My pick this week is Santa's Xmas Caper for the Commodore 64.

This was my very first cute-'em-up, and I used to play it every Christmas, so it should be fun to revisit. It's a tough little game, but possible to beat unaided with a little bit of practise!

Quoting: StoneColdSpider

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MLB Power Pros 2008 (2008 2K Sports) - Sony PlayStation 2 - Sports (Baseball)

Yay, more of the Power Pro guys!

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderNow for my bad Christmas joke of the week……
Q: How do you help someone who has lost their Christmas spirit???......
A: Nurse them back to elf......
*ba dum.... tssssh…...*

HAHAHAHAHA!

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderNow for my bad Christmas joke of the week……
Q: How do you help someone who has lost their Christmas spirit???......
A: Nurse them back to elf......
*ba dum.... tssssh…...*

Hey, that joke works for cars too!

Q: What do you do with a car that leaks oil?
A: Nurse it back to elf!

SteamWorld Quest is still a mixed bag. Some parts are fun, some are tedious because of the repeats and the bad partial repeated dialog animation sequence skipping and some are really bad, e.g. when a character gets knocked out and you redraw some cards and you get unusable cards instead of the unusable cards you wasted a limited action on to get something else.


Edit: What I forgot to mention is the added tediousness on top of everything, because the game does not have any mechanisms to switch between several decks or item loadouts. Because there is no XP-share and you have to juggle between characters to keep everyone at a usable level, the roles of the characters switch around. If you want to be in a good position in the next encounter, you basically have to manually switch the 8 active cards per character around and the two items per character. The interface allows you to select a different number of cards, but you cannot do anything if you don't end up at exactly 8.

Even switching between active characters is tedious. When you have three active and you want to switch someone out, there is no automatic anywhere – manually select the fourth one and then deselect one of the other three. If there are four characters and I deselect one of the active three there should be a way to automatically select the fourth character.

The UI is like the Windows 8.1 control panel – some things hidden in different layers of the system settings “folder” and some things hidden in the tiles of the start menus second page.


The graphics, sounds and music are still good, but some of the (idle) animations seem lazy since it is the usual SteamWorld bobbing – imagine the ocean with something floating up and down on the exact same wave every 5 seconds.

Last edited by Klaas on 14 December 2024 at 3:07 pm UTC

Does anyone own Halls of Torment, Vampire Survivors and Brotato?

I only got the first two (and only the first two DLCs for Vampire Survivors). I've asked the same question in Brotato-related news posts, but no answer so far, except someone who wanted to know the same thing:

Is it worth it to own all three of them?


Comparing HoT and VS there are a few things that stand out to me:
VS is a lot less organized than HoT concerning the upgrade system. In HoT I feel like I have more control over the randomness.
HoT looks better, but has fewer (only five) levels.
HoT has an enormous number of quests, but the quest system is very confusing – although it was improved in a few recent updates, it usually boils down to entering a level and then exiting and switching characters to match the selected “recommended” quest. VS is straightforward in the beginning before you need the obscure item unlocks that depend on other item unlocks that depend on level unlocks without hints.
VS's weapon evolutions can be more fun, because they can create a lot of chaos and it feels like there are more different systems.

I've watched a video of Brotato's gameplay and it seems that they didn't bother with levels at all. The DLC seems to have mixed reviews with many people claiming that the additional weapons/characters/etc break the system because there is just too much stuff to be able to randomly get something that is useful for your character.