This Next Fest runs until October 20, 10 am Pacific.

Look at that new stick! The original thumbstick of the Steam Controller was always a bit imperfect. I bought my Steam Controller on day one, but a few years in, the soft-touch material on the stick started to flake off. That's gross! Those flakes that rub off also don't help with gripping the stick. It already has a convex-shaped top, which I like less than a concave top. It always feels like I'm pushing the stick in some direction but my thumb is slowly slipping. After almost a decade of putting up with this, I had enough. I looked around online and found that people had figured out how to upgrade that part of the Steam Controller, and it's actually decently easy and cheap. ## Replacing the stick [It turns out the replacement sticks for the 8BitDo SN30 Pro fit perfectly in the Steam Controller!](https://shop.8bitdo.com/products/8bitdo-sn30-pro-sn30-pro-pro2-joystick-rubber-replacement-1-pcs) The Steam Controller is held together with Torx T6 screws. I opened it up and carefully lifted up the mainboard, making sure not to harm the ribbon cable underneath. From there, I pulled the stock thumbstick cap off of the stick and slipped on the replacement one. I now have a Steam Controller with a thumbstick that doesn't rub off and is even concave for better grip! [My notes on how to do this replacement yourself](https://gemini.envs.net/~silv/wiki/steam_controller_stick.gmi)

## Surf the web! As the millennium turned, cyberspace sat abandoned, leaving behind only bots, ads, and the few who dared venture into the ruins. In Kitten Burst, you play as Hapi, a flying race cat with an awful losing streak. A hacker offers to help you get a win, but in exchange, you need to fly through abandoned sites to help her harvest their energy.  The primary gameplay challenge in Kitten Burst is time trial races scattered across the game's levels, where you need to touch enough checkpoints as fast as possible. I've found the flight-style controls to be pretty tricky, but after tweaking my Steam Controller settings, I'm gradually getting used to them. What makes good control so important is that flying close to obstacles builds a boost meter to go extra fast, which encourages "surfing" very close to floors, walls, and ceilings. The risk is that bumping into obstacles kills your acceleration and makes you lose control for a few seconds. The game tries to help with the "whiskers" visual aid, drawing lines from the cat to nearby objects to help you judge the distance. Despite that, I sometimes still find it too hard to avoid crashing, like when the sand dune I'm surfing on starts to curve up but everything nearby uses the same uniform dark sand texture. After completing the races in a site, you get access to the boss challenge. These take a different format that's more like a shmup. They're an abstract rhythm and bullet hell fusion, as if the game Just Shapes and Beats went 3D. You dodge obstacles that the boss shoots at you while listening to the music, and the challenge is complete when you reach the end of the song.  Like with the standard races, it can be hard to judge depths and distances despite the visual aids. This just leads me to wonder if being able to view this game with VR or stereoscopy could ease this difficulty. Overall, Kitten Burst feels like a 3D platformer except all the 3D platforming has been replaced with time trial flying challenges. There are level hubs, various missions to do, things to collect, and places to explore. Sometimes, though, the game takes a cue from the web's wild tangle of hyperlinks, and instead of having traditional hubs, has zones link to each other haphazardly.  ## So Y2K you can lick it If you haven't noticed from the pictures and video clips yet, Kitten Burst is loudly inspired by the graphic design, music, and cultural trends of 2000. ### Graphics from 2000 I'm a huge sucker for the graphic design around the turn of the millennium, so I am obviously eating up this game's look. To improve my frame rate, I even chose to lower my game resolution rather than reduce the graphics setting! I want all the refractive glass, shiny curved metal, and shader effects — I want all of those authentic renditions of the graphics of this era. Every picture from this game looks like a 2000 techno album cover or a Windows Media Player skin. There is also a variety of other environments in cyberspace to enjoy with your eyes. There are Counter-Strike surf maps, old abandoned sites riddled with ads, music piracy sites, and gimmicky single-purpose sites.    World's longest site, huh? I wonder what's down there.   Oh. ### Music from 2000 Kitten Burst replicates the styles of electronic music of the era, too. The soundtrack bundles together the likes of electronica, jungle, eurobeat, and a lot more! ["Bounce2me" uses that cheery, sugary eurobeat sound as the in-universe equivalent of Caramelldansen. This music video is also packed with references to meme music from the 00s!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw4Li0qRd7A) ### Culture from 2000 It's the type of people and attitudes you see in-game that make Kitten Burst more than just an aesthetic pastiche of the year 2000. That's what makes it feel authentic: it portrays the way people used to understand and use the web. The game takes you on an adventure through the subcultures and communities of 200X. There are forums, fanfics, first-person-shooters, and furries.    There is even an image macro generator!  The game also has a single jumpscare. I actually think it's pretty funny. If you know about online culture in the early 00s, you'll see it coming. Thankfully, the game does have a setting to remove this one jumpscare if you don't want to deal with that. ## All the cats are belong to me I've noticed that I've played a lot of games lately that prominently feature cats. Kitten Burst only continues this trend. * Cobalt Core * Nine Sols * CATO * Jazztronauts * OneShot I've even written about some of them! * [What I'm playing 🐈🍞 CATO | cat + toast = puzzles](https://sh.itjust.works/post/36482646) * [What I'm playing 😼🚋 Jazztronauts | Plunder the Steam Workshop for money](https://sh.itjust.works/post/35534975) ## I can haz analysis ### The dot-com crashed Kitten Burst's structure and gameplay loop look a bit strange to me. You explore sites and can admire their pretty scenery, but sites tend to be sparse with points of interest like NPCs and races. I guess cyberspace being abandoned is an adequate in-universe justification for this.  Completing all the races in a site unlocks the boss, but the races have no time requirements — the only thing required is to finish. That means you don't need to spend much effort to just advance in the game, since exploring and racing well are optional. At minimum, you could just treat all the gameplay as basic chores that unlock the next cutscene. However, I see the charm in Kitten Burst's humour and authenticity and I'm willing to play along so I can savour the experience. Besides, when a game gives you a timer and a ghost replay, you have to at least try a bit to shave down your times! That's what I did in Neon White and Sonic Racing Transformed, so this is no exception. ### Cyber punks Kitten Burst runs a cyberpunk story. Real cyberpunk, with actual punks.  It's a story of rebelling against the megacorporation that took over cyberspace. Although it's set in 200X, it uses the setting to provide commentary on the state of the modern web. We see commercial interests taking over and polluting a good thing. There may be non-commercial alternatives, but those are where technical-minded users retreat to. ### Cousin of Hypnospace Outlaw As I've gone through the story of Kitten Burst, it has started to feel like a cousin game to Hypnospace Outlaw, the detective game set in a fictional 90s web. Like that game, Kitten Burst's look and feel is obviously nostalgia bait, and yet this dedication to authenticity is an important piece of the game's narrative and message. They both place the player in an immersive representation of the internet and portray a past era of the web and its culture. While Hypnospace Outlaw starts in a burgeoning web, full of unexplored potential, Kitten Burst starts in the aftermath of a ruined one. Both then follow how their settings evolve to draw parallels with how we interact with technology and Big Tech today. [Hypnospace Outlaw's follow-up, Dreamsettler, was unfortunately cancelled.](https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/hypnospace-outlaw-sequel-dreamsettler-has-been-cancelled-we-just-way-overscoped/) This news was part of what made me move Kitten Burst further up my game queue. If you're willing to go with the speedy flight gameplay, you might find that it scratches the same kind of narrative and nostalgic itch as Hypnospace Outlaw. 

## The next book Moss is a VR "third-person" platformer set in a story book where you help a little mouse on a big adventure. All six VR players liked it so much that there's a sequel! Moss: Book II picks up right after the events of the first game, after you helped Quill kill the big bad snake.  The game starts with me opening the literal next book in the story and being transported into it.  ## It's on the mouse Quill, the mouse, works with the usual third-person platforming controls. Like every game that calls itself action-adventure, there's the usual mix of combat, puzzles, and exploration. However, the special feature of the Moss series is that you can directly interact with the level to help her, with the level shown at about the height of your chest. You can pull and push objects to help Quill get around or even grab enemies to hold them still for her to hit. The combat is very forgiving, with enemies slowly telegraphing their attacks, plus you can heal Quill any time by holding her in your hand.  As expected from a book, Moss: Book II is a linear adventure. I sometimes get pulled out of the book world back to my seat to watch the next pages of the story unfold.  ## A VR game that doesn't try to throw you around Even as an experienced VR user, it gets annoying when a VR game feels the need to have very large spaces or to fling you halfway to Mars to try to sell the immersive power of virtual reality. In contrast, Moss sells the immersiveness of VR modestly but also more intimately. The environments are smaller but very detailed, like a stage right in front of you on a desk.  Unlike a lot of VR games, in Moss, sitting is actually required. Sometimes, you need to lean and look around, but the game never asks you to get up and move around. Keeping with the book theme, instead of scrolling the view as Quill moves around, scene changes are represented as turning a page of the book. Since everything happens right in front of you, at about chest- to eye-level, and you never need to turn around, Moss is a much more comfortable and less intense experience. ## Friend-shaped Virtual reality is a very intimate format for a game. Eye contact and physical gestures feel so much more compelling in VR than in any other format. VR games inevitably integrate the players themselves into the game setting, so the fourth wall is always at least a bit loose in VR. In Moss, there is no fourth wall. Quill knows you're reading her book and often turns to look up at you to ask for help. And you can pet her!  And you can high five her! ## Where we've been At this point, I've explored swamps and castles on a quest to get the important things that do the important stuff. I've just made it past a big twist in the story, which I deliberately left out of the pictures and videos in this article. But here's a picture of a beautiful swamp. 

This is by [pannenkoek2012](https://www.youtube.com/@pannenkoek2012), who you may know from his Super Mario 64 videos. [You know, the one from 2016 about playing Watch for Rolling Rocks in "half" of an A press.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A)

About a year ago, I heard someone mention that Outer Wilds had a VR mod. I do have a VR setup and am an experienced VR player, so I really could experience this game for the first time in VR. Is that reasonable or should I play it the first time with flat graphics? (Index btw)

Let's share our lists and opinions on the demos. We'll help each other find promising games. This Next Fest runs until Monday, June 16, 10 am PDT.

First, a little announcement. At this point, I've made plenty of articles in this "what I'm playing" series, and this is the eighth. [So now I'm gathering them onto my extremely barebones website, under the "gamelog" tag!](https://gemini.envs.net/~silv/tags/gamelog.gmi) ## Not your father's Nokia Snake game WORMHOLE, like all Snake-style games, has the usual formula. Eat stuff, get longer, and don't hit the walls or yourself. I found this game from a Steam Next Fest last year, where I was drawn in by the enigmatic trailer. I was really surprised by how intense and hypnotic the demo's gameplay was. ## Snake Arcade (Snarkade) But WORMHOLE is also a natural advancement of the Snake formula, bringing in arcadey additions. You get a choice of three classes of worm each with their own unique ability and wind your way around the galaxy through craptons of levels, full of planets to eat. You occasionally get a break to choose which set of levels to go to and get an upgrade on the way.  There are side objectives to eat, like the skulls that show up to steal your snacks, costing you points. UFOs fly by, worth big points if you catch them. Eat an entire trail of stars and you trigger a supernova, clearing the whole screen.  Obviously, there are wormholes as well! That's why this game is called WORMHOLE. You go in one and come out another. They make it easy to reach faraway parts of the level and can be handy escape routes if you trap yourself with your long body. It also mimics old-school arcade games in its presentation. The game uses monochrome pixel graphics with the usual set of filters to make the game feel like it's on a worn, ghosty CRT display, but you can turn those effects off if they bother you. The extremely restricted palette of WORMHOLE's graphics reminds me of Downwell, which does the same thing. And likewise, you get to unlock alternate palettes as a minor reward for playing the game. I've been deliberately switching palettes to show them off in this article. You can also choose from a range of corny background art that's like what you might see on the panels of an arcade cabinet, including some that write game instructions into the art. ## Snake turned up to 11 A game of WORMHOLE starts off looking and feeling pretty mild, but that contrasts with the much more intense late game. This game hypnotizes like the Polybius arcade machine from urban legends. It's full of very juicy effects to dazzle you, with plenty of particles, screen shake, and hitpause. It's especially apparent in the bonus levels, which are packed with UFOs to eat.  Early on, the music sounds chipper and friendly, but gets more and more panicked and aggressive near the end. The game gets faster and faster. Your worm gets longer and longer. The levels get increasingly intricate or cramped. You'll need to react quickly to navigate the levels. Thankfully, the game helps you a bit here: you get a brief warning period if you're about to die, with the game slowing down and the screen dimming. And if you don't save yourself in time…  With a longer worm and smaller levels, you'll start moving in dense squiggle patterns to fit, but that comes with its own risks. If you're not careful, you'll make a closed loop and trap yourself.  ## This wormhole was made for me I've been playing this game a lot in the past few weeks. A full run doesn't take too long but it's definitely satisfying to get into a flow state and mentally sink into the wormhole. Early on, I was really struggling to control the worm properly, especially as the game speeds up. But once I synchronized with the vibe of the game, I started to figure it out. Knowing which wormholes are connected. Always keeping track of where the head is to steer accurately. Always keeping in mind the tail length so I don't trap myself. Developing a strategy for which upgrades to take. Of the three classes of worm in the game, I found a fave in Yeehaw, a cowboy hat-wearing worm that shoots bullets. Lately, though, I've been focusing on playing Dash because of its strong high score potential. I've found that the Dash worm's high-speed charge can finish levels very quickly, which leads to big score bonuses. ## WORMHOLE is a hidden gem WORMHOLE is a proper hidden gem. The game is small in scope but very polished for its purpose. Currently, it has only 35 reviews on Steam. If you merely finish the game, you'll be guaranteed a top 10 spot on the leaderboard, since only the top 9 have even gotten to the kill screen! You want to make it to the kill screen?  # EAT EM ALL.

The ruthlessly random puzzle platformer just had a major update to make it a "Mosa Lina 2". - The number of tools and levels has about doubled. - There are new features for custom levels. - There are many other improvements. It's on a small sale until June 11, then will increase in price on June 13.

https://p2ce.org/clustered

CATO is that old nerd joke about cats and toast turned into a puzzle platformer. Cats always land on their feet, but buttered toast always lands butter-side down, so if you strap them together…  I found CATO through a Steam Next Fest in 2024. The first few levels in that demo were promising enough to get me to wishlist the game. CATO is in a corner of the puzzle game genre I like to call "single-player co-op" since you control two characters at the same time. The cat can run and climb but can't jump, while the toast can jump sideways and up walls but is helpless on ice. When the two are assembled together, their abilities are combined and they also gain infinite jumps. Almost all puzzles in the game involve splitting up and reassembling at the right times. There's also a basic plot about running out of milk and going out to get more. For a puzzle game, that's enough of an excuse to get the game started. Story is obviously not the reason a puzzle game fan would play this.  ## Smart puzzle design I consider the puzzle design in CATO to be exceptionally smart, yet understandable. The levels are laid out so it's easy to tell what they want you to achieve, with each major step of the puzzle placed in a different part of the screen, so you only need to worry about how to solve it and not what your objective even is. While these are often multiple simple steps, the challenge is completing them all at the same time. The most interesting levels remind me of community-made advanced levels for Portal 2, where it's often easy to just reach the exit but tricky to get there with the door held open. A small number of puzzles instead focus on execution challenges, like sensitive timing, but these are thankfully rare. The game gently teaches its mechanics with just level design and no text. That's the ideal execution of a tutorial, on the level of the greats. It follows the classic pattern: you first get a very easy puzzle using the mechanic, then the puzzle repeats, each time with an extra twist added that makes it harder, guiding you to discover the mechanic's nuances. The game makes good use of its mechanics, exploring each deeply, and in later levels, starts combining them and challenging you to understand how they interact. There are mechanics like: * Walls that become solid if the cat is carrying the toast! * Cheese that is bouncy for the cat but sticky for the toast! * High-speed pipe transport! * Multiple toasts!  Overall, CATO isn't too hard of a puzzle game, but there definitely were a few levels that had me sitting still, thinking for a while. There's also a hint system available for most levels, which marks the important places in a level. ## Action breaks The final level of each of the five worlds is an action-focused level instead of a puzzle. Some are runner-style platformers, like Canabalt, which have you dodging obstacles while sliding to the exit. Others are boss fights that feature the main mechanic of that world as the key to beating the boss. None are really that difficult, but they're an adequate change of pace after playing a long chain of puzzle levels. Although five worlds sounds somewhat few, each actually has a lot of levels — about 30 or so in each.  ## Looks The art style of the game is pretty interesting. It imitates chunky pixel art with 3D graphics, while maintaining the flat, two-tone shading to sell the pixel art look. But with its 3D art, it gets to have very smooth animations and detailed environments. Without the obviously artificial pixelation effect, this would have been fine, but unremarkable 3D art. Without the 3D, there may not have been the smoothness in the animation or the flexibility to zoom in and out to appropriately fit levels on screen. Also, there are skins! Don't worry, they don't require any money or grinding. You unlock them as rewards for finding in-game secrets. There are separate skins for the cat and the toast, but I find the default toast to be too much fun to switch off of. Despite that, getting these secrets is relevant for achieving… ## One hundred percent! I liked CATO so much I decided to 100% it. I consider this a great honour for a game, since I so rarely bother with full completion. (The previous time I did so was with Grapple Dog in 2023.) That involved finding all the secrets throughout the game. On the level select map, some level icons have a mark indicating there's a secret there. Some secrets just involve going into a hidden passageway, like in Doom or Quake, but accessing others requires using a level's puzzle elements in a counterintuitive way to get the cat and toast into an obscure corner of the level. Some secrets just contain unlockable skins or easter eggs, but some actually lead to additional, secret levels. More interestingly, they feature a special mechanic that only appears in these secret levels! If you never go for secrets, you would never even know about this mechanic. (Of course, I won't be giving away what this mechanic is.) Most of these secret levels have a similar difficulty as the main levels, but the ones near the end of the game get particularly hard, involving clever usage of the secret mechanic in combination with the other mechanics. 

[Jazztronauts doesn't have a page on the Steam Store. Instead, it lives on the Steam Workshop!](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1452613192) Quick facts: * It's a full game mode for Garry's Mod * Genre: Uh, first-person collectathon? * Number of players: Singleplayer and online co-op ### Getting Jazzed Up *Jazztronauts* is a deeply meta kind of game that takes full advantage of its Garry's Mod base: it uses the Gmod workshop as its playground and the story takes place within it as a "Source engine multiverse" of sorts. I find it's a great experience in online co-op with friends. The story starts off with you playing normal Gmod. However, while playing some unremarkable Half-Life 2-styled map, a band of interdimensional cats show up, exploring the worlds of the Source engine. They recruit you to help with the mission: you're going to help them gather junk from maps from all over the Gmod workshop. You will actually go out to real maps to steal props and level geometry! Wait, otherworldly visitors that show up to offer you a job for a mysterious agenda? Am I back in Black Mesa? ### Joining the Band Once you join the cats, they take you to the Bar Samsara, their hideout between maps. You chat with them to get to know them better and receive jobs from them to fetch certain quantities of certain objects.   You go over to the giant TV and channel surf on the *real* Gmod workshop for a *real* map that you want to visit. These are maps people made for other game modes, like Sandbox, Prop Hunt, or Zombie Survival. In one rare case, I stumbled upon a map that was specifically designed for Jazztronauts, called jazz_artemis, uploaded a few days prior. [jazz_artemis on the workshop](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3244640713)  Once you find a map you want to raid, you call over a trolley to take you there and the map starts downloading. Panels all over the bar also display stats about the map. Hopefully it has a lot of props to steal! You get in the trolley and honk the horn repeatedly to tell your friends to hurry up and get in.  Once you're in the map, you pull out your prop snatcher baton and start ripping stuff out of the map. You remember to be on the lookout for any quest items you need to grab. When playing with friends, credit for stolen props is shared, so there's no need to compete for props. When you snatch stuff, it'll automatically be lifted off the map, leaving behind a pink crystal pattern to indicate what used to be there.  After a while of stealing potted plants and office windows, you're satisfied with what you've gotten and the map is looking pretty pink. You pull out your keyfob and press the button to summon a trolley to take you back to the bar. This exit effect is absolutely amazing, with the trolley smashing through map geometry to get to you. It's an impressively robust and seamless transition!  Now back at the bar, you head to the prop claim area to get paid. You pull the lever to unload your haul of stolen props for the cats. When playing with friends, all money earned to date is copied to each player, so late joiners automatically get caught up with money. You can then go see the Bartender to buy upgrades for your tools.  The tasks the cats assign you start off simple, like "find 15 barrels", but the needed objects become more and more obscure: washing machines, live headcrabs, suspicious chemicals. Later quests get strange:  ### Grooving in Maps The variety of quest items means you're going to have to explore far corners of the Gmod workshop for many kinds of maps to find your loot. Here are some examples of maps I found. rp_newexton is a roleplay map where you pretend to live in a fictional Australian city. There are apartments, a shopping mall, a giant banana beside the highway, and even a working train that takes you to out of New Exton to the suburbs!  This map, whose name I don't remember, has a turret that rapid fires rockets.  vp_voidmall is a creepy, sprawling abandoned mall with phenomenal lighting. There's also a playable story in this map if you were to play it properly. It was too powerful for Jazztronauts and crashed the game! However, it was too intriguing to pass on, so my friends and I explored the map in vanilla Gmod instead. This is no doubt the highest-quality map I've ever played from the Gmod workshop.  ### Coda Jazztronauts feels like a wild take on a story mode for Garry's Mod itself, given its persistent story and its awareness of Garry's Mod and its player culture. It has a special, meta perspective on the game it's built on, reaching through the fourth wall but never getting smarmy or self-referential about it. This game certainly could only exist as a mod on top of the mountains of content made for Garry's Mod. Jazztronauts is an earnest love letter to the Source engine and celebrates all of the things fans have made for it over the years. In fact, this is at the core of their objectives: they want you to collect stuff so they can build an interactive Source engine museum! Learn about brushes, the intricacies of crouch-jumping, and surfing! Now this is edutainment.  Is the gameplay of Jazztronauts thin? Yes. One of the cats even says to your face that this is "fetch quest hell". You run a long chain of fetch quests for objects that aren't even guaranteed to appear in the maps you visit. How many maps do you think contain Dr. Kleiner? Nonetheless, my friends and I enjoy playing; we care more about the journey than the destination. We get to share our reactions to all the interesting things we find, and some maps have stuck with us. Months on, we still talk about the memorable ones: maps with awesome atmosphere, humour, wacky ideas from novice mappers, and inventive interactive elements. Jazztronauts has taken us on trips to see more of the Garry's Mod workshop than we'd normally bother to. (If you really want, you can open the console and directly load a map that you know has quest items.) Jazztronauts is like some fever dream interpretation of what surfing the web looks like inside cyberspace. It's like a StumbleUpon for Garry's Mod. ### Want to play Jazztronauts? You'll need: * [Garry's Mod](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4000/Garrys_Mod/) * [Jazztronauts from the Garry's Mod workshop](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1452613192) To avoid map errors, make sure you have Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 installed. To avoid *more* map errors, you'll probably have to install more Valve games, like Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2. If you're playing with friends, make sure to always have the same person host the game because the save file is kept on their computer. 😺

> Coming to PC and Consoles on May 28, 2025

## The condensed looter shooter experience Gunfire Reborn is a looter shooter with an Asian aesthetic and a short, but extremely replayable campaign, which runs for less than an hour. It supports four-player online co-op, but this time, I was running solo. In short, it's the full Borderlands experience without the questionable writing and Randy Pitchford. You travel across multiple lands to purge the corruption (an ARPG classic), fighting terracotta soldiers in their crypts, sniper birds in the desert, samurai fish at the shores, and polar bears up in the frozen mountains.  Within the past few years since exiting early access, Gunfire Reborn has had seasonal events, like Path of Exile's leagues, adding a bit of extra spice to the campaign. The fourth season (Star Link) started just a few days ago, so I thought it was a good time to get a run in with a character I wasn't familiar with. ## This run: Zi Xiao In the head video, I'm playing as Zi Xiao, an owl who commands the stars with cards. I'm using Golden Bow, which deals immense amounts of single-target damage but is terrible with dealing with large packs of monsters. Good thing Zi Xiao's abilities can make up for it! With the best cards, I call the stars to strike down an area in front of me. Oh yeah, I somehow managed to get more than 100% accuracy in this run. I wonder how the game is counting that.  ## Yeah, it really is a fast, Asian Borderlands Gunfire Reborn is transparently inspired by Borderlands. It features the same three core elements of Borderlands: fire, corrosion, and shock, and has the same focus on scavenging for weapons. One difference is that it relies on mechanically unique weapon designs, compared to the part-by-part weapon generation system that Borderlands has. Still, like any proper ARPG, there are piles of modifiers that can appear on any item. Why not try… * An octopus that sucks moisture from enemies to power a water laser * A shotgun that's really a small, handheld demon that eats fish and sneezes death * A star compass that rather than shooting bullets, projects a damaging ring around you that you can grow and shrink * The [Unkempt Harold](https://www.lootlemon.com/weapon/unkempt-harold-bl2), straight from Borderlands 2 * A brick  *Yeet.*

Have you ever read Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott? I did as a kid (nerd). Each group in literature class got to choose a novel to study and we picked Flatland. One day, two-dimensional creature A. Square gets a visit from a three-dimensional creature and gets a glimpse of a new dimension beyond his world's two. The novel ends something like this: > "So are there more dimensions beyond the third?" > > "Nah," said Sphere. ## Anyway, let's go golfing! Sphere was wrong and 4D Golf is the proof. I got it on the recent sale and just started it and it's just about what I expected. It's really a straightforward game. You play mini-golf, but the course spans the space of four dimensions instead of three. However, you, the player, are still a 3D creature and can only see a slice of the 4D space. That means the part of the challenge is just to figure out where you actually need to face to get the ball into the hole.  As a bit of aid, the game gives you several tools to help you visualize and navigate the course. You have the ability to spin around the 4th axis and you can see ghost images of what's perpendicular to you in the fourth axis so you get a better idea of what's around you.  You can also switch to a "volume view", which lets you see and explore the floor plan of the level. Like how a floor plan is two-dimensional for a 3D area, it's three-dimensional in 4D, so you fly around with six degrees of freedom in the floor plan mode.  After playing a handful of levels, I think I've built up enough of an intuition to orient myself properly. I'm getting a hang of this internal mental shorthand of the level changing around the ball as it moves. The first few levels also deliver a quick tutorial on understanding 4D space, with the classic explanation for the topic. It starts by talking about how a 2D creature would perceive 3D space, then extends the analogy to a 3D creature in 4D space. It really is quick, so I'm not sure how helpful it could be for anyone who isn't already slightly familiar with 4D. ## I'm slightly familiar with 4D Yeah, Flatland got young me fascinated in this kind of funky geometry stuff. I was finding sites to learn about exotic geometries. Four dimensions was only the start. Well, I clearly wasn't the only person who was fascinated by this stuff. 4D Golf is essentially developer CodeParade's followup to their previous game, Hyperbolica, which was set in a three-dimensional world where the rules of geometry were different. Parallel lines never stayed parallel and five squares could share a corner, not four. I'm glad I get to enjoy multiple extremely nerdy geometry games. ## Bonus: discover more funky geometry-related stuff Novels * Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott — A. Square lives in a two-dimensional society and discovers the third dimension. It's in the public domain, so it's free to read online! * The Planiverse by A. K. Dewdney — A class in a computer lab accidentally makes contact with a two-dimensional universe. It's a more rational, "hard" take on how a two-dimensional universe would work. Online resources * <http://hi.gher.space/> — 2003-era site with an introduction to four-dimensional space and an exploration of how a world like that would work. * [Outside In AKA "turning a sphere inside out"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO61D9x6lNY) — An old-school YouTube upload of an even older-school animated presentation about math research on the topic. [Here's the 1996 official site!](http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/docs/outreach/oi/) * [Portals to Non-Euclidean Geometries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqUv2JO2BCs) — In this YouTube video, the host takes you through portals to spaces where the rules of geometry are weird and different. More games * Hyperbolica — By the same guy as 4D Golf. A light-hearted walking simulator in a world with hyperbolic geometry. * Miegakure — A 4D puzzle game that's been perpetually in development since like 2007. It still shows up on YouTube, at conferences, and in the solo dev's blog posts from time to time.

My gift for Christmas is sore arms from playing Beat Saber. It's a serious workout playing high-difficulty maps. That map shown in the head video is: * [Lights Camera Action](https://meganeko.bandcamp.com/track/lights-camera-action) * Artist: meganeko * [Map by Tacky](https://beatsaver.com/maps/10d15) I consider Beat Saber to be one part of the essentials pack of modern VR gaming. As a rhythm game fan, it's what got me hooked on VR, having played it at a VR arcade back when the HTC Vive was considered new. I visited that arcade multiple times and would spend my entire time slot playing Beat Saber. A few years later, I got a Valve Index and it's still one of my go-to games when I use it, alongside Half-Life: Alyx.  ## Water breaks! Beat Saber is obviously a physically intense game, so I make sure to stretch beforehand. I also take water breaks every few songs or I'll get too exhausted to play well. To help reduce fatigue, I move the rest of my body around with the beat so I'm not just standing still like a scarecrow. ## Modding! One great benefit of PC-powered VR is easy access to modding, and with Beat Saber, modding enables the ability to play community-made beatmaps, which are all I play. Interestingly, my preferences for music in rhythm games tends to be slightly different from my personal tastes. As a result, my collection of maps is very EDM-heavy since the strong beats feel fun to hit in-game. I also use a camera mod that shows a view on my monitor that's nicer for spectators and screen captures, which is why I have clips of my gameplay. I record with camera settings that roughly approximate what I see and my experience in the headset. ## So many maps! Over the past few years, I've collected a whole lot of maps. I've noticed that the maps I like to download and play fall into four categories: 1. Really fun movement and patterns 2. Music from another rhythm game (mainly osu!) 3. Music I own 4. Novelty (maps of stuff like ["half life 1 medkit type beat"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN5vhvZIBXE)) Here's an example of movement that I find particularly fun, on a map that I like to play a lot as a warmup. Both hands move independently while having a matching rhythm. * [Hoohah (VIP Edit)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee7fEEMaPPA) * Artists: Fox Stevenson & Curbi * [Map by Ruckus](https://beatsaver.com/maps/216d)  Finally, here's a "Bandcamp special", a map I found just today by plugging in names from my music collection into search. Getting to play music I personally listen to is a treat. I think this would count as *extremely* active listening. * [CITRUS!](https://lianhua.bandcamp.com/track/citrus) * Artist: lianhua * [Map by adgato](https://beatsaver.com/maps/3e34d) 

Did you know you can throw objects in Portal 2? You pretty much use your player camera as a cannon to fling objects by letting go of them while moving your view. This is not intended, [so clever throws can just bypass or break some puzzles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NhfVHLl6uE). This quirk came up in a puzzle while playing co-op with a friend. We figured out a throw that would bypass the main part of the puzzle. I've played the co-op campaign multiple times, but this time I was playing it with a friend who hadn't. It took them a while to get used to thinking with four portals. I would hang back and let them take charge in solving the puzzles, since I'd obviously know how to solve them. Except…  This level, Funnel Drill, I didn't remember how to solve, so the two of us were stumped together. After some co-op thinking, we had roughly narrowed down the flow of the problem. We needed to pass an object through that barrier to block a laser with it. We played half-court basketball instead.  I had an exit portal facing the laser. As soon as the ball came out of it, I quickly sent out an excursion funnel right behind the ball, completely bypassing the need to carry it through the barrier. We probably could have figured out the puzzle in the time it took us to get a successful throw. ## Bonus video 🥏 I throw a disc like I'm playing ultimate with GLaDOS! It actually lands in the disc reader! 

I haven't logged into Steam for several days now. All my gaming recently has been rRootage, which I recently rediscovered after looking around on Flathub for unrelated software.  This is an old favourite of mine. Years ago in high school, I snuck it onto some computers and later saw it on others, so people were definitely copying it around. rRootage is a bullet hell with all the extra stuff ripped out. Yeah, that's just about all there is to say about it. There are no minor enemies. Each level is a rush of five bosses. Each difficulty, from 1 to 9 then 0, has three hand-crafted levels, plus a fourth where the bullet barrages are created randomly using a genetic algorithm! All my footage here is captured from my attempts on difficulty 8. It features four game modes. There's a "normal" mode plus three modes with mechanics inspired by other shoot-em-up titles: Giga Wing, Psyvariar, and Ikaruga. Some bosses are so dense with bullets that the game actually starts slowing down. It even seems to me that the game is balanced around this. You get more time to figure out how to navigate a field packed with bullets and your ship moves slower, which lets you nudge around safely. It was originally released in 2003 by [Kenta Cho (aka ABA Games)](https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/), who has made a name for himself making shmups and quirky minigames. A few years ago, he updated it, and more recently, [someone ported it to Switch](http://victor.madtriangles.com/code%20experiment/2021/10/07/rrootage-port.html). He also created a markup language called BulletML for describing bullet barrages, which has appeared in some of his other games as well as in games by others. ## Getting the game rRootage costs nothing. [The official page](https://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/rr_e.html) offers Windows downloads. Some Linux distributions offer a package, and if yours doesn't, [you can get the Flatpak](https://flathub.org/apps/com.abagames.rRootage). (It's also free software released with the 2-clause BSD license, so you're free to mess around with its 2003-era C++ codebase, which features an obsolete version of SDL. Good luck building it from source.) ## Bonus video This is me somehow making it through a relentlessly fast bullet pattern on pure instinct. 

Bonus: it also seems that the episodes have been rolled into the base game. [Full details of the anniversary update.](https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife2/20th) 

https://dadako.itch.io/bad-pixels The developer occasionally uploads clips of the game.