Here we are again, another end of the year and yet another time of winding down and reflection of both past and future. Not gonna lie, this year has been hard for me in more ways than one. But the musician in me gets reminded of the old adage – to look for the silver lining, whenever clouds appear in the blue. Sometimes you really need to force yourself to look even if you don’t think it’s there. You may be surprised on what you can find, or even come up with.
For the Kupo Brand HQ, there’s a bunch of small things to celebrate. Our podcast, Kupo Talks! past our 10th episode this year! We also got some recent redesigns from management too! Plus, Mog Knight’s personal neocities site is still going strong with some content this year. Oh, and did I mention Mog Knight starting on his own vtuber journey? Maybe next year he’ll break out of his shell to make some friends and do some collabs.
But enough talking in 3rd person and about the future, we’re here in the now! And we’re here to celebrate the one constant we, Mog Knight and special guest Andrew, had in our lives this year – video games. We played a variety of games this year, though a bit smaller of a pool than usual due to various changes in our lives, and this year we have come together to award arbitrary awards to games and their experiences that stand out in our minds.
It is my honor on behalf of the Kupo Brand HQ to introduce the awards for Day 1 of the Kupo Writes! Game Awards in the year of our Lord 2021!
Small Business, Honest(?) Work Award:
Sunshine Heavy Industries by Daisyowl Games
This year it felt like my stress levels ebbed and flowed like waves crashing against an already rocky shore. It also didn’t help that a lot of the games I was playing had an innate element of stress – ticking timers/countdowns, trying not to be detected, running out of money due to poor business decisions where one can argue I should not be in charge of, and just trying to survive while the odds continue to be stacked against you until you break.
The one game that didn’t care to break me to my limits, but rather made me feel welcomed in a way, was a little game where you build spaceships for clients. As you would expect, your clientèle of truckers, travelers, mercenaries, scientists, rogue AI, and everyone in-between expects their ship to meet certain criteria of parts and whatnot.
Some parts like fuel need to be connected to pumps, other parts emit radiation so they cannot be near bunks where people reside, and other parts cannot be blocked in a certain direction so that things like a cockpit can actually function. Later in the game, you have to worry about electricity management, adding heat sinks to parts, hull shielding, maneuverability fins, and many more elements that add to the whole puzzle of meeting the client’s demands.
It may seem like a lot to manage. And it is sometimes. But the game gives you a lot of breathing room to accomplish building a ship. No timer to worry about, the ability to place any part anywhere on the 2D plane and just build without any annoying warnings blaring at you, the ability to drag and drop multiple parts while also rotating or even copying and pasting them too, and the best part of all – no one really cares how it looks. You can make the ugliest looking ship with holes and misplaced exposed fuel tanks and the clients will accept it as long as it’s functional to their needs. It just needs to work.
In a way, just that alone made me want to see this game to the very end. My life is busy and stressful enough as it is, and when I picked up this game (that was conveniently recommended on my twitter timeline by somebody, bless them) I felt, just for the tiniest moment, I was in control. There’s enough self-imposed challenges in the game that I wanted to meet for no one but for myself, to see if I could do it. Things such as optimization, budget control, and for me just making a ship that looks like an actual ship. The game doesn’t reward you for perfection though, so sometimes I just submit a ship that’s good enough for me and call it a night.
I didn’t really expect that building these ships would be one of the most fun I had this year. It also helps that the story is just really fun and silly, the art and the UI are cute and fit the overall vibe, and just the character and clients you meet are so memorable in so many different ways. Sometimes you see return customers in your client list and it’s just fun seeing why they came back.
In a way, this game gives me the vibes of working small business again – all the good parts though, not the stressful parts. You just do the work, talk to folks that came out all this way to partake in your services, and just vibe until the shift is done. Who would have thought building all these ships would be such a vibe? That’s why I award this game the “Small Business, Honest(?) Work” award, as the shipyard you do work in is just you and the newly-appointed inheritor of the business. Though some of the business dealings with space pirates may be questionable, it’s still good work.
[written by Mog Knight]
Game of Questionable Moral Fiber Award:
World of Warships by Wargaming/ Lesta Sudio
Did you, like me, grow up in the late 90’s/early 00’s and had basic cable, you watched a lot of television that didn’t necessarily line up with your core demographic interest of cartoons and stand-up comedy. Sometimes when there was nothing good on TV, I like many other boomer grandpas, watched a lot of the History Channel where they had programming with an utter fascination with every aspect and documentation of World War II, from naval battles to occult superweapons. This was the seed of an amateur history enthusiast that lead down many roads and interests in wargaming, from hex-based board games like Advanced Squad Leader and PanzerBlitz to computer games like Hearts of Iron and Panzer Corps. Eventually, I began to dabble into more action-orientated games where something like World of Tanks and WarThunder have found their niche. I started playing World of Tanks, only because they had a Girls Und Panzer collaboration going on, and from was sucked down the whole of fast-paced 9v9 deathmatches which essentially got me sucked into a PvP fever that I seldom feel for these days.
Long story short, World of Warships is a PvP free-to-play arcade-shooter, where you and a team of others get to plink at other ships several kilometers away in beautifully detailed warships from the pre-dreadnoughts of pre-World War I to World War II fast battleships/battlecruisers. The gameplay is slow, frustrating, and nerve-wracking. I love it. There is something magical about zeroing in on your opponent’s speed from over islands and scoring explosive critical hits to vital systems. The term gunnery in other video game environments sounds a little too try-hardy for most, but there is some margin of skill that one has to figure to out in order to score successive hits against moving targets at the optimal angles that allow proper penetration of AP shells. To me, it’s a game of premonition, when it takes several seconds for shells to reach their target, you at times have to make guesses or interferences on how your opponent will react to your fire and adjust accordingly, when the rush of next hit kills, do you double down on that initial firing solution and unload all salvos at one mark or spread your salvos across a horizontal arc so even if the first shot wasn’t lead far enough maybe the rest can score a hit or two? These are the decisions that I personally love about the game. Sure sometimes you maneuvered in the wrong place at the wrong time and get torpedoed to hell in a destroyer ambush but hey maybe next time you’ll be on the other end of an ambush and feel like a genius.
Now major disclaimers, World of Warships is a free-to-play game, rife with premium purchases, 4 different currencies including premium, with overbearingly long in-game timers, major grinding to get higher ships. In all, nothing too far from what most people are used to from to play but to hold them to the prerequisites of this award, the published/developer of World of Warships has been accused and/or known for antagonizing its own fanbase/content creators by filing DMCA takedowns of backlash against its premium paid content AND may be implicated in:
- Passport fraud
- Moneylaudering featuring Eastern European Paypal
- Various finance crimes / tax evasion
In an article by Kotaku Senior Editor Luke Plunkett he explains:
In August 2021, Wargaming found itself amidst controversy once again when a large part of the “Community Contributors” (a form of associate program) walked out in protest over the over-proliferation of lootboxes and gambling mechanics in World of Warships, paired with the chronic abhorrent treatment of them and the players by the developers at Lesta Studio in the last few years.[48] In the wake of the walking out of the CC, an employee nicknamed “Gneisenau013” of the Texas office was terminated. However, said employee was not involved in the entire situation, but merely a scapegoat. In protest of this behaviour, a senior manager for World Of Tanks resigned, stating that the displayed behaviour of the senior World of Warships management is “cowardly, contemptible and shitbird-like”.
That was too good of a quote that I could not help but include it.
Will I keep playing it? Maybe.
Would I buy premium if I could get Kantai Collection skins?
Absolutely 10/10 game love Kongo.
[Written by Andrew]
When Determination Beats Actual War Strategies Award:
Fuga: Melodies of Steel by CyberConnect2
If you’ve read the premise of this game, it is such a wild one. Children trying to find their parents after the war reached their quite little town and razed, and in that search they find a giant, basically mythical tank of legend and they just ride that thing to the heart of the war? Plus if the battle gets really tough you can choose to feed a child into this thing called the “soul cannon”, sacrificing their life energy to instantly win the battle. If that doesn’t sound insane to you, wait until you get to the climax of this whole game.
As one steam review writes: “Howl’s Moving War Crime”. I will defend the children though, they were just wrapped up in an all-around bad situation.
Anyways, the most interesting part of the creation of this game is that it’s made by CyberConnect2. Famed for their work on various 3D arena fighters from series such as Naruto, Kill A Kill, and their latest project Demon Slayer. Of course, they also developed other games such as the .Hack series and the cult classic Asura’s Wrath, but the real point of interest is their very first release in 1998: Tail Concerto. Thus began the start of a world setting used by CyberConnect2 called “Little Tail Bronx”.
What’s interesting to me is how people refer to “Little Tail Bronx” as CyberConnect2’s passion project. The idea that this game, along with the three other games that use this setting, isn’t really meant to sell, but rather just to be put out there and experienced. In fact, when this game came out the only reason I bought it was because it was among the newly released games on Steam. I never saw any marketing for it, I never knew it was going to be released at all. Little did I know, like these kids riding their tank across war-torn lands, I would be in for quite a ride.
The game itself is quite standard for a simple JRPG – an RPS weakness/strength system, a bond-partner system that makes certain pairs more powerful as they grow closer, a kind of base management system, and a few smaller systems that all make up the framework of this game. I feel like it doesn’t do anything particularly new, but it does layer a lot of different systems in a way that feels unique and effective, though maybe sometimes a bit tedious and slow.
The biggest strength is its story and cast of characters. The way the story progresses through the gameplay adds to that feeling of getting closer and closer to the heart of the problem, which is literally in the heart of the country. Each character has different bond stories as you level them up, so even though you don’t get to see all of them interact in the main story, you do have a chance to see how they mesh with each other when you talk with them inside this giant tank. The cast of characters does kinda fall into a cliché, but at the very least their designs are unique and recognizable. Though I feel the more you don’t get too attached to them the more willing you are to sacrifice them to the soul cannon.
I say it’s the biggest strength, but honestly the gap between that and its weakest part is not that big. All in all, it’s a standard 16-hour experience of an RPG that involves one giant tank and a bunch of children “solving” the war effort in a way their trained generals could not.
In a way though, this game left an impact on me. If not for the bond stories and the general story premise, it’s the fact that Cyberconnect2 created a game it wanted to create. Publishers and investors be damned, they created the next game in their “Little Tail Bronx” passion project. And for that, like the determination in these children, they deserve an awarded place for this year’s spectrum of games.
[Written by Mog Knight]
That’s it for today’s awards! Join us tomorrow for another round.
Thanks again for reading!
You can follow Mog Knight on twitter, Andy on twitter, oh and also check out our podcast Kupo Talks!
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