Nick’s Game Diary Week of Jan. 21, 2024
A weekly diary of the things I’m doing and digging.
Jan. 22, 2024
New ep is out! Such a good talk with Mark. Heading into the weekend, I was bummed about all the recent video game media and development layoffs. To the point that I had to take a break from the web and playing games for a few bit. Between all the extra sleeping and football watching, I think I’ve recharged my batteries. Time to play more Transistor before Josh kills me.
Jan. 23, 2024
I’ve really tried giving Palworld some time. I played a bit of Friday and gave it a few more hours today, it’s just not sticking with me. To be fair I’ve never been big on survival games. I was always more on the creative side with Minecraft and games like Rust and Valheim were so over my head I didn’t even bother to boot them up. On Palworld, I also can’t decide if the game is playing the satire angle or is really just a quick smash n’ grab lifting assets and designs from other games. Folks seem to be freaking out a bit about the slavery and animal cruelty in the game. Pocket Monsters has had those markets cornered since the 90s. How dare Palworld encroach upon them! All that said, the player counts are bonkers, and I hope everyone is enjoying their Pokimans.
You know what series would thrive with Palwolrd mechanics? LOST PLANET! You can’t tell me that wouldn’t be amazing.
Give that giant snow worm a gun and put him to work!
I promise I’m playing Transistor, but right now all I want to write about is Nuclear Blaze. This cute little Metroidvania-lite came out in 2021 and is a masterwork in building suspense. You’re a little bean-shaped firefighter who while helping to put out a forest fire, stumbles upon a mysterious building that’s gone up in the blaze. I’ll avoid spoilers…for now…but the game has you descend deeper and deeper into this building all while fighting fires. Each room is more maze-like than the last. These rooms are challenging puzzles that have you manuevering flames covered platforms, activating sprinklers, and searching for secret areas. All this while the game continuisly hints that there is something amiss about this fire. I haven’t finished it yet, but I think I know where it’s heading. We’ll see if I’m right.
There’s also some great chiptunes in the soundtrack!
Jan. 24, 2024
Feeling a little weak in the lungs, so we pushed recording with Shinobi to later in the week. With the extra time I slept, but I also played more Transistor and Nuclear Blaze between bits of sleep. I’ve finished the second chapter of Transistor. There’s an interesting moment where your sword boyfriend loses a bit of his humanity between fights. His normal green glow disappears and in its place a jarring flash of red. Sentences become loose collections of words and degrade further into noises. My loving weapon of destruction has all but vanished in this moment, before returning to his normal self in the next area. I’m still a ways away from really getting this game and what it’s going for, but if I had to guess based off what I’ve seen so far, Transistor at its core is about human connection and the way those connections fade when a person passes. More to come on this.
Your love is a drug…get it, cause she drags him around.
I did finish Nuclear Blaze tonight (about 2 hours of playtime). The game did not conclude in the way I thought it would. I’ll save the spoilers for now, but I do feel a write-up for the site in the near future. The ending was a lot goofier than I thought it would be, but that didn’t really ruin the suspense I was feeling in my descent of the game’s central location.
What is really cool is the game’s new game + mode, the appropriately titled Hold My Beer mode. This mode changes your path, the order in which you gain upgrades, and makes putting out large flames more difficult. I am stuck in the first major fire fight currently, but wow this game just keeps surprising me.
I’m going in!
Jan. 25, 2024
Playing a new game for review. Can’t say much more than that.
On the writing end. I am just about done with my latest pilot. My first multi-cam comedy, BASTARDS’ KEEP. Coming from a background in stage comedy at Second City Chicago, the multi-cam script format has been a great nostalgic trip back to writing sketches in the mid 10s. Putting this bad boy out into the world over the weekend for notes. Feels good to have something new again!
Short excerpt from BASTARDS’ KEEP.
Jan. 26, 2024
Got reacquainted to the Hyper Light Drifter OST. It might be time to hop back into this one.
