Today’s game is some more Animal Crossing. I was gonna do Alan Wake 2, I swear I haven’t dropped that like everything else lol. But I came home at like 9 from a showing of Iron Lung I went too, and for some reason my internet just decided it didn’t want too anymore today. I tried resetting it. I tried unplugging it. Nothing. I was tired and just wanted to relax, so I just said fuck it and played Animal Crossing.

First thing is that I finally caught the fucking tarantula. This asshole has been terrorizing me outside my house for like the last week. I choose to believe it’s the same Tarantula because this one seems to have a vendetta against me. I caught it though and put Asshole The Spider (Ats for short) here in the Museum. A fitting punishment I choose to believe.

I also complete the Pachy which is nice. It’s the first bone set I’ve done so it’s a little milestone for me. I’d like to dedicate myself to filling out the compendium of this game, so that’s my main goal right now. Fossils I think will be the nightmare, we’ll see though

I also got a lovely “handmade” bottle crate stack from Sherb that I used as a table for my Squid. I put it next to a cute DIY table I got from Whisp.

I ended the night by fishing a little bit. Looking at my compendium I’m only really missing a goldfish which I can’t seem to catch. I had caught another carp and just decided to try again tomorrow.

Git Repo.

Friend slop (positive) isn’t for everyone, but Super Battle Golf looks like a tonne of fun.

There are 27 different courses to fight across, with a barrage of offensive and defensive items to use against your pals. If you grew up playing Worms, then you will probably get the vibe going on here. It’s a little bit Peak meets Worms, and I mainly say this because putting a landmine into the path of your friend zooming towards you in a golf cart just for some reason puts memories of Worms 2 in my head that i didn’t even know I had. 

Skate players were explicitly told map areas would not be "locked behind a paywall"

Today's game is Ultimate Chicken Horse. It was on sale, and me and one of my friends had a blast during one of the previous free weeks, so we convinced some of our friends to pick it up with us with it on sale.

Returning to this game with more than one person was already an improvement. It feels like things actual become a challenge quickly. I'm not really sure how to explain the game to people who don't know, so my suggestion is to watch the trailer or gameplay footage. I'm sure it'd do a far better job than i could.

We end up working against eachother to fuck each other over. Honestly, this game might be tied with Mario Party in making us distrust each other. Like, most actions i take are less to advance me and more to screw over my friends who i think are gonna try and screw me over.

We also tried a custom map. This one was appropriately called "Saw Hell". There used to be a lot more saws. It honestly made a unique challenge of us working together to clear things before trying to fuck eachother over. Ultimately it made the fucking over a lot more uneasy, because we couldn't trust they'd keep being friendly.

Ultimately though, i think this game while fun isn't a Multi-hour kind of game (and ultimately why today is kind of short). It's good for like an hour every week or so, and honestly, i think that's okay. For 6$ on sale it wasn't a bad choice. It was a good time with friends, and taught me a lot about trust.

So, who exactly is she? Well, externally, she’s the former VP of Product and Engineering at Meta, CEO of Instacart, and current board member for Coupang and Home Depot. She only recently came to Microsoft in 2024 as the President of CoreAI. Don’t worry, if you’re double-checking to see if any of that is related to gaming in some sort of way, let me save you the trouble; it’s not.

Nightsoil Steam store page

Known in Japan as The Hyrule Fantasy: The Legend of Zelda. The main title was dropped in the US to make the name shorter and some claim it was to avoid confusion with the upcoming Squaresoft Final Fantasy game, which would debut a year later.

The Legend of Zelda was inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto's explorations as a boy in the surrounding areas of his home in Sonobe, Japan. One of his most memorable experiences was finding a cave entrance in the middle of the woods. After some hesitation, he entered the cave and explored its depths with the aid of a lantern.

The story and setting were developed by Takashi Tezuka. He drew inspirations from fantasy books such The Lord of the Rings. The legend of the Triforce was written with inspirations from the battles of medieval Europe. The Master Sword was introduced as their version of Excalibur in A Link to the Past, which is regarded as reminiscent to the legend of King Arthur. Princess Zelda was named after American novelist, socialite and painter Zelda Fitzgerald. Tezuka modeled Link's appearance after the eponymous character of Walt Disney's Peter Pan.

What is your favorite Zelda memory?

I stumbled across this one while scoping out the Quebec Games Celebration this week, and the weirdness of the art immediately had me hooked. Horripilant is an incremental dungeon crawler (which I THINK is a fancy way of not saying “Roguelite”), with a strange pixel art style that also somehow manages to feel like hand painted ink nightmares with a dot matrix vibe. Yeah, it’s a lot. Pulling from classic dungeon crawlers, this one looks super weird and delightful.

Worth mentioning that there is a demo for this one on Steam, but I haven’t had a chance to play it myself yet.

Who am I?

Former game journalist, current game dev who wants to put a spotlight on games. Indie games are struggling to get enough coverage. I run a weekly newsletter of games I find that look cool called Indie Dispatch.

If you don't know who Gamma is, he's the smart, smart fellow behind GammaOS, an alternate operating system built for a ton of retro handhelds. It is built on LineageOS to improve on nearly every aspect of the default OS which ships with handhelds.

https://github.com/TheGammaSqueeze/GammaOSNext

I reached out to Gamma a fair while back about interviewing him and have since befriended him, and am pretty happy to be able to share his story on how/why he got started, and what goes into all the work he does.

If you're a fan of retro handhelds and emulation, I'm sure you'll find this interesting. I got him to specifically detail what went into his work for Anbernic's recent RG DS handheld, too

As ever, if you want to read through the interview, you can find it here:

https://gardinerbryant.com/the-developer-the-handheld-scene-depends-on-an-interview-with-gamma/

Today’s game is some more Halo PvP. I decided to mix things up a little in picking my screenshots. Usually I just take screenshots and tie them to the text somehow. This time I wanted to do something different. So instead I loaded up 3 different games I played and picked 3 Screenshots from each of them (there’s a few extras too, but I won’t use those). I’m not sure if it will result in anything to different but I wanted to try it.

One of the first games we played today is Jenga. I really like this custom game mode. There’s something super satisfying about seeing cards parts whizz past your head and narrowly missing you. There’s something just as satisfying about hitting your own friends with vehicles too.

With this game mode I can’t even feel a little pang of disappointment at losing. The fall to my death is cathartic even in a non weird way. It’s like combining that with Reach’s satisfying physics makes a nice combo.

There was Forklift sumo we did too. This one for people who don’t know, is basically just as it sounds. Kick everyone else off and be the last person standing in your forklift.

There’s something satisfying about this one too with the janky ass Forklift physics. As soon as we all get in we charge for each other. Sometimes we’ll even end up in little clusters. And get caught on each other.

The best part though is when you’re fighting someone and you both go over the edge. Like, yeah, you lost. But you took someone else with you. And with the janky physics that’s something to feel proud of.

Then finally, there was social games. What’s there to say? It’s social games. We got our ass kicked and had fun. We did 8v8 which was a good time. It was on Rat’s nest which felt a bit small for it though.

I

I got in the Driver’s seat and another guy hopped in the Gunner’s. One of my friends joined me in Passenger. We didn’t get very far though as I hit a box and we flipped over.

Me and my friend kept moving as we didn’t feel like there was time to stop and fix the car. We ended up getting demolished right as we rounded the corner though. And that basically sums up the entire game. We got our asses handed to us.

After that everyone split off to go do our own things for the night, and my headphones were almost dead. I actually invested in a semi nice pair of wired ones just to stop that issue. I’m just waiting for this to be how I find out my PC’s headphone jack doesn’t work. Anyways, after that I played some more Alan Wake 2 and then cleaned up my old Hard Drive. I have a super old one that’s an absolute mess I’ve been cleaning out. So that’s been my “project” these last few days

Hey! Just popping by to let people who might be unaware know: if you like Voices of the Void, there's now a community for it at !VoicesOfTheVoid@indie-ver.se

...and if you haven't heard of the game, give it a try! It's super fun! :)

Personally I think it looks outstanding and I haven't been this hyped for a game in a long time.

I am an indie dev and former game journo, and I run a newsletter where I share recommendations of cool indies coming out every week. I’m not going to link to it here but I thought I could drop an interesting find on here.

LOVE ETERNAL is a brutal platformer with a psychological horror story behind it. A soft sequel to an insane platformer called LOVE that took 7 years for someone to actually beat it or something like that. This has some of the edges sanded down, and does some really unexpected things. Worth checking out if you love hard platformers.