Cats Like Plain Crisps
This is the first 'real' entry on catslikeplaincrisps. You'll be pleased to note that the website simply Does Not Look Very Good, and that's, shockingly, on me. I'm not... particularly aesthetic-minded, and in addition to this my skills at 'website editing' aren't great -- yet! I fully intend to make this a much more aesthetically pleasurable experience. It's on the nice little list of things I need to do that I keep on Notion. As well as making the website a little prettier, I'm also going to be streaming the games I play for this blog over on Twitch! You can follow me to recieve a nice little notification whenever I go live, or failing that I will probably tweet when I do. 'Figure out why my game streams like shit and then take the necessary steps to fix it' is also on the aforementioned Notion list.
I'm probably also going to expand the concept of this blog, which was in essence 'play all the games you bought on Steam', but get this -- I've also purchased a whole bunch of games on Other Platforms and not played them (and also several more games in the Steam Summer Sale...). I am a sick man who loves to spend money on entertainment and then simply not allow it to entertain me, unless it is a "team-based FPS developed by Blizzard Entertainment". Anyway -- I'm trying to make this a more interactive process, I guess, because I'm going to be doing it anyway so I may as well make a friend or whatever lmao.
Wargroove
The first game that I decided to play for this project was Wargroove. By 'decided' to play, I mean 'I put my list of Steam games into a list randomiser on the internet and it told me that Wargroove was the game I should play first'. Pretty foolproof. I was okay with this decision -- a few weeks ago during the Nintendo Direct, sort of thrown in at the end after announcements of a NEW METROID, a NEW WARIOWARE and a new MARIO + RABBIDS (god that game is underrated), was the announcement of a reboot of both Advance Wars and Advance Wars: Black Hole Rising, which were released for the Game Boy Advance (more on the GBA or 'God's Handheld Console' later...) in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Unfortunately this reboot drastically changes the art style of the original games; beautiful and simple pixel art replaced by kinda fugly 3D models. Fortunately the core game looks to be unchanged; a turn-based tactics game set in a grid-based environment, a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship between the units, and punishing difficulty (which, personally, I could do without). This announcement gave me a real hankerin' to play the original Advance Wars, and while I do still own a Game Boy Advance, I don't feel any real hankerin' to spend $90 on a cartridge-only copy of one Advance Wars game -- I'm kinda crazy like that! Fortunately for me, though, and maybe for you, Wargroove really scratches that specific itch, in that it is comprised of beautiful and simple pixel art, plays the same way, and is also punishingly difficult (perhaps too much so). Am I still going to pay the $70 or whatever to play ugly Advance Wars? Yes. I am simply a slave to the Nintendo Corporation. Not a crime! Anyway, this isn't about Advance Wars. Kinda.
There were a few ways I considered writing this review of Wargroove, and as I've been writing it I've thought of yet more. There was the initial idea to combine it with a review of Starbound, also developed by Chucklefish, and do a deep-dive into the similarities between them. I debated combining it with a review of Disgaea PC, which on the surface is a similar game, but actually includes much more depth. I also considered doing a 100% run of the game; the reasons for not doing so will probably become clear over the course of the review.
Short Version