So I had a massive brain fart and thought Halloween was this Thursday instead of next Thursday.  So we’ve got another week of Q&A. Yaaaaaay. Sorry about that, but I really want the first bit of book 2 to be released on Halloween.

To make up for it, I’m doing another game talk thing. This time I’m reviewing one of my all-time favorite games, Roboblitz. You’re a robot in charge of bringing a space station’s giant energy cannons online to shoot down an enemy robot space station that’s teleporting evil pirate robots into your base. “But Kuma, that’s not a scary game!”, you say. Well, for me, when I first played it the boss enemy (a spherical robot with a big toothy grin, see picture) gave me reoccurring nightmares. The fact he would appear behind you in cutscenes ingame didn’t help. However, after beating him for the first time, I had a dream where I threw him in a lava pit, and the nightmares stopped. More about the game – Basically to power up the railgun, you need to activate the space station’s six subsystems: Fueling (to power the cannon’s motors), Cooling (to stop it overheating), Security (to get the launch codes), Shell production (To make the slug), Radar (to target the station) and power (to power the railgun’s capacitors). Each part has its own little tricks and features, such as bouncing lasers off mirrors in the security area, or having to climb a radar tower with a grapple hook. At the third level of each section, there’s a boss encounter, and the boss can only be beaten by using items in the arena to your advantage. For example, if you shoot a barrel of fuel to light it on fire, and throw it at the boss, it knocks him out, which means you can get past his armored shell. It has a great balance of puzzles and combat, and I recently played it again to see if it was nostalgia making it seem better than it was. Spoilers: It was just as fun as I thought it was. There’s also a climactic final boss (which I won’t talk much about) that I never beat as a child, so I finally beat it, six years after my first try. The graphics aren’t the best, but it’s a marvelously fun game and I can’t reccomend it enough. If you want to purchase it, it’s on steam for 9.99, with a demo here. Yes, you will see reviews saying there are bugs in the boss fights – and there are a few – but I’ve found that you can normally get past stuff with a few tries. Also, if I’m correct, the devs are still patching the game, so that’s a plus. If you do experence repeated bugs, try limiting the framerate – this game is over a decade old and the speed of newer PCs tends to mess with it a bit.

One last thing – I did a review of Factorio a while back, and I’ve learned a lot of the complaints people had with the game is the textures are a little dull. Fear not – they did a graphics overhaul, making a lot of stuff look nicer.

See you guys next week!