iZombie (TV Series, Season 1)

When Liv Moore is turned into a zombie, she opts to take a job at the local morgue to deal with her hunger for brains. As those brains give her flashes of former owner’s memories, she uses her talents to help hunt down murder victims.

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Overall: It bears little resemblance to the original comic, but I enjoyed it regardless. I worry it may outgrow its premise, but I’m definitely willing to give season two a shot when it becomes available to me.

Humble Eye Candy Bundle

I bought this bundle mostly because I’d been waiting for Evoland 2 to go on sale, and then I could buy it via bundle for $10 (half-price) and also get a stack of other games.

Evoland 2 - A more refined, more story-driven (as opposed to gimmick-driven) game than the original Evoland, it’s primarily a top-down action-rpg in the Zelda or Mana vein, with plenty of puzzles and fighting. But if you like genre changes, there’s also stealth sections, platforming sections, shoot-em-up sections (top-down and side-scroller), a fighting game section, a beat-em-up section, auto-scrolling platforming, Bomberman-pastiche, Fire Emblem-style tactical maps, and even a rhythm game segment. And the original conceit of the graphics changing as you travel through time remains just as amusing, with four major eras that each have their own style, and a puzzle dungeon that requires actively swapping between them. This game was really made for video games fans of a certain age (mine, thankfully) and level of experience—you need to be at least passable in all of the above genres to get through all of the required areas. (Though there are three difficulty levels, and on “easy” the abundance of save points makes most things less frustrating.) The plot is heavily inspired by Chrono Trigger, but stands on its own very nicely with a mix of serious story and wacky parody…and then you need to piece together the fan theories to figure out everything that actually happened, because it’s all a closed time loop that the heroes are mostly at fault for.

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Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut - This is the second game in the Shantae series; I played the third on the 3DS. The third game made very good use of the 3DS' extra screen by giving you a constantly-accessible map. I miss that. On the other hand, this game’s maps are designed in a pseudo-3D manner so you can go "in" or "out", and that's an interesting switch. Instead of pirate equipment, your special abilities in this game are transformations triggered by bellydancing. I found the difficulty curve a bit unpleasant: The first real boss requires an absurd 120 hits to take out—what is that about? And then I got to the Battle Tower, and couldn’t get through it despite a dozen tries. It’s not as good as the sequel, but that makes me very excited for the fourth game, because the designers are obviously learning.

(The original game in the series was apparently a late-cycle Game Boy Color game. I pulled the rom and gave it a try...it's kinda lousy. It drags and the platforming mechanics are unpleasant. I'm impressed they managed to make a sequel.)

Human Resource Machine - This is a programming puzzle game from the makers of Little Inferno, which means that you're playing a wage-slave using limited programming commands to move things from an inbox to an outbox, and outside the world is burning. I was reminded uncomfortably of Comp Sci 126 back in freshman year of college, but I suspect for anyone else with an analytical mind but relatively little programming experience this would be both fun and a decent tutorial. (Heck, I may actively push ARR into playing it if he shows an interest in programming or puzzle games in general.)

Mini Metro - A casual/puzzle game in which you try to design a subway system that doesn’t overcrowd passengers waiting at your stations. Each of the maps is based on the real map of a major city, though attempting to match the real thing probably won’t get you very far. Credit for being something unique and original; good for an hour or two.

Mushroom 11 - An interesting take on a puzzle-platformer, as you control a green blob of fungus that you can erase parts of and have it immediately grow back elsewhere. The inability to jump (you instead have to either bounce or stretch upward creatively) makes it distinctly different from many games in the genre.

A Boy and His Blob - A remake/reimagining of the NES classic, in which you play a boy who has a pet alien blob, which can shapechange when you feed it various jellybeans. In this version, the graphics are really splendid and the jellybeans seem to be unlimited, which makes the game feel appropriately modern as a puzzle game that doesn't hate you. Unfortunately, the boy is still a one-hit-point-wonder with really lousy jumping abilities, and the delays of calling for the blob and waiting for it to eat the damn jellybeans mean it's not particularly fun for me. (I had similar problems with the original.)

The bundle also included the arena-shooter / local multiplayer game TowerFall Ascension, but I wasn’t particularly interested in playing that.

Overall: This bundle was basically my excuse to purchase Evoland 2, but definitely earned its keep with the rest of the collection.

Android Games Reviews: The Second KEMCO Humble Bundle #5 - Fanatic Earth

In a world where an alien bacteria known as the "Achratoth" nearly wiped out mankind, Xilleon City was created using a particle shield to protect many of the remaining inhabitants. Join forces with a brash amnesiac hero, a detective in the local police force, an android, and a young girl with a mysterious past as "defenders of justice" and take on Cyphatek, the largest corporation in Xilleon City, to expose their corruption!

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Overall: I can’t really claim that this is particularly stand-out as a game, but it gets a lot of credit for having a plot I haven’t seen before. You’d think that there’d be more sci-fi buddy cop rpg stories, actually.