Back around a decade ago, I decided to switch to Linux for my desktop PC. I went with Mint, a distro known for being beginner-friendly. I loved my time with Mint, but gaming on Linux back then was pretty dire. Few games had native Linux support, and even emulators weren’t always as plentiful or good as those available on Windows. Eventually, I drifted back to Windows for my PC gaming needs and just accepted that it was the standard OS for gaming. Here in the year 2026, however, I’m back on good old Linux Mint and having a much better time.
Things have changed a lot for gaming on Linux in 10 years. I think much of that can honestly be attributed to Valve, who have poured a lot of effort and resources into making SteamOS (based on Arch Linux) a viable choice. Proton, a compatibility layer developed jointly by Valve and CodeWeavers, was first introduced in 2018 and has become a godsend for anyone trying to play games on Linux. Given that the Steam Deck runs on all this stuff, it makes sense that the amount of games playable on Linux has drastically increased in a short time.
Darkest Dungeon 2 works just fine, so I’m back on the Grand Slam grind.
With my fresh Mint install, I installed Steam and was shocked to see nearly my full library playable without any extra tinkering on my part. This is so different from how it used to be. I don’t need to fiddle with anything or look up guides on what specific software to run to make a game work with my distro. In the immortal words of Todd Howard, “It just works.” Speaking of old Todd, the first game that gave me any trouble was one that he worked on, because of course it was. Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition was a bit fiddly to get running, making me alt+tab out and then back again before it would display properly. I also can’t seem to change any of the graphical settings, so it’s stuck at the authentic 2006 experience of 1024×768 resolution and no anti-aliasing until I figure out how to force the changes. Still, that’s a minor inconvenience compared to trying to get virtually any games running on Linux in ye old days.
It’s like I’m really back in high school.
Bethesda games rarely run well on their intended operating systems, so I’m not too upset about that. What’s remarkable is that this is the only game I’ve had any issues with so far. Old games, new games, indie games and AAA games all work nearly flawlessly without a bit of effort on my part. It’s nice to be back, as someone who isn’t thrilled with how buggy and privacy-invading Windows is, on top of the recent nagging to sign in to an account for everything. Whether I’m playing games through my Steam Deck or desktop, it’s a much smoother process than it used to be. I haven’t even tried any of the more gaming-focused distros like Bazzite or CachyOS, but I’ve heard good things about them. I’m just happy to see that most of my games now require no more effort than clicking the install button and maybe waiting a moment for Vulkan shader processing on boot. It’s a welcome change from how it used to be, and I can see myself staying with Linux for the long haul at this point.
Consider this a first impression, since I haven’t unlocked even half the content in Vital Shell yet. When I first saw this Vampire Survivors clone pop up on Steam, I was immediately reminded of playing the demo for the original Armored Core on my PS1 as a kid. This game looks like someone wanted to take the aesthetic of that game and combine it with the gameplay of Vampire Survivors and its ilk (do we have a genre name for that yet?), and the result is a fun throwback for our short modern attention spans.
The PS1 aesthetic will always be charming to me.
In Vital Shell, you choose a mech and stage and then try to survive against 20 waves of enemies. After each wave, you can upgrade your mech with stat boosts, new weapons and mods for said weapons. There’s a fair bit of customization available here. Additional weapons range from slow-firing but powerful mortars to flamethrowers that provide low but continuous burn damage. Each weapon has four gem sockets, which you can gradually fill with gems of various affinities. These provide bonuses like life-stealing properties, extra critical rate and faster attack speed. Certain combinations of gems like four of a kind or two sets of two will unlock more powerful variants, as well. This system is fun to play around with and will be familiar to anyone who’s played another game of this type.
You even get virtual memory cards.
At the end of each stage, you confront a boss in the form of another mech. If you manage to win, you unlock that mech and the next stage. I haven’t unlocked everything yet, but it looks like there are several different mechs and stages in total. Each mech has its own innate stats and advantages/disadvantages compared to the others, so it’s fun to experiment with builds until you find the one that suits your play style. Vital Shell also has a skill tree system called “devotions” which provide the incremental meta upgrades games like this tend to have. This is where you gain permanent boosts to armor, attack rate and so on. The mechanic here is unique in that it has multiple devotions to unlock, each with their own upgrades focused on one core aspect like damage or defense. You can only have one equipped at a time, further emphasizing the need to find a play style that works for you.
I have no idea what the enemies are supposed to be, but they look neat.
If you enjoy the early 3D, low-poly aesthetic, catchy music that mimics ’90s electronica, customizing mechs and the addictive gameplay of Vampire Survivors, Vital Shell is worth a look. It’s fun for a low price, which is always nice in my book. It also plays wonderfully on the Steam Deck, so I’ve been enjoying it from the comfort of my couch. If this game had actually released on the PlayStation back in the day, I shudder to think of how many hours I would have put into it.
Over the weekend, the ice on the roads around me had melted enough to finally get out of the house, so my husband and I went to our local theater to watch Iron Lung, the film adaptation of the popular indie horror game made by Markiplier. He had actually been really interested in seeing it, despite not being the stereotypical demographic for a movie made by a YouTube star. We aren’t Markiplier super fans, but we’ve watched some of his videos to check out horror games, since he plays mountains of them. More to the point, he was interested in this movie as a passion project, and I felt the same way.
I won’t spoil anything about the movie, but will say I enjoyed it. It was better than I expected it to be and generally well-made. Nothing looked or sounded cheap to me. Having a very limited setting surely helped a lot, but it’s worth praising for how it brings that sub and blood ocean to life. The performances were good, music was great, and for what it’s worth, I don’t think you could make a better adaptation of the source material. It’s a slow burn, which may not be what you’d expect from a guy who got famous screaming at Five Nights at Freddy’s. Making an interesting movie where 99% of the runtime is a guy in a dark room is a tall order, and I think the crew pulled it off pretty well.
I find passion projects very endearing, so it was really cool to be in a chain theater watching a movie where the credits included video game voice actors like Troy Baker, video game composer Andrew Hulshult, and not a single Hollywood A-Lister. Iron Lung creator David Szymanski, who was heavily involved in supervising the movie, even has cameo as one of the handful of characters in the story. I heard others mention it was the first time they’d ever seen a movie with no production company logos at the start. Markiplier even credited himself as Markiplier in the opening credits and only used his full name during the ending credits, which I thought was funny.
Being a movie from a big YouTuber, I went in half-expecting the audience to be a bunch of teenagers yelling about the Bite of ’87 throughout, but I was wrong. In a mostly full theater, ages seemed to be all over the place and everyone was dead silent until the credits rolled. The credits were pretty cute, by the way. Photos of everyone involved are shown, ending with Mark, his wife Amy and their dogs. The two times people shouted during my screening were cheers when the editor for Markiplier’s YouTube channel, who goes by Lixian, showed up, and specifically for the dogs when the last photos appeared. I thought that was wholesome.
For what the Red Letter Media crew would call a “black tanktop movie”, Iron Lung was pretty solid. It’s much more subdued than the average Markiplier YouTube video, is a faithful adaptation of the source material, and somehow stretches a 45-minute video game set in a tiny sub into a 2-hour movie that manages to stay interesting. It’s admittedly a little on the long side, but I was still curious to see how it would wrap up by the end.
Iron Lung has made an estimated $21.5 million globally as I write this, on an estimated budget of $3.5 million. That’s a huge success for a movie that was self-financed, had little marketing outside of the star posting about it on social media, and was originally slated for only 50 theaters. My city wasn’t going to get it at all until the major chains agreed to screen it. Not everyone has 38 million YouTube subscribers to go see their movie, but I still think it’s worth discussing a movie made with such a small budget and crew in light of Hollywood’s continuing issues with out-of-control budgets.
As I said, it makes me happy to see a passion project succeed. I think we all have some dream project we’d make if we had the resources to do so. If I were rich, you can bet I’d be making phone calls trying to get the rights to make some weird adaptation of Darkest Dungeon no studio executive in their right mind would greenlight (Resident Evil already has a dozen movies, so there’s no point in doing that).
I wrote recently about replaying WARP’s bizarre game D2. That playthrough got me thinking that I should finally get around to doing a full playthrough of Enemy Zero for the Sega Saturn, the middle game in WARP’s odd trilogy starring characters named Laura. I had never finished it prior to this month, and while I enjoyed the experience and think it’s a very interesting game, I must admit that I didn’t beat it “legit”. The third and final disc has the harshest difficulty spike I’ve ever encountered in a video game, and I just have to share.
Our protagonist, Laura Lewis.
Since I assume not many people are familiar with this fairly niche and old game, I’ll give a brief overview of Enemy Zero. You play as Laura Lewis, a woman aboard the spaceship AKI that gets overrun by invisible aliens. Crew members start getting picked off, and you have to try and find an escape pod back to Earth while avoiding your new foes. Since it was made by WARP, several characters here went on to star in D2, albeit with different roles. The plot heavily borrows from both Alien and Blade Runner, and they somehow got film composer Michael Nyman to provide the game’s score. It mostly consists of some appropriately moody ambient music with light piano notes, though the opening cinematic is accompanied by a pounding drum and bass piece that is undeniably ’90s. For one last bit of star power, Laura is voiced by Luscious Jackson singer Jill Cunniff, though you only ever hear her speak when loading the game (I’ll explain that in a bit).
Laura, David, Kimberly and Parker, who all reappeared in D2.
The game plays like a strange mix of point-and-click adventure and first-person shooter. In the introductory sequence and many other areas, you slowly move around a pre-rendered environment looking for objects to interact with or collect. Enemies are never a threat during these segments. They can only pursue you in the other area type featured in Enemy Zero, the fully 3D environment. All the hallways throughout the AKI are rendered in standard 3D, and this is where you have to look out for (or rather, listen for) hostile aliens. These sections give you different controls, where you can sprint, raise and fire a gun and freely look around your surroundings. It’s very strange going from back and forth between pre-rendered areas and the janky early 3D halls, but it will feel like a more linear version of D2 to anyone who played it.
Get ready to see this hallway with a new coat of paint over and over.
As mentioned above, the aliens trying to kill you are invisible. This means your only hope of detecting them before it’s too late is an earpiece called the VPS that works very similarly to an audio-only version of the motion tracker from Alien. Whenever an enemy is nearby, the VPS will start loudly dinging to approximate its location. Bear in mind that this is a Saturn game without stereo audio, and you can start to guess that combat is a problem. The way it works is that the ding sound will change pitch and frequency depending on how close the enemy is, but this is a very flawed system. For starters, the VPS doesn’t account for walls. You may think an alien is straight ahead when it’s actually waiting around the next corner, or is technically close to you but isn’t even aware of your presence due to the wall between you. It also becomes borderline useless when more than one alien is in the same area, since you’ll just be blasted with constant DINGDINGDING noises and no idea where you should be pointing your gun.
That corpse sprite is the only time you get to see the aliens outside of cutscenes.
Speaking of the gun, it’s a sci-fi weapon with its own strange rules. It doesn’t use traditional ammo, instead blasting off a charged energy shot. Its capacity is also limited for some reason, meaning you can only fire it 3 times before it needs to be taken to a charge station. The result is that you need to make every shot count, which is a real pain when you can’t see your enemy. You have to wait until your target is right in your face and about to attack before firing. I actually love this on some level. It’s very similar to how photographing ghosts works in Fatal Frame, and does create a lot of tension.
The problem is that Enemy Zero struggles to balance tension and frustration, with the latter frequently overtaking the former. You can insert “Disc 0” when you start it up to watch the big intro sequence and play a training mode. This mode contains 3 little practice areas meant to acclimate you to combat, but it can only do so much to prepare you for how difficult this game gets in the later areas. The biggest reason for the high difficulty is something I haven’t mentioned yet: the save system. You see, the devs opted for something more diegetic than traditional save points. Laura picks up a voice recorder at the start of the game. Whenever you’re in a pre-rendered safe area, you can use the recorder to save your progress. This is explained as Laura making an audio diary of everything that’s happened so far. When you load a save file, a scene plays of Laura pulling out the recorder and playing back her last entry. This is the aforementioned only time you’ll hear her speak, which is a weird thing WARP did in all these games, having the protagonist be nearly silent except for some occasion to speak.
This did not adequately prepare me for the challenge ahead.
The tricky part is that the voice recorder has a limited amount of charges and can’t be recharged. Depending on your chosen difficulty level, both saving and loading your game will cost some amount of charges (such as 3 to save and 1 to load). As someone who isn’t the most tech-literate, I tested this out because I couldn’t believe it actually kept track of how often you loaded your game in the manner it does. I assume that numerical value is actually saved any time you select the option to load your game, because I did that and then turned the system off. When I turned it back on, the charge was still subtracted. This means that you can actually run out of opportunities to load your save file. And believe me, you will. Even with multiple difficulty options available, the only one I would truly call easy is the Japanese beginner mode (not to be confused with the North American/European beginner mode), which gives you unlimited charges. I attempted to play this game on easy thinking it would be lenient enough with its 99 charges compared to normal’s 64 (and guns that are always charged when you find them) and was gravely mistaken.
If you have a great sense of direction, you may not struggle as much as I did. Enemy Zero heavily utilizes maze-like areas to create tension and difficulty. You spend so much time running through hallways where everything looks the same and your VPS is blaring in your ear. As I said before, I do think this creates a lot of genuine tension. That is, until you realize you’ve run into a dead end and die again, with the full knowledge that you just wasted some more charges. I’m one of those people who can get lost walking in a straight line, and I demonstrated that many times during my playthrough. Some of the areas you have to run around are quite big and can contain up to 4 aliens, creating an absolute nightmare scenario for someone like me.
A dead alien in a cutscene.
Admittedly, the first 2 discs aren’t that bad. Most of your time will be spent in the point-and-click sections, free from enemies. There are some obtuse puzzles where I had no idea what I was doing, but the game does try to ease you into combat. I’m pretty sure disc 2 only has a couple of combat zones in its entire length, and they’re relatively easy at that. The first disc pulls a cheap move of having you encounter enemies before you even get a gun, but I didn’t have any trouble getting around them. Each area you explore during these discs also features at least one computer terminal where you can view maps of the local floors. The real problem is disc 3, where it suddenly feels like Enemy Zero doesn’t want you to finish it.
Once you get that prompt to switch discs, the kid gloves come off. There are no more maps to find, and you better hope you have enough charges left to save before you step off the elevator to the first area of disc 3. What follows is almost entirely combat sections. You get to run through 3 floors in a row with multiple enemies in them before the next safe room. There’s one nice goodie to find in that room, a gun with unlimited charges. Getting this gun feels less momentous than it should, since it really just seems necessary for the combat gauntlet that follows. When you leave the safe room, you then have to make your way through 6 large floors full of enemies before you get another chance to save. A new enemy type is even introduced just to make things worse. Much smaller aliens resembling maggots crawl along the hallways from this point on. They’re actually visible, but are numerous, still instantly kill you and have the audacity to respawn if you backtrack.
The scenery gets pretty interesting on disc 3, at least.
It’s hard to accurately describe how outrageously difficult the final stretch of this game is. In a normal game with save points, you can just reload as many times as needed to get past even the hardest difficulty spike. Now, I know what you might be thinking: plenty of old games didn’t even let you save, so having to start over isn’t that weird. That’s true, but older games adhering to arcade design philosophies were typically very short. Getting back to where you left off isn’t a huge deal in a game that can be beaten in half an hour. On the other hand, Enemy Zero takes around 3 hours to beat if you’re playing it perfectly, largely due to the many unskippable cutscenes and unbearably slow movement during the pre-rendered sections. Laura moves around like a glacier, which makes it incredibly tedious to have to redo mundane actions like pressing buttons and flipping switches over and over between getting killed by enemies you can’t see. I’d be surprised if anyone made it to disc 3 for the first time and didn’t end up running out of reloads. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I think there are 3 rooms in the entire disc that allow you to save, with enemies galore in between.
It’s a shame, because I actually really like the very last stretch of the game. During her ordeal on the ship, Laura learns that she and her boyfriend David are both androids. Think the twist from Alien, but if Ripley was the android instead of Ash. They were totally unaware of this, both having false memories a la Blade Runner and the obvious capacity for human emotions displayed by their relationship. Not long after this revelation, David is attacked by an alien and mostly destroyed. Heartbroken but determined to escape, Laura presses on. In a nice touch, the final gun you find is implied to be his. If you make it through the hellish combat sections on disc 3, you’ll see a worrying cutscene. Laura’s VPS battery dies. As she slumps over, distraught, a voice comes through over the AKI’s intercom. It’s David. He explains that he managed to upload his consciousness to the ship’s systems. He’s activated the self-destruct system to get rid of the alien menace for good, and can lead you to the escape pod before it blows. This leads to a really cool section where you actually do have to listen for David’s directions over the blaring alarm as you run through identical corridors. He’ll even let you know if an enemy is approaching.
Aww.
Laura and David’s relationship comes up a few times throughout the story, with some implications from him that things were a bit rocky before the current catastrophe. But hey, it’s easy to put that aside when you’re in mortal danger. They worry about each other and even share a big, dramatic kiss when they reunite. Laura is devastated by his apparent death, and so relieved when she hears his voice again. The focus on love in D2 was one of the aspects I appreciated most about it, but it was a much more morbid game than Enemy Zero. Here, it all comes across as very sweet for a horror game. It’s also interesting to see from a nearly 30-year-old game, considering that there are modern video game publishers who are terrified of including romance in their games because they’re afraid of upsetting shippers or “making players feel gay” when they see a female protagonist embracing a man. So, I think it’s unfortunate that the payoff of David surviving in some capacity and helping Laura make it back to Earth was probably not seen by many players in the days before save states existed.
Enemy Zero is a weird and interesting game, unmistakably a WARP production to anyone familiar with the studio. It also has the most insane difficulty spike I’ve ever encountered in a video game. Despite how frustrating it is, I can’t help but like the game. It has some neat ideas and shows a great capacity to create tension at times. If it ever got a remaster, I’d be there day one to try it again. Truth be told, I feel a nagging urge to go back and beat it properly. You even unlock an unused cutscene of the aliens fully rendered and visible if you beat it on hard mode, so there’s something to work toward. As a final note, check out Enemy Zero the Graphics if you want to see something wild. This Japanese behind-the-scenes book features lots of screenshots and information about the game’s development, including some incredibly risque concept art for designs and ideas that never got used in the final game.
As you most likely know, a big snowstorm has been moving across large portions of North America over the past few days. The estimates I’ve heard range from 185 to 270 million people across Mexico, the US and Canada being affected. Over a million people are currently said to be without power, including some of my friends and family. Thankfully, my city usually doesn’t lose electricity during these big storms, and it’s held on so far. Given that it’s too cold to go outside, I’ve been playing some video games while waiting for the roads to clear.
I love these rhythm minigames.
I figured now would be a good time to check out the NSO Genesis/Mega Drive app, since I’d been meaning to for a while. It has a pretty good selection of classic games, though I question why the selection of Sonic titles is limited to Sonic The Hedgehog 2, Sonic Spinball and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. The blue blur is the company mascot, after all. The app plays the little “Seeeegaaaaa” jingle on start-up, which is a nice touch. My first choice was Toejam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, as I’m one of those weirdos who prefer it to the original game. The plot is appropriately amusing, as it’s a reverse alien invasion story. Upon returning to their home planet of Funkotron at the end of the first game, the titular duo accidentally brought along some human stowaways, whom the locals find very annoying. These humans take pictures of their new hosts, let their pets run wild, throw baseballs with no regard for their surroundings and other rude behaviors, so Toejam and Earl are tasked with rounding them up and putting them on rockets back to Earth. Many people dislike this game compared to its predecessor, but I like the more linear platforming, rhythm minigames and funky tone.
Kayla, with her minions Wally and Inky.
The other Genesis game I really got into recently is Landstalker, an isometric action/adventure game that I hadn’t even heard of until a few years ago. The reason I started playing it is kind of narcissistic, but hopefully funny: there’s a character in the game named Kayla. I hardly ever see characters with my own name in video games, so I got curious about it. You play as Nigel, a treasure hunter with a fairy sidekick named Friday who goes out in search of the treasures of King Nole. You’ll hack and slash your way across various dungeons, caves and forests while occasionally solving puzzles and visiting standard RPG towns and cities for supplies, saving and maybe finding your next objective. As someone who has always had issues with isometric perspectives in games, platforming can sometimes be a pain here. It’s a fun game overall, though. Kayla is a rival treasure hunter who shows up from time to time with her henchmen to ruin your good time, though they are comically inept. The one notable thing about her is there’s a scene in the original Japanese version where she attempts to seduce Nigel, which was cut from the American release.
Can you tell I had a daily to equip dwellers with flamethrowers?
Fallout is actually the only other series where I’ve encountered my name, so it’s fitting that Fallout Shelter is another game I’ve been playing during this storm. I’ve played it on and off on multiple devices over the 10 years since it released. Can you believe it’s been that long? They recently decided to shake things up to promote the TV show, so it now has seasons and battle passes. It’s currently on the second season and I actually like how they’ve implemented the seasonal content here, for what it’s worth. Each season has you start a secondary vault with its own special challenges to complete, rewarding you with unique dwellers, themes, weapons, outfits, pets and some lunchboxes. There are free and paid tiers of the battle pass, as expected, and any items earned during a season will be made available in your main vault once it ends. References to the show are the big draws here, with the main characters being freebies. Progress in the seasonal vault is much faster due to the time limit, which makes it pretty fun. It’s nice to take a break from a vault that’s countless rooms deep to quickly throw one together and see how big you can make it in a month’s time.
Moppu is pretty much me right now.
Finally, I’ve been checking out the new updates for cozy games Hello Kitty Island Adventure and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. AC recently got a big update that, among other things, added a hotel to the island run by Kapp’n and his family. You’re encouraged to help them by decorating the rooms with various themes and crafting furniture they need, and can earn tickets as a reward to buy things from the hotel gift shop. It’s very similar to the Happy Home Paradise DLC, except this all happens right on your island. Hotel guests will even check out the local scenery and shops while visiting, which is neat. Over on Friendship Island, a new update brought the character Moppu into the group and added bears to the character customization options. Moppu is an introverted gamer who lives in a frozen cave in the snow village, whose primary concern when you first meet him is that his game console and personal vending machine are broken. Him showing up while I’m stuck at home in the cold playing video games is perfect timing.
Have you been affected by the big storm? If so, I hope you’re staying safe. I have friends and acquaintances as far south as Texas and as far north as Toronto, so I know plenty of people who are stuck indoors right now. Here’s hoping this all gets cleared up soon.
I’m not a very competitive person. I’ve never enjoyed playing ranked modes in fighting games or shooters, and am pleasantly surprised if I make the top 10 in an F-Zero 99 race. That said, Nintendo Switch Sports does a good job at incentivizing people to play online, and the ranking system has made me want to challenge myself. I recently hit A rank in two of the sports, and thought it would be fun to talk about.
Woo!
Technically, A isn’t the highest rank in the game. It used to be, but a patch a while back changed the ranking system so that the highest tiers within A were converted into S ranks instead. So, you hit rank A29 and then get promoted to S0 the next time you rank up in the new system. I’m not sure if I’ll ever hit S rank in my favorite sport, tennis, but I’m happy to have finally made it to A (A16, to be exact). I actually played on my school’s tennis team for a while when I was younger and enjoyed it, but I was never the star player by any means. When I started playing Switch Sports, I progressed through the ranks at a nice pace and then got stuck at B+. I stayed there for so long, I thought I might be stuck forever! A nice little win streak last week finally pushed me over the edge into the A team, and I’m pretty happy with it. You get a spiffy crown for each sport you reach A rank with, which is a nice bonus.
I love this very ’90s outfit.
As I said above, Switch Sports does a good job of encouraging everyone to play online. There are many sets of cosmetic items to collect that can only be earned with points from playing online, including outfits, stamps (emotes), titles, hairstyles and hair/eye colors. Each hour, two sports are chosen to give double points. This is pretty much why I also ended up getting to A rank in bowling. It’s an easy and laid-back sport compared to the others, so I often pick it as a back-up when queuing for tennis (since you can pick up to 3 sports for matchmaking). I reached A rank in bowling before tennis, and am currently at a higher sub-rank in it at A25. I struggle with some of the advanced lanes that are littered with hazards and get plenty of cringe-worthy gutterballs, but it’s always fun.
I play Switch Sports almost every day, and feel it makes for a great successor to the Wii Sports series. It’s fun to collect new outfits and stamps while gradually improving at the games, not to mention providing a great excuse to get up and move around while gaming. I’m not sure if I’ll ever hit S rank in any sports, but I plan to keep trying. I’m also currently trying to get better at basketball and golf, both sports where my skill level can be described as abysmal. But hey, it’s fun to learn!
I love Kairosoft games, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog. Their library consists of casual sims of various flavors, all wrapped in graphics reminiscent of SNES oldies and available on every platform under the sun. While their titles can be a bit samey, I love unwinding with them and seeing what new themes they explore over time. One of their most recent games, Final Frontier Story, is the game I never knew I wanted: a cutesy space colony management sim.
You can have hot springs in space!
I’m a big fan of sci-fi, but have never really gotten into games set in space. I think they tend to be too complex and interested in the mechanics of maintaining spaceships or buildings for my tastes. That’s where the Kairosoft formula of cute visuals plus casual gameplay comes in to make Final Frontier Story appeal to me. The premise is simple enough; you’re put in charge of a small colony just starting out on a new planet. When you start a new game, you get to design a pilot who will be sent out on missions to explore the territory. Then, you get a brief overview of what types of structures you can build and the resource management required to attract new settlers and expand the colony.
The gameplay loop is pretty simple. Your pilot and helper robots will fly around exploring uncharted areas and collecting resources while you construct various facilities for your citizens. You’ll gradually unlock new research proposals, which allow you to build more structures ranging from convenience stores to concert halls. Keep your population happy by making sure they have all the facilities they could want and need, and your colony will gain fame and attract new citizens.
A fight against a space mermaid in a tennis ball ship.
As your pilot explores, they will encounter aliens looking for a fight. Given the lighthearted nature of the game, combat is typically presented as a jokey challenge. When one of these missions is selected, your pilot will engage the enemy like a shoot-em-up on autopilot. You don’t manually attack; instead, your pilot attacks automatically based on their stats and tactics that you have assigned. Your one manual input here is to deploy bombs if they are available.
Once defeated, enemies will become allies. They and your citizens will freely mingle, they can set up shops and hold events in your colony, and they will even join your pilot in future battles. Your pilot can also become stronger through various means, such as spending research points to upgrade individual stats, discover and manufacture new ship parts, and changing jobs. That last one can take all sorts of forms, like becoming a tennis player who flies in a ship shaped like a tennis ball that also uses them as projectiles in combat.
This concert brought in many tourists.
The presentation is all very cute and whimsical, which I love. I haven’t seen a space setting this cozy since Opoona, and it’s the perfect backdrop for a casual management sim. It’s a happy-go-lucky game that feels sort of like a Saturday morning cartoon. The gameplay is simple but addictive and fun, perfect for quick bursts of play whenever you have downtime throughout the day. If you’re a fan of casual management sims and want to befriend some adorable aliens, give Final Frontier Story a look.
I like playing and talking about weird video games, which I’ve made no secret on this blog. Even if I don’t think a game is especially good, I can appreciate one that is sufficiently odd. Kenji Eno made weird games and had a unique perspective on the video game industry, making him someone whose work I enjoy discussing. His studio WARP’s final game, D2 for the Sega Dreamcast, is one of the strangest games I’ve ever played and ripe for exploration. It’s a horror game about the end of the year and the end of the world, with genre-mashing gameplay and all sorts of quirks.
The weirdness begins even before you properly start the game, since you have to pop in disc 4 to watch the intro and then switch back to disc 1. Selecting an option on the main menu also greets you with the sound of a woman crying out, helping to set expectations for what follows. A full deep dive of the plot would be too long for this post, but I’ll cover the strange highlights. The premise is that on Christmas Day 2000, our heroine Laura is a passenger on a flight that gets hijacked by cultists raving about “Shadow, the final destroyer.” They start shooting, but the plane is hit by a meteor and crashes in the northern Canadian wilderness. Laura wakes up in a cabin ten days later after being found by another survivor named Kimberly, and the two soon discover that people have begun turning into plant monsters in the area. The infected sprout tentacles and attack normal humans, though seem to retain some of their mental faculties as they tend to repeat dialogue while hostile. The only way to know for sure someone is infected before they “blossom”, as the game puts it, is the green color of their blood.
You never know when tentacles are going to burst out of someone.
The gameplay in D2 is a strange mix of adventure game exploration and first-person shooting. Anytime you’re indoors, the game plays like a point-and-click. You look around your environment in first-person and find objects to interact with. This could be pressing A on a door to open it, a healing item to pick it up, or other objects such as documents to read. Outside, the perspective switches to third-person and you move around using tank controls until a random battle occurs. You’ll be walking along the snowy landscape when all of a sudden, you’ll be rooted to the ground and staring at a plant monster or a few. In this battle mode, you spray bullets at the monsters, hopefully hitting a weak spot like a Resident Evil-esque eyeball that’s out of place, and can only move by turning to catch up when they move out of view. It feels like a random arcade light-gun shooter crammed into an otherwise slow-paced horror adventure, and I’ve never encountered anything else quite like it. You can also use your starting rifle outside of combat to hunt animals, which you’ll want to do to keep a reliable stock of healing items in case you run out of the limited first aid sprays littered around the areas you explore.
D2 is not what I would call a good game, but it is very memorable. The gameplay really is a strange mix that doesn’t align with traditional survival horror games, and the story goes in all sorts of weird directions. It’s a game that I feel really wants to say something about humans’ cruelty toward each other and environmental destruction, but it does it in a clumsy and disjointed way. The plot ultimately seems to be about two cosmic forces known as the Great Mother and the aforementioned Shadow battling it out. The latter wants to destroy all life on Earth as some sort of punishment for our destructive ways, while the former wants to save us. Throughout the game, there are intervals typically following boss fights that intersperse stock footage of war, deforestation and other unpleasant imagery with scenes of Laura wandering in the snow before being magically teleported to her next destination by the Great Mother in the most naked display of the deus ex machina plot device I’ve ever seen.
Combat is a hectic affair.
A lot of the weirdness comes from how the game mixes sex and horror. Admittedly, this isn’t terribly uncommon in other media, but wasn’t a big thing in video games at the time. There’s a pervasive theme of sexual horror throughout D2. Right after Laura meets Kimberly, one of the terrorists from the plane barges into the cabin and transforms. One tentacle grabs Kimberly while another is shoved down her throat. This scene was censored for the North American release by panning the camera a bit, though it’s still extremely obvious what’s happening. Another infected character you encounter is the grandfather of a little girl named Jannie, who Laura and Kimberly find and care for while she attempts to locate him. Laura runs into him by chance while checking out a nearby facility, at which point a huge tentacle pops out of him and a boss fight begins. The tentacle sprouts out of his chest in the North American version of the game, but was originally placed much lower to really creep players out in the Japanese release. Toward the end of the game, you encounter a huge computer that is shaped like, get ready for this, the lower half of a woman giving birth with her legs splayed out.
At some point, I think the censors gave up, because there’s a unique monster that shows up in cutscenes and then as a boss fight that is a completely nude clone of Kimberly with its own plant parts emerging from its crotch. You encounter a few of these clones, who are apparently the result of her run-in with the infected man at the beginning of the game. Kimberly goes through a lot in D2, as she also gets propositioned by a different surviving terrorist in a tense scene that ends in Laura listening from under a bed as she kills him. She tells you she already had issues with trusting men prior to the crash, and it’s a theme that really shows up in her encounters with other survivors throughout the story.
You can guess where it was in the Japanese version.
The Kimberly clone is introduced in a scene that is pretty disturbing except for one aspect that hurts the game’s atmosphere: the use of stock sound effects. Laura returns from looking for supplies to find Kimberly (or so she assumes) wearing only a towel and being menaced by a man waving a gun. A lengthy cutscene follows wherein he interrogates the terrified women while accusing Kimberly of being a murderer and monster, culminating in him shooting her in the leg to reveal her green blood. Then, a boss fight commences with the imposter. Here’s the thing, though. The gunshot sounds both in the cutscene and boss fights are a stock splat! sound you’ve probably heard in various children’s cartoons. It’s such a jarring thing to hear during dramatic scenes, and makes it hard to take them seriously. The first time I got to this scene, I went from being glued to the screen to laughing out loud at the absurdity of it.
Another subplot that illustrates how the goofy presentation can hurt the tone of D2 is that of Tom, the musician. Tom’s mother Martha wanted him to be a great pianist, so she made him move to a cabin in the wilderness with her to escape “distractions” such as friends. She even made him get hooked on a drug called Linda to keep him practicing all the time. One day, he snapped and burned her face before taking up residence in a different house nearby. He lets Laura and the others stay in that house until Kimberly inexplicably kills him, which is also part of an odd subplot about how her own addiction to the drug causes her to kill people without remembering it. When confronted by Martha about this, she just kind of admits it must be true and what should be a pretty big twist (especially considering the clones seemed to be set up to explain “Kimberly” having a violent side) is just dropped. It does lead to Martha turning into a plant monster and becoming a boss fight, however.
Laura, Jannie and Kimberly.
The culmination of her and her son’s story would be quite tragic if not for how goofy the battle with Martha actually is. She plays a violin during the entire fight and constantly pirouettes around the room, all while repeatedly yelling out a handful of lines about her son. It’s cacophonous and very silly to witness, and goes on forever thanks to the tiny violin being her weak spot. Once again, the cartoony gunshot sound effects don’t help matters and combined with the very dumb visuals of this woman twirling around the area, make it hard to take the whole thing seriously.
One of the biggest plot points in D2 is Laura’s relationship with David, which is also fittingly strange. David is an FBI agent who strikes up a conversation with her on the plane after she drops her compact and he hands it back to her. The compact was a gift from her late mother, and mysteriously starts glowing when the terrorists attack. David looks into it and sees a vision of the impending plane crash, causing him to grab Laura’s hand and take off toward the back of the plane before impact. When Laura wakes up in the cabin, he is nowhere to be seen. Kimberly hasn’t seen him either, but notes that Laura was calling his name in her sleep.
The least festive Christmas tree in video game history.
This also ties into one of the weirdest aspects of the game, which is Laura’s refusal to speak. She is largely a silent protagonist, which doesn’t really work in a game where other people regularly converse with her. Kimberly even undergoes some positive character development in deciding to kick her drug habit and overcoming some past trauma thanks to befriending Laura, but it feels unearned given that Laura just stares and nods during their conversations. If not for that bit about David, I would have thought she couldn’t speak. I think the developers were going for something deep here by only having her speak for important moments, namely by stating her own name to gain access to her mother’s abandoned science lab and calling out for David a few times. Like the stock sound effects, though, it just makes the overall presentation bizarre.
Back to Laura and David’s relationship, which is actually my favorite part of D2. Upon waking at the start of the game, Kimberly informs Laura that it’s been ten days since the crash, but she only found her two days ago. She also hasn’t seen David. This leaves a mystery as to where he ended up and what happened during that eight-day period, since Laura can’t remember it. He only shows up during the intro, ending cutscene and a few flashbacks throughout the game. In all of these flashbacks, David can be heard speaking to Laura while snow falls over a white backdrop. It becomes apparent pretty quickly that these conversations took place during that missing time. He talks about being critically injured, how strange the vision from the compact and his actions toward this woman he had just met were, how he grew up in this area and was coming to visit family. Gradually, the tone of the conversations shifts to him pleading with Laura to make sure she survives this ordeal as he comes to accept his impending death. Unlike other serious scenes that are marred by goofy visuals or sound effects, I find these flashbacks appropriately somber and effective at conveying the bleak situation these two found themselves in.
David, as seen in the intro.
The game never outright states this, but I think you’re meant to infer that Laura at least partially cannibalized him. Call me crazy, but Kimberly makes a casual comment at the beginning about how Laura seemed like she had eaten during her time lost in the snow despite not having any supplies or tools for hunting. David’s body is never seen in-game, even though he presumably died not terribly far from any of the areas you can explore. You also meet people who are strongly implied to be his family members and wonder about his absence; his brother being the crazed man who exposes the Kimberly clone according to photos you find and his father being a man at an observatory who mentions that his FBI agent son was supposed to come visit him. (As a side note, said man converses with a living plant he is in love with, then tells Laura about how he knew the world was ending before anyone else did and asks her to kill him with a nearby flamethrower. I told you this game was weird.) Given the lack of a body and David’s insistence that Laura do whatever she must to survive while sounding increasingly pained during the later flashbacks, I think Eno wanted players to conclude she ate him.
Regardless, David’s sacrifice for her is one of the largest motivations Laura has to keep going throughout her journey. She wants to find him or at least repay his kindness by granting his last wish and making it out alive. After meeting his father, she treks to her mother’s science lab and makes some utterly bizarre discoveries about her past. It turns out, Lucy Parton was part of a genetic engineering and cloning research team that found a preserved woolly mammoth. While taking DNA samples from it, the team discovered the undigested remains of an unidentified organism resembling a winged human. Given that this is a very weird story, Dr. Parton naturally decided the best course of action was to extract a sperm sample from this unknown species and use it to impregnate herself. While in labor with Laura, she experienced visions of some cosmic force invading Earth sometime after her daughter reached adulthood. She died shortly after, but her fellow researchers and the government took an interest in continuing her experiment and uploaded her consciousness into a big supercomputer (the aforementioned machine that looks like it’s giving birth). She asks Laura to put her out of her misery, leading to a rare boss fight against an opponent who doesn’t fight back.
Lucy as she appeared before the whole supercomputer business.
The final stretch of the game naturally ramps the weirdness up to extreme levels. After all the other survivors of the crash have died, with Jannie having a particularly baffling death from just randomly melting, Laura makes a solitary journey up a nearby mountain that has started glowing an ominous red due to the presence of Shadow within. The final boss fight against him is unlike any other I’ve ever played, and truthfully one of my favorites for how surreal it is. Shadow looks like one of those illustrations of Biblically-accurate angels you sometimes see, a mess of eyeballs and various symbols. The showdown begins simply enough, with your goal being to fire away with the best guns you have. After you take off some of his health, he says he will demonstrate his power and the futility of your struggle against him by taking away your sight. This makes the screen go black save for the most basic HUD elements. You have no choice but to keep shooting him while listening for signs you’re hitting his weak point. After some more damage, he takes Laura’s hearing and leaves her paralyzed.
As Shadow gloats about her helplessness to defeat him, Laura recalls her final conversation with David. He plucked a flower from the frozen ground and placed it in her compact as a keepsake before saying goodbye. At this point, your next move is to select her compact from your inventory and open it to reveal the flower. Through the power of love, Shadow is weakened and Laura’s senses are restored so she can finish off the last of his health. Then, she hears the voice of the Great Mother telling her to go forth and find the one who saved her life, to remember him and call out to him to save everything. You actually have to press a button to yell for David here, and I think it’s a nice little touch. Ultimately, the relationship between Laura and David is what I like most about D2 because it’s a morbid love story. We don’t get many of those in video games, so I find the combination of romance and abject horror appealing for how unique it is.
Happy New Year!
In an appropriately weird design choice, D2 ends on a happy note that turns cynical. Laura finds herself sent back in time to New Year’s Eve 1999, browsing in a bookstore where Jannie is happily running around. She drops her compact, and David picks it up to return to her. He notices the book of poetry in her hand, written by Kimberly, and comments on how a particularly uplifting poem describes a woman who looks very similar to Laura herself. After their little chat, they part ways outside as the countdown begins. After a moment of hesitation, Laura blurts out David’s name and runs up to him. They embrace as the year 2000 begins, and all is well. And then, a long montage of that stock footage featuring war, natural disasters, industrialization and all manner of chaotic and destructive human impulses that had appeared during brief moments of the game plays out while stats are rattled off such as the current and future projections for the Earth’s population and HIV rates. It’s quite the tonal shift and extremely heavy-handed. You can even change it up some more if your system clock is set to near midnight on 12/31/00 when you beat the game, since the time rolling over will trigger a message saying “Welcome to the 21st century!”
D2 is a truly weird game both in story and gameplay. It has a lot to say, but not all of it makes sense and much of it is lacking in subtlety. Still, I enjoy the surreal experience of it all enough that I’ve beaten it multiple times, and think it makes for a moody and atmospheric experience around the turn of a new year. Horror and romance go surprisingly well together, if you ask me, while the totally insane subplots and presentation are at least amusing when they fall short of their intended reactions. If you’re a fan of horror games or obscure auteur works, D2 at least deserves a look.
I had a longer post I wanted to work on today, but I’m sick, so I thought it would be fun to try out a daily writing prompt. One of the items I loved the most as a kid was my PlayStation. I spent untold hours playing the likes of Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy VII on it, and rented games for it nearly every weekend.
Technically, I owned two of them before I managed to upgrade to the PS2. You see, the PS1 had common issues with disc-read errors due to the laser becoming misaligned or wearing down over time (I’m not the most tech-literate, so excuse me if that isn’t exactly correct). I have no idea how I and many other children managed to figure this out, perhaps I heard it from someone, but we all collectively deduced that you could flip the console upside down to get it to read discs. Apparently, the power of gravity could help re-align the laser and delay the inevitable for a time. This did work for me for a while, but my beloved console kicked the bucket eventually.
By the time my original model croaked, the PS2 was maybe a year out from launch. I knew my chances of getting one early on were slim, since it was a pricey new console and likely to experience stock issues to boot (and it sure did). Instead, my parents opted to buy me a replacement PS1, thanks to it getting some nice price cuts, followed by a Dreamcast the next year. I was happy as could be with that set up, especially since I finally got to play games with the DualShock controller for the first time. Looking back, I kind of can’t believe how often I received new consoles as presents given my family’s tight budget. I hope I showed my parents plenty of gratitude.
I have no idea what became of my original PS1; I assume I put it away in my closet and it eventually got tossed out during a move. My second model served me well until I finally got my own PS2. When I got my new console, I gave away that PS1 to one of my best friends and her siblings. They owned an N64 but not a PlayStation, and were happy to now have both. I think it was a pretty common experience to give away old consoles to people you knew back then, and it happened between my family and others in our community several times over the years.
Happy New Year! I hope this will be a good one. There are a few special anniversaries coming up for me in 2026, so I’m hopeful despite the ongoing insanity of the world. One thing I didn’t expect to be talking about so soon is being a Switch 2 owner, but here we are. Before settling in to watch Stranger Things last night, I ended up making a run to my local Best Buy to grab a new console.
I didn’t have time to grab a New Year’s hat before the countdown, but hearing Hopkins’ resolution made up for it.
I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not I should buy a Switch 2 for a few months now. I wasn’t terribly excited by its launch lineup or new features, so felt like spending a big chunk of change for some performance upgrades was a bit frivolous. On the other hand, there’s a looming fear that the price will increase in the foreseeable future, much like all tech being affected by component shortages and tariffs. That was ultimately what led to a conversation with my husband yesterday about whether I should buy it.
Even though I’m not currently wowed by the exclusive games, I have a big collection of Switch games I’d like to keep playing going forward. Something like Nintendo Switch Sports or Animal Crossing New Horizons can’t be played elsewhere, and I similarly have a lot of time invested in my Hello Kitty Island Adventure island on the console that I don’t want to lose if it croaks. We thankfully are in a position where we can afford to buy new tech right now if we need to, so we’ve both been thinking about what upgrades we might need to make in the near future. With that in mind, plus the prospect of future exclusives and getting to play Hello Kitty at a decent framerate, I decided to bite the bullet and just get a Switch 2 now so I wouldn’t have to worry about any future price changes.
One of the first things I did was fire up Luigi’s Mansion.
I appreciate Nintendo making the effort to have ample stock available. As far as I can tell, that hasn’t been much of an issue at all since launch. I lived through the PS2 and Wii launches, and can vividly remember spending about 6 months trying to track both of those down back in the day. I just walked into my local Best Buy and asked for one, with multiple SKUs to choose from. I ended up just buying the basic model without Mario Kart World, because I don’t really see myself playing it when Mario Kart 8 Deluxe suits me just fine.
I really like the console itself so far. There are noticeable performance improvements for Switch games that struggled before, the screen is quite nice and even the design is fashionably sleek. I’m someone who loves garish, brightly-colored consoles and accessories, so I wasn’t sure I’d like the inverted Joy-Con colors compared to my existing neon sets. I must say, the black base with blue and red accents is pretty cool in person. The system transfer was a simple and smooth process. Being a fan of the GameCube, I immediately installed the NSO GameCube app and fired up Luigi’s Mansion. That app might be the thing that finally gets me to sit down and beat Chibi-Robo!, which I’ve been meaning to do for years. I wasn’t sure how Animal Crossing would handle it, but it was fine. I popped onto the island to see the New Year’s festivities, so that was a nice way to start things off with the new system. Overall, I’m happy I went ahead and got a Switch 2, and will probably check out the Kirby and the Forgotten Land DLC in the near future. I hope you all have a wonderful 2026!
Kay Talks Games 
