100% Orange Juice – postmortem

Wow, that actually lasted longer than I thought it would!

One of the elements of this game that I didn’t mention last time (because I forgot about it) is the deck-building aspect. At the beginning of every game, you choose 10 cards that go into a communal deck. When you draw a card, you may or may not get one of the ones you put in. The game suggests choosing a card that helps you more than it helps other players, but there weren’t any obvious synergies, and in any case it all gets drowned out by the chaos of the dice-rolling mechanics.

So it’s basically as much of a random-fest as I remembered. This time, I got all the way to the last scenario in the opening single-player campaign before realizing that the only way I was going to beat it was by playing it over and over again until I got lucky. Yeah, no thanks.

Out of curiosity, I went to go check the Steam page for this game, and to my shock, the reviews are mostly positive! They generally praised the aesthetics (which is fair – the game is pretty cute, honestly) and also the pointless randomness(???). To paraphrase Daria Morgendorffer, 100% Orange Juice is bad. Don’t people know the difference between good and bad? Seriously, if all you want is randomness with cool visuals, go stare at a lava lamp.

In the intro, I compared this game to Mario Party, but the game it really reminds me of is Killer Bunnies, which I hate for the same reasons. Mario Party requires a decent amount of skill and strategy (even if chance plays too great a role in the proceedings), whereas 100% Orange Juice and Killer Bunnies both have no skill and only enough strategy to get your feet wet. I guess there’s some interest to be had in setting things up and seeing what happens, but that’s not enough to engage me when I could have a monkey make decisions for me and get similar results.

Recommended if you’re the sort of person who enjoys both parts of drag bingo. If you like games of pure chance, you might find that the pretty lights on display are enough to satisfy you. Otherwise, I’d give this one a miss.

140

Time to start a second game! (And I’m also still playing 100% Orange Juice – didn’t see that coming.)

140 is a minimalist rhythm-based platformer. You play as a stalwart trio of geometric shapes in their brave quest to collect things and bring them to places. The game is solidly made with flat but compelling visuals and a snazzy soundtrack – other than that, there’s not really much to say about it.

I didn’t quite finish 140 – I got about halfway through before deciding it wasn’t worth finishing. You see, friends, after the first four levels, 140 removes the checkpoints. Lots of games do this, and it’s a mistake every single time. Being light on checkpoints has two effects: first, it makes the game feel more difficult than it is, because it increases the amount of time taken to get through a challenge without increasing the number of attempts needed; and second, it forces you to replay a part of the game you’ve mastered over and over in order to get to the part where you’re having trouble. If you want your game to be more difficult, then make it more difficult. Removing the checkpoints from your game doesn’t make it harder – it only makes it more tedious.

I’m fairly confident I will at least get back to where I was last time – we’ll see if I have enough patience to push past that point.

100% Orange Juice

Friends, let’s start with a weird one.

100% Orange Juice is a digital board game featuring various anime-esque characters. I could have sworn they were all taken from a specific anime, but I can’t find any details about that. Instead, they seem to be characters from the developer’s previous games. So, I guess it’s Mario Party but with maybe 1% of the recognizability.

Steam says I’ve played this game for 40 minutes, and that sounds about right. What I got upon starting the game for the first time was a roll-to-move / roll-to-attack random-fest that didn’t have any strategic depth at all. Maybe if I’d been familiar with its cast, I might find some enjoyment at seeing them in this new scenario, but I don’t know who any of the characters are, and 100% Orange Juice doesn’t seem interested in introducing them.

I find this game’s existence fascinating. I was all ready to tell you that I didn’t understand why this game was made – it doesn’t seem to have any interesting mechanics or ideas on display, and its assumption that I’m familiar with its various main characters means that it’s not doing a good job at driving me towards any of the previous games. Of course, that was when I was under the assumption that this game was free, since that’s what I remembered. It turns out that I actually spent money on this! How horrifying. It was probably less than $2, but still. I’m still not ready to say that it’s a cash-grab, though – there was enough polish on display that I can at least respect it as a finished product, even though I’m not exactly looking forward to spending a lot of time on this one.

Friends, I get the feeling that I’m going to wrap this one up quickly. But a promise is a promise, and I promise to at least get enough time on this one to see if there’s more depth to the proceedings than I saw last time.

Steam Project – Introduction

Hello friends! If you’re like me, you have lots of games on Steam. It looks like my count is 496, not including the many entries listed as “Tools” (mostly servers for multiplayer games) and exactly one thing categorized as “Software.” Here’s the thing, though – I’ve never played a lot of these games. Either they came as part of packs where I wanted something else in them, or I just never got around to them after buying a bunch of stuff during a sale and prioritizing the other things. For lots of others, my experience with the game was extremely brief. There are lots of reasons I might bounce off of a game, and I’m sure only about half of them actually deserved it. For the rest, it’s been several years (for most of them) since I gave them a shot, and I know that I’ve changed a lot since then, as have the standards that the medium holds itself to.

I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of money here. I’m also somewhat of a completionist, as evidenced by my obsession with metroidvanias. So I thought to myself, instead of continuing to throw money at Gabe Newell so he can achieve his goal of ridding the world of the number 3, why don’t I go through my back catalog and make sure I’ve gotten to everything? So that is what this is. I am going to play through every game in my collection and write down my thoughts. I’m not committing to finishing all of them, but I am going to be more determined to get through it than I normally would be.

Here’s how this is going to work: Before I play each game, I’ll give my thoughts on what I remember of it – the type of game that it is, how far I got, whether I liked it, etc. After I go through it again, I’ll post a followup indicating my new experience, whether I think it holds up and/or gets better on a replay, and what my recommendation is. These will fall into three categories: the rare “Recommended To Everyone,” the somewhat more common “Recommended To No One,” and the all-purpose “Recommended If,” where I try to guess what sort of person would have a good experience. I don’t intend for these to be reviews in the traditional sense, though – think of them more as log entries.

I’ll be playing the games in roughly alphabetical order. I say “roughly” because I usually play a couple of games at a time (because I have the attention span of a goldfish) and I’m not going to play two games in a series simultaneously. For example, if game A is Bioshock and I finish game B, I’ll skip past the series for my next pick instead of picking up Bioshock 2. I’ll also be skipping any demos and betas, and if I have more than one version of a game, I’ll play the most updated version (enhanced or what have you). In addition, there are a few genres I feel the need to call out:

Roguelike: For most of these, it’s theoretically possible to reset progress and start everything from scratch. I will not be doing this. Instead, in general, I’ll be doing at least a few runs through each.

Multiplayer: For games that are multiplayer only, it usually doesn’t mean anything to finish them. Again, I’ll be playing enough of it to get bored – which I guess means at least a few matches / whatever the equivalent is in other types of game. Also, I’ll probably try to explore the distinction between playing the game with people I know and people I don’t.

Jackbox: I have a few Jackbox Party Packs – I will be skipping these. This is entirely because I feel like they are fundamentally a different type of thing than the other games I have. I think it’s a bit tough to clarify why I feel this way, but the main issue I can foresee is trying to schedule in-person sessions, since I don’t know when I’m going to get to them, and since we’re still in the middle of a pandemic. I’ve tried these over Discord, but I don’t think it really works that well.

So come along with me on this journey, friends! We’ll try not to think about how much this has all cost me.