Fredison

@fredison.bsky.social

406 Followers 198 Following

Mild-mannered video game nerd and occasional dev (he/they) Wow, links! https://fredison.itch.io/ https://www.twitch.tv/fredison__ https://letterboxd.com/Fredison/

That weird THIS IS AN XBOX ad campaign but it's an Excel spreadsheet
"You have unlocked" Jim Varney looking happy "Boss Rush mode" Jim Varney looking bored
cat.
Time Hollow for the Nintendo DS
5 stars What a game! I really, really enjoyed Dragon Quest Builders 2, which finally sold me on the Minecraft experience by adding in character-based gameplay hooks, story and tutorialization. And since this is effectively DQB3 featuring a franchise I actually like, Pikachu might as well have come out of the screen and handed me a bowl of crack cocaine. I only have a few nitpicks with the game, chief among them how its three slightly different housing methods coexist awkwardly. It's also a bit much how the pokémon praise your player character over every little thing, sometimes as soon as they meet you! I know the game wants to fulfill the fantasy of having Gardevoir tell me I'm cool, but at least make me WORK for it a little. Oh, oh, oh, and the real-time day-night cycle means that, as an adult with responsibilities, I almost never get to see in-game daytime unless I mess with the system clock! Which I did. The Switch 2 is two hours in the past forever now. Anyway, I marked the game "completed" because I completed the story and pokédex over a month ago, but in reality I'm still playing it. Building houses for little guys is a lifestyle for me now. I expect if I looked at my playtime I'd have an Ark of the Covenant moment.
Mother Brain from Metroid
1993 movie Yoshi, which is just a photorealistic dinosaur
3-star review of Void Stranger Real mixed feelings on this one. Never has a game before made me vascillate between "This is GENIUS! I LOVE this!" and "Oh god dammit, this sucks actually." so often and so intensely. The frustrating elements being intentional (at least to some extent) doesn't make it better to me, either! I have a pet theory that this one is so popular with streamer types because having an audience fundamentally changes the game. Chat can give hints when you're stuck, remind you about bits of lore, validate which hunches are worth investing time and effort into. When the game is being a repetitive slog, it makes for a Just Chatting stream with a great, vibey soundtrack. And when it pulls one of its many frustrating tricks? That's content, baby! As for me, I called it quits after 34 hours and about three layers of True Endings which, full disclosure, had me looking up a few puzzle solutions. At the end of the day, I'm just not that much of a sokoban sicko, you know?
Not much to say here. I'm an incremental game sicko (see footnote) and saw this recommended. Had a pleasant enough time in the 7-ish hours I played but it didn't charm me enough to make me want to dig into it further. Maybe I'll get back to it at some point. * My secret shame is that I've played (and still actively play) a bunch of browser-based one that I don't log on this site. Completely unrelated: I just have no idea why I'm so bad at accomplishing productive tasks.
A supernova.
The Escalator to Nowhere, from the Simpsons episode "Marge VS the Monorail"
Lanky Kong smiling as he watches the DK Rap for the first time
Homer strangling Bart, while Marge looks on in horror
Qobuz playlist titled "The Eight Robot Masters" featuring Piano Man, Sharp Dressed Man, Scatman, American Woman, Nowhere Man, Particle Man, Rocket Man and Hurdy Gurdy Man
3 1/2 star review of VA-11 Hall-A Come for the smoking lesbians, stay for the impeccable vibes. And keep an eye out for the poorly-aged shout-outs to YIIK: A Postmodern RPG!
3 1/2 star review of Q-Up An entire game built around a single joke, that of attaching all the dystopian noise and cruft of modern gaming, e-sports and tech culture to a completely uninteractive coin flip. I make it sound bad, but the good news is that one joke is really good! The satire isn't completely dud-free, but at its best it's laugh-out-loud funny. The actual gameplay consists of setting up a "skill grid" that reacts to the coin flips by interacting with the game's various stats and currencies. Eventually, you can build yourself a very satisfying Rube Goldberg device and make number go up to absurd heights. As an fan of incremental games (my brain is cool and normal) I really enjoyed that aspect! Unfortunately, even on the Turbo speed (which a recent update turned into an account-wide unlock) the game can sometimes become as much of a vapid time-waster as what it's making fun of. Still, I'm more than satisfied after clearing the game with three characters, which took me 20 hours.
Sonic saying "I want games made by people"
Between Hypnospace Outlaw, UFO 50 and now this, I'm coming to love this emerging game genre that's (at least partly) about worldbuilding through a sort of retro-styled anthology format. This one is the kind that's just barely interactive enough that it almost feels odd calling it a game, but I don't hold that against it. Blippo+ is definitely its most fun at the start, when you're seeing the various shows and characters for the first time and blindsided by all the wacky ideas and loving pastiches on display. After this, the game settles into a familiar, pleasing groove as you catch new episodes of all the same shows, some more varied than others. It's repetitive but that's by design, for better and for worse. Apparently the Playdate version rotates episodes weekly, so the format makes a bit more sense there as a comforting weekly ritual. Definitely hope to see more like this!
As a longtime SRW fan, most games in the series leave me with the reaction "They sure made another one of those, but luckily I like those fine". This one is no exception, almost identical mechanically to SRW30 despite an engine and UI overhaul, and featuring an overarching plot that contains few surprises. On the upside, the character writing is charming as hell, and the writers did manage to weave crap into gold with some of the spotlighted series. (I'll let you decide which ones I'm alluding to!) Compared to SRW30 they did a much better job making the various casts bounce off each other and feel part of the same world. One glaring exception however is Witch From Mercury, which very much seems thrown in at the last second, with none of its plot and worldbuilding getting a single mention outside of its own focus stages. I'll definitely be coming back for the DLCs, which introduce Kamen Rider W to SRW! I still can't believe that's real, to be honest. Now, please join me in a prayer circle to get Bandai Namco to finally make a new Super Tokusatsu Taisen.
Un bernard l'hermite et une canette de Buzz Cola.
Pokémon Z-A party and box named "The Goth Club", featuring pokémon of various levels of spookiness including Mawile, Froslass, Ariados and, controversially, Starmie. Gabite is in the bottom-right corner yelling "LET ME IIIIN"
Kiyomi was completely overwhelmed. She had known what mitochondria were, but she’d never had any reason to think about them so extensively. They were certainly mysterious, as he had said.
the words "mobile suit gundam char's counterattack" but it's 90s WordArt. idk sometimes I do things okay
Billbine from Hype Moments Battler Billbine
Dunbine from Aura Battler Dunbine