Hi, I'm Dranzerstorm
Welcome to the Video Game & Music Lounge
This world is dedicated to Video Games and Music as I'll be showcasing the following.
Video Game Reviews set to the same tones as Retro Retrospective's Anime Reviews
Music reviews of Anime Openings & Closings
Western Cartoon music
Vocaloid Classics.
We may even have some Top Tens
I hope this World entertains you.
All of today's titles take a page from the country of India.
Raji An Ancient Epic
We start with a title right at home among games like Assassins Creed, Prince of Persia and Shadow of the Colossus, Raji incorporates Hindu mythology and takes inspiration from epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana, with an art style of Pahari paintings, taking it's landscapes from medieval Rajasthan, a large region of India, a lot of effort went into this game and it shows taking you on an epic quest through some of the best stories in Hinduism. The gameplay plays equally as smooth.
A-Tier Game
Venba
Taking it's main inspiration from Tamil culture and South Indian cuisine, Venba presents a cooking sim played through 30 years of the life of an immigrant Indian family who move to Toronto Canada from Tamil Nadu, starting in 1988 with the birth of Venba's son Kavin, through an old set of recipes you are taken through a journey of family connections through cooking, despite going through 30 years with the family you only really get 30 minutes of game, we don't get enough time to really connect to this family clearly going through the trials and tribulations of being an immigrant in a foreign country, were forced to fill in the gaps of why certain events happen to Venba, this just leaves the game a bit empty.
D-Tier Game
Thristy Suitors
A title like this is just asking for a piss take.
We have a popular South Asian film in the UK called Bend It Like Beckham where the main character breaks free of the chains laid down by her family's heritage and becomes a soccer star, this is not that film, in fact it's closest comparison is Scott Pilgrim as Jala is forced to confront her ex-lovers one by one in turn based RPG battles, among cooking mini games and bare bones basic skateboarding. The game wears it's bisexual themes like a medal but Jala and the cast are some of the most toxic ass holes ever written in gaming as everything Jala says and does, comes across as really manipulative in both her dialogue and actions, I barely got through the tutorial of this game without vomiting, Boyfriend Dungeon is better than this and that is so low of a bar to crosd it's practically buried in the ground.
Trash Tier Game
Now to tackle two games that cover some uncomfortable subjects and one about a thorny issue that needs addressing.
Boyfriend Dungeon
In most dating sims in the role of the female protagonist, you simply date a guy, in Boyfriend Dungeon he becomes your weapon to breakout of eldritch horror dungeons, the game is the first instance I've seen of a disclaimer for uncomfortable topics, as it covers instances of controlling behaviour and topics of abuse, this lowers the tone of a game far too silly to even contain such subjects, also if you have to warn your target audience of a subject that they ultimately expect in a game where you date multiple guys on different levels of behaviour, you've already failed. I downloaded it for a joke but it just makes me depressed.
F-Tier Game
Coffee Talk
A visual novel like VA-11 Hall-A Cyberpunk Bartender, but this time instead of making cocktails listening to Synthwave in a neon stylish world where every character is interesting, you run a midnight coffee shop where the local fantasy cast talk about political and social problems listening to Lo-Fi. Cover such thrilling topics like, generational divides formed by racist bigoted parents, racial profiling, overprotective parenting, the toxic gaming industry, a spaceman who wants to smash and a novelist who never leaves the coffee shop. The only interesting characters are Jorji the Police officer and the Orc Indie game designer who really gives no shits. The sequel is more of the same, it's an interesting concept especially the logistics of a midnight coffee shop but I really don't want to talk about these subjects, my Bing news feed already does enough of that. I'd give it a lower rating but I also found out the creator of the game died during the production of the sequel while researching, considering where the creator came from, it's any wonder they decided to cover these topics.
C-Tier Game
Calico
Imagine a world where nothing bad happens, no wars, no racism, no sexism, no bigotry, and every animal is tame, friendly and cuddly, that's Calico, a world created as the ultimate safespace for every colour of the rainbow spectrum of the LGBT+....however long this abbreviation is, they seem to add more every time I pass my local pride hub. Any who, you run a cafe and get to play with all the animals around the island while learning some useful magic to make the experience more special also doing fetch quests for the townsfolk, the game is very poorly made as phasing through floors and getting yeeted into space are common occurrences but my overall feeling is "Don't you think you deserve better than this?" I'm reminded of the 90s gaming scene where girls had to fight for even a scrap of a half decent game instead of Barbie Horse Trials 5 the Pinkening. Now I'm looking at the same scenario 25 years later for the Pride audience.
Animal Crossing and Disney Dreamlight Valley succeed at the cozy life sim better as you can at least create the game to fit your image, Calico can't even give you a decent wardrobe to wear let alone a decent environment to live in because it's stuck in a permanent safespace, probably do a lot better with some design tips from Ru Paul's Drag Race.
Trash-Tier Game
If there is any game genre that has defined how off the wall achievement hunting can get, it's the simulator games and these are three of the most bonkers.
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator
With all the integrity of a late 80s stock brokers computer, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator has you play as the butcher trying to make a business out of the removed organs of the endless supply of dead aliens during an intergalactic dictatorship, quite off the wall choice for a gamepass title that you can play on an Amiga.
C-Tier Game
Placid Plastic Duck Simulator
Inspired by the 1992 Friendly Floatees spill where thousands of children's bath toys including ducks broke free from a container ship in the Pacific Ocean during a storm, the incident becoming an accidental experiment as the indestructible and buoyant nature of their design meant they could provide a better read on Ocean currents with the last known sighting as late as 2017.
That's nice and all but how does this game work? Well you sit in the corner and look at the plastic ducks as they spawn in at set intervals in a pool that infinitely loops providing the ducks aren't kicked out of the pool and into the unknown, the best you can do is sit back relax to the Lo-Fi beats and make the ducks quack every so often.
That's not a game, it's an expensive novelty screensaver.
B-Tier Game
Powerwash Simulator
Imagine in the height of a heatwave, you're struggling to come up with any motivation to play anything because any movement even fingers will add to the endless pints of sweat, then you see a game where all you do is clean vehicles and buildings with a Powerwasher, you instantly start feeling yourself cooling down as you witness endless jets of cold water spraying from your hose, the phenomenon called temperature contagion is triggered by seeing an image that makes your brain think it's hotter or colder than it really is, because of how long the heatwave was and how much the game triggered my OCD, I found myself completing every task even long after I had 100% the achievements.
To give you an idea of how addictive the game can get, the world record for playing continuously is 24 hours 6 minutes.
It still baffles my friends how much time I put into this game while all those superior triple A titles remain ignored.
A-Tier Game
Were looking this week at the starter pack for any good gamepass title, a spiritual successor, a roguelike and a physics simulator.
Hotshot Racing
If there was any game that came the closest to reaching the peak of spiritual successor, it's Hotshot Racing, very much like Virtua Racing, Hotshot Racing has everything a spiritual successor needs, polygons, woefully late 90s early 00s inspired characters and difficulty levels that go from easy to inhumane, definitely worth a go.
A-Tier Game
Dead Cells
Roguelikes depending on your approach can either be not worth the struggle or a journey of self improvement through constant defeat, Dead Cells walks a deadly tightrope as you take the immortal head of a prisoner and borrow one of the many corpses piled up in the prison on your journey, success leads to freedom, death will have you start again with another corpse needing to be used up, it's certainly one of the better ones.
B-Tier Game
Totally Reliable Delivery Service
The physics games are nerdy titles that have you perform all sorts of tasks in a sandbox environment while awkwardly controlling your character with constant noodle like arms and ragdoll physics, in Totally Reliable Delivery Service, you have to make deliveries to various parts of the map while also controlling a number of vehicles as the map doesn't allow you to cheese the deliveries by walking due to time limit or impassable obstacles that need planes or boats; this makes an already stressful game about controlling weeble like characters an absolute chore to complete, no wonder Amazon courier drivers are constantly miserable.
D-Tier Game
It's surprising how much Disney seems to pop up in my gaming history.
Pixar Rush Adventure
Two of these games are former Kinect games, for the uninitiated, Kinect was a motion sensor control system for the xbox 360, it never caught on so this game and Disneyland Adventures were permanently dumped on Game Pass minus the motion controls and it shows by how much easier both games are.
Pixar for the most part is a collectathon where you go through set pieces in the given Pixar franchises from loose adaptations from the actual movies to original stories made for the game, Ratatouille suffers the most with this, the fact that each scenario is told by a kid, you can forgive for getting things wrong or throwing in original characters.
B-Tier Game.
Disneyland Adventures
In your life time, you should really only do Disneyland twice, once as a child and again with your own children, the game presents itself as another collectathon but manages to create that sense of wonder that comes with going to Disneyland, couple of things I found particularly jarring was 1. Pirates of the Caribbean didn't have Jack Sparrow but an original character called Black Barty and 2. They had characters from Song of the South.
For those who don't know, Song of the South is the only film in Disney's history to be quietly banned worldwide and the whole Black Barty thing with Pirates of the Caribbean tells me that they couldn't get the rights to Jack Sparrow.
Despite being insultingly easy, it at least functions better than Kinect Pixar Rush.
B-Tier Game.
Disney Dreamlight Valley
Dreamlight Valley is just Animal Crossing with Disney characters that's been in early access for a year now, the story tells of a ruler who returns to a ruined forgotten valley emphasised by dark thorny plants, in what essentially is calling out the adult Disney fans for forgetting the magic, it's the first time I've seen a Disney property communicate to it's growing adult audience, the game is the best example of a free game done right however you play it the same way a Beta tester does.
A-Tier Game.
