I thought I'd crap out my thoughts on this game while they are still somewhat fresh. I hope that Journey lovers don't take this as a personal attack, because it's not.

I understand that my personal aesthetic may make me a poor candidate for appreciating games like Journey; indeed, I am so bored by this kind of stuff that I can't get far enough in the game to warrant writing a proper review.

But I have to ask to nobody in particular... what's the appeal? Bear in mind that I am the same hater of all things beautiful and stripped down who doesn't have much love for Ico and Shadow of the Colossus either.

But getting back to Journey: it's a very simplistic game. I may be wrong (again, I only passed 3 or 4 'levels') but here is a title where you can really make do with one button.

The good old Sonic the Hedgehog games only made use of one button function too. But those games offered some semblance of challenge and there was lots to see and do.

Not Journey though. This 'game' is a bland beige tour through a wasteland with cyclopean structures jutting out here and there, involving hopping about and riding carpets to no worthwhile end.

On some occasions, I can pierce the heavy veil of pretentious praise from supporters and see that they love the game because it offers something 'different and beautiful in its simplicity.'

I think back to Out of This World, which was a game that was different and offered a simple, yet beautifully told story of friendship. But that game also had sick puzzles and hard as hell shooting elements. That game killed you a lot.

I imagine OoTW in an alternate universe, where Lester and the big alien just hold hands and run and jump to the end. That would have been something else.

It's a round number, so I'm noting it as a milestone of sorts. Which gives me an excuse to celebrate heavily today. CHEERS!

Can you provide a link? I think I know where it is on Amazon, but I'm not sure.

I decided to join on the Apollo 18 20th anniversary tribute which was posted to the text adventure forums back in December. I probably took too many games--the organizer wanted them all to be claimed by January 1 or so and so I stepped in with some ideas by January 15th, worrying nobody was going to take things. So I feel bad having taken so much, and I didn't really go after reciprocal testing, but I have to say this: it was a ton of FUN when I had the time, and despite being rather sick for 10 days, the 3-month buffer was enough.

And other people started picking things off. Some members of the Chicago-IF group took one here and there. Some other people I'd never heard of dropped in, too, some writing their first games. And if there aren't any super-big-long-time-historic traditional names writing (except Nick Montfort) I really enjoyed the opportunity to beta-test other people's games, which gave me ideas for my own.

I have a hard time finding what sort of criticism and creative trade I like, but with text adventures, I think I am really happiest at the moment. The sort of criticism where I know someone is going to fix Obvious Bug X (e.g. they say there's graffiti there and the player can't examine it) or they don't respond to a standard verb (e.g. SING in a game with a guitar, or maybe BURN PHOTOGRAPH in a game where the room is on fire.) It gives a chance to be positive and suggest a person can do more. That's when criticism's at its best.

So whom would I recommend? I had a blast playing Carl Muckenhoupt's game (My Evil Twin) before it was fixed, and I know he will--his game The Gostak will either annoy you or blow your mind or both.

I was able to provide a lot of checking for Ben Collins-Sussman and Jack Welch's Narrow Your Eyes. As they co-wrote it, and they live a thousand miles apart, they used Google Code. I enjoyed being able to report issues to the issue page and also being able to see the source--which I learned so much from.

Ryan Veeder also won IFComp 2011 (just ahead of someone else here's fine effort on HonestGamers) and his two games are almost certainly worth playing. He writes funny stuff.

Whether or not you're familiar with TMBG, it's probably a lot of fun to poke around. I have to admit, I've got a potential embarrassment if some of my games don't work (hint: Space Suit received the most testing) but I think if you're in the mood for a quick text adventure game, any of the Fingertips will do. They're all intended to be 1-movers and many have VERY different ways of looking at things.

And I just like how this collection acted as a sort of farm system for people who were maybe newer to writing text adventures to join in.

Anyway. That's what I've been up to. I'm already planning my next game, too. It may not get wide exposure, but after my 2011 IFComp entry, I finally wrote a game (as I wanted to.) Now I want to write one really well.

So I know Jason has a full-length novel. What's everyone else doing writing-wise outside of HG?

LR for WonderSwan

I wasn't aware of the WonderSwan until I went searching for new versions of Lode Runner (LR.) It was a last resort. You see, so many ports of Lode Runner contain the same levels from the original. Maybe they throw in a story with animals to rescue or something, but it that couldn't disguise the exact same levels made by kids pulled off the street long ago back in 1980. Which is annoying to see after I've poked my way through several Japanese menus. Yeah, first world problems, rom downloads aren't perfectly legal, and so on. But when so many Lode Runner games come with level editors (also part of the original) that the developers themselves never seem to use, it's hard to believe much care went into these products.

Not so with the WonderSwan port (WS.) It's not brilliant, but it doesn't have to be. It hits all the basic LR puzzles and adds a few more. As in other LR games, you basically climb ladders, walk on ropes, and dig holes to the left and right for enemies to fall in. The holes can fill up, trapping the enemies, who reappear at the top, or even you. Get all the gold, and you will get a ladder or door to the next level, often positioned awkwardly. You die if enemies touch you, but it's also common to get stuck with no way out, which is awfully frustating but also the source of some of the best puzzles. You may have to dig through a whole structure for that one last gold piece without getting trapped, or you may need to make an educated guess about which blocks are fall-through--they look the same as the regular ones. It's part logic and experimentation, and often after thinking I knew what a square had to be, or thinking the game was vague, the solution tipped off other things. LR: WS is really good at forcing this educated guesswork or giving these a-ha moments.

And here the game changes more than just enemy speed or how fast the holes fill in--those have been enough to create vastly different puzzles. The biggest is the crumbling block--it, like the fall-through block, is indistinguishable from the regular sort you walk over. However, it disappears after a second once you step over it, often making a one-way passage or ruining an obvious digging sequence.

The other new feature is water. It's an amusing one, where a small pool can spill out to the whole level. If you dig a bounding block, it pours out to that side and below. Water slows you down, unless you chose the scuba suit at the level's start--and then, you aren't able to outrun monsters until you're in the water. There're also lobsters that scuttle back and forth in some pools. They're often guarding gold, but if you're clever, you can get the lobsters to block enemy. You can also walk on top of the lobsters for some tough-to-get gold pieces if you're very careful. And if all of this doesn't sound like much, it doesn't need to be. LR is very basic without ever approaching the total dryness of, for instance, Sokoban, and also unlike Sokoban, the action and interaction allow for believable added enemies and challenges like this.

LR also makes challenges optional, so you don't get stuck as easily. Non-gold items you can get in WS compromise between die-hard fans and people new to the game and a great way to get around the usual "gee, you're stuck" in a puzzle game. For instance, cake slices just get you points, and getting 90% of feathers unlocks the sort of bonus round Lode Runner fans love. Often you need to do something like jump and run on a falling enemy, or futz with a certain area at the start, to get these. Sometimes you just need to pray that the ladders that pop up after you get the gold will let you grab everything.

All this gets more demanding and nastier, and I mean this in the most complimentary way, as you reach the end of the 125 levels. Sometimes you need to freeze the screen to see the whole board--the WonderSwan screen not being very big--and that leaves the game feeling like busy work at times, because you have to scroll up to see where the enemies you just killed are about to reincarnate. This doesn't ruin the game, of course, but often feeling like the WonderSwan is asking you to check your work can get in the way of basking in a nice solution.

This is about the biggest nuisance, though. LR is a good game for black-and-white systems, and here the lobster and your squid-like opponents are more than acceptable. The scuba suit you wear is also very cute, with little bubbles coming from your guy either way (no, he won't drown if he stays underwater.) And if there are no especially wild puzzles, the game never seems to be mailing it in.

All this left me with a very favorable impression of the WonderSwan. Not that I found another game to play. But it's good to find a port of my favorite series on an obscure system that upholds the tradition and does something new. It'sabout the right balance of challenging and inviting, and if every port had thrown in a tweak like water or crumbling blocks, it'd have been quite exciting. It's too late to hope that Lode Runner will ever make a comeback, and I think I've exhausted all the old-school systems that might have new levels, so I'm grateful to be able to find games on the Nintendo 64, TurboGrafx and, yes, the WonderSwan which at least reminded me that other people enjoy the challenges in Lode Runner and were able to pass them on.

I didn't even listen to 300 new songs in 2011, probably. Wow.

Lol...you might be right. Since, while CC was a long review, it wasn't 350K words long.

I don't know if its just because I've had a lot to say about certain games like FF XIII and Chrono Cross, but I've been more in the 8-9 MB realm than the 5-6 MB realm recently. Might have to do a couple short-n-sweet reviews just in case I'm just getting overly verbose.

OD's Thought for the Day

I found it worth reading through too. Kind of jealous really :). Great that the event grew so much.

I've tried other text editors but can't believe I didn't discover Notepad++ until recently. I really like NoteTab Standard for organizing things that need chapters, but Notepad++ is great for typing one-off stuff like reviews I don't need/want to take too many notes on--it even tracks the # of bytes a file is, and so forth, which is nice when I don't want to bloat a piece of writing too much.

I'd actually heard of Notepad++ before but assumed it was too much like Notepad for some reason. But it's not. After trying a pile of other text editors geared towards HTML coding and such (which I bet some people here might find useful) it took me about fifteen minutes to realize that I'd found something I wanted and probably should've done so years ago.

So what finally made me take the plunge? I got sick of Windows 7's Wordpad asking if I wanted to save a text file as text, because it might lose all the formatting I never put in anyway. I could kill this in XP or even Vista by closing and reopening.

Can't give any non-windows recommendations, but it's great to find a freeware that -works-.

Well...yeah. I was confusing. It's good to see people glad to have me back.

Basically I have to admit I'm not trying to hit a home run with my reviews. But I don't want them to be low quality and boring all the same. I just want to make sure I am writing when I want to write. And it felt good writing the last one. I'll see where I go from there. Who knows, maybe I'll discover some old NES games I never played and I'll have something to say about that.

On the other hand there are games I'm glad I played like Kickle Cubicle that I have nothing to say about. I guess I needed some time away from review writing and feeling I really should--now that other writing is picking up, I feel better coming back to it every once in a while. I mean, it's great to read everyone here's writing, but just being physically around writers (regardless of talent) and throwing around ideas has its benefits.

Here's a weird thing I noticed online. Epic Dungeon is no more. It's now called Cursed Jewels or something like that with an extra class to play as.

I tried to read why, but can't remember. It just seems kind of lame because you and Joe have outdated reviews of a game that no longer exists in that form, I have a game I have no reason to review for that reason AND, most importantly, even if you have "Epic Dungeon", you still have to pay $1 to get this updated version. I mean, the money's no issue, but the principle of the matter is. To me, it'd be like if Bethesda came out with a patch for Skyrim where they fixed things, added a couple minor details, changed the name to NordWorld and charged you $50 more for it.

Since I'll be reviewing it in the next couple weeks most likely. Love the game, but am starting to get a bit tired of it. 150ish hours of something does do that.

1. Avoid Fast Travel when possible. I only use it to get back to base and/or collect quest rewards, but try to walk everywhere. The game's really attractive and immersive, but when you rely on fast travel, it really devolves. Which is why I'm still going strong after 150 hours. That walking takes time.

2. Most alive world I've experienced. Just the sheer number of quests you can get from just about everyone, as well as all the little randomized events that can happen as you're walking around the countryside.

3. If you play aimlessly with the purpose being to wander around and see what trouble you can get in to, it's near-perfect. If you play in a more regimented style, things kind of fall apart, as most of the game is based on a repetitive style. Get quest, go to dungeon, kill stuff, get item and/or kill boss, go back and get reward. If you're freestyling, you don't notice (or you notice, but don't care), but if you're planning to sit down and, say, knock off 4-5 missions for a guild or something, it kind of grates on you.

4. Even that's better than in Oblivion. Just because the dungeons look so much more varied. You might be getting sent to 30 different caves for fetch quests, but at least they don't all have the same general look.

5. Difficulty balancing is still an issue. Around when I hit the late 30s level-wise, virtually everything got very easy. It might have been because, thanks to smithing/enchanting perks, I massively boosted my armor rating AND added superior enchantments to everything. But, whatever, when you get to a certain point, it does get a bit depressing, as I went from needing to use stealth and guile in many situations to just being able to destroy everything with my fire-enchanted warhammer.

6. And by "stealth and guile", I mean "exploiting enemy AI issues". Hello, Mr. Bandit Marauder! You're a tough mofo, so how about I use sneak to peck away at you with arrows while you only make lackluster attempts to find me even though I'm only about 30 feet away! Man, I got pissed when I fought Movarth the Vampire, as he apparently regens health, so that strategy didn't work and I had to actually man up and fight melee style.

7. Gotten lucky with glitches compared to things I've read. Only quest that really glitched in any way was the Brotherhood quest where you have to assassinate a woman during her wedding in Solitude. Apparently, the town gets hostile and one of your DB buddies creates a distraction. Neither of those things happened and I also didn't get the reward for the perfect kill even though I did push the statue on her while she was addressing the crowd. The most annoying thing is that I did all three Bard's College fetch quests, but the special instruments never left my inventory, so I have 10-12 pounds of non-droppable quest items cluttering things up.

8. The inventory, for MISC items, is a bit glitched. Things don't always stack, which makes the list obscenely long. Also would have been nice if they created sub-menus for ores/ingots and soul gems and quest items. MISC just gets so long and cluttered.

I'd planned to write one. But I didn't. Still, I've been going through my writing notes. I have lots of other things to do, but sometimes I get hung up on something I always wanted to do and figure I might as well just have done with it.

Quite bluntly if I'm more interested in what people have to say about other games than they are about this, I can't blame them. I'm glad to be able to express something and to have that forum for it, even if I don't have nearly as much to say on this as I used to. And I'm glad to see several reviews already out there competing for RotW. And to see old names I know and new names I don't.

But with this sort of review (assuming it gets accepted) I always hope to act as a sort of pace car, e.g. if ASchultz writes about this--surely I shouldn't be worried about the sort of game I want to write about?

That seems to have been taken out with the last site revamps. Might have to talk to Justin about that, as I have a bad habit of screwing up HTML deals and it's nice to catch a minor error that would turn the entire site into italics before going live.

I hope it all works out for you, Joe. It would be unfortunate to see less of your stuff on HG and wherever else... but real life beckons -- I get that.

I'd seen Parallel Trippers got translated. I was wondering if that'd be worth downloading sometime (even though I have a million other games to play) and now I know to put it on the "maybe do in the next 20 years" list!

I like the big band rendition of The Thing. Great way to get the afternoon going!

Chris Jericho's coming?

That's the best possible outcome! Especially if it's slimy, big-word-using Jericho.

Since it's been a couple of weeks since I've bored/enthralled everyone with that sort of thing.

1. Oblivion. Been so long since I played it that I decided to just start over. It'll be interesting to see how long I keep away from Fast Travel. Playing it in HD (didn't have my new TV when I first played it) is nice enough to keep me interesting in watching the countryside. I've done the entry level mage guild work (in other words, walked virtually all the main roads) and the opening bits of the main quest to where I now have to take Martin to Weynon Priory.

2. Final Fantasy XIII. In Chapter 8. Where Sazh and Vanille have to fight one of their eidolons. Not positive which one -- I just remember both were getting kinda angsty, but that chapter had been pretty throwaway with those two walking around a crowded city and occasionally getting story stuff before the enemy FINALLY started attacking, so I could so something while walking on rails. This was the first chapter things started annoying me, as at least the rail-walking was loaded with combat previously and here, I had two or three "walk a while, then cutscene" deals before getting to kill stuff.

3. Wild Arms 2. Mixed bag. I like seeing how a lot of WA 3 stuff was implemented here and just refined a bit for the PS2. But they tried to go more plot-driven here than in 1 or 3. I've had nights where my couple hours with this game have next to no dungeon work (the best part of these games, what with all the puzzles), because you're doing plot-related stuff. A couple nights ago, I got stuck with three boss fights in my home base that ate up a lot of time. Last night, I had to find three tablets in the water, followed by taking them to a town with a trip to an optional dungeon located in the mix. The optional dungeon was short. I do, however, still think Liz (and Ard, to a lesser degree) is the greatest character in the history of gaming.

On my computer, I'm also working on two others.

Phantasy Star 2. In the "about frickin' time" category. Nothing like a brutally tough old-school RPG to remind me of how easy gamers have things nowadays. Like last night, when I added Hugh to my party and just when I was starting to make him something better than a liability, I pick up Anna, so I have another L1 character to build up and buy better equipment for.

Dragon Quest VI (the translation patch for the Super Famicom version). In that really annoying grinding bit before fighting Jamiras. It takes a while to buy all the good equipment and he is a tough boss. A lot tougher than Mudo in my opinion.