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.
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.
The so called spiritual successor is an intriguing concept, you take a video game franchise that is no longer active and team members of that original game build a sort of cheap ass sequel if you will and today's subject is the Danger Zone + Dangerous Driving series by Three Fields Entertainment.
Spiritual Successors can work, Bloodstained Ritual of the Night being the best example, while plenty of Project Gotham Racing's influence has shaped the racing genre for the last decade, Burnout falls under the same camp with Wreckfest and some of more recent Need for Speed games.
Three Fields of course being made up of ex-staff of Criterion, the makers of Burnout wanted to relive those glory days by starting with Burnout's very much missed crash mode that sets up a stunt track to create the biggest crash possible, the first game Danger Zone did everything in a make shift test lab before going to public roads in Danger Zone 2 and finally making the Burnout clone in Dangerous Driving.
This is where the comparison to Burnout ends as these games start missing the elements that made Burnout a complete game.
For Danger Zone 1 and 2 its the lack of raw destructive power that comes from unleashing a crashbreaker as well as a very janky set of physics that could make you fail instantly, not to mention a lack of music because Three Fields were too cheap to afford a composer, this problem is prevalent in Dangerous Driving as well although that one has much more glaring problems by the fact it looks and plays cheap, granted a team of 7 compared to a team of 70 does make for an unfair comparison but remember that these games were built on the remnants of a 19 year old game in Burnout 3 and there are smaller teams that have made solid games such as Among Us, Untitled Goose Game, Stardew Valley and Omno just to name a few, there really is no excuse for such mediocrity when the tools available can make alot of quality titles, budget or not.
Danger Zone 1 and 2 are both C-Tier titles while Dangerous Driving is a D-Tier, I call that generous considering that this studio doesn't have an original idea among them, even the re-releashed Burnout Paradise is doing better than them.
For this selection were getting into the more well known titles.
Full Throttle
In this quirky point and click by the Monkey Island master himself puts you in the shoes of Polecats Biker leader Ben as his gang is framed for the murder of the president of the last domestic motorcycle manufacturer, with a wannabe journalist capturing the murder on camera, Ben has to clear his name and stop vice-president Ripberger from stealing the company.
The game mixes point and click with a few sections of actual bike riding, it's pretty standard stuff and I'd call it the weaker of the Tim Schafer games compared to the others.
B-Tier Game
Celeste
You take control of Madeline as she attempts to hop, skip, jump and climb up Mt Celeste all the while fighting the personification of her crippling depression; considering how hard this game is, the fact that the game is about overcoming depression is oddly appropriate, and with such a well crafted narrative that anyone can relate to, you forget that the character you've been furiously throwing up the mountain is transgender. If it wasn't in the same camp as other rage titles like Jump King, I'd give it a higher tier.
A-Tier Game
Undertale
You control a human named Frisk who awakes in the Underground, they are confronted by Flowey who attempts to kill you in the tutorial before being saved by your guardian Toriel or Goat Mom, Toriel attempts to stop you from going to the surface but fails as you piece together what happened to humanity and what has become of the world's monster race as you meet a quirky cast of characters. Unlike most RPGs where you kill everything to get to the end, in order to get the best ending, you can't kill anyone, instead you are given options to talk and convince your enemies not to fight you, in fact killing everyone nets you the bad ending.
Both endings have a very tough final boss battle, the mechanics also require you to dodge bullet hell style to survive any battle. Along with an absolute killer soundtrack by Toby Fox, you'll find yourselves in the most unique RPG you'll ever play.
A-Tier Game
