As many of you know, I enjoy a good round of Magic: The Gathering. And once upon a time, I was invested in Hearthstone, praising many of its creative foundations despite leaving the game due to disagreements with its card design philosophy.

Wizards of the Coast released a new game on PC and mobile a short time ago, asking the question: “What if we combined Magic: The Gathering with Hearthstone to create something new that bridges them together?” That game is Magic: Spellslingers.

Let’s give it a shot. We might end up liking it.

We won’t truly know, for another several weeks or months, whether or not this is a good game. Not only do players still need time to test the balance of each planeswalker spellslinger, and the cards they each have access to, but we need to understand the long-term support plan for the game. How often do they plan to add new cards, tweak each character’s abilities and stats, and what approach do they take to doing so? These are all pertinent questions that we simply do not have the capacity to answer. I’m hopeful, but WotC has a spotty track record in this area, so there’s reason to be cautious.

That said, the foundation they’ve built out here is a solid one. The most famous problem that players of Magic experience to this day is mana flood/mana screw, where despite building a balanced deck, they lose simply because they could not draw the land necessary to play their cards. By adopting the Hearthstone approach, this problem practically solves itself by ensuring a steady and consistent increase in mana as the game progresses. And by choosing a land other than the default, players can trade in that consistency for a chance to proc effects that further assist them over the course of the game.

Further, this hybrid appears to have addressed, at least so far, a big problem I’ve long held with Hearthstone: Its overreliance on randomness. While Spellslingers certainly has cards and effects that hit or proc randomly, by and large, most cards do require players to declare targets and think about the proper sequence of their plays. The tactical depth that I associate with the brand is maintained, even as they borrow heavily from Blizzard’s example.

I intend to stick with it for a time, to see if it has the staying power I want from it. Time will tell, but for now I’m happy with the game.

It’s not even October yet, and we’re already graced with yet another adventure from the wizards of horror over at Supermassive Games. Only, instead of another one of their Dark Pictures Anthology games, they’ve produced an experience on the scale of the work that first put them on the map: Until Dawn.

And of course, I couldn’t play one of these without inviting my good buddy Acharky to join me for the adventure. The Dark Duo rises once more.

I am tired of licensed music getting in the way of me and my stream fun. Both Twitch and YouTube hit me with different copyright violations over the music used in the opening segment. Playing this game every time I want to stream something with licensed music just isn’t fun. It never will be.

Having said that, I’m surprised how long this introduction section has been, but that might be because I’ve grown used to the abridged pacing that we experience with The Dark Pictures Anthology games, the tighter and more focused experiences that they are. I’m not entirely sure that the extra length does any favors for games like this, but we only just began and I’m open to being wrong.

I do appreciate some of the new options we’re given in the accessibility menu, like the ability to automatically pass QTEs. It gives me more freedom to enjoy the game by focusing on the aspects I enjoy, like the decision-making and uncovering the clues/evidence to piece together the story behind the monsters we’re certainly about to face.

We’re in for a long night.

Our improvised plans against Jean Bison have backfired. Though we’ve technically defeated him, it was a pyrrhic victory. After locating our safe house, the old relic managed to steal and sell off all of the Clockwerk parts to Arpeggio, the final member of the Klaww Gang.

Unless we stop him, it’s only a matter of time before Clockwerk is reassembled, and his hatred of the Cooper line is reborn anew to terrorize the world as he once did. That can’t happen, not at any cost.

Thanks to CooperCurse for his compilation of all the bonus movies we used at the end of the stream. You can find it here for your own viewing pleasure.

To this day, it impresses me that this game visited true consequences and heaps of pain upon the central cast, which they carry with them into the next game. While this was certainly the era where platforms were starting to grow darker and edgier, Sly manages to tow a balance between light-hearted cartoon antics and those more emotionally mature themes, that gives weight to them without miring so deeply in them that it grows tonally dissonant. It avoids the trap of being darker-and-edgier than franchises like Jak and Daxter fell into, staying kid-friendly while giving a more mature audience food for thought.

Combined with the shift to more open, sandbox levels, and a cinematic approach reminiscent of Ocean’s Eleven and other heist movies, this sequel did so much to cement Sly’s identity among a sea of other 3D platformers and is largely the reason the franchise has such a dedicated following that persists to this day.

When next we stream, I’ll be joined by my good friend Acharky. The Dark Duo shall regroup once more to play Supermassive’s latest work: The Quarry.

Whenever another set gets added to Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel, it’s accompanies by a couple of key archetypes, usually more powerful than the ones that came before and this set is no different. So what monsters are fit to take on the wyrms, beasts, and Eldlich zombies that make up the current meta?

Migratory birds, of course. We’re playing with Floowandereeze and friends. It’s time to Floowandereeze Nu… No… No, that joke is too easy.

It’s almost shocking how effective the deck can be for how easy it is to play. As long as we can go first, and get the right cards in our hand, we can win most matchups by virtue of completely locking our opponents out of the game.

Since so many modern Yu-Gi-Oh decks rely on special summoning a ton of monsters, especially link monsters, and using their effects to chain into bigger, deadlier threats, our core strategy is adept at kicking out their knees before they have a chance to even started. And if we’re lucky enough to draw into a Dimension Shifter, we can also incapacitate any deck that relies heavily on its graveyard.

And in a format where everyone is playing three copies of Maxx C, it feels great to be able to completely ignore it.

I can see myself playing this one for a while, or at least until the next big archetype takes my interest.

The Contessa’s schemes have been thwarted, but not without consequence. And yet, we must press on in our plans to steal and secure the Clockwerk parts.

Our next target is in Canada, the infamous lumberjack Jean Bison. He’s in possession of a wealth of the parts, so it’s time to liberate him of their burden.

If you thought it couldn’t get worse than our heroes being caught and thrown into police custody, then you were wrong. The spoils of all our previous heists have been stolen, and now all of the clockwork parts are in possession of the final member of the Klaww Gang. And to top it off, poor Murray lost his van.

It can’t get any worse, can it? Can it?

It’s been several months since we last spent time with gaming’s most iconic assassin, Agent 47. But just because we took time away doesn’t mean IO Interactive has. They’ve been hard at work creating new content for the game, free for all players.

Shockingly, this includes a brand new map, which was just released. Welcome to Ambrose Island.

As far as missions go, this one wasn’t too difficult. There’s not much mechanically to discuss, but just the idea of having a new map in Hitman is significant enough to warrant marking the occasion.

I’ll have to look into the technical problems I encountered while playing to see if there’s something I can do to fix it. The last thing I want is to stop streaming Hitman, but I might have to if I can’t fix it.

Post-script: The fix was updating my goddamn Nvidia drivers. The auto-update wasn’t set up like I thought it was.

The gang is back together again after two of its member suffered brief incarceration under maximum security. And yet, we have unfinished business with the warden of that prison: The Contessa.

Turns out, she was one of our targets all along, possessing the Clockwerk Eyes. That means it’s time for a little payback.

This game in particular doesn’t get enough credit for the way it gradually escalates the stakes and danger of each episode. What started out as a break-in at a nightclub has escalated into a global conspiracy involving several interlinking crimes. There’s a clear method underlying them all, which wasn’t the case in the first game. Where the Fiendish Five were all separate people who did their own thing, the Klaww Gang is a much more organized, united front.

And as we continue, this will only grow even more true. The conversation between Jean Bison and Arpeggio we overhear lays a lot of significant groundwork for the reveals to come, but we’ll talk more about them when they arrive.

For now, we’re getting closer. Not much more left.

Last week, we played a game about moving through a heavenly space as quickly as possible, murdering all the demons we encounter along the way, catering to speedrunners looking to climb the leaderboards for the best possible times.

So now, it’s time for the complete opposite. Let’s enjoy a slower-paced, lo-fi experience about breaking down, and salvaging spaceships. This is Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

This game, at its core, is a celebration of manual labor and how joyous it can be in a vacuum. You might not think a manual labor job would make for compelling gameplay, but you would be wrong. There is a primitive joy in breaking down the individual components of each ship, watching it get reduced into parts for processing or resale. And as the player masters the discipline, teaching themselves how to expert and efficiently do the work, it feels good.

But more than that, the game is also about how the joy of these jobs can be sucked away by the oppressive systems that they exist under (read: capitalism). This is a world where legends of “labor unions” that existed hundreds of years ago are spoken in hushed tones, lest the company begin to crack down even further. As the player, we’re insulated from these forces, able to focus on the task at hand, but the characters in the plot are constantly brought low by circumstances outside of their control, which cause stress that bleeds into the work.

It’s an intensely empathetic experience unlike any I’ve played before, and I look forward to finishing it.

And how the worm turns. In this episode, we finally succeed in robbing Rajan of his remaining Clockwerk parts. Usually, that would be cause for celebration, but that simply won’t be in the cards for our heroes. Nay, what follows is one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Cooper Gang.

Can we pull through it, or will cruel fate have other plans?

Something unique to Sly compared to many other cute mascot platformers of the era, and eras past, is a willingness to put the main cast through pain. Video games often exist as a power fantasy, where the player is allowed to act in some way more capable than they are, or even could be, in reality. To facilitate that power fantasy, the protagonists we play are usually made to succeed at whatever goals they set out for themselves so that players can feel accomplished.

So seeing two of our three playable cast members getting incarcerated as a result of our heist was genuinely shocking at the time. It was the first time that our cast wasn’t able to get away. To top it off, the only one left is arguably the least confident in his own abilities, and it’s up to him to bust his friends out.

By playing around in this space, and doing something to shake up the usual formula, the game accomplishes quite a few important goals.

• It creates a gameplay scenario where we can’t rely on the full cast, which gives the subsequent chapter a unique texture before anything else in the series before or since.
  
• It shows that our characters aren’t invincible or omniscient despite how capable they are. They can be fooled or make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences.
  
• It raises the threat level of the Klaww Gang. Where the Cooper Gang was able to defeat the Fiendish Five decisively, the Klaww Gang is able to store a significant win in this chapter of the game.

And this won’t be the last time the series is willing to explore these darker colors. It adds a little more maturity that what you’d typically see from a cartoon mascot platformer.

I’m not a part of the speedrunning community. I don’t derive pleasure from playing the same game hundreds of times in order to optimize my play for the extra fraction of a second, hoping to improve my personal best or beat a friend’s time.

And yet, here I am playing Neon White, a speedrunning game that is, in the words of the developer, “for freaks”. I guess that makes me a freak because I’m all in.

I’m astounded by how this little indie title has been making huge waves in both game critic circles and my immediate friend groups. The most common factor in that has been the Friends Leaderboard. Everyone that I know who has gotten seriously into Neon White has a “villain” on their friends list that they consciously or subconsciously compete against for the best times. For me, that’s my friend OrangeCreamsicle.

Even if I don’t beat his times, which is often because they’ve posted some really strong ones, knowing that someone I personally talk to can get times in that range gives me the added confidence when going for Ace times that I can do it, that a human being can reasonably get that good.

It helps that the stages are also designed with the idea of getting played and replayed multiple times, often with multiple routes shortcuts baked in for players to discover after multiple runs. Though the game does call for some level of precision, I find that the barrier of every is lax enough where I can make a couple of small mistakes and often still hit an Ace time if I’ve got my route down perfectly. And should a run go pear-shapers, the quick restart key means I’m back and ready for another run with limited downtime between. If there was any amount of loading for that, then that fiction alone would be almost deal-breaking.

An all-round excellent game like this doesn’t come out too often, but when it does it is so sweet.