I am absolutely delighted to be contrasting this review to my last one for a number of reasons, because in most of the ways River City Girls failed, Neon Abyss manages to make playing it not only tolerable, but enjoyable. Granted, they are not similar games, with one being a fighting game and the other being a side scrolling rogue-lite. But what I mean is that Neon Abyss sets out to build a game that I’d want to keep revisiting over and over, and they passed that test with ease.

Neon Abyss opens with Hades asking the player to defeat the new titans, who have stolen some of Hades’ powers and taken over the human world through corporations. So the player picks a mercenary to enter the titular neon abyss to slog though a set of dungeon and boss fights, leading to a showdown with one of the titans.

Each defeated titan unlocks another target to hunt down, and defeating the regular bosses also unlocks alternate forms of the fight. For example, defeating Tok, the god of social media, unlocks Tik, and beating Sung, the god of Screens grants access to later fights with Sam. Continue reading

Time is a funny thing. The way you experience it can feel vastly different depending on whether you are enjoying what you do, or whether you were being tortured. For example, I played just a hair under fifty hours of Shakedown Hawaii and loved almost every minute of it. Then I played twenty-two hours of River City Girls, and it felt like it would never end.

Unlike Shakedown Hawaii, an homage to GTA games, River City Girls is an actual entry in a very long-running franchise, Japan’s Kunio series. The intellectual properties were bought by ARC systems, who then went on to make this and many more games. I can’t talk about the quality of the others, but I can say this was quite a painful experience, both physically and mentally. Beating the game somehow made all of my efforts even worse, like deciding to pick my nose after scratching my sweaty butthole.

Oh, and I need to warn you, there will be massive story spoilers this time, because I cannot explain my pain without exposing that god awful ending. So if you want to avoid spoilers, skip this review, okay? Continue reading

Bro. Bruh! This game…if I were inclined to review games based only on the first day of play-time, Brotato would have not only been a 5 star winner, it would have been on my games of the year list. A lot of this comes down to its similarities to Vampire Survivors, but also to sharing some features of The Binding of Isaac.

Let’s get the story out of the way first. You play a potato who is killing waves of purple aliens. Yep, that’s it. If I make that sound bad, it’s really not. Sometimes it’s good to play a game where the whole premise can be summed up in a sentence, and all the real intricacies comes from learning to master its core mechanics.

In this case, the core mechanic is simplicity defined. You don’t have to push any buttons to attack, because that’s done automatically. All you have to do is learn to move, either to dodge attacks or move in just close enough to deal some damage of your own. Continue reading

You know, I’m starting to wonder a lot about myself. Last year, I loved playing a serial killer in Party Hard, and now here I am mostly loving Shakedown: Hawaii, a game about an evil CEO learning to embrace his inner mobster. If not for the end game, this might have even been a 5 star review because I loved being evil, which makes me wonder: dudes, what the hell is wrong with me?

But let’s start with the plot. The CEO of Feeble Industries is watching TV when he sees a report that his empire is failing. His CFO Ron explains that streaming is killing his video stores, online shopping is killing his retail empire, and most of his other enterprises are falling behind as new technologies supplant the things he’d invested in. So this CEO decides to get “aggressive” to return to prominence.

I think the best part of this story is how many times the CEO discovers how modern business models are forcing him to pay more for bullshit like convenience fees or HD streaming, and he’s mad, but not because they’re fleecing him. No, he’s mad because, as he says, “Why aren’t we doing this kind of con already?” Continue reading