AlanWithTea || The Indie Ocean
@alanwithtea
Infrequent YouTuber, fairly prolific poster, siaradwr gwael o Gymraeg. Likes indie games, board games, trad roguelikes, medieval history. He/him
Next finish: The Queen's Gondola This is one of those anomaly-spotting games. I generally don't enjoy playing them myself but I quite liked this one. The aesthetic is nicely moody and there are scraps of plot revealed as the game goes on. It's very short (under 1hr) but also free. Decent.
Next finish is Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Mechanically each Danganronpa game has improved over the previous, though the writing has declined. This one has the worst cast of the three, with lots of truly obnoxious characters. Some solid mysteries though, so good on that front.
Meanwhile, #RandomBoardGameSaturday gives us Myrmes. This is a pretty substantial game of trying to grow your ant colony, including relatively involved bug stuff like scent trails. I've been wanting to play this again for years but that premise seems to make it hard to sell to potential players
For #RandomGameSaturday this week, we drew Sonic Rush. To be quite frank, I don't think I ever played this. I have no idea why.
Next finish: Snap & Grab Episode 1 I didn't know this was episodic when I bought it, but it's worth picking up anyway. A bit of Hitman-ish disguise stealth, a bit (lot) of action-programming through photography, and a good helping of charm. Looking forward to more
Next finish: Tower of Mask Puzzle-heavy, grid based (but real time) dungeon crawl. Puzzles are sometimes opaque but mostly decent, combat is bogged down a bit by stingy weapon durability rates, but on the whole it's good. Enhanced by creepy lore revealed piecemeal in a way that's effective.
Meanwhile #RandomBoardGameSaturday gives us Bountytown, a thoroughly mediocre game of cowpersons duelling to collect bounties, with the duels implemented as simplified poker. Sounds fine, but is a bit dull in practice
This week's #RandomGameSaturday roll of the dice gives us Teleroboxer, one of the better Virtual Boy games in terms of the 3D effect feeling kind of cool instead of pointless. Punch Out but with robots, and fists that fly right at your face
Tangentially - the way the spine title of Grand Theft Auto 2 is capitalised is so odd. "GTa2"? Why??
This prompted me to (literally) dust off some of my physicals. It's a slightly odd selection.
It's kind of reassuring to see that in some ways board game box art hasn't changed all that much in 30 years
I'm not a sport person, but I've been having fun with Clutchtime recently
Next finish: Secret of Mana (replay) The vibes of the early game are still really strong and a good half or so of the game is solidly fun. It does trail off later (with some sections being dizzyingly brief) and there's some boss recycling, but overall it's still decent.
You know that bit at the beginning of Zelda 1 where you go into the cave and get the sword? The first time Small Alan played it, that's not what he did. He saw four available directions, shrugged, and picked one. Walked west, got killed immediately.
Next finish: Bloodwood Dungeon Gamebook from the Greymarsh dev. Oddly, it's un-learnt some things from the earlier game. Still enjoyable, it just works less well. Mixed combat, where it's sometimes pleasantly tactical for text, and other times just a roll-off. Decent, but Greymarsh is better
Meanwhile #RandomBoardGameSaturday gives us Michael Schacht's Serengeti. I like auction games and I like games small enough to shove in a pocket, of course I bought this at some point
This week's #RandomGameSaturday roll of the dice gives us the platinum release of Final Fantasy VII. I'd forgotten that this included a demo disc for VIII
These eyeballs are annoying because they can moogle you
Gaia's Navel (the exterior bit, at least) is such a brief area, just a couple of minutes long, and yet it's what I immediately picture when I think of Secret of Mana
I listened to this a lot while in Miami Beach a couple of years ago, with good reason. Miami Beach (left), Paradise Killer (right)
Wrapping up my experiments in animated Tolkien with Rankin-Bass's version of The Hobbit. As expected, being a story for kids it fares better than their attempt at Return of the King, but it's still very goofy and has weak songs for a musical film. Worst part: goblins have two throats for no reason
I remember summers peaking at somewhere around 25-28C when I was a kid, so I thought I'd check and see if that's just the mistiness of memory. It isn't.