Mid-March update

Well that dispute is settled.

I had Jones to be rewarded with violence for stringing together some button presses, and the PSN had Moral Kombat XL on sale. I remember getting grossed out by this game a few years back, but maybe my recent playthrough of Doom hardened my resolve. Either way, the developer has spent the last 3 titles building a legitimately good fighting system. In addition to the animators and modelers who have PhDs in anatomy, the jumpy battles are komplete with quick flips, snappy kombos, and kcertain moves have a great sense of impact. To hear the kreator Ed Boon talk in his Midwestern accent and witness friendly demeanor, you'd be hard pressed to imagine a guy like that signing off on Jax's fatality where he shoves your extended arms into your body, rips your head in half and ashes his cigar on your tongue. The roster is huge, and the horror franchise guest stars Predator, Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, and the Xenomorph from Alien feel right at home in this expanded title.

I started Broken Age, a strange point-and-click adventure about two characters whose destinies intertwine. I started as Vella, who is the only girl with any sense in a village that sacrifices maidens to appease some obscure god. During the first part when you're trying to escape the ritual, Vella makes quips and komm--err, not talking about Mortal Kombat anymore--comments about complacency with ridiculous and unfair traditions. In short: Vella is woke.

The other half of the story is Shay, who despite being at least a teenager, is stuck aboard a space ship where all his comforts are met, but everything on the ship panders to him as if he were a toddler. For example, you're wandering space in your ship, "rescuing lost aliens" in what turns out to be a crane grabber machine that's collecting stuffed animals. It's all pretty dang cute, but the point is to break the fantasy and get woke.

Milking people out of money for
mobile games is a business chra-di-shin!

I am also playing Frozen Free Fall, a gem-matching mobile game that was ported to consoles. There are 400 levels, and you get 5-8 lives at a time before you have to wait 15 minutes to get more lives. There is one repetitive music track, and this game has no shame about coming from the awful business practices that are associated with mobile games. Frugal me, of course is simply planning on getting all the trophies over the next 6 months - year instead of ponying up the dough. That'll teach em!

I've been making progress through Final Fantasy 6, which spends at least 50% of the story focused on Terra, an magic using demi-goddess. Now that I'm playing it this month, I think it qualifies as a female-lead game, despite the multiple narratives and story branching. I'm about 20 hours into the game, and the world as I know it is about to be destroyed. If any of you remember the Floating Continent, you'll remember that the battles jump significantly in difficulty. You may also recall the music there, too. If not, Youtube it!

Finally, I started Nex Machina. This is a twin stick shooter by the dev team Housemarque, the folks who made Super Stardust HD and Resogun. That means dope electronic music, flashy effects and hard-but-fun boss fights. Nex Machina is a little different in standard twin stick shooter level design. It features a bunch of smaller maps that you navigate through instead of the usual area that you're bound inside of as wave after wave chases you. I'd better make up the rest of March with more girl games, cause this certainly doesn't have anything there. It's still dope and addictive, dho.