Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 36


    So, I've had a bit of a hard time getting into Rock On! Island. This is partially because I don't generally play a lot of tower defense games; I've never touched any Bloons TD, which from the outside seems like it must be seminal given the number of sequels and its placement on digital storefronts. Long ago, I probably took a little dip in Defense Grid and thought, "Neat!" before returning to the rivers and lakes that I'm used to. It just isn't a series of waterfalls that I tend to migrate up casually, and there simply has to be a way to escape this TLC metaphor I appear to be trapped in!
All I'm saying is that I'm a tower defense scrub- ENOUGH!

I've lost a bunch, and have slowly been learning weird tricks like putting chickens next to fires or spending meat while the dinos are active. Things that would have let me start kicking this game's butt MUCH sooner had I known about them.

...but that's just how UFO 50 is, right? We're chasing that experience of loading up a bunch of cracked shareware or renting games from the local gas station, situations where we didn't have the manuals and needed to learn to play the games by doing. I have years of practice at doing just that, so I got stuck into this challenging little game without ever bothering to enter your home Village of Peace.

It turns out there's been a whole helpful tutorial area at the beginning of this game the entire time! I've gotten way too used to figuring everything out the hard way. Everything these villagers are telling me is stuff that I found out through brutal trial-and-error.
I'm really mad at myself, but the humor inherent to this discovery was also painfully sublime; my partner was quite startled when I screamed "THERE'S A WHOLE VILLAGE?!"


    Going forward, I'll try not to assume that the UFO 50 Recovery Team is against any and all modern creature comforts. And if I manage to defeat Rock On! Island, perhaps I can keep a little tower defense streak going. I like the agency of being able to help my placed units out with my own avatar, and I've been hearing good things about Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Void Stranger and Player Expectations

Image
     After hearing murmurings from Super Eyepatch Wolf and others, I decided to jump into system_erasure 's latest game  Void Stranger completely blind... This is normally where spoiler warnings would be appropriate, but I'm not sure how much I could possibly spoil given I haven't really started the game yet. That's right; I'm stopping to write this in response to playing the game for all of 5 minutes! + + + Void Stranger appears to be a game about defying player expectations. Before even getting past the title screen, I am confronted with a dynamic representation of the simple controls; Up , Left , Down , Right , A , and Start , in black, white, and gray against a field of rising particles. The interface responds to inputs and makes it clear that my controller is indeed working, but pressing Start simply causes it to light up; it does not allow me to actually start the game... How strange. A bit of thrashing around on the buttons yields a minor discovery; did the
Read more

FFVIII Junctioning Isn't That Complicated, But...

Image
    A  common refrain you tend to hear from Final Fantasy VIII 's detractors, (a group I certainly belong to, despite my devil's advocacy) is that its reviled Junction System is "too complicated." That's a bit reductive, and putting stock in stories of forlorn players pushing deep into the game without ever engaging with the system is difficult, given how exhaustively they teach and over-explain it. You can tell your 18 y/o teacher is into you if she slow blinks Heck, given her age and status as a pump-fake love interest, I suspect the only narrative reason Quistis Trepe was written as an instructor and not just an upper-classmate boils down to naturalizing her unhinged level of tutorialization on the topic! Individual spell casts get sucked out of enemies and act like consumables, and Guardian Forces buff you by equipping stacks of spells to your stats; that's about it! Core player understanding of FFVIII 's Junction System wasn't really one of its
Read more

Ahab Souls

Image
I am haunted; kept up at night by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that certainly will exist, but whether or not being devoured by it will satisfy me won’t be revealed for another two months…      The first time I played the Lies of P Demo, I was duly impressed by the audio-visual design and charmed by its over-the-top premise, but the experience didn’t manage to fully entangle me in its strings; not yet. You see, combat is well over 50% of what makes or breaks a souls-like title, (with the rest being monopolized by level and world design) and when it came to dismantling frenzied puppets, I bounced off; the meta-narrative driving this whole release seems to be “Elden Ring is lovely, but the world wants a sequel to Bloodborne very badly,” and so this vertical slice of a Pinnocchio-based spiritual successor convinced me to play it like one.      Everything about the Victorian steampunk setting told me to find a rhythm of attacking and dodging that would make a hunter of hunte
Read more