Today’s game is Alan Wake II. Did you know these guys were on the front porch? Because I didn’t. 4 playthroughs in and I had no idea these guys were here until I went back in the house and saw one of them walking out front. I thought I was seeing things at first or it was some sort of Easter egg, but I found them out here and they were just chilling (or in the guy in the towel’s case, he was literally chilling)

I also went hunting for the cult stashes. I found this one specifically that I had to break out algebra for. Out of everything I’ve ever had to use Algebra for I didn’t expect it to be this.

I also wanted to stop and praise the Mind Place/Writer’s room. Because I fucking love these. Legitimately, I love games that have like a little “pocket space” you can enter. Fable 2 had one and I loved that. Alan Wake does something cool with there’s where the sound from outside leaks in which is really cool. While I was doing the deputies boss fight they were shouting idle lines and they were leaking through. Spooky shit.

Spoiler

And finally, 4 playthroughs in. I met the mayor. I had no idea this was him. Which is ironic with how obvious it all is. To be honest this game does that a lot. I really like it.

I’m going to start the Lake House DLC next, at least if I understand how you access it correctly. I stopped right before then, so hopefully I’ll head on to that and finish the game again. I love this game, but I’ve picked up a game that I’ve been wanting to play since it released a while ago and I’m excited to get to it. I also want to replay the original Alan Wake now too after hearing The Poet and The Muse on the Jukebox.

This is a digital tabletop game called Dobbel Dungeon, that comes from a two-person team out of the Netherlands. This light fantasy romp has you assembling a party of three before you venture out armed with your dice. At the start of a turn you roll the dice, and then power up your abilities. There are no chances to hit or misses in Dobbel Dungeon - as long as you have the numbers you can perform your abilities and defeat your foes. 

Looks like a cute fun game. I’m a big tabletop fan but rarely get games to the table anymore so this could be a good one for me personally.

Choice quote:

Satya Nadella has made an incredible number of bets and invested an incredible amount of money and credibility in the transform model AI future. Xbox, like a lot of businesses that aren’t the core AI business, is being sunsetted. They don’t say that, but that’s what’s happening. I expect that the new CEO, Asha Sharma, her job is going to be as a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night.

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.

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?

Nightsoil Steam store page

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/

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.