It doesn't feel like we've experienced 19 Humble Indie Bundles over the years but the fact is that we have. I remember when the Humble Bundle came on the scene with World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Penumbra: Overture, Lugaru HD & Samorost 2 and no Steam keys. In fact, getting Steam keys didn't make sense to me as why would anyone use Steam if they had a DRM free download? Times have changed but the Humble Indie Bundle is still going strong and the 19th edition looks to be quite good.

I haven't played any of the games in this bundle, which is good, but from what I know of the games included and what's more my style the top of the bundle seems to be Halcyon 6 Lightspeed Edition that seems to take elements from FTL & RPG's and mixes it up into a very cool game. Mini Metro has "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews on Steam and looks to be a really cool metro building sim game. Poly Bridge is a fun game that spawned off a ton of gaming memes as people tried to build strange bridges for cars to cross. I've heard good things about Soma and if you like horror games it's well worth checking out. If you want to pay $14 or more you can get SuperHot a really unique shooter game with interesting time mechanics. Rakuen & Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes are also included to help round the value of the bundle out. As with most Indie bundles a few games will be added later and as that happens I'll drop those in the comments.

I've limited myself to only purchasing 5 games this year and consider a bundle to be one purchase. That might be cheating but, it is what it is and I really do want to play Halcyon 6 quite a bit. Let me know if you plan on picking this up and if you've played anything in this bundle!

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/humble-indie-bundle-19

RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of the best Sim games to come out of the 90's. Created by Chris Sawyer it spawned a ton of sequels such as RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, 3, World as well as a 3D version and some releases on mobile and PC such as RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic which is a modern port of RollerCoaster Tycoon and it's sequel. Needless to say there are a lot of ways to play it and since I've been a longtime fan I've got my original RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 on CD from back in the day. RollerCoaster Tycoon was available for digital download first on GOG and later came to Steam and I got the original deluxe version as part of a Humble Simulator Bundle on Steam.

RollerCoaster Tycoon: Deluxe on Steam, GOG & CD

If you love the original game and want to play it the good news it still, mostly, runs on Windows 10. It's easy to find on nearly any PC digital store and it's cheap and comes with all the expansions. The only downside is that it doesn't run very well on Windows 10 as the game window only stretches so far and you can't mouse away from the game while playing it as it sort of locks up your PC from anything else. When I close the game my Windows 10 PC is unresponsive for a bit but after a minute things come back and all is well. Even though the original game runs strangely on my PC, for some people it doesn't run at all. Publisher Atari just took the original game and the XP update and packaged it up for release and while it still runs, it's not the best way you can play it.

RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic

Is a modern remastering of the best games in the series RollerCoaster Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and all of the expansions and ported to PC, Mac and tablets. I haven't played it but it reviews well and seems to be what fans have been wanting for quite sometime. That said, the PC version does use the same code as the Tablet version and as such the menus look at bit odd in that context but it doesn't seem unplayable because of it.

Open RollerCoaster Tycoon 2

Is one of those open source projects that make you happy that awesome people have free time. Meant to be a complete source recreation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, ORCT2 is a very well established project that is extremely faithful to the originals. It's a recreation of the sequel but you can point at your install of the original game to play the original park scenarios if you want. If you are looking for an amazing way to play RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 and the original scenarios on Windows, Mac or Linux and you have the original games you need to check this out.

One tip is that if you can find the original RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 demo you can use that as the demo timeboxed you to 1 hour and the open source version does not. That said, getting RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 isn't hard and any version will do.

https://openrct2.org/

Humble is giving away The Darkness II on Steam for PC and Mac during the next 24 hours. I played the heck out of the Darkness II demo on PS3 back when I first got my PS3 and that one level was incredible, even after playing it 15 times. I imagine it ports over well to PC and Mac and since it's not quite a cutting edge game, I imagine it will run extra well on your gaming PC.

"Inspired by the popular comic book series produced by Top Cow Productions, Inc., The Darkness II is an intense first person shooter that delivers a twisted and gripping narrative of tragedy, modern crime drama, and supernatural horror.

Players will be taken down the brutal and personal path of Jackie Estacado, head of a New York crime family and wielder of an ancient and ruthless force of chaos and destruction known as The Darkness. "

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/the-darkness-ii

South Park Phone Destroyer was announced at 2017’s E3 and based on the good reviews of South Park Stick of Truth my interest was peaked. Even though I was really interested in playing it Phone Destroyer somehow the game launched and I didn’t hear anything about it. That changed when I recently saw it in the App Store and since it’s a free to play game I installed it.

Cowboys VS Indians

I’m going to start things out by noting that South Park gleefully revels in offense. At this point South Park has made fun of just about everything so saying that South Park might offend people isn’t really news. Some give South Park a pass because they spread out the satire and mockery to everyone but that doesn’t get it off the hook for sometimes being a bit mean spirited. That said, when South Park is at its peak it’s witty satire is biting and contains a socially relevant message.

Phone Destroyer picks up right after the events in The Stick of Truth where the kids are done playing Elves and Orcs and want to play Cowboys and Indians. Whereas it was common for kids to play Cowboys and Indians in the 80’s, 90’s and earlier it seems like this form of play has lost fashion. Parly because other forms of pop culture are more popular such as Superheroes and Star Wars but also because of cultural appropriation and many Native Americans taking issue with it. Satire at its best has a larger message to inform the audience and in the case of Phone Destroyer it seems that Cowboys and Indians is merely a backdrop. If it’s some kind of political or social satire I didn’t get far enough in the game to see it so it just seems to be… offensive because it can be?

Get To The Gameplay Partner!

The core gameplay of Phone Destroyer kept my attention longer than something like Animal Crossing Pocket Camp but that’s not high praise. The game does feature ace voice acting and innovative story beats such as other characters calling you in game requiring you to turn your phone to actually take the call.

Like many free to play games you can buy in game currency in gold coins and cash. These can be used to buy in game card packs and give you access to materials to upgrade cards or buy new cards themselves. Advancement is through a PVP leveling system and a Candy Crush like set of game levels. You get free cards packs every couple hours so the free to play aspect of the game isn’t too punishing. In fact the game isn’t all that bad itself it just suffers because it’s core gameplay, like many free to play games, is repetitive and boring. Like, why do I care about PVP again? Come to find out I don’t and the most interesting part of the game, it’s character interaction and paper thin story beats don’t come enough to keep me interested. When I realized that I had unlocked all the base level cards and I needed to be PVP 5 to continue and i’ve mostly stopped playing because of it.

TLDR

Phone Destroyer is a fine free to play game and if you love South Park you should check out. I didn’t love it but it contained enough fun elements to keep me playing for a few hours.

Far Cry 5 is the upcoming Ubisoft shooter that is set in Rural Montana as you set out to take down a religious cult. The game premise has been controversial but the games most interesting element might be the inclusion of it's map editor, Far Cry Arcade. Map editors have been included in the Far Cry series for sometime but with Far Cry 5 it will be integrated into the main game.

"Far Cry Arcade is a chance for players to crack open the game and use its assets to build their own customized adventures and experiences. Far Cry Arcade's goal is to make these custom maps as accessible as the campaign, and one way to accomplish that is to integrate them directly into Hope County – and your character's progression.

Walk up to an arcade machine in a bar, for example, and you can jump straight into Far Cry Arcade, check out the latest user-created levels (which will be curated by the developers), and start playing. You'll visit these worlds as the same custom deputy you play in the campaign, and any experience points, perks, or money you earn while playing will cross over into the campaign when you're done

.Your creations won't be limited to the buildings, vehicles, and weaponry you'd find in Hope County, either; Far Cry Arcade will include assets from Far Cry 4 (including yetis) and Far Cry Primal, as well as Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Assassin's Creed Unity, and Watch Dogs. And as post-launch content for Far Cry 5 is released, those assets will be added to Far Cry Arcade as well, letting you get creative with Vietnamese jungles, Martian arachnids, and zombies."

Looks like the Far Cry Arcade should give players a lot more stuff to play after they are done with the main game and hopefully will allow certain mod makers a great time to show off what they can do. Are you getting Far Cry 5, if so let me know in the comments and what you think of Far Cry Arcade?

https://news.ubisoft.com/article/far-cry-arcade-dramatically-expands-far-cry-5s-map-editor

Travis and I have been busy during our spare time coding up new features on Cheerful Ghost and today are launching a new way to look at comments, posts and profile pages. Once upon a time Cheerful Ghost had a Membership system and it was a pretty good way for people that love the site to contribute to it but I always felt like it wasn't the best it could be. Because of that we're rebuilding the Membership system from scratch and it's starting today.

Comments, Posts and Profiles oh My!

If you click open a comment stream or look at a post you will see a new thing we call badges. Badges are a cosmetic thing bestowed on certain users for things like post authorship, membership, site support and admin or mod status. These badges are shown on posts, comments and profile pages and can help give certain discussions some context. It's also a nice thank you to people that financially support the site or work closely with it.

If you have questions about what the user titles or roles mean, we have a handy page to explain it better linked below. If that doesn't work well for you drop your comments on this post.

Old Membership Is Dead, Long Live Memberships!

Since all former Cheerful Ghost site Members old memberships have lapsed they are now rolled over to supporters. We're still working on the new Membership system and process to become a Member again but the cosmetic enhancements were in place so we decided to roll those out now for comment. The new site Membership system should launch in the next bit the only real blocker here is me having enough time to come up with an interesting video about it. Right now we're thinking about using Paetron for site Memberships and we need to spend a bit more time to make that launch just right.

The Future

I don't want to talk too far in the future about what's coming but I do want to say that these changes are all in service of a larger goal that will become more clear later. When I think about what's the most fun about Cheerful Ghost for me trying to make that baked in to the DNA of this site sounds really interesting and hopefully these site updates get us there.

https://cheerfulghost.com/user/titles
https://cheerfulghost.com/Travis/posts/3655/introducing-the-ghost-scale

It’s a pretty special time when a new Nintendo games comes out and Brad Smith has something with his latest entry to the NES lineup with Lizard. After reading about the game, playing the demo and quite enjoying my time with it I decided to reach out to him and ask him a few questions about the game and his process of creating it.

“Choose your lizard carefully. You can find six different ones scattered across the land, each with its own special ability.

You'll need these abilities as you make your difficult journey through many dangerous places. Carefully hop your way to the top of an active volcano. Surf down a surging river. Swim an underwater lake. Ascend a snowy mountaintop. What kind of strange creatures will you meet? Can you unravel the mysteries of Lizard?”

jdodson: Why create a new Nintendo game?

Brad Smith: I got interested in NES development first through a music program called Famitracker. I've always had an interest in video game music, but I found this program (more than 10 years ago now) that allowed me to write music for the NES, and I thought this was great. A few years later I used it to make an NES cover of the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon, and from public response to that I found my way to some chiptune communities. The more I worked with it, the more I had questions about the NES hardware, and finally I bought one and a PowerPak flash cart so that I could write my own programs for it and answer those questions.

The more time I spent with this machine, the more interesting it became. It's got a great balance of being just powerful enough to be versatile, but it's still very limited and something you have to constantly design your work around. Some aspects of the machine seem very simple, especially compared to modern computers, but in a lot of ways the simple premise will turn out to have very complicated consequences. There are also a lot of dark corners of the NES hardware that are very intriguing, things that are subtly broken, or didn't turn out to be useful in the way their design intended. It's an extremely fascinating machine, and all of its quirks really put their mark on every game that came out for it.

I very much feel like the machine becomes a partner in design for an NES game, in a way that stops being true when you have more computing power to play with. I liked having to deal with its limitations, and the end product is a game that really belongs to this console. The other aspect of it being so limited, is that its games are just small enough in scope that I can handle one on my own.

People often ask about nostalgia, and there is some of that too, but I never actually had an NES when I was a kid. A few of my friends did, but I grew up with an Atari ST and Sega Master System, and then a long string of others. While I have fond memories of those other systems the NES is the one that stimulates a creative urge in me.


jdodson: Now that Lizard has launched, how do you look at how the project has gone from the initial concept to Kickstarter to launch?

Brad Smith:Well, I am satisfied with the finished game. It very much is the game I set out to make, and while the specific details of what the game is were gradually decided as the project went along, it definitely fits within my initial plan for what it was supposed to be. It's a game I wanted to see, and I'm glad to have made it.

On the other hand, I am disappointed in how much time it has taken me. I have spent too many months, and too much money working on it. It's too early to see how well it will sell, but it seems unlikely that I will break even on it. It was more important to me that I finish the game I wanted to make, than to ensure it was profitable. I'm more disappointed in just the time itself, it's been years of my life of doing this one thing instead of many other pursuits I'd like to try. For that reason I'm extremely happy to be finished with it, finally.

When I ran the Kickstarter, I had been working on Lizard for about a year, and I was confident that I could finish that version of the game as it was going in another half a year or so. When the Kickstarter finished, it had raised a little more than I had asked for, and at the same time I had an opportunity to cut down my cost of living, so I decided to stretch it out. The demo version I had for the Kickstarter felt too small to me, and I decided then that I should double the size of the game, both the literal physical size of the ROM data, and the breadth of the game's world. I drastically underestimated how much extra work this would take to accomplish. I don't regret it, because it resulted in a much better game, but it cost me so much time.


jdodson: What are your top 5 NES games?

Brad Smith:In no particular order here are five current favourites:

StarTropics - The strange grid based action scheme of this game is really amazing to me. I've never played anything quite like that. It has some interesting puzzles, and a very charming theme as well.

Battletoads - I love how much variety this game has, every level is something new. Great tunes. It's notorious for its difficulty, but I think it's for the most part very fair difficulty, which is hard to pull off. When I die in Battletoads, I can usually blame myself for it.

Super Mario Bros. 3 - Another one that has incredible variety. The levels are small, but each one has something unique to it. Not like Battletoads where ever other level is almost a completely different game, but just a new novel situation created out of the existing blocks and enemies.

Mr. Gimmick - This is a fabulous platformer made late in the life of the NES. Gorgeous art and music, very well put together, and has a very solid gameplay mechanic of throwing a star that you can also climb on.

Sweet Home - A fantastic survival horror RPG only released in Japan. Has a very interesting story that is slowly revealed as you play. You have five characters and any of them can die before the end. It has standard JRPG random battles but the main difference is that healing is very limited; grinding won't help you, more battles will wear you down!


jdodson: What’s been the hardest part of launching Lizard?

Brad Smith:The launch part is a lot easier than everything that came before. Self publishing in itch.io is not hard at all. Steam is more tedious but still pretty straightforward, and mostly self directed. Marketing is harder, and that's an ongoing challenge. I'd like to see Lizard make it to some other consoles, but all of them require significant financial investment, so I have to wait and see how Lizard sells in its current form before I can take the risk elsewhere.

If I take the question to mean everything before the launch as well, the hardest part of making lizard is the design. I don't mean the high level ideas, like "what lizard powers should I have?" but the small details I have to work through day to day. Should I make this platform 4 or 5 tiles wide? Which of those is more fun? Should I make this crab jump higher, or faster? After making 200 other rooms, how do I make room 201 interesting? Is it better for this frog to be here, or 3 pixels to the left? Will this frustrate players? How much frustration is too much? Which combination of enemies or items fits the NES colour restrictions for this room? These are often subtle, but usually tricky and subjective questions, and there is an endless supply of them every day.

The big time sink here is that most of these questions have to be answered by building different versions of the game and trying them out. I test and test and test a hundred versions of every room. I shorten a platform and then try jumping off of it 20 different ways to try to get an idea of whether it's better or worse than it was before. All this testing takes more time than any other part of game development. A lot of the design difficulty is trying to find useful changes that don't have a large global impact, or just weighing how much work various ideas require. Changing how an enemy behaves will affect every instance of that enemy in the game. If there's 100 frogs, that's 100 things to test and re-evaluate if I ever make a change to how those frogs work.

After testing and design, programming is also difficult. Writing a program is like making a machine with a hundred thousand moving parts. When it takes 100 lines of code to make a dog jump, there's a lot of room for mistakes, and even if you write exactly the code you intended, there's a lot of room for unintended consequences. Think about kicking a koopa turtle shell in Super Mario Bros. What happens if it hits a block? What happens if it hits a goomba? What about falling off the bottom of the screen? What if it hits a springboard? A flagpole? A fish? A vine? A mushroom? Mario's foot? Mario's head? A block that's been bumped from underneath? When you have systems of things that can interact with each other there's A LOT of combinations to think about. This is not easy to manage. Complexity grows exponentially, and problems in programming can be extremely unpredictable.

jdodson: Creating a platformer requires lots of attention to how the gameplay feels. How did you approach getting it right for Lizard and when did things seem right to you? Were you taking inspiration from other platformers in terms of getting the game to feel at home with them?

The way a character moves in a game has a lot of components. There are a lot of decisions to make here: whether to include slopes, whether blocks are completely rigid or have "soft" edges that push you out, how fast to accelerate, how fast to slow down, how fast and how high you jump, how much control you have in the air, whether you lose momentum for pushing against a wall, whether you can release the jump button early to jump lower, is there water, is there ice, yada yada yada. Some questions are at least fairly binary, so you only have to try a version with it on or off, but a lot of these factors are quantitative... when it's a matter of how much you have to try a lot of different versions to answer that for yourself.

For Lizard, I made some rooms to test, and put together the character controller with the elements I thought I'd want. I experimented jumping over obstacles with different shapes and sizes, and tried a lot of different settings. I eventually narrowed toward something that felt good to me, and I went with that. Basically from that point on the character physics were set, because the design of nearly everything else in the game is dependent on them.

At the very end of production, when I began beta testing I was unsatisfied with how many people were reacting to it, and I decided to test an alteration to the character physics at that point. I won't go into all the details on this, as I'm planning to write an article about it, but I wasn't expecting to use this alteration. I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity. When I tested it, though, I was surprised by it. I had found a very low impact change that I think significantly improved the feel of the game for a lot of players. After a couple of complete playthroughs and some review of its design consequences, I decided to keep it. I didn't think I could mess with the physics without having to redesign the whole game, but it turned out I could, at least a little.


jdodson: How did you get into game development?

Brad Smith:I found a book on beginner BASIC programming in the school library when I was a kid. There was a whole series of these by Usborne, colourfully illustrated, and they got me started. Computer magazines used to have code listings in them too that you could type in and run. I learned a lot from reading and experimenting with others' code this way. I really liked video games, and I wanted to make my own, so I did. I made lots of very small video games growing up, and slowly learned more and more about how to do it.

When I was a teenager we got the internet, and suddenly I had access to some amazing information that I could never find at the public library. There was a set of documents called the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia that were shared on various FTP sites back then that I learned a tremendous amount from. At that point I was very interested in JRPGs, after having played Final Fantasy IV and some other Squaresoft games. I was determined to make one of my own. I also found an RPG engine community called VERGE, and hung out on IRC and forums with other people where were trying to make RPGs with that engine, even though I was trying to make my own from scratch.

Eventually I went to university. I got a bachelor's degree in music, and also in computer science. Between what I'd learned on my own in years prior, and everything I gained at school, I thought I was ready to apply for a programming job at game companies. I was hired by Obsidian Entertainment as a junior programmer. I moved to California, and worked for them for a few years, mostly on an Aliens RPG that would be cancelled, but I still learned a lot.

After a few years there, my dad died unexpectedly and I wanted to move back home to Canada to be nearer to my family. I left Obsidian, but I had a few friends who were trying to start a game company of their own, and they were willing to let me work remotely from home. For a few years I did that, until the company eventually fell apart (long story I won't go into). We had many dead end projects, but released one game at least (Yar's Revenge, 2011). After this I became a contract programmer for a game engine company for a few years. When that contract came to an end, I decided I'd had enough of making games for other people and wanted to make a game for myself. That's when Lizard began.


jdodson: Now that Lizard is released and the NES carts are on the way have you thought about what project might be next?

Brad Smith:I actually have enough game ideas to last the rest of my life, I think. I keep a lot of notes about these.

I want to make another NES game, but one very different from Lizard. I don't forsee myself ever wanting to make a Lizard 2, but it's not an impossibility either. I don't have too much to share on this future project yet.

The other thing I want to do is make a BASIC programming environment for the NES. Something that's free and open source, and good for learning. I've already begun work on this, and I'm hoping to be able to sustain myself through Patreon or proceeds from Lizard, but it remains to be seen whether this will be feasible.

I have a few other projects I'd like to continue as well, such as the NES music emulator NSFPlay, which I've been promising to update once Lizard was done.


jdodson: If you didn’t have an idea I have a free game suggestion you can use for your next project if you want. A Super Nintendo game about a family of Super Nintendos where one Christmas they all decide to take a trip to Paris. That night one of the Super Nintendo kids gets dumped on and sort of yells at everyone and is sent upstairs early. That night a power outage resets the Super Nintendo parents alarm clocks and they are late for the airport. In a scramble every Super Nintendo makes it to the airport minus the one Super Nintendo kid who is left behind. Anyways, i’m thinking in the game other Super Nintendos might want to rob him and the kid can build traps and stuff to mess them up but not quite kill them. Anyways, one working title for the game could be SUPER DOMICILE UNATTENDED!

Brad Smith: Heh, well I'll say this about game ideas: the overall concept and idea for Lizard took maybe minutes or days, depending on what you consider the "full" idea. Building that idea took 4 years. There's a 1000:1 work to idea ratio here. Game ideas are really fun to come up with, but also not very hard to come by.


jdodson: Thanks for taking the time to do this, anything you want to say before we wrap things up?

Brad Smith: Nothing more comes to mind, but thanks for the interview.

http://lizardnes.com/

The new year is here meaning that Hearthstone will be rotating the amount of sets in standard. As part rotation a new expansion has been announced called The Witchwood. The above trailer seems like The Blair Witch Project meets... Hearthstone? It's a fun expansion reveal and the ending is well worth sticking around for.

The Witchwood is a traditional Hearthstone expansion but it seems the pre-order nets you 20 extra packs than it did before. Seems to be an adjustment on Blizzards part as it seems the general community consensus is the game is really expensive to play. Still is, but they seem to be tossing in more value, which is nice.

The Witchwood is also shipping with a new single player game mode similar to Dungeon Run of the last expansion called Monster Hunt. In this mode you play as one of 4 unique heroes where you take on 8 bosses to complete the Monster Hunt. This seems to be a cool extension of the Dungeon Run mode added in Kobolds and Catacombs which was my most played aspect of the last Hearthstone expansion.

I have a special fondness for Hearthstone but the thought of getting back on the daily grind makes me get all queasy. It's a great game and possibly the best free to play game ever made but you either have to sink a ton of time into it daily to get enough gold to open packs or spend more than $150 a year to open enough packs to remain competitive. Both prospects, right now, seem unfortunate to me but i'm really happy the game is continuing on and people seem to love it which is awesome because it's a game that should continue to be improved.

https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/expansions-adventures/the-witchwood

In the 90’s Nintendo sold us everything from Mario underwear, trading cards and cereal. I was down to get all of it, or at least as much as Mom and Dad would buy me. One seemingly unattainable aspect of the 90’s Mario craze was Nintendo’s Cereal System that had a split box of Zelda and Mario cereal. The only time I ever had any was at my cousins house and it was pure magic to open the box, eat Zelda cereal and after breakfast play Nintendo all day. Fast forward to the dystopian hellscape of now and Nintendo doesn’t sell us trading cards or underwear anymore but the cereal thing is back in the form of Kellogg’s Super Mario Cereal.

At this time Super Mario Cereal is a bit hard to find in stores but they seem to be getting it back in stock and if you can’t find it the old fashioned way you can get it online. I luckily found some at a local grocery store for about $3 a box and picked up two. A few weeks later a work friend gave me some as a present(thanks Joe) so i’ve had enough Super Mario Cereal to make a grown Italian plumber stomp on some poor Goombas.

According to Kellogg’s Super Mario Cereal is 8.4oz which means super mario cereal is in a small box. It’s about the height as a normal-ish cereal box but it’s thin and it’s not as large as a normal box of Cheerios, think about the size of a box of Grape Nuts.

How’s Mario Cereal taste? Well… about what you’d expect if you’ve ever had Lucky Charms, Marshmallow Mateys, Flintstones Marshmallow Fruity Pebbles or Marshmallow Fruit Loops. Wait… Marshmallow Fruit Loops… *clicks some shit in Google* OH GOD THAT SOUNDS HORRIBLE WHO WOULD DO THAT TO A KID? *sigh* Since I don’t eat this kind of cereal nor subject my kid to stuff like it trying Super Mario Cereal was like a blast back to the sugar rush of my youth. The cereal isn’t really great outside of one bowl but that one bowl is pretty incredible if you like cereal that is way too sweet. Come to find out I do and eating a whole box was a fun ride down marshmallow lane.

Speaking of way too sweet if you read the ingredients one cup of Super Mario Cereal being 32 grams for each cup contains 10 grams of sugar. That’s right kids ⅓ of Super Mario Cereal is sugar. ⅓. But it’s cool because it has 3 grams if fiber so you know that 10% really buffers out the sugar part.

But who buys this stuff as health food? Super Mario Cereal is supposed to be a glucose spike with an amazing sugar crash just like Saturday morning intended. Oh and while your at it you can also swipe your box by your Switch in the Mario Odyssey game for 3 gold coins. Not sure that’s the worlds greatest in game reward but isn’t ⅓ content being sugar it’s own reward? I think so.

Super Mario Cereal nutrition information - https://www.kelloggs.com/en_US/products/super-mario-cereal.html#nutrition-modal
Game Explain scans Super Mario Cereal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9tNcTpOOJc

Bonus Cheerful Ghost + KIDS Review!

Timogorgon: As luck would have it, the same day I finally found a box of the Mario cereal Jon sent me an email saying he was going to do a review of it and wanted to know if I’d like to contribute to the post. I decided to rope in my children too, since kids are probably the target demo anyways.

I thought I knew what I was getting into since it looked like a lucky charms knock-off, but I was not prepared for the cereal itself being berry flavored. That was kind of an odd choice. It’s like someone took the marshmallows from Lucky Charms and then dumped them into a bowl of Fruit Loops. However, the berry flavor must be a coating on the cereal because after about a minute in the milk the “berry” flavor was basically gone.

To say this cereal is sweet is kind of an understatement. For the record I do normally like sugary cereals, but this one was a bit much even for me. The box is pretty small, which depending on your point of view might be considered merciful. All four of us each had a bowl and the box was nearly empty afterwards. I’m glad I found a box and got to try it, but I have no plans to purchase another one.

But what do kids think of this? Let’s turn to our panel of judges:

Mia (age 9): I think it tastes really good and that it should be one of the top five cereals. (I asked her what the other “top five” cereals are and she informed me that they are: Fruit Loops, Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and Raisin Bran.) I like the fun marshmallows a lot.

Briley (age 8): Super duper good! I want this all the time. It tastes sugary good, really sweet. My favorite part is the marshmallows.

Micah (age 5): Two thumbs up! (I asked him if he wanted to say anything more, to which he answered “Nope!”)

Timogorgon: In closing, let me say that the resulting sugar rush for all three kids was pretty epic.

When Valve started the hype train for Steam Machines in 2015 I was excited. I love consoles but I don't love having to re-purchase games for each device I own so the thought that you could by a game one and run it anywhere really interested me. Plus I love Valve and Steam so getting a dedicated Steam Machine for playing games in my living room seemed like a great idea. Since i'm not usually the first to adopt brand new tech I decided to wait for the reviews to come and had a thought to picking up a second or third generation machine because, by then, the kinks would all be worked out. Thing is... Steam Machines seem to be a first generation only thing because frankly, they seem dead.

Are Steam Machines Dead?

Officially Steam Machines don't seem dead as they are still listed on Steam itself but PC Gamer did an interview with three Valve partners that released Steam Machines and they have basically discontinued them due to lack of interest.

“Nobody was buying it with SteamOS,” Digital Storm marketing manager Rajeev Kuruppu tells me over the phone. The manufacturer had already been building the Eclipse—which is still available with Windows—when Valve pitched SteamOS, and added a Steam Machine build mid-project. That version has since been axed, and Digital Storm no longer has an active relationship with Valve.

“I think over time as the demand from customers wasn’t there we basically had no reason to speak with Valve,” says Kuruppu. Digital Storm is still open to working with Valve, so long as its customers want what Valve is putting out. Right now, they don’t."

Valve Released The Steam Link And It's Incredible

I wonder if part of the reason why the uptake of Steam Machines wasn't high was because alongside Steam Machines Valve released the Steam Link. The Steam Link is a $50 steaming device that let's you transmit your PC Steam games to your living room in 1080p and it seems that users decided to go that route instead. And it's not a bad choice either because i'm using it right now and with all the updates Valve has brought to it.... it's incredible.

When I attended Steam Developer Days I got a free Steam Link and Steam Controller with the ticket. After my son was born I really didn't have much time for PC gaming so the Link sat in the closet and recently I dusted it off and hooked it up. After 10 updates I started streaming games from my ASUS ROG laptop. The streaming was great but, occasionally, the game would lose a frame or two. It wasn't a huge deal but it was noticeable and I remember reading reviews that suggested you use it over wired ethernet. The Steam Link and my ASUS ROG are both connected to wireless and my router supports 5G Wireless 802.11ac 2x2 (MIMO) so I figured all would be fine but there were noticeable hiccups. I have a PC gaming desktop that is connected to wired ethernet and I decided to give that a go and the Link streaming was perfect. So it seems that if one of the machines is connected to wired internet that can help considerably and moreso if both are.

I've tested a few games on the Steam Link but the game i've played the most is Death Road To Canada, which is perfect for the living room. Fallout 4 ran well and I didn't notice any kind of performance issues with it either. I don't imagine i'll be playing a ton of shooters that way for but platformers, adventure games and rogue likes playing Steam games in the living room is a great way to experience them.

https://www.pcgamer.com/what-happened-to-steam-machines/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/Steam_Link/