Game 31: Aero Star

 

You might have noticed that the screenshots look a little bit different than before. Instead of perfect, sharp pixels...they're a little fuzzy. This is because I am increasingly lazy as I age.

Formerly, I would capture the screenshots at their native resolution: 160x144. This is the resolution of the game boy, and is just a bit too small for a modern device. Think "postage stamp on a mattress" and you'll get the idea.

Then, I would take all of these screenshots and apply an IrfanView macro to them that tripled their size but kept them pixel perfect. These 480x432 pictures were perfect for the blog theme I'm using, which is honestly outdated and quite narrow. But they worked.

Now, the first thing is still true - I capture them at native resolution. But now I don't give a shit and just upload them straight to Blogger, and set the size to "Medium". This resizes them using the browser, which does not maintain pixel perfect resolution. Instead, they get antialiased a little bit, because that's how most people would prefer to see pictures. But you know what? I could resize these pictures and post once every 3 years, or I can just upload them right to Blogger and post more regularly. 

I choose the latter. They say that "perfect" is the enemy of "good", but "good" is also the enemy of "just doing the god-damned thing" and I'm shooting for that.

Anyway, Aero Star absolutely rules. It's hard as hell, but it just freakin rocks. 

Aero Star is a shmup of sorts - you have a little ship/car thing, and you shoot bullets towards the top of the screen to blow up bad guys of some description. Neat! Not special.

Game 30: The Adventures of the Smurfs

Did you know that as people age, they shrink? That's why my theory about Smurfs is that they're all extremely old people who read some dubious things about silver curing their illnesses. Hence their inability or unwillingness to remember words, replacing them with "smurf," the fact that they are all genderless (we all know gender dies with age) except for Smurfette (who is literally a construct and not a real Smurf), their terribly-out-of-date fashion, and their endless capacity for unfunny jokes. 

This is not a dig on Smurfs or old people - all of the above is good! I just think it's true.

What, you thought I was going to address a 5 year absence in the opening paragraph? Of course not, you know me.

Well, you probably don't know me all that well if you haven't heard from me at all in 5 years, but hey, that's on me. Suffice to say that I now live in the frigid north of the US, my politics are extremely radical (and tubular), and video games turned me gay. Sort of.

This is not the game that turned me gay though, nor is it my favorite Smurfs game on the Game Boy Color, nor is it much of anything at all! It is, in fact, a collection of minigames tied together by (horror of horrors) a top-down platformer.