I haven’t had a thought interesting enough to blog about for a while now, but I have had lots of smaller thoughts that I hope – when glued together – may resemble something worth reading. A sort of word… well I was going to say homunculus because I thought that meant a Frankenstein-style beast constructed from loose bits of flesh, but I’ve just Googled it and it turns out it actually means a miniature human being? So perhaps this post is, instead, a collection of word homunculi? Much to think about.
Anyway. Here’s what I’ve been fiddling around with recently:
WarioWare: Move It! (Switch)
Ah, man. I have complicated feelings about this one. I love WarioWare! I consider 2021’s Get It Together! to be one of the best co-op games on Switch! But whereas that entry reinvented the series, evolving its single-input mechanics into something fresh and exciting with the introduction of multiple playable characters, Move It! feels like a step backward in comparison.
Look. It’s fine. The microgames are as barmy as ever and – for the most part – the motion controls (around which the game is designed) work well enough. The issue is that they don’t work consistently, randomly failing to register your movements and causing you to lose a precious life as a result. With microgames often lasting less than 5 seconds, it’s simply too fast-paced to be reliant on an input method that we’ve known to be flawed since the Wii was released in 2006. Actually, I’d say that Move It! is less responsive than Smooth Moves, the very game it’s attempting to follow on from that was built for – presumably – inferior motion control hardware. It’s frustrating!
But, whatever. We got a few hours of enjoyment out of it. Better than a punch in the head, I guess.
Destiny 2 (PC)
Former RPS colleague (and current friend) Ed Thorn and I have been getting back into Destiny 2 in preparation for its upcoming Final Shape expansion. We never intended to get so Destiny-pilled when we booted it up around six weeks ago (we just wanted to try out its wave-based Onslaught mode!) but that’s the power of Destiny, I guess. Those heads won’t pop themselves, etc. etc.
Do I like Destiny 2? I honestly don’t know. I like hanging out with Ed! And it’s certainly an enjoyable space to facilitate a weekly hang with my pal. As a game, I’d say I spend an estimated 90% of my time playing it in agony and 10% actually having fun. I really like the shooting! But everything else is a bloated, overdesigned mess. For example: prepping for the Final Shape proved so convoluted that I was forced to create a spreadsheet to try and figure out what to do next.
Still. We keep coming back! And we’re having fun! I really can’t emphasise enough just how good the shooting in this game is. I really like shooting Vex, and I guess that’s enough reason to sink another 100 hours into a game that makes me angry every time I play it.
Very normal!
Rusty’s Retirement (PC)
I tend to avoid idle games. Although they’re intended to be played passively over an extended period of time, requiring little to no input from the player, I still get obsessively drawn into them to the detriment of whatever task I’m trying to do at the same time. Taxes, maybe. Or a spreadsheet for Destiny 2.
It’s the same with Rusty’s Retirement, an idle game about maintaining a small farm. The game’s primary gimmick is that it sits at the bottom of your desktop screen, allowing you to keep an eye on things when performing other tasks. It’s great in theory, but because you can’t tuck it behind a Google Doc I spend my entire time just watching Rusty and their robot pals bumble around, planting crops and turning them into biofuel.
It’s really nice! I literally can’t get anything done while playing it! 10/10!
Fallout 4 (PC)
Fallout 3 was the first Bethesda RPG I truly loved. I rinsed that game, spending hundreds of hours exploring the Capital Wasteland and uncovering all of its secrets. I played it so much that when New Vegas launched two years later, I didn’t really have the appetite to devote the same amount of time to something functionally similar. I felt the same about Skyrim. I felt the same about Fallout 4.
When the Fallout TV show was released back in April, I picked up Fallout 4 and all of its DLC for less than a tenner on Steam. I figured that ten quid was a decent price to pay to dip my toes back in for a bit before Fallout fever subsided and I returned to the few other AAA games I’d been picking away at this year, namely Cyberpunk 2077 and Death Stranding.
Well, I was wrong. 46 hours later, I have conceded that this is The Game I am playing at the moment and it looks like I will be for a while longer. Fallout 4 is good! I understand why folks were a little cool on it when it launched in 2015, but in a post-Starfield world it’s scratching a particular RPG itch I didn’t realise I even needed scratching in the first place.
It helps, I think, that I’m playing it on Steam Deck. It is the perfect game for a handheld. It runs great, for starters, rarely dipping below the 40fps cap I’ve enforced on it even in built-up areas. Other than a few rogue crashes and some extended loading times, it lends itself surprisingly well to the pick-up-and-play mentality that makes handheld games so special. A single quest rarely takes longer than 20 minutes to see through, making it great for playing in short bursts while having a coffee before work or when waiting for some food to simmer on the hob.
The magic of a good Bethesda game is in how they string micro-moments together in a way that feels organic and narratively cohesive. Upgrading a gun, improving a settlement, clearing out a raider camp, exploring an abandoned building, searching for your missing son. Transitioning from one objective to the next is natural and fun, the game beckoning you ever forward to try out its next exciting thing. Compared to Starfield, a game that constantly raised blockers in between your goals, Fallout 4 is an open world in that purest of definitions. I’m having an absolute blast.
I’ll probably be back with a full review / retrospective post at some point in the future, so look out for that I guess.
Various other things
I’ve also been playing a bunch of very good indie games, most of which have been released over the last few weeks. Instead of repeating myself here, you can hear me enthuse about Crow Country, Cryptmaster and Hades II on the latest episode of the Indieventure podcast. Oh look he’s mentioned his podcast again. Shocker.
Well, that’s all from me! Have you been playing anything fun? I’m always looking for new recommendations, so please let me know.
Any spelling mistakes, grammatical errors or badly phrased sentences in this post are all intentional. Cheers.