Episode 71 High Res (Patreon)

Cooper handed me off the final versions of his guest comics. Man oh MAN do they look good! There's some grade A reaction faces in them! You're gonna enjoy it!

Been slowly playing the game Eastward roughly an hour an night or less for a bit now. I gotta say, it has some incredibly nice sprite work. It's got a bunch of fun, memorable characters, nice music, and I enjoy the zelda-esque style gameplay. Just needs a good editing job to cut out some of the fluff.

Putting aside the bunch of not good boring dialogue that, frankly, a lot of games have issue with, biggest issue I have with Eastward is that sometimes it feels like it's wasting my time. Events occur that feel like they're a side quest, but are actually part of the main quest and you have to do them no matter what.

The one I've run into recently is this bet you have with this casino owner dude about making him something delicious because prophecy something. Anyway, you're told "Hey, there's this super delicious berry! You should hack and slash your way over there and get it!" So I do, come back, and then your partner gives the berry away. After that they go "Okay, so berry plan is a bust. Let's make some crab." So you do some side questing and fetch questing to get it. You get it and start cooking. Then, as you're in the middle of cooking, a character runs into the house and goes "You gotta come with me to save the circus! So you run off and do a couple of mini games and a fetch quest to save the circus. By the time your characters remember they're cooking crab it's like half a day later at night. So now I'm told "Hey, go to this place and get some fish by having this monster guy stir them up." And that's where I left off last night because I did this optional boss fight to get an item and the game crashed.

It's a cute and enjoyable game, but there's a bunch of instances where I feel like my time is being wasted. Like they took a first draft of a story for a game and ran with it.

Also the newest episode of 16 bit sensation sure got duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuumb. Except for the PC98 mainframe. That was cool.