MIDI Week Singles: "Charge Assault" - ACE COMBAT 7: Skies Unknown (SOS)

 

"Charge Assault" from ACE COMBAT 7: Skies Unknown on Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Linux, Steam OS, Nintendo Switch (2019 - 2024)

Composer: Keiki Kobayashi

Album: ACE COMBAT 7: SKIES UNKNOWN Original Soundtrack

Label: SuperSweep

Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment

Developer: Bandai Namco Studios, Inc.

"Charge Assault" could easily have been an unforgettable song for your first mission in ACE COMBAT 7.  The stage plays somewhat like a tutorial mission, getting the player comfortable with flight controls, recognizing and customizing the HUD, and gushing at how great the game looks, even for a seven-year-old arcade flight sim.  Nothing really to distract the player from completing the mission.  Loud driving drums, synths, and "bwoooaaammmms" are all the hallmarks of a Harry Gregson-Williams score you'd find in a Simpson/Bruckheimer film from the mid-1990s.

But that lasts only 1 minute and 45 seconds, because that's when the proverbial beat drops.  The theme of AC7 blares, adding to the feeling that you're an amazing fighter pilot.  Every time this particular theme plays, not only during this song but also during at least five other songs during the game, I can't help but feel amazing.  

This song is victory incarnate.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I Might Have Looked the Other Way

Game EXP: Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (SOS)

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
Release Date: January 31, 2019
Systems: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows, Linux, SteamOS, Nintendo Switch
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Developer: Bandai Namco Studios
Time Spent: 21 Hours 42 Minutes
Post-Game Playthrough Videos on YouTube

[For my first impressions and initial thoughts about this game, you can read my First Impressions article here.]

I think I can safely say that it took me six years to come back to the Ace Combat series because Ace Combat: Assault Horizon left such a bad taste in my mouth that I felt completely disillusioned with the series.  I had no desire to return to this franchise if that was the direction Project Aces was taking.  I had ignored all trailers for the game, didn't read any of the reviews, and had just written off Ace Combat altogether.  That was a mistake since, for me, Ace Combat 7 felt like a return to form, to a type of arcade shooter flight-sim that I loved, although it still has some elements that I'm not particularly a fan of.  That's bound to happen with nearly any franchise, so I'm not salty about not liking every single little thing about this game.

Ace Combat 7 follows the familiar gameplay loop that I love about the series.  There's a debriefing about the mission with computerized gridlines and arrows in place of planes and enemy troops, with the audio and dialogue as if you're in a briefing room receiving intel before a mission.  Occasionally there's banter between characters, but the protagonist is always silent.  You then proceed to the hangar where you select your plane, weapons loadout, and modifications you want to add to your plane, such as increased standard missile load (from a measly 60 missiles up to 80ish+), increased armor to buff guns and missile defense, or whatever is needed to outfit a plane to increase maneuverability.  You can also select the paint job on your plane if that's your thing, although it's really only beneficial in a superficial way for multiplayer and has zero impact on actual gameplay.  Then you're off in your plane and participating in the mission.

By completing missions, you earn points you can use to buy more advanced planes, special weapons (like advanced missiles and bombs), or modifications that work on any plane, regardless of type or where you bought the upgrade in the plane/skill tree.  Think of it like spending experience points in an RPG.  By completing the main campaign, which took me about 19 hours on Easy (there were some instant death missions that I was struggling with that I'll get to later), there were still a lot of planes that I hadn't unlocked because of how expensive they were, and I would tend to buy any modification I came across because I wasn't sure if it was something that would come in handy in a mission down the road, or if I thought I might actually need to have a quick de-icer on my plane while flying through clouds at high altitudes.  The point is, at least on Easy, and a handful of missions I've beaten on Normal and Hard difficulty settings, that you're going to need to do a bit of grinding in the campaign mode to unlock all of the planes; some of which you have to buy to gain access to other planes along the same airplane tree (ie, if you want to buy the F-15E Strike Eagle, you'll also have to buy either the F-15J or F-15C Eagle first).

Let's briefly get to the aspects of the game that I wasn't a fan of, because while at times it felt like a lot, looking back, it really wasn't.

The first time the game throws something at you that isn't a straight "go kill enemy bogies" is Mission 7: First Contact.  You're initially tasked with destroying radar sights in a mountainous area filled with sky-reaching pinnacles.  You soon discover that a thunderstorm has encroached on your area, and so you have to now fly through heavy rainfall while tracking enemy planes and radar sites, which isn't too bad until you factor in the lightning.  If/when you get hit by lightning, you briefly lose control of your plane; your radar and HUD fail, leaving you to have to target enemies manually while also fighting to regain control of your plane while not crashing into the surrounding mountains.  Then at the end of the mission, you have to fly against an enemy plane that's effectively a mini-boss fight, rain, lightning, and all.  I'm sure the lightning strike RNG is purely random, but it's really hard not to feel that the game is purposefully targeting your plane specifically when you're about to either lock on or fire a missile.

Immediately following Mission 7, in Mission 8: Pipeline Destruction, you have to fly through a desert during a sandstorm, which restricts your radar capabilities.  In the back end of the mission, you have to track down 20 tanker trucks moving speedily through the desert like they're in a Mad Max movie, again, while you have limited radar capabilities that will flicker on and off during the sandstorm.  And then in the back half of this part of the mission, you have the additional headache of dealing with the super agile UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, an attack drone) which doesn't seem to be affected by the sandstorm at all.  If any of the fuel tanker trucks make it out of the combat zone, you have to start over from the last checkpoint.

The last gimmick that I want to harp on about is that, in the second half of the game, the antagonists have knocked out GPS systems, which means that while your radars do work, they have limited functionality.  First, targeting is spotty, so sometimes you might be able to lock on to an enemy, and other times your HUD will flicker off.  Combined with this is the added complication that, for some missions, because the loss of GPS is a multi-mission problem, you can't tell who is a friendly and who is an enemy until you're almost within a hundred yards or so.  So when you're flying 2,560 kph, that distance comes up on you really quick.

Not so much a gimmick but more of a feature in this game is that the enemy have a hard-on for the aforementioned UAVs.  Once they're introduced in Mission 2, almost every mission, at some point, will feature a veritable swarm of these quick little bastards.  What makes these speedy little shits so annoying is that it makes the missions hard to plan for if you're trying to roleplay in any kind of logical manner.  When you receive a mission briefing about having to attack ground forces, take out trucks, tanks, and structures, you would normally think to bring in a plane whose speciality is Air-to-Ground, like the wonderful A-10 Warthog.  But no, that would be a bad choice, because halfway through the mission, you might be tasked with having to take out 15-20 of these quick attack drones, or god-forbid, another encounter with the mini-boss, Mister X, and trying to do that in a plane that flies like an overweight elephant armed with a front-mounted 30mm Gatling gun and a handful of missiles is not the ideal situation to be in.  This is probably the reason why there aren't a lot of air-to-ground-focused planes in this game.

I guess I just wish that there were more simplistic missions where you just had to go out and destroy a bunch of stuff within your 20-minute time limit.  But I guess that's what free play mode is for.

But you know what?  Despite all of the complaints I have about this game, I still loved it.  Like I said up at the top, I felt like I was able to fall in love with this series all over again.  I enjoyed the minorly convoluted story, where the narrator was a woman whose story ran tangentially to the playable main character for the first quarter of the game.  I liked the arc of the playable character and how they fit within the overarching narrative.  The game had a lot of elements that I love from the series, like stupidly large enemy ships with a 3,600-foot wingspan, planes that can carry 100+ missiles, planes that can generate force fields, flying into an underground/underwater tunnel that was 100% not designed for a full-assed-size plane to fly through, and orbital space laser cannons.  It's ridiculous, and I love it.

On the Steam Deck, the game ran fine for the most part, with some of the load times taking, at most, just under a minute.  The game ran at a consistent 60fps with the settings at a mix of medium, high, and max.  If I don't have the Steam Deck plugged in, I can play for about an hour before the battery dips below 20%, which isn't good, but I rarely play unplugged, so it's not really an issue for me.  I cannot think of a lot of games where the game offers me a replay feature, and I'll watch the entire thing all over again because the game makes my gameplay look like I'm a complete bad-ass.  I'll sometimes even watch the slightly faster-than-real-time playback on a computer grid where your plans are just arrows and trail lines because it's fun to watch yet another angle of what I just played.  With that in mind, the actual time to beat the campaign on easy is probalby probably closer to only about 10, but that's just for a single run through on Easy.  I'm sure that if I were focused on playing on Hard, getting S rank on all of the missions and buy the X-02S Strike Wyvern, I could probably put in at least another 30 hours and all of the things that bothered me would just be minor annoyances.

 

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

P.S.  If you watched any of my videos, you'll notice that I never used defensive flares, but not because I never felt that I needed them, but because I never figured out which button to press to use them.  Every so often, I would press different buttons to try and figure out how to use them, but nothing ever worked, so I just went without them.

How Do You Be A Supportive Consumer In The Age of Studio Layoffs and Closures?

Yeah, I don't know.  That's why I asked the question.

Back in October, 2025, I bought the 2023 remake of Dead Space, developed by Motive Studios, a subsidiary of EA Games, and published by EA Games.*  I did this for two reasons.  First, the game was on sale for $11.99, down from the MSRP of $59.99 (and would drop further to $8.99 on November 20th).  Second, because on September 29th, 2025, EA released a statement that they were being purchased by a consortium of private equity firms, one owned by the Saudi Prince and orchestrator of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman, and another with the son-in-law of fascist and wannabe dictator Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, which received $2,000,000,000 of its start-up capital from the Saudi government.  The point of all that is to say that I wanted to support Motive Studio for the work they did (albeit, support them after the game had gone on sale) before any of that money could be paid to EA after they were officially acquired by a dictatorship and fascist government.

We're going to stick with games published by EA Games, apparently.  That was not the goal, but here we are.

On August 27th, 2026, EA released Star Wars Zero Company to widespread praise.  I don't think I've read anything excessively negative about the game apart from aspects of the game people don't like, not that the game itself is a bad game.  All of the stuff about EA Games under new ownership aside, four days after the game was released, it was reported that developer Bit Reactor had put 80% of the development team behind Star Wars Zero Company on unpaid furlough.  Now, I love me a good Star Wars game that expands upon the canon of that galaxy, far, far away, but how do you go about buying (leasing?) a game that looks and sounds like a lot of fun, without saying to the company that just furloughed nearly 80 of its workforce, "I support your decision"?  Now I feel like I have to do additional work, looking into Bit Reactor's press reports to see if the furloughed workers have been brought back, but now EA Games is officially owned by the fascist conglomerate.  I don't want to support that.

Most recently, as of Tuesday, September 22nd, Microsoft/Xbox Game Studios was consulting "...with employees [of developer Ninja Theory] on a proposed closure."  And it was just over the summer that Xbox touted the release of Senua, the third game in the Hellblade trilogy, which has received nothing but stellar reviews since the first game was released.  How do you buy a game from a publisher that has closed down the studio that developed it without coming across as complacent and compliant with the closure of the studio that developed the game?  I get that part of the decision was likely financially based in that it would look better on the company's financials to report a loss and to be able to "write off" that expense, especially with Senua essentially completed and slated for release sometime in 2027.  It'll look great for Xbox and Xbox Game Studios CEO and CCO Asha Sharma and Matt Booty, respectively, when they present to their board of investors that they were able to trim costs, bring down expenses, and bring in a net profit in the red in Q4 2026.  Bonuses and dividends all around.  Except for the employees of Ninja Theory.  And Halo Studios.  And all of the other thousands of employees impacted by these cuts.

I don't have an answer, hence the first sentence up there.  I just needed to expand on that.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Nur ist heut darum schlecht bestellt

*P.S.  What is it with studios developing games in the Dead Space franchise and then EA having them develop a Battlefield game that essentially grounds the studio?  EA did this with Visceral Games/EA Redwood Shores after they finished Dead Space 3 in 2013, then went on to develop Battlefield Hardline in 2015.  Then Motive Studio developed Dead Space in 2023 and then assisted with a couple of other EA-owned studios on Battlefield 6 in 2025.

MIDI Week Singles: "Prisoner of the Badlands" - Jamestown (PC)

 

"Prisoner of the Badlands" from Jamestown on Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch (2011)

Composer: Francisco Cerda

Album: Jamestown OST

Label: Humble Bundle, Bandcamp

Publisher: Final Form Games

Developer: Final Form Games

Jamestown has so much good music in it that it was really hard to land on a single song, which is why we started the whole Game Scores series.  I was tempted to use music from late in the game, but I decided upon "Prisoner of the Badlands" for a couple of reasons, besides the obvious: "It's a really cool song."  This song happens in the third stage, "Badlands," where you attempt a rescue mission to break out the fictionalized Joachim Gans from the Conquistador's prison ship.  This is also the last level that the game allows you to play on Normal difficulty before things really ratchet up and the game becomes a lot harder, so I've always interpreted this song as a song of nostalgia, reminding the player about the good times, the eaiser times.  

Except the music in each stage is the same regardless of the difficulty level.  So when you play "Badlands" on Legendary, which the game requires you to do before you can play the final level, you're going to have to hear this song multiple times through agrivating upon agrivating level.

But like Bit.Trip Runner and Super Meat Boy, having wonderful beautifully composed and orchestrated music that is as enjoyable to listen to outside of the game as it is within the game, can 100% make a difference in enjoying a game that's constantly kicking your ass.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

The Endless Knot

Movie Review: Resident Evil (2026)

Resident Evil
Release Date: September 17, 2026
Writers: Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten
Director: Zach Cregger
Studio: Columbia Pictures, Constantin Films, Davis Films, Vertigo Entertainment, & PlayStation Productions
Distributor: Sony Pictures Releasing
Run Time: 90 Minutes

[It's been a while since we last did a Movie Review article- six years, in fact, which actually coincides pretty well with when COVID-19 hit and when The Squire was born.  Since then, Conklederp and I haven't been out to the movies very often, and seeing as how Resident Evil is a video game movie, I thought it the perfect time to get back to this long-running, often neglected series.]

I thought the movie was alright.  Not great, not terrible, just alright.  But before we go any further, I need to get this out of the way.

My feelings about this movie have nothing to do with Zach Cregger's comment about the story taking place concurrently with the events in Resident Evil 2.  They have nothing to do with the characters using "modern" technology, e.g., smartphones that wouldn't have existed in 1998.  They have nothing to do with the box of shotgun shells not existing in the canonical timeline until Resident Evil 4.  They have nothing to do with the fact that it's snowing in the movie and the canonical events of Resident Evil 2 take place from September 29-30, 1998; also see the first sentence.  They have nothing to do with there not being any characters from any of the games in the movie.  They have nothing to do with Leon Kennedy or Claire Redfield not being in the movie (see the above sentence).

The tl;dr before we even get to the meat of the article is that I went into Resident Evil expecting a tense survival-horror film, and instead I watched a comedy with tense survival-horror elements with great character design and makeup effects that might have been (slightly) ruined by the movie's advertising campaign, of which I was a very obvious target demographic; meaning my social media feeds often contained targeted ads for Resident Evil. (Can a tl;dr be too long?)

My two biggest critiques of the movie were that I found it to have too many comedic moments/elements and, likely due to my own fault, watching/engaging with too many of the trailers led me to recognize too many scenes while watching the movie.

From this point on, there will be spoilers sprinkled throughout, so you know:

~SPOILERS~

I get that part of Zach Cregger's approach to his vision of what would make for an effective Resident Evil movie is that he wanted the main character not to be a Leon Kennedy, but to be the person playing/surviving within the world of Resident Evil, and I really like that approach to a horror movie.  This is essentially what led to the actionification of the Resident Evil and Dead Space games and the original Evil Dead movies.  You have a consistent main character(s) who grow accustomed and experienced with the repeated enemies and situations they find themselves in, and so the horror is diminished because once you've experienced one zombie/necromorph/deadite outbreak, you've been through them all.  All of that to say, having the medical courier Bryan be the main character, a regular person who's never fired a gun before in their life, being placed in a situation where they not only have to fire a gun, but fire it at a person-shaped monster would be an incredibly horrific experience.

Or it would have been a horrific experience if so many of the moments hadn't been played for laughs.

After his first run-in with an infected/zombie, Bryan had fired wildly because he was panicking; he was running away from the creature, he was inexperienced with a gun, and the recoil from shooting a gun (with one hand?) was more than he had been expecting.  After killing the creature, he returns to his car, which won't start.  This part felt tense because the creature had already gone through a "fake death" scene, and it's implied that it could happen again; coupled with a long shot of the flipped-over police cruiser, the snowy field in the middle of nowhere, and at least two dead bodies is perfect setup to continue to build tension.  Bryan leaves the car to examine it and notices that there are bullet holes in the hood, presumably having permanently damaged the engine.  He makes the connection between his haphazard firing and the holes, and it comes across as a womp-womp moment.

In another scene, Bryan is escaping from a farmhouse and, while sitting in a purring 1980s-style Ford pickup truck (it's the type of sound that lets you know the truck is full of gas and has recently been serviced because there's no rattling or knocking noise when he starts the engine), he notices a locked gate in front of him.  He goes to check the closed gate and sees the giant padlock and chain securing the gate.  I did appreciate the diamond symbol on the lock; nice callback.  Bryan considers going back into the farmhouse where he last encountered a newer creature (yes, that one, which we'll get to later), but instead tries shooting the lock, but the lock holds.  In desperation, he drives the truck into the gate, but the lock holds and lifts up the truck with the dented frame of the gate, disabling the truck.  Upon climbing out of the stalled truck, a key falls out of the truck with a diamond shape at the end of it.  Womp-womp.

Late in the movie, Bryan is told that he needs to climb up 24 flights of stairs to get to his destination, and while he does make an appropriate stink about having to climb 24 flights of stairs, it seems a bit overdone as far as his reaction goes.  We then see a short montage of him climbing stairs, passing doors and floor signs to show progression.  The scene stops when Bryan himself stops, clearly out of breath, looks at a door, and it says "4th Floor."  Womp-womp.

Bryan manages to flank a creature that projectile regurgitates gallons of acidic vomit.  He then grabs the creature around the neck, then points the creature's head down an elevator chute so that it spews its acidic vomit at another massive pursuing monster.  He pushes the creature down the elevator chute, then delivers a one-line quip.  While not quite a womp-womp moment, it still feels played for laughs and a "fuck yeah!" moment for both the character and the audience, which ties back to my comment about the progression in previous RE games transitioning from horror to action, and this felt a lot like that.

My other critique is partly my own fault from watching several of the trailers that were released, as well as shorts that came up on my various social media feeds.  Part of it was that I wanted to know whether the Resident Evil movie I was getting hyped for would be false hype based on the last handful of live-action RE attempts, but that ended up with a lot of scenes rolling around in my head when I watched the movie.  During the aforementioned farmhouse scene, there's a shot where two bodies pull themselves together like something that would've been in Resident Evil 4, and I immediately thought, "Oh, so that's how that creature in the trailers is going to come about."  And when Bryan was outside the farmhouse, and the camera cut to the open farmhouse door, I thought, "Oh, it's going to be that shot from the trailer."  And it was.

After Bryan made it into Raccoon City, he eventually found his way to the sewers, and apart from thinking, "Oh yeah, Leon and Claire go into the sewers in Resident Evil 2," I thought, "Oh, this is going to be the scene with the giant bloated pale guy."  And it was.  To me, what felt like it should have been a slow and terrifying reveal of this static creature deep in the bowels of the dark sewer turned into another, "Ah yeah, this scene from the trailer."  This really annoyed me because, as someone who loves survival-horror (and just straight-up horror) video games, seeing a grotesque sight like this creature at the end of a long hallway, not moving at all as the main character slowly moves towards it, should have been absolutely terrifying.

My last example (although there are a few others) is what's been referred to as Jump Street.  Where Bryan is sprinting down a street filled with cars, and zombies/creatures are jumping/throwing themselves off of building roofs and splattering on the ground within inches of the actor/character.  Once again, when the camera panned up (I think it panned up; I've only seen the movie once, last Thursday, and I'm trying to do this all from memory) to show this gauntlet of buildings leading to Bryan's destination, I thought, "Oh, this is the blood bag scene."  "This is the scene where Austin Abrams was six inches away from getting crushed by one of the practical effects, a 200lb human-sized bag of blood, because it was accidentally released too early."

As mentioned above, there were quite a lot of things I did actually enjoy about the movie, although I won't be covering as much ground here because it's rather difficult to keep repeating "I really liked..." and to keep the remainder of the article interesting.  But I did really like the approach to telling a story, either told within the Resident Evil universe or, at the very least, that had a lot of the spirit of the games; eg having the main character be an inexperienced medical courier.  I also really liked the monster designs, how they felt novel and unique to this story, even when several of the designs felt like they were heavily referenced by Las Plagas in Resident Evil 4.  I loved the design of the creature in the farmhouse picture and how it evolved throughout the movie, which reminded me a bit of the end of INSIDE, albeit with a significantly higher Dex score and modifier.  

I liked a lot of the easter eggs, like the diamond key and lock, and the weapon progression from handgun to shotgun to SMG.  I liked that there were a lot of padlocks blocking Bryan's progression into different areas, even though how he called out the world for there being so many padlocks was played for laughs.  I liked the attention to detail with Bryan frequently checking the number of bullets he has left in his pistol and constantly being worried about when to use his last few remaining shots after running out of ammunition for the shotgun (more like losing them on the road as they tumbled out of his pocket) and SMG.

I also really liked the audio work throughout the movie.  I know there was music in the movie because I was deathly aware whenever sound cut out, but I can't recall any specific music cues.  That's not meant to be a dig at either composer, Hays or Ryan Holladay, because effective horror music is supposed to keep you within the movie and not take you out of it.  The lack of music, even if it was ambient drone music, helped create a feeling that something bad was about to happen, and it usually did; it also unfortunately meant that you could slightly hear audio from the other screens on either side of the theater we were in.

I feel bad about having been disappointed in Resident Evil.  I had gone into it expecting a survival-horror movie, one that was focused on the survival of the main character under horrific circumstances, and to a certain extent, it was.  But it was also a comedy at almost every other turn.  Bryan swore left and right, which someone in that situation would likely be doing, but it felt like it was used to cut the tension, and the tension was never allowed to build for more than a minute or two.  The original Resident Evil indeed drew from B-movie roots like The Blob, Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead, where the quality of the acting was overshadowed by the next scream and the next appearance of the monster.  I think if I had known ahead of time that Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil, even after knowing that he had cut most of the jokes out of the movie, was going to be a comedy with survival-horror elements, I might have had a better time than I ended up having.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Given the Chance Would I Return?

P.S.  And for anyone who cares, I gave it a 7/10 rating on IMDb.

[All pictures after the first picture are copyright “Resident Evil” (YouTube/Sony Pictures Releasing)]

Game EXP Trilogy Part IV: Super Meat Boy, COGS, Jamestown (PC)

 

This is an interesting collection of games.  I enjoyed all three in their own right, but I only finished one.  I could see myself keeping one of these three installed to come back to on occasion, which is saying something.  So instead of being annoyingly cryptic, let's just get to the games in this month's Game EXP Trilogy that have been sitting in my Unfinished Games of Steam queue for the last 11-14 years.

Super Meat Boy

Systems: Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: October 20, 2010

Publisher: Team Meat

Developer: Team Meat

Time Spent: (3.9 Hours; Last Played October 24, 2015) + 13 Hours 30 Minutes

Partial Playthrough Videos on YouTube

You know, I was fully expecting to go back into Super Meat Boy, prepared to play for about 15 minutes and remember why it was that I stopped playing this game 11 years ago.  At the time, I was barely making it through Chapter 2: The Hospital, and the game wasn't being fun anymore.  For all of its "pixel-perfect platformer" reputation, Meat Boy seemed to be a really floaty jumper, and it didn't so much feel like I needed to be pixel-perfect, but rather to be able to account for how Meat Boy floated when jumping while either regular or X-running and mentally calculate that into when I jumped and what would be around Meat Boy when he landed.  While I still kind of feel that way about the mechanics, all thanks to having played and beaten (the main campaign) of Celeste, I now feel that I was able to make another go with Super Meat Boy.

Instead of jumping right back into the thick of it with World 2, the hospital stages with the fountains of broken syringes, I played a handful of levels from World 1. I quickly found my footing again through muscle memory, despite the 11-year gap in playing.  I remembered from muscle memory that I was mostly playing by holding down X to sprint, but this time, I thought I would take my time and forgo any desire to get through the stages quickly.  That lasted all of about 19 minutes before a level forced the player to sprint to make long jumps, and then it was just sprinting throughout the rest of the game.  There were a couple of late-game levels that required a combination of X running and regular movement running to make it through tight-fitting jumps between buzz saws, which was oddly nice to know that the game would, at times, force the player to slow down.

Overall, I found the game to be enjoyably difficult, compared to needlessly difficult, although that aspect still exists in the game.  If I wanted to "complete" the game, I would need to beat the default time on each stage, which then unlocks a harder version of the Light World stages in the Dark World, and I found a lot of those stages to be excruciatingly difficult; but I also consider those to be optional.  The second to last stage, World 6 Level 5, was one of those levels that was incredibly difficult, taking me just over an hour to beat, which both sounds like a lot of time and was a lot of time, but I frequently felt like I was making incremental progress, and so that made the game feel bearable.  The last level, the "boss" fight against Dr. Fetus, I actually enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting, for the sole reason that the level was on rails.  Because you could only progress when the predetermined moving blades aligned, and how purposeful the game had been about timing and placement up to that point, it meant that I just needed to figure out how and when to move.  And even with Dr. Fetus chasing you, I was able to ignore their attacks throughout the majority of the level, because as long as you kept moving when the game wanted you to move, the good Dr. was not really a threat until after you reached the final room.  

But that Final Part II stage, that was a pain in the ass, and I'm glad it's over.

Briefly, something else that really helped me get through the game was the music.  Danny Baranowsky's music throughout the game was that perfect blend of catchy and high-energy melodies that helped me to push forward when levels were feeling really hard.  Similar to the music in BIT.TRIP Runner, the never-ending enthusiasm of the music 100% helped me to get through this game.

COGS
Systems: Windows, Mac OS  X, Linux, PlayStation 3
Release Date: 2009
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Lazy 8 Studios
Time Spent: (56 Minutes; Last Played December 8, 2012) + 2 Hours 4 Minutes

COGS has a lot going against it.  First and foremost, it's a game where the primary mechanic consists of sliding block puzzles.  I don't like sliding block puzzles.  Never have.  I have a vague memory of standing either outside or in my neighbor's house, trying to figure out one of those birthday party favor sliding block puzzles; it had a yellow or green frame, but I don't remember what the picture was.  I recall getting so frustrated with the puzzle that either my neighbor or I took out the pieces, and we tried to put them back in, but the puzzle was essentially broken.  In Resident Evil 4, I was eternally thankful that the in-game time paused while trying to figure out that sliding block puzzle; who knew it was that easy?  Second, the game has varying levels of stars as part of your reward for completing each puzzle, made up of the time you took to complete the puzzle, the number of moves it took you to solve the puzzle, and.....  Lastly, and connected to the second point, levels are locked behind a set number of stars, so even if you beat a level, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to play subsequent levels if you don't have enough stars.  That whole nonsense again.

What COGS has going for it, though, is equally a lot.  The game is visually appealing as it gets.  The woodgrain of the board and tiles is that comforting cedar stain.  The brass accents on the steel pipes just pop.  The gears are large and somehow friendly-looking; I don't know how else to describe it.  In levels that use pipes, they're frequently this gorgeous shade of brass that denotes loving care has been taken with them, as opposed to dirty pipes rusted with age. The music is calming and helps alleviate the stress of the fact that I'm playing a sliding block puzzle.  I love the look and feel when I'm doing a puzzle that spans across multiple sides of a cube, and the satisfaction when that last block slides into place and the whole contraption works is quite the serotonin boost.

The game itself is broken up into three separate modes: Inventor Mode and Challenge Mode, and within Challenge Mode are Timed Mode and Moves Mode.  Inventor Mode is the primary source of puzzles, where you're graded on completion, speed, and the number of moves used.  Generously, just completing a puzzle gives you three stars, but to acquire three stars in the other two categories, you need to be fast and mindful.  Of the 51 levels, I've only made it to level 14 here, with only one level, the first, earning three gold stars in each completion for time and moves.  In Challenge mode, puzzles are unlocked from Inventor Mode, but here you're limited by either time (30 seconds) or moves (10 or fewer).  Moves Mode in Challenge Mode is probably my favorite because I know ahead of time that the puzzle is designed to be completed in 10 or fewer moves.  The problem I have with Timed Mode is that the timer starts at the exact moment the level starts, before you've even had time to register the level prompt and take in what the puzzle looks like.  By the time you're ready to move your first block, at least five seconds have already elapsed.  It doesn't feel great.

Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony

Systems: Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch

Release Date: June 8, 2011

Publisher: Final Form Games

Developer: Final Form Games

Time Spent: (4 Hours 24 Minutes; Last Played January 27, 2014) + 3 Hours 12 Minutes

Gameplay Videos on YouTube

Like COGS, I have a love-skill relationship with Jamestown.  I love the aesthetic; I love the steampunk design and retrofuturism of a 16th century American colony story taking place on Mars with a lot of the same historical figures; John Smith is still a piece of trash, which still tracks.  I love the amazing soundtrack by Francisco Cerda and how the music at times comes across as dynamic, all because the game is on rails, so music cues can be "pre-programmed" to happen in time with events on the screen.  I love the "oomph" the game gives the player when destroying waves of enemies and the execution of special moves; visual impacts can be felt.

But I can't beat this game because of both a skill issue and how the game handles progression.

The game has five difficulty levels, from Normal to Difficult, to Legendary, to Divine, and all the way to "Judgement" (ie, stupidly difficult).  You can play the first three levels on any difficulty, but the fourth requires Difficult or higher, and the final level requires Legendary or higher.  I get that the game's progression requires you to get better at this type of bullet-hell game, and it doesn't help that I'm not particularly good at this genre either.  Something I found interesting was that the hitbox on each of the four playable characters/crafts seems to only be the size of your character, and not the ship they're piloting, and that enemies themselves do not cause damage, only the projectiles they're firing.  I'm sure that this plays into actually being good at this game, although for me, I found that I became really jumpy whenever the screen really filled up with enemy fire.

I did a bit of reading about the DLC that includes several additional characters/ships that have different abilities, and the consensus seems to be that the additional ships are really good overall.  Which got me thinking that maybe I could benefit from access to additional ships, but then that felt like paying to win the game, and that made me sad.  So I didn't pick up the DLC, which leaves in a tight spot.  Because the game doesn't have cloud saves, I'll either have to manually save whatever file it is that you're supposed to save to, then use for games that don't have cloud saves, or just start over from the beginning if I decide to uninstall the game, because I know that I'm not going to be able to beat it this time around either.  I might just have to resign myself to that fact, which I'm kind of okay with.  

Mostly.

So those were the recent additions to my current and "long?" running series, Game EXP Trilogy.  All three of these games were a lot of fun, but for COGS and Jamestown, it just boiled down to a skill issue, and one that I'm not so eager to build up just to say that I beat these two games.

I'm going to take the month of October off from publishing another article in this series so that I can focus on a couple of other games I'm working on, but I'll be back for November (or December if I get caught up again).  But there are plenty of games in my aging Steam backlog that I'll be getting to in the coming months.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Hot Damned (Level 4 Light World)" - Super Meat Boy (PC)

 

"Hot Damned (Level 4 Light World)" from Super Meat Boy on the Xbox 360, Windows, Linux, OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Wii U, Nintendo Switch (2010 - 2018)

Composer: Danny Baranowsky

Album: Super Meat Boy Digital Special Edition Soundtrack

Label: Humble Bundle, Bandcamp

Publisher: Team Meat

Developer: Team Meat

I'd been listening to this soundtrack for about the last 14 years, so it was really awesome to finally get the Hell levels where this music played nearly nonstop for about an hour.  It helps that the song is about as catchy as one gets on the entire soundtrack because, especially in a game where I died over 2,700 times, having good music that, in essence, cheers you on is key to rage-quitting into oblivion.

What I find interesting is that the song has five sections, each lasting about 15 seconds.  There's the loud and exciting intro, which we'll get back to when the song loops.  There's just no time to build up to presenting the main theme; it's just right there, in your face, overly loud, and appropriately full of energy.  Then there's the keyboard wailing away, going all over the place.  Then there's a bit of a break, with a rhythm guitar vamping while palm-muting (yes?) while the keyboards hold tied-together whole notes.  The fourth section brings the energy back up with an excited keyboard doing runs left and right while the choir and chimes bring the churchy-Hell aspect back to the song.  The fifth and final section is a bit of a callback to the earlier keyboard section that leads to a glissando of sorts, right back into the loud brashness of the beginning of the song.

It really is an amazing piece of music in one of the more fun and less frustrating (but still equally frustrating) series of levels in the game (don't at me, I know there're the Dark World levels, the retro levels, Super Meat World levels, and Cotton Candy Alley to deal with).

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Ground Under Teeth of Time

First Impressions: Red Dead Redemption (SOS)

 

Red Dead Redemption

Systems: PlayStation 3/4/5, Xbox 360/S/X, Windows, Linux, Steam OS, iOS, Android, & Nintendo Switch

Release Date: May 18, 2010 - December 2, 2025

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Rockstar San Diego, Double Eleven

Time Spent: 33 Hours 12 Minutes

We're going to keep this a little short.  

Red Dead Redemption is a 16-year-old game, although the Steam port is almost two years old.  This is a game with over 25,000,000 copies sold across all platforms since its initial release.  Between 2010 and 2011, it won 17 of the 37 awards it was nominated for.  It has a Metacritic rating of 95, if those kinds of ratings are your thing.  The point is, the only thing I can offer about this game is a brief look at how I've been playing it and how it's been running on the Steam Deck so far.

Before I started playing, I had Patrick Gill's 2024 video about roleplaying in Red Dead Redemption 2 in the back of my mind.  I don't think I've rewatched it since then, but I remembered the parts where he said that he rediscovered a newfound appreciation for that game when he was roleplaying the character, and not just playing a video game.  For the most part, that is kind of how I already enjoy playing 3rd-person adventure games, like Tears of the Kingdom and Skyrim.  So, without knowing the mechanics, I planned to roleplay John Marston as someone who needed sleep, would take jobs when he needed extra cash, and would jump into story missions when they made the most sense.  And for the most part, that's worked out well.

At the beginning of the game, when John Marston is recouped by Bonnie McFarlane, I thought it important to perform as many tasks as I could around the farm before heading out to do significant exploration of the area.  I then made the mistake of trying to take a bounty and capture bandits before I did the story mission where you get a rope and learn how to lasso horses and people; I thought bounty hunting would help earn money to pay back the doctor's fees, which I was sad to find out you don't actually need to pay Bonnie and her father back.  As it turned out, a lot of the story missions on the McFarlane ranch also functioned as tutorial levels, but without explicitly keeping you on the ranch with invisible walls or guards pushing you back if you tried to leave.

I was sad to find out, thankfully pretty early on, that the only purpose of collecting flowers and plants, and collecting resources from animals like meat, skin, and antlers, was to sell them to make money.  Granted, there are a couple of optional side quests where an NPC will ask you to collect three of each flower that grows in the region to give to his ailing wife, but for the most part, it's to make money.  I was also a little sad that the bank in the town of Armadillo serves no function, and that the bank clerk is stuck in an endless animation of tending the furnace (I think it's the furnace), hoping that I could deposit my money, thinking that if I died, I would lose a portion of it as another doctor's fee when I respawned; which is not actually how the game works.  I was then shocked when I went behind the counter to talk to the clerk, and he immediately freaked out; I got a wanted rating and a bounty for attempting to rob the bank.

That's another thing that I've found I'm a little frustrated with, but in an amusing way, in RDR.  Accidentally doing something I didn't mean to do and everyone going absolutely apeshit.  Just last night I was riding along, and someone on horseback was being attacked by a small pack of wolves.  I entered Dead Eye mode (a mode you activate when aiming to slow down time to be that much more of a badass), and in the process of shooting the aggressive wolves, I accidentally also shot the leg of the horse.  This led the person I was trying to help to start shooting me, and when I returned fire, my Honor level plummeted by 100; I think it was around 250 or 300.  In another instance, I accidentally rode my horse into a nun whom I was trying to talk to to turn in a side quest, but the game registered that as an attack, and she ran off into the bush, and I failed.  

I mention this because these instances are the few and far between times when I haven't roleplayed.  I reload a previous save file.  But saving in the game isn't as straightforward as a modern auto-save or a start>menu>system>save file progression.  Saving in the game is done automatically when you complete quests, when you hitch your horse, and when you manually save when you go to sleep.  There have been a couple of times I've pulled up an autosave or a previous game file, losing 15-20 minutes of gameplay because of unintended actions I didn't mean to perform.  However, I just read about a method to "trick" the game into autosaving and not having the game progress time by six hours, which is what usually happens when you manually save.  I guess I'll need to buy a second horse deed.

I'll wrap up this article with some positivity.

Right before you go up against Bill Williamson at Fort Mercer, I was afraid I was reaching the end of the game, maybe 15-20 hours in, and with so much of the map that was either inaccessible or that I just hadn't explored yet, I was confused.  Thankfully, the game pulled a minor deus ex machina: Bill Williamson escaped during the assault, and now John Marston finds himself in fictionalized Northern Mexico.  While in Mexico, there is no attempt to have the player understand Spanish unless the player already understands Spanish.  There are Spanish subtitles, but that's because I have subtitles turned on.  I think it would be a fun mechanic to have John learn/study Spanish while he's in Mexico, so the Spanish dialogue is roughly translated over time, but that would be assuming that the game takes place over months, and not just an eventful fortnight.  But for the meantime, I enjoy having John sheepishly looking at his feet while two people have an argument in Spanish around him, and there's no effort to tell the character anything about what's being said.

Like millions of people have already known, Red Dead Redemption is a gorgeous game with some great voice acting and, so far at least, is telling an engaging story.  There hasn't been anything revolutionary, and I might be a little terrified to find out what my body count so far is, but that's the same thing that was brought up with BioShock: Infinite.  I'm really enjoying riding my horse between locations, and when I do use a stagecoach to "fast travel," it's usually because I don't want to ride all the way across an expansive land and run the risk of getting ambushed and not initially being able to tell who the bandit is and who the hostage is, or getting ganked by a mountain lion out of the blue.  And even then, I'll sit and watch about half of the trip for the rotating camera angles before pressing A to skip to the destination.  I enjoy having John buy three to four drinks at the cantina, drinking himself into a near stupor after setting fire to a village of rebels so that he can progress the story to find out where Bill Williamson might be in Mexico.

I'm enjoying this game.  I enjoy roleplaying John Marston, as I think he might have lived in/about a fictionalized 1911 Southwestern United States.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I Must Explore the Boundaries

P.S.  I realized I didn't talk much about the experience of playing on the Steam Deck.  It runs just fine without any compatibility issues.  I play the game locked at a maximum of 60fps with a lot of the graphical settings turned up to High and Ultra, which is probably why the fan blows a lot, and if the Steam Deck isn't plugged in, it will run the battery down from 99% to 10% in less than an hour.  The only annoyance is that because the game automatically logs you into whatever Rockstar server you're forced to log into when you start the game, if you pause the game and power down the Steam Deck, I'll get kicked out of the game when I turn the system back on.  Progress is lost after the last save/autosave.  So that's not fun, but otherwise no other issues that I've noticed.

P.P.S.  I get that there are a lot of randomized encounters that the game generates, but one of the stranger and darker ones happened while I was running back to the McFarlane ranch because my horse got shot while I was trying to take out some bandits.  A woman was crying over a dead man, and this was out in the middle of nowhere; northeast of Armadillo and west of the McFarlane ranch.  I stopped and looked at them because I couldn't talk to them; the game didn't give me the option.  Then this woman bent over, picked up a revolver off the man's body, and then shot herself.  Like, what's their story!?  I get it's random, but still.  Damn.