Weekly Update #1: First Weekly Gaming Update!

Woohoo, my first weekly update! Hopefully the first of many to come. I'm still trying to figure out how everything will be structured so please pardon the dust. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to let me know! First off, let’s start with my game acquisitions:

Game Acquisitions

My very first week of blogging and I’ve already accumulated 22 new games 😅 I’m never going to get my backlog down at this rate! Thankfully, most of these are short and free which I suspect will be a common theme. I spent a total of $4.01 to get these which comes out to an average of $0.18/game. Not bad, although the Speedrunning with Awesome Games Done Quick Bundle at Humble Bundle is looking mighty tempting right now.

I already own BPM Bullets per Minute so that would go up for trade and I really don’t care for Sonic games but the value is still there for the rest. I’ll wait until Tuesday to see what games are offered for Humble Choice before making a purchase decision. For those unaware, Humble Choice is a subscription service offered by Humble Bundle where they offer a new bundle of games on the first Tuesday of every month. You can pay for a yearly subscription, often $100 for the year during Black Friday sales. I normally don’t like subscriptions but this one is different because not only do you get to keep the games you claim permanently, if the bundle offered doesn’t suit your tastes, you can pause your subscription for the month so there’s no rush to play everything. Essentially, a yearly subscription purchase gives you 12 credits to use whenever a bundle is offered that you’re interested in. I paid a total of $106.42 for my subscription during Black Friday which comes out to $8.87/month for a selection of usually eight games or $1.11/game. I do tend to pause most months because I either don’t care about the games offered or I already own them. The bundles usually offer a mix of one or two AA or AAA games and a bunch of indies and most of them have never been bundled before so they’re usually a good deal.

Anyway, enough rambling about Humble Choice. So I got 22 new games this week. Surely I put enough game time in to justify it, right? Let’s see my breakdown of what games I played and for how long.

Game Recaps

Huh, only four hours and eight minutes of gaming this week. That’s definitely on the low end for me. I’ve been so busy setting up my recording software, my blog, writing, and learning how to edit that I just have not had any time to actually game for my gaming blog. I’m hoping once everything is set up and I get into the swing of things, I’ll have more time to game. I’m thinking of posting my gameplay videos onto my channel I haven’t uploaded to in forever and link those here in my posts. It seemed weird to start that in the middle of my in-progress games though so I’ll try to start it when I start a new game. I do want to catch you all up to speed on the two games I’m actively playing right now, starting with:

This is an RPG Maker game where you play an exiled Elf queen who is trying to build up her businesses to earn enough money and take down the corrupt Bureau of Business. There is no combat in this game which is a rare departure from other RPG Maker games, but there is still health and mana that you can use for various things such as growing plants to sell and boosting customer rate for a short time.

Madama Biz

The gameplay loop mainly consists of going into town to buy materials, craft items to sell, upgrade your shop/clientele, and do various side quests. The end goal seems to be to automate as much as you can so the shops basically run themselves and you can just rake in the money. Here is a typical shop run so you can get an idea of how the game works:

 

OK, there’s a lot to break down from just that one clip. First, take a look at the eight items along the top of the screen. Those represent the different commodities you can sell. They are ordered from common and cheap to rare and expensive. You can even see me buying the item farthest from the left (VenDRANK!) from the vending machine in my store for one coin each. Why the customers don’t simply use the vending machine instead of letting me upcharge them I’ll never know.

The fermented tea can be purchased from the blue-haired guy who sits down on the couch 20 seconds in. You can also obtain it straight from the source, although you may not like how he makes it…

Mmm, toilet tea

Yeah, he brews it in the toilet. There’s a lot of interesting humor like that in this game. The craft bags are made by combining knick knacks and curios which can be purchased from the vendor in the bottom-right at the very start of the video. They used to be called loot bags but the city banned the use of the term because they felt it exploited people. Long story short, we were able to negotiate with the city to rename them craft bags so they could continue to be sold. Yay capitalism!

Envelopes can be purchased from these lovely ladies at the post office. Unfortunately, the Bureau is bleeding the post office dry so they’ve been forced to sell stocks as well to stay afloat.

The assorted fruit can be obtained by buying seeds from a fairy in town and then either growing them there or in the pots in your shop.

The art can be obtained by commissioning it from the artist who lives in the same building as the fairy. When you talk to her, you can take her to various places in the world for inspiration and she’ll get various amounts of inspiration depending on where she goes. 

Because it’s a video game, everything boils down to numbers. One commission costs 200 gold and can lead to anywhere from four to 12 inspiration from what I’ve noticed. One inspiration and one mana will produce one art. Mana is restored slowly over time and can also be restored by drinking alcohol purchased from the barkeep in town. There’s also the option to pay my pixie friend hanging out on the second floor of the shop to automate all of this for a price. I’m not quite sure how this works yet as I haven’t used the option myself. I’ll need to look into this next time.

You can see the station for making craft bags at the bottom. The colored orbs are automation keys which I'll get to later

Moving on, upmarket coffee can be purchased from the kingly fellow sitting next to the red portal with his cat on the right side of the shop. The number above the portal represents the amount of coffee that can be purchased and this number will slowly go up over time.

So far, the only item I haven’t been able to make yet is the battlepass (more gaming meta humor). You can see the instructions for doing so using this clever John Wick reference:

I see what you did there

I know where the bees are but don’t remember how to get wax from them. The wicks are purchased from a dog running around town, simple enough. The fire is the hardest part. I know there’s a place in the sewers under the city where you can pay someone to let you into some sort of arena where you can run around trying to collect as much fire as possible within a certain time limit. I’ve only done this once because it was kind of expensive and I was not very good at it. I’ll need to look into this later.

So that’s how all the goods are acquired. Next, I want to go into detail on the safe. You’ll notice numbers for taxes, tax payment, loan payment, and loan debt. Here’s a picture so you don’t have to go back to the video:

As you sell goods, the taxes you owe goes up. Every few minutes, the tax man will come and collect what is owed from the safe. If you don’t have enough money in the safe when he goes to check it, you’ll get a strike. I don’t know what happens when you get three strikes but I imagine it can’t be good. He’ll drop the strike after enough successful payments. It’s a good idea to keep some excess money in the safe just in case. If you notice the tax man enter the store, you can actually block his movement if you need to run to the safe really fast to check that you have enough stored. You can also make loan payments at the safe, although I haven’t done this yet either and my loan amount keeps going up 😭 This needs to be one of my next objectives before it gets out of control.

 

The tax man

On the bottom-left of the screen you can see my health, mana, level, and level progress. Health and mana were discussed earlier. Levels are obtained by selling goods and completing quests. I’ve noticed sometimes that after a level up, when you exit the store, a cutscene plays that furthers the main story. More importantly, it plays this very satisfying jingle:

On the bottom-right you can see a little glowing bug counting the number of envelopes sold out of 18. These represent mini objectives that you can work towards for GG points. These points are used to earn money and unlock certain perks at the skill tree.

This all can be overwhelming at first, and trust me, I was lost for a while after taking a month long break from the game. Keep in mind that I’m now roughly 10 hours into the game. The beginning of the game was much simpler with a smaller town and a shop that only sold three items. 

So much smaller and more peaceful

This is much more manageable

 

Each mechanic was explained as they were introduced and the difficulty didn’t ramp up significantly until the big town was unlocked. I’ve just been trying to explain everything up to this point in a single blog post so you aren’t totally lost on what I’m talking about in future posts.

The Bureau really did a number on this place

You can walk anywhere in the world you’ve explored so far on foot. There’s also little teleport orbs you can use to get to different places in the big town like the pink one above the knick knack vendor.

I’ve noticed these orbs appearing as I complete more and more of each commodity’s side quest. They’re very useful for getting around town but what about if you want to get back to the first town? After all, you can pay a visit to your first shop and collect earnings from an elf friend you left in charge there. There may be other quests that take you to that part of the world as well. Of course, you can walk there if you feel like it but it can take a couple minutes to get there which gets tedious. Another option is to use fast travel. In this game, you access fast travel by entering THE HORSE DIMENSION:

Yeah, this game is really weird sometimes. Speaking of weird, there’s also this owl you can go to to buy levels. The way he speaks always makes me chuckle.

Another weird aspect of the game is the collectibles. You can find apples in the world and when you collect enough apples, you can unlock certain chests that can provide items or upgrades. You can also use them to unlock upgrades in the apple maze.

Haven't figured out how to get to this one yet

This maze used to be filled with people starting at the entrance but I've cleared them out by collecting apples

As mentioned earlier, the ultimate goal of the game seems to be to upgrade your businesses so you can earn enough money to take down the Bureau. You can achieve this through automation as well as upgrading the shops and customers. In the big town, you can go through an interdimensional rift to buy all of these upgrades. The automation keys allow items to be placed automatically when they are sold.

These upgrades cause the automatic restocking to happen faster. I haven't purchased any yet

These upgrades cause the customers to spend more money. As you can see, these can get pricey

My money has been going towards the automation keys. They help ensure my items are in stock. After that, I want to pursue my next item side quest. At the end of my last session, the game informed me that I’ve sold 1,000 VenDRANK! and should go see the Queen Bee. Here’s how that went down:

I’m thinking of donating 10,000 to them since they said there are thousands of them and there are consequences for giving too little. It will take a little while to get enough money for that. After that, I want to buy the rest of the automation keys and then finally work on paying down my loan amount. We’ll see how that all pans out.

Oof, that was a lot of information thrown out there. Expect future posts to not go nearly as in-depth for this game. Now that you know the basics, I’m hoping I can just quickly recap what I did in the previous week and share any interesting pics and clips. Now, let me move on to the next game I played. There won’t be quite as much to get into here since the game is more story-focused and not a mechanically complex RPG.

In this game, you play a bird by the name of Finley who has just been hired as a junior doctor at St. Ursula’s Hospital. The game starts with you chasing a patient down the hall of the hospital and getting hit in the head. After a weird dream sequence, he wakes up at his apartment and you find out he had to take several weeks of medical leave from his new job to recover.

Finley!

You start the day waiting for a bus that never comes and you end up being late on your first day back. Here, you’re introduced to your stern boss who chastises you on your tardiness and gives you your assignments for the day.

Dr. Krokowski. She is not very nice

The gameplay loop involves completing the three tasks for your patients from prescribing medicine to listening to their breathing to giving them their shots. These tasks are presented in the form of minigames which are as difficult as the game gets. They don’t present much of a challenge as this isn’t that kind of game. They’re mostly there to break up all of the dialogue.

This one is literally just Wordle

CONTENT WARNING: Cartoon depiction of a shot being administered

When you aren’t treating patients, you’re running around both the hospital and the town talking to friends, coworkers, and various townsfolk. There’s one patient in particular who loves to tell stories from when she was younger. I love the scene transitions at the beginning, it really shows how pretty the art style is.

Bestie

The activities you do in town varies. It always involves talking to people, but you also do things like talk to a shop owner who accidentally spills paint on you:

Or go to a bar with friends:

Or…whatever this is:

Treating patients and talking to people is the majority of what you do in this game so it’s nice that the town activities mix things up a bit. It helps that Finley has an interesting personality too. He’s always making up stories while depicting various objects in town, and his side-eye when he’s annoyed or suspicious is second to none.

When I last left the story, Finley and his friends went to the bar to have some drinks and talk after work. A couple patrons walk in and accuse his friend of killing one of their loved ones a year ago and starts berating them and demanding compensation. Eventually the friend has had enough and a fight breaks out between them.

At the hospital the next day, the chief physician calls Finley and his friends to his office, places the friend who started the fight on leave, and gives the other two written warnings. The hospital was already in hot water over leaky pipes dripping water on a patient’s bed and a storm damaging part of the roof so staff was instructed to keep a low profile. They said it will all blow over soon but tensions are high. Luckily the fall festival will be happening in my next session so that should lighten the mood a bit. But for now, it’s time for Finley to get some sleep.

I’m playing through this one with a friend and we’re voicing all the characters. More accurately, I’m voicing Finley and he’s voicing everyone else and doing a great job at it too. I enjoy playing through these story heavy games with him, and this one is extra special because he’s a healthcare worker so the game can hit close to home for him sometimes. He also provides some interesting insights tying Finley’s experience working in a hospital with his own. This game is on the shorter side and I think we’re past the halfway point so it shouldn’t take too much longer. We try to hang out every week and play for a couple hours so we’ll see.

And that’s the end of my game recaps! This took way more time and effort than I was expecting. I thought I would only post a couple blurbs about each game and show them in action and it turned into a whole thing. Future recaps should be shorter since I won’t have to explain every mechanic and the story up to that point. I did want to touch briefly on the movie and TV shows I watched.

TV/Movie Recaps

I watch a fair amount of TV shows throughout the week, and I usually have a movie night on Friday where I’ll watch one movie from my list. Here is everything I watched this week:

• Agatha All Along Episodes 7-9 (finished)
• American Dad Season 21 Episode 10 (all caught up, show ongoing)
• Marvel's What If...? Season 3 (finished)
• FLCL Season 1 Episodes 1-4 (currently watching, show finished)
• Barton Fink
  

I’m a big Marvel fan, and I enjoyed Agatha All Along and What If…? well enough. Agatha All Along never reached the highs of Wandavision but it was still pretty good. What If…? Season 3 was a big step up from Season 2 which I thought was a letdown. Season 1 was probably still the best but 3 was good too. I’m bummed the show was canceled. American Dad is what it is. It’s your standard Seth MacFarlane animated show so if you’re familiar with Family Guy, it’s like that. FLCL has been an interesting watch so far. I don’t fully understand what’s happening but the animation is unique and the scenarios are over the top so I’m enjoying the ride. I just finished the movie Barton Fink as I was writing this so I haven’t fully digested it yet. It started out simple enough at the beginning with a playwright hot off a successful play being hired by a Hollywood big shot to write a script for a motion picture. He’s struggling on how to start since it’s a wrestling film and he isn’t well acquainted with the sport. As he works his way through writer’s block, he meets some interesting characters who help him out (or hurt him, it depends). The ending was wild though, I need to think about it some more. I did enjoy the movie though.

Conclusion/Upcoming

These weekly updates were supposed to be my short posts! What happened? I’ll have to work on truncating my thoughts next time. What did you think? What can I improve on? Does having section headers help with readability or do they seem out of place? Please provide any feedback you may have. My plan for next week is to finish FLCL and start Firefly. FLCL is a short show so it shouldn’t take too long to get through. Firefly is also short with only one season and a movie so I should get through that quickly as well. The next movie on my list is Rushmore. For games, I will continue with the same two. I don’t usually jump around games and just stick with one single-player game and one co-op game per friend. Please look forward to my next post on Sunday. Thanks for reading!