Matt's Video Game Backlog #36: Roots of Pacha (2023)
The pitch for Roots of Pacha is it’s Stardew Valley with cavemen. Say hello to my cavemansona, Mat, who’s jacked from a lifetime of carrying stacks of rocks to and fro. He’s never cut his hair.
Matt's Video Game Backlog #35: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective (2010)
I’ve been meaning to play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective pretty much ever since it originally came out for the DS over a decade ago and By George I’ve finally managed it. I knew this game had become a cult classic, but I think it deserves to be a classic classic....
The Compleat Gamester
London: 1674. It has been eight years since the Great Fire destroyed the medieval city. King Charles II, 14 years into his restoration, has just signed the Second Peace of Westminster, marking an end to two decades of intermittent war with the Dutch. Barely a generation has passed since the introduction of “tea”. The fusion of England and Scotland into the United Kingdom is still thirty years away.
In the colonies, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware are just a decade old, and Pennsylvania is but a twinkle in William Penn’s eye. In the older colonies of New England, tensions...
Beauticious occupation is immediately unfolded
Photo Credit:
What DALL-E thinks a "Bundle Warden" is.
On July 23rd, 2021, I checked my spam folder, revealing maybe the best email I have ever received.
Introducing: Turt
Inspired by a certain other blog and this cat-based project I’ve added a little buddy to the page.
Matt's Video Game Backlog #34: Norco (2022)
So here’s the thing, I picked up Norco almost immediately after I finished Paradise Killer but I struggled to get through the first chapter at the time because a lot of the early subject matter is just so heavy. Like look at this game’s content warning screen:
Matt's Video Game Backlog #33: Paradise Killer (2020)
First-thing’s first, Paradise Killer’s vibes are IMPECCABLE. The setting is this fantastic blend of vaporwave and eldritch horror, taking place in a pocket dimension where immortals called “The Syndicate” farm peoples’ spiritual energy to reawaken their dormant gods. It’s all very grim, but at the same time the architecture of...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #32: Pentiment (2022)
Meant to post this a full month ago but I forgot, whoops! Pentiment is so incredibly my shit, to the point that I’m not sure if other people would like it as much if they haven’t taken a couple college courses on medieval history. But you’ll definitely enjoy this if...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #31: Floppy Knights (2022)
Floppy Knights reminds me of a high quality 3rd party DS-era game for some reason. Probably because it’s a strategy game in the vein of Advance Wars or Fire Emblem. The twist is that it’s also a deckbuilding game - each turn you draw a hand of actions from your...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #30: Minit (2018)
The central gimmick of Minit is that you respawn every 60 seconds, which I thought was going to be really annoying, but once I got into it it really wasn’t! It’s a very cute little game. Very clearly inspired by the original Zelda, but if that was one big puzzle...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #28/#29: Cat Game Combo - OneShot (2014) & Stray (2022)
OneShot is one of the oldest games in my backlog, and while playing it I realized it had a lot in common with one of the newest games I’ve played: 2022 indie darling Stray.
The most obvious similarity is that in both games you play as a cat. Granted, Niko...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #27: Inscryption (2021)
Inscryption was on a lot of GOTY lists last year so I was looking forward to it when I finally got around to picking it up. Playing this duing the Halloween season was a good choice. I really enjoyed the sort of PS2-era graphics and overall creepy vibes. It made...
Reliving 2011 With Elden Ring
Happy Black Friday I guess. I’m not sure who exactly reads my blog, but you might have noticed a pattern where I post a bunch around the winter holidays because I have the downtime. WELL I noticed this too. Back in January I was like, you know what, 2022 is going to be the year I write blog posts more regularly, or at least knock out some video game backlog stuff. Who knows.
And then I bought Elden Ring on release day to see what the hubbub was about and it consumed two months of my life.
Matt's Video Game Backlog #26: A Mortician's Tale (2017)
I found A Mortician’s Tale to be more of an interactive educational tool than a game. The game part is the peanut-butter surrounding the gamer-pill of “learning about the death industry”. What gameplay there is mostly consists of reading (very engaging) emails on your office PC and playing little minigames...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #25: Hitman (2016)
I got Hitman (2016) for Christmas years ago and then never played it. I think I assumed my-then computer wouldn’t run it, which is probably true, but I never tried because, I don’t know, I thought it wouldn’t be my sort of thing? It is very fun though. I once...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #24: Speed Dating For Ghosts (2018)
Speed Dating for Ghosts might sound like some silly Hatoful Boyfriend type thing, or that dating sim where you date tanks or whatever, but it’s actually really earnest. The game explores some legitimately serious and heartfelt topics through conversations with its vibrant characters. Each ghost you meet has a different...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #23: Carto (2020)
Carto is outstandingly cute, and unlike a lot of Cute™ indie games it’s able to back the cuteness up with incredibly creative gameplay. The plot centers around a little kid who accidentally destroys her Granny’s enchanted, continent-altering map. She then has to travel the world to find the missing map...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #22: Graveyard Keeper (2018)
I want to love Graveyard Keeper. I do love chore simulator type games - I’ve put so many hours into Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing and there’s no telling how many big holes I’ve dug in Minecraft just to relax. Graveyard Keeper could be (superficially) described as “occult Stardew Valley”,...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #21: Control (2019)
I meant to write this one MONTHS ago and since then I’ve forgotten most of the things I wanted to say. That said, I think Control was my unexpected fave of 2021. It’s so rare these days that I pick up a game and get so into it that it...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #20: Disco Elysium (2019)
This game wasn’t in my backlog, strictly speaking, but I put off getting a copy for a long time so it sort of counts. Either way this game is a blast so I’m going to talk about it.
Disco Elysium might be the most pretentious game I’ve ever played. I...
Going Way Too Hard on Dolly Parton's Christmas Musical: Part 2
So I first saw Christmas on the Square over Thanksgiving 2020 and wrote most of the first part of this shortly thereafter, but never posted it. When the Christmas Season came around this year I felt I needed to show the movie to Tessa and the second part of this two-part essay is adapted from her takes, which she has bestowed upon me with her blessing.
Going Way Too Hard on Dolly Parton's Christmas Musical: Part 1
Let me get one thing out of the way: absolutely no one was tuning in to Dolly Parton’s 2020 movie-musical Christmas on the Square expecting thought provoking socio-economic commentary. You watch this movie for the over-the-top musical numbers and the child-bartender and Dolly Parton wearing an increasing amount of rhinestones in each scene. And boy does it deliver on those fronts. That being said, I think the way this movie adapts the classic “A Christmas Carol” story is a bit… odd. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, which I definitely recommend you do because it is insane. It features Christine Baranski as Scrooge Regina Fuller, a cold-hearted banker midwestern landowner who is visited on Christmas Eve by Christmas Ghosts an angel, played by Dolly Parton, who helps her see the error of her selfish ways and go to his nephew’s Christmas party reconnect with her community. There are a lot of parallels to A Christmas Carol, is what I’m getting at. As with everything in this movie, the Christmas Carol plot beats are cranked up to 11, and this includes the cruelty of the villain-protagonist and the righteous fervor of the commoners. In this one area, I think, the cranking up of things acted to the detriment of its plot, in a way that I’ll explain… now.
(I’m going to spoil everything so, don’t read this post if you care.)
Matt's Video Game Backlog #19: Pyre (2017)
Pyre was made by Supergiant (the studio behind Hades), so I was really looking forward to it, but it hasn’t gripped me as much as I hoped it would. As with Hades, the presentation is top-notch, and the music, art direction, and writing are all incredible. I especially love how...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #18: The Forgotten City (2021)
This is might be the newest game I’ve added the the backlog, but after hearing The Forgotten City be described as “Outer Wilds but in ancient Rome” I just had to check this out. Outer Wilds, but with fun history trivia? Sign me up! And boy did it deliver on...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #17: Mutazione (2019)
If you’re into games that focus heavily on storytelling, go give Mutazione a play if you haven’t already. In it, you play as Kai, a young girl visiting her dying grandfather on a post-apocalyptic island of mutants. Your task is to - get this - talk to the townsfolk to...
Matt's Video Game Backlog: One Year In
A little over a year into this project and I’ve gotten through less than half of my original list. That said, it’s been a complete success. It’s really expanded my horizons in terms of what games I’ll consider playing, and I’ve loved the amount of times I’ve gone “oh, that’s...
Dune Thoughts
I recently finished reading Children of Dune and I have a lot of thoughts about it as a series so here they are. These books are fifty years old now and incredibly famous so they probably aren’t going to be original thoughts. I’ve structured everything here around the question of what Dune is “about”, per the meme above. This post is going to have a lot of spoilers in it so heads up if you care about that, but also this may not be intelligible to you if you haven’t read Dune. Also on the topic of spoilers: at some point before reading the second book I went and “spoiled” a lot of the series for myself on the fan-wiki and still ended up loving Messiah and Children. My belief is that the events of the Dune books are so out-there but also so dependent on internal monologue that while you can spoil the literal play-by-play of events, doing that doesn’t spoil the full effect of the prose. Also a lot of the things that happen in the Dune books sound really silly if you just literally describe them, and I’ve listed my favorites below the cut.
Matt's Video Game Backlog #16: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003)
The recent Star Wars movies left me kinda “meh” on Star Wars as a setting, but Knights of the Old Republic has been doing a good job of re-interesting me in the universe and lore. KotOR is the best-written piece of Star Wars media I’ve ever consumed. The RPG format...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #15: Monster Hunter: World (2018)
So, it became apparent really quickly that the four-hour window I came up with for these backlog games was absolutely not going to cut it for Monster Hunter: World. The number of systems that the game bombards you with right out off of the bat made getting into it seem...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #14: Kids (2019)
Well that was weird. Kids is an “interactive animation” that I feel belongs on an iPad at the MoMA. Presentation-wise, the black and white visual style that seamlessly blends the interactive and non-interactive parts is fun to watch. All the little dudes have very smooth animations and every movement has...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #13: Slay the Spire (2019)
I’m a big fan of deckbuilding games so I had a really good time with Slay the Spire. I didn’t think I was that in to roguelikes, but between this and Hades maybe I’m coming around. As with Hades, you don’t really mind dying since it just means you get...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #12: Night in the Woods (2017)
This game was pretty good. I really struggled with the first half or so of it, I think because I had trouble relating to Mae and didn’t enjoy acting out her naive and erratic behavior through the gameplay. I guess I got annoyed because what I wanted to be doing...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #11: Deus Ex (2000)
All of the hullabaloo around Cyberpunk 2077 put me in the mood for some lowercase-C cyberpunk content so I booted up the original Deus Ex. If you aren’t familiar with Deus Ex, it’s a game from 2000 about world governments using the vaccine for a deadly virus to control the...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #10: Outer Wilds (2019)
I don’t think ever played a game like Outer Wilds before. It’s truly special. The central conceit is that you’re a member of alien NASA on a mission to do space-archeaology in your solar system. The entire thing is one big puzzle, so I don’t feel like I should describe...
Disaster-Ballad Genealogy
Photo Credit:
Ludolf Bakhuizen / Public domain
Probably over a year ago, the song M.T.A. by the Kingston Trio came on and it sounded really familiar, but I couldn’t place why. Given that I’ve recently moved to the Boston area I figured I’d give the song a google to educate myself on the local culture, and what I learned is that M.T.A. is part of a nearly 150-year lineage of folk tunes. These songs are a family linked by their recycling of lyrical and melodic ideas, and the whole family is in a category I’m going to call “disaster ballads”. This probably isn’t the technical term, and I should probably take an actual music history class, but nevertheless, these songs all center around something bad happening and the way that that affects the people. A quintessential example of this might be Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. What I think is so interesting about M.T.A.’s family of songs is that though their melodies largely stay the same, the nature of the disasters they chronicle changes quite a bit with each iteration. In order to discuss how these songs disasters have changed over the decades, I have to start with the granddaddy of them all from 1865.
Matt's Video Game Backlog #9: Dr Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald - A Whirlwind Heist (2015)
Not sure when I acquired this game but it’s free on Steam and I never actually played it. Really charming little heist game. The narrator adds a lot of drama. I especially loved the bit where you have to sneak through the vault, and Dr. Langeskov is a great character....
Matt's Video Game Backlog #8: Fallout 2 (1998)
Bioshock made me want to check out Fallout 2 next, and I had a really fun time. Fallout 2 is in my backlog as opposed to Fallout because I played the first game yeeears ago and was really turned off by the style of gameplay and by the stress the...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #7: Bioshock (2007)
The entire time I was playing Bioshock I could not stop comparing it to Bethesda’s Fallout games. The faux-1950s aesthetic shared by both games is too similar to ignore. Both have you exploring crumbling art-deco settings while oldies music plays from radios as you shoot drug addicts, etc. Both games...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #6: Pikuniku (2019)
Pikuniku was fine, but I felt like the cuteness of the graphics and music and animations and character design didn’t make up for the relative lack of substance. The platforming is kind of janky in a way that I feel like was on purpose, but it sort of annoyed me....
Matt's Video Game Backlog #5: Firewatch (2016)
The second book club game! Firewatch is a work of art that I don’t want to talk about without spoilers, so don’t click read more if you haven’t played the game. IF you haven’t played Firewatch, I recommend it.
Matt's Video Game Backlog #4: Wargroove (2019)
Groovy! I have mixed feelings about this one. On one hand, the graphics and animations are GORGEOUS. I love this game’s aesthetic, it’s well done and well suited to the genre. I really missed the tiny sprite art dudes when I played Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and playing this was...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #3: Donut County (2018)
So this one wasn’t in the backlog originally, but some of my friends started a “Video Game Book Club” and this was the first game! Donut County is basically inverse Katamari: you’re a racoon that sucks ““trash”” (your victims’ possessions) into an expanding hole. It was pretty good. The writing...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #2: Half Life (1998)
Half Life surprised me with how immersive it is for a game that came out in 1998. Sure, there are barely enough polygons to go around, but the simple gameplay, uncluttered UI, and real-time events go a huge way towards making you feel like you’re inhabiting the space of the...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #1: A Short Hike (2019)
This game is wonderful. I went in with basically 0 expectations and here were my reactions, in order:
- Ooh, this art style is cute.
- Ohoho I’m a little bird guy!!
- gonna jump into the sea lol
- oh my god it’s just letting me swim out to sea
The...
Matt's Video Game Backlog #0
I’ve been playing a lot of relaxing and comfy games for the past couple of months, for reasons you can probably guess. I’m still on the Animal Crossing train, and then I was playing a bunch of Pokémon romhacks (Pokémon Prism is VERY well-done if you haven’t played it). There...
Announcing Friendo 2.0!
After 10,000 years, I’ve finally published updates to Friendo!
> You can play it here: friendo.mattdelsordo.com <
Apologies in advance: Friendos hatched in v1.x.x are not compatible with this new version.
Click for a changelog from version… 1.2.1?
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (VHS, 2000)
Well, Cats: The Movie is out, and it seems like it’s the complete mess that everyone expected it to be. I’m excited to eventually see it (hopefully with friends, inebriated, at 2AM) because I’ve never really seen Cats even though I’ve been aware of it for basically my entire life. Why? Because a trailer for the 1998 direct-to-VHS adaptation of Cats preceded the 2000 direct-to-VHS adaptation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat that I probably watched over 100 times as a kid. From what I can piece together, the only reason that my family owned a copy of this is because at some point my parents went to see Joseph live, and my mom developed a crush on Donny Osmond.
Anyway, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is absolutely buckwild and I want to talk about it while the Andrew Lloyd Webber fervor is still fresh. It’s a story from the Old Testament so also Happy Hanukkah I guess. I’m going to be talking about the 2000 VHS version of Joseph because it is the only version that I’ve seen/care about. If you want to follow along, at time of writing the entire thing is on YouTube. Or so I hear, I’m not a dirty internet pirate. If you want a more legit version, the soundtrack is on Spotify and the show is sung-through so you’ll get some of the effect. I’m not sure I can convey the energy that this show has in words alone.
19th Century Meme Theft
This post is adapted from a talk I gave as part of the University of Rochester’s Music Interest Floor “Tune Up” talks. It’s about the history of the “pizza song” from Spiderman 2 for the PS2:
Quick music review:
- Why is the audio quality so bad?? Oh my god???
- This mess gets steadily faster as it goes on, but it also changes key whenever it speeds up, and I’m pretty sure that whoever made this gave so few shits that they just sped up the audio file instead of actually orchestrating it to go faster. So they aren’t really key changes, the pitch just shifts up whenever the tempo increases because the actual sound wave is being played back faster.
- It’s an incredibly monument to human apathy and I love it.
Anyway time for some music history.
Comme d'habitude
Did you know that My Way, the song made famous by Frank Sinatra, is an English adaptation of the 1968, French, song Comme d’habitude (made famous in the francosphere by Claude François)? I’m going to spend this post trying to convince you that the French version is better.
Apologies for the bad video quality but I want you to see this man’s incredibly 60s haircut.
Malazan Book of the Fallen Stinkpost (Part 2 of ??)
Photo Credit:
u/braidafurduz on Reddit
In a previous post I wrote about the things I enjoy in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. While I continue to be entertained (just started reading House of Chains!), this post is going to be about the things I don’t enjoy. Probable spoilers up through Memories of Ice.
Currently reading the Malazan Book of the Fallen (Part 1 of ??)
Photo Credit:
"Gardens of the Moon" by Marc Simonetti
Sorry that the feature image is so big, but Marc Simonetti’s art is too good to not include.
I just finished reading Memories of Ice which is the third book in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. These books are an incredible amount of fun. Reading them is like watching a Marvel movie - you’re not walking into the theater expecting some sort of biting commentary or depth of character, you’re expecting Badass Superhero Blockbuster Shit (tm), and the Malazan books really deliver on that.
"Steven Universe: The Movie" Was Good
Steven Universe: The Movie came out the other day, and I want to talk about it. I really enjoyed it, it was fun, it made me feel some feelings, had the good slice-of-life-but-also-aliens humor that I crave, and the soundtrack was full of bops. But it was also kind of… weird, structurally. The plot made use of two tropes that I conversely hate and love to feel sad about, so click on this post if you want to read about that because I’m about to spoil basically the entire show.
I Guess I'm A Metalhead Now?
Photo Credit:
Flightless Records
At the risk of sounding like a base-model white guy in his early 20s, one of my favorite musical groups right now is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. A couple of weeks ago I bought tickets to go see them in Philly and something that I seriously felt like I had to take into account was, “in light of their upcoming thrash metal album, am I going to be sucked into the ensuing mosh pit, and die?”. My favorite King Gizz albums have always been their more chilled-out stuff like Sketches and Paper Maché, so I was apprehensive about how much I’d enjoy Infest The Rats’ Nest and whether or not that would affect my enjoyment of the concert that Ticketmaster was going to charge me a bunch of BS fees to see. Well never fret folks ‘cause this one absolutely slaps.
Requisite "I have a blog now" Post
Hello
I’m Matt and this is my blog. To the left you can find links to some projects I’ve worked on. Here’s a photo of some capybaras for your trouble:
