Listen to the Rain

My first spooky game for October!

Hey, there are ghost pirates. It counts.

As I mentioned in my review of Loom lo these many years ago, I grew up playing Sierra adventure games and repeatedly dying, so I always considered the focus to be the progression of the puzzles. In addition, even though games like Quest for Glory I or King's Quest VI had humorous elements and a lot of jokes, particularly the Quest for Glory series, they were still fundamentally serious stories. Even Loom was the same, mostly serious with a bit of humor in it, and Maniac Mansion had more humor but not that much dialogue in which to really display it.

My sister wanderluster_kp bought Curse of Monkey Island and played through it with uriany, though, and that had a completely different mood. It was much more focused on the jokes, on the snappy comebacks and side comments in dialogue, on Murray the Invincible Demonic Skull and the singing pirates. I clearly remember how hard I laughed when Guybrush shot the banjo and his response when accused of foiling the duel was, "That shot could have come from the grassy knoll." I never played it but the two of them beat it, and when I recently listened to an episode of Go Back and Play about The Secret of Monkey Island, and now that it's October, the time had come.


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Final Fantasy VI is my favorite Final Fantasy, and playing it through again hasn't changed that opinion.

I didn't own an SNES as a child, but several of my friends did. I remember us playing through FFVI together, trading off at various story points, taking turns naming characters--I named Setzer "Han" because he was a gambler and a scoundrel and also I was ten--but I didn't get very far. I came in wherever the person's save was, and of course it wasn't a group game or anything like that. They absolutely kept playing while the rest of us weren't around, and so I only remember bits. The Opera House where I got to name Setzer, of course. The opening crawl, obviously inspired by Star Wars, with Tina (Eng: "Terra"), Biggs (Eng: "Vicks"), and Wedge piloting their mage armors across a desolate snowfield toward the lights of Narshe in the distance. Protecting Banon on a raft down a rushing river and repeatedly choosing the looping fork to take advantage of his healing ability. But no consistency. No real understanding of how the story all fit together. All that came later when I played it through on my own.


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On Saturday, Anime Chicago had a Summer Anime Sampler event, where a bunch of us piled into a room and watched the first episode of a lot of upcoming anime while we ate food. I made a big pile of tamagoyaki--a dozen eggs' worth--and paid the $12 for a year's membership to Anime Chicago so I could attend, and we watched anime for five hours.

Here's my thoughts, ordered by how likely I am to watch more of it:

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I've never played Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing. I've never played Farm Simulator or anything like that. But when Stardew Valley was announced as a Harvest Moon-like that fix all the annoyances and problems that had crept into Harvest Moon over the years, I was incredibly excited and I couldn't wait to play it.

I think it's because the one time I lived in a rural farming area it was amazing. Most of Chiyoda by land area was rice fields, and despite being foreigners and not speaking Japanese that well, our neighbors would drop off extra vegetables during the harvest season, invite us to local festivals, and buy us drinks when they saw us in the local izakaya. None of our friends who lived in Hiroshima City had any of that happen to them, but we drank sake and ate pickles and roasted fish with the neighbors as all of their kadomatsu burned in a giant bonfire in the center of the field. I don't have a connection to my Chicago neighborhood the same way I did to Yae-Nishi, and I'm not likely to get one any time soon. Even if I knew my neighbors' names, there are too many of them to really get a feel for the community. City living provides anonymity, for both good and ill.

In Golden Sky Stories, a translation of the Japanese RPG ゆうやけこやけ that I could describe as "Stardew Valley from the perspective of the junimos," there's a particular line that I loved that I could easily apply to Chiyoda:

Only a single rail line passes through it. A two-car train comes every hour, and no more. In front of the station are a row of shops not seen anywhere else. Many of the roads around the town are narrow, too small for cars to pass. Some of them are mere dirt paths, used by cats and rabbits more than people.

You can see open fields here and there. The rice paddies outnumber the houses. If you look into the distance, you’ll see only mountains and trees. Narrow rivers flow from mountains, from ponds, gathering into one big river. The water flows in, the water flows away

I could just as easily apply it to Stardew Valley.

The portraits in the screenshots below come from the Rikuo's Character Portraits mod, which edits everything to be more anime.


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This game caught me completely by surprise. I backed Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night as soon as I became aware of it based mostly on the strength of the Kickstarter video--and apparently I backed a physical copy, so I guess I'll be getting that at some point in the future--but I haven't really been paying much attention to the updates. I rarely do, especially with games, because I don't want too many spoilers before I actually get to the game itself. So as it smashed through stretch goals and climbed up the Kickstarter rankings, I completely missed the "Free 2D, pixel-based, retro-styled prequel mini-game" that they promised. And then all of a sudden it came out at the end of the last month and it looked amazing.

It is amazing.


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On Friday night, liszante and I went to see Neverwhere after I was the only one to respond with a definite date and time to a Facebook post asking if anyone wanted to go. Points for decisiveness.

Lifeline Theatre did a performance of Neverwhere a while ago, while I lived in Japan, so I never got to see it then. And due to rights issues with the adaptation, there was a note in the program that this would be the last run of the stage performance for the foreseeable future, so I'm glad I went. I did not get a picture of the stage, but I did take this picture out in the lobby:

There was also a "Chicago Below" collage with pictures submitted by various people, which kind of makes me want to run a Neverwhere-inspired game set in Chicago.

The stage was set up in two levels, with a catwalk and ramshackle (or ramshackle-looking) boards on top, a stairway that kept moving, and several ladders. True to the theme, there were doors everywhere, close to a dozen of them scattered all around stage's two levels, and people were constantly going in and out of them. Richard Mayhew and a few bystandards started on the top level, as he waited for the bus that would take him down to London and the old woman read his palm and uttered the words that I remember most out of the whole book:

"You've a good heart. Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go. But mostly, it's not."

Most of the script followed the book pretty closely, but there were a few additions that stood out to me as particularly expository, though I'm not sure if that would be the same for a viewer who hadn't read the book half-a-dozen times like I have.

Each of the actors played multiple roles. The same actor played Old Bailey, the Earl of Earl' Court, and the abbot of the Black Friars, for example, the same actor played the angel Islington and Richard's friend at work, the same actress played Hunter and the partners' assistant at work, and the same actress played Jessica and Lamia (and maybe Anesthesia the ratspeaker, now that I think about it), which itself makes a point about Richard's views on women. They did an excellent job of portraying separate mannerisms and dialects, though, to the point that I mostly only noticed if I concentrated on it. I thought Mr. Croup and Islington had the same actor until I realized that was impossible because they'd have to be on stage at the same time.

I don't know from theatre criticism, but I liked the performances. Richard never quite achieved the quiet confidence that killing the Beast gives him in the book, but he certainly portrayed a complete outsider confused by everything around him very well. I could have believed the Marquis was the traitor based on his dismissiveness if I didn't know who the real traitor was, and Croup and Vandermar were fantastic. Door was much like she was in the book--muted emotions, devotion to her family's quest, and slight fondness for Richard, like a stray cat that keeps hanging around your house until you take them in.

The fight scenes weren't very believable, though, but there weren't many of them.

It runs until July and it's the last production, so I strongly recommend it if you have the time and ability.

​Most people my age probably learned the Konami Code from playing Contra, but I learned it from playing Life Force.

Over summers in elementary school, I hung out a lot with two other kids who lived on my street. One of them had an NES with Life Force and the three of us would pile into his room--his room with its own television, what a luxury--and play Life Force over and over again. We weren't good at it all, since we weren't steeped in arcade culture and didn't understand high score charts, one credit clears, or any of the other ways that arcade junkies measured their prowess. But with thirty lives and two players, we could get through the whole game and that was good enough.

Today, I needed something like that.


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Based on Transistor and Bastion, I'd say that Supergiant has a type. Both games begin after something has gone catastrophically wrong, with the protagonist left in the ruins trying to piece together what happened. Both games have a silent protagonist. Both games are isometric action games. Both games have a vibrant, beautiful art style that complements a world full of nooks and crannies containing their own fragments of story. Both games explain almost nothing at the beginning and allow the player to discover the background as they play. Both games have combat systems that emphasize player choice and quick response to changing situations. Both games are narrated by Logan Cunningham.

Though I can't blame them for that. Everything should be narrated by Logan Cunningham.


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I feel like I should have done one of these in previous years, but I didn't. Well, it's not too late to start. Here's a list of all the games I played and beat in 2017, in chronological order.

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​The thing that Nintendo almost never forgets, the reason why I'm glad they exist and have their own way of making games, is that games are fun. Games can also tell stories or comment on life, of course. I played Night in the Woods last month and loved it. But games can be interactive fun in a way that passive media like movies or books are simply incapable of, and that is one Nintendo's great strengths.

I feel kind of bad for Microsoft, honestly, and the reasons why are summed up in this tweet:

Not that all their games are fun, of course. Metroid: Other M exists. But Super Mario Odyssey's fun is not in question.


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I've never played Ultima VII, but I know about its reputation. The truly simulationist RPG, predating games like Deus Ex, where the protagonist could get into hidden places by stacking up boxes by the sides of houses and climbing on them, bake bread, have infinite storage space by picking up the cargo door for a ship's hold, paint a self-portrait, rob the bank blind, earn infinite money through rigged gambling, or bake bread using blood to bind the flour together. These were the kind of interactions that Divinity: Original Sin promised in its kickstarter video, but with more modern design, applied to a turn-based combat engine, and with multiplayer. Moving barrels around to solve puzzles? Getting enemies wet and zapping them with lightning? Doing all of that together with schoolpsychnerd? All of that sounded like a lot of fun!

I was going to say that this was the third game I kickstarted, after Wasteland II and Pillars of Eternity, but it turns out that's not true. There were a few other games in there like Shadowrun Returns and Sealark, but this is the third big game I kickstarted, and one of the ones I was most excited for.

Well, it took us almost two years to finish it, so that may provide insight into what I thought about the game.


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I'm a Midwesterner, born and bred. I remember corn fields visible from our back porch until the forest a mile away, and while houses gradually filled in that space, I still played tag in the corn fields every summer--the one element of my upbringing that my Southern wife feels free to mock me for. My father is from California, but he married a Wisconsin farmer's daughter and made a life here in this broad, flat land of corn and wheat, cows and cider farms, and hot summers and sudden, cold winters.

Okay, I lived an hour's drive from Chicago, so I wasn't exactly from prairie country. But when I heard that Night in the Woods was a game about millennial angst in the ruins of a midwestern town devastated by the economic changes of the twentieth century, and also that it was spooky, I knew I would play it eventually. And this past October it went on sale for the first time, and I bought it. I didn't quite finish it during October because Super Mario Odyssey also came out, but I'm not too far off. And now, I shall sing its praises the way Mae's band sings of their despair.


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Why do bad things happen to good people? What purpose does suffering serve? Is there some greater end, some trial through which G-d is putting us with the ultimate goal of tempering us, like steel hammered out on the forge? Or is it just a part of life that we have to learn to deal with, and maintain our own composure and avoid temptation while doing so? Does G-d understand the compromises that we have to make to exist in the imperfect world, or does He gaze sternly upon us and demand better?

And if you think there's a lot of questions in the preceeding paragraph, you should see some of the dialogue in this game.

The Shivah is the first commercial game by Dave Gilbert, of Wadjet Eye fame, though I wouldn't have guessed that just from playing it. That's partially because this is the "Kosher Edition," with voice acting and revamped graphics, but also because it's polished and very well designed without a lot of the pitfalls that adventure games usually fall into. I felt more like an investigator during the Shivah than I ever did during Gabriel Knight, and without any of the latter game's sleaziness. The Shivah is grounded, which is its greatest strength.


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