Recent reviews by naesten

This is quite fun, even if it is the barely-remembered PC port of a mobile game.

It's just a BR with mechas and pilots (you unlock these) and guns (you find these in match); when your mecha is destroyed, you can fight on as a pilot with those guns, and in a typical match you can summon your match several times if you want. Sometimes you just wanna run/skateboard around as a pilot, though, and use the guns you found to destroy mechas and kill pilots.

I haven't put any money into the game, so I've only got the two starter pilots (iirc, you choose one of the two to start with and can unlock the other just by playing the game, and all the others seem to cost money?), but I've been able to unlock several mechas without paying a cent. Honestly, Ning is the only pilot I need, because she knows where she got shot from.

Anyway, it's actually great fun, and the more people that play, the more fun it can be.

You should totally buy this game. Preferably, go back and buy it before SE came out.

I'm pretty sure this game is harder than TIS-100.

While SpaceChem programs can have more than 15 instructions, the closest you get to comments is that you can diagram the "molecules" that you intend to be sent through each intermediate pipeline. It can be quite tricky to find room for the instructions you need without causing your "molecules" to collide with one another or with the edges of the play area, which gets extremely frustrating up until you manage to squeeze everything in, but that just makes coming up with a tight design super-satisfying. If simply solving a problem isn't enough for you, you can try to optimize your solution for speed, symbol count, and reactor count. I've heard the histograms haven't been updated in a long time, but that doesn't make it any less satisfying to find your score to the left of a big bump in the graph.

The "production" problems additionally require you to choose how to subdivide the problem into pieces you can tackle with the available reactor types, but on the other hand they allow you to choose how to subdivide the problem into manageable pieces. However, if you can't come up with a good approach, you can often find a reddit comment where someone gives a hint describing a set of reactors in terms of their inputs / outputs and (in tricky cases) interconnections, and there's still plenty of satisfaction to be found in actually programming the reactors. (In one such case, I have yet to understand how the poster managed to make their implementation as inefficient as they say it is: apparently, their version has three atoms looping around getting fused up to Uranium, but I had enough trouble figuring out how to inject a second atom into the loop in my version when I realized that one Uranium was not enough.)

P.S. If it wasn't clear by now, this game is definitely not about chemistry, it's merely chemistry-flavored. (As are the fish sandwiches, which I do not think should be eaten under any circumstances whatsoever.)

The biggest flaw I hit in this game: it's possible to make the game unwinnable by placing a respawn point on one of the moving platforms on that "snow" level such that the vehicle then respawns in its default position and the respawn point is left floating in mid-air, and you are repeatedly dropped in the instant-kill snow. I also kind of would have liked if there was some way to ask the game "what level number is this?".

Contrasted with VVVVVV's patented "ice-level style" slippery controls, which (a) are just mean, (b) are confirmed intentional and (c) [presumably] follow you through all of VVVVVV, LOVE comes out as a definite "CHALLENGING BUT FAIR".

Don't bother waiting for it to go on sale: this is worth well more than full price.

Quite fun, if you're up for a pretty faithful remake of an NES remake of an arcade game (which means you die lots, and don't have a lot of actions available at once: remember, the NES only had two action buttons, A and B), and also okay with the fact that instead of jumping, you have to swing/climb around on your bionic arm.

It does crash out-of-the-box, but this is easily remedied by installing the appropriate version of PhysX from nvidia's website. (Pay no attention to the PhysX installer that's bundled with the game; it installs a completely irrelevant version of PhysX.)