Fuzzy Buzz

Is My Time at Portia better than Stardew Valley?

My Time at Portia is one of the better indie Harvest Moon clones to be released in recent years, featuring a unique setting and a fully 3D world, but it can’t escape being compared to Stardew Valley, the pixel-art darling that rejuvenated the genre.

I’ve spent an ungodly 255 hours tending my fake farm in Stardew, even after declaring I didn’t have timefor it. Portia is threatening to take up a…

The Steam monopoly is crumbling, so where’s the rejoicing?

Epic Games is now challenging the supremacy of Valve’s Steam platform in the PC games market, and PC gamers are supposedly up in arms. The reason? Epic is “forcing” them to download a new launcher if they want to play shiny new murder-ups like Borderlands 3, Metro: Exodus, Hades, or Outer Worlds.

So… What?

Oh, there are loud excuses. Epic is partly owned by TenCent, a Chinese company that people…

It took a few years, but these independent West Coast studios came roaring back with new titles this year. Fullbright followed up with Tacoma, a sci-fi drama about an investigation of a space station disaster. Giant Sparrow delivered the ambitious What Remains of Edith Finch, a story about generations of a cursed family.

Both of these titles are superb interactive experiences, brimming with world building detail and genuine human emotion. I would heartily recommend them both to the gaming aficionado. However, I can’t say I would mount such a full throated pitch to more casual gamers, like I did with Gone Home and The Unfinished Swan.

    If you can get your high expectations out of the way, Tacoma is a clever and amazing experience. The plot is hokey and contrived as hell, but so was the plot of “Gone Home.” The mechanic of following AR recordings around a stylish space station is very unique, as are the characters. Yes, there are 3 gay characters out of a crew of 6, so the game feels like it’s pushing a fantasy a bit hard, but I think it follows in the grand Star Trek tradition of exploring contemporary social issues through a less judgy lens. Also, 4 of of the 6 crew members are paired up in romantic relationships, making you wonder if the Tacoma space station has a shortage of professionalism, as well as oxygen. But that contrivance allows for a richer exploration of themes with a smaller number of characters, so I let it slide. The good v evil tale is also a bit harder to swallow when the game itself suggests opportunities for a more subtle and foggy approach to the morality of its universe.

It’s possible the recent improvements in the professionalism of video game voice acting and presentations have raised my expectations to the point that even Gone Home and The Unfinished Swan wouldn’t impress me as much these days. Maybe the walking simulator genre is played out. For every Kentucky Route Zero or Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, we now have something unfinished or broken like Wander or Beyond Eyes.

Scanner Sombre is a triumph of sound design. Literally all of the tension, drama, and emotional content of this experience come exclusively from the sound effects. The rest of it is boring as hell. Don’t get me wrong, I smiled when I first used the game’s LIDAR scanner to recreate the walls of a pitch black cave in a thousand points of laser light. It’s an extremely clever idea … for one item in…

Can thatgamecompany’s Sky reach new heights?

Finally got around to checking out the teaser for Sky, thatgamecompany’s latest effort, aimed at the mobile market: I’m excited. I really am. Flower and Journey are two of my all-time favorite interactive experiences. I am intrigued at the idea of a high-quality thatgamecompany experience on a mobile platform that will allow my…

Subsurface Circular, I have lots of questions

Subsurface Circular is a strange little thing. It’s not really a game, though it has a few middling puzzles. It’s billed as an interactive adventure with a branching story, but the story branches about as much as a wallet chain. And that story makes about zero sense. That’s disappointing, because I quite liked Thomas Was Alone, one of the previous efforts by this developer. MASSIVE SPOILERS TO…

William Gibson, All Tomorrow’s Parties

Wheeling around Second Life a couple weeks ago, I noticed that the majority of the love that Linden Labs once put into the virtual world had migrated to the company’s latest project – Sansar. And then I discovered it was in open beta testing. Time to make an avatar…

After selecting a flavor of hipster dipshit from a short list of preconfigured beardless children, I started jumping into a few sims … er, “Experiences.” Sansar is being built with the idea that it will be experienced on a VR headset plugged into bleeding edge hardware. I toured it on a 1050p monitor with a GTX 1050 Ti and an Xbox controller. Your mileage may vary.

Overall, Sansar is impressive in a very limited way. Linden did away with many of the conceits that weighed the Second Life experience down, such as the idea of a cohesive world, crazy freedom of movement, instantaneous transportation to half-loaded sims, prim-based graphics, “land” purchasing, and … a “second” life with ridiculous character names.

With it’s thumbnail-based browser, discreet sims, and default user spaces, Sansar borrows a lot from the now-defunct Playstation Home. It’s no surprise to see Home veteran Loot appearing on Sansar celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the Apollo moon landings with two of the best showcase sims I’ve seen on the platform:

With a healthy dose of imagination on my limited setup, this is where I can see Sansar truly shining. A VR-focused virtual world with easy development tools really could bring virtual museums and even virtual “real” places into the eyeballs of students or disabled individuals who would not otherwise be able to experience them. The Egyptian tombs rendered with near photorealistic quality by Linden Labs also highlights this potential:

The demos and experiments available on the service today strongly highlight Sansar’s far more modern rendering potential for fantasy spaces and impossible architecture:

But, never fear, thanks to a very accessible personal space customization interface, Second Life’s shitpost aesthetic is still alive and well:

There are no robo-strippers or sex balls littering the landscape just yet. Sansar’s scripting is pretty rudimentary, mostly consisting of objects that can play audio and visual media or teleport you to other parts of an experience or another experience entirely.

And there are bugs. Oh, the bugs. Experiences frequently fail to load. The game controller setup reverses the X axis on the camera stick, and there is no option to change that. I’ve seen fare share of crashes.

But, overall, Sansar appears to be avoiding mistakes of the past and trying to create the virtual world of the, hopefully, VR-powered future.

Second Life: A decade under the influence

It has been five years since I “rezzed” into Second Life. It’s no coincidence that those years of absence coincided with the arrival of my nearly 5 year old daughter. I took a whirl this weekend to test out how well my GTX 1050 Ti fares against the 14-year-old virtual world’s notoriously punishing environments. I had to resolve a weird objection by Second Life to the nature of my nVidia driver…

I’m trying really hard to like No Man’s Sky 1.3

Really hard. I’m doing the base building quests. I now have a dune buggy. I rehabilitated an old, crashed hauler. I’m even kinda trying to find Atlas. But I’m not really enjoying it. For having an infinite galaxy to explore, there is still very little to see in No Man’s Sky, and that’s a problem for a game about exploration. The animals and plants that I’ve found are all pretty samey. The…

Just Cause 3 does not need story missions

When I first played Grand Theft Auto III nearly 15 years ago, the open world concept was a revelation. The mini map full of icons was an open invitation to nonlinear mayhem. The emergent gameplay from primitive AIs reacting with hostility, terror, or even suicide attempts to your antisocial behavior brought a whole new concept to an industry full of on-rails experiences. A decade and a half…

Linux gaming just had another Icarus moment, but all is not lost

Computer gaming isn’t a cheap hobby. You can buy $300 consoles, but you subsidize them with $60 games. You can buy cheap games on Steam, but you need expensive Intel CPUs, nVidia GPUs, and a Windows license if you want the full experience. If you have several children, this gets very pricey very quickly. For the past few years, many parents I know have let their children game on cheap tablets.…

nVidia’s GTX 1050 Ti: The perfect graphics card for indie gamers

You wouldn’t know it from looking at screen shots, but Abzu will eat your integrated graphics alive. Don’t let the simple textures fool you. It murdered my AMD A8 laptop and my Core i5 6400 desktop at the lowly resolution of 720p and showed absolutely no remorse. Chalk it up to the gorgeous lighting effects, tons of swimming creatures or even lack of optimization. Didn’t matter. When Matt Nava…

Firewatch and video gamey melodrama

It’s disappointing that, even as Generation X moves steadily into middle age, the games designed to appeal to the First Video Game Generation are still saddled with the campy, melodramatic conventions of comic books, B movies, and television. Other than Kentucky Route Zero, Portal and possibly Dear Esther, there isn’t much to recommend in the interactive experience category if one is a well-read,…

Stardew Valley is a (slow) walk down memory lane

Stardew Valley is basically a retro-pixel ripoff of Harvest Moon, a game series I’ve always wanted to love, but always bounced off within hours. “Ripoff” is harsh. Maybe it’s more of a love letter? A really cloying love letter that makes you queasy when you read it years later with the benefit of maturity and hindsight? I’ll be fair: Stardew Valley eliminated the “ticking time bomb” element of…

Oxenfree is great! But it’s not worth replaying

Over the past year, I’ve read lots of comparisons between Oxenfree – a shortish adventure game about five teens and their supernatural adventures on a Pacific Coast island – and Kentucky Route Zero. I agree with the conclusion of most of these comparisons. Beyond the adventure game control conventions, stripped down art styles, and supernatural elements, these games are nothing alike. Kentucky…

RetroPie is a blast, but it’s not the family-proof Nintendo Classic Mini

TechRadar posted a cheeky article today with a very sparse tutorial on setting up a RetroPie for Nintendo Entertainment System emulation, instead of buying a Nintendo Classic Mini. Actually, if all you plan to do with your RetroPie is load legally gray NES ROMs onto it and play with wired USB controllers, this tutorial will probably suffice. Wander outside that narrow realm, however, and it gets…

Pokémon Go: Just a janky free-to-play scam

My daughter is now 3 and a half, so she’s starting to get fun. I had started playing with my old Nintendo Wii games with her, but then the disc drive failed. RIP, old friend. Fortunately, in a fit of drunken disregard after the failure of the WiiU, Nintendo handed the prime jewels of its IP catalog to a former Google augmented reality experiment company, Niantic, who promptly used it to re-skin…