RocketPun. A Dragon Quest Romp.

Video game enemies lead storied lives. Coming out the darkness only get swatted down by would be heroes and making sure to pick up milk on the way home. Once in a blue moon a lowly creature is selected to go on their own quest. A Dragon Quest. We will now fight the urge to make pun related Dad Jokes.

Some time around the start of this wildly popular blog I wrote about Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior II. Going against popular speculation we're covering Rocket Slime instead of Dragon Warrior III. All in due time.

This guy gets his own game! That's right chocobos, move over. Rocket Slime teaches us so much about the slime race. Who knew that slimes could stretch three times there length and snap like rubber bands to send foes flying and can glide by flattening themselves during a jump. The traditional Dragon Quest games would have been over really quick if they fought to their full potential. Slimes are also nature's pack horses, for when you don't have a horse, I guess; they can hold 3 slime units of weight at a time. A slime unit is the typical amount of weight of something. Yup. Don't read too much into it.



During the 10 hour action game Rocket (the slime) has to rescue the other inhabitants of Slimeria who were kidnapped during a raid by the platypus mafia when they attacked with their giant tank. If you remember Saturday morning cartoons, this conveys that feeling very well. Makes me want to grab a bowl of cereal watch acid influenced cartoons for hours; then again, we have Adult Swim for that now. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

The core of the game revolves around slamming yourself into items and enemies to stack them on your head so you can throw them onto railways to deliver them to the home town. Some light platforming and puzzle solving come up and are  hardly ever difficult. Boss fights are handled in tank battles. Tank battles. You have a pair of cannons on your tank that use the random items you have accumulated from around the game world (each with different attributes) and fire in two different arcs while your opponent does the same. Even your allies can have different effects when fired from a cannon. If that's not enough, it's possible to break (or fire yourself from a cannon) into the enemy tank and steal their ammo and hopefully destroy the core that's accessible when a tank's health reaches zero.

Rocket Slime is an absolute treasure. It's no where near serious and can serve as a palette cleanser between serious or dense games. Value can't be overlooked here either, you can grab this DS cart for under $10. As long as there's not a Steam Sale going on you can't expect better value than that! Buy the first North American Dragon Quest to not use the Dragon Warrior moniker.

Puns. The entire game is based on puns. From the Schleiman and Purrsecuter tanks to the Kingdom of Slimeria there is no shortage of delicious word play. Let me leave you with this.

Chrono Twigger

How could you not?

Ethan Carter....or How I Wanted to Test My New Graphics Card

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a very atmospheric game that looks incredible! There. I just saved you reading the rest of the post.

Walking through an abandoned train tunnel, generic worldly paranormal investigator #337 enters a valley that has seen better days. His biggest fan wrote letters to him that got more and more disturbing that finally warranted investigation. Paul Prospero fights for missing children everywhere, or at least in this valley he can't leave.

The Astronauts have created a total feast for the eyes. These environments are some of the best ever in a mid-tier/indie release. The amount of work put in into the rendering of the rocks, trees, water, buildings, and murder scenes deserve all the praise in the world. It feels like you are searching through an actual place called Red Creek Valley that may have been an important mill/mine/railway stop 50 years ago. Because the environment is the most fleshed out "character" in the game the actual character models leave a little bit to be desired. They look like game character models in an almost photo realistic setting. The experience may only last a few hours but you could spend just as much time treating the game like a virtual nature walk. Oculus, we're looking at you.

Gameplay is handled pretty well in Ethan Carter. You are a detective piecing together how an incident (likely murder) took place. Different snippets of the event play out in front of you like the image above and you must put them in the correct order to find out what happened. A few other points in the game you have to search an area for traps, drive a motorized mine cart, and avoid a ghost in an underground maze. Control is handled just like a first person shooter sans the shooting so anyone who has played a popular game in the last decade should be able to pick it up and play. The only gripe I have is when you have to duck under something 75% into the game and it's the first time you have to do so. Then again, crouching in a first person perspective game should probably be second nature by now.

The story of Ethan Carter is just as much part of the environment as anything else. It's always nice to see a story on the small scale. The story isn't small per say, just not affecting the entire world. It doesn't always have to be the entire universe in the balance with the chosen one reluctantly stepping up to save it. Restraint can be so much more powerful than going all out. 

In an age where there is an outcry against games that aren't games this is a good argument that this stance is something that no one will care about or remember in the next few years.