Humble Comics Bundle – Back to the 80s with IDW

Ghostbusters (volumes 1-4) – The classic characters, another few years down the line from the second movie, and periodically referencing the events of the video game. Interestingly, the art style is neither based on the cartoon series (which doesn’t seem to be in continuity) nor on any kind of realism. They introduce a love interest for Janine who, amusingly, is drawn like the cartoon version of Egon. The first volume revolves around a third servant of Gozer who is intent on making Ray choose a new form (instead of the Marshmallow Man) so that Gozer can properly return. The second volume features a buildup of Walter Peck as an antagonist again, which doesn’t really pan out. The third volume features a road trip across America with stops at various haunted locations. The fourth introduces the “Ghost Smashers” as antagonists, clearly loosely based on the female Ghostbusters team from the reboot movie, but with a new character as their driving force and no real personality behind them. It’s cute and the dialogue is snappy, but there isn’t actually much new or special about it and the actual stories are pretty forgettable.

Jem and the Holograms (volume 1) – A reboot of the original 80s material with the usual Netflix-style modern twists. I have to imagine it would be better as a cartoon, given that a massive splash-page spread each issue is dedicated to a musical number. I remember always being vaguely disappointed (though I didn’t watch very much of the original cartoon) that Jem wasn’t doing anything superhero-ish, given she had a superhero power set and a secret identity. This is similar; it’s all about the rival band drama and teen romance plotlines with minor sci-fi hologram stuff. It does, however, have explicitly queer characters, as opposed to the original which was just heavily gay-coded.

Back to the Future (volumes 1-3) – The first volume is a grand collection of short stories showing snippets of things that weren’t in the movies but could have been squeezed in here or there. The second volume is a single story, with a series of adventures featuring Doc (between Marty leaving the old west and him arriving with the flying steam train) and Marty (from 1986, six months after the third movie) bouncing around 1986 and ridiculous sci-fi 2035 and revisiting old tropes while they try not to create a paradox. In the third volume, Marty finally addresses the fact that his memories don’t actually match up to the world that he lives in, and that the Marty of that world disappeared into 1955 and never returned. Fortunately for lazy writers who don’t actually like making definitive statements, a rival mad scientist comes along and steals the Flux Capacitor and starts causing changes to history, so Marty can fight some robot duplicates of himself and come to grips with his situation without actually getting any real explanations of it.

Back to the Future: Citizen Brown - Based on the Telltale game and in an alternate history from the other comics. This stands alone and also honestly holds together as a single narrative much better than the other comics, wrapping up everything it starts in a nice big timey-whimey package. (It’s a goddamn time-travel mess with characters constantly messing up history and going back to try to fix their mistakes, and that fits the tone of BttF really well!) I hadn’t realized, but Bob Gale, one of the original writers from the movie, was the writer on all of these BttF comics and the game this was based on. (And has a bunch of other Marvel credits to his name, as well.) Nice that he’s still getting work!

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic (volumes 1-2) – Everypony is being replaced by pod ponies! Queen Chrysalis and her shapeshifting shadowy minions have returned and have kidnapped the three little sister ponies, so the Mane Six must go on an adventure to defeat her and rescue them. The climax kinda falls flat, as it’s overwrought and overdone power-of-friendship that I suspect they do a lot; but the adventure getting there is cute. (The second volume then features the return of Nightmare Moon and a journey to the moon to deal with it.) I maintain my stance that this series was clever and fun but not worth the massive reaction it garnered.

Star Trek Classics (volume 5) – The “Who Killed Captain Kirk?” arc from the DC-published comics. Very Peter David, full of puns and references that would fly over your head if you didn't get them. (Including a veritable storm of puns when Spock encounters a group of philosophers in a hallucination of Dante’s Inferno.) There’s a weird formatting issue with the name “Captain Zair” in word balloons, and I’m wondering if it changed from the original printing, but I can’t find anything about it online. I was pretty certain I had read this before, and sure enough, I have the 1993 trade paperback, which has the same weird formatting. I don’t have the original 1988 pamphlets, so I’ll still have to wonder what was up.

Clue: The Graphic Novel - Clearly doing its best to be a modern take and not the slightest bit related to the movie; this manages to make Mr. Green (an i-banker and pharma bro) the most odious of the bunch. The fourth wall is a gentle suggestion at best to Upton, the butler who narrates throughout, and the twists of the mystery actually do manage to come together. A fun standalone story.

This bundle also had a Highlander book I didn’t really care about, and some Transformers Classics that I might eventually check out when I’m next in a Transformers mood.

Overall: There’s some fun stuff here, a mix of new material and reprints; and a mix of new and old authors. If you’re already a fan of one of these properties, you might enjoy the new material.

Itch.io Indie bundle for Palestinian Aid, Part 1

A number of the games “included in this bundle” are, in fact, free-to-play browser games. That feels disingenuous.

Basil goes O.U.T.S.I.D.E. (Platformer, Browser game) – Basil is a little purple man who wakes up in a cave and goes on an adventure that leads to him dying a lot, because touching most things kills him instantly. You have to love wall-jumping and careful platforming, and not care about story or inflicting violence upon your foes.

When it’s safe again (Exploration, Browser game) – A five-minute exploration of little things in someone’s life while they miss their SO during quarantine.

Walkerwall (Puzzle Platformer, Browser game) – A minimalist puzzle-platformer; you can slide around corners and change gravity by doing do, and there are pickups you can only retrieve while gravity is going a certain way. Many points for cleverness; I haven’t seen anything quite like this before. But it also can be hard to grok because of that.

Tetrible (Puzzle, Browser game) – What if Tetris, but the floor is lava and the tetrad stack is constantly sinking into them? This is neat, and it changes the dynamic of Tetris because you need to be mindful of both building too high and falling too low—you need to make a thin stack and build out from it to score lines, and do that again and again repeatedly because your wide stack will end up in the lava.

Glitch Dungeon (Puzzle Platformer, Browser game) – A curious puzzle platformer where you eventually learn 4 spells and can switch between them each granting you a different power: Ignoring gravity, jumping high, being invincible, and climbing walls. (They’re color-coded and change the dungeon tiles when in use.) I got stuck on a puzzle room and frustrated, but I thought it was a cool concept.

Light Borrower (Puzzle, PC game) – This I really enjoyed. In an underground bunker called Haven, where the prophet Charlie led his followers before the End, Rachel is undergoing a coming-of-age ritual by solving lots of light-based spinning-wheel puzzles. The draw is the puzzles, but the story bits, told in notes, are interesting also. It took me an hour to get 34% and see the first ending; I may go back for more.

Worldcraft (Puzzle, Browser game) – A short but clever game of matching up lines, which is an abstraction of organizing planets and stars.

MineFinitum (Puzzle, Browser game) – It’s Minesweeper, but it scrolls forever as you solve chunks of it. It doesn’t keep score and there’s no penalty for misses. It’s very zen.

Pixels Out of Space (Platformer, Browser game) – A very Game Boy-style platform-and-shoot game, but the gimmick is that different areas change to different colors, causing environmental effects. (The sharply limited ammo, while appropriate to a “horror” game, doesn’t actually make this more fun.) I think I would need save states to get through it without getting too frustrated, but points for cleverness.

The Majesty of Colors (Puzzle, PC game) – I played this years ago, back when it was a Flash game. It’s a fun little thought-experiment game, where you awaken as a tentacle monster in the ocean and become fascinated by the strange things above you. It’s short, and the only real trick to it is finding the five endings.

Pleasant Dreams: The Welcoming Play of Kirby’s Dream Land by Joel Couture – Couture clearly has a very most favorite game from his childhood, and wants to tell you in excessive detail why that is. To save you 90 pages: It’s because it’s very good at being its own tutorial and isn’t very hard. This deserved to be a blog post, not a book.

Radiant Chaotic Sorcerer (D&D 5E class variant) – This is really delightful: For the player who thinks a Wild Mage is too controlled, they randomly cast random spells. When you attempt to cast a spell, it’s randomly rolled (with a chance of a wild surge). When you do anything else that requires a roll, there’s a 1/10 chance you’ll cast a random spell instead. After 15th level, you counterattack anyone who hits you with a random spell. This is wonderful one-shot bait and I want to use it.

The Book of Common Games by Kyle Latino – Less games and more a mix of meditative thought experiments and commentary on hobbies. What are hobbies, really, than ridiculous games we play over time? I don’t think I’m really the kind of person to attempt any of these, but I can imagine there are people who would.

Overall: Light Borrower was a lot of fun, and the Radiant Chaotic Sorcerer will appear in a game at some point. There were a few other clever ideas in things I tried, but those two stood out.