fucking what

Demon Turf (PC)

Demon Turf is a good foundation for a neater game, a sentence I choose to open with to stab it to death. Not for any great sin in particular, to be honest it's actually okay, I just got kind of fed up with it. It has neat ideas and some pretty neat levels and platformer ideas, but the controls and moveset available are kind of rough and the good ideas are offset by numerous bad ones.

The most glaring is combat; for whatever reason the devs decided that combat should involve not being able to defeat enemies with your attack. Instead your attack just kind of stuns them and shoves them a bit depending on how much you charged up or how many times you hit them in succession, and the idea is you to have to throw them into provided red spikes or some other hazard with killing power, or just off the edge. Combined with kind of slippery movement, your only attack being a short-range projectile with no auto-aim, aim assist or targeting reticule or anything, and combat is just kind of a nuisance. Naturally, then, combat rooms where you have to kill 2-10 enemies to proceed are a regular level feature.

Movement is kind of stiff and while Beebz has a lot of jumps, including the full Mario 64 ensemble except for the dive (she can long-jump in the air instead, and hover for a short and frequently inadequate distance), the levels aren't really designed for the triple jump or side/triangle jump so you don't get much use out of them. Everything basically requires hover or long-jump and gaining verticality is almost always a case of finding the path up or spring up or wall-jump setup up, basically no instances where you can finagle it with other jumps.

There's a lot of ill-consideration like that, in and amongst the roughness. The grapple hook is fiddly and its targeting indicator breaks easily, the snake-wheel accelerates to uncontrollable speeds very quickly necessitating constantly letting go of it to slow down more than anything, making the "mod" you can equip that lets you control its speed (not very well, at that) feel necessary to make it usable, etc.

Game is absolutely packed with shit, minigames and collectibles and unlockables of all kinds, and every zone rolls over and becomes a set of "harder" levels with a different look and path through the same layout. The game's load screen tells you you need to do some of these to get to the final boss, but in actuality you need to do all but six levels to get enough shit to get into the final boss, so I don't know why they downplay it or make any of it seem optional.

It has charm, the 2D sprites in a full 3D environment is a neat aesthetic (marred somewhat by engine lighting often covering the whole screen in a colourful haze that makes it difficult to see shit at random), and it's certainly value for money (there's a follow-up DLC and a roguelike tower mode in the "Queens Edition" now), but it's like, store-brand basic platforming a lot of the time. Fine, acceptable, but not enthralling, not enthusing.

Killing Commendatore (eBook, Penguin Random House 'Vintage' label)

No-one can quite sell the intrinsically fascinating aspect of mundane activities done and described in meticulous fashion quite like Haruki Murakami. Quite a lot of the book is incidental sentences describing cooking dinner or doing chores or other such things, but the inordinately calm voice of the unnamed narrator (describing the events of the story in retrospect) and the just-so amount of focus on any given activity help work the hook in pretty quick and make it just a soothing read. It is funny to see him be more explicitly self-indulgent in this one; we've moved from classical music having a prominent spot in the plot in the likes of 1Q84 to that being the case but also the main character gets access to, and adores, an elaborate collection of classical music vinyl records he makes extensive use of, and the other most prominent character in the plot also adores classical music, has an extensive record collection, goes to high-class opera houses to hear performances and tries to play it on piano. Just among other things that show up in recurring fashion.

It's just a very pleasing read most of the time, and particularly the way Murakami describes the acts of creating art, thinking about it, the purpose in it or finding the drive to do it (the nameless narrator is a painter, originally of portraits and then extends out) is always fascinating and tickles the brain. The sequences of Tengo rewriting the novel in 1Q84 also had this aspect, but here it gets more focus, and so much the better for it. Specific characters, including the narrator, do occasionally speak like total sorcerors to otherwise uninvolved, ordinary people and nary an eyelash is batted, which is fucking funny to see but perfectly adds to the continuous layer of surreality that overlays and permeates throughout the whole thing. It is that surreality that binds it all together, I think, and what makes the meticulous recounting of mundane activity work the way they do.

Sort of thing that makes you want to sit down and type the day away.

Blue Archive: Volume EX Chapter 3 ("The Sky of Unity"), + major event Operational Plan: Steel Continent (iOS)

A vending machine developed a god complex in a side event ages ago and dealing with it gets a level of pomp and focus on par with the grand finale of the first major arc.

The event, Operational Plan: Steel Continent, was akin to the one that ran during Volume F's release; story goes to a point, then route out to the event to fight the Decagrammaton raid bosses in new environments/with slightly new setups in a server-wide co-op event. Progress unlocks cutscenes (like the glorious and now seemingly required mecha battle) and subsequent fights against Malkuth and then Decagrammaton, both new fights with interesting mechanics; the former gains resilience against the different damage types until staggered, the latter has periods of extreme weakness between giant attacks (summoning the husks of the raid bosses). They went all out with making it all as flashy as possible, including the Event's menus, which have piles of special animations and little sequences for everyone sitting around on the airship, messing about with each other or relaxing between bouts. It's the shit you want most from these.

It all gets rather elaborate, and culminates in a pretty fucking rad sequence to finally dump the glorified vending machine into the bin, which does a remarkable job of driving home one of the core themes of the Volume, that of self-determination and free will in a world where one's material conditions render the concept nebulous, and the worth of acting regardless. In Blue Archive's way, it leaps rapidly between goofball gag comedy, shounen action sequences and heady plot sequences thick with names and notions ripped from Kabbalah that sometimes kind of lose themselves; there's one point where in the jump between chapters, Decagrammaton floors everyone in the transition and it implies the player character was heavily, perhaps even mortally wounded, but then just kind of forgets it did that and hopes you do too.

It is again another instance of Millennium getting the best plots, best events and the lion's share of the best characters; Kei's elevation to actual character was a winning move because she's fucking great in basically every scene she's in and her dynamics with the teams she's among are great (and white hair, red eyes, always a winning combo). Aris and Rio's arcs advance significantly, Himari got over her beef with Rio, and there's another future character in the vein of Shiroko-Terror wandering around to pick up with later.