This Bed We Made - title

I think I bought This Bed We Made on a PSN sale. Or maybe it was one of the free monthly titles? The trailer piqued my interest. It looked like it might be a fun little murder mystery.

Mystery video games are difficult to get right. It's a tough balancing act to give the player enough information to solve the mystery, but not so much that the game basically plays itself. Can the solution be easily brute-forced? Do option prompts give the solution away? Does the player ever get that sense of "eureka!" for figuring things out for yourself?

Generally, in my experience, the bigger the game, the more difficult it is to hit that fine balance. It seems like indie games make much better mystery games due to their smaller scope. This Bed We Made certainly keeps its scope fairly small, which helps to provide a reasonable possibility space for the player to work with, and allowing for player-driven deduction and some assertive leaps of logic.

The protagonist is a hotel maid with a penchant for snooping into guests' personal belongings.

The player plays a hotel maid tasked with cleaning up the rooms for patrons. But she has a penchant for snooping around in the customers' personal belongings. The game takes place entirely in the handful of rooms that she is assigned to clean, on a single floor of the hotel, as well as the lobby, and some of the employee-only spaces in the basement. The protagonist being a hotel maid also introduces the game's core gimmick: the game isn't necessarily about solving the mystery; it's more about how you handle the evidence and clues that you find.

Your job is to decide which pieces of evidence should be cleaned up, and which should be left behind. After all, your job is not to tamper with guest's belongings; it's simply to clean up their trash. Throwing away the wrong scrap of paper could, hypothetically, get you fired. But at the same time, not throwing away certain pieces of evidence could incriminate you or another innocent character.

Furthermore, your choices will also have impacts on the other hotel staff. Your actions may reveal co-workers as negligent or insubordinate, but that negligence or insubordinance may be justifiable or sympathetic, which leads to interesting moral and ethical dilemmas. Does a co-worker deserve to be held accountable for their actions and potentially fired? Or are their reasons for the inciting action justifiable or excusable, given the circumstances?

Your actions (or inactions) can lead to consequences for yourself and other characters.
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Ara: History Untold - title

Civilization VII is right around the corner. For the first time in the Civilization series' history, it will actually have competition in its specific niche. One of those competitors is Microsoft's Ara: History Untold. Of the various games in the "historic 4x grand strategy" genre, Ara might very well be the most unique -- both to its benefit, and also to its own detriment.

Part Civilization, part city-builder

In addition to the obvious comparisons to Civilization, Ara: History Untold feels almost as much like a medieval survival-village-crafting game along the lines of Banished, Settlement Survival, or Manor Lords. The bulk of the game is spent building resource harvesters, building crafting buildings, and then trying to set up an efficient and self-sufficient economic engine that converts those harvested resources into manufactured goods. As you research new technologies and advance through the eras, you'll unlock new resources and recipes for new things you can craft with those resources. In fact, most of the tech tree is dedicated to unlocking new resources and craft recipes.

There is a huge variety of resources and manufactured goods.

The limited space available to each city will prevent you from ever really feeling like you've built a perfectly efficient machine. There's enough different crafting buildings, enough different resources, and enough different crafting recipes that you won't have enough room to build all the collectors and crafters for everything. So you'll be switching what crafting building is crafting what goods periodically, as certain infrastructure or units may require specific goods. Goods can also be assigned to buildings in order to "accelerate" their crafting efficiency, or to the cities directly in order to satisfy the needs of the population or to provide passive buffs.

For example, if you build a butcher shop in one of your cities, you can assign it to craft either salted fish or salted meat. If you choose salted meat, then you can assign a cow, pig, or venison, as well as optional salt or spices in order to speed up the production of that meat. You can then take that crafted meat and assign it to a city to provide extra food for the population.

Similarly, you can harvest raw iron ore from mines, process them into ingots in a forge, then combine the iron ingots with coal in a foundry to produce steel. That steel can then be used to create everything from skyscrapers to house more population, to luxuries like consumer automobiles and refrigerators, to tanks and battleships.

Candles can be equipped into housing to improve the knowledge rating of the residents.

And there are so many things that you can craft. There's candles, furniture, pottery, linen, medicinal herbs, pastries, coffee, microchips, and so forth. These sorts of items can be assigned to other buildings to provide certain passive benefits. A candle, for instance, can be assign to a residential dwelling to increase the "knowledge" rating of the city, which speeds up your technology research rate. Presumably, the people living in that dwelling are using the candle light to study books and learn things through the night. Similarly, metals, glass, and fuels can be used to craft lampposts, which can be installed in cities to reduce crime and improve the city's security rating.

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Madden NFL - title

But before I get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that EA has actually partially addressed some of the issues that I've discussed in a previous installment of this essay series. Specifically, Madden 24, Madden 25, and College Football 25 have substantially improved player logic in loose-ball situations. Since I published the 5th essay, about loose-ball situations, EA has added a number of new animations of players diving or falling onto fumbled footballs. This has mitigated some of the frustrations that I expressed in that essay. Scooping-and-scoring does not happen nearly as often, and players are now also able to recover their own fumbles.

There are still problems with fumbles and loose ball logic, so I won't be rescinding the entire essay. Many of the criticisms are still valid. Most notably, fumble recovery animations often appear pre-determined and break the laws of physics and human anatomy. Awareness during loose-ball situations is also still hit-or-miss.

Nevertheless, EA did actually improve this area of the game, and I want to acknowledge that. As I've said before, I don't make this content simply to shit all over Madden and EA for the sake of it. I make this content because I love football, I love football video games, and I want EA to give us a better product. All my criticism is intended as constructive criticism that I hope is taken in good faith by anyone who watches. As such, I always want to give credit where credit is due.

This full essay is available in video format on YouTube.

In any case, I previously started talking about off-field strategy and team-building. Now, I want to talk more about what to do with that talent once they have been scouted, drafted, and evaluated. Today I'll be talking about another one of Franchise Mode's most glaring high-level flaws. It's finally time to talk about how Madden handles (or fails to handle) gameplanning and preparation.

At a very high level, Madden focuses its game strategy almost exclusively on what you like to do! Not off of what the opponent likes to do, nor even off of what you team is built to do. This is not really representative of how real NFL teams prepare for games. In real football, teams do not generally take their entire playbook into any given game. They install, tweak, and practice a different subsets of specific plays each week, based on what they think will work best about their upcoming opponent.

However, modifying your playbook for a given opponent has just never been a part of Madden. This is especially frustrating, because the game has a mechanism for doing this. There is a Custom Playbook and Gameplanning editor that was introduced in Madden 11, and which is still in the game after all these years. While Madden games from over a decade ago did encourage users to use this feature to customize your play-calling to your personal preferences, newer games have pushed this feature more and more into the background, in favor of EA pushing updates to the pre-set playbooks, based on the play calls from real-life teams as the real-life NFL season progresses.

This seems good on paper. Why wouldn't we want realistic playbooks based on the plays that real coaches are calling this season? Don't we want those plays and play-calling frequencies to change to more closely reflect how those coaches call plays in real life? After all, that more closely reflects how the real NFL season is unfolding, right? Sure. Those are great things for Play Now pick-up games and Ultimate Team matchups against randos. But it's not exactly ideal for playing in a simulation Franchise Mode, in which the user is ostensibly taking on the role of a head coach or general manager over the course of multiple seasons, and in which coaching decisions should be based on the events and situations within the Franchise Mode, and not on how things are happening in real-life. And that is where Madden's Franchise Mode falters.

Madden 11 introduced a gameplan editor along with its playbook editor 15 years ago.
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Maximum Football - title

I generally do not play free-to-play games. I usually associate such games with scammy, exploitative micro-transaction economies. However, I do feel that one genre of video game that could actually be a very good candidate for a free-to-play model is sports games. Sports games have long been criticized as being "full price roster updates". This has become painfully more true as games have become bigger, more complicated, and more expensive to create. There just isn't enough development time in between annual release schedules to implement comprehensive updates to a sports game, and so they typically only receive minor, token changes, which often feel under-developed and poorly-tested and balanced.

In a free-to-play model, however, the developers aren't constrained to rush a "full new game" out every year, in time for the start of the new sport season. They can continue to update the same game, adding new features -- no matter how small or large -- on a much more liberal schedule.

More importantly, gamers aren't forced to buy a whole new game each and every year and reset all their progress. If I play a particular release of Madden for a few in-game seasons, building my team through the draft and developing my players, I eventually get to the point where it feels pointless to continue playing. The new Madden will release, and all my draft picks, player upgrades, and roster moves will be erased and replaced with whatever happened in the real NFL season. Even indie games that aren't tied to a real-life sports league (and its rosters), such as Axis Football, have this same problem. Every new year's game release requires restarting my franchise or dynasty from scratch, erasing dozens (or hundreds!) of hours of play and progress.

My rosters and progress won't get reset every year when a new game releases.

With a free-to-play model, there isn't going to be a "new game" every year, and supposedly, I will be able to continue playing the same dynasty or franchise for as long as I want, and still be able to receive any gameplay updates or new features that are released.

Honestly, I've been wishing that Madden would go to this sort of model for years now. Just have a single, live service football game that is funded by Ultimate Team and other in-app purchases. Maybe annual roster updates could be like a $10 DLC or something?

Dynasty season pass?

But this does beg the question: how will Maximum Football's publisher make money? The method of monetization was always a concern for Maximum Football's reboot. They wouldn't have the names and likenesses of real football players to slap onto digital trading cards for their version of an Ultimate Team. They could potentially get by with selling cosmetic-only items. But would there be enough of a market for such purchases? Maybe they would have to resort to micro-transactions that feel more like pay-to-win mechanics, such as paying for progression boosts for Dynasty players, or literally just buying recruiting prospects (think of the original launch of Middle-Earth: Shadow of War).

The good news is: there is no trace of any pay-to-win mechanics in Maximum Football's Dynasty Mode that I could find. The bad news is: Dynasty Mode is still monetized.

Even though Maximum Football does have its own equivalent of Ultimate Team, complete with in-app purchases for card packs and power ups, the Dynasty Mode is pay-walled by ... <sigh> ... a season pass.

If you want to play more than 1 or 2 seasons of Dynasty, you have to pay (or grind).

You can download Maximum Football for free. You can create and customize teams for free. You can play as many exhibition games as you want (using your created team(s)) for free. And you can start a Dynasty and play through a full year or 2 for free. But if you want to carry that Dynasty into a second season, well then you gotta pay. Additional seasons of Dynasty are locked behind a $20 season pass. Or you can use the 2 Dynasty Tickets that you start with to play 2 seasons, and then try to earn more Dynasty tickets from daily login rewards or from grinding other game modes.

New Dynasty tickets seem to be earned every 14 days that you log into the game. I guess if you're playing 1 Dynasty match per day, then the daily login rewards should be enough to keep your Dynasty going indefinitely.

The game says that the $20 Season Pass grants "unrestricted access" to Dynasty Mode. So I'm assuming (and hoping) that this means Maximum Games isn't going to charge us for a season pass every year if we want to keep playing Dynasty -- effectively turning Dynasty Mode into a subscription service. But I guess we won't find that out for sure until next year.

In fact, there's a season pass for the Franchise Mode too, even though the Franchise Mode isn't even actually in the game yet. The game is techncially in Early Access, so the idea of paying for content that isn't actually in the game yet is a little more forgivable than retail games that sell season passes for future DLC that doesn't exist yet. But still, I'm wary of any game that sells content that isn't actually in the game yet. If Maximum Football flops, and this Franchise Mode never actually releases, then that's $40 down the drain.

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The PSVR 2 has had a tumultuous first year and half. With all the uncertainty regarding the hardware, and Sony's future support for it, I wanted to spend some time sharing my thoughts about the hardware and the games that I've played on it, because I've actually really liked the PSVR2, and I think it would be a shame (and a mistake) if Sony kills it prematurely.

I've been a late adopter of VR. I played a few VR games on a few different headsets at friends' houses over the years, but never really got into it. The games were fun to a degree, but they never wow-ed me to the point that I felt I needed to run home and order my own VR headset. They also usually made me nauseous within 20 or 30 minutes of play. It wasn't until playing Star Wars: Squadrons and Ace Combat 7 on a friend's PSVR that I finally actually wanted a VR headset, and the PSVR actually felt comfortable to wear.

But I had already played Star Wars: Squadrons and Ace Combat 7 on standard displays, as well as Resident Evil VII, so there weren't any PS4 VR games that I was really eager to play. Déraciné was really the only PSVR game that I wanted to play at that point. So I decided to wait until I could get a PS5 VR headset instead.

When I actually started playing PS5, I was really liking it. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that when all is said and done, the PS5 might end up being my second favorite console after the PS2. The novel haptic feedback and surprisingly accurate motion sensor functions have even rekindled a long-lost love of Gran Turismo (and racing games in general), and it just so happened that Gran Turismo 7 was supposed to get a really good (free) VR update for the PSVR 2! Since I had been enjoying the system, I was a lot more inclined to spend more money to get the most out of it. I got a nice tax refund in 2023, and put that money towards a PSVR 2 headset.

The PS5 was heavily marketed as being fully backwards-compatible with PS4 games, so I would surely be able to go back to the PS4's VR catalogue and play any of the games I had missed out on. Or so I thought...

This entire review is available in video format on YouTube.
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A gamer's thoughts

Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on. Feel free to read more about the blog.

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