Freezair

The Missing Steps Five days after officially moving into the lighthouse, the soldier occasionally known as “Double H” finally worked up the courage to admit that his full name was Hubert Alfonzo Higgenbotham III. Two weeks and three days after moving in, Zaza casually revealed that today happened to be her seventh birthday, and Hub was put on cake duty as the whole lighthouse rushed to get an ad hoc party assembled. The only cake he could find on short notice was carrot cake. Only Fehn and Oumi really liked it. One month and a week after moving in, Hub made arrangements for his family to finally come and visit him in his new home. His father Bert swaggered in on his homegrown pneumatic prosthetic leg, which earned more than a few appreciative comments from Pey’j; his mother Zeppie brought socks for all the children and told them with a very stern wink that they were to call her Granny. His younger brother Hector, a father himself, fell right in with the kids, while Jade remarked

Family Bond Event “Owie!” now available. “Wow, Hana’s so energetic! Hey, you don’t think she going to end up accidentally hurting herself at some point, do you?” ☐ Go to the Autumn Dragon Shrine (12 pm - 7 pm) There was a soft thud, followed by a decidedly not-so-soft shriek of pain. Kaguya and Cuilang were out of the Shrine in a flash. Hana lay, folded over herself, on the steps that lead up to her home. Her face was a gaping red knot as she heaved deep, rumbling sobs, fountains of tears running out of her eyes and nose; she didn’t even look up towards the sound of the footsteps racing towards her. “Maaaamaaaa!” “I’m here!” Kaguya gasped. She knelt down to her daughter’s level and took her small, soft palm between her two full-sized ones. “Sweetie, what happened?” Her husband knelt behind her, the hem of his coat within easy clutching distance if the little girl needed it. Only the merest green glint showed through Hana’s puffed-up eyelids as she heaved up her head. “IIII

Issue #15 True Psychic Tales was a venerated newsstand institution, as much an icon of the Psychonauts as their famous trefoil logo. But as any fan cornered a party with nothing better to talk about would tell you, it didn’t start out that way. Originally an unofficial zine, Psychic Stories, put out by young cottage psychic Silver Begay (“from the errant speck on the map known as Trombone, Utah,” as the official line went), the first two issues were run off the copiers at his college’s print shop and distributed at cons. It wasn’t until the third issue that he managed to score an interview with a group of promising young psychics from up in the Pacific Northwest, relating, in comic form, a particularly daring story in which one Ford Cruller managed to stop a robbery at his favorite diner with psychic power alone. This story took off like a pyrokentically-induced wildfire, orders flew in from across the country, and suddenly, Silver was rolling in gold. He hired a business lawyer

Games Only I Care About: Switch Mid Stavaganza 3 So good, it deserved a threepeat! It’s the SWITCH MID STRAVAGANZA! It’s getting increasingly hard to find nice middle-of-the-road games on the Switch. Which is not to say they don’t exist! Literally, they’re just difficult to spot among the morass of shovelware that avalanches onto the digital storefront every week. In a lot of ways, it’s to be expected late in the life cycle of an extremely popular console. The Xbox Live Arcade was full of bizarre cheapoware even back in the late 2000’s. The PlayStation 2 was famously swamped with strange ultrabudget releases, up to and including “activity centers” based on the worst animated movies imaginable. (Look up “Phoenix Games” if you’re unfamiliar, and bring plenty of popcorn.) And to this very day, you can still buy Famiclones stuffed to the gills with bootleg NES roms in the checkout lines of major retailers. How lucky it is for you, then, that you’ve got a friend who likes digging through

Level 6-3: Ghost Castle Do I like most of the levels in Page 6? I respect a lot of them, certainly. I think they’re cleverly designed, and provide an appropriate level of challenge both to Real Gamers™ seeking out all 30 melons and to children just trying to survive. I have fond memories of a lot of them. But on those days that I just want to play a bit of Yoshi’s Story in Trial Mode, they’re usually not the levels I gravitate towards. When I do a full run-through of the game, I certainly get enjoyment out of choosing which stage will be my final challenge. But it’s usually not the level in the run I’m most looking forward to. “Ghost Castle” is the reason those are all “usuallys” and not something more hardline. That might seem a bit surprising on first glance. This is a third stage in the final Page, and Little Me was not persnickety about collectibles. Certainly my youthful incompetence kept me out of “Piranha Grove” for ages, so you might expect the same to hold true here. But

Games Only I Care About: Switch Mid Stravaganza 2! Told you I had enough of these to do another. For those of you just tuning in, the elevator pitch: There’s a lot of crap on the Nintendo Switch eShop. And I mean “crap” in both the pejorative sense and the metasyntactic variable sense. Who wants to spend a bunch of time and, more importantly, money rifling through it all? I DO, that’s who! I’ve scooped up (and tried) a whole mess of things while they were on sale, and now I’m going to tell you which ones are kinda sorta maybe interesting! This is my chance to shine a spotlight on games that are awkward, imperfect, and even occasionally a little bit of a hot mess. But they all have something about them that makes them worthwhile, especially when the price is right. Like 80% off or something. And hey, sometimes I’m just blowing this whole “mid” thing out of proportion and they’re actually pretty good, just kinda niche in their appeal. And if I actually like them a lot, writing a

Jade couldn’t remember the last time the Lighthouse had been so busy. Men and women of all different species swarmed over the island, their voices drowning out the waves and their feet beating the mud up from beneath the grass. A gorilla woman passed off a set of tools to a human man before dashing off towards the temporary shed set up by the hill. Two humans conversed over a blueprint tacked up to a wall, and a shark man glanced at it over their shoulders. And the bright, reflective strips on everyone’s vests constantly caught the sun, making the Lighthouse blink as if it had been decked out for a festival. The bustle was hypnotic to watch. For just a moment, Jade leaned in the hangar doorway, listening to the hammers thud, the saws buzz, and the drills whir. Then she slipped downstairs. Things were no quieter in the hangar. At the docks, the children chattered and jostled impatiently while, one by one, Pey’j helped them into the back of the hovercraft. “No need to shove, now!

Games Only I Care About: Switch Mid Stravaganza! Greetings, zeroes and ones, and welcome to a quick-‘n’-dirty installment of GAMES ONLY I CARE ABOUT! The infrequent series where I ramble about games that are important solely for the fact that they do something that appeals to me—because now I do this kind of crap professionally and sometimes I need to just barf words on a page without about what my editor is going to think. (That sentence was pretty run-on! But THEY CAN’T SEE THIS SO THEY CAN’T STOP ME.) If you haven’t figured it out by now, I tend to gravitate towards games that are a little... off-beat. I love big, polished tentpole releases and a lot of my favorite games tend to fall into that category, but the things that really activate me tend to be the weird things. The small studio’s passion project they’ve slaved over for nine years. The six-dollar games buried deep in digital storefronts. And brother, the Nintendo Switch has an embarrassment of riches there! It’s been

PAGE 6: FINALE Level 6-1: Mecha Castle Has this moment truly come to pass? Do we truly stand on the cusp of the final page, ready to begin our very last descent into the depths of Yoshi’s Story? Did I actually manage to see one of my projects through to something resembling completion? Yes it has, yes we are, and it only took me seven bloody years. The final levels often held a sense of trepidation for me as a child. By the time I managed to drag myself onto page six, I was badly battered; my Yoshis were down from six or eight to a measly one to two, and these last few stages are out for blood. While I might have been able to pick up a White Shy Guy somewhere in the Ocean, these stages are still full of bottomless pits, crushing traps, and other mean little tricks that can put a swift end to a run. Very often this was where my precious White Yoshi would meet her end. And I didn’t yet realize that I could simply turn off the game to get my Yoshis back—I didn’t know it saved