Hmmm... Okay. The sequel to 2023's Super Mario Bros. Movie has come out in theaters. Once again produced by Illumination Studios, this entry expands massively the universe that first got a proper introduction in the previous film. However, for as much as this movie tries to be a continuation, I think its scope reaches too wide, and that hurts it as a result. But! I'm getting ahead of myself.
The Story
The movie opens on Rosalina (Brie Larson), the princess of the cosmos, who takes in her little Lumas for bedtime. However, before she can read them a story, the Comet Observatory they live on is attacked by the Koopa Troop. Despite her best efforts in protecting the Lumas (and showing crazy powerful magic, at that), Rosalina and a lone Luma end up taken away by the attackers.
Meanwhile, Mario (Chris Pratt) and Luigi (Charlie Day) have made a name for themselves as plumbers and general problem-solvers across many Kingdoms. One day, while helping in the Desert Kingdom, they find a lone Yoshi (Donald Glover, yes really) that adopts them as friends. The Toads are celebrating the day they found Princess Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy), treating it with the same importance as if it were her birthday; and Mario can't seem able to admit that he has feelings for the Princess. The group also kept the miniaturized Bowser (Jack Black), who has taken residence into a mini-castle. The Koopa King tries his best to get along with his captors.
During the celebrations, a rain of Star Bits falls across the Mushroom Kingdom, and a Luma crashes in the mushroom forest. Investigating, Mario and his friends find the poor thing and after recovering, it says that Princess Rosalina is in danger. Without knowledge of what is happening in space, the Bros. first opt not to get involved; but Peach decides to, and leaves to space with Toad (Keegan-Michael Key), using the Luma as a launch star.
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.
For your sake and mine, I’ll spare you ten paragraphs of intense screaming at everything that was wrong this year. This fucking year. 2026 doesn’t look like it’s going to be much better, either. But god damn, 2025 was probably the worst year I’ve ever lived through. And look – for me, personally, years never go THAT badly. I keep my job, I am financially stable, I have decent relationships, the blog is doing well (in fact, it’s doing better than it’s ever been). But as someone with some empathy and who feels the need to keep track of news, these past twelve months were some of the most mentally and emotionally exhausting shit I’ve had to deal with.
I knew we were in for a bad time all the way back in January when-
CRAP! I said I wasn’t gonna do that! Okay, you know what? I’m going to focus on the blog. ‘Cause I really, REALLY don’t want to start on another tangent with all this. (And I’m holding back, ‘cause gaming, in general, has been a huge bearer of shitty news all year, from Nintendo’s attempt at patenting creature-battling to all the game development studios going mask-off with A.I. at the end of the year and – Dammit! Moving on!)
But it’s like I said. My year? On a purely personal standpoint? It was alright. Speaking strictly of employment and hobbies, that is. I think I mostly stayed true to my desire to keep this blog as a pure hobby, so that’s at least a net positive. I’ve written articles I had wanted to do for a while (the Sonic movies, Pokémon Sun/Moon and their rereleases), and I once again covered a decent number of games across the year. (If we count all the ones I covered in my itch.io and Nintendo Classics articles, then I technically covered more games this year than ever before, but… should those really count, with how short most of them were?) I'm just glad I started both of these, too, as they're two concepts I quite enjoy writing for.
I didn’t overshoot too badly with my Year Plans, but I think I could have done even more if I hadn’t landed myself a Balatro addiction. (Seriously. I’m 250+ hours in.) Perhaps the best blog-related achievement this year was the sheer number of views. It took me from 2013 to 2024 to reach a million views on the blog, then 2025 casually comes around and boosts those numbers by 450,000! For a short time around the last week of October and the first of November, I got over 9,000 views per day. Several days in a row. Ever since October, I’ve been getting over 55k views per month, blowing my previous record of views in a month (40k, back in May 2017) right out of the water. I still have no idea where this sudden spike came from, but hey, I’m not gonna complain!
Slowly but surely, I’m going through my collection – now, if only I wasn’t buying damn near as many games as I finish… Okay, enough chitchat, time for the yearly lists.
After writing so many Top 12 lists, I decided I wanted to get creative with them. My two lists of worst marketing campaigns required a ton of research, and I loved that aspect; so I felt like digging into a different type of research, this time data collection. The results could be… interesting, after all. So hey, why not make a list of the least known games I’ve tried?
Just the first 8 questions... of 473.
For this article, I created a Google Form cataloguing every single game I reviewed on this blog (all 473 of them), and for each one, gave four options:
-I’ve played it (does not necessarily mean its player owns the game);
-I own / have owned it (considering how many gamers I know with massive backlogs of games they’ve never touched, I felt something would be missing if this wasn’t included);
-I heard of it (saw someone else play it on a livestream, or know of it through word-of-mouth, advertising, or reputation);
-Or I've never heard of it (the element that matters today).
I knew most games covered on this blog were likely to be in that last category, especially since I pivoted to playing and covering a lot of indie games after joining Steam in 2016. Yet, there are still plenty of surprises to be found.
At the time of writing, I had received 42 answers to this survey, but it was enough to cut down the list to… 34 titles. That’s a long way from 12; so expect me to lump together titles for which I have the same comments to make. Had I received 50 or 100 responses, maybe this would be different; maybe I would have ended up with much fewer unknown games, maybe even fewer than 12! Thus, you can take today’s article with a grain of salt, I know my sample isn’t as representative as it could have been. That said, I think the results are interesting! In fact, tune in this coming Monday for more data I’ve picked up from studying the survey results. By the way, you’ll notice that there isn’t a single console game on this list – it’s all PC, indie games. Oh, and if games are no longer available for purchase but their Steam page is still up, I’ll include a link to the page anyway.
When I joined Steam, my first order of business was to find as many games as possible to add to my new collection, in a short time and on a small budget. The solution? Go down the list of Free games, and pick among those. Now, I’ll differentiate between Free-to-play (which can make its budget back through players’ in-game purchases), and full-on Free. Generally small stuff that a developer could easily give away without feeling a blow to their finances. I’d imagine that such games are often released without much fanfare, with their studios either banking on their pre-existing reputation (like Studio Pixel, which released the Pink duology but is better known for Cave Story+), or a freebie that ties well with the remainder of their output (like the Elisa prequel, which ties into games with a price tag). You have to seek these out, basically. With that said, offering free games is a winning strategy; it seems to have worked well for Epic Games’ own platform...
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.
Oh, you expect me to say more? World’s going to Hell, magnitudes worse than it did 12 months ago. We can fully expect America to crumble under the weight of its own bullshit, pulling down several other countries (including possibly mine, because I’m right fucking next door!) along with it. Hate has won and is on the rise. And I would be here happily munching on my popcorn watching the leopards of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party having the feast of the fucking millennium, if so many of my friends across the United States weren’t getting caught in the crossfire!
Will things get better? I’m doubting it more and more. I am genuinely terrified of what’s to come. Across the next months, across this year that has just begun, across the next four years and beyond. These are not flashbacks to 2017; no, it’s so much worse. I am not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And from my position, the best I can do is reskeet posts about current issues and show my support any way I can. If shit comes knocking at my door, I’ll take my signs and march in the streets. My scope of action is limited, so I’ll do what’s possible. It’s kind of odd just how militant I became against the rising bullshit when it struck. My first order of action was to leave the site formerly known as Twitter, and become a recurring poster on Bluesky instead. Join me over there, it’s got its issues we must fight against, but otherwise it’s going much better.
You know that joke from Airplane!, “I picked a bad week to quit drinking”? 2025 looks like a good year to start.
Okay, you know what? Life’s gonna suck, but if I keep crying about it, nothing will get done. Besides, you are not here to hear me mope, and moping won’t solve anything anyway. If you’re here today, you’re here to be distracted from the *gestures wildly at everything* and have some escapism. So… I’ll provide. It would do me some good, too, to think about something else for a moment.
Scaring women in the name of advertising! Yeah, that's one Hell of a low-hanging fruit.
Studios are likely to cater directly to the target audience of the game they’re about to release. It only makes sense to do so. And since a lot of video games are horror or shooter types, who is the audience? Teenagers! And what is the stereotype of teenagers? That they hate their parents, or that they think their folks aren’t cool! Therefore, if their parents – or someone similar – object to their product, that product will instantly look cool to these teens! Sound logic there!
In 2011, Visceral Games and Electronic Arts made big plans for their latest survival horror shooter, Dead Space 2. Heavy stuff, hunting down monstrous aliens on a space station and dealing with mental illness. My brain who has never played this franchise immediately went, “that sounds like Aliens meets Resident Evil”. Anyone versed in the franchise can correct me. This combo says exactly what you can expect: Blood and guts galore.
That rating at the bottom couldn't be clearer!
The ad helpfully informs us that the women presented in its 32 seconds were part of an “actual focus group”, not actresses. So, we can assume their reactions are genuine. Grandmothers, moms, older women, you know, exactly the kind of person unlikely to enjoy what is being shown. Beyond the ad, the official Dead Space channel included full versions of some of the interviews. Hammering in these women’s outrage and anger at what they’re shown.
There’s just one problem: The game isn’t directed at younger teens. The ESRB rated it M for Mature. AKA, for older teens bordering on adults. I'm not saying they must have outgrown "your parents suck" at 17, but at that age, there's no need to involve the parents into the advertising. So, this campaign, on top of traumatizing multiple women, also completely missed the mark as to who it was speaking to. The whole thing was considered in very poor taste. The use of an age-old (pun intended) stereotype also turned away many people outside of the ad’s target demographic. To say nothing of the ESRB, who got a strong talking-to for allowing the ad to be broadcast.
All natural? Nice. Maybe don't advertise your burgers with gross pictures of what they'll look like after a month. That's a quick way to make anyone not feel hungry anymore.
It’s that time of the year again, and instead of thinking up a new idea for a Top 12, I’m going back to a well I began exploring twoyears ago. As I said at the time, marketing is a fascinating field to study and discuss. Some marketing campaigns have practically changed the world for the better. And on the opposite end of the scale, there have been several embarrassing campaigns; oh well, wipe the slate clean, try again later. That is, unless the marketing campaign bankrupted the damn company; you’d be surprised how often that did happen.
When it comes to video games, it’s as if anything goes. The target audience is kids and teens, sometimes families or adults. Such campaigns were aired as TV spots or as full pages in print magazines for a long time. In the age of the Internet, we see a lot of campaigns thanks to YouTube and on various social media platforms. And although the Web may be great to promote your product, it can become a double-edged sword.
SEGA does what Nintendon't. Like pissing jokes.
In the original two-part article that I wrote on the topic, I overplayed my hand. If you reread it, you’ll notice that I frequently talk about more than one disastrous campaign at a time. Maybe I should have kept some on the side, just in case I wanted to do another of these, right? Well… During my research for this new list, I found several more promotions that went haywire and gave exactly the wrong kind of attention to the product. But hey, you know what they say: Even bad publicity is still publicity.
This time around, I’ll leave more room for types of campaigns and stunts that weren’t as prevalent in the original list. Other than that, everything’s on the table, games and consoles alike. After all, failing to adequately promote a console means that said console’s entire library of games is at risk of underselling.
Be aware that some topics discussed may be heavy, and some images may be disturbing.
12. Bloodvertising
Oh, this is gonna be funny.
Just as they opened my previous list, Acclaim once more find themselves at the front of the line. Some companies have left their mark in the world of crazy advertising, and there are plenty of examples; but few have gotten as tasteless and horrid as some of the ideas that Acclaim’s marketing team came up with.
Finding the boss is more complicated in the Mistlands than anywhere else. Look for Vegvisirs deep within Infested Mines packed with ticks and seekers. In there, you can also find black cores and Sealbreaker fragments. You need black cores for the latest crafting tables, and nine fragments to build a Sealbreaker, the key that opens the door to the Queen.
We are literally mining the brains out of a dead giant and combining this to Yggdrasil sap to make our magic.
You’ll also want to look for Jotun skeletons laying around, made of marble that cannot be mined except with black metal pickaxes or better. These dead giants still have squishy brains, which you mine for soft tissue. Then, build an eitr refinery and turn both sap (obtained from extractors on Yggdrasil roots) and soft tissue into refined eitr, necessary for every Mistlands-level worktable and piece of equipment.
It's not flying, it's falling with style.
Including the feather cape. See, navigating the Mistlands is bullshit. I talked in Part 4 about the rough terrain. I’d go a step above and say that the sixth biome is “make it or break it”, in that visiting it is so difficult and annoying that this is the point where many players either soldier on or give up. It’s a difficulty spike beyond anything seen before. While playing to write this part, my viking died at least once by falling to his death because I couldn’t see how low the ground was. It was fun getting back to that gravestone. The powerful enemies aren’t helping. It take more work to get to a point where you’re comfortable in the Mistlands, since the good items are all locked behind the refined eitr, itself tough to obtain in the first place.
Everything changes when you finally a) craft a feather cape, which lets you flutter down, negating fall damage, and b) learn to use magic, even if limited by what you can cast with your wand.
I almost never used ooze bombs before. Now, they're one of my favorite weapons within dungeons. Thanks, mines!
But even then, clearing the Mistlands is an arduous process, because black cores and Sealbreaker fragments can be rare as fuck and you’ll be forced to visit a lot of infested mines to get everything you need. And those aren’t exactly easy dungeons, either, with loads of enemies in cramped spaces. I had to visit four of them to get enough fragments and cores, and all of them left my Viking beat within an inch of his life. With combat on fucking Very Easy.
Fighting The Queen
It was a relief to finally be able to craft the Sealbreaker and head towards the Queen. Her Citadel was located near the Ashlands. The solution? Get Moder power, sail for two in-game days, park near those Mistlands, set up portal, go home, sleep, get Bonemass power, upgrade every piece of equipment to the best stuff, get the best foods (which means I took a long detour to raise chickens and grow onions!), then finally step in.
Dang, already at 4 parts? Guess that’s what happens when a review doubles as a full-on guide...
The Mistlands – “The Queen”
This guy must be eating spicy. Look at that fire.
Not a pretty sight this close. Or from afar, really.
Yagluth, you’re going down. When it’s summoned, you find yourself fighting a giant skeleton top half with a crown. The undead king of the fulings, allegedly. A spitfire on his best days, and when he’s angry, he can rain meteors on your head. Beware the explosion when he smashes the ground with his fist. He has no weaknesses to exploit, but his attacks all involve fire in some way, making fire resistance barley wine vital in this battle. You can also take cover behind the stone pillars surrounding his altar.
Right, the meteors. This guy gets points for theatrics.
A long battle eventually won – and for that, you get Yagluth’s trophy, which unlocks his power, granting massive temporary resistance to magic, fire, frost, and lightning. You also get Torn Spirits, with which you can build wisp fountains, which summon wisps at night. Those wisps can be made into wisplights, which will follow you around and disperse the mist of the Mistlands; you can also craft them into wisp torches to plant on your path.
I know it's in the name, but still - it's annoying that you can't see shit around here.
Not unlike the swamp, the Mistlands mark an intense difficulty spike. Everything turned up to 11. You’ll need to be brave and well-prepared to face it. It’s an infamously nasty place, home to the worst monsters yet. When I played in the multiplayer server, the streamer grew to hate the new biome, and wouldn’t go there unless they absolutely had to. Or had a team to explore it with. I guess now is as good a time as any to discuss multiplayer a bit.
When I said we become hoarders, that wasn't a joke. This is all in one solo game. Not shown are 30 more chests in other rooms, as well as 15 more where my portals are so I can quickly empty my pockets when necessary.
It helps that I had my two solo runs to see what the game was like on my own, as it let me see just how many resources a single player needs. Now take that amount and multiply it by the number of folks in your multiplayer game. If you want everybody to have the best equipment and food, that is. That’s probably not gonna happen. Depending on how the team gets structured, everyone may get equipped with everything, or folks might settle into roles, as is often done in MMOs; one who can take damage, one who uses melee weapons, one who uses ranged weapons... Due to the variety in threats across Valheim, it may be better to stay prepared for anything.
Still got a lot to cover, huh? Last time, we were about to fight...
The 'Mass
This beast looks like Swamp Thing and Slimer had a baby, and then that baby grew addicted to crystal meth.
I vividly remember when I first fought Bonemass. I threw the Withered Bones into its altar, and that mass of goo and bone appeared. To their credit, the enemies and bosses of Valheim have logical weaknesses; fire and axes against the tree-like Abominations, as an example. Being a slime, Bonemass is weak to frost arrows, but unless you skipped steps, you shouldn’t have those; your other option is blunt damage. Still not sure how whacking a blob with a club can kill it, but whatever. Both times I took it down, I was equipped with the iron sledge, a two-handed weapon made using Ymir flesh, obtainable from Haldor. My second time was a lot easier, because I was better prepared.
Full disclaimer, at this point of the review/guide, I've gone back to the Viking I beat the game with. If I want to do these fights again for screenshots, I'll make it easier on myself. My capture didn't involve a lot of enemies.
Bosses really are the final exam of their biome, and Bonemass is every annoying aspect of the swamps rolled into one bastard. Its area of effect causes nonstop rain, so you can never shake away the Wet debuff. It pukes poison gas regularly, so fighting it without poison resistance is stupid. It tosses its own matter, creating blobs and skeletons, so there’s always enemies to kill – and that’s before considering the other swamp residents who can butt in like unwanted neighbor visits on a day off. Draugr, we can deal, but... Abominations? In the middle of a Bonemass battle, they’re fun.
And of course, he's puking, too. What a classy gentleman.
Valheim is BRU-TAL.
This visual sign, accompanied by a "ding" that gets higher- pitched as you get closer, is what you get when the wishbone detects something underground.
When Bonemass is killed, it drops its trophy and a wishbone. Its Forsaken power massively increases your resistance to slash, blunt and pierce damages for five minutes. We’re reaching the point where your foods provide plenty of stamina, so your greater worry is surviving enemy attacks now. Eikthyr’s power was fine so far, but Bonemass’s power will save your Viking ass regularly. As for the wishbone, when equipped, it will beep close to stuff hidden underground. There are many Viking burial sites with jewels to plunder. Thanks to the wishbone, you can also find masses of muddy scrap piles hidden around a swamp, allowing you to farm iron without walking into a crypt. (It’s also possible to “prospect” by hammering the swamp ground with a two-handed mace to find these piles before beating Bonemass.) The wishbone is the main way to find silver nodes in...
This thing is huge! Well, I can take it down like any other forest tree: Axes and fire. Boom.
When we left off, we were ready to face the Elder, a creature made of wood said to be the King of Greydwarves. Eikthyr was weak all around; starting with the second boss, you learn to try various strategies and stick to what works best. (Or use the wikis if you can’t figure it out.) In this case, melee with an axe is viable, but dangerous. Fire arrows are the way to go if you play safe. I did it that way every time, but I recall my first battle against this thing took forever. Then again, at the time I still hadn’t set up a portal for quick travel from camp to the altar, so every time I died... which was a lot... I had to do the whole trek back, retrieve my body and equipment, and then resume the fight – with my enemy having regained health. Oh yeah, when you’re learning Valheim, it’s brutal.
Remember how I said that I made a new character while playing on the world where I've beaten the Mistlands? Yeah, all these chests are from the other game.
Which is why it’s so important to set up a living space. Your base, preferably near the water (as you will need to sail to reach future Forsaken), needs a lot of space and amenities. Your bed, of course, but some place to keep all your treasure chests. You’ll gather so much crap, you’ll spend nearly as much time sorting it all out as you’ll spend out on the field. And since almost everything has a use, Vikings become hoarders, reticent to throw anything away.You'll need a lot of workbenches, but that's good; those can ward monsters away, too.
Those rings? Yep, all portals. There's 10 more you're not seeing here.
No need for coal, I have lots already. Can always do with more copper and tin, though.
You’ll need a space for your portals, since this adventure will bring you all over the procedurally-generated map, and you’ll have to make a lot of ‘em. A recommended strategy is to always keep one just labeled “portal”, carry the materials to create another wherever you are, and create more at points of interest. You’ll need a space for metal refinery – that means an area for charcoal kilns, in which you put wood to make coal, and smelters (and later, blast furnaces) to refine your ores. The more the better. And of course, an area with all your crafting stuff – workbench, forge, cauldron, fermenter, etc. You can build yourself a house, and if you’re good at it, you can create homes that are literal works of art. Take a stroll down the ValheimBuilds subreddit and you’ll see just what marvels avid builders have come up with.
...I favored practicality over design. I won’t make it look good; I’ll make it just big enough to have everything I need.
Anniversary review time! And as usual, I’m doing a big one.
If I had a nickel for every video game about Vikings stuck in purgatory trying to earn their place into Valhalla... well, I’m pretty sure I’d have more than just two nickels. More like four or five, easy. “But it’s weird that it happened twice, right?”
Hey, somebody has to cultivate the veggies, and I don't see anybody else around here.
When it comes to survival games, the story is rarely a plot with beats and more of a suggestion – you can have a gaming experience of dozens of hours without ever thinking about whatever story justifies the setting. You may have a goal... or not. You may choose to focus on anything else if you want. Games like this are ginormous sandboxes for adventurous and/or creative players to do whatever they want. You feel like braving dangerous lands today? You want to chill at the base and spend five hours sorting your item chests? Build and protect your land? Farm? Fish? Go. For. It.
Valheim, developed by Iron Gate AB, published by Coffee Stain Publishing, and “released” on February 2nd, 2021, is still in Early Access, but has already made a name for itself in the genre. Like many survival games, this experience can be done on your own, or with friends; up to 10 players can join the same multiplayer server.
Hey! Careful there with those talons! I was struck by an arrow at that exact spot in my back before I died!
Full disclaimer, for the needs of screenshots for this 5-part article, I created a new character, but I dropped him in the world I had played in up to finishing the Mistlands. Makes it easier to take pictures and retrace my steps.
This game’s "story" begins after character creation – you can play as a male or female Viking, no difference in gameplay. Your character is dropped in the middle of a circle of sacrificial stones, with nothing but rags on your back. You died ingloriously in battle, and to earn your way into Viking Heaven, you must prove yourself to Odin. Hugin, a helpful crow, explains the quest to the player character: Hunt down the six Forsaken, massive monsters residing in the various biomes of this “tenth realm”, take their trophies and bring them back to these rocks. The defeated Forsaken grant abilities that will come in handy for whatever comes next.
I’ve accumulated over 350 hours on this game since I began, and I’ve been determined to see it to the end. I’ve played alone and with friends, so I’ve got a pretty good understanding of how the game works. It would make sense to cover the game in much the same way that one would discover it. My point of view on this game comes from three different playthroughs: My first, where I learned the game as I went; one I played joining a Quebec streamer’s multiplayer server, contributing as much as my stupid n00b ass could; and my third one, taking full advantage of the knowledge gained and the World Modifiers, which at the time had been freshly added. As a result, while this series is a review, it’s also an excellent guide for a newcomer to Valheim. Alright, on with the article.
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.
