Back to the Bundle For Racial Justice, Page 3

Page 3 was a bit lighter on games that would run on my linux box, but here’s my impressions…

• Pikuniku: Played well, pretty cute. Dylan had watched one of his Youtubers play this one, so he kept spoiling it for me. Also, while it starts up, it has a warning not to turn your computer off while the autosave icon is showing. I can’t tell if that’s a “We just left that in from the console port” thing or a deliberate parody.
• Tape: Not a game. Some kind of project management software?
• The Night Journey: Want to play this. No linux port.
• Sleepaway: I guess this is another pen-n-paper game?
• CanariPack 8Bit Top Down: Asset pack game making. I wish I could get my brain together enough to work on making a game.
• Far From Noise: Another with no linux port
• Codemancer: No Linux port, but an Android one. I like this game. It’s a kind of broadly Pokemonish Programming game: you play a student wizard in a world where magic takes the form of writing little scratch-like programs for your feisty animal familiar to execute. Hoping I can get the kids into it.
• Serre: Another visual novel, which, I’ve mentioned, aren’t usually my thing. This one seems to be about a romance between a lonely young girl and an invading alien lady. I don’t care for the art style but the story is cute.
• Wakamarina Valley, New Zealand: No linux port but it looks neat.
• Vilmonic: This is more Dylan’s kind of game than mine, and after a few minutes something went squirrley with the controls causing my little dude to just continuously run downward.
• Hidden Folks: A sort of Where’s Waldo kind of hidden objects game in a sketchy art style. Reminds me a bit of Highlights for Children.
• Pagan: Autogeny, The White Door, Vignettes, Sagebrush, Tamashii: No Linux Ports
• Intelligent Design: I found the game a little irascible. Evolutionary sandbox doesn’t sound like my thing. Also, the UI was too small. Finally, I’m left-handed, and the physical setup of my space precludes me from using the mouse right-handed. The reason I mention this is that while WASD is standard for movement, most decent games will also let you use the cursor keys, or at least remap the movement keys. This does not. It is incredibly inconvenient for me to use WASD because of the aforementioned “I have to use my left hand for the mouse” thing.
• As We Know It: Another visual novel, this one a postapocalyptic romance I think. Visual style reminded me a bit of Goliath. Plot didn’t grab me really.
• The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith: Another visual novel. This one seems to be anthropomorphic animals and also Lovecraft? Soft pass.
• Bonbon: Windows only
• Death and Taxes: This is a ton of fun. You play a grim reaper in a bureaucratic afterlife in a way that’s reminiscent of Papers, Please, though the pacing is not nearly as frantic. It takes kind of a while to get to the point where the other shoe drops, but the art is fun and stylish and the relaxed pacing kept me from getting flustered.
• Super Win the Game: Wow. Retro-styled puzzle-platformer that draws most heavily from, of all things, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. The jump physics are a little weird, but it feels deliberate. Very wide open – I accidentally sequence-broke from the starting gate. Really enjoyed this, putting in about an hour before I noticed.
• HUGE pixelart asset pack: Oof. Ever guiltier I feel about my failure to write the vidgams.
• Signs of the Sojourner: No Linux port.
• Game Development Cheatsheets – 2018 Edition: Not really sure what this is. It seems like job description posters for game dev jobs. Okay…
• Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass: “Full length pixel RPG”? Yes Please. No Linux port? Fuck.
• Task Force Kampas: Windows only, but I don’t like shmups anyway, so okay.
• Glittermitten Grove: A fairy-themed colony management game. I think I might have liked this more when I was younger? I got overwhelmed pretty quickly and my fairies kept starving.
• Silicon Zeroes: A puzzle game based on building circuits. Very similar to Nandgame, but with a bit of narrative and working at a higher level. I had fun with it and I plan to introduce Dylan to it.
• Pixel Fireplace: Same libcrypto issue I’ve run into a few times. I am curious why so many of these games, apparently games without any obvious need for cryptography, have a dependency on a newish version of OpenSSL.

I also managed to sort out the dependencies for Haque and Minit, which I’d previously been unable to play. Both are sort of Zelda-esque Action-RPGs in an 8-bit style. Probably Speccy for the former and Apple 2 for the latter, though Minit kinda feels almost Arduboy. I liked Minit, whose gimmick is that you die (and restart back at home) every 60 seconds. Haque was a little too much noise for me.