Hoo boy, where to begin. Where indeed. There’s just so damn much to say about Garry’s Mod. Well… for starters, it’s not so much a video game as it is a physics engine that allows for an insane level of creativity on the part of its users. …Yeah, that’s the short version. I don’t think I can properly review this as a video game, as it really is more like a tool to create games… or to have fun putting items together and seeing how they interact. Unless the games made by its users count as the game itself. Anyway!
Developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve, Garry’s Mod was released on… November 29th, 2006. Almost 20 years ago. That makes it one of the oldest products in my Steam library. When this game came out, my French-speaking ass was still learning English in high school!
Everybody has to start somewhere. Me? I got myself crushed by that tower. That's how I found out that we still have HP during sandbox/construction...
Officially, this software was created by Garry Newman, a developer from Valve who worked on Half-Life 2. The original, titular mod was just that game with a few additions; but then this expanded into a full sandbox game comprising not only H-L2’s physics engine and assets, but also the assets of other games made with the Source engine. Notable ones include Left 4 Dead and Counter-Strike, as well as possibly the biggest name out of all of them, Team Fortress 2. The only requirement is that you own the other base games in your Steam library in order to access the assets.
If you ask me, the funniest thing about this article is that I took so long to get around to talking about Garry’s Mod that Facepunch Studios released a sequel in the meantime; S&box came out last April, roughly 19 and a half years after its predecessor. But let’s focus on Garry’s Mod, or as it is also known, GMod.
I could decorate a cozy home with this stuff. Too bad this field isn't much of a house!
Full disclaimer here, I did play a few hours of this game in preparation for this article, but not dozens, so I obviously won’t have the experience of others who've spent hundreds of hours on it. Heck, this article will be less like a review and more of an informative thing. Though, it will have some of my impressions based on what I’ve tested. I wasn’t even sure whether I could cover this product correctly, it’s just a sandbox after all; as a result, expect this to be less about the game itself and more about what others have made from it. Honestly, I’m coming in so late to this that it’s probably the best I can do; celebrate how this program was used and how it left a mark in gaming history.
In Part 1, I covered a part of the plot and went over many of the game’s features. Well, there’s more to say today!
Fantastic Photo Features
Yes, Corsola! Get to the apple!
This new Snap game takes full advantage of the abilities of the current consoles, and takes cues from all the ways people have gained to edit their own pictures on smartphones. The photo edit feature is accessible from the Photodex in the Lab.
Cel-shaded is great. I would play a cel-shaded Pokémon game.
First is filters; at time of writing, I had found 15 out of 20, from classic black-and-white and sepia to greater changes like cel-shaded, a comic style, a fish-eye lens, or pixelated. Second is stickers, which can be added to the picture: Symbols, facial expressions, effects and speech bubbles. Finally, special frames can be added for extra flair. Filters, stickers and frames are unlocked through gameplay, by earning research titles and by completing pages of the Photodex.
Still not enough? You can use this menu to add your own caption to the picture, upload it online to your New Pokémon Snap page, or download it to your console’s photo album, if you like it enough for that.
Most of these settings make changes so minute that only a photographer with real experience would be able to tell. The biggest exception is the brightness, of course.
Another feature added is the Re-Snap, which you can access after your run through a course has been scored by Mirror. You can take any of your pictures (doesn’t need to be one that the Professor scored this round), re-frame it, and change the brightness, blur, focus size, or focal point; you can even put new filters or change the caption! However, since this can only happen after the scoring’s been done, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a pleasant extra that allows you to do the perfect shot out of a photo that wasn’t perfect to start with. It’s not pointless, but if you’re playing for scores and exploration and not for the creativity aspect, it won’t be what you’ll gravitate to.
Through the years, I’ve seen a lot of franchises attempt ideas outside of their usual perimeters – as a result, I’ve seen both crashes and burns, and massive, unexpected successes. I don’t think it’s any surprise to say that Pokémon Snap is in the latter category. Released on July 26th, 1999, the Nintendo 64 game featured Todd Snap, a young photographer tasked by Professor Oak with taking pictures of all 63 Pokémon species found on an island.
For a franchise still in its early days, this came out of left field! The game, while short, had everything going for itself. It tickled that desire for gamers to hunt for better scores. It had unlockable tools and mechanics to get different reactions from the photography subjects. And there were plenty of secrets that could be found by just trying things and seeing what happens.
Catching the three 'puff on film is fun. Pissing them off by playing the flute is even better.
This idea took a long time to return, which always felt odd to me; just make one at every Generation, add new Pokémon and locations, and that should be it, right? Imagine the possibilities! And yet, despite many attempts, several plans for a second Snap game didn’t make it far. Photography didn’t truly return to the franchise till Pokémon Sun/Moon; that side-quest felt like Game Freak testing the grounds. Even though their fans had been asking for this for 17 years by that point! Finally, our prayers were answered, with New Pokémon Snap releasing on April 30th, 2021, on the Nintendo Switch.
With all this time between installments, surely the system has been massively updated, right? Let’s take a look.
Welcome to the Lentil Region
This time, our character is an avatar representing a child. He is greeted on the first island of the Lentil Region by Professor Mirror and his assistant Rita. They direct the Laboratory of Ecological and Natural Sciences, or L.E.N.S., on Florio Island.
A Prof in Pokémon without a tree name? That's rare! Also, neat pun for the name of the laboratory! P.S. These screenshots come from the playthrough by MunchingOrange. Go check it out!
I’m hard at work on the next articles, since I have huge plans for VGFlicks this time around. Plus, I didn’t get a mystery box of music last year, so I figured I’d just go through fewer albums this year.
I’ve done this intro each year since 2024 now: Needlejuice Records is an indie label from Nashville, Tennessee, that I greatly enjoy. I started off knowing just one band from their lineup, then expanded thanks to mystery boxes, and now I’m going as far as to try and at least hear everything their artists have put out. Some bands I’ve discovered this way are now big favorites of mine. Are you into indie rock? Maybe metal? Prog? Techno? Punk? Vaporwave/slushwave? Comedy music? Damn near every genre’s covered in some fashion. The label is very LGBTQ+-friendly, and has both a Bandcamp page and a website. (And a Discord server, too, accessible from Bandcamp.)
This time, I’ll do things differently by focusing on a specific band. This journey of mine began with one musical act: Nuclear Bubble Wrap (shortened NBW), whom I discovered around 2010. Crazy to think that’s been 15 years. Songs from the band were posted to a forum dedicated to “Weird Al” Yankovic by the band’s frontperson (and one of its singers), Jace McLain, which is how I first discovered them. McLain, one of the founders of Needlejuice Records, still puts out music both with this band and as a part of a few side-projects.
I did buy some physical albums from the label in 2024, including an anniversary box set of NBW’s fourth album, Exploding Head Syndrome (shortened EHS), packed with three additional CDs – so instead of bogging down a whole list of 10 albums with constant repetition, I figured I’d just dedicate an article to covering all four discs. Along with the other album of theirs I’ve got that I haven’t covered yet. And maybe throw in another album that felt like foreshadowing towards the existence of the label.
Once again, I rank from my favorite to the least favorite, starting with…
Psycho Delicacy
This was the first NBW, non-EP album to be made up entirely of original songs (zero parodies) that all have either a comedic or psychedelic edge. Sometimes both. At a sprawling 72 minutes and 21 songs, Psycho Delicacy, released on May 13th, 2014, is NBW’s longest official album, funded through Kickstarter. I backed it; along with the physical CD, my reward included a bonus disc containing demos from their next album, Multiverses, and other random songs.
Spend a lot of money to install your coasters! And make sure your peeps pay through the nose to ride it, too - or else, how will you make that money back?
Sometimes, you buy a game just because of one feature you really want to try out. I can’t say I wasn’t ever guilty of that, and in fact, I can think of quite a few games I bought just because I was intrigued about one thing I wished to test! Today’s game, for which the version I'm covering is no longer available on Steam, is one of those. The RollerCoaster Tycoon (RCT) games were a creation first of Chris Sawyer and later of Frontier Developments released from 1999 to 2004, and yet all of them were great examples of what computers could achieve at the time, even if some of them used interesting game dev magic to function. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 was first released in 2004. It’s available on Steam under the name Complete Edition, which was released to online stores in 2020; but what I own is the Platinum! edition, which was pulled from online retailers in 2017 due to an ongoing lawsuit between Atari and Frontier. And, well, after Complete’s release, there's no need to bring it back.
I’ll review the version I have. This version includes expansion packs: Soaked!, which focuses on waterparks, and Wild!, which favors animal exhibits and shows. Let's manage some parks!
The Peeps are Back
Always gotta think of entrances, exits, and paths towards both anytime you place a new attraction.
The core concept of RollerCoaster Tycoon is to manage amusement parks with different objectives. You may be asked to have a certain number of guests in your park, or to hit a certain park value; other times, you tend to VIP guests and must satisfy them before they leave. The Peeps are as funny – and numerous! – as ever. But, I must be honest here, there is exactly ONE reason why I bought this game when I already owned RCT1: In 3, you can use the camera to get aboard the rides and roller coasters you place around your park, giving you a first-person view of all the excitement. So, as you can imagine, my first instinct when booting up this one was to go into Sandbox Mode and create everything I could, just to experience it myself right afterwards. That alone was worth the price.
Descending soon... WHEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAHHH!
Clint Bushton: Coaster amateur, ex-president, likes women named Monica. All similarities with persons living or dead, yadda yadda.
But! There’s still a game behind all this! 18 scenarios in the classic package, and an extra 21 (9 in Soaked!, 12 in Wild!) across both expansions, for a total of 39. All of them have objectives split in three ranks: Apprentice, Entrepreneur and Tycoon. You can’t move on to the next rank until you’ve finished every mission of the current one. On early scenarios, the later rank missions are just extensions of previous ones (ex. Have 450+ guests in your park for two months on Entrepreneur, when one request in Apprentice demanded 300+ guests for one month).
Continuing today with the remainder of the albums from the mystery box.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Live in London ‘19
The members of KGLW have released more bootlegs in 2024 than ever before (37!!), which makes their previous 14 bootleg-friendly live concert releases pale in comparison. The way the bootlegging program works is that the band openly offers the stems and files on their website, free to download, and any label can use them to create their own variant of any album made available, be it a live concert, a demos collection, Teenage Gizzard (which I discussed), or Polygondwanaland. The band’s one request is to be shipped copies of the created variant, to sell on their label p(doom) records’ own website.
Their most productive year for those, prior to 2024, was 2019. That year, the band’s albums were the boogie and blues-inspired Fishing for Fishies, and the intense thrash/doom metal of Infest The Rats’ Nest. Along came six live “official live bootlegs” recorded between July 12th and October 14th, three of which (Brussels, Adelaide and Paris) were released in January 2020 to amass money for a charity fighting the Australian Bushfires. The other three (Asheville, London and Milwaukee), released in late 2020 or in 2021, also prominently feature tracks from 2019's studio releases.
I heard them all. And despite being the only one I own out of those six, Live in London ’19, recorded at Alexandra Palace, might be my least favorite. I know live bootlegs aren’t the place for incredible sound quality (…or might not have been, but then again, compare this to the sound quality of their 2024 live output), but even here it doesn’t feel so great. Maybe it’s because I’m a lyrics guy and I like to understand the lyrics when I listen to music that has them, and it’s a bias.
Don’t get me wrong, this album has lots of fan favorites from King Gizz’s discography. The Mind Fuzz Suite (though it’s missing its finale!), Evil Death Roll, Rattlesnake and Float Along – Fill Your Lungs are examples. However, when compared to the other live bootleg albums from that year, London ’19 has little that makes it stand out. The longest track, Crumbling Castle, while still my favorite, doesn’t even reach 11 minutes. Very few songs here are given the jam treatment, so it feels like it just doesn’t have enough of what makes KGLW concerts interesting.
If it’s only your first or second time hearing a live performance from the band, it’s fine on its own. However, at the time, there were already plenty of live bootlegs with more adventurous setlists. Honestly, it’s only middling in comparison to the rest of their output; on its own, it’s pretty good and does feature the range of their sound from the time (let’s just say, they’ve expanded it a lot in 5 years).
Doing this again this year! Same concept as last year. I feel it’s just right to do this, as though I am doing my part to promote Needlejuice, a record label that has its big names, but also a lot of lesser-known artists that can benefit from the spotlight. Needlejuice Records, from Nashville, specializes in indie artists, providing physical versions of these artists’ albums (in vinyl, cassette and CD formats, and beyond). They have a Bandcamp, a website and a Discord server. From 2021 to 2023 ('24 was too busy a year for them to do it), they sold mystery boxes through which they pass their overstock, even adding extra goodies. Each mystery box I purchased contained three vinyl records, three cassettes and three CDs, with a bonus vinyl test pressing and an extra surprise.
In my previous article, I said I wasn’t sure why it took me a full year before ranking the albums from the first mystery box I purchased. I do have an answer; before making this list, I want to make sure I understand each album within the wider context of its creator’s discography. Which is a fancy way of saying that, like the madman I am, I shove every studio release from each artist into a single Spotify playlist and listen at random, getting a good feel of each artist’s stuff and giving me a new perspective on the album I received. I even plan to check which albums I enjoyed the most in that playlist, and will buy those too.
Why yes, my music collection is big, why do you ask?
I purchased a second box in late 2023 and received it in early January 2024. This has given me a year to hear these albums several times (some more than others) and do that deep discography dive. I threw into that playlist every studio album from these artists, and for good measure, I also included any new albums from artists I had already heard (from the previous list) and who had new stuff out.
Another 11 albums, once more ranked from favorite to least favorite. Remember that if I rank an artist lower, that doesn’t mean their stuff is bad – it can just be that it didn’t click with me. Maybe it will click with you. Oh, and the previous article was too long, so this time, I’m splitting it into two parts. Starting with…
Nick Lutsko – Swords
The sad clown says it all.
Nick Lutsko, from Chattanooga, Tenenssee, has been releasing music since 2012. He made a name for himself providing comedic songs for Netflix and CollegeHumor, including a longer stint making satirical tunes for entertainment company Super Deluxe. He has albums that are satirical, albums that are more comedy/horror (he has released a few songs every Halloween since 2021), and the occasional serious one, with today’s album being an example of the latter. He performs live with The $100K Band.
Keeping up with the news, even if to do funny stuff with it, means being constantly exposed to everything messed up about the world. Lutsko came out of a long period of writing satirical songs, I paraphrase his words, “disillusioned with the zeitgeist”. If there’s a group of people that’s painfully aware of the state of the world, it’s comics and comedians.
Swords is an odd beast; Lutsko hesitates to call it a concept album, though the signs are there. Each title is a single word starting with S (so… S-words?). Most songs are about a deeply troubling aspect of the world we live in. Starting with self-destructive willful ignorance (Sideshow) and xenophobia (Superior) and moving on to social media addiction (Straitjacket), hopelessness (Sometimes) and more. If the lyrics to Software, the closing track of the album’s original version, were too subtle, the video spells it out: It's about the general unwillingness to prevent school shootings from happening so damn often in the U.S.. Ouch. The songs are tied by recurring motifs and lines, and the instrumentation to many tracks incorporates circus-like music in some capacity. The result is indie alt-rock/progressive pop that sounds incredible from beginning to end.
Although this album has elements of his career up to now, it also stands as his most serious. The cassette I got included the tracks from “Seven Inch Swords”, a minidisc follow-up that includes Spineless, a song so good I keep thinking it’s part of the original Swords. It also includes two demos and two live versions. I think Swords is his best work so far, and I love it, even though he himself admits to it being “a bit of a bummer”.
If you want to hear more from him, Nick has the satirical Songs on the Computer duology; and he compiled his recent Halloween songs onto HAUNTED, released in 2024. He has also been working on a follow-up to Swords titled Ends, and I am HYPED for it. One single has already been released.
Ooh, I’ve always wanted to visit Paris! Maybe not like that, though.
We're actually upside-down right now!
A creation of frecle released on June 27th, 2018, Youropa is about Paris tearing apart and taking to the skies. Our character, a humanoid white shape all covered in paint, finds itself in the ensuing mess, and must find its way around the floating pieces of land, while dealing with all the strange gravity-based happenings. The paint on your character is also its health bar, and you can see it fall away anytime it gets hurt, falls, or gets splashed with water.
We're gonna kick some balls. Hey, this IS set in Europe, we just have to play football. (That's how they call soccer.)
Gravity is… strange. The direction of the character's gravity is entirely tied to the floor they’re walking on. If you moved from the ground to a wall thanks to a round floor, its gravity changes accordingly. If, however, you step off a ledge, you’ll become subject to normal gravity (read: pulled downwards), no matter what your current orientation is. If you’re upside-down? Part of the game is keeping in mind how gravity affects you relative to the world. Thankfully, you can press the mouse wheel to get a full view of the mass you’re on (and in which orientation you are – to know where “below” is), and to press the alt key to see a map of the game world and where to go next.
The chunks of Paris are lovely this time of year.
When it comes to abilities, all you can do at first is walk around. You gradually unlock new skills, like grabbing items or kicking them, both needed to solve later puzzles and defeat enemies. Midway into the game, our character learns to jump. Even later, they learn to run by holding down Shift. Further down the line, they finally can stick to walls in the middle of jumps.
Did anyone catch the number of the bus that ran me over?
There are little touches that give the game some flavor; if you land after falling from too high, the character is dazed and regains consciousness by you clicking the mouse five times, shown around its head like circling birdies. You can change your character’s look while standing on spots that serve as spawn points; alternately, you can get splashed by paint from cans lying around. You can even pick up spray cans and paint statues or graffiti walls. Finally, every level contains three pink tape cassettes. It’s a bonus challenge to find them all. The Eiffel Tower area has ten of those.
Considering you die if the paint is completely washed off your body... yeah, rain's bad!
I mentioned that the character’s health bar is represented by the paint on their body, which peels off as they get hurt; so yes, you can get a Game Over in this game, but all it does is that you reappear at the latest spawn point, the same you would have reappeared at if you had just fallen off the stage. If there isn’t a greater penalty for a Game Over than there is for losing health, why bother?
The game comes with a level editor, for which you unlock new pieces with every pink cassette you find, as well as a Challenge Mode that opens when you beat the story and reach the top of the Eiffel tower, putting Paris back together in one piece as a result.
There's also the occasional gameplay change, with moments where we use cars, pogo sticks, bicycles...
Design away! (An "erase" button would have been nice.)
As far as puzzle platformers go, this is about as straightforward as it gets; its main issue is that in a genre oversaturated by gravity-based gameplay, Youropa struggles to set itself apart. It does so in the details – the inexplicable plot of having to reassemble a city and its most famous landmark, and the paint-based elements. The first hour is kinda dull, boiling down to walking around the maps as we lack every other skill, with only the pretty sights and the mind-screwy gravity to make it interesting. The camera often shifts on its own, which isn’t great; but it’s nice that we can look at a stage from afar to find new details. The bonus features and occasional changes in gameplay are pretty cool, too.
(To be honest, maybe I’m just burnt out on puzzle platformers after covering so many, but I don’t want that to reflect negatively on Youropa; it’s not the game’s fault.)
Youropa is available on Steam for 14.99$ USD. It’s also on Switch.
I wanted to do something very different, a surprise article for once, something that would allow me to showcase some stuff I enjoy. This is an article about music, not gaming – and it’s an easy one to do while I work on the reviews proper.
What’s "Needlejuice" in the title? It’s an independent record label that formed in September 2017 and operates from Nashville, Tennessee. It has both a website, a Discord server and a Bandcamp page, and features a lot of (but not exclusively) artists from the LGBTQ+ community. It favors indie bands and musicians and covers a very wide variety of tones and genres, from the comedic to the serious, from pop to rock, from psychedelic to prog passing by vaporwave. The label is dedicated to production of physical media: CDs, of course, but also cassettes, vinyl records and more. This short description doesn’t do them justice; I’ll simply close on saying they deserve to be more known. Maybe your new musical obsession is waiting for you somewhere in their large catalog.
My 2022 box also included a shirt!
Since 2021, the label has been offering mystery boxes on their site at the end of the year. The boxes include albums in three formats – the Tier 1 box had one CD, one cassette and one vinyl, Tier 2 had two of each, and Tier 3 had three of each, plus a vinyl test pressing and extra goodies. The first such box I purchased was in 2022. (Why did it take me till 2024 to write this? ...Hell if I know.) When making a mystery box, the label considers the buyer's purchase history, ruling out what they already own, and will include albums both old and new. The box I ordered in 2023 had stock fresh from the year as well as albums that date all the way back to 2008.
I figured I would help with their visibility in my own way, by listing down the albums I obtained in that first box from the one I enjoyed the most to the one I enjoyed the least. This is all subjective, and that I didn’t like a band or artist doesn’t mean they’re bad – merely that their stuff didn’t click with me or fit my personal preferences. Even with the ones I didn’t like, I’ll do my best to be positive. In summer of 2023, thanks to Spotify, I did a deeper dive into all these bands’ larger discographies, so my adoration for the bands may not match the position they’ve been given here - I’m ranking the albums themselves. I’ll also include an embed to my favorite track off each album.
If anyone from Needlejuice reads this and notices some facts that are incorrect, tell me and I'll correct them!
Starting with...
Nuclear Bubble Wrap – Problem Attic
I’ve been following Nuclear Bubble Wrap (whose frontman Jace McLain is also one of the founders of Needlejuice Records; shortened "NBW") since roughly 2010, when I discovered the band through a forum dedicated to "Weird Al" Yankovic. Back then, the band did both parodies and original comedy music, but evolved in the following years to ditch parodies and focus on a psychedelic sound, albeit retaining a comedic and often geeky edge. They appear a few times on this list.
Problem Attic (geddit?) has been described by McLain as the last album of a trilogy, and whereas their previous two albums discussed anxiety and depression, this one covers the sources of both in modern society for the younger generations. The first half is more comical in tone, with tracks about murderous AI, late-stage capitalism, and conspiracy nuts. Side B is where the facade breaks, with songs about sexist legislators, climate change, police brutality and the growing dread towards the future. The title track is a brutal takedown of the older generations who allowed, if not encouraged, things to get this bad for their personal benefit, their children be damned.
It is, as far as I can tell, their most socially charged album, and will probably remain such. It’s a bleak but sobering listen with biting satire and only a few alleviating moments, like a song about how the Mars rovers are awesome or another about T. Rexes being perfect creatures because they can’t jerk it. Yes, you’ve read that right.
Jace McLain and the second singer, Kyle Thorne, offer great performances. I cannot recommend this album enough, it’s a great display of their skill. I’m so hyped for their next full-length release.
Can’t say I ever played Minecraft. If someone asks me, can I say “….but I played this instead”?
Castle Story was made by Sauropod Studios and released to Steam on August 17th, 2017, following development funded through a Kickstarter campaign that gathered over eight times its goal. While I do the comparison in my first paragraph, it’s more as a joke than anything else; aside from gathering materials to build stuff, there isn't much in the way of similarities, the world isn't voxels everywhere and the constructs you build don't have that Minecraft blocky look to them.
Timber!
This game focuses a lot more on the collective efforts of your little builders/soldiers/whatever job you assign them, the Bricktrons. Those spawn from a magical blue crystal that passively gains energy, eventually having enough to make a new one. The tutorial in the game shows the starting steps of making this community. You assign tasks to your Bricktrons, such as harvesting resources or building stuff, and then proceed with constructs that allow them to refine the materials and then use the results to create other stuff. And so on. The many, many maps available in Sandbox mode are very large. Although I never really ventured all that far from my starting point (Bricktrons seem terrified of straying too far from the Crystal, at least as long as they’re not sufficiently prepared to do so), I imagine these lands can be explored in their entirety, given you have enough Bricktrons and all the necessary tools.
The Bricktrons even have cute little names!
The Sandbox is what you play if you want a chill experience; if you want something a little more action-packed, you can try the Invasion Mode, in which enemies called Corruptrons will attempt to invade your base and you must equip your Bricktrons in order to fight back. Or, become the invader in a Conquest Mode, with other castles to take over. Still not enough? Build a map of your own! Still not enough? Join the Multiplayer mode and see how you fare against other human players.
I'm gonna stick to Sandbox Mode; I don't feel like I'll ever master the system enough to defend or fight in the other modes.
Well, okay, I don’t know if there are enough players to make that mode worthwhile. That said, at least it offers enough variety for gamers that they can have fun in single-player. Of course, I haven’t gotten far enough into a single-player mode to see if the game holds up for longer periods of time, when your constructions add up on the field. As far as I can read, although the base build is really good, very few updates have been made to it afterwards, so a lot of little issues and glitches might not have been ironed out. The game has seemingly been abandoned and left in its current state, but it’s sufficiently playable for some basic fun. The loading times are also pretty long.
I have little soldiers now, but I don't even have a castle to defend yeet!
The Bricktrons are cute, and it’s fun to see them build stuff or get to their tasks. The crafting system is pretty complex and intricate, and so are the various things you can build. It certainly takes a moment to get the hang of everything – even creating soldiers and archers can be tricky unless you can remember the sequence of actions necessary. The game allows for a large variety of things to do and encourages creativity – the Community tab on Steam is full of examples of buildings that people built.
At least the Tutorial covers the basics well. But after that, you're on your own.
Though it’s not my kind of game, I think it’s fine. Even in its current form, it offers plenty of options. Although its unfinished state, possible glitches, and lack of updates in a long time means that there are some flaws lurking beneath the surface. I’d argue it’s probably not worth its price tag of 27.99$ as it stands now, but a thing to discover if you can find it at a discount or in a bundle.
Yeah, I’m not starting a career as a pilot anytime soon.
This looks pretty decent. Now I can just mirror this on the opposite side...
Jundroo, LLC released SimplePlanes to Steam on December 17th, 2015. It’s a physics game in which you can construct a plane, piece by piece, and then test it out in a flight simulation. You have a very wide variety of possibilities in constructing your plane, with all kinds of parts. Of course, you always have to have the basics: One cockpit, two wings, landing gear at the front and back, stabilizers and some form of propulsion (blades or reactors). Experiment with shapes, build your plane like you would a LEGO model (or go crazy and stick anything, anywhere, to see what works).
Aaaaaaand... takeoff! Yeah, I doubt I'll build a plane better than this one.
After which, take to the skies! Spin the blades with the left Shift key, take off with S, and then control your plane in the air with WASD. Are the plane physics in flight accurate to real life? I don’t know nearly enough in that field to tell. But I feel the game tries to be as close to reality as possible. A tutorial exists to show you how to design a plane and how to control it in the air afterwards, but even with that it can take a while to learn to use the controls.
One issue in the game is that you learn to take off and land, but aren't taught the mechanics of flight too well. You have to try and figure them out on your own.
A fighter jet for a simple island race? There's no kill like overkill.
So – you’ve built your air vehicle? You’ve learned to pilot it? You’ve been through all the exercises? You made the necessary adjustments? On to the game proper, then – in which you can take part in races and try to beat CPUs to the finish line. That’s still not enough? Time for the big guns. Literally – you can equip your plane with weapons and learn to use them, and have a set of missions associated with this, including a mode to partake in a dogfight. Still not enough? Try one of a couple of challenges, which may require out-of-the-box thinking in order to complete.
There’s more: You can download plane models off of the game’s website, including many that are similar to real life planes. The plane-building part is accompanied by a sandbox world that you can freely visit, and in which you can even discover distant lands. Finally, the game has a small modding community through the Steam Workshop.
That's an awesome-looking jet. I would never be able to build that.
By the looks of it, I'm also not great at piloting. (For the record - I crash into the mountains 10 seconds later.)
From the original sound of it, I thought this game would include only the plane design and test parts of the simulator, which would already be pretty cool (if short) on its own. The inclusion of races, combat and challenges was a great surprise, not to mention the sandbox world. Much of the game involves learning to build planes to make them as aerodynamic as possible, and while I mentioned LEGOs earlier, it’s much more complicated than that. I doubt I’d have the level of knowledge in physics and engineering to properly build an aerodynamic vehicle and then improve it after a few tests, but it's still a fascinating process to experience. Just add some peer review and you’ve got genuine scientific process here!
There’s a lot to try out here, so that could be a very interesting game to test. That said, if you’re not physics-inclined (or if you can’t pilot worth a damn without crashing – seriously, I make Launchpad McQuack look like a God of landing safely in comparison), you might not spend a lot of time with it.
