The Needles Underpass is 2.4 m high and yet it sure does catch a lot of flies!

Tic Tac Together is team-based recursive tic-tac-toe. When both teams try to claim the same square at the same time, they have to fight for it by playing a subgame. Or a subsubgame. Et cetera. It’s surprisingly strategic. How much board control should you give up to secure a contested square?

I’ve heard good things about Sunderfolk but haven’t played it myself. It has hex-grid tactical combat with co-op done via smartphone, so only the buyer of the game needs to share their screen.

Which ones have you heard of?

• Gauntlet Slayer Edition
  • Good old dungeon crawling. 2014 revival of an 80s arcade classic.
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
  • Defuse a bomb with your friends
• CATO: Buttered Cat
  • Puzzle platformer featuring that joke about how cats and toast land when dropped
• Mosa Lina
  • Aggressively randomized puzzle platformer
• Assault Android Cactus
  • Arcade-style twin-stick shooter with pumping soundtrack
• Pizza Possum
  • Very soft stealth game about stealing and eating lots of food
• Moving Out 2 (or 1 if you’re fine with local only)
  • Drag and move furniture onto a truck

I will back up Cassette Beasts for having a strategically interesting turn-based combat system.

If you’ve followed the news and history of this bridge, the city did actually try. They increased the clearance from the original 11 ft 8 in to 12 ft 4 in, but that’s still a bit too low for large vehicles. There’s limited room to expand since that bridge is a rail bridge and there are utilities under the ground.

Because of the weirdness drivers know they have to pay attention or else death and injury awaits.

That is one thing I admire about chaotic roads. I remember hearing the rule of crossing the street in Hanoi is to just look where you want to go and walk in a straight line at a constant speed, and expect traffic to work around you. Standardization and signage really just exists to make driving easier.

Looks like you enjoy retro-style 3D platformers. Get Corn Kidz 64!

Like Pseudoregalia, it’s another N64-style 3D platformer released in 2023 with a goat protagonist trapped in a dream. This is an oddly narrow coincidence.

deleted by creator

For more bridge webcam nonsense, check out Needles Underpass!

Stopping doesn’t make the vehicle shorter! This is a common myth, especially among large oversize vehicle drivers in this area.

Here are some “patient” games I’ve played that are on dollar-bin deals right now. Some are actually cheaper off-Steam, so in those cases, I link there instead.

• Black Mesa — 90% off, tied all-time low
  • The fan-made remake of Half-Life
• Crypt of the NecroDancer — 90% off, new all-time low
  • Rhythm roguelike
• Downwell — 75% off (cheaper on GOG)
  • Shmup platformer about jumping deeper into a well
• Gato Roboto — 85% off (cheaper on GOG)
  • Little metroidvania featuring a cat in a mech
• Her Story — 90% off (cheaper on GOG)
  • Freeform detective game with FMVs
• Bastion — 80% off (same price on GOG)
  • Action RPG with painted art, and Supergiant Games’s debut title
• Psychonauts — 80% off (same price on Itch)
  • 3D platformer where the levels are in the minds of interesting characters
  • Note: It’s an old game that works a bit weird on modern hardware, so check PCGamingWiki for tweaks
• Grapple Dog — 75% off, tied all-time low
  • Grappling hook platformer with Nitrome-style pixel art

According to SteamDB, 40% is tied for the all-time low.

Grenouilles

Charcoal with the big ears

I played around with the pixel settings in the Next Fest demo. It’s honestly more of a curiosity than something that really matters, but I’m glad someone on the game thought of this. The most notable change with pixel-perfect mode is the text font becomes lower resolution to be strictly snapped to the grid. Other than that, you’ll find that the backgrounds scroll choppily. I’d imagine it would feel good that way on a smaller screen.

It’s that eternal struggle you may have seen if you play modern games with pixel art. How strictly should the game follow the grid? I think Pipistrello’s default “soft” mode is my sweet spot. Rotated and resized pixels are yucky, but I’m okay with smoother scrolling and sharper text. Celeste is that way as well.

I was super impressed with the demo from Steam Next Fest last year. It’s definitely high on my list for Steam sale purchases.

One neat feature the game has, which was unnecessary but that I appreciate, is the pixel perfection settings. The game uses “soft” pixel precision by default for smooth scrolling and sharper text, but you can enable strict pixel precision, which snaps everything to the pixel grid.

My friends and I love to hum the gloriously CC-licensed main menu music!

I don’t think any game has made me feel so much for characters I don’t even get to see. There’s some real humanity in Hypnospace.

Damn that’s a shame

Day 5

Day 4 was all black cats