I hate the environment. It’s where Nature comes from, and Nature is the worst. Seriously, Nature will sting you (with wasps and scorpions), burn you (with lava and the sun), eat you (with sharks and bears), break you (with rocks and rolling logs), and cut you (with claws and other, sharper rocks). List goes on.

Look, we went to a lot of trouble to stop being gorillas, and we did it to get away from the environment. Birds and meerkats and stuff, they chose not to evolve. Human beings said, “the environment is being kind of a dick with the rain and the tapeworms; let’s invent ‘Inside.’”

The price of Inside was a hundred thousand years of miserable self-awareness. Air conditioning? Hot Pockets? Insect repellent? We bought those things, my friends. And by God, we paid for them.

So I keep saying I mean to write more often (I never actually intended to write less often, it just happened, and then years passed). But it occurs to me that, as assertions go, “I plan to write more stuff” is rather vague. It’s like saying “I’ll be a better person.” There’s no there there. Then today while I was avoiding doing work it occurred to me that maybe what I ought to do is paint myself into a corner. Publicly commit to a concrete deliverable on an actual timeline. A binding contract* between myself and all the person who still visits the site.

It’s Next Fest this week on Steam. There’s over 700 demos of upcoming games! I will play and report on twelve of them. One a day, chosen at random† for the next twelve days! Hooray!

Click the thing for some ass-covering disclaimers.

If you only play one NieR game, Automata is the one to play. If you liked it enough to want a second helping, Replicant is probably the best form you can experience that in. It still feels a little more like medicine than dessert.

Mad Devils, by Itzy Interactive, gets a play test outing on Steam. Lead a squad of damned GIs to thwart a Nazi plot in hell

Tenderfoot Tactics is an open world turn-based tactics game where you play as a band of goblins exploring a vast archipelago, getting into cool fights and pushing back a malevolent force known as ‘the fog’.

The fights are cool because they’re all about manipulating and dramatically transforming the battlefield. You can smash craters and crack ravines into the earth, fill them with water then electrocute, boil, or even ice the water over to cross it. You can grow movement-hindering (or enhancing!) brush then set it alight to toast your foes (or your tender toes). You can even infect enemies with a fecund poison that, on death, spawns a ‘bog body’.

My first bog body was called Bobbie. Bobbie the bog body.

Unfortunately Joel Goodwin of Electron Dance and I have not been able to do Side by Side this year due to, well, the nature of the series being totally at odds with a pandemic. Joel had always planned to do a deleted scenes episode for season 5 but he got distracted. Well, that time is now, or, it was, about a month ago when he put this together, but I got distracted and forgot to post it up. Lots of amusing clips here of what was a great selection of local multiplayer games. Fingers crossed for 2021…

When your original mod has been downloaded more than 5 million times, what’s left to do? Go bigger and bolder, according to Element Studios.

25 hours of space adventuring, in a gorgeous 2.5D setting? Sign me up.

It’s not as good as the first one…

On paper, I fit the fanboy bill. I’ve decreed my love of The Last of Us to not only my gaming friends, but to my parents, wife, and kids, all of whom I’m sure are dying to hear my thoughts on the sequel. I’ve played through the game twice on each of the last two generations of PlayStations. I even dabbled in the vastly underrated multiplayer despite my failed campaign to recruit my friends. 

This proves that 1) I need new friends, and 2) I’m a devoted disciple of Naughty Dog’s tale of Joel, Ellie, and Friends. 

So then, here’s the short version: The Last of Us Part II is the most disappointing masterpiece I’ve ever played.