody thought you were great. Maybe you’ll turn up for me someday.
Though I missed a huge swath in comparison to the 400 or whatever games I usually play, here’s a list of my favorites that I was able to spend some time with.
…An unordered list of my favorites. I don’t have the willpower for that stuff anymore. Paper Mario’s the GOTY though!
Paper Mario: The Origami King
If you remember much about the Summer of 2020, it’s that things were Not Good. But for a measly little weekend in July I was able to have one fucking moment of goodness to myself, and that was Paper Mario: The Origami King. No, the game isn’t the return to Thousand Year Door-form that some of the fan base pines for. I love Thousand Year Door, but I don’t love it because it’s an RPG (and the new combat is actually pretty good!). I love it because it’s a vehicle for the Paper Mario developers to make fun however they can. Whether it’s having best-in-class writing and localization to place it alongside some CRPGs and the Yakuza team, or being able to come up with a million silly ways to scavenger hunt Toads, Origami King is first-party Nintendo doing work. I’m sad it didn’t get the attention it deserved. Also Olivia is probably the best partner in the series and I want her to hang out in every video game. Good vibes all around here.
Disc Room
Kind of a minigame collection of action escape rooms? I love it very much. At first glance just an enemy avoidance game with a couple twists, Disc Room locks you in a bunch of rooms with a bunch of discs. Mostly sawblades. They fly around the room and you survive for 5 seconds. Then the door opens and you move into the next room and survive for 20. Then maybe the next one is 30 seconds without dashing. Things progress like that for a bit, and that’s what I was on board with from the trailers. Already cool, right? Then oops surprise it’s also secretly a puzzle game with really clever solutions. There’s a ton of variety here for a game that you can finish in an afternoon. Gameplay stays spicy the whole time between the unique world mechanics (like the disco floor levels which rule), the speedruns you can choose to do on each screen, and the active abilities you collect and swap through (Ex. cloning yourself for puzzles across multiple rooms!). Just an absolute treat if you’re looking for something with a Meat Boy sense of quick iteration and pacing.
Half-Life: Alyx
I wrote quite a bit about it here… and then promptly never played it again! Covid and depression intensified and I never slapped that headset back on. One of these days though. Kinda wish I could just play it on my tv.
Umurangi Generation
The coolest game of the year no doubt, and the one that feels like it wraps up 2020 pretty well for me. In the limited capacity I was able to see anyone over the past year, I still felt the need to make sure my friends saw Umurangi Generation. You’re given a camera and a sheet of things to take pictures of, and sent off on a series of five to ten minute levels filled to the brim with detail and life. It’s a photography scavenger hunt game! And it came out in the same year that the Pokemon Snap sequel was announced! Separating itself from Snap, though, not being on rails allows for platforming to come into play (you have a generous double jump so no worries) to line up special photos from specific places. All of this good gameplay takes place over a dozen or so courses that paint a picture of a world where things are bad and getting worse, thanks to a lackluster government response to an avoidable tragedy. Yeah, this is probably the one I’ll take with me.
Scourgebringer
My favorite roguelike of the year! Even though I think Hades is super neat, it didn’t stack up to how effortlessly smooth it feels to slash and shoot monsties in Scourgebringer. Everything about this game is fast fast fast. Dodge, jump, slash, shoot, leave room, repeat. You pop in the room and do some light platforming to cut up 15 dudes in 5 seconds over and over again. Though it may lack some of the staying power of an Isaac or a Gungeon, it’s hard to say that either of those games feel better in moment to moment play than this one. I haven’t played much of it since I plowed through its early access content early last year, but every time I hear about the updates with new perks and skills and bosses and stuff I get real pumped for when I’m able to hop back in. If you like this, try out the similarly underappreciated roguelite, Monolith!
Super Mario Maker 2 3.0
This is that real shit we’ve been wanting all along!!!! You thought it was cool that we could make Mario levels? Now we can make Mario games! The world map feature introduced in the giant 3.0 update may feel a bit slight once you’ve found its limits, but wow oh wow is it fun to string your levels together on a map you hand-crafted yourself. Some of the most fun I had in a video game all year, actually. Sadly, the features kind of fall apart once you finish your first masterpiece, as each player can only make one World at a time. But hey, the first week everybody doing nothing but making worlds and playing everybody else’s can’t be undersold. Super Mario Maker 3 has the potential to absolutely knock it out of the park now that they’ve set the stage for entire Mario Game Making. But it’s Nintendo, so we’ll see.
Dreams
Now you too can experience Media Molocule’s Wild Ride without interacting with bad LittleBigPlanet platforming. Hooray! Surf through some of the dumbest content made by the randos of the internet, all on the couch with your PS4. If you can get behind a novelty, you need to treat yourself with this one.
Once I played a game about a scary toilet, then I played a game where I had to do some of the worst 3D platforming I’ve ever seen just to get to Shrek’s outhouse. Then All-Star played and Donkey showed up. I would have paid $100 for this.
If you don’t intend on creating (like me), it’s pretty much just PlayStation itch.io which is pretty rad. Also somebody made a Dreams Marble Madness game and it’s the best marble game I’ve ever played. People are doing legit good work in this thing.
Astro Bot Rescue Mission
Asobi Team is rushing its tiny robot legs towards the modern platforming throne. Astro Bot only sticks around for a few hours this time, but it’s a delightful couple of afternoons you’ll cherish. I would play an entire game around the gyro-control bow and arrow combat section in the forest. Let these people make a full big game with all the money they want Sony!!!!!
Immortals Fenyx Rising
Did you like Breath of the Wild? These folks liked it so much they made another one, to mostly positive results! Cool shrines. Still wish it was called Gods and Monsters.
And those were some brief moments of respite throughout last year. Pretty good ones!
Disco Elysium was actually the best game I played in 2020 by a country mile… totally should’ve finished that one in 2019. I’ll never forget it. Control was still a very solid GOTY though.
But what about now? What about the future? Let’s make bold predictions. Have I done that one before? Probably.
HippoChippies (Probably Not) Game of the Year 2021:
Also, shout out to WordPress for only letting me bold the numbers in the first list but not the second one. Good website!
Honorable Mentions:
Breath of the Wild 2 – maybe not happening this year.
Resident Evil: Village – I really enjoyed 7 but I think maybe these just spook me too much these days!!!!
Maquette – good trailer and neat puzzle mechanic, I wanna see more.
Elden Ring – who knows when on this one.
Monster Hunter Rise – I love these games, but it would take a lot after how much World shook things up.
BioMutant – hope it actually comes out! looks good!
Praey for the Gods – it’s actually been out in early access for like two years so maybe it’s already great idk.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits – sure looks pretty but we don’t know a ton else about it. cautiously optimistic!
Weird West – top down rpg from the Dishonored devs. odd blend of immersive sim elements here.
Knuckle Sandwich – no solid date at the moment. still looks amazing.
Astalon: Tears of the Earth – do we need more indie metroidvanias with pixel art? no. do i like em? yes.
NieR Replicant – didn’t super care for the first Nier, loved Automata. need to see more of this one.
Back 4 Blood – I remember Left 4 Dead, but I also remember Evolve.
And I guess that’s it? Check back soon (for real this time I promise) for some good stuff. Did you know that there’s a new Celeste game that came out this year? And that it’s maybe not the best platformer released in 2021 already? Stay tuned! Thank you very very very much for reading any of this and sticking with me. Whether you’ve followed the site since 2009 or this is the first thing of mine you’ve ever read… you’re amazing!
Thanks again and take care of yourselves. (thumbs up emoji) (i do not have access to emojis on this computer) (good bye)
SPOOKWARE from Adam Pype and Viktor Kraus is a gift to a broken world. Easily gaining Halloween Classic status, SPOOKWARE imagines if WarioWare’s namesake was less of a stinky capitalist and more of a Jigsaw.
It’s one game of WarioWare with a high score of twenty, with one speed up at halfway. It’s tough! The microgames all only use the four arrow keys, but when you’re slamming all of them to rotate a garage door to stop THE GRUDGE from getting in, things start to get tricky. The horror inspirations range from Slenderman to your standard cow abduction, and after playing for an hour I laughed when I realized on their website there’s only ten in the mix. “10 BLAZING FAST MICROGAMES. EACH ONE SPOOKIER THAN THE LAST ONE!” as game’s page boldly states. I still haven’t been able to beat it.
Look at that little guy!
Adam Pype is currently teasing a follow-up to be featured in the Dread X Collection 3, so as SPOOKWARE’s protagonist so often rumbles, “hellll yeaahhhhh.”
Here’s a bonus directly from the Dread X Collection 3 page about the sequel, SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store:
I am ready for the skelebros.
Check out SPOOKWARE on its itch.io page!
No, the the virus hasn’t found me. Yes, I’m behind and the stress of the world falling apart around me maybe contributed to the lateness of this post. Remember the first thing I posted this year? About how this is gonna be such a fun year for new creative projects and shit? Well, hindsight’s 2020.
As a being riddled with depression and anxiety, I’ve thought about getting my writing done (here and otherwise) every single day. I’ve been trying to write a horror novel, one that I think you’ll enjoy if you like anything on this site, but this year just hasn’t been conducive to writing fictional horrors when there’s so much going on right now to actually be afraid of.
But this isn’t a LiveJournal and you’re not here to read one. This preamble does serve a purpose going forward, however: I don’t have the energy to rank Games of the Month right now. And maybe I won’t ever have that energy again, who knows! This month you’re getting one game from March and one game from April.
I realize you might meet this information with a shrug, but trust me, this is something that has caused me stress for literal years. Ranking games can be fun! But just finding a lot of the stuff that comes out every month can be a struggle. There are so, so many small games that come out every single day it’s impossible to actually see everything that’s out there. And still, leave it to my brain to personally feel responsible for each one I miss or don’t have a chance to cover. On top of all that, attempting to quantify an ordered ranking of every month’s games? It’s not feasible for me anymore, and I have to stop pretending that it is. Having a Games of the Month post at all is better than me sitting in quarantine thinking, “Wow, maybe Nioh 2 is better than Persona 5 Royal.” and vice versa ad nauseum in between bouts of sheer panic because I looked at the news.
TLDR: Games of the Month aren’t ranked anymore because my brain is broken. And this one’s a two-monther because of quarantine stuff, that part’s not permanent.
Enjoy the show!
Oh right, video games!!!
Half-Life: Alyx isn’t just a great Half-Life game, it’s an incredibly good introduction to what virtual reality is capable of. Sure, a lot of what’s on display here feels a bit too gimmicky for its own good at times, but having Valve tune a combat system to a VR setting really shows us what we’ve been missing. No matter how many weird 3D menus they make me rotate, I will continue to do them if they let me run around my actual room and feel like a scrappy rebel taking down an army.
I have a bit more to say about Half-Life: Alyx here in case you missed it.
Wait just a second. Before you think the quarantine ruined my brain and made me decide Mario Maker is the Game of the Month every month, listen up. They made this old one even better.
They finally added the thing everybody wanted since the announcement of the original non-Super “Mario Maker,” a World Map Maker! Bad news first: you can only upload one World at a time. That sucks, it’s dumb, and it’s very Nintendo. Everything else about it? *chef kiss*
Yes, making Mario levels is the best thing about Mario Maker. They added a bunch of new objects and enemies and all of that and that’s excellent. But letting me make a Super Mario World map? And put my own levels into it? The greatest novice game creation machine in the world now feels like you can build a whole video game from the ground up, not just bits and pieces of one.
The editor, though it’s clearly testing the waters for Mario Maker 3, is shockingly diverse already. You can place enemy icons on the map to make the traditional Hammer Bro fights. You can hide castles underwater so that some levels only appear after certain criteria are met. There’s even a handful of unique Toad House mini games tossed in for good measure to spice up your map. I already loved Super Mario Maker, but this feels like we’re getting much closer to what they always meant this series to be.
There’s a lot of room for improvement here, like how there’s not a way to make secret exits or hidden warps. But for a free update to a game that I’ve been playing for nearly a year? Definitely worth the six hours I spent crafting a world when the update went live at midnight.
Nioh 2 – A vast improvement over the original in every way. Better level design and bosses show that Ninja Theory is taking the right lessons from the best of From Software.
Final Fantasy VII Remake – The first hour seems great! The mix of turn-based and real-time combat isn’t something I’ve ever seen before, or something that should be as fun as it is.
Persona 5 Royal – Persona 5 is a bit of a mess, and Persona 5 Royal does its best to tidy that mess up. Really enjoying it a lot more this time around… I’ll still never finish it.
Doom Eternal – There’s a good game in here somewhere, I just haven’t had the patience to dig past the occasional god awful level design and general clutter to find it.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons – If you want a series of chores to do while looking very, very cute, have I found something for you. If you want to not stress yourself to the limit trying to get home by real-world 9pm to buy something from the shop before it closes? Maybe admit that your brain just isn’t cut out for this kind of thing and play more Mario.
Half-Life: Alyx’s slow start doesn’t do it a ton of favors. I’ll admit, I’m over a decade out since my last Half-Life 2 playthrough (I’m due, I know.) but I remembered Half-Life being fucking awesome right? Thankfully, after a couple hours(!!) of VR tutorializing, Valve stops playing their hand so close to their chest.
Tech in the Half-Life universe has always been fun as hell to toy with, and luckily the Gravity Gloves are handy enough to carry a few hours of wandering. Point at anything in the environment, hold the trigger, and flick it towards you. Whatever you aimed at will come flying at you and you can catch it in midair. It’s awesome just about every time. You’ll explore some sewers and city streets. You’ll pick off some head crabs and a combine or two. You’ll solve a surprising variety of puzzles. And then, a handful of chapters in, you have your first serious combat encounter with some heavily armored bruisers.
I cannot exaggerate how goddamn good the combat in this game can be.
Did you play Doom 2016? Do you remember how the level design and weapons and systems all came together perfectly to make you feel like the coolest person alive? Well, since Doom Eternal shit the bed this go around, Half-Life: Alyx is here to pick up that particular torch and start running with it.
Imagine the most excited you’ve been in a video game combat encounter, and that was my experience with the first heavy gunner fight in Half-Life: Alyx. It absolutely ruled. I, as a physical human being, had to crouch and hide and run around a room to outsmart a bunch of soldiers. You can sneak, you can rush, you can hoarde a bunch of grenades and hope for the best. The level of creativity in player solution is almost certainly more limited than what it feels like in the moment, but it’s also the only game outside of Superhot to make me feel like I’m beating these dudes in a real-ass fight. I ducked under shotgun fire, blind fired from behind cover, all of that shit. We’ve done it a million times in games before, but man, VR! And it’s not just that it’s in VR. I’ve played plenty of shooters in VR before. Half-Life: Alyx has a pedigree of people who know exactly how to balance a fight, give you juuuust enough ammo and grenades to scrape by, and make you feel like there’s no way in hell you’re gonna survive. And then you do! Remember when these people made Left 4 Dead? Man, I’ve missed ’em.
I know I’m a huge sucker for virtual reality to begin with and those not already converted may not be convinced, but believe me when I tell you Half-Life: Alyx put me in a game in a way I’ve never felt before. Sadly, I’m visiting someone else to use their VR set and with the virus being what it is… yeah I haven’t gotten to play the game in a month. But, again, I’m not joking when I say that my heart is racing just thinking about being able to play it again. And it highlights how much not fun I’ve had with Doom Eternal so far, but that’s a different discussion for a different day.
The game isn’t perfect by a longshot, though! The first couple chapters are super boring! Some of the secrets feel so arbitrarily hidden that you’re forced to just do the air flick thing at random and hope a collectible comes flying towards you. Grabbing things in VR can be unwieldy, and those headsets just aren’t comfortable enough yet to play for more than an hour or two at a time. BUT: I just can’t imagine having the same experience with the combat if it wasn’t in virtual reality, as much as it sucks to say. I do hope that Half-Life: Alyx, through mods or otherwise, becomes accessible to more people, even at the risk of losing a bit of its soul. It’s still a good Half-Life game! There’s smart writing (Russel’s chatter in your ear is always welcome), a cool Ravenholm tribute section (this is a horror game when it wants to be!), and just generally clever puzzle design throughout. If you have any way to get your hands on this thing, you gotta give it a shot.
hippochippies 