The Weird Longevity of DDR and IIDX

 

Rhythm games are a thing that I assume most people, even the most enthusiastic of gamers, don't think about very often.  Around 2005 the genre got a pretty big boost in popularity for a while with the release of Guitar Hero and that boost was bolstered in part by the subsequent release of Rock Band but the whole thing turned out to be just a fad and the genre once again faded back into obscurity once those games died.  If you are a person who owns a Guitar Hero, Rock Band or DJ Hero controller I can almost guarantee that it's caked in dust and you probably forgot to take the batteries out and they have no leaked everywhere.

This is a bit less true for the Japanese arcade scene where the genre has been a staple almost for as long as the genre has existed but even in a space like this games come and go all the time.  Various rhythm games will pop up for a while and then vanish without a trace or be reduced to one machine stuffed in a single corner of the arcade that never gets used.  For example when I first moved into my new house in January of this year, there was a new game called Chrono Circle and at current time of writing I am completely unable to find a single cab for it anywhere.  It's been removed from my local place despite them initially having 5 cabinets and none of the bigger arcades I frequent in central Nagoya have them either, dead on arrival.  

But then there's Dance Dance Revolution, a game that has been a core part of the arcade experience both in Japan and the west since I was in primary school and a series that doesn't seem to be slowing down its content updates even in the current day.  I remember seeing it for the first time, I must have been about 10, in a bowling alley near my old house in Manchester.  Most arcades were either sit-down fighting game cabs, novelty games or rail shooters but then this motherfucker just sat there with its giant pad and massive speakers blasting out J-Beats and it sure as hell got peoples attention.  I played in that arcade pretty much all the way to me graduating high school and it was the one machine that would often stay fairly well maintained and updated with the place replacing the Euromix 1 cab with a Euromix 2 cab almost as soon as that version dropped.  Fast foward to my life in Japan in 2022 and DDR is STILL going strong, being one of the most popular games in basically any game center you go to and still being updated on the regular.  Hell, the last version to be released was DDR A3 which came out March of THIS YEAR with new songs being added constantly.  Also I can't speak with any degree of certainty but the few enthusiast arcade places I know about in the UK seem to always be packing at least a Euromix 1 or 2 cab.

Beatmania IIDX is another game with a similar life span as DDR but with it being Japan only its a game that most people outside of the rhythm game enthusiast circles actually know about.  It started with Beatmania back in 1997 which had 5 buttons and a turn table for a controller which was probably quite unique at the time.  Then in 1999 Konami released Beatmania IIDX which was a bigger, badder, louder looking machine with 7 buttons and then there was a Beatmania 3 in 2000 which had a pedal or something? and everyone hated it and it died after 2 years.  IIDX however, like DDR, is still getting content updates and new versions to this very day with the newest version IIDX 30: Resident being released very recently 

There are other games in the Bemani franchise such as Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania which have also had similar life spans and still get updates but the machines are stocked less and barely used by anyone that I can see.  Meanwhile, DDR and IIDX are so popular that most places have to have multiple copies of them and even with an average (based on places I go to) of 2 DDR cabs and 4 IIDX cabs there are still queues CONSTANTLY to actually get to play them.  Some of newer games from the Konami library are starting to cement their places in the arcade such as Jubeat and Voltex but if they are still around in, lets say 10 years, only time will tell 

I can't imagine why this is the case really other than that the skill ceiling for mastering these two games inparticular is IMMENSELY high.  Seeing extremely high level play for games like Voltex, Chunithm, Taiko etc. isn't exactly uncommon if you spend enough time hanging around these places but really high level play for DDR and IIDX is not something you see very often at all.  If I was to hazard a guess I guess it's the drive that these players have to truly master these games that keeps them coming back and pumping coins or Paseli credit into the machines which in turn keeps Konami updating them and pumping out new versions for people to get good at.

That's just my game theory on the matter anyway.  Does make me wonder if DDR will still be around in 30 more years.....and if I'll still be able to play it at that point

2022 Horror Challenge Roundup

 

On October 1st 2022 I started a challenge that involved playing though 31 horror games within a month (outlined in this post http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2022/09/31-game-horror-challenge-2022.html) and on October 30th 2022 I completed that challenge!  It was a stressful month, for sure, but it was an immensely fun challenge and I'm totally planning to do it all again next October.  For now I wanted to just go over a few of the games from the challenge that I thought stood out, so think of this post as a sort of "Halloween spooky game award post" 

Best Game

I did a horror game challenge about 2 years ago and failed it miserably because I'm an idiot that put some IMMENSELY long (and shitty, Days Gone) games and Yuppie Psycho was one of the ones I didn't get to back then, so better late than never I guess.  It's a game that's truly best experienced by knowing as little as possible about it but, let's be honest, is there anything more frightening that office work?  Pepper in a unique setting and some occult-type beats and you have a rather unique experience that is as charming as it is scary. 

That's all you're getting for this one, go play it

Worst Game

Dread X Collection is a collection of short horror games made by various developers that I played off stream and was deeply disappointed by.  Dread X Collection 2 I played on stream and it was probably one of the most miserable experiences I've had with a horror title in a very long time.  The ideas behind the games are bad, the games themselves are bad and there's this sort of air of smugness about the whole thing that makes it pretty unbearable to play.  It's a level of incompetancy that is rarely found anywhere within game development and I feel that most of the people involved should probably fuck off to some other medium.  Most of the games in this collection are barely playing, boring, try-hard messes that despite having an extremely short length feel like they drag on and on just because of how vile they are.

There are 2 exceptions to this though.  One game was called Squirrel Stapler which was really daft but sort of fun to play.  The other was called Sucker for Love which is a sort of joke dating-sim where you have to try and woo an Eldritch God which was pretty funny and also came with some decently creepy concepts and imagery.  However play Sucker for Love with the voices OFF because the voice acting was extremely cringe worthy.  

I own 3 or 4 more Dread X games since I got a bunch of them as a set and after playing these two I have 0 motivation to continue the Action52 of horror games.  

Biggest Surprise

After seeing the AVGN review and being told about it by various people I was expecting something truly awful, something akin to the level of quality of Dread X Collection 2.  However Countdown Vampires is a game that's actually pretty fun to play, at least on stream with a group of people to banter with and revel in its insanity.  It's just a shoddy clone of Resident Evil that has basically no vampires and like, 4 countdowns in it but there's something sort of endering about the whole thing.  The 3D FMV sequences are non-sensical but weirdly well produced and a decent amount of effort went into the pre-rendered backgrounds even if the actual render quality is sort of shoddy.  Also the game is really, REALLY funny between absolute batshit character design and voice acting that makes Resident Evil 1 sound like Shakespear; the whole thing, while not good, was highly entertaining and I'd happily play it again 

Scariest Game

I know that saying Silent Hill 2 is scary is like saying that the sky is blue, just obvious bullshit thus making this pick seem like a complete cop-out but the one "mistake" I made this year was that most of the games I picked almost completely failed on their horror fronts.  F.E.A.R gets a close second for, while not being scary in the slightest, at least TRYING to get an ambience down and Alien Isolation gets props for making me make silly noises when I messed up but I wasn't actually scared by any of the games this year except for maybe this one. Even then its more fear of a concept of my wife getting sick and dying before my eyes than it is of the actual game but it scared me pretty badly in my teenage years so it gets the scariest game spot for being creepy on multiple levels at least. 

Least Scary Game

I didn't know anything about Geist when I put it on the list.  I mean, it's called "Ghost" but in German so I was expecting something at least a little spooky but what I got was a sort of ghost-themed action game/puzzle game?  Not that I'm going to bash it too hard, it was fun to play and the ghost-based puzzles were equal parts interesting and funny but there was a bit too much just shooting dudes with guns in first person for me to really consider it a proper horror game.  Still, I feel like a lot of people haven't tried this one so if you get a chance, give it a go. 

---

So that's it for this year!  There will be other horror games peppered into the stream here and there throughout the year, of course, but we wont be going full spooky again until next October.  Keep me informed of any cool horror games you find via Discord or twitch chat and maybe they'll get put on the list! 

 

It Follows? It Sucks! (Kinda)

 

Between streaming horror games on my Twitch channel I've been trying to squeeze in a few horror movies as well, with it currently being the season for it and all.  One film that I've had my eye on since it came out and never got around to watching was It Follows from 2015 a film that has had quite a lot of positive press surrounding it for a long time and now I finally got to see it.  

Despite the title of this blog post I'm not about to attempt to tear it a new one, it wasn't THAT bad.  The acting is fine, the cinematography is really nice and there's a handful of pretty effective scenes and touches that stop it from being a stinker but overall the whole thing is just kind of silly

The premise to the film is that there is a person who is being followed by some kind of thing in human form that is invisible to everyone except the person who is the current target and previous targets.  If you are the target, the only way to get the creature off you is to have sex with another person, where the curse is then sexually transmitted to the person that you had sex with and then they must pass it on to someone else.  However, if the person you had sex with is killed, then the thing starts going back up the line so, for example, if I was the creatures current target and then I have sex with you, the reader, and then the monster kills you it will then come right after me again.  This isn't a Ring style situation where you can just have someone watch the tape and then be rid of it, you'll always be sort of concerned that your turn is coming. 

The idea of a slow yet tireless thing that will follow you for all of time is a decent premise despite the whole "sexually transmitted" part being a bit daft and the scene at the very start of the film is extremely good in giving you an idea of whats going on while still leaving a bit of mystery.  It's after that scene though where the whole thing starts to fall apart a little.

See, the thing in It Follows is a real thing that exists in the world its inhabiting.  It's not a ghost than can walk through walls, its got maybe some slightly higher than average strength but for the most part its similar to a human and while its invisible to everyone except the victim, other people can interact with it and you can even make it partially visible by throwing a sheet on it.  Also you seemingly can't kill it but you can stun it for a small amount of time but shooting it in the head or using some other means.

Now that I've explained all that, the reason I think this movie is quite silly is that despite all of this being figured out by a group of about 5 people, they spend the entire movie making absolutely braindead decisions and putting themselves in danger for pretty much no reason.  Anyone watching the movie could figure out that the trick to stopping it would be to simply trap it in something.  The main character in a scene about half way through the film stuns it by blasting it in the head and on multiple occasions she also sees it being blocked by doors and walls and yet, despite this, the idea to lock it inside a place NEVER CROSSES HER MIND.  Instead she goes for some absolutely batshit insane plan where they try and electrocute it inside a swimming pool which completely fails and then their plan after that is to just....have sex with hookers?  

A long time ago I watched an anime that I quite enjoyed called Ajin, a series about immortal people getting up to some shenanigans.  There's a scene in that show where the army is trying to aprehend an Ajin who's up to no good and they know that while they can't kill him they can stun him, like the thing from It Follows, for a small amount of time by hitting him in the head.  So they get the first hit on him and then their plan is nearly successful because they surround the body and have a guy with a rifle putting another bullet between his eyes every couple of seconds as they try to carry him into containment.  

The characters in It Follows have a gun, have a means to blast it in the head over and over and could probably quite easily get their hands on some kind of container that they could lob into the ocean and yet it's never done, it's never tried and its never even talked about.  They are more than willing to barricade themselves IN to rooms at multiple points but the very basic idea of just trapping the thing is left completely off the table.

The situation in It Follows reminds me of why I had such a problem with other horror movies such as A Quiet Place, where very obvious solutions to an issue seem to be all around around them but because they are "horror movie characters" they go with the most stupid, nonsensical actions possible so that the film actually has something to work with which in my opinion is just shitty writing.  My first thought actually was to just flee to a different country but the film actually establishes that the thing can swim so that obviously goes right out the window but it puts so many solutions so blatently there on the table that the characters not rubbing their brain cells together just takes me out of the film completely.

Like I said, it's not an awful film by any stretch and if you're looking for a competently shot, competently acted movie with some decent scares here and there to maybe have on in the background or watch with friends, It Follows is a good pick for that.  Just don't buy into all that hype about it being "striking" or those weirdo critics claiming that its "deep" because the demon is sexually transmitted.  

One of the most 6/10 movies I've ever seen

The Bayonetta 3 Debacle

 It's been a hot minute since I've paid any kind of attention to some industry drama and good golly has a sort of big one managed to fall in front of me.  

Bayonetta is a sort of niche series I think but she IS featured in Smash so I assume most people know about her but just in case you live under a rock being stored in a nuclear bunkers panic room Bayonetta is game series about a freakishly tall women fighting angels or something.  Granted I've only played the first game and even that was way back when it first came out but I'm pretty sure its something to that effect.  It's basically Devil May Cry but with a freakishly tall and lanky lady instead of a freakishly handsome and funny dude.

On Sunday I came across a series of videos from the voice actor for Bayonetta, Hellena Taylor, talking through sobs and tears about how shes SO well educated and SO well versed in her field and was somehow only offered a total of $4000 to voice the entire game.  Not only this, but as a result of her shitty offer she was calling upon fans of the Bayonetta series to boycott the release of the game and not buy it.  Also at this point I think news came out that by not taking the offer she was dropped from the series and a new woman, Jennifer Hale, has now taken up the role for the third game.  ALSO  ALSO Hideki Kamiya, one of the big boys over at Platinum Games, the developer of Bayonetta, went on an all caps tirade about how shes lying and the offer was closer to $150,000 before his account got deleted, seemingly by his own volition but I have no idea whats going on with him.

So at this point I was sort of torn.  It's a well known thing that voice actors are underpaid in a lot of cases and $4000 to do all the voice work for the 3rd game in a niche yet quite succesful franchise of character action games seems insanely low even by shitty game industry standards.  But something felt off about Taylor's videos.  The chest beating regarding her education and experience, the call for a boycott and the crying just gave her videos a weird stank that had me siding with Platinum Games instead of her despite her shitty situation.

Now I'm not going to go down the stupid Twitter argument route of "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER DEVS BEING PAID FOR THEIR WORK" because, like most people are eager to point out, the other developers of the game are probably salaried or have some kind of other contract going on and have already made their money or have agreements about their money with the company.  But put the money aside for a second.  Imagine you are a programmer, a level designer, sound engineer, 3D or 2D artist or one of the myriad other jobs required for a game to get made.  You've spent YEARS of your life putting this thing together, working hard, probably doing a fair bit of overtime and maybe even making some personal sacrifice to try and ensure that the fans of this game get an experience that they enjoy and that you can be proud of.  Then, some suit in your company, completely devoid and separate from your work goes and makes a bad decision and makes ONE member of the team a crappy offer suddenly all the work you did for all those years is getting hate thrown at it and potentially thrown to the wayside just because of that.  You'd feel like complete shit.  If I was, for example, Takaaki Yamaguchi (the lead Animator according to Bayonetta 2s credits, assuming its still him) and I heard that you were trying to sabotage years of my animation work because some businessman in the company offered you a shitty contract, I would want to find you and smash a glass bottle right across your stupid fucking head.  Takaaki is probably a bit more level headed than that, but the rage I would feel over even the SUGGESTION of something like that would be incredible.

BUT THEN I load up Twitter this morning and I find that the plot had thickened.

Turns out that, if true, the actual offer for Hellena Taylor's voice over was $4000 per session in the booth (which according to the same Twitter user is 4 hours) and that she would be paid that 4 or 5 times.  That's considerably more money than what she was claiming to be the case in her original videos.  This still seems sort of low, I guess, I am not entirely sure what is considered to be a "good wage" for video game voice work but its still significantly higher than what she originally suggested in her fishy as fuck run of videos on Twitter.

My inital theory on Sunday when discussing it with a friend of mine was that Bayonetta is just not a very voice heavy game.  Most of it is high action with a couple of cutscenes here and there and even of those cutscenes, a percentage of those are going to be mostly unvoiced action scenes.  Getting $4000 for 4 hours of work to get into a booth, say a few lines in an over the top British accent and then spend the rest of my work day going "HYA!" "HOO YA!" "TAKE THIS!" into a microphone seems like a pretty good fucking deal to me.  Then again I guess I don't have the "pedigree" that Ms Taylor has now, do I?

If Taylor hadn't have made an attempt at emotional manipulation in that first run of videos my reaction would have been "wow, that sucks, I hope she can negotiate something better" and I would have moved on.  But this has now EXPLODED into a big story with people potentially lying and parties skirting what can and cant be said thanks to NDAs and it's now something I'll be watching quite closely.

Oh and by the way, I'm going to go play Bayo 2 right now and I'll pick up Bayo 3 on launch, fuck you and fuck your tears, Hellena

CrossCode

 

I'm pretty critical of a lot of games that I play and when there's something I don't like, I can tend to be a little mean about it.  But usually when I play a game like that, I can at least see the appeal of why other people like it, so while I'll be mean towards the game I won't think anything less of the people who do like it.  Breath of the Wild is a good example of this because I think that game is a steaming pile of overly-easy, uninteresting garbage but I can totally get why someone else might really enjoy it.  But every so often I play a game that's so foul, so heinous, so irredeemably shit in almost every way, that if you admit to enjoying it in front of me I will judge you negatively for as long as I know you.  Famously Outlast 2 was one of those games but now CrossCode can be added alongside it in the hall of shame.

Released in 2018, CrossCode follows the adventures of Lea who wakes up on a cargo ship inside of a fictional MMORPG called Crossworlds and is told that she must follow the main quest line of the game in order to regain her memory.  From there she meets other players, gets involved with weird villains and uncovers a bunch of schemes and conspiricies which she must get to the bottom of.  I dont want to spoil the story too much JUST INCASE there's some massive twat reading this post who has decided that the extremely generic sounding plot sounds interesting but that's the basics.  Presentation wise that game has some decently pretty pixel art but the whole thing is done in this faux-anime style and the story writing and dialogue has this weird aura of smugness about it like the devs are constantly jacking off somewhere quietly behind you as you play because they are so fucking pleased with just how "clever" they are.  

But whatever, smug and shitty writing aside, the game play is arguably the more important factor here.  Well when you first start CrossCode you may be tricked, like I was, that the game plays pretty well.  The world seems fairly expansive, there seems to be a lot of quests to do and the combat feels pretty tight at first.  However the more you play the more it all falls apart.  The combat being the biggest offender here which starts out OK and then becomes repetetive and obnoxious with almost every encounter being an absolute chore.  You can throw little balls at enemies by clicking and then if you pull the mouse near to Lea you can change to a melee attack.  You get a sort of Pound Land Sphere Grid that you use to upgrade various things like shot power and aiming speed so you can sort of build Lea to fit your play style.  Also on that grid are various skills which seems cool and look very flashy when you do them but most of which are an absolute ballache to pull off in the heat of the combat.  Not hard, mind you, the actual execution of the moves is very simple but awkard to do when under fire and ultimately not that useful with the exception of the spin attack you can perform by just holding down the space bar.  After a while the game will start to demand that you hit enemies with various elemental attacks or in specific parts of their body which doesn't really add any challenge but sure as fuck adds heaps of annoyance.  

The quests are another problem because there are plenty of side activities for you to do but almost all of them are uninteresting and the rewards you get for doing them are PATHETIC.  I spent the first few streams of the game trying to dilligently do all the quests I could find as I got them but they were so boring, so samey and the rewards so bloody useless that I stopped and just powered through the game as fast as I could.  Although the world design didn't make that easy because while the world seems large, its not very interesting.  Every area has a unique theme but every part of that area looks the same so once you've spent 10 minutes running around its very easy to just get bored and glaze over.  The world is also very cluttered and hard to navigate with the game demanding that you run across platforms and up and down different elevations but there are numerous points when that becomes a real pain the ass because the perspective is dogshit and the graphics are muddy as fuck.  These smug pricks KNEW this was a problem as well because they showed some footage from a new, very similar looking game they are working on via twitter where the environments have shifted to proper 3D graphics to make that shit clearer.  

The game is also mind boggingly long for absolutely no good reason.  When its not wasting your time with shit exploration and shit side quests, its having you navigate maybe the most annoying Zelda-esque dungeons I've ever played through in my life.  All of them essentially the same fucking thing just with a different coat of paint depending on what the flavor of element you're getting is and filled to the brim with the most long winded, tedious and sometimes painfully obtuse puzzles you've ever seen.  Each dungeon is extremely formulaic with them being structured like puzzle→combat→puzzle ad nauseum until you get the dungeons specific element power, then repeat again until the boss.  The puzzles are are quite samey to, usually involving pushing blocks, bouncing balls into targets or clearing a path for a slow moving ball to hit a thing to open a door.  The bosses at the end of each dungeon are also extremely uninspired so if you've played basically any Zelda game since A Link To the Past you've seen basically everything that Crosscode has to offer.

There is SO MUCH more detail I could go into about why I hate this game but if I did that this blog post might be the size of a Russian Novel (that means over 200k words, by the way) so to sum it up for you Crosscode has shit writing, shit world design, shit gameplay, shit dungeons, shit progression and some quite pretty yet very busy and annoying pixel art.  Somehow this game is quite well liked within the indie scene and I just don't get it.  One day I'll replay CrossCode and actually write that Russian Novels worth of a critique for a YouTube video but for now consider this the TLDR version of why I think it sucks

Fuck this game

31 Game Horror Challenge 2022

 A couple of years ago I attempted a 31 game horror challenge for October and failed due to the fact I mistakenly picked some very long games.  I will be trying again this year and hopefully I have picked some more reasonable games.  Here's this list of games and the order they will be played in 

1. Silent Hill 2

2. INMOST 

3. House of the Dead Remake

4. Bloodwash 

5. Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles

6. F.E.A.R

7. Splatterhouse 2 

8. Deathsmiles Mega Black Label 

9. Among the Sleep 

10. Lucius

11. Resident Evil 3 Remake

12. Maid of Sker

13. No Delivery 

14. Dead Space 2 

15. Dementium: The Ward

16. Yuppie Psycho

17. CASE: Animatronics

18. The Witches House

19. Project H

20. Onimusha Warlords 

21. Geist

22. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

23. Mr Bones

24. Nosferatu

25. Rule of Rose

26. Penubra Overture

27. Countdown Vampires 

28. Deep Fear

29. Dino Crisis 2 

30. Dread X Collection 2 

31. Alien Isolation

For every game on this list I do not finish I will be donating 10 GPB and adding prizes to the prize list.  

Lets get spooky!

Free Indie Game Roundup

 Recently I did a event on my stream that I titled "Free Indie Game Dumpster Diving" and despite the word dumpster in the title, most of the games I played during that stream were actually really good.  Here's a quite roundup of those games 

1) Gun Devil 

Gun Devil, avaliable for free on Steam, is a 2D side scrolling platformer.  It starts with a story sequence about your characters wife being kidnapped and its full of semi-edgy early Newgrounds tier writing that's a little bit cringeworthy but once the game gets going its a rather enjoyable experience.  It has tight controls, some very nice pixel art and despite being a quite a short game has some replay value after you are finished because you can get these giant coins at the end of each stage for doing it no hit and killing all the enemies.  I would have happily paid a few bucks for this one but you can play it right now, for free. 

2) The Backrooms: Lost and Found

The Backrooms are some creepy-pasta thing that I dont fully understand but there seems to be a lot of media surrounding it.  This game involves navigating through the backrooms looking for wooden giraffes while you are on the hunt for an exit.  Depending on how much you explore you can get one of SEVEN endings which I have to admit is quite a lot for a free game.  However, the game has a really stupid stamina system that makes running around sort of tedious and after the first run I can't really see myself ever going back to see what those other 6 endings were.  Not terrible by any means but you can do a lot better in terms of free indie horror

3) Freight Hopper

There was a game that came out a while ago on Steam that cost money called Clustertruck (I think) that involved free running across the tops of trucks as they sped down the stages.  It's the kind of game that's made for speedrunning with its emphasis on clearly levels quickly and movement mechanics.  Well this is just a free version of that.  Not many levels and the controls are sort of floaty and weird but once I got used to them I had a pretty good time.  If you liked Clustertruck and you need some more of it in your life, play this one I guess.

4) Workaholic

A first person shooter about shooting your co-workers in the face with finger guns.  There isn't really much more to it than that, you just blast your way through 4 stages that have sort of random layouts and then your done.  The art is cool and the gameplay is fast but its way too short and is just begging for some kind of endless mode which I don't think would have been too hard to implement given that the levels are procedurally generated anyway.  There's a fairly impressive selection of weapons for you to find which is cool but picking up a life steal, super kick or dual weild powerup puts a weird filter over the graphics that make it borderline unplayble.  Pretty good as long as you avoid those items, would play again .

5) Ghost Trap 

Very basic precision platformer that doesn't go too crazy with the difficulty.  My only real complaint is that there's a lot of waiting around for the games 2 bosses that make them quite annoying.  Comes with a cool speedrun mode which lets you play all the levels back to back without having to go through the annoying menu every time.  

6) Resonance of the Ocean 

Some kind of art game about a person on a island trying to communicate with someone by copying strange noises that come from another nearby island.  You have to go around picking up and combining items to make the right sound and then take them to a big megaphone to end the stage.  Very basic, very easy and very much has its head shoved up its own ass.  Nice art though

7) The Night that Speaks

When someone in my chat told me about this game they described it as "a game where you fight monsters by giving them the finger" which got me very excited.  Upon playing it though it's just a bland and boring horror game and giving the baddie the finger to make it go away isn't awesome like I thought it would be and it isn't even really all that funny.  Also the game was made to look like it was on Game Boy, which sounds cool but it just makes all the graphics murky and its hard to make anything out.  I got it for free and felt ripped off

8) Self

A interesting platformer where instead of jumping you sort of expand a big rubber band and use it to flick yourself around the level.  Not much more to it than that but its short, sweet and has some really good music.  Comes with some bonus challenge levels that are actually really hard and its very satisfying to clear them after some practice

10) Grippy

A Pico-8 game where you play as a piece of chewing gum that has to grab its way around a bunch of stages.  Its interesting because you play it by using the arrow keys to direct your fists and then you have to hold and release either Z or X for each hand in order to swing around.  Takes a while to get used to but really fun once you get the hang of it.  Also has multiple routes through each section with the harder ones being shorter so the more skilled player can get a faster clear time, which is a nice touch.  Will probably play again some time to get my time down.  

11) 13 Gates

A very basic first person platforming game.  You play the 13 levels, have a sort of good time and then never play it again 

12) Guardian Sphere

The game I chose for this posts header image because it was EASILY the best one I played in the entire 14 hour stream.  A top down shooter that has the cool gimmick of your life points also being your shot power AND a form of currency.  There are 5 stages and each stage has a couple of shops in them where you can spend your HP for various upgrades creating a sort of risk/reward system that can be really satisfying when you gamble all your HP for a sick upgrade and then survive long enough to collect a few more hit points again.  The game also has 8 playable characters to choose from each with there own shot type and 3 difficulty settings.  I did a 1cc run of the game on my first try on normal but that's because I'm an actual shmup God rather than the game being overly easy, I think for your average player this game may be kind tough depending on how lucky you are with the RNG shops.  You coulda put that on Steam for $10 and I woulda been happy but giving it away for free on Itch is just Godlike  

13) Plead with the Mountain God

A PS1-like platforming game which rips off the story of Shadow of the Collossus almost enitirely.  Only instead of having epic battles with giant monsters, you're very clunkily jumping up a tower.  Gameplay gets very dull very fast, has no music and at once point I glitched through the floor but not an awful experience by any stretch.  A forgettable game

14) Ashes 2063

A full, stand alone Doom conversion that I didnt finish during the marathon but happily added to my "now playing" list as it was a ton of fun.  Adds a bunch of stuff that base Doom doesn't have like towns, dialouge and shopping.  Quite challenging as well but there's a chance that I thought that because I was 12 hours deep when I started it.  Will post more about it in the future

15) Mini-Doom

A Doom fan game that I played for about 20 minutes but that seems really good.  A 2D platforming version of Doom that has a Mario 3 style world map and elements of a Metroidvania.  Didn't play enough to form a proper opinion but at a glance it seems very interesting indeed

That was all the games I played during the marathon and overall I had a damn good time.  If we get enough channel points via the stream at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis then we'll do another one!