Weekly Update 2026-02-22
Meet'N'Fish Kingdom
Game Releases and Updates
Age of Empires 2: The Last Chieftans – along with three new South American-based civs and an overhaul of the Inca to finally save them from getting casually labeled ‘Meso’ alongside the Maya and Aztec, this patch brings the long-awaited complete overhaul of the naval gameplay that’s been in testing hell for some time. And it all seems pretty good, at least to me – I have done skirmishes with all the new civs, and really like the dynamic of their new basic infantry type, or maybe I just like any excuse to drop outposts all over a map and play like I have the game settings on Revealed.
VOID/BREAKER Hard Reset update – a new zone, a new weapon, and the addition of wallrunning all sound great, but it’s going to be hard for me to tear myself away from playing, you know, already completed games, to check this roguelite shooter out some more. But you never know, I might get the itch to drop a building on some bots again before this EA wraps up.
Toziuha Night Witch Mode – alternate play modes, homage reskins, very cute. Too bad I still haven’t gotten around to actually finishing this one.
Styx: Blades of Greed release – the third game in the beloved[?] gobbo-mode stealth franchise creeps from the shadows. That’s… kind of cool, especially if you happen to be French, I suppose. The first game was not really my favorite in the genre, but more to the point, I realize now that I either never played the second game, or managed to completely forget everything about it. Well, that’s a big reason why I rigorously document this kind of thing these days.
Demon Tides release – speaking of sequels to games I maybe medium disliked… Demon Turf was, as the kids might say, [a couple years ago anyway] one of the retro throwback platformers of all time, and while I didn’t have any real problem with it, I simply did not make the time to finish it after getting about halfway. The sequel, Demon Tides, had a demo last year, and I played it. Look, it’s fine. If you liked the first game I’m sure this will be even better to you. Me? I’m just reminded of Bubsy.
The State of Games Played
I sacrificed some of my precious remaining hours of mortal life to the howling chasm of Diablo II this week… boy, how many times in my life have I had to say that? The new ladder season officially started by now, and I was expecting sweeping nerfs to the new class, changes to the new Herald system, hell, any patch whatsoever addressing anything people were complaining about beforehand. Apparently wasn’t a big priority – warlock is, while still a thoroughly fun and perfectly themed character, quite an overpowered one, and not just as a single build – each tree has at least one thing in it that has Bliz-brained no-lifers braying for blood, except the ones too much like a pig in shit actually playing Warlock to want it to change.1
Nioh 3 finally managed to surprise me… with a sudden time leap forward, introducing my new favorite character and also the most Scottish Gentleman I’ve ever seen.
With Next Fest coming this week, I decided to clear out some of my backlog of demos I’d downloaded and then forgotten about. Consider this a little teaser for the coming week’s worth of articles, all less coherent than the last.
DEMOS
Into the Grid – a cyberpunk roguelite deckbuilder… wait, where are you going? Come back! ItG genuinely has pretty solid design, some good, mildly complex card and skill interactions, and decent art and sound. Now, is that enough to overcome my racism towards deckbuilders? Not super… a lot… though it does get some pass for thematically being a cyberpunk hacking game and therefore getting to call its deck a capital-D Deck.
You know, playing this demo just made me nostalgic for Midnight Protocol [a combination of cyberpunk hacking RPG and typing game] more than anything else.
Project Chameleon – this demo [and the next two] were, if I recall correctly, part of the recent Brazilian games feature on Steam. This one is a stealth game where you have to transform into background objects to evade detection from patrolling robots, each of which is programmed to ‘notice’ you in the guise of a single object type. What follows is a FAR too long ramping up, with the game forcing you to endure about a dozen too many utterly trivial trials before introducing a half-decent new mechanic, which then ALSO takes too long to get challenging or even remotely engaging.
Now, it did have some pretty incredible voice acting.
By the end it finally unveiled some gimmicks, and I could almost see where an actual fucking game might lie at the end of the tunnel, but boy is it a slog to get there. You know the old business slogan of location, location, location? Pacing, pacing, pacing. Cut the crap and make me think at some point in the first minute and then again at least once a minute afterwards or you do NOT have a ‘puzzle game’ here, chief, you got some shit I’d have played on Newgrounds while pretending to work on an essay.
Arashi Gaiden – pretty slick little roguelite about dashing around ‘ice block’ rooms as a ninja. Some neat ideas doled out, while not quite rapid fire, at least more generously than in the last demo. I especially liked the power I got near the end, which allows you to put ‘launcher’ tiles on the ground near you, to turn your move into a zig-zag redirection. It’s real tough to say with these sorts of games if they’ll be consistently compelling and challenging, but it’s at least a much more promising first impression.
RoboGAL: Gaga Delta Lady – alright, so this is a Mega Man clone. Just straight up, that’s what it is. Hey, no shade, I like Mega Man. This lacks a bit too much polish to really be electrified by, but it’s got the beginnings of decent art and core gameplay.
One of my two big complaints would be that the ‘first’ stage is by far the harder of the two in the demo, full of very precise movement around instant-kill spikes and bumpers and lifts designed to make it even harder, though you can just pick the easier level first in true Mega Man fashion. The other is that the charge shot doesn’t feel powerful enough – it barely one-shots fucking anything, and the only reason I begrudgingly hold down one face button for 90% of the playtime of the classic Mega Man titles where it’s included is because when you let it go it usually eliminates whatever problem is directly in front of you. Not so in this. Too much shit just tanks that shot and makes the muscle cramp and chronic joint damage being incurred feel worthless. Zexion did it right and every game that does it wrong from now on is dog water. And yes that will probably include Mega Man 12.
Lure of Passion – a hentai adventure game that is also a fishing game? Already got my rod in my hands, pal.
You are a fisherman who lives in a cabin in the woods and one day a beat up catgirl shows up at your door. You take her in, let her sleep in your bed, and a few weeks later she’s jerking you off in exchange for fish. That’s a little on the nose, isn’t it?
Anyway, despite the title and the game including a decent, though not terribly deep, fishing minigame, you actually wind up doing a variety of minigames to unlock sexual favors from the all-female cast of NPCs. There’s gambling, gardening, worming, even a dungeon crawl with battles executed through Match-3.
The art and animations are okay, the minigames are fine, but to be blunt here, I expected more fishing and fucking in my fucking fishing hentai game. I spent way more time in the Match-3 dungeon than I did doing anything else, which is a problem. It spreads itself a bit thin trying to give you quests for each character, there’s not much to any of the minigames, and the scenes you unlock are barely interactive at best. Plus, the game is obviously designed to be playable with one hand, but it’s the wrong hand! Everyone uses their mouse with their dominant hand!
Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilege – alright, so this is a Castlevania clone, ect, ect, you know the deal. Well, it’s also clearly drawing inspiration from Infernax, the Castlevania clone whose gimmick was being ridiculously tongue-in-cheek, obscenely over-the-top gory and ‘extreme.’ Except this is way less extreme.
Honestly liked it quite a bit. It’s stiff in all the right ways, has perfectly serviceable art that occasionally gets hammy enough to crack me up, and the first NPC I met I accidentally exploded with an attack instead of talking to him. I am a little… leery of a game having the Volgarr the Viking/Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light ‘wall spear as a platform’ gimmick while having an ammo counter for that spear, but we’ll see.
Writing
I’m going to be spending a good part of every coming day writing about demos, which is exciting because who knows what I’ll have to say, what kind of weird mood I’ll be in, and where this week will take me. I have been making more and more notes for other articles, but I think I’ll probably take at least a week off of working seriously on anything after Next Fest.
Other
Recently watched, for the first time, the 1971 film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, still easily his best book. A story about brilliant scientists given exorbitant funding and authority just to prove every single one of their assumptions to be completely, disastrously wrong, their best preparations leading to a catastrophic escalation that threatens to have consequences orders of magnitude worse than if they’d just done nothing? Well, surely that won’t resonate as much here in the 2020’s. *clears throat awkwardly* But how about the movie? I loved it. It does have a little bit of that ‘70s hokiness in the vein of, like, a typical war film of the time, but manages a balance of grounded fiction and spectacular set and prop work that absolutely sells the setting of ‘cutting edge late ‘60s research lab.’ Its pacing is wonderfully glacial in an authentic way you just can’t get anymore – it’s one of those things that’s impossible to replicate or even emulate in the modern era without some level of irony and self-awareness that leaves a little taint.
The movie makes some changes from the book, and most of them are kind of bizarre and pointless but not terribly offensive. I don’t know what the point is of changing the end, and in such an off-hand way too – I guess maybe it was some sort of sequel hook?2 Stuff like them changing the tranquilizer darts to lasers that somehow stun a person when hit feels like they just didn’t want to figure out how to shoot someone with prop darts and have them stick. Probably the most notable change, and the one that’d be getting a ton of complaints these days, is the gender swap of Dr. Leavitt, played in the movie by Kate Reid. Forget gender politics and representation and the modern tokenism industry – she is a fantastic inclusion, a hard-smoking, outspoken, gruff researcher who comes across as exactly the sort of off-reservation but begrudgingly respected genius that certain people will hate and others really will bend over backwards for. All the other casting is great too, but she stood out as definitely my favorite.
Less spectacular are some of the other creative decisions, like the bizarre comic-book panel framing in a handful of scenes, and the incredibly confusing series of flashbacks and flash-forwards to explain things that, frankly, should’ve just be rewritten in some way for the movie format. The timeline of events could get pretty confusing if you’re not already familiar with the book, and not in an intentional way.
But the real star of the show is the set, which includes a pretty realistic electron microscope setup, people struggling to manipulate things with remotely controlled mechanical arms, the rugged Buck Rogers-esque glove-box suits, and most of all, most brilliantly, the incessant blare of nonsensical PA system messages, calling out error codes, announcements of events on the other side of the facility, a notice that someone left their headlights on in the parking lot, and so on. This is one thing that the first Half-Life game nailed, and it’s great in this too. Really, the movie’s biggest flaw is that it’s so short – with enough time to breathe, to drone on, to irritate and wear down viewers, it could come pretty close to capturing the book’s portrayal of the fatigue and discombobulation masked by superficial efficiency while working in artificial, sterile environments, hours slipping by as you stare at screens, your mind screaming at your body to shut up, it hasn’t been that long, you’re doing something important here, not realizing that it’s three in the morning and you’ve just been looking at a Wikipedia article about dog dick cancer. Or reading a movie review at the end of a blog post that’s supposed to be about playing videogames or something.
Like me, for example. Wanna fight about it?
Guess what, there IS actually an official sequel to The Andromeda Strain, a ghost written novel with Crichton’s name posthumously emblazoned across the cover which I recently bought at a discount store out of sheer bemusement.