Souls Like Strings

Surprisingly souls-like

Why

• Nails the intangibles, feels better than it should
• Evocative pixel art
• Compact & fair, even on hard

Why Not

• Pretty short
• Not especially challenging, even on hard

Impressions

My expectations for this were right around Shantae given the similarities; retro pixel metroidvanias which at least from their store page look like they were drawn with one hand. In reality Momodora was more or less the exact opposite of Shantae; rather than being bright & cheery but clunky and frustrating Momodora sets a distinctly Dark Souls-like mood and plays with surprising...

• 'Next refresh' means 'next background refresh' not 'next time you can successfully request a refresh'
  • It's still wrong though haha
• Demoing is easier when you break it up into chunks
  • And have separate links/accounts for each chunk
  • And close the links from the previous section before starting a new one
  • Luckily for my talk at Tokyo Rubyist I have slides & no links
• Not for the first time, returning inside a block (like reject) actually returns in Ruby
  • What you're thinking of is next
  • Please do not get stuck on this for...

Man I wish Valve still made games

Why

• The orignal but better
• More variety in scenery/the tools at your disposal
• A lot of interesting lore about Aperture/GLaDOS
• Humour is spot on just like the original, and more frequent

Why Not

• You hate thinking just as much as Wheately

Impressions

The original Portal was a really cool puzzle game with some light story and funny moments to keep you motivated, but there are only so many white-walled test chambers a mute can struggle through. The best parts of that game were when you broke out...

Waifus fight music

Why

• Pretty wide range of difficulties
• Songs play pretty differently to each other
• Enough tracks that there'll be a few which hit for anyone
• Monetisation seems very fair

Why Not

• Not incredibly fan-servicy, but there are some skins you wouldn't want your partner to see you using
• Some tracks require incredibly quick/well timed consecutive inputs, even on easy

Impressions

I took a flier on this since it was ~200yen and was pleasantly surprised; never tried rhythm games before but this probably won't be my last. The presentation and character designs are...

• Building your entire development/testing strategy around LocalStack can be an issue if they suddenly decide to start charging
• I'd definitely much rather write plain CSS than use a framework these days, messing with Oats is just annoying
• If you're gonna delete users in an async job, probably prefer one to multiple
  • having more than one makes it difficult to reason about the order different steps execute in
  • and can lead to actions being taken more than once
• Legacy products have a lot of information about the domain which is likely to be out of date
  ...