I Know What I Did Last Weekend

Every so often I hit a tipping point where I have a lot of game-related things to talk about, but none of them quite rise to the level of needing a full post on their own. And so… here we are, with bits and pieces from a lot of games.

Quest 64

First up: Quest 64, one of the very few RPGs for the Nintendo 64. It received poor-to-middling reviews when it was released, and since then it’s become something of a meme. Leading up to the Analogue 3D launch, I’d collected a bunch of N64 games – some new to me, some old favorites. Among them were a few traditional turn-based RPGs, including Paper Mario, Aidyn Chronicles, and this game.

Quest 64 was the least well-received of the three, but… the memes. I started seeing Quest 64 memes everywhere. It went from “maybe if I have time” to “this will definitely be the first game I finish on the Analogue 3D.”

You play as Brian, an apprentice mage whose father (the king) has disappeared just when the kingdom needs him most. Your job is to travel the land, helping people along the way, following rumors, until you finally find him.

The game has an innovative battle system – one I haven’t seen before or since – that is surprisingly deep for a turn-based RPG. The game is grindy. A LOT grindy, if I’m being honest, but the power creep is real, and it feels great to return to areas that were once deadly and one-shot everything you encounter.

BTW, putting this out here so other Analogue 3D owners don’t suffer as I have: saving to the virtual controller pack DOES NOT save to permanent storage by itself! You must explicitly QUIT THE CARTRIDGE from the Analogue 3D’s system menu for the save to persist!

Pokemon TCG Pocket

After finishing Pokémon Legends: Z-A, this is currently the only Pokémon game I’m still playing. TCG Pocket has entered its second year with the “B” series Mega Rising expansion. Like last year’s Genetic Apex, it has three different packs themed around Mega Gyarados, Mega Blaziken, and Mega Altaria.

After much scrimping and saving of pack stamina points, I finally had enough to trade them in for a second Mega Blaziken ex, which allowed me to build an absolutely killer deck. It now sits alongside my Suicune ex, Cranidos/Lucario, and Magnezone decks as builds that can take on just about any opponents.

The new trading and sharing mechanics elevate the whole system to new heights. I can see what my friends want, they can see what I want, and I can straight-up gift my extras to friends who don’t have them – and they do the same for me. It took me the better part of a year to complete my Genetic Apex Pokédex. I’m now just over 20 cards away from finishing the Mega Rising Pokédex after only a month and a half.

Deluxe Pack ex, not so much. I’m fairly sure I have copies of all the missing cards for the Deluxe Pack ex Pokédex, but they don’t register. Even when friends gift those cards, they still don’t register. What makes this more frustrating is that the new sharing system lets me see how many cards friends need for each expansion – and many of them have the Deluxe Pack ex Pokédex completed.

This is my not-happy face.

Dune: Awakening

The game may be dead, but Calrain and I are still acting like it isn’t in Dune: Awakening. Not too long ago, I could chat with people in the Deep Desert and the Landsraad was hopping. This week, only our guild and one other even showed up in the Landsraad—and there were no Harkonnen guilds at all.

We’re not sure there will be a server to take us when server merges begin, and yet we have to leave this one anyway, as it’s a server neither of us owns. I suppose I could spin up my own server and move us there, but would it just be another dead server cluster?

That said, we’ve been pretty active. Calrain made a second carrier, so now we have two. We stripped two large spice clusters entirely on our own – no competition, no PvP, not even other players getting in the way. We more or less have the world to ourselves.

The game is fun. It would just be more fun with more players. And no PvP. Funcom keeps threatening to make the Deep Desert more dangerous, but I don’t think that ends the way they think it does.

Guild Wars 2

Team Spode finally finished up Living World Season 3. We’d already played Path of Fire and End of Dragons, so we knew Balthazar would be escaping, but we still had to go through the motions to prove it.

With LW3 complete, we were finally able to start the Visions of Eternity expansion. We’ve only finished the prologue so far; the next instance is pretty long, so we opted to set sail next week.

Audio Mech

This follow-up to the Audiosurf rhythm game from… a long time ago… puts your music front and center in a bullet hell/platformer. It uses whatever music you’re listening to, from any source, to grant you weapons based on the strength of the bass, treble, and vocals – and the enemies are listening too.

As the power of the music grows, so does the power of your enemies.

It’s just amazing. You can tune the difficulty to your liking, from an OP power walk to frantic bobbing and weaving. I saw this on Scopique’s Video Game Awards wrap-up and stopped reading and started playing.

Sword for Hire

One goal I had, coming into this year’s Advent of Code, was to build enough expertise with Lexaloffle’s Picotron fantasy workstation so that I could start developing games there that would be easy to build and easy to share. I was pretty disappointed in how my Sword for Hire game came out last spring; I completed it (aside from some bugs) but I’d built it on Python in a terminal. That made me feel warm and fuzzy in an early 80s way, but it just was not portable.

So I put it aside.

Now it’s back. The adventure is complete and stored in YAML files. I have all this Python code. And I have a new development environment. All I have to do is… port over a metric crapton of code.

I do have LLM help for the donkey work of converting Python to Lua, but it’s still on me to build the UI, get everything working, and fix those bugs.

But… it should finally be possible to release this game someday, and anyone who wants to will be able to play it.