Re the lispygopher chat, just a few thoughts longer than a toot.
I played the hell out of MOO back in the '90s, as well as ran my CircleMUD (D&D-like combat-oriented) for a while, and my own CloudMUD system which was a Java chatter with rooms you could put images in. I have my more recent in-development-maybe VRMicro project which reduces it to sprites walking around reading files in a 2D memory palace.
Terms:
MUD: Multi-User Dungeon. A server runs a virtual world, you connect with a chat client, interact with it like interactive fiction but with other people. These vary from MUSH/MUCK chatters, to MUD which was adventure-oriented.
MOO: MUD Object-Oriented. Users can create their own objects, script them with a fairly powerful LISP-inspired system.
I'd love to have one back, and I've even recompiled LambdaMoo locally and it works, BUT.
Moderation then was awful, and on the Internet now it'd be disaster. See My Tiny Life but imagine millions of cybercriminals and trolls.
MOOs require you to moderate objects, rooms, & scripts as well as people. You need several staff 24/7, who are calm, serene, at least competent hackers, with the wisdom of Solomon, and the righteous fury of Judge Isaac "Hanging Judge" Parker. It's an impossible task to make safe.
The technical side is also tough. Nobody really wants telnet anymore. In theory you could make a distributed one with Spritely Goblins or something else, but I haven't seen a practical example of:
In short, it's a space fantasy RPG, turn-based combat, gacha but generally free-to-play (F2P) friendly. I'm running it on iPad, but it also has Android, Windows, soon Playstation. Like the company's previous two games, Honkai Impact 3rd & Genshin Impact, it's very pretty. Unlike them, it's turn-based combat, with heavy emphasis on elemental rock-paper-scissors, getting team skill synergies, and better gear ("light cones" are weapon buffs, "relics" are armor).
It has some of the best writing I've seen in a game. There's in-universe lore, letters between characters, chat logs, database dumps, a ton of weird people with semi-branching storylines. Occasionally some really serious consequences; telling the truth might set someone free or destroy them, I've seen both happen. Could I have avoided a crushing, cruel fight if I'd been more subtle? There's also a lot of comedy, and references to science fiction and other culture. The trash cans are more than they seem.
HI3 was all waifus, very blatantly taking advantage of Chinese & Japanese otaku. GI was a little less predatory and monotone, tried a little harder at the global audience, but then had the most annoying mascot ever, Paimon, that did all your talking for you. HSR has found a nice balance, there's a lot of hot female chars, but also boys (alas, all twinks; none have body or facial hair or any build other than "teenage swimmer" except a couple older NPCs), and the game tends to throw opposite gender flirt at your main character; I'm glad I chose the male MC.
They've learned how to make maps. HI3 had very narrow corridors to do linear action fights in. GI has a vast, largely empty and samey world to scrape over for materials, and then closed mini-dungeon arenas to do jumpy puzzles & action fights in. HSR maps are fairly small, mostly interiors or box canyon mazes, with connected zones at a couple places, but they're much more interesting than the HI3 maps, it's worth going back a few times to find all the secrets, kill the special monsters. Many HSR maps have 2-3 floors, and switches for different paths, just like a real RPG.
The daily grind is a mix of little fetch quests and other tasks in explored zones, Simulated Universe which is a "roguelite" series of fight rooms & random buffs, Forgotten Hall boss fights, Calyx Trees where you grind mobs for specific materials.
If you overlevel the mobs, you can just set combat on auto, 2X speed, and it'll be fine. As soon as you hit any kind of elite or boss, or near your level, that stops working, you need to KNOW how elements interact, PLAN your fights, and use skills intelligently. Read the hints as they pop up, and the books in your database/library, it's all explained.
HSR owes an enormous visual & story debt to Galaxy Express 999 (Matsumoto Leiji anime, willowy long-haired girls & emo boys in dusters with hair over their face, trains in space, vast cosmic threats treated as secondary to personal squabbles and little children, etc), with a much better thought out variant of the cosmology in HI3. Gameplay and visuals are extremely similar to Star Ocean, SMT Persona, some Phantasy Star (esp. the architecture). That's not to say it's a "ripoff", just fairly obvious about its influences. Weirdly just before this, I was playing Eroica, which is fantasy-steampunk-science fiction gacha game about a train on rails of light, fighting magically-corrupted monsters in turn-based combat with the same kind of time-to-strike counter; Eroica's much lower budget, but it was good training wheels for this.
The UI is pretty much the same as Genshin Impact's, but a little more smartphone-like; you hit the phone icon, and that gets you a single top-level menu (and your char holds up their phone! Every char has a custom phone skin/dangly bits). There's hot-buttons around the screen for specific parts of that menu. There's a soft joystick in the bottom left, action buttons bottom right, border's full of widgets and data like any MMO. Sometimes it's a little crowded, but not like a WoW raid screen.
Gacha
So, the gacha needs to be addressed. You get "star rail passes" which are for the normal banners, and there's a starting banner at 20% off (8 passes = 10 pulls). My advice is to spend the 40 passes for 50 pulls it gives you, just for the discount and one five-star char you get from it; I pulled Gepard the tank, not my favorite but useful later. Then keep pulling those passes on the regular banner after that, and enjoy whatever you get. Don't spend jade (F2P gems) or anything else on this.
There's also "Special Passes" for the event banner, currently Seele who is the best single-target DPS char so far, and I loved the version of her in HI3, so I want her back. If you play intensely, and spend all your jade on it, you may be able to hit the "soft pity" level where you have an increased chance to get her. Even if you don't, the pity apparently carries over to the next event banner. I'm planning on doing everything F2P to get her, and then if that doesn't work, I'll think about spending a little real money on it; I have paid for the $5 monthly pass, so I'll have some paid gems. I'm not willing to spend $200+ to guarantee getting her like some streamers have!
You don't need any of these. The main character (Trailblazer, same whether male or female) is actually pretty good as physical DPS/tank, and after an event becomes a top-tier fire DPS/tank (Eroica did the same thing, but without the choices! Sei is the best tank in the game). The free shielder (March 7th), healer (Natasha), AOE (rock star Serval), hunter (the very boring Dan Heng), etc. are more than good enough to get you through all the story and all but the very hardest optional bosses. Don't waste money thinking you need a better character; only spend if you can afford it and really want a specific char. I don't believe in rerolling, I think it's a very stupid & anti-fun waste of time, and this game takes a couple hours to reach the point where you could reroll hoping for a 0.3% chance at a specific char.
Rating
I've spent, uh, rather too much time in game; since Tuesday, I've done consistently 4-8 hours per day, total 27 hours. That's clearly deranged; I'd like to get it down to ½hr daily, 2hr weekends. But I'm now on the 3rd world! So that should calibrate your JRPG-grind meter. Like all live service games, it'll presumably keep getting material until we don't pay/play anymore, HI3's still supported after 7 years. Shockingly HSR's not as CPU/GPU/battery-burning as others, a couple hours is <25% battery used.
I have one world left to slowly explore and then nothing but dailies to do until the next update (maybe in May when the next banner starts). If you're less obsessive about it, this could be months of game right at launch, and you'd never run out.
★★★★★ absolutely must-play if you like JRPGs. Don't spend money until you know you like it.
Screenshots
Galaxy Express 999
Pondering the world.
69, dude! Just happened as I was getting a battle shot.
I've so far on iOS bought "Myst (Legacy) for Mobile", "Riven (Legacy) for Mobile", "The Manhole: Masterpiece", and "realMyst" [sic capitalization]. On Mac, I played the original CDROM Mac Classic Myst, Riven, URU, and "realMyst Masterpiece" [sic capitalization], Obduction off Steam. Cyan got their pound o' flesh.
Myst (Legacy) & Riven (Legacy) has screen-by-screen tapping, it's extremely obscure what's going to happen when you do, and the low-rez screens compressed into the teeny OG iPhone size aren't great. But it's also the only version that has Riven! And it's basically playable. These are fine. Adequate. ★★★☆☆
The Manhole is super weird. It's for kids ("V is for VOID"), but you'll like it. Go experience it, it's $1.99 and maybe the best if most amateur, almost outsider art thing Cyan's ever done. You think Myst is perplexing, Manhole is 100x weirder and harder to navigate. ★★★★½ (down ½ for the tiny window & unlabelled tap areas; the content is ★★★★★)
realMyst has a pretty reasonable modern interface. You'll want to "invert look" (I just started it up for a screenshot, and couldn't get up the stairs until I flicked that switch). The graphics are fine for an early-00s 3D game, and honestly you don't need more than that. I'm not going to re-solve it, but I did so without cheats last time (sweet Cthulhu I hate the subway puzzle, and should've cheated that). ★★★★☆
Myst Mobile now, needs a pretty modern iPad, my Air works fine but got very hot. The graphics textures & grass and such are much better, early '10s quality but still not peak AAA quality. I can get better views from MineTest with shaders. I think realMyst has better lighting, or at least more consistent. Indoors in Myst Mobile I often couldn't see much of anything, at the same brightness settings that were usable in realMyst.
I picked the "randomize puzzles" option, and sure enough the puzzles are different from standard, but all solved the same way as OG, go read books and look up values in the library, planetarium, click buttons and do a little math, etc.
Movement is with a soft joystick, and drag the screen to rotate camera. realMyst's movement was much better.
The problem is the controls are all over the place. Doors are still sliders, rather than swinging open; 3D budget doesn't go that far, I guess. Some buttons you just tap (there's a new button to open the imager cave). Some switches you tap and they flip to the opposite state, some you have to pull all the way into position. Doors you tap on the handle… sometimes that works. The log cabin door was difficult to tap on, which you need to do at speed to reach SPOILER REDACTED. Knobs don't turn linearly, but sort of randomly spinning to a new value as you move your finger. The clock tower puzzle is an unbelievable pain in the ass, getting the levers to move all the way down and not release is very fussy, I bet most new players cannot get them to work. I hate literally every control that isn't a button.
The letter from Atrus to Catherine is missing, so you have no idea what the switches are for. If you know, the new CGI heads for Atrus, Cirrus, Achenar are super cheesy and plastic, like bobbleheads floating in space.
They have a camera, and as usual it only makes square, kinda shitty Polaroid photos even tho Polaroid's been dead for 20 years, but there's no journal, and they don't save in order!!! THE FUCK. I actually miss the shitty grainy, wrong-gamma, square photos & journal in URU's KI system.
They only give you access to the island first. So I opened all the Ages, and… can't go to them. It's $9.99 IAP, soon going up to $14.99. If you don't own any version of Myst, that's a good deal; if you've bought a new one every decade or so for the last 30 years, it's kind of bullshit, and I'm probably not inclined to pay for it.
★★★½☆
What I want is for them to remake Riven, maybe make peace with Ubisoft and remake Exile, Revelations, End of Ages, and URU? There's a fan-made "real URU" in progress, so at least that'll be playable again soon. Instead Cyan has Skyrim Disease, every new platform needs a new adaptation, but they never move forward. (Yes I've played Obduction; pain in the ass most tedious train simulator ever).
Screenshots are SPOILERS! (Soylent Green is PEOPLE!)
View (compare with RealMyst)
Island almost unlocked
I have no idea which pattern it is now
Fixed the clock tower
Atrus goofy floating bobblehead
View out the tower
CLUES. I misread one and had to go back.
Powering up
Learn to play piano
Raise the Titanic
Worst pirate you've ever heard of… but you HAVE heard of me!
So I like to watch videos of the games I play; maybe learn something, maybe just recognize "oh, I do that too". Parasocial but shared-ish experience.
The problem with a free, open source, often Linux-based game is, nobody has working sound. And they really don't have working mics on their broken dumpster-dived Thinkpads, or video editing software. So the MineTest youstubes are mostly divided into:
No audio, sub-5-minute, incoherent flailing around.
[CRACKLE DIGITAL SCREAM] FREE FRAPS quality audio/video, mostly children on PVP servers, and I like none of those things.
Germans. And I'm not usually one to pick on anyone's appearance, but… maybe leave the selfie cam off if you fill 90% of the view. From across the room.
Handful of good youstubers; some are non-English but I can muddle thru Spanish, a few words of Portuguese, or French.
There was another one, professionally done but rather boring where he just dug tunnels in his mine, laid down glass slab floors, and rarely came up to add to a kinda artsy tower, 100+ episodes… and it's gone. He's vanished, taken down his videos? And I'm drawing a blank on his name now so I can't even find out what happened.
If you have other suggestions, that are not 1-3, comment/tell me on fedi.
OK, thinking about projects time, what I've done with my 3-year summer vacation (extended, 2022 edition).
Scheme for local problems, sysadmin tasks, just general dorking around on the computer: ?, best decision I've made in some time. In case it's not clear, Chez Scheme and Thunderchez.
Schemers in general are annoying but less annoying than LISPers, so if the LISP community pissed you off, Scheme's might be 50% less toxic. I still have to block some people in IRC because they won't STFU or tolerate anyone Doing Things in Unapproved Manner. You know what would be amazing? A language as technically awesome as Scheme, with Python's friendly community. Python the language is trash, tho.
Haunted Dungeon, Scheme roguelike. Needs at most weeks of work, and then I can take a day and grind out binaries for various platforms (UUUUuuuugh Windows & Linux suck so much to interact with; Mac does for different reasons), ship it. It ballooned past my original tiny roguelike design long ago, but it's still not that big.
Multiple small Scheme programs & games, once I do that ship day I may just make a bunch of binaries. None of these are amazing but some are nice. Don't ask a developer to praise their own software, you know?
New Perilar CRPG, also Scheme. I have this at like 60% functionality, map generation's beautiful, and fuck-all for story, it's fine, same shipping problems, so much I need to think about if I get it to a playable state. Or it may be a learning experience.
Little Atari 8-bit game. Dungeon crawler with no purpose but it's cute, was meant to be a ZX SpecNext game but that's still not shipped after 2 years so… It's now at like 30% done, but I have some vision for it.
Open world action-adventure game I've got a bit of design for (in my paper sketchpad! Not even on the computer!), it could either be Scheme or Atari 8-bit or whatever. I don't actually know of anything like this design, tho original Zelda & Metroid are the parents (I clearly don't understand genetics) of all such games. Needs so much mapping & writing before I even start, but all the technical side is easy for me.
Currently Atari stuff's in TurboBASIC-XL which is less bad than you'd think, but still really sucks compared to having a modern language; both Pascals and C's I have access to are less useful. I've been borderline to making a new language that compiles to 6502 ASM, but I know I'm lazy at tools-to-make-tools support.
One nice part with Atari 8-bits is, shipping is easy. Put it in an ATR file, with an Atari emulator as seen on archive.org. One click, any browser shows it. Down side is, can't really charge money for this. Beg for patreon support; which I need to be better about giving you goodies in return for your cash, my fine patrons. Shall I write thee a sonnet?
Update & reupload my iPhone stuff. Should I even bother with Castles? I liked the underlying game but the UI is unbelievably shit, I had no idea what I was doing and limited by iPhone 1 screen/UI constraints. But Perilar, and some utility stuff, and maybe patch Brigand to be paid-up-front instead of IAP and say "this is what you could've had!". And I have my 3D game which never got shipped, just shown as demos. Worth spending some time on this and then never looking at it again.
Tabletop RPGs. Fuck this third goddamned plague year, which has made playing & playtesting RPGs just a nightmare. Every online group I try flakes out so fast they may be composed entirely of microscopic black holes. So I have my "original dungeon game" retroclone, and my much nicer sword & planet game, and a couple tiny gamelets. And with Hasbro's sabre-rattling at the OGL and "One D&D", I'm inclined to just ship only the sword & planet game, and turn the rest into world books for it. But I'd like to test it more than once with other Humans and also not get infected with plague. So. State of that world is uncertain.
One of the games (modpacks) for MineTest I've been trying, is SurviveTest. It's much closer to vanilla MineTest Game, but with a good selection of mods to make a survival/mining game, and the developer is updating it regularly, and making youtube videos (in Portuguese, but you get the gist).
The Awards panel is pretty good at driving you thru the game. Some things are less obvious, tho.
Fishing: Every videogame expands until it can do fishing. Put your fishing rod in a slot, and bait in the slot right of it. You can get worms by left-click hoeing ground, then right-clicking the worm as it comes out, or rip up bread (in crafting area) to get bread bait. Then left-clicking water with the rod places a bobber, and in some time it may go under and right-click will pull a fish! It's not very visually friendly, but works.
I mostly just swordfight sharks that jump fences to get into my garden every morning (that is a sentence nobody sane would ever write).
You can also combine signs with fish to make trophies, and for servers there's a fishing tournament UI.
Gardening: Apparently now most crop seeds can only be got from traders (for gold) or dungeon chests? But I find a lot of wheat seeds at least digging grass blocks, and apple trees grow apples, so you won't starve. Cotton bushes drop seeds, and cotton can be made into string or wool. Water only hydrates land 3 blocks away, not 4 as in Minecraft/MineClone2. But kindly reeds grow up to 3 blocks away from water. Chase crows away from your farms, they will steal from you. I dunno if scarecrows actually work, but I put them up anyway to look cool.
Bread is more realistic: 4 wheat make 1 dough, cook dough and it becomes bread. The pies & cookies are fun, but take much more resources than they're worth, and I haven't been able to reliably farm chickens for eggs yet. Soups are a pain, they don't stack.
Fruit Juice: Barrels are W-W-W, I-x-I, W-W-W (Wood, Iron), slightly expensive. Place them out, right-click TWO fruit (strawberry, apple, or melon) into each; it'll take all your fruit for nothing. Wait for an intolerable length of time and the barrel will change color. Make some bottles G-x-G, G-x-G, x-G-x (Glass), 10 bottles per 5 glass. Put ONE bottle in your bar, because if you click with multiple bottles they will be destroyed. Right-click one bottle on the barrel, and you get fruit juice. You can restack the bottles of fruit juice, and use them as a stack and it'll only consume one. Seems one of the higher value foods, out of otherwise very cheap food, and it's just a fun little farming activity, other than the bottle bug.
The bottle rack W-W-W, B-B-B, W-W-W (Wood, empty Bottles) gives an OK-looking shelf for 2 rows of bottles, no indicator as to how full it is but it looks nice enough next to a bookshelf, which holds a similar number of books.
Traders: Currently they spawn on "special jungle wood floor" wood, which you can steal from villages and put in your local trading hut to make them spawn. They'll trade gold for items, often pretty good items, or rarely crops & such for gold. They don't move, they don't do anything except vend goods, which is kind of a relief after dealing with MineClone2 villagers.
Mining: Mineral levels are much deeper down, see chart below. Stone tools suck when you dig hundreds of blocks down. As soon as you can, start making bronze tools from the extra tin & copper you get, I just carry a stack of bronze with me now and craft more tools as I go (I also bought a nice Mese pick from a trader). Then every 50-ish depth, I make a little mineshaft grid, get some of that level's minerals, go further down. I'm finally at diamond and below, looking for the Dungeon Master. A lot of MineTest players do ladders and falling, but I prefer a staircase so I can safely get off.
Storage: Drawers work mostly like Storage Drawers mod for Minecraft. 1, 2, or 4 chests & wood between makes a drawer, right-click places materials in it, left-click withdraws. Make "upgrade templates" (a one-chest drawer with sticks around it), combine with steel, gold, obsidian, or diamond, to make an upgrade, right-click the border of the drawer, and put the upgrade in the arrow slots, to get 2x or more. Sadly this mod doesn't show upgrades visually, or have a redstone fill indicator, or such, but it works fine for the vast amount of junk you accumulate. I just keep chests now for loose things I won't need more than a stack of, or tools. Hm, some of the MC mods add shelves for things like tools, that might be a good idea.
The MineClone2 "map" is basically just a compass, it shows a picture of the local chunks but can't be resized. So… where have I been? Where are my bases?
There's a couple cartography mods, but they seem to only make small maps for use in-game. There's a minetestmapper.py in the base game's distro, but it's python2, requires an obsolete version of PIL, 2to3 didn't fix it.
SIGH, C++ and libraries. I actually have libgd installed with MacPorts, gd2, but it wasn't found at first, adjusted my env vars and now:
cmake . -DENABLE_LEVELDB=1
make
Grinds for half an hour, get a full white image, because all the MineClone2 nodes are unknown, so copied colors.txt to my-colors.txt, and add this to the end:
Repeat, half an hour… I still get 227 lines of unknown blocks, but the base map generates OK now, and looks good enough. I hate the sand color, and I dunno what the dark areas are. OOH, what's that structure at the far west? I'm planning to skyrail far west, then go there and the unexplored village W-SW next time. And I'll add more to my-colors.txt file and post that sometime.
I've been playing Elder Scrolls Online since 2014, beta. I have a monkey and a map made of paper (if you know what that means).
Today I hit the end of my sub period, and nothing's got better from the last 2 updates, or next.
ESO has become another bad card game on top of ruining my alts with "Account Wide Achievements". Can't clear some "easy" dungeons because they keep screwing my build over. New content is just broken.
So I'm on hiatus, maybe for a year or two, probably forever. Dunno what I'm doing for entertainment. Minetest, mobile games, there's a couple MMOs with Mac support and some potential but no decision making at all for a while.
I'm writing up a longer postmortem, where I'll talk about exactly what was good, bad, and ugly, and share many screenshots from years of it.
World boss run with Kitty Rainbow Dash!
Daedric portal, struggled on an easy dungeon
Ember, best companion!
Mirri, also best companion!
Arox the Mutilator, best buddy you can have, alas not a companion.
Mortissa Kamidjani, Khajiit necromancer, sleeps at last.
Yesterday, Mr Mori the Animal Crossing youstuber predicted there'd be some AC news.
As usual, I bold anything interesting.
Fire Emblem N-Gage: Bringing back mobile gameplay from a long-obsolete phone/console. Seriously, 100% gachapon nonsense instead of a tac RPG, everyone involved in this should curl up and die of shame.
It Takes Two: Do you like jumpy puzzles and waiting on a switch for someone else to complete their jumpy puzzle? This is a game designed to cause two people to murder each other.
Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse: "The Forbidden Story Begins" NO! It is forbidden! Taking selfies to capture ghosts, remake of a 2001 game. This would be interesting if it was remade as an AR game set in YOUR HOUSE, but instead it's the most toothless Resident Evil-without-guns possible.
Xenoblade Chronicles DLC again: Pay even more up front, to get the chance to pay more every 3 months, for the game that should've shipped at half the price. Very much built on the mobile MMO model, not quite gachapon but there's no sense of a story or world, just battle to grind up numbers, pay more to grind bigger numbers. Shambling corpse of remake/sequels after remake/sequels from the original Xenosaga games which had art and philosophy.
Spoogeboob Squizzpants: I'm sure it's fine for 6-year-olds.
Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star: This is the opposite problem. FotNS ran in manga until '88, in English until '95, the appallingly ugly anime until '88 and almost immediately fansubbed & brought over. So the audience is basically, what, pudgy 40-60-year-old men with a (non-Lite) Switch? I mean, maybe.
Oddballers: Dodgeball was a horrible, traumatic experience for almost everyone except gangs of hooligans held back 2-3 years and ready to take out some violence on younger kids. Let's turn that into a super fun little game, says Ubisoft! Yeah, no.
Tunic: Small fox, isometric action adventure game. Hey, you made a game for me!
Front Mission: BattleTech ripoff.
Story of Seasons: Harvest Moon devs were fucked out of their title by American studio fuckwits, so renamed it. I love the idea of HM/SoS, but in practice the time-driven rush thru the day, and then thru the seasons, drives me insane with time pressure and I just quit the second I fall behind. I can barely handle Animal Crossing's 1 day per day, and have to time travel if I mess that up. If you're not neurotic it may work for you.
"Splatfest": Not actually a porn convention, but Splatoon event. Do not care.
Octopath Traveller II: Sequels. Why does it always have to be sequels? Same weird mechanic as the first. I might like these if they were organized traditionally, but I get annoyed at "optimal path" games.
Fae Farm: Animal Crossing but faeries.
Theatrerhythm: Beat match game with new soundtracks, mostly locked behind overpriced DLC. Did you know you can listen to music and play drums or air guitar to it yourself for free! Nobody can stop you! YET. Coming soon: Air Guitar DRM.
Mario+Rabbids Sparks of Hope: Mario in open world: YAY! Fucking rabbids: OH NO NOT AGAIN. Also has DLC/season pass nonsense. Can you just make a game?
Rune Factory 3 Special: Farming, fishing, fu… marriage in Rune Factory world. Obviously, Animal Crossing needs in-character marriage with small furry animals to keep up with this kind of amazing innovation.
More NES, SNES, N64, Genesis games, latter two only if you pay the super online fee. Goldeneye is fun, right?
Various Daylife: Previously reviewed on iOS. Not great, but less gachapon than most daily grinder games. Available now for $28.99! Wait for it to be marked down 90%.
Factorio: Grindy factory building/tower defense. Long available on other platforms.
Ib: RPG Maker CYOA with artpunk/just plain incompetent graphics for everything not from the RPG Maker tile set.
Mario Strikers Battle League
Atelier Ryza 3: "The Final Summer Begins": Well, yes, global warming means the world will at some point quit having other seasons, just endless dying in heat. BUT ANYWAY, the game looks really nice, running around a pre-apocalyptic island collecting magicky bits? No mention of DLC, might actually be a real game.
Sports.
Shigeru Miyamoto-San!!! Theme parks, eh. Pikmin Bloom is a smartphone Pokemon Go ripoff, great. I live in the middle of nowhere and don't go out, doesn't help much. Pikmin 4 on Switch in 2023, no gameplay video. Can't say if it's any good until we do see some video.
Just Dance: Just sit on my ass on couch.
Harvestella: JESUS GREEN THUMB FUCKING CHRIST why is every damned game a life simulation/farming/Animal Crossing ripoff? FATE OF THE WORLD FIGHTING DOOM / gotta get my carrots planted you know.
Bayonetta 3: Bay is wearing clothes. Has now done a complete heel/face turn, is a heroine and not a creepy assassin boob witch. Zero out of 5, do not want.
Raincode: Gloomy corporate dystopia. Adorable chibi child detective with sexy gothic lolita ghost sidekick. "Master detective", and even more goofy carnival-ride "solve the case" realm. WHAT. It's like they saw Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and thought "how can we make this even less plausible"?
Resident Evil Village Cloud: RE7 DLC but streamed from Stadia because the Switch can't run a high-res game, even if it's a really shitty, undeveloped game.
Sifu: Kung fu fighting game? Oh, this is the one where every time you lose, you get older and a compensation skill. Lose a few times because you practice that way, and game over of old age.
Crisis Core FF7 Reunion: Remake of a FF7 side story game on the PSP in 2007. Pretty lame, you basically got missions and ran down corridors, did a top view shoot-em-up, got a few bits of dialogue as Zack (remember Tifa's real boyfriend?) Not a bad little game, but it's been a long time.
Radiant Silvergun: Galaxian ripoff yet again.
Endless Dungeon: SF roguelike shmup ripoff of Diablo.
Tales of Symphonia Remaster: Absolutely unnecessary, and minimal effort, remake of a good PS1 RPG but cliché quest. Characters still look like LEGO minifigs with slightly better hair. Sets are not even that good, maybe Playmobil quality with badly-placed decals.
buncha remakes. Don't touch.
Kirby's Return to Dream Land Deluxe: Orko arrives on a spaceship and follows a local cute flesh-eating blob. "Everyone can play as Kirby!" I mean, it's a Kirby game. So fun but silly.
Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom: Sure, probably. Maybe you'll go kill the evil Queen and her whole country will shut down in mourning so you can break all their pots and steal their "rupees" (taken from the kingdom they conquered & robbed). All we see in this video is some hang-gliding and such, could just be an extra map for Breath of the Wild.
So I hate the default adventurer skins, even if it's usually covered by armor and I use first-person camera. I have my own skin. But MineTest has no built-in config for skins! Mods to the rescue.
On your world select, hit Select Mods, Find More Mods, and search for skinsdb, and smart inventory, install both.
Back to menu, select each of those and Enable. Save.
Now in terminal:
cd ~/Library/Application Support/minetest/mods/skinsdb/textures
cp ~/Pictures/My-Minecraft-Avatar.png character_whatever.png
This only seems to work with MC 1.0 avatars, even tho skinsdb says it works with MC 1.8; if you have multiple layers, remove those and resave without them. I tried installing the 3d_armor mod, which might enable that, and it has broken dependencies. 🙁
Play Game, and in game, open inventory, click the skin icon, and at the bottom of the big new Smart Inventory screen, skin icon. Select, done.
(The skin was originally a Spider Jerusalem skin, which I wanted a Nine Inch Nails shirt on, but there's only room for NI, which makes it even better.)
